Politics
Forget the NHS: clear up the litter
Published 22 May 2000
Denis MacShane finds a hot political issue that has been overlooked by the Third Way gurus
All sorts of explanations have been put forward for Labour's local election losses. Peter Kilfoyle thinks we aren't listening to the heartlands. His fellow Merseyside MP, Frank Field, thinks the Tories have the best tunes over asylum-seekers, Tony Martin and Europe. Margaret McDonagh, the party general secretary, thinks that ministers should spend more time campaigning.
May I modestly offer another proximate cause? Litter. Yes, grubby, paper- and plastic-flecked municipalities are the issue (to use a Bennism) that makes voters mad and drives them away from voting Labour.
The source of this assertion is a response to an invitation on a Labour newsletter distributed in my heartlands constituency of Rotherham. Voters were invited to write in with their comments on what concerned them most. There were replies from 180 people. (Some mentioned more than one issue; so the percentages in the table don't add up to 100.)
By far the biggest issue was litter. In fact, people didn't think much of council services generally. Only one person mentioned the NHS and only one mentioned jobs - which may reflect how, since 1997, unemployment in Rotherham has dropped to its lowest level in three decades. Clearly, this survey is neither MORI poll nor focus group. But it does confirm my experience of canvassing, street surgeries and meetings in the run-up to the May elections.
"All politics", declared the legendary Boston politician Tip O'Neill, "is local." I think he's right. There is a growing gap between SW1 political-media Britain and the real, existing country: I return from a Westminster village obsessed with asylum-seekers, fox-hunting, welfare reform, the over-valued pound or Europe, to voters for whom clean streets and a tidy neighbourhood are the most important issues.
Classic theoreticians of democratic socialism or the new gurus of the Third Way have not written widely on street cleaning. There are, as far as I know, no plans to appoint a litter tsar. Councils are always being urged to clean up their act, but what they should be made to do is clean up their streets.
London-based commentators and the Conservatives have tried to portray the council results as a negative verdict on Labour nationally. There are cries for a major change of course, a demand for a return to old Labour ideas: middle England should be ignored, we are told, and heartland voters indulged.
Yet history and a closer examination of the results locally suggest otherwise. Mid-term, previous Labour governments have done worse. In 1968, Labour lost 15 out of 18 boroughs in the London council elections; in 1969, it lost nearly 1,000 council seats. In 1977, after three years of Labour government which saw big increases in welfare spending, pension rights and trade union rights, and a pay boost for the low paid without parallel, the response of voters was to boot Labour out of most town halls. That year, I worked hard in Birmingham to produce mini newspapers for 39 council wards extolling the virtues of a Labour council and government. My reward was to see 39 wards lost.
The detailed results in Rotherham this month also counter the view that it's something about the new Labour government that drives the voters away. Labour still has 58 of the 66 council seats. Pensioners are said to be particularly aggrieved. Yet in the ward in my constituency that has the highest proportion of pensioners (including William Hague's family home) the Labour vote went up. The reason? A very active team of councillors and party activists knocking on doors, talking to people and listening to them.
In a nearby ward, by contrast, the Labour vote fell by 25 per cent, and a similar drop in the Labour vote in another ward let in a Lib Dem who had worked hard - if opportunistically - on local issues for two years. If Labour nationally was uniformly unpopular, one would expect to see a uniform drop in the Labour vote across Rotherham. But the wide variations reflect the difference between engaged, enthusiastic, local political activity and those wards where the local party has become moribund.
So can Labour rest on its laurels nationally and urge local councils to focus on cleaning up their streets? No. The delivery of good public services is about all that is left of 20th-century socialism. The politics of council delivery has been the Cinderella of the new Labour project. Union leaders, business bosses and the media have been cosseted, given peerages and made to feel wanted.
But the 11,500 local councillors who represent Labour have been left out in the cold. Labour councils must be given the means to deliver services that people want and need. And party political activity at the grass roots should be revived. Labour was lucky to get a warning shot in the local elections. If we forget that all politics is local, next time it will be worse, much worse.
Meanwhile, can we have a cleaner Britain?
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