This is an article I wrote for a Progress pamphlet.  It explains how Labour in Lambeth became more representative of our diverse community in an attempt to re-engage and win back power. 

Click here to see the pamphlet online.  

Experience shows that Labour loses power when we stop talking about the
things that matter most to people, whether at a local or national level. Losing
power, as we did in Lambeth in 2002, is a wake-up call. It forces you to look at
how you’ve become disconnected from ordinary people and what you need to
do to reconnect.

After our defeat in 2002, we set up a process to listen to the community and ordinary
party members so we could understand where we’d gone wrong. We called it
‘Learning the Lessons’. We learnt a lot. We learnt that in our community, where nearly
40 per cent of the population is Black, Asian and Minority ethnic (BAME) and over
50 per cent female, we were too white and too male. It was sobering to learn from our
own analysis that a white male putting himself forward for selection was nine times
more likely to be elected a councillor than if he had been black. In fact, the council as
a whole was only six per cent BAME.

Being more representative matters for two reasons. First, people are more likely to
vote for candidates who they think share or understand their experiences. Second, if
we don’t bring the range of diversity and experience from our communities into our
town halls, then the policies and services our town halls develop are unlikely to meet
the needs of the whole community.

We set up a programme to address under-representation of BAME communities
in the ranks of our Labour councillors. The first meeting, attended by 30 black and
Asian party members, told us where we were going wrong. We learnt that our meetings
were off-putting because of what we talked about, where we held them, when we
held them, how newcomers were treated, and how we used impenetrable language
talking about GCs and LGCs and ECs and the detail of party organisation –
acronyms and issues that don’t mean much to most people.

We developed the programme to build the capacity and experience of our black
members to win selection in winnable council seats. We held workshops and discussion
groups with senior party figures, offered mentoring and arranged shadowing with
sitting councillors, and held campaigning activities and training events specifically for
BAME members. In total, up to 60 people took part in the programme.
To ensure we didn’t just select more diverse candidates in seats we were less likely
to win, we secured the support of the local party in principle to reserve Labour-held
seats where the councillor was standing down for experienced BAME candidates who,
thanks to the programme, were now in greater supply. The results were spectacular.
Before the election, Labour had just three BAME councillors out of a total of 28.
Afterwards, we had 12 out of a total of 39 and all of them with real leadership potential.
By contrast, there are still just two BAME Lib Dem councillors and, to their
shame, the Tory councillors in multi-ethnic Lambeth remain a whites-only zone. Our
diversity showed we were the only party that was serious about representing the whole
borough.

I have no doubt that the increase in diversity among our candidates contributed to
the scale of our victory in the elections in May 2006. That year, we were the only17 16e Reed
council in the country where Labour won back majority control from opposition, and
we did it by a landslide. But it wasn’t just how we looked that mattered; it was what we
said and the credibility we had when we said it that gave us the edge.

A second major issue we had to address was remoteness. We learnt that voters
saw us as too distant from their locality, more likely to be walking down the corridors
of power than down the streets or through the estates where our voters live. That
required a different form of engagement to understand people’s concerns street-bystreet
and area-by-area. It’s nothing we don’t already all know – it meant knocking on
more doors and delivering more questionnaires so that we really knew the local issues.
On the doorsteps, instead of following the script and asking people, ‘which party do
you most identify with?’, we asked them, ‘if there’s one thing we could do locally to
improve things for you, what would it be?’. That gave us our issues.

We took a decision not to fight a borough-wide election but to fight the council as
if it were a series of by-elections. We talked to people only about the issues that mattered
most in their area. By having these issues voiced by a more diverse group of
candidates, we won greater credibility for what we said. In a local election, even when
the national situation is difficult, people will vote on local issues if we make a powerful
enough case. People won’t use a local election to have a cost-free kick at the government
if they think it will mean losing their local swimming pool.

Back in power, our newly elected BAME councillors are already making a huge
difference to our Labour administration in Lambeth. A stark example of this is our
response to the gang-related violence we’re experiencing in south London in common
with a number of other inner-city areas. The socio-economic issues that underlie
alienation and social exclusion are experienced most heavily in Lambeth by BAME
communities. It is black boys, in particular, who are drawn into gang membership,
while nearly every victim of gang-related gun crime is black. These individuals come
predominantly from poor families living in poor areas where a disproportionate number
of black people live. It is impossible to get under the surface of these issues and
find credible answers when the council is almost exclusively white.

It’s our black councillors who are the leaders in the work we’re doing to tackle
guns and gang-related violence. Lorna Campbell is a lifelong Lambeth resident with
first-hand experience of bringing up children and grandchildren on an inner-city
estate. She was elected a councillor in 2006 and is now leading the search for solutions
as chair of our cutting-edge Guns and Gangs Commission.

The solution we’re working towards is very wide-ranging. There are five themes in
our approach – tougher enforcement against violent and anti-social behaviour;
stronger support for families who are struggling to cope; action to get people into
meaningful work; more resources for schools; and a better deal for young people with
more activities, mentoring, youth facilities and help for those getting into trouble. All
of this aims to extend opportunity to those young people who currently feel it is
denied them.

This isn’t just about a deeper understanding of the issues; it’s also about being
able to face tough decisions. We recently cut funding to a number of black-led projects
and voluntary organisations that were failing so the money could be switched to
programmes that make a difference. An unrepresentative council would find it harder
to defend these decisions.

At the same time, we are conducting a review aiming to increase support and
capacity-building for black-led organisations, a fundamental equalities review of decision-
making across the council, and launching a programme to involve more black citizens
in decision-making in public life by serving as school governors, members of
service-user groups, on the boards of voluntary organisations and as councillors. The
same insight got us talking to faith groups and community organisations about involving
them in delivering services because they are closer to many of our diverse communities
than the council could ever be. This is challenging for a council that prefers
to do things itself, but we believe in empowering communities to do things for themselves.

When we look like our electorate and when we talk about the things that matter
most to our electors, we give ourselves the best possible chance of winning.