‘We need street-fighting social democracy to beat Reform’

As the Labour conference comes into view, the Westminster village is up to its usual tricks. Instead of focusing on the issues facing residents in constituencies like mine in County Durham, it’s obsessing itself with tittle tattle and aimless leadership speculation.

Anyone engaging in this nonsense from Labour is doing a disservice to everyone across the country that voted for change last summer. Anyone distracting us from this task would be handing the keys to Downing Street to the most extreme right-wing Prime Minister in history.

The mission is clear: make tangible, hard-won improvements to people’s lives from now until the election or risk a Farage government.

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Alongside lower NHS waiting lists, rising wages and more breakfast clubs, the government has taken another positive step towards delivering those tangible changes today. In hundreds of communities across the country, the Prime Minister has announced he will be investing £20 million over the next ten years.

This is game changing levels of investment – £20 million pounds for a council estate, village, or small part of a town. It’s not hard to imagine the difference that level of funding could make. New playgrounds, parks and community centres. The staff to run these properly. More bobbies on the beat, restoring the public’s faith in the state. More provision for children and parents, starting to repair the hole left by the cruel scrapping of Sure Start.

These have been identified through official statistics, looking at things like deprivation – not the Tories’ approach to dodgy formulas and crooked spreadsheets.

I’m proud to represent communities like these across my seat and I am delighted that Stanley South has been awarded the funding. These are the places that forged the Labour Party more than a hundred years ago and which we have been established to serve.

Yet too often they are blighted by boarded-up shops, anti-social behaviour and a general sense of decline. This is never the local people’s fault – it is the product of 14 years of Tory austerity and decades of de-industrialisation.

To start to put that right, Starmer is rolling up his sleeves, getting his government working estate-by-estate, neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood, to restore pride and strength to places like Stanley. This is street-fighting social democracy, using the fiscal power of the central state to rebuild communities.

Philosophically, this adds up to a much more muscular approach to neighbourhood management than we have seen for some time.

Residents tell me that it’s not acceptable that local public spaces feel derelict and neglected, afflicted by fly-tipping and rats; that gangs of youths intimidate on off-road bikes; that sometimes nothing happens when you report an issue to the council. The message from government is clear – enough is enough.

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We will work alongside local partners, yes, but we will have a strong voice to act on the side of working-class communities. To bang heads together when the council aren’t listening to residents. To do whatever it takes to improve working-class communities.

Crucially, we will put local people and communities in control of how the money is spent, people who understand places like Stanley.

This is what every Labour government does: the urgent community repair job after years of scorched-earth Toryism. Just as the New Labour government built Sure Start centres and revived communities through the New Deal for Communities programme, this government is breathing life back into our neighbourhoods.

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While gossip and intrigue are what get too many in politics out of bed in the morning, this Labour government is getting on with the hard job of delivering for post-industrial towns and villages, like those I represent.

Ultimately, this requires using the full strength of the British state to achieve this mission. This might be directed from Westminster, but in the corridors of power in Whitehall we have a Cabinet whose minds are firmly fixed on constituencies like mine across the North of England.

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