Local Elections 2018 Preview: Labour look set for gains, but what we need more is a greater diversity of perspectives

Manchester City Council, with 95 Labour councillors and 1 Liberal Democrat, is a prime example of the need for a greater diversity of unwhipped perspectives in local government. Photograph: Manchester Town Hall by Stephen Douglas (Licence)

After last year's opportunistic election did not go to plan for Theresa May's Conservative and Unionist Party, her government - propped up by the Northern Irish loyalist Democratic Unionist Party - has been stumbling from one potential crisis to another.

These elections come at a strange time. Despite both main parties struggling, they both remain at around 40% in the polls and have a strangling grip on local government. Is this a chance for smaller parties to make some breakthroughs on councils?

With the majoritarian two-party system reasserting itself, some pushback from smaller parties like the Greens or Lib Dems would be welcome, to ensure representation of a wider set of perspectives - and to increase the accountability of local councils.

Conservatives

This will be the Tories first big electoral test since then. The final totals will need to weighed against the fact that half of the seats up for re-election are currently held by Labour. Yet there could be some headline defeats for the government.

Theresa May's party is particularly at risk of losing council seats in London. This includes control of Wandsworth, their flagship council from the time of Margaret Thatcher, which was used as the pioneer for contracting out local services.

The Conservative have taken a low key approach to the local elections. This may be a result of their own strategists projecting heavy losses to Labour. Downing St may have accepted that and prepared to downplay the significance.

This hasn't stopped local Conservative branches from pursuing aggressive campaigning tactics - including repeating the racist and Islamophobic overtones of the Goldsmith campaign for Mayor of London, which targetted Sadiq Khan's ethnicity and religion.

This time around there has been condemnation from Tory voices. But is the Conservative establishment distancing itself simply because of the timing? Local councillors have said their leaflets were signed off by Conservative HQ.

Mired by the Windrush scandal - entirely of their own creation - and with the media pursuing Labour hard over antisemitism, did the Tories just find it an inconvenient moment to be pursuing openly divisive tactics themselves?

Labour

With Labour holding most of the council seats up for grabs this time around, the party has to make inroads in Conservative areas. Part of that has them focussing very heavily on London - perhaps sensing that there are big headlines to be written.

Key Conservative controlled areas could be vulnerable to Labour and sweeping gains - on a night when they will begin already in a dominant position - will be an emphatic statement that can be milked for publicity and be used to continue the narrative of a Labour Party on the ascent.

For the Labour Party leadership, that would be a much need boost as their forward momentum has been arrested - despite the Tories creating problems for themselves - by their inability to adequately address the issue of antisemitism.

The media and critics have run roughshod over Labour on the issue, and Corbyn and his team have not come up with a way to convincingly show that antisemitism will not be tolerated - and thus diffuse the issue. As a result, a cloud hangs over the party.

So too does the ever looming prospect of a split. It's hard to see how anyone on the opposition benches would benefit, in the short term, from an inamicable split - even though a split increasingly seems like a good idea, to end the spiteful internal squabbling.

A split is hindered however, by the archaic quirks of our electoral system, that does not abide multiple parties and the increase in critical perspectives it can bring, nor the prospect of groups working together despite holding different membership cards.

Opposition

The Green Party laid out this, the big theme of the local elections, in the UK in their campaign launch. Co-leader Jon Bartley called for an end to Britain's "one-party state" local councils, to increase their transparency and accountability to local people.

It's an argument that thinktank Compass and it's chair Neal Lawson also press, stressing that Labour need to overcome their obsession with claiming a monopoly on power - which leads it to absorb or crush any possible rivals, rather than working with them.

In terms of the Green Party's own prospects, their best hope may be in trying to make inroads into Labour dominated councils, whose unchallenged authority has resulted in some poor outcomes - that have left some voters disaffected. Consider, for example, the goings-on under Labour at Haringey or Sheffield.

The other visible party of opposition in local government are the Liberal Democrats. Buoyed perhaps by their consistent - as usual - good form in council by-elections, they've been talking up their chances of a mini-revival at the local government level.

With the polls consistently putting the Conservatives and Labour neck and neck, 40% to 40%, it's difficult to see where the Lib Dems will make inroads - especially after several years of desperate defence, to hang on to what they hold.

As supporters of a Progressive Alliance, The Alternative wants the Lib Dems to refind their progressive side. But at present their best chance of picking up seats may be by, finally, convincing Conservative voters that what they liked about the Coalition was actually the Lib Dems all along.

So watch Lib-Con head-to-heads. This is a dynamic that could have a gigantic affect on a future election, where Lib Dems taking votes and seats directly from the Tories could tip Theresa May out of office and open the way for Labour.

Voter ID

These local elections will also be the first to trial the controversial new Voter ID measures that the Conservatives hope to roll out nationally. Such measures have been deeply criticised by electoral and rights groups.

