‘See it, say it, sort it!’

I know the British media are obsessed about who will lead Labour into the general election but I still want to talk about the recent local elections. Indeed, it is because of the local election results that as a Party we now find ourselves in this so-called ‘leadership crisis’.

It seems we have moved swiftly on from the “awful set of results” to “let someone else have a go” without a period of reflection and indeed without giving some people time to absorb their losses, both personal and for their Council.

So I want to return to that painful night – particularly hard in Yorkshire where it is fair to say we had a right drubbing.

No more so than in Barnsley that has been Labour for the past fifty years or so. It is still hard to watch the BBC interview with the former Labour leader Steve Houghton, a man dedicated to the town, and who is largely responsible for its renewal. Despite that, and whilst acknowledging he is respected and much loved, the electorate wanted to give Labour nationally a bloody nose.

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Steve said that he knew something like this was entirely possible. In various interviews he repeated “The reason we are here is not down to Keir Starmer… this has been building for the last 30 years with too many places and communities feeling left behind…. Changing the Prime Minister but keeping on the same direction is not going to cut it.”

He was not the only one to reflect on that. Former Labour Leader of Bradford, Susan Hincliffe, who lost her seat said “I think this is bigger than talking about Keir Starmer. You look back to 2016, since then we’ve had six Prime Ministers.

And South Yorkshire Labour mayor Oliver Coppard talked in a post on Facebook of how South Yorkshire folk weren’t feeling the fundamental change they were promised “and for as long as this government fails to recognise the urgency and scale of those demands, that sense of anger will remain.”

I live in South Yorkshire and yes, we turned the region red in 2024 but there is still something underlying in many communities that is feeding a sense of abandonment. Post industrial communities and seaside towns who’ve lost their mojo feel that they have never really recovered. For some places nothing has come in to replace what they lost.

That is not to say Labour has not tried to address this. One of the first acts of the new Blair government was to set up Regional Development Agencies (RDAS) specifically to drive economic development across all regions. This spatial awareness of regional inequalities was vital to try and rebalance our economy and to address the fundamental fact that we are a deeply unequal society. According to the Guardian “Britain in the 1970s was one of the most equal of rich countries. Today, it is the second most unequal, after the US.”

The Treasury weighed in with some pretty hard-hitting Productivity Reports, the Wanlass report on long term funding for the NHS and a deeper exploration of research, development and innovation in the regions. But the 2008 financial crash changed the direction of travel and the 2010 general election literally threw all of this out of the window. The coalition government never got it and cared even less.

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This Labour government has done things we can be rightly proud of. And there is an issue of perception over reality. Anyone who says that Barnsley is not transformed as a town never went there in 1980 and certainly has not visited today. Since coming into power, Labour has changed the dial for people in a positive way but it does not appear to be enough.

What seems to be lost is the story that goes behind this and how we actually deliver. We need to acknowledge the deep rooted and structural inequality that is unfortunately still evident and then show the routes out of this. The response of yet another reset does not wash unless there are changes in the way we do things and this may well start with how we tell our story as Labour and how we operate as a government.

Let’s look at government departments and the silo mentality surrounding them. The Treasury needs to learn to let go a bit more and give regions some devolved fiscal powers. The office surrounding Number 10 needs a bit of a shake too. Fundamentally we need to address concerns about how, who and where power is exercised, something that lies at the heart of the excellent work coming out of the Good Governance Forum. I would, as an aside, add pace on House of Lords reform to a full elected chamber on the regional list system. And I’d love a Minister of the North with a Cabinet role to address regional inequalities, although I already concede this does not address issues in our coastal communities and other regions.

As for telling our story – it’s really not that hard, it just needs good communicators and a consistent and authentic message. It’s not good enough to say we are listening or “I hear you” – I claim to listen to my husband most of the time – I still go and do what I intended to do in the first place. Increasingly I’m becoming a “see it, say it, sort it” type of gal, but then maybe I spend too much time on trains.

And so back to May 7th. I would love someone to map who voted in these locals vs who voted in GE in 2024 as I think it was a very different electorate. And it felt very much a rerun of the 2016 referendum. Turns out, so called non-voters are voters after all, just not all the time. That’s where we should start – in those communities and having those conversations.

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We can move the deckchairs politically but unless we do things differently, we will get the same results. And – sorry for repeating my old mantra – but we are still, as a country, too London-focused and driven by the square few miles around the city and Westminster.

So, let’s use this opportunity to really reset and reframe our politics and our institutions that capture the early ambitions of the Regional Development Agencies. And let’s learn to tell our story more convincingly.

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