Thank you, Theo, and thank you to everyone for coming.
I took over as chair of Progress late last year. An organisation with some history, having been formed in the enthusiasm for the historic Labour government that broke the tyranny of 18 years of Tory misrule.
But, fundamentally, what Progress is, is a group of Labour people who want to see a Labour government again.
So to lose last year was frustrating, and so too is to be out of government.
Well, that’s not quite right. We are out of government in Westminster.
But ask Nick Forbes who is in government in Newcastle. Ask Sharon Taylor the same for Stevenage. Ask Claire Kober in Haringey. Or my own Phil Davies in Wirral. And across the whole of Wales, ask them about Carwyn Jones.
Because as you all know, in fact, Labour are in government in Britain.
I am glad to be here with Claire and Peter. Because they are people who are running our towns and cities, and they deserve to be recognised.
While we pontificate in parliament, they are building houses. While we are shouting at ministers, they are setting budgets, and while we are dreaming up grand plans for the future, they are leading their communities.
So, this is the reason for today’s launch of the Governing Britain Network, a new initiative from Progress to connect our councillors and AMs and to give them a greater voice through articles, interviews and events.
NATIONAL OPPOSITION, LOCAL GOVERNMENT
As many of you know, I used to be a councillor in the London borough of Southwark. I was deputy leader of the opposition Labour group under the incredible Peter John.
I loved being deputy leader, and I like to think Peter and I led a pretty good opposition to the Lib Dems.
But if you were to ask me what really stays with me, it’s this. It’s the memory of my constituents coming to see me desperate for help with housing.
It is the floods and leaks and the mould that the Lib Dem council in Southwark once wilfully allowed my residents to be harmed by, because they would not progress the decent homes standard in the borough.
I can still hear the words of a constituent who was sleeping in her kitchen at night, alongside her asthmatic child.
‘We can’t go on like this’, she said. They needed help.
And I realised that through the failing of that council, my constituents were reliving my own dad’s history, whose health had suffered in terrible rented housing in Liverpool in the late 1950s. Suffered, that was, until my dad and my grandparents were helped by a local Labour councillor to find the security of a council flat. After that, each bit of housing casework I did felt like a small effort on my own part to repay my family’s debt.
I am now deeply proud to represent my home town in parliament.
But, frustratingly, I swapped one kind of opposition for another.
I do my casework, and I like to think my speeches are a bit better, but I have just as much power to change the system that holds people back as before. None, in truth.
Yet look at Southwark.
The year after I left, we won control of the council and Peter became leader.
And even with this awful Tory government hammering local councils, Peter is building houses, reforming services and giving young people help to get to university.
Housing casework only gets you so far. Southwark’s system of housing only truly became safe, dry and warm once Peter took control.
I am a few miles from a Labour government in Southwark, but a Labour government in Westminster – for the whole of Britain – feels far away. And that is why Progress needs this new network.
When the next Labour government gets hold of the keys to Downing Street, there could be precious few MPs left who have seen the inside of a government department before.
Barely a handful of us will – as John has – have had to grapple with the choices and dilemmas that face people charged with exercising real power.
So when that next Labour prime minister chairs their first cabinet meeting, the real experts in government will be local leaders.
We will need to lean on them, and learn from them. And that is one thing that this network is for. Because if local government leaders will be influential in the future we need to listen now.
VISION AND DELIVERY
But how to use power is not the only thing the next Labour government will have to learn from our local leaders. We need to learn how to win power as well.
Look at the seats we need to gain to secure a majority in Westminster. Corby, Milton Keynes, Stevenage, Brighton, Crawley.
Places that voted for Labour councils but not for Labour MPs.
I don’t think that is just a midterm thing, I think it is because of how Labour councils approach elections and voters. I have visited many of these places as part of my Governing Britain tour, speaking to the council leaders who are running these towns and cities.
Having listened to them, for me, two ideas stand out:
The first is that they all love the places they represent, and have a story about the future that everyone who lives there can buy in to.
The second is that leaders need and deserve the power to get things done.
Nowhere is this more obvious that in new towns like Milton Keynes and Stevenage. Talking to Pete Marland and Sharon Taylor, I was struck by how similar their stories are. Both had to contend with negative outside perceptions of their towns. And both are determined to prove the haters wrong.
Milton Keynes is one of the fastest-growing places in the UK – an aspirational city, as Pete called it. Full of can-do people.
Stevenage has its 70th birthday this year, but Sharon is keeping it true to the original vision that was there when it was founded. Good, sustainable communities, providing a decent quality of life.
Quality of life, which sounds so simple, but is often overlooked in politics now. It means good housing, a brilliant school in walking distance, green spaces.
Then in Corby I met the brilliant leader Tom Beattie.
Back in the 1980s the steelworks closed and it was a tough time, but Tom is not negative. He tells of the pioneer spirit that brought people to Corby back in the 1930s – and how the council are harnessing that to drive the town onwards.
Building new houses, seeing businesses open and bringing in tangible benefits that just make people feel proud, like Corby’s first cinema.
This is the point though, what all the leaders I’ve met have is ambition.
