Labour’s crushing local election results have rightly prompted a moment of soul-searching for the party. But the answer is not to look inward and descend into the toxic infighting of the past. That would be an unforgivable betrayal of the voters who elected us and of a country consistently let down by years of Conservative psychodrama.
Voters don’t care about who’s up and who’s down in the Westminster village. They care about their own villages, towns, high streets and communities
Instead, we must now look outward and see the country through the eyes of voters. They don’t care about who’s up and who’s down in the Westminster village. They care about their own villages, towns, high streets and communities, and we want to match their ambitions. This is the urgent political issue of our time and we must never be distracted from it. We must recognise that people’s hometowns are not just where they are, but who they are. This must be the basis of our domestic political agenda.
The politics of place is not new. Many governments have talked convincingly about pushing power and money out of Whitehall and across the country. It is an argument that resonates with voters because they know instinctively that it would improve their lives. The problem is that no government has ever seen it through, as the temptation to bring power back to the centre has always won out in the end.
The Blair-Brown governments made positive improvements for the country, but they poured in cash without building community leadership and capacity to adapt to the changes reshaping their world, and they did not challenge top-down decision-making that forced many poorer communities into dependency. New Labour failed to make communities more resilient, so when an incoming Conservative government turned off the funding taps those communities sank.
In 2019, Boris Johnson adopted levelling up as the Tories’ post-Brexit agenda to increase opportunity for people and communities across the UK. It was a deliberate attempt to steal Labour’s clothes as the party of greater equality in order to take Labour’s voters in areas traditionally held by Labour. Those voters, in desperation for change, had just voted for Brexit breaching their already fraying political connection with the Labour Party. Politically, it worked, helping Johnson win a landslide victory in the 2019 General Election.
After the election, Michael Gove became Secretary of State for the renamed Department of Levelling Up hoping to deliver an economic and political agenda, but this was opposed by the then Chancellor and large swathes of Tory MPs representing more traditional Conservative seats, and so it shrank back into a campaigning and communications strategy while the government presided over widening inequality.
The chasm by 2024 between what had been promised and what was delivered contributed to the backlash against the Conservatives in the Red Wall seats most of which returned to Labour, helped by an increase in the Reform UK vote. These are the seats where Nigel Farage’s party is now polling more strongly as frustrated voters seek a vehicle to express their desire for rapid and profound change. Labour needs to win them back.
Gove commissioned Rachel Wolf, author of the election-winning 2019 Conservative Party manifesto, to conduct research into voter responses to his levelling up agenda. She wrote: “Many of the Government’s flagship ‘levelling up’ projects, designed to better fund parts of the country long-neglected by governments in Westminster, are long-term. Big infrastructure – trains, roads, which allow cities to become bigger and more productive – takes time to build…
“If the Government wants to show it really understands people and places, it is going to need to… invest in the physical fabric of places, and in supporting shops, events, and culture. Broadly, it needs hanging baskets: the ‘small stuff’ that sounds boring in a speech but actually matters to people and gives them renewed pride in where they live.”
The Conservatives’ voter coalition was unsustainable and ultimately collapsed because of the contradictions inherent in the levelling up agenda. Labour has the opportunity to avoid the Conservatives’ mistakes by focusing on visible change.
So far though this government has focused on a programme of national renewal that still feels too abstract and remote to many people. Change needs to be visible and tangible or they won’t believe it; people want ‘change you can feel’.
But there is also of a new approach through the Pride in Place Programme, investing £5.8 billion over ten years in nearly 300 of our poorest communities, and allowing them to choose how to spend the money. This has already begun the process of rebuilding trust, agency and resilience in those areas, with new projects more inspiring and plugged into what the community needs than any politician in Whitehall could have dreamt up.
But because it is focused in such small areas it benefits less than four per cent of wards in the country; we need a wider cross-Government agenda for local renewal that demonstrates ‘change you can feel’ in every neighbourhood with people feeling they have more control over the decisions that affect them. This is how we rebuild trust in politics and in the Government’s wider agenda with a framework for radical reform of local public services, politics and the state.
Every party’s time in office is precious and limited and this week’s events are a startling reminder of that. So, our choices from now on must put real power into the hands of communities, build people’s sense of agency and influence over “the system” they feel is stacked against them, and bring pride back to every corner of the country.
Steve Reed MP and Michael Gove will be speaking tomorrow at Levelling up vs Pride in Place, a Spectator event in association with Autodesk
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