NEC Statement from Restoration: ‘Restore the industrial base, party bonds and integrity’

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We are writing this in the week of the Makerfield by-election. For the last month, thousands of activists, journalists and politicians have made their way to its rarely-mentioned towns and villages: Hindley Green, Hindley, Platt Bridge, Abram, Ashton, Winstanley, Worsley Mesnes, Orrell, Pickley Green.

Maybe you were one of them; a Labour activist from London or the South, heading up North with the best of intentions. The first shock is the train fare. Without a railcard, and unless you booked a week ahead, an open return can run to a hundred quid. The second shock comes when you reach Wigan North Western and realise the campaign HQ at Stubshaw Cross Community Club is only four miles away. In London, four miles is fifteen minutes on the Tube. In Wigan, once you’ve waited for the bus and walked the rest, it’s the better part of an hour.

Walk down Ashton’s high street to the Community Club and you see a familiar picture: barbers, chicken shops, betting shops, a lone wedding-dress shop, and vapes in as many flavours as your heart desires.

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You haven’t knocked on a single door yet, and yet you start to understand the anger directed at Westminster. Why did it take us – Labour – so long to be honest about what has happened to towns like this?

Partly because we were once so proud of them. This area has sent a Labour MP to Westminster since 1906. Coal defined what we now call Makerfield for two centuries. You wouldn’t know it from anything but the history books or reading Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, but Wigan was once a byword for mining.

Ashton-in-Makerfield carried a parallel reputation for metalworking – nail-making by hand, then locks, hinges and bolts – alongside a booming textile trade of cotton spinning and weaving. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Britain was a country that made things, and the science, the engineering and the rising standard of living all followed from that. The work done in places like Makerfield built what made Britain great. There was a great deal to be proud of in being from here. They were a central part of the national story, now they’re a talking point for podcasters and panellists.

We treat these towns like a laboratory. Let’s run the experiment: can Labour’s most popular politician still hold the ground in a former heartland? The country once known for what it built is now known for the City of London, and not much beyond it. For the towns outside that single square mile, the clock more or less stopped in 2007 – which is roughly when wages stopped rising. That is the result of an economy built on services and privatisation. The hubris of looking down on working with your hands.

This is why we built Restoration.

We have no factional bone to pick. We will work with anyone, from any wing of the party, who feels the pain of working-class communities and wants to cure Labour’s malaise with the left behind before it becomes terminal. There are three issues Labour has let slip, and we mean to restore them.

The first is the industrial base. Labour must confront the thing that makes manufacturing in Britain uncompetitive: some of the highest industrial energy prices in the developed world, and pairing cheaper power with serious public capital investment, rather than another decade of managed decline. It also means giving workers a real stake. We support a British version of Italy’s Marcora Law, which allows workers facing the closure of their firm to pool their redundancy entitlements into the capital needed to buy it out and run it themselves, as a cooperative or mutual. Where a viable business would otherwise be shut down, the people who know it best should have the first right to save it.

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The second is the bond between the party and the people it claims to speak for. Britain cannot rebuild unless Labour first looks like, listens to, and answers to the working class it wants to empower. We’re the only group promoting working-class candidates in blue-collar professions because we want to see the people that Labour was built for have a real say in the halls of power again. Too many times the same old people from the same old backgrounds have been making the same old poor decisions for our party and country – this has to change.

The third is integrity. We were saddened and disgusted by what the Peter Mandelson revelations exposed: a culture in which proximity to power is used to enrich a few, and in which the comfort of the powerful is allowed to matter more than the harm done to the vulnerable. A party that asks coalfield towns to trust it again cannot also be a refuge for people who treat public life as an investment opportunity.

READ MORE: 

Labour To Win statement
Mainstream NEC statement
Momentum NEC statement

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