We need to offer more than just a slightly kinder state

Ed Miliband’s speech on the deficit confirmed what we all knew. Labour will not sweep aside austerity. We will boost wages and tax the better off, but there will still be cuts to public spending if we are to eliminate the deficit.

We know too from the autumn statement that what George Osborne will do is use austerity to dismantle the state, there is no other conclusion to be drawn from his plans to cut government spending to 1930s levels.

But what I didn’t hear either Ed talk about enough was how the society Labour seeks to create will be different from that of the Tories. We need to offer more than just a slightly kinder state.

We face a huge problem in Britain with rising inequality. Increasing numbers of people feel they are being left behind. That’s led to the disillusionment in Scotland, it’s led to the rise in UKIP’s popularity and on a more extreme level it led to the London riots.

This is about ordinary people who feel they have no power and politicians still wanting to peddle the illusion that they can do it all when they can’t. Politicians can inspire and enable but they can’t provide everything.

Involving people is the only way a modern society works. We see this from Twitter to Wikipedia to crowd-funding. The future is about working with everyone so they have a say and can change things.

The only way to solve this is to offer a different, more cooperative and collective society. This does not mean empty “big society” rhetoric, but designing a state and services where people are given the power to help, and where the most selfish and powerful have to pay.

It is something that as a local councillor, I have had to think about, as have many others.  We are facing very severe cuts in Camden, as are almost all local authorities, particularly those with deprived populations. The LGA reckons the funding gap for local authorities is rising by about £2 billion a year. By 2018 Camden will have lost a total of £163 million since 2010/11, about half our controllable budget.

There has been a tendency for councils – and for governments – to have an all or nothing approach: to provide everything or simply to pull out of things.

We have been forced to think about more cooperative ways of doing things because we are unable any more to shoulder the whole burden. Nor is withdrawing completely an option. We have had to think hard about the kind of borough we want and that our citizens want.

The encouraging thing is how willing people are to help. They have offered to take more responsibility for their street, to look after their neighbours, to recycle more. New technology is making it easier to take part because citizens can map problems like fly-tipping and communicate with us and others for collective action.

We are giving people snow shovels and encouraging them to help us keep the streets clear in the winter. We are working with residents to run libraries. Our community centres are welcoming more disabled people, so they do not just rely on isolated day centres.

This brings huge, and often unforeseen advantages: people are growing more vegetables on council land and planting more treepits. They are asking to take over tiny squares to run chess clubs and weekend fairs.

What the community want from us is to let them run with ideas. But they also want us to use our powers strategically. They keep ringing up with new proposals which would never have seen the light of day if they thought they could just wait for the council to provide everything. But our contribution is still indispensable and we still hold the ring. But we end up with more collective and interesting solutions, because more people are involved.

Our capital funding can make things easier: we are using the value in our assets to fund high quality council house building. We are insulating council houses so as to minimise heating bills. We are creating more sociable spaces in parks. We are investing in computer coding classes for young people so they can find more highly skilled jobs. We have introduced a minimum wage guarantee.

On the other hand we are penalising big polluting cars with high parking charges, charging more council tax on people who use our housing as a place to dump money, and shaming and fining selfish citizens.

We are creating a fairer, modern more sustainable future, where we use the state to work with citizens. Labour needs to articulate a similar future nationally where everyone and particularly the rich pay their fair share and we create a society in which we can all participate.