Listening to what people want, and then getting it for them. The basics of politics, but basics that we should never be distracted from.
In truth, I wonder if there is an arrogance about the parliamentary party with regards to local government.
A feeling that MPs are the ideas people. The brains of the operation. We come up with our theories, make our speeches, write our books. And that is what ‘politics’ is.
But that’s nonsense.
Labour council leaders with power now can do more good in a week than MPs in Westminster can do in a decade of opposition. Politics is about delivery not deliberation.
We don’t start from pontificating about our values, come up with ideas, and then try to impose our own dogma. We start from the world as it is, what needs to be done, and then we apply our values to those problems and find solutions.
Our local government leaders understand this truth. And there are lessons we need to learn from them.
LABOUR AND BRITAIN
The first and most basic lesson is the power of a positive, forward-looking ambition for Britain.
Because I look around Britain today and I can’t think of a time when we have had weaker political leadership. The government are wracked by infighting over Europe.
And then on our side, we seem stuck in an abstract and arcane internal debate. Taking us further away from the public, and stopping us taking the fight to the Tories.
The driving force behind this leadership deficit is pessimism. A tendency, on the hard right and hard left, to think that this country is in decline. That our best days are behind us.
But this is rubbish. Britain isn’t a declining power, as the right seem to think, nor has individualism corrupted our values, as many on the left argue.
Measure our progress by the way we treat each other and it is certain: Britain is a better place to live than it has ever been before.
Even thinking of the next generation, the pessimism is misplaced.
Yes, there are challenges, but which of our parents or grandparents would not have traded places with us?
Who would have shunned the freedoms, opportunities and equality that we have enjoyed, and which can increase in the future?
I would not choose to have lived my life in the 1950s or 1960s, and I doubt todays Millennials would choose my growing up in the 1980s and 1990s.
There are real problems, of course, but they are far from the sum total of what our country is and what it could be.
Sometimes, when we talk about Britain, we fall into repeating a mantra of misery.
And even when we do talk about what we want to achieve it is often so abstract.
The word ‘devolution’ means little to anyone outside politics. But I can tell you what people do understand. When folk in Manchester, or Glasgow, Corby or Stevenage see their town or city grow when they see derelict land replaced with a good place to live, they know government is working. That’s the connection people make with politics: real progress, not just words on a page.
So this is my first lesson from local government.
We need to drop the miserablism and the moaning.
The obsession with problems, rather than solutions and the fatalism that holds us back.
It was David Cameron that used to call this country ‘broken Britain’ – let’s never let our party be caught agreeing with him.
Britain isn’t in decline, it’s going places.
The Tories may put rocks in the road, but the Labour movement shaped the country I love – it’s given me every chance. We don’t need to do it down, we need ambition for its future.
POWER AND CAPITAL
So if the first thing I have learnt from local government is that being ambitious for the place you want to represent is a prerequisite for winning power, what about the second? What about leaders having the power they deserve to get things done?
Labour’s mission in government is to disrupt – whether through the education system or the planning system, through employment or housing – the tendency of the few to hoard power, wealth and opportunity, and to change the system to put those things in the hands of the many.
To work with people to secure a good quality of life for everyone, as Sharon Taylor might put it. This is the very practical challenge of growing our economy to support the needs and hopes of the many not the few.
In order to do this, I say we need to focus on capital: financial, human, and social.
On financial capital, I will spare you all a lecture on George Osborne’s failures. But it is absolutely clear from the housing market that, when in parts of the country we cannot build homes that the average family can afford, and in other parts of the country, we cannot get housing built at all, there is something wrong with how capital is allocated.
A Labour government could help. Make right to buy receipts truly stay in the town or city where they came from, and prevent that capital finding its way back to Treasury coffers. But we also must look at the structure of finance in this country.
Osborne has broken the post-crash consensus that we should have challengers to the big banks, including building societies. Building societies that have strong local ties to our towns and cities in Britain.
The Chelsea, the Yorkshire Bank, the Cheshire. Even the Halifax.
With London consistently seeing over double the business investments of the entire north-west, it is clear there is an urgent need for action.
Instead of the banking levy cut that helps HSBC, and hits building societies, we should be finding ways to help building societies flourish – especially those with a local or regional base of customers.
Labour’s banking policy ought to do more to support local government’s aims on housing and crucially sustainable town centre development.
Because when their historic centres have been sold off piece by piece to absentee landlords, the public are pretty powerless.
Local authorities need power to get owners of these assets round the table. At risk of repeating myself, ask Tom Beattie about Corby, or Sharon Taylor about Stevenage. Town centres matter for civic pride.
Not some abstract notion of identity, but the pride the public feel when they see a well looked-after, well-developed town centre providing a space for everyone to enjoy.
And speaking of pride, let me turn now to human capital. Too often I hear of economists looking down on Britain and puzzling at why our productivity growth is so dismal.
But look at our economy at the level of an average British town or city, and the productivity puzzle is no mystery at all. The Tory policy of getting people into any job, no matter what the prospects, or whatever skills and talents they may have has created geographic clusters of low-paid people struggling to move on and build a career. And the housing situation makes it worse.
