Looking beyond opposition

By Lisa Nandy MP / @lisanandy

I’ve written extensively on LabourList about the impact the coalition’s right wing agenda will have on my constituents in Wigan and hundreds of thousands like them up and down the country. While it is right that we expose this attack on the vulnerable and the poor, it is also important that we look beyond opposition to consider how to create the inclusive, aspirational society we seek.

The Labour Party, under Ed Miliband’s leadership, has to take time to rethink our approach after such an historic election defeat. Those of us who have knocked on tens of thousands of doors over the last year know there are a range of reasons why we lost, not least because people felt Labour wasn’t listening. Now is our time to listen.

But while that important process unfolds, there is no reason why those on the centre-left can’t pave the way for a new and invigorated Labour Party to present radical and effective solutions to the problems we face as a country. In fact, it presents something of an opportunity; in acknowledging the problems, both of our time in government and that the coalition is creating, we must consider what worked too. Cameron and his team are skilled in highlighting genuine problems, but where he has shown himself to be completely out of touch is in his populist, sometimes bizarre, and often deeply ineffective solutions.

One of the great privileges of being an MP is that you are surrounded by people with bright, often radical solutions. These ideas do not always involve reinventing the wheel, and are sometimes brilliant in their simplicity. I came across one this week at the Comprehensive Future AGM: the Local Schools Network, an organisation that brings together local people to champion and improve their local comprehensive schools. They recognise that while some comprehensives don’t do well enough for the children in their community, that is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater and scrap the egalitarian principle that underpins comprehensive education.

The Local Schools Network is in the best spirit of the left – collective, community based action to improve local services for all and it stands in stark contrast to the negative ‘free schools’ and academies approach which aims to lift a select number of children out of badly performing schools and leave the rest behind. The Tories have always taken this exclusive and inherently unfair approach; one notable example being Thatcher’s assisted places scheme in the 1980s. A small number of bright children were lifted out of their local schools and given a place at an independent school; the rest were left behind.

The Local Schools Network is an inspired alternative to the approach taken by the New Schools Network, which I have been questioning Michael Gove about over the last few months. While Gove has given large sums to an organisation established to champion his divisive approach, communities have come together through the Local Schools Network to protect valuable state education with the message ‘why shouldn’t everyone do well?’ It is in stark contrast to the negative, anti-aspiration vision that we should expect the best but only for the few. In a way, it’s a genuine ‘big society’ vision of civil society working to protect the services that matter to communities, against the hollowed out vision of Cameron and Gove.

This is just one practical response from the left that could pave the way for Labour and that’s why I’m so delighted that LabourList launched its ‘ideas for electability’ series. Sites like this are a perfect forum to have this debate. We need to be consistent and proud of our values first and foremost, but there is also a desperate need for positive and original policy ideas, and it seems there are plenty of those ideas out there. What are yours?