There are some aspirations that most of us share. We all want to be able to fulfil our potential, to have productive, engaging jobs, to live in safe attractive neighbourhoods, to be part of strong, sustainable communities. We all want our elderly to be cared for, our children to be educated and the vulnerable to be protected.
And yet it too often feels that there is an unbridgeable gap between these basic aspirations and the reality we currently inhabit. Connected Localism, a new collection of essays published by LGiU last week, argues that a significant factor in this shortfall is a long-term failure to sufficiently localise and diversify systems of power and decision-making in the UK.
Meeting long-term challenges such as caring for an ageing population; driving local economic renewal; ensuring that young people have the skills they need, and mitigating and adapting to the impact of climate change will require local innovation, not one-size-fits-all central initiatives. We will need a collaborative form of civil engagement that engages communities, citizens and the state in new ways of working together and of sharing power and responsibility.
We call this connected localism: connected across services, across places and across the public realm.
Connected Localism does not belong to any one party or political tradition but it poses some particular opportunities, and a key challenge, for the progressive left.
The challenge is that localism can be seen as antithetical to an ethos of universal public service entitlement with postcode lottery effects acting to reinforce existing inequalities. Similarly, the involvement of communities in the design and delivery of public services is seen as a cover for cuts, a displacement of responsibility from the state to citizens.
Both these criticisms are misplaced. Progressives believe that people are the best judge of their own interests and believe in the capacity of individual and associative action to drive positive change.
This can only happen, however, if communities have sufficient agency to make that change happen and if that local autonomy is part of a wider network of innovation and strategic governance: not a postcode lottery but genuine local choice.
In this context, progressives will see the state as an enabler, not as a deadweight to be removed.
That requires a different settlement between central and local government but it also requires councils to adopt a new role: stimulating local innovation, supporting the participation of communities in service design and delivery, scaling up and connecting local successes and providing democratic legitimacy.
The essays in Connected Localism start to sketch out what this looks like in practice. Patrick Diamond explores a framework of structural reform that would permanently root power in local communities. Sophia Parker gets to grips with the tough realities of getting innovation to happen and making it stick. Anthony Zacharzewski envisions how a truly participatory local politics would work, while Richard Reeves examines the tension between individual and community aspirations.
Labour councils across the country are at the forefront of this new approach, demonstrating that localism is not a brand that belongs to the coalition.
As we approach the next election, Labour nationally will have to decide whether it reverts to the ineffective centralising tendencies it has too often shown in the past or whether it wants to follow the best of Labour local government in driving a genuinely progressive shift that gives communities the tools they need to shape their own futures on their own terms.
If the party aspires, not simply to win an election, but to govern, a connected localist approach is an essential foundation for better public services and more powerful communities.
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Jonathan Carr-West is chief executive of the Local Government Information Unit. He tweets @JonCarrWest
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