The reality is that, first of all, Britain has very little in the way of electoral fraud, and second, that Voter ID does little to stop voter fraud. In fact, it does little but deter voters - discriminating particularly against the poor.

The trial runs will take place in Swindon, Gosport, Woking, Bromley, and Watford.

Municipalism

If we are to have effective local government there must be no barriers to participation for the community. Their representatives must be accountable and transparent, and able to hold local bodies to those same standards on the public behalf.

Erecting barriers, especially those disproportionately impacting voters from minority groups, and leaving one-party local councils unchallenged, is a recipe for bad governance. Well run, accountable local government can achieve so much at the municipal level.

There are big ideas out there, from Barcelona to Preston. Municipalism taking root. Local government can empower local people. The first step is to break up the local political monopolies, to leave them no choice but to start hearing criticism and engaging with it.

The collapse of Carillion has thrown open the door to Municipalism, but there is work to be done to make it a success

Photograph: Future site of the Library of Birmingham, from 2009, by Elliott Brown (License) (Cropped)

The collapse of government outsourcing giant Carillion has opened a door for critique of how the neoliberal approach to giving out services contracts to the private sector is handled - and mishandled.

With profits subsidised, companies mismanaged to threaten jobs and small businesses, and responsibility for pension funds all too frequently abdicated, that is to be expected.

But beneath and within that critique, is the opening of a much deeper line of thinking. It has opened an avenue for thinking up a new progressive direction - it has become a case study for assembling so far disparate thought and theories.

Voices from all across the progressive wing have been chipping in with pieces of a larger theme that's starting to take shape.

Jeremy Corbyn has followed Carillion - and the defeat of Clare Kober and her Public-Private development scheme - by launch a commitment to the renewal of municipal socialism. He has called for councils to bring services back in house and make regeneration about people first, not speculators.

on Newsnight, economist Mariana Mazzucato argued that Britain's outsourcing partnerships operate in a parasitic ecosystem, where profits are siphoned out of services, but the risk is left with the public. That we need to set out new terms, to define a what a good partnership looks like.

Meanwhile, writing a new column for Open Democracy, journalist Paul Mason began by talking about how neoliberalism had disassembled social mobility along with community. Mason acknowledged that nationalisation can't be done the way it used to be, but that neither can outsourcing. Central government needs to shape models and strategise, rather than dominate.

The example that people keep turning to, for a new model, is Preston. In the past few decades, Preston suffered through, ultimately failing, private-backed regeneration plans. After the failure, the council in Preston responded by doing something incredible.

Preston council tried to use it's own resources, and the funding tools at it's disposal, to stimulate it's own local economy - rather than trusting to more inward private investment and the precarious jobs it brings.

In part courtesy of the efforts of Michael Brown, the council used it's procurement budget to invest in local businesses, it supported local co-ops, and it fought off pop-up high street pay day lenders by backing a credit union.

In the era of government outsourcing giants going under - Carillion, and now Capita the latest to be fighting to not go the same way - rethinking how government budgets are spent, and who they subsidise, is a question that people are finally asking.

So what are these and other thrusts driving at?

Municipalism. A return to communities having an empowered stake in their own local government and local services. Co-operatives, small community-based businesses, community-owned water, energy, homes and rail. Restoring a sense of local purpose that might restore some sense of local hope.

The really interesting thing, though, is what comes next. If efforts to relocalise, to reestablish community, are successful, then influence, money and subsidy are going to be in the power of local municipal politicians. This is so much closer to putting power in people's hands.

But it isn't the end of the battle. Without oversight, without transparency and democratic accountability, local government can be - and at times, is - even harder to keep an eye on and hold to account. If we are going to realise the potential of local government, we need the democracy and oversight to match.

In simple terms, addressing that has two elements: the political and the journalistic.

For the political, reengagement is the first big task. Local election turnout is abysmal. There isn't really any other way to put it. Without people engaging and voting on local matters, there is no more empowerment locally than nationally.

Alongside the collapse in local community life, globalisation has also ushered in the near elimination of local journalism. Local newspapers - like the Coventry Telegraph, that once employed six hundred people - are long gone. The starting point for building oversight will be in finding a way to revitalising the local press.

These are just two starters on a list of issues to tackle. Of which, economically, 'hollowing out' may be among the largest. After decades of sending outside experience, it is no great surprise to find no expertise left inside - or the infrastructure needed to support it.

There is hope in municipalism. A real empowerment to be had. A chance for communities to rebuild, to recover their self-confidence. That has to be worth supporting. To achieve those ends, progressives of all stripes need to throw themselves into preparing the ground.

General Election 2017 - Plaid Cymru and Wales: Poor, fractured and ignored, Wales needs a new and radical alternative

Plaid Cymru want to pick up the baton from Labour, but Wales needs a much more radical revival.

