Labour should listen to its councillors

The days when ageing regional trade union officials were given a safe seat in the Commons as a pre-retirement job in exchange for loyally voting the leadership line are over.

The new block vote, as it were, of about a hundred Labour MPs is formed by the 60 former Labour councillors who won seats in July. They join some 40 previous ex-councillor MPs. Georgia Gould, the Leader of Camden Council  where the Prime Minister lives, was one of them. But the roll-call of experienced, knowledgeable Labour councillors, who have handled multi-billion budgets and know in detail the repairs broken Brexit Tory Britain needs, is very impressive.

They know far more from direct hands-on experience of what needs to be done and how central government in Whitehall keeps making mistakes in the most centralised state in Europe. All the special advisers or SPADS, clever clogs that they are, rarely have this experience.

Nor do Whitehall mandarins. In opposition, as candidates fight to win seats, they embrace local councillors as key players in the common task of electing a Labour majority and seeing Labour ministers in power.

But once in government there is often a sense that MPs are the superior officer class while the councillors left behind are the NCOs — the sergeants and corporals who do the grunt work of showing day after day that Labour does make a difference to people’s lives.

Right now there are 40-50 council by-elections taking place to elect replacement councillors for those who are now MPs.

In Soho and Mayfair, for example, there has been a hard-fought campaign to hold the Westminster Council seat vacated by Jessica Toale, who pulled off a remarkable win to become the Labour MP for the hitherto solid Tory seat of Bournemouth West.

There was an impressive turn-out of canvassers and leaflet deliverers for the Westminster Council vacancy created by her becoming an MP.

Unfortunately, three days before the poll on 19^th         September, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and the Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, announced the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street. Britain’s best known shopping street runs through the heart of the ward Labour was defending.

There are arguments for and against removing public transport on Oxford Street (private cars were banished years ago). But 300 buses transport at peak times the  218,800 passengers, many Labour-voting workers, that go to or across Oxford Street every day.

The pedestrianisation scheme will take years of construction and cause huge disruption. It is deeply unpopular with local residents. Labour-controlled Westminster City Council, won from Tories in 2022, was not consulted and immediately issued a detailed 10-point letter to Sadiq Khan and Angela Rayner outlining their concerns.

It was too late. For Labour campaigners working to hold the seat it was an enormous disappointment for this election-losing announcement to be made by top national Labour politicians on the eve of the poll.

All politics is local and honeymoons don’t last long in politics. Every time Labour was defeated in a general election, the signs were clear in local government elections in the previous year or two.

Local government votes are the canaries in the political coal-mine warning of danger ahead.

There is a natural and normal reaction, after a big win in seats (if not in popular vote), for MPs and ministers to assume they know best.

This might be a mistake, given the volatility evidenced by the much smaller share of the vote Labour won compared to previous big wins in numbers of MPs.

Labour ministers, SPADS, the Downing Street leadership team should ensure that anything they propose is cleared first with Labour councillors. This is not in the sense of a veto, but to make sure councillors in two or three years’ time are enthused by what a Labour government is doing.

Harold Wilson had lost his Labour base of councillors by 1968 and lost power in 1970. I stood for Camden Council in 1978 and it was clear voters had given up on Jim Callaghan. Both prime ministers imposed policies that were approved by the Treasury and Whitehall advisors, but alienated core Labour voters.

Councillors understood this but were ignored by MPs. If Starmer’s Labour wants to win a second term, it should listen more to its elected councillors and less to the think-tanks and academics, who mean well but have never stood for election.