It’s what they do, not what they say. All opposition leaders are localists until it matters. Keir Starmer said in January he wanted to “take back control” for local communities. The Labour leader wants them to have more say over jobs, transport, energy, climate change, housing, culture, childcare and finance. He wants to liberate what is now recognised as the most centralised state in Europe. So why, now, has the Labour leader decided that the people of the North of Tyne area will not be permitted to reselect their current mayor, Jamie Driscoll, to stand for Labour at the next election? Why did he agree in March that his predecessor as leader, Jeremy Corbyn, should not be reselected as MP for Islington North?
Whatever the perceived misdeeds of these two politicians, surely these are matters for their respective communities to decide on. Come to that, I notice in the past few weeks that, despite his devolution speech, Starmer wants no devolution of power over council tax rises, local housing decisions or the siting of wind turbines, among other things. Nor will he tolerate any nonsense from Scottish people about “taking back control” of Scotland. He may want to move on “from slogans to solutions”, but whose solutions?
Starmer, his advisers tell us, wants to show he is in charge. He wants to alter Labour’s chemistry, changing the party from a regional and ideological coalition that includes the left and the centre into a personal hegemony. He wants to cleanse it of any association with the eras of Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn and restore the firm hand of Blairism. As Tony Blair saw off Militant and clause IV when he was party leader, so today Starmer is seeing off those with whom he disagrees by vetting candidates’ lists.
Nothing in democratic politics is as wayward as the transition from opposition to power. The first requires making wild promises to an electorate, the second requires refashioning them in the harsh reality of high office. Starmer is right to see Blair’s leadership of Labour in the years 1995-97 as possibly the most successful example of a political opposition since the 1940s. He delivered a genuinely reformed Labour party, stripped of its old ideological baggage, “new” and fit for government.
In power, Blair’s stance on localism was much the same as Starmer’s is now. He saw elected mayors as a way of sidestepping local Labour old guards and reviving democracy. But he allowed John Prescott to stall their modest introduction and Gordon Brown at the Treasury to limit their power. Blair then maintained Margaret Thatcher’s clampdown on local finance, in much the same way that David Cameron later took control of planning and housing targets. All power centralises, but when a constitution fails to protect local democracy, power centralises absolutely.
Starmer’s January speech was certainly passionate. He promised a bill in his first term to instigate “a decade of national renewal”. He would “devolve sweeping powers to local communities” and grant a new “right to request powers” beyond even those he had listed. This was to be “no catchphrase interchange” but a recognition of the desire of communities “to stand on their own feet”. Those who have laboured long in this vineyard find such phrases desperately tired. Though Starmer was all for “communities” – a word that might imply Women’s Institutes, local fetes and Dad’s Army – he never mentioned local government or local councils, as if these were the bogey words of localism. In a democracy there should be no distinction between communities and democratic institutions, yet the Labour leader did not seem capable of admitting this.
So could communities really regain control of their children’s education, as they did before Thatcher? Could they fix business rates and domestic taxes to meet their description of local need? Could they recover power over local development, so communities could decide how their area looked and changed? All these powers have passed from local councils to London in the past 30 years. Will Starmer really return them?
In 2019 the Institute for Public Policy Research concluded its study of regional wealth across Europe. It found that Britain had the widest division between its capital and its regions of any comparable country. This disparity appeared in the amounts that people earned, the levels of economic productivity, the availability of local services – pretty much everything. A senior Treasury official admitted recently to the Institute for Government that this was probably “the most centralised government in the developed world”.
It is two years since the all-party parliamentary group on devolution reported on lockdown. The report concluded that when lockdown decisions were delegated to devolved nations and local councils, they had proven “more flexible, effective and responsive” than those decided in Whitehall. The reason was simple: “the widest range of social and economic factors are often only visible to leaders rooted in the local community”. Big national challenges needed “place-based responses”. It apparently takes a parliamentary group to discover this.
We might hope that Starmer got the point, and that he really does want to “stop power being hoarded by Westminster”. The trouble is that is what they all say, until they are doing the hoarding. Even before he finds himself in Downing Street, Starmer cannot bring himself to respect the local diversity that has long been Labour’s strength. He cannot allow his party to let the people of the north-east choose who it is they want to lead them. It is a very bad start.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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