Councillors must be heard inside Labour
—Britain is changing. In some places in a great whoosh of social and economic revolution, gentrification, migration or the birth or death of an industry that can sweep you off your feet. In others the pace of change is glacial, measured in fractions, barely discernible beneath the surface.
As places change so do opinions, attitudes, people’s needs and wants. This matters for politics and political parties. We are all, to some extent, interpreters of the public mood. We watch the polls and pore over focus groups to get a sense of the way the wind is blowing, what tone to strike, what button to press. But with a country that is moving so fast and diverging so much, there is only one way to keep up – we need people on the ground.
Local representation is the bedrock of electoral success. Not for nothing does the Labour party strive so hard to establish ‘bridgeheads’ and ‘toeholds’ in marginal seats and long-term prospects. We know that we need a base to build on, a visible presence in the community. Take a council seat, then the ward, then the next, eventually take control of the council. This is how we have always built. It works and we must never stop doing it.
But while we understand the local value of having councillors on the ground, the Labour party as a whole is not very good at making the most of it. The most valuable resource a councillor has is their knowledge of their area, how it is changing, what people are thinking. Importantly, councillors often represent places that have Tory members of parliament and have no other contact with the Labour party. They are little dots of red in the great oceans of blue that colour vast swaths of the political map.
Labour needs to be winning in places like Reading, Swindon and Warwickshire, but how do we know what people in these places are thinking? We certainly cannot assume these seats are the same as they were in 2001 or even 2005 when we last held them. In this context the information our councillors can give us is like gold dust, but is hardly treated with reverence by the central party. Messaging is for strategists, boffins and Americans not Councillor Bob from Bolton.
So what to do? The Labour party is a wonderful machine, but it tends to be better at disseminating information to people on the ground than it is at collecting it from them. We need to look at our structures to see how we can generate good feedback and incorporate it. There also needs to be a formal role for local government leaders and our new generation of mayors, who will have more governing experience than the combined shadow cabinet by the time of the next election.
Alongside the reform of structure must come a shift in attitude. An end to the belief that politics only happens in Westminster and everything else is just dull local administration. A respect for councillors not just for their graft but also for their political guile. After all, if we won’t listen to our own councillors, what chance do the public have of getting a hearing?
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Alison McGovern MP is chair of Progress
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