Today’s New Deal for England announcement by Labour doesn’t just underline how much of the political action is in the regions at the moment, but how the party is coming to terms with some of the mistakes that it made when it was last in government.
The significant devolution of power and spending to local government announced today by the Local Government Innovation Taskforce is a clever way for Ed Balls to save money, but it’s also a recognition across the party that a centralised state did not delve the sort of results it should have done in the party’s 13 years of power, and so something must change. It was initially a conviction of a few key party thinkers that was resisted vigorously by equally key colleagues, but is now the prevailing philosophy. When I talked to one senior Labour figure about why the party was falling in love with localism, aside from it being an affliction of any party in opposition, he said:
‘We’ve had to recognise that we didn’t achieve what we wanted to achieve in government, that we didn’t make sufficient advances on poverty in the way we wanted to.
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