At the micro level, British people are too often faced with a choice: live somewhere you can afford, but with insufficient prospects in the job market; or work somewhere that might offer you a career, and either face an unsustainable commute or a genuine struggle to find a home at all.
We make less of our talents than we should because the system doesn’t work for people.
The answer, then, is to work out how British towns and cities can reshape their labour markets to stop the dominance of low-paid work with little chance of moving on. We need much better childcare for families, and we need devolution of skills policy and schools policy to create a learning culture for the entire population, not just teenagers. But most of all, we need Labour leaders from Aberdeen to Brighton to remain in power.
I joined Labour because I saw the contrast between the Tory government I grew up with who made life worse for ordinary families like mine, and my parents and grandparents who believed there was intelligence, talent and skill in everybody. That is the best of British values and we need people in charge who feel that in their hearts, not just pay lip service to win an election. That is what Labour is for.
So then, social capital. Not just the money we have, or the skills we possess, but the value inherent in that which binds us all together. It’s the gain we make when everyone is working for a common end.
Now, the best local government leaders have a pervasive vision for their town or city developed in partnership with the community.
You might think that there is a lesson for Britain here. We need a vision about our country that everyone can buy in to.
Which leads me to an important caveat. You can’t have a vision written by a powerful minority that others are disassociated from. And this is especially true in relation to English devolution.
On this question, I regularly experience what I think of as the ‘fallacy of the south-east’. Westminster debate is already dominated by people who live and work in the south-east of England. The idea that all English people could be well served by so-called English devolution measures like Tory English Votes for English Laws is rubbish.
Those in the north are just as poorly served with Evel as they have ever been by the Westminster parliament. And the same goes for an ‘English parliament’. If such a thing were dominated by the powerful south-east as Westminster is, it would alienate people in the north in exactly the same way.
Of course we should never be dismissive of English cultural identity. I am English and proudly so.
But it is hard to see how social capital can be built up around an English idea that alienates rather than unites. Devolution can offer a chance for greater expression of identity, but it is devolution to the towns and cities that make up our country that will deliver this.
And it’s this lesson that, finally, I think we should take from local government and apply to Britain.
We require a true union of ideas and vision. The United Kingdom is at its strongest when all its places can play their part. And as well as ideas for our whole country’s future, we need to get behind the leaders of towns and cities as they demonstrate the real powers that they should have as part of a radical agenda for devolution.
Polling commissioned by the LGA consistently shows around three-quarters of people trust their local council to run services, with well under one-fifth trusting central government. We need to respond to this public feeling and put the power in the hands of those trusted to use it.
Unfortunately, as it stands, the Northern Powerhouse brand is just a brand, not a real economic or political strategy. But I believe if local leaders, north, south, in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were given the powers they need, I think our country’s growth could be secured.
As Tristram Hunt said earlier this week, we need to combat the centralising instincts in our party and realise that tackling inequality can only happen if power is dispersed rather than hoarded.
It is time for Labour to recognise that the engines of progressive change in the coming decades will be local, not national.
CONCLUSION
So our local leaders need powers, but they also need a voice.
Whether it is inside the party, or on the national stage we need to put our leaders front and centre.
Jim McMahon recently said that he feels like now that he is an MP he has much less power, but every word he says gets reported. We have to end this paradox. Labour mayors and council leaders should be in the news or on Question Time just as much as Labour MPs.
The public trust them; it is time for the party to trust them as well.
If there is one thing this network achieves, I hope it is this.
Finally, I want to end by saying something about the elections in a few weeks’ time.
The government is in a mess. A budget that unravelled, junior doctors on strike, a prime minister who says we are in it together, but stashes his cash in tax havens.
Tory resignations, Tory infighting, Tory chaos.
The idea that there is talk of losing council seats to Cameron’s Tories is pathetic.
Alongside Labour members, I am fighting for hundreds of gains, Labour mayors in London and Bristol, and Labour majorities in places like Norwich, Plymouth, Calderdale and North-east Lincolnshire.
In Wales, where the government have sold out the steel industry, Carwyn Jones deserves an increased majority.
Losing control of a single council at this stage would be an unacceptable betrayal of the people who depend on this party.
Because these elections are not some barometer for the national party.
People everywhere need Labour councillors and representatives who have got their back.
That’s what we are fighting for.
I have always thought that the job of our party is to build platforms on which people can stand. You can only truly be all you might wish with the security of a decent home, school, and the backstop of the welfare state.
These local elections matter because they are the foundation for British success today and our party’s success in the future.
So if Labour members and MPs are going out on the streets in the coming weeks, it should be with clipboards and voter ID sheets, not just placards and loudhailers.
These elections are not just a protest against the government, they the means by which we can secure Labour governments for the people we serve.
Governing Britain is not a distant dream, it is the founding mission of this party.
At the moment, it is our local leaders who are putting that mission into practice. It’s time for the rest of us to sit up and take notice.
And with the Governing Britain Network, that starts today.
Thank you.
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Alison McGovern is chair of Progress. She tweets @Alison_McGovern
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Read all of Alison’s interviews with local government leaders here