Ideas to put us on road to transformation will all be generated locally

Friday evening was an eventful one, but I suppose that it wasn’t the world’s biggest surprise when former Prime Minister Boris Johnson provided our country’s latest political shock when he announced his immediate resignation as an MP, thus triggering a problematic by-election for the Tories.

This was always the potential endgame of Johnson’s appearance before the Privileges Committee, and to further deepen current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s headache, two Johnson allies – Nadine Dories and Nigel Adams – also resigned, seemingly in a fit of pique, over their exclusion from Johnson’s resignation honours list, meaning a tough Thursday is on the horizon for Sunak and his party.

One senior Tory has said that they fear that they are about to “tear themselves apart”. That may well be the case, and will be of little comfort to the people and small businesses all over the country who are currently worried sick about the state of the economy, public services, and general direction of travel right now.

This current episode of the ongoing Tory soap opera shines a light on an inward looking, deeply divided group that is massively out-of-touch, has run out of steam, and has nothing to offer other than an obsession with an economic model that has run out of road. They simply have no ideas towards solving the big challenges that we face, and it is both infuriating and deeply frustrating. But then just as Johnson’s departure was not a big surprise, neither is this.

George Orwell didn’t write all hope lies in localities’, but he might’ve done, and he would’ve been right. Top-down policy making has ultimately led us to the situation that we find ourselves in, and alongside austerity and the stripping-out of skills and expertise both locally and centrally, havoc has been wreaked which has caused untold damage to villages, towns and cities around the country.

Here in The Potteries, a third of children live in a household with at least one adult working full-time, yet they still live in extreme poverty. Can someone please explain to me why this should be happening and is considered acceptable?

For a number of years we’ve heard a lot about levelling up, but the reality is, this electoral slogan is nothing more than a myth in the real world, and in our part of that real world has seen little more than 90s/00s physical regeneration with less money, something which won’t touch the real issues.

The Levelling Up White Paper provided a good analysis of the challenges, but proposed solutions are lacking in strength, depth and meaning, and maybe that is a good thing. Because the big ideas that will put us on the road to transformation will ultimately be generated locally.

Last Thursday I attended the launch for the Centre for Business, Innovation and Regions at Staffordshire University where Dr. Jon Fairburn, Professor Steven Griggs and their team introduced a unit within the university’s Business School that – through partnership and collaboration – will be focusing on important themes that will help us to transform North Staffordshire, including inequalities, employment and welfare, innovation and leadership, and regional economic development, regeneration, and – most importantly – alternative economies. Never mind Tufton Street, here’s Leek Road.

If local people and small businesses are at the heart of this approach, then it is places like this – away from Whitehall – that will lead the political debate and the battle for ideas, and this will be the right thing to do because ultimately, we have to live with the consequences of policy making, for good or ill.

People have begun to lose faith in democracy, for perfectly understandable reasons, and so if we want to save it, then we have to do things differently. We have to remember that we should be doing things with and for communities rather than to them, and that to keep power, you will need to give it away: devolve and decentralise, and develop a culture of participation and cooperation.

It is time for renewal. We have to make things work again, and microwaved policy from the 1980s should not be on the menu. There is an appetite for something new, and North Staffordshire can be at the forefront of this.

DP
12th June 2023