Without Brown’s reforms, a Labour government will be doomed to fail

Gordon Brown’s report on the future of the UK constitution has been attacked as a distraction. Labour, it is argued, should focus on more immediate matters, such as the cost-of-living crisis and growing backlogs in the NHS. This was the line taken not just by journalists at the report’s launch, but also by some within the Labour Party machine. But without the changes Brown proposes, a Labour government will condemn itself to failure on the very challenges that detractors claim to prioritise.

The critics are effectively saying that an unreformed British state can deliver a Labour programme. But they overlook the fact that this state has failed to make any progress for years on a whole range of problems that a Keir Starmer-led cabinet would want to resolve: weak productivity, regional inequality, social care funding, NHS demand pressures, poor transport connectivity. The list goes on – problems that have now reached a point of systemic crisis in the form of cost-of-living pressures and public sector backlogs.

Labour, of course, lays these failures at the feet of the Conservatives. But, while some truly awful decisions have been made, those resisting change should be wary of drinking the party’s own Kool-Aid. Fresh faces in power may help break the log-jam, but alone it will not be enough. Labour needs to be fully alert to the fact that the government machine no longer has the capabilities or resources to generate the profound shifts our increasingly struggling country needs.

The failure begins with the technocratic assumption at the heart of the British state: that change can be generated simply by passing down orders and resource from on high to the civil service or the public sector workforce. The challenges are now so great and complex, and the money so limited, that such a simplistic approach inevitably falls short. ‘Levelling up’ is a case in point; the classic technocratic response of some legislative tweaks and the redirection of a limited amount of public money is obviously never going to be enough to turn around the centuries-old problem of regional inequality. As a result, it is proving entirely ineffectual.

Brown has seen this and has proposed a very different approach, one that recognises that solutions to Britain’s biggest challenges cannot be found by relying solely on the efforts of Westminster and Whitehall. Instead, we need deep reform that empowers and resources local areas and communities to draw on their own insight, energy and assets to bring about change.

Having actually been in power for the last decade, many Labour councils have already come to the same conclusion. They are ditching the technocracy and shifting towards a community power approach. This maximises the possibility of meaningful change by mobilising communities to augment the work of local government and public services. This is why Camden and Newham are shifting to a much more participatory model of democracy. Why Wigan has developed a community-led approach to social care. Why Bristol actively supports highly mobilised communities like Lawrence Weston. And why Wakefield has launched thousands of open, meaningful conversations with its residents to understand better how council and community can work together.

This is the mindset shift Labour in government will need to adopt. Dispense with the top-down, we-know-bestism of the classic technocratic state and instead understand how every change the new government wants requires engagement and close working with the communities where the change needs to happen. That means doing just as Brown suggests: boldly devolving power and resource to the local level; opening up decision-making to popular participation; thinking of public service delivery and the resolution of challenges as a genuinely joint endeavour between the central state, the local state and local communities; and encouraging this community-powered mindset across the whole of the public sector from Whitehall down. And, absolutely vitally, reforming a core institution like the House of Lords so it becomes the guarantor of this new way of working by making it the voice of localities and regions.

Of course, there are risks involved in launching such a major reform. But defaulting to Whitehall technocracy is an even bigger risk. Ignoring the vast knowledge and energy present in local areas and communities and instead working alone, Whitehall will only be able to take the smallest nibbles from the overloaded plate of challenges a Labour government will face. And soon the failures of the technocratic state will come to be seen as the failures of Labour, just as they currently are for the Tories. Worse, the country will still be stuck with a growing mountain of seemingly irresolvable problems as yet another ineffective administration comes to a close.