Wales is poor, fractured and ignored. To get to the bottom of the needs of the country, it's necessary to start by accepting that. The next step is to accept that very little has been done to address the first step.

The fault for that doesn't fall only on Labour. Since the party spent thirteen years in government at Westminster, and in office as the government of Wales for the last eighteen, it is unsurprising that Tories see Wales as Labour's weak(est) spot.

But the Conservatives have little to offer now and have done little for Wales in the past - other than shut down the last primary industry upon which the country had depended, when they closed the coal mines.

Through three eras of Westminster centralisation - one Labour, two Conservative - Wales has been left with an economy painfully dependent upon public sector employment and its remaining industries are in a perilous state.

Steel in South Wales is struggling to stay afloat against the sudden flood caused by China's mass dumping of its huge stocks of steel onto markets. The scrambling efforts of Conservative ministers and Labour MPs to find a way to secure jobs bought time for Welsh steel.

This desperate scramble shouldn't be necessary. But so little attention has been paid to Wales that it has fallen into dependence: on a narrow few industries, on public funding, on EU funding - it was in fact among the larger recipients of Europe's Regional Development Funds.

Yet even these few things are at risk. The established parties just keep papering over the cracks. The reality is that Wales needs a new party.

Plaid Cymru

Plaid Cymru would very much like voters to see them as just that. But the trouble is, that they're not.

At the core of their manifesto is a commitment to protecting funding and increasing investment, to be issued from Cardiff rather than Westminster, within the context of defending Welsh sovereignty. It's a vaguely nationalist, but otherwise ordinary, pitch for twentieth century social democracy.

Now. Properly implemented, there is plenty that social democrats could achieve for Wales. From fresh funding, to supporting new industries, these are essential projects that only the public body capable of providing.

Investment in infrastructure, in rail and road, in telecomms and broadband, and in new homes; supporting small businesses with public contracts, reformed business rates and a Welsh Development Bank; caring for people with more compassionate welfare and better funded healthcare.

These policies are all progressive priorities and all necessary to boosting Britain's economy out of its doldrums. But they're all just focused on making the best of the status quo - even with a little more devolution.

The problem for Plaid Cymru are that they're caught between fighting their long battle to pull Wales out of Labour's grip and fending off Tory efforts to to take advantage of Labour's, seemingly, ebbing strength.

The party are also affected by being close enough to power in Wales to play it safe. Its an outcome for the party's internal historical struggle, between nationalism and conservatism on the one hand, and a Left-wing community socialism upon the other.

The outcome of the struggle was a Centre/Centre-Left party of social democrats, comfortable with public intervention - much the same as Labour, just with its policies filtered through the lens of national identity.

The party matches the progressive parties at Westminster in their commitments. But where is the rebirth that Wales sorely needs?

Rebalancing Wales

Wales is a country whose political bonds are breaking It is split geographically and economically between South and North, between just two concentrations of people with a dearth of infrastructure and wealth lying between them.

In important ways, the situation of Wales reflect that of Western Europe, Europe and the West as a whole - rural versus urban, towns versus cities, richer versus poorer, migration & concentration, the centres becoming intolerable and the fringes being abandoned.

Politics in Wales hasn't helped. How deeply Labour has embedded itself in communities is a huge impediment to progress. At the local elections, there were many independents that made life difficult for Corbyn's Labour. But beneath that simpler narrative was a more complicated one, of Labour versus unofficial Labour.

That situation is a problem, because Wales right now needs less Westminster and more grassroots. It needs an Ada Colau more than it needs a Jeremy Corbyn.

Plaid Cymru should be better positioned that any other party in Wales to offer some truly radical alternatives. Among the party's founders was DJ Davies, also a founding member of Welsh Labour, an industrialist and economist who believed in the economics of co-operation and putting control in the hands of workers.

In their current manifesto, the part that comes closest to a project for rebirth is "Putting energy into our environment". Their plans, to support a national electric car infrastructure, green energy tidal lagoons and decentralised public energy, strike a theme of industry reborn under community ownership that thrusts towards the heart of what Wales needs. But it gets too little focus.

A New Mentality

Wales needs a new mentality, based on a radical devolution to the local level - to reengage people with the power and funds to rebuild their communities. But it can't be just urban municipalism.

It needs a movement that can give towns, both urban and rural, back into the hands of their communities and reinvigorate civic life - a locally focused, municipal-agrarian movement that can be brave and rethink how we approach rural life and make it sustainable in the future.

A movement that is prepared to imagine new ways to build the bonds between communities. That builds a sense of common identity by building the bonds between communities, that builds a sense of country by building a country.

Wales needs a brave new vision. A revival. Yet nobody is truly offering one. As it stands, fresh polls suggest Corbyn's Labour may make it through it's dark Welsh night. It doesn't deserve to, but New Labour's cynical adage remains true: there still isn't really an alternative.