In the closing passages of New Model Island, English poet and writer Alex Niven reflects on the experience of the 2017 UK general election campaign, when Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party unexpectedly overturned the Tories’ majority. Niven admits to having been deeply pessimistic about Labour’s prospects when the election was announced. Weeks later, and watching the results come in on TV, however, he describes a sense of possibility entering his thought:

I thought about the possible disappearance of food banks, the safeguarding of surgeries, libraries, and schools, and the people who might now be saved from loneliness, suffering, and indignity in a future without privatization and austerity. I thought about the people in the West End of Newcastle, whose jobs, pubs, housing, and sense of pride had been obliterated over the last four decades, and who might now hope for something better. I thought that perhaps in the future my friends wouldn’t have to live precariously, meagerly, and permanently on the brink of mental illness in a society without social safety nets . . . I thought about my son’s difficult birth, and the amount of blood my partner lost because the doctors were understaffed, underfunded, and unable to help her quickly enough . . . All of this combined in a stab of emotion that was weirdly unfamiliar. It felt as though some kind of curse was beginning to lift, that a new version of this disparate, strangely formed country might finally start to come into being.

If, in 2017, a new world seemed like it was coming into being, its arrival has now been indefinitely deferred. New Model Island was released at around the midpoint of the 2019 general election campaign — a campaign that unfortunately ended in decisive defeat for Labour. The Tories now have their majority back, and it’s a big one. What’s more, this shift has been driven by a collapse of Labour support in the so-called heartland seats in the Midlands and North — among them, the North East seat of Newcastle where Niven (and, as it happens, I) live and campaigned.