On a cold March day, the east wind whips across the car park of the Bretton centre. Shoppers have their heads down, oblivious to the brutalism of their surroundings. It is a measure of how much Peterborough has changed in one lifetime that I can remember this urban wasteland when it was woods and fields, not so far from the birthplace of one local hero, the naturalist poet John Clare.

Created in 1970, Bretton was the first of the townships that were to turn the cathedral city into a new town, a clean uncrowded setting for the people of London’s worn-out inner suburbs. In 2015 it’s still white and working-class. But it’s also a bit fed-up.

This March afternoon the Ukip candidate, Mary Herdman, is getting a friendly reception from four out of five of the shoppers she leaflets. That may partly be because she’s a nice-looking middle-aged lady with an approachable manner, the sort of person you’d expect to be raising money for, say, Marie Curie. But it may also reflect the truth of the polls that suggest Ukip will get about 20% of the vote here.

Close results are nothing new in Peterborough. I grew up against a background of knife-edge election nights that thrust my humdrum home town into the national spotlight. Once, the sitting Tory MP Sir Harmar Nicholls won after seven recounts, by a margin of just three votes – a record for hair’s-breadth legitimacy that still stands. Ever since, it’s been a reliable indicator of the state of support for the ruling party.

But in 2005, the troubled Labour incumbent Helen Brinton, who at times seemed to bear single-handedly the impossible weight of the overinflated expectations of Blair’s Babes, crashed out. She left the local party in turmoil, and the seat in the hands of the rightwing Eurosceptic Tory, Stewart Jackson. Peterborough is now a mere 73rd on Labour’s list of winnable seats, but in this election of 650 byelections it could be closer than that. It all hangs on the Ukip vote. At the local elections last year, Ukip won three seats on the council and was close behind in several more. Not a revolution, but enough for the party to declare it a target seat.

Out at Bretton, some passers by leap at the chance to unburden themselves to the woman with the purple and yellow leaflets. One elderly man complains about the 80 new houses going up behind his home, to add to hundreds more than have been built recently. She listens sympathetically. “What do you expect,” she says, “when we let in so many immigrants?” This is what the fastest-growing town in the UK looks like. Between 2001 and 2011, the population – already diverse and multicultural from early incomers – expanded by 17%, mostly after 2004. That was when the new Europeans – Poles, Lithuanians and Latvians – were able to come and work in Britain without any of the restrictions other countries imposed.

Peterborough’s multicultural community is more cohesive than critics say but it feels disconnected from Westminster

A couple of years ago, it shot to a kind of fame when one of its primaries became the first where all its children spoke English as a second language. This year there are four schools where nine out 10 children do not speak English at home. Bad landlords, multiple occupancy and a chronic housing shortage add to the perception of a city under strain. On the face of it, prime Ukip country, the land of the left-behinds.

Jackson fights Ukip by fighting his own party leadership. He ridicules Downing Street sensitivity to the word “swamped” and attacks what he calls the “nonchalance and insouciance and … impotence which … drives the [voters] into [Nigel] Farage’s arms”. In the Spectator last October, he wrote: “They don’t want to be told there’s a problem, they want to be told the solution.” In any renegotiation with Europe, the free movement of people will be the main objective. But he tells voters in his last column before the election that the glass is half full. Voters might ask, why only half?

Peterborough is 40 miles north of Cambridge, the world’s leading university. Its roads go to the Midlands and the East Anglian ports and a high-speed rail link. There are ambitious plans to be part of a London-Stansted-Cambridge corridor of scientific and technological innovation. It should be a hothouse of economic success.

Yet, in truth, the city feels so far from Cambridge that 40 miles might as well be 400. The transport network merely makes it a top location for Amazon and DHL. The city centre is full of high-street chains and job agencies offering minimum wage work in distribution.





But what also feels clear, walking down Gladstone Road, the terraced street built for railway workers in the 19th century and colonised by the new Asian migrants in the 20th, past Roz’s world foods and signs offering Urdu lessons, is the truth of another of Jackson’s observations: the city is not festering with suppressed racial or ethnic tension. The school that first hit the Daily Mail headlines for its foreign-born intake is a typical Victorian building made distinctive only by the seven different translations of the sign instructing all visitors to report to the school office.

At one of the two mosques on Gladstone Road, a notably white school party from the other side of town is straggling out after an educational visit. In the community centre where I call in, the questions are not about discrimination but immigration appeals and housing problems.

Round the corner, in a Portuguese cafe, the owners – who have been here for 17 years – are gripped by a reality TV show in Portuguese about cosmetic surgery. Unlike a lot of more recent arrivals from Europe, they have taken British citizenship and could vote in the general election, but they don’t see the point. Politics just means trouble, they say.

Peterborough’s multicultural community is much more cohesive than the critics say, but like much of the rest of the country it feels disconnected from Westminster politics.

In theory this should be an opportunity for Labour. At Gladstone primary, which is so oversubscribed it has opened a second site round the corner, teachers say the real problem is not language but the churn of children in and out. Unite’s regional officer, Mike Plumb, describes how people move from one minimum-wage job to another for longer hours or a bit more security, and their kids wash through the schools after them, like flotsam on the tide.

If Miliband’s pledges about slum landlords and zero-hours contracts are getting through, this is where it should be heard. But the party is still on a painfully slow trajectory of recovery. It couldn’t organise an anti-Tory coalition on the city council. Lisa Forbes, the Labour candidate, only joined the party in 2010. She is an authentic voice, four kids, no experience, lots of commitment. “We did an event with Yvette Cooper here. There was a really good turnout. People accept that immigrants are the same as the rest of us – just looking for a better life.”

It’s hard to dispute, though, that a better life for a new arrival from Lithuania is likely to mean a slightly harder struggle for a local worker with a family to support. That’s partly because, though unemployment in the city is low, so are wages and skills.

Forbes says if she wins she’ll fight for a university, to go alongside the University Technology College, which was due to open this year but has been delayed after a slow takeup from new students. Meantime, the ones who go away to university don’t come back.

The truth is that for a generation the city hasn’t had the investment it wants to provide the services it needs. Peterborough deserves better, and its voters should make sure they get it.