The Independent Group is disrupting politics. But policy needs disrupting as well
The tectonic plates are starting to shift at Westminster. But whether the result is a landscape reshaping volcano or merely a short-lived tremor will be decided as much by policy as politics.
At the moment, we have two main parties that have struggled to develop overarching visions that feel fresh and responsive to a changing world. Labour is hooked on recreating a post-war idyll characterised by in-house public services, nationalised utilities and expanding welfare. The Conservatives march on dead-eyed, mouthing tired tropes about private provision of public services, fiscal restraint and low taxes. Under normal conditions this anachronistic duopoly of dullness might have been broken some time ago, but Brexit has sucked the energy out of domestic policy-making.
The appearance of The Independent Group on the scene offers a chance to shake things up. A cross-party body literally starting from scratch should by rights be a fertile breeding ground for ideas too radical for the backwards-facing elites running the other parties.
It is very early days, of course, but there is clearly some way to go. TIG was launched with a statement that was only exceeded in tiresome predictability by the logo of the new group. The comments from the defecting MPs have been strong on aspiration for a transformed politics but light on detail and what policy ideas have been mentioned have hardly been box fresh.
If any party – brand new or centuries old – is looking for genuinely radical policy thinking, they could do far worse than pay attention to what is happening on the front-line of public services. Look to the most innovative parts of local government and the NHS and you will find a new approach emerging that has one idea at its heart: the transfer of power and resources from the state and into the hands of communities.
Councils like Wigan, Cambridgeshire, Gateshead and Barking and Dagenham are hotbeds of radical transformation developing ways to put communities in the driving seat of designing and delivering public services. Many of the NHS Vanguard pilot areas have spent five years trialling how citizens and their networks can take on responsibility for vital healthcare services. Most strikingly, the Big Local initiative is revealing the transformation that can occur when you give 150 of the country’s most deprived neighbourhoods a million pounds each to spend with no strings attached.
For the public sector, this community power serves a vital but pragmatic goal. In an era of rapidly rising demand, there is an urgent need to move away from crisis response and towards prevention. That requires the mobilisation of communities and citizens to find their own long-term solutions from below rather than rely on public servants to deliver short-term care from above.
But beyond the pragmatism, this is also an approach that responds directly to the deafening roar of popular frustration at politicians and officials determined to take vital decisions in their offices and debating chambers with no methodical or thorough-going effort to engage the wider public. It is that frustration that is feeding the rise of an angry extremism. Those who want to challenge that extremism need to offer a distinct ‘take back control’ agenda built around a deeper democracy and real influence for citizens over the big and little decisions that affect their daily lives.
This vision has been hidden for some time in the undergrowth of public service delivery rarely explored by national politicians obsessed with Westminster shenanigans. But now a growing band of public sector radicals are connecting the dots. Hilary Cottam’s Radical Help and Alex Fox’s New Health and Social Care System eloquently sum up what is happening at the grassroots.
Next week the New Local Government Network publishes its own analysis in the form of The Community Paradigm: Why public services need radical change and how to achieve it. We explain there why an irrevocable shift of power towards citizens and communities is relevant not just to front-line delivery but also to the way national politics works. It amounts to a fundamental reinvention of both the local and central state. For those in Westminster who recognise the need for a big volcano of transformation rather than a minor tremor of reform, it will be worth a read.
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