We must embrace the politics of the possible

Every decision I have to make as Mayor of Liverpool is hard these days. Rationing services. Cutting budgets. Making ends meet. Dreaming up new ways of holding on to what we have. It’s the politics of the possible. Of practical solutions. Dealing with the world as it is, not as we would want it to be.

At the weekend, Jeremy Corbyn held a rally in Liverpool and was asked a question about our city’s libraries.  Despite not closing a single one of them, there are plenty of critics from the left who think that any change to the service is the same as closure.  They oppose us finding new and innovative ways to keep providing services, despite losing 58% of our Government funding.  Jeremy’s answer was disappointing from someone who wants to be the next Labour Prime Minister.  Apparently we should simply “work together to fight Tory-imposed cuts”.

Labour now stands at a crossroads. We can back the politics of the possible – basing our approach in reality, as we’re trying to do here in Liverpool, or we can embrace the politics of the impossible. Of loud demands and easy promises. If we do, the party will be doomed to wander in the wilderness until the public think we can be trusted again.

It’s up to us when that moment comes. Either we can learn from May’s result, get our house in order and come back stronger in 2020, or we can talk among ourselves, play “pin-the-tail-on-the-Tory” and wallow in our self-righteousness. If we go down this road we’ll have flying cars before we see another Labour government.

The choice for us is that simple – and it’s that stark.

Everyone, right across this party, feels the pain of austerity. No-one wants to see services cut or our welfare state undermined. All of us came into politics to make the world a fairer and better place, especially for those who get a raw deal, but we need to temper this with realism.

On the national stage, we failed to convince enough people that we had the answers to the country’s problems and until we do, we won’t win again. That means being disciplined in what we promise.

If we learn from our local government leaders, we can base our politics in hard-headed solutions. For Labour councils, this is not a theoretical, academic, polemical exercise. Many of us are already finding innovative ways of delivering services, by being clear what we want but pragmatic about how we get there and using our core Labour values to decide what to prioritise.

After all, ‘the language of priorities is the religion of socialism,’ as Nye Bevan put it. It means having the courage to face up to hard choices. It also means remembering what’s really important and what isn’t. That’s what he did in creating the NHS. He compromised where he needed to, but never took his eye off the main prize, a service free at the point of use, based on need, not ability to pay.

How it was delivered was another matter. The consultants wouldn’t play ball so he bought them off, ‘stuffing their mouths with gold’ to get to where he needed to get to.

That’s what we need to remember as a party. Governing is hard. It isn’t a question of proclaiming something should happen and then standing back waiting for it to appear in a puff of smoke. It’s about convincing and cajoling and compromising to get to where you need to be. And there usually isn’t a pot of gold waiting at the end of Whitehall to pay for it.

That’s what we need to be hearing from our leadership candidates. Idealism and realism. It represents the best of our party’s past and a way for Labour to rebuild now.

Joe Anderson is Labour Mayor of Liverpool