The real outsiders and insiders, and the leadership debate:
The current state of Labour’s. leadership election is not what I had expected, to say the least.
Many voters in the election would not associate themselves with UKIP, the SNP, or populist parties. But I wonder if the current Labour leadership battle is less about left versus right, and more about identity. It’s now the insiders versus outsiders. The outsiders signal their leftwing virtue by taking to Twitter or Facebook to condemn the insiders, hate the Tories, and repeat their slogans. The insiders sigh and warn about electability.
So how did this happen? It’s certainly true that for too long, the Westminster insider culture has left too many people feeling outside in the cold. I know how people come to feel like genuine outsiders in the political process.
The current Tory government does not want my town to survive. All the places I represent are very important, but the one I live in – New Ferry – faces crisis. So many empty shops, we have lost count and buildings crumbling. The cause of this disarray is not just one thing. There is an out of town retail park up the road. But just along side New Ferry are vacant grasslands where new housing should be. This is dead space was left by the cancelled Housing Market Renewal Initiative. Labour’s housing regeneration scheme was ditched by the Tories in 2010 and the house building abruptly stopped. The new people who could be shopping in New Ferry have never come.
There is a plan: Wirral council will give up their local car park to a developer, in order to regenerate New Ferry. But developers won’t bite, because the current housing mix doesn’t produce a good enough return on their investment. It’s a vicious circle. Tory cuts mean there is no public investment available for regeneration. So New Ferry falls further.
George Osborne’s ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’ – or austerity – has left too many towns without a hope of a new start. And some in the leadership election suggest that printing money for public works will sort this out. Both are false. Neither will work.
It’s not holding a political position that matters. It isn’t how loudly you shout to defend council homes that matters. It’s not how vitriolic you are. What really counts is whether or not you can rebuild New Ferry, and hundreds of towns like it.
It is important because people walk through these towns every day, and believe that because their place. is in a mess, they themselves must not matter. It is because the state of the place is depressing and the cause of unhappiness. It is because it shows that whoever is in charge, they are not listening to the people. The people in charge don’t care. New Ferry, to give just one example, is outside their concerns.
Rather, proper devolution of resources and sensible investment by the public sector could – as demonstrated by already regenerated cities in the north – reap huge benefits. Better housing encourages investment, and turns an economic cycle of decline into a virtuous circle of growth.
To make the point even more starkly, I have met people who are true outsiders.
Some years ago, when I was a councillor in the London Borough of Southwark, I was at my surgery, and in walked a woman who spoke little English. She told me Southwark had put her in a temporary housing block and left her there. She said there were ten other families in my ward without allocated social workers, just waiting for someone in authority to get them out of there.
I told her that there wasn’t a temporary housing block in my ward. In my defence, I thought this was true: I had scoured that ward in search of Labour votes, and I couldn’t believe there was a building I didn’t know was there. She argued with me, and I was so sure, I offered to go with her, there and then, to see the building and to prove I was right.
I was wrong. She showed me to a prefabricated hut that I had taken for a store of some kind on the edge of a large housing estate. I went inside. Just as she said, ten families. Each living in one room, sharing two toilet blocks and a kitchen. The social worker who was supposed to be housing them had taken sick leave and never been replaced. They were in limbo. Truly powerless.
I, dutiful and shamefaced, took all their details and told them I would get them a social worker on the case.
But the experience of the last family I met in that building haunts me.
A pregnant mum, and a dad, and two little children in one room about 3 metres squared. They were from Burundi, and were refugees from conflict. They had lived in that temporary housing block for months and months. They were in crisis, and ignored by anyone with any power. Mum had significant mental health problems from her experiences, and Dad was desperately worried. The family were in a mess, and getting worse by the day. They had escaped terror, and now they were in a country they did not know well, and no one could help.
They deserved decent shelter, at least, to say nothing of basic medical care. This is the least that powerful people in our world can do for pregnant women who are the victims of violence. Everyone I know in progressive, Labour, politics believes that we should fulfil our responsibilities to vulnerable refugees who have no home to call their own.
This not a position for a debate in a student union. This is not a badge to wear or a slogan to shout. This is no ‘virtue signal’. This is the difference between life offering people a chance, or a person’s circumstances crushing their hopes. When your needs and your concerns are ignored by those in power, you are an outsider. And, amongst other things, it is the job of progressives, of the left, of Labour, to listen to the outsider, to give them better fortune.
Solidarity with people truly left out is important, but it implies on us a duty greater than tweeting a hashtag. Greater even than attending a march or signing a petition. We have to know what change is needed, and get it done. And that means getting power. The power to really invest in housing, not just tell stories about People’s QE and printing money that only the willing believe. Or in the case of refugees, the power to face the world and see that Britain can be a force for good in relation to conflicts that threaten the welfare of children whose names we may never know, but nonetheless we would desperately wish to help if we could. The view we take on the world outside our shores is too important to be used as a mere proof-point of leftwing (or for that matter, right wing) credentials.
Sometimes I feel like an outsider amongst the powerful at Westminster. I hate the feeling that it is all set up for people who shift seamlessly from private school to Oxbridge college to Westminster.
Even on the Labour side, friends rightly laugh at the chips on my shoulders. I secretly – or occasionally when it bursts out – express frustration at the good luck of some people whom powerful people have given a hand, it appears, beyond their talents. I blame my northern roots or the ages long conspiracy against women.
But this is not right. My constituents did not send me to Westminster to be resentful or jealous. They did not elect me into the House of Commons to watch me shout in protest without any alternative, waste time concocting grand theories about global economic affairs whilst Tory austerity bites, and families wait for homes.
Nor will my passion for human dignity ever do a single other person any good if time is wasted on promoting divisions within that keep Labour powerless and the Tories powerful. I will likely never know the fear and horror that man and woman from Burundi had seen. But I know what I saw in their eyes, and the need to offer people something better – not a better demo, or a better campaign slogan, but a better life – is too urgent and important to ignore.
If you are an outsider to politics, getting access to power matters. As Angela Eagle rightly says, you either do politics or you have it done to you.
Electing people who will bring change is the only route to equality. And, though it can momentarily bring relief, just shouting at Tories, in the end, does no good. Without power, it’s just words.
We are correct to hate Tory austerity. We are right to think ill of those who turn away from outsiders in need of help. Five years of carelessness towards our society has been enough, and we likely face five more.
So if you are ‘left wing’, or ‘progressive’, or Labour, and you are about to cast your vote for our leader, remember to think of those without power. You might feel – as I have done, and still sometimes do – that you are an outsider. But if you are lucky enough to be part of our movement you are inside a body of people who demonstrably have the capacity – who have been shown to have the power – to change the world. We ought not to let the world down.
