Forget consultations – if Labour wants to be radical and democratic we need co-production

Was Ed Miliband’s victory yesterday an end to the long process of internal reform or could it be the start of a new era for progressive, participatory politics?

The relationship with the Trade Unions and the processes for selecting our candidates and our leaders are all important issues. Building the platforms on which those candidates and leaders will stand matters even more. This weekend’s decisions are steps in the right direction. If we truly believe that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone then it is to the process of policy development that we now should turn.

Labours shadow treasury team are rightly using the time in opposition to construct a “zero based” spending review, nothing ruled in and nothing ruled out. Why stop at the numbers? Why not also a zero based policy review conducted as a matter of standard practice between elections? And why not, crucially, actively engage the membership now in reimagining, reconsidering and reconfiguring ?

Jon Cruddas and colleagues are doing excellent work but we know that we are at our best when power and opportunity are in the hands of the many not the few. We need to throw open the doors and windows and issue invitations, not to comment or to join a focus group, but to collaborate and not through the passive and uninviting bureaucracy of the existing machinery but through urging and facilitating open conversations some on line, some out on the ground.

I’m not talking about consultation. I’m suggesting co-production. Building policy from the ground up. A process rooted, of course, in our values but opening hearts and minds to the kind of fresh and refreshing ideas that have emerged on Changing London in recent weeks. Ideas excite, energise and engage beyond the already committed. They are the foundations of a mass party and they change lives, surely the real purpose of politics.

Changing London is a very basic platform launched shortly before Christmas to crowd source ideas for the next London Mayor. Discussion is encouraged not only on the direct responsibilities of the mayoralty but also on the “powers of influence” – the voice, the visibility and the unique capacity to convene.

We talk, for example, about the “good society”, what would be the building blocks of the “good city”, the practical policies? Suppose we determined to make London the greatest place on earth to raise a child, the global capital for ethical business or a peaceful city free from violence in our homes, in our schools and on our streets – what would we do and how would we do it?

Changing London is local and tiny and new but the vitality and calibre of the debate on questions such as these already hints at the potential for a comparable approach on a wider scale.

There are practical reasons and there are ideological reasons why the policies we fight for, locally and nationally, should be originated and owned by us. No one has a monopoly on the best ideas, we believe in democratic engagement and mobilising the membership motivates the membership. Its smart politics, its progressive politics and its good politics