Deborah Mattinson Column: Putting ‘local’ at the heart of Labour’s plan for government – LabourList

Tip O’Neill, US speaker of the house from the late 70’s, is credited with inventing the expression ‘all politics is local’ and for deploying a strategy bringing national policy to life at a local level. However, the term originates from 1932, when commentator and columnist Byron Price used it very differently, describing instead how local ‘hometown’ issues and local economics could and should shape national government plans. O’Neill’s approach was top down – about making national politics more relatable, whereas Price called for a bottom-up approach where local needs could determine national policy. It’s an important and often overlooked distinction.

The power of potholes

Voters have always used the lens of local examples to identify improvement – or more commonly – decline in the public realm. Anyone who has ever door knocked knows the power of potholes. In a recent project for the Progressive Policy Institute I asked voters to keep a digital diary, noting what was right or wrong in Britain nowadays. They uploaded image after image of boarded up shops, cafes and pubs in local high streets, rough sleepers, litter, roadworks, and yes, potholes in every shape and size imaginable. Frankly, they were furious: “We’re pothole central…it makes me angry on a daily basis”, complained Karys, “The number of barber shops, vape shops and nail salons…are they a cover for organised crime? The high street just doesn’t feel like a safe place to be anymore”, wrote Nic,”Public places that are disused or in disrepair, dirty or untidy…I do think in the North we aren’t as well looked after as we are down South” argued Sally.

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Boris Johnson’s ‘levelling up’ was a response to grievances like these, vocalised in the run up to the Brexit vote. It was a nod to another important feature of localism – voters’ suspicion that someone, somewhere was getting a better deal out of the nation’s wealth than they were. When researching my last book, ‘Beyond the Red Wall’, I met many people in Midlands and the North who, like Sally, felt deep resentment towards London and the South East. Johnson, aware of this, suggested that all regions could be raised to the level of the affluent South. It didn’t work – what little happened was too often window dressing, papering over more structural cracks but, had it done so, it could have been the signature policy of his government.

Why local matters

Why does local matter so much? It’s partly about winning the battle for attention. While some voters aren’t following national politics very closely ( most voters actually – see my last Labour list column!) they do notice what’s happening on their doorstep: in their kids’ schools, their local GP, their local shopping mall. They are also more likely to watch and read local news and access many local sources of information such as community What’sApp groups, Facebook groups and of course, most trusted of all, word of mouth. Voters are twice as likely to trust their local MP than MPs in general, and more likely to trust local councillors to bring positive change to their community too. Given how little they trust national politicians to deliver, there is an urgent need to demonstrate the local impact of national policy, and to use local concerns to inspire and drive national politics.

That voters view the world through the filter of their own experience is hardly new, but applying the insight successfully in government is oddly less common than it should be. A great example of O’Neill’s ‘top down’ approach was the expansion of Medicare in Australia. Voters supported greater investment nationally in what Albanese eloquently described as a ‘patriotic mission’ but when they saw the impact in their own high street as that investment funded community emergency care centres, the policy became less abstract and more powerful. It was frequently quoted as a reason for reconsidering  Labour in focus groups with swing voters I ran after this year’s election.

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Examples of the Price ‘bottom up’ approach are harder to find. At the very least it means using local concerns to design national policy. But it could mean asking local people to design that policy themselves, using deliberative democracy tools like Citizens’ Assemblies to enable understanding of the trade-offs and deliberation. I ran the UK’s first Citizen Jury back in the 1990’s – yet progress has been slow. Politicians fear giving up power. In Taiwan it took a full-scale occupation of parliament to force a fundamental – and highly successful – rethink with local campaigners invited to mentor politicians and co-design a different approach resulting in a turnaround of the government’s reputation.

I believe giving up power in this way enhances rather than diminishes the politicians brave enough to do it. Take Congressman Jared Golden’s successful campaign In Maine. His working-class voters had long felt ignored so he chartered a boat to sail a cross section of local people to DC “If Capitol Hill won’t come to Maine, Maine will come to the Capitol” He encouraged them to speak for themselves. In doing so he became a local hero and was one of the few winning Democrats bucking the trend in a Trump leaning area.

Pride in Place

The government’s flagship Pride in Place programme offers a unique opportunity to do government differently here in the UK. It’s a truly impressive initiative providing some £2m of funding to 264 places, and, crucially, demands that key decisions about how the money will be spent are taken by a neighbourhood board, which in turn will be obliged to consult widely, giving back control to local communities, encouraging and empowering people beyond the ‘usual suspects’. The boards will be chaired by independent members of the public, not politicians.

The first 75 areas are now underway, with imaginative consultations including a conference bringing together local business, police and school kids in Eston and a plan to engage park runners in Hastings. In Elgin more than 1,000 ideas have been submitted to revamp the shopping centre and repurpose empty shops, while in Peterhead, real change has already begun with investment in CCTV to deter antisocial behaviour.

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Pride in Place is a chance to ensure that local people determine the priorities for their local area and are responsible for ensuring that delivery happens. But to realise its full potential it must be both top down and bottom up. Having convened local groups for deliberation and decision making along with developing new methods for local consultation it surely makes sense to maintain the people and processes that have been established and use them to generate ideas and hold the government to account more widely. If this approach were then extended beyond the 264 locations into every community, it could be the centrepiece in the government’s story, revitalising democracy, rebuilding trust and putting local people truly in charge of their local community while enabling them to use those skills to influence national policy making .

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