I took part in a brief twitter exchange with Simon Wren-Lewis and others today, with those 'others' asking how Simon, Mariana Mazzucato and I might still influence Labour if Jeremy Corbyn is its leader, which is an outcome both Simon and I have shown little enthusiasm for.
My first response was to point out that I do not think Labour is the be all and end all of power. After all, no less than eight parties supported the motion on country-by-country reporting in the Commons this week. I think its important to recognise the role of cross party working.
But there is another dimension as well. As John Harris pointed out in the Guardian this morning:
Sadiq Khan's recent win in London sealed Labour's control of all the major English cities, from Newcastle to Bristol — and the party is also in charge of sizeable places such as Hull, Oxford, Brighton and Southampton. Even in Scotland, Labour still controls Glasgow, and runs Edinburgh in a “capital coalition” with the SNP.
This is Labour in power. Look at this list:
Even in unitary authorities it is in the lead:
It's only not true in country councils:
District councils are mainly Conservative, but in Wales and Scotland Labour is in the lead:
In other words Labour is in power, but just not nationally.
And in that case there is scope to talk to Labour on policy, but it's locally.
And for those, like me, who have been talking about local solutions for a long time that is interesting.
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Hi Richard
In the above tables the figures for York Unitary Authority (City of York Council) are out of date and therefore wildly wrong. Following the last election in May 2015, we now have a Tory/LibDem coalition (and double the number of Green councillors.)
If York is the only mistake then it doesn’t make a substantive difference to the article, but it might be worth checking in case there are many other mistakes.
Best regards
Oh….the trouble of using wikipedia…
Sorry Richard but any researcher worth their salt NEVER uses Wikipedia?? It is not always updated on a regular basis?
Oh come on
This is a blog
If you honestly think I have time to double check all sources you are mistaken
But the point is exactly the one I made
Handy all those high streets are emptying themselves of banks too, making room for local community owned money-creation. Bit better than borrowing from China a la Sheffield, which serves largely to see the good folk of Sheffield working to make people in China wealthier.
Now that the UK is leaving the CAP and the CFP, you might like to take these ideas: devolve farm subsidy policy to local authorities in ENG and the regional governments for the rest of the UK. Ditto for fisheries policy, unless you have no ports. This would set localism loose, which it’s good to know you are a supporter.
That would not work in the context of us in Scotland, Mike. The SNP-led government would design our own fisheries policy which would be sustainable and income-generating. We would also get 40-45% ( due to the land area formula ) of the UK CAP budget to spend on agricultural and environmental support as we see best. Then after indyRef II we would join the EU as an independent nation and transfer those competencies back to Brussels.
Richard, just a word of caution. ‘Labour in power’ does not necessarily equal ‘good’.
Manchester has been a one-party state for more than thirty-five years; if there were one place in the country where it would be possible to make a strong statement for ‘Labour in power’ = ‘good’ based on the circumstances of power and how that leads to a track record of achievement then this is it. The results have been the opposite.
In a region that has been traditionally entrepreneurial, the ruling party has managed decades of below national average job creation, below national average wage levels, above national average levels of poverty and above national average levels of joblessness, literacy and other educational attainments.
A host of other metrics tell the tale of below-par achievement with the exceptions of inner-city hipster housing projects greenlighted, council PR voice and hype. The only people who have prospered in the last thirty-five years have been property developers, lawyers and financial bods. In other words a neoliberal wet dream.
Probably not the image you wish people to give but that’s the reality, I’m afraid.
If things were going well new ideas would not be needed
I am aware things are not going as well as they might
Manchester, the home of free trade, has gone back to its roots! The People’s Museum in Manchester has some records of nineteenth-century incomes of the wealthiest ratepayers, which were phenomenal, while the plebs were labouring in the dark satanic mills. Shame it’s not creating the wealth it did in the nineteenth century.
“Un other words Labour is in power, but just not nationally.
And in that case there is scope to talk to Labour on policy, but it’s locally.
And for those, like me, who have been talking about local solutions for a long time that is interesting.”
It is not. The Tories and bankers control the magic money machine and that is what matters. Same with the comment – “We would also get 40-45% ( due to the land area formula ) of the UK CAP budget to spend on agricultural and environmental support as we see best. Then after indyRef II we would join the EU as an independent nation and transfer those competencies back to Brussels”
Let’s just think about this for a moment.
The seats currently occupied by Labour MPs are in essence “bedrock” Labour seats, where people vote Labour regardless.
Some famous politician once said that in “bedrock” Labour seats hostility to Conservatives is so deep that if you put a red rosette on a farm pig it would be elected.
Indeed this has sort of happened from 1997 to 2010: during Blair/Mandelson’s reign of spin a large number of thinly disguised thatcherite entryists were rammed down the throat of constituency parties. Even Blair himself represented an ex-mining area seat.
The result has been that currently the vast majority of constituency parties have declared for Corbyn as leader, while the majority of MPs they have so far selected has voted no confidence, and because of boundary changes most will *have* to be reselected.
The long term problem with Labour is that Blair had no power base in the party; he was chosen by the MPs as their “conservatory-building classes” friendly PR frontman.
He then tried to build after-the-fact his own power base in the party, but he only managed to do that among MPs, by giving safe seats to reliable photogenic apparatchiks without much of a root in the party, just like himself.
There is no easy solution to this but one thing is certain – Corbyn or no Corbyn – those right wing MPs have to go if Labour will ever achieve power.
BTW I agree Corbyn is incompetent.
Apart from the interesting fact that Plymouth has regrettably passed from Labour to a UKIP/Tory coalition (no less) I’d suggest that political parties for local councils are not really of great importance as local authorities have so little power. It will get even worse as their finances are due to be self supporting – also including, it seems, any revaluation of council tax bands and business rates, as that appears to be far too hot a political potato for central government. So Labour might be in power locally but they will be skint, and probably in hock to any neoliberal ‘benefactor’ who shows up.
I think it’s essential that all local authorities urgently increase their independant power 1, by utilising their own local authority pension funds in local ways, 2, by creating local coop/not for profit banks and 3, by creating local currencies which they accept in payment of council tax – so creating some new money locally. (Indeed the former Mayor of Bristol was paid his entire salary in Bristol pounds.)
Those are the sorts of innovations that are needed
The inference is what then?
That there is an opportunity to build a genuine ‘from the ground up’ movement into an effective political machine?
But the way the party is ran at the moment and who is running it means that this can’t be capitalised on?
Sounds about right to me.
Sad.
My point would be that representative government starts with local authorities. Any ground up movement would do well to start there too, by making local authorities as financially independent as possible and as soon as possible, because history says that central government too easily subcontracts lots of very difficult decisions down to the locality as a way of ducking the flack themselves.
If local authorities have sources of finance they control they will have more independence. And with a central government – of whatever hue – necessarily obsessed with Brexit for years to come (I see new Grammar Schools as largely diversionary playing for time) there is an ‘open goal’ opportunity to start as close to home as possible. That would really be about ‘taking back control’ more than Brexit is likely to give us!
The only difficulty in this is macroeconomic: tax and money have, ultimately, to be controlled centrally
I see the development of a sustainable framework for the UK in which this stress can be resolved as one of the core economic challenges we must address
I suspect most do not agree because it is about the architecture of government and that’s not sexy, but that does not deflect from its imp0ortance
Richard
Do these results show that the right wing media does have power over national government results but has little interest in local government hence the results? The same could be applied to the EU and Brexit.