Guest Post: In a powerful essay, Johnbosco Nwogbo explains who he will support to be Labour councillors in Brighton and Hove — and why!
The process of selecting Labour Party candidates for next year’s local government election in Brighton and Hove has entered the crucial stage, where ordinary members of the party choose the candidates they want representing them next year.
The number of applicants, from what I hear, is healthy and — for the first time in a long time — the membership of the Labour Party in this city will have the opportunity to be genuinely involved in the selection of the candidates that represent us.
I, for one, will seize this opportunity with both hands and will vote in Hollingdean and Stanmer for candidates that convince me that they deserve my vote.
But how can a candidate convince me and, I believe, by extension, the bulk of our party’s new membership, who support Jeremy Corbyn and his vision for the United Kingdom?
My answer to this question is: by passing the “Nancy test”. I named it after Nancy Platts, councillor for East Brighton, because it is based on a statement that I have heard her make at least three times in the last three months, most recently at an event I organized under the title “Corbynism from Below: How Labour members can change society from the ground up”.
She says: “I’ll never tell you that we can’t do this, or we can’t do that. If you want it done, come let’s work together to find a way to accomplish it. There must be a way.”
Nancy offers this same idea — in slightly longer form — in a recent Facebook post, where she spoke about “empowering people by supporting them and ensuring their voices are heard; breaking down barriers and navigating them through the maze of bureaucracy, committees, form-filling, dates and deadlines; giving people hope and the right to be ambitious for their neighbourhoods; being ‘can-do’ and keeping their vision alive until their goals are achieved. Another world is possible.”
The four criteria laid out below for how I will evaluate candidates and cast my votes in the selection process are drawn from my understanding of what she means in the above statements.
I will vote for candidates who believe in building mutually-empowering relationships with the membership of the Labour Party
A story could be useful in illustrating part of the point I want to make here. Some weeks ago, I joined the Super Saturday door-knocking campaigning that took place in Hollingdean and Stanmer.
There were many councillors in attendance, including our sitting councillor, Tracey Hill. Tracey is a really good councillor and this story is not about her.
Before we went out to door-knock, we were split into groups. In my group, a particular councillor ran the board. I won’t say any names or offer any identifying features, because this not about name-calling.
But I have to say that throughout the session I found this councillor to be incredibly condescending to me, referring to me with a term that could only count as endearing when used for a toddler.
One telling incident took place: we came across a person who this councillor happened to know and when they were asked what we were up to, the councillor said: “We are out door-knocking, and these are my volunteers”.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Maybe calling us their volunteers might be permissible if the councillor in question was the sitting councillor of the ward we were door-knocking in. But that was not the case. Even then, it wouldn’t really be permissible, but it could conceivably be debatable in that situation. In what way then were we their volunteers?
It is an incredible feat of self-delusion for a councillor — any councilllor — to think that I would get out of my room, drop every other academic or community campaigning engagement I have, to volunteer to door-knock for them personally.
It makes no sense unless this councillor saw us members as underlings. This is just one case, among the many, that I have experienced — which really brought home to me the great hierarchical gulf that has now come to be taken as normal between members and councillors. I think that this is a bad thing. I wouldn’t vote for a councillor who perpetuates this kind of order in the party.
Consider another case. I was recently informed that a sitting councillor wanted the selection meeting fixed around their availability and didn’t appear to think that it was important to offer any reasons why this would be in the party’s interest.
From what I was told, it seemed as though their thinking was “I am your councillor; I am important; and you’re going to make sure this arrangement suits me”.
To be clear, this councillor did not explicitly say this. But I was told that was the attitude. The person who informed of this, having been a branch officer for some time, could arrive at this conclusion also given their history of dealing with this councillor’s attitude in the past. It takes thinking that members are answerable to you to make such a demand. If you can’t make it to the selection meeting of the ward you represent, then you just can’t. The business of the party must continue.
Now, there is one area that I consider to be the ground-zero of this kind of hierarchical gulf between members and councillors: the area of local government policy.
It is true that because they are exposed to policy discussion and debate as part of their job, councillors are often better attuned to grappling with concrete policy than many members of the party.
Reading reports, attending policy briefings, dealing with relevant casework on the ground, are all part of their day-to-day job. And when a councillor has done their job well, their knowledge of policies often far outstrips that of a typical member.
To be sure, I am not suggesting that members aren’t knowledgeable about policies, too. The Labour Party is blessed with members who have intimate knowledge of policy areas, either by studying policies in-depth, or by campaigning on them for many years, or by working in the relevant sector.
There is no doubt, however, that there is a knowledge/information gap between ordinary members and councilors — in favour of councillors. This knowledge/information gap absolutely exists and, as an ordinary member myself, I am not afraid to admit it.
But it often seems to me that many councillors believe their superior knowledge of policies and laws is borne out of their being more deserving or more intelligent, or that this situation results from dumbness on the part of party members. They act as if policy discussions with members debase them; they lose patience or are irritated when being challenged by a member on the basis of what they believe to be wrong information or insufficient understanding of the relevant policies.
The mentality that this attitude exposes creates and sustains the hierarchical gulf I spoke about, between members and councillors.
I don’t want a councillor that thinks they are superior to members or that the business of the party is all about them.
I want a councillor that understands that their superior knowledge of policy and the law is quite accidental, and attendant on the fact that we, the members, selected them to represent us at the council.
I want a councillor who will patiently explain things to members and, if they’re going wrong somewhere, show them how they’re going wrong in a humble and respectful manner.
I want a councillor who will see it as their role to empower members with the knowledge we need to go into our communities and talk to people and, it is hoped, try to make change.
I want a councillor that doesn’t believe that they exist on a higher plain than party members, in some imaginary hierarchy.
Finally, I want a councillor who extends this patience and humility toward party members to members of the public who are not party members, especially to the homeless, the traveller/gypsy community and council tenants. Not just to businesses and suburban householders.
I will vote for candidates who know what they believe, who articulate them clearly, and who will fight for those things given the opportunity
We all take it for granted now, but it is incredibly noteworthy that the vast majority of the Labour Party membership here in Brighton and Hove is way more “radical” than our elected councillors.
This is often the context for all those cries of “it’s not that we don’t want to do them; it’s that laws made by national government, or Tory government austerity, prevent us from doing them” that are all so common in the local Labour Party these days.
Members want to build more houses and eliminate homelessness tomorrow; they want more services kept in-house and those that have been out-sourced reviewed and brought back in; they want the council to be more cooperative with the unions and lend weight to the work community campaigners do. Members want to see the council supporting the formation of more cooperatives and they want youth services properly funded. And so on.
But it is not always clear whether our elected councillors want these same things.
To be sure, it is difficult, even impossible (in a few cases, at least), in the current budgetary and statutory environment, to achieve many of the things that members want to see happen. And you can count on your local Labour councillor to tell you that.
But it is not always clear that, even if they had the chance to do these things, by way of socialist policies, in the event that a Jeremy Corbyn government is elected soon, that they would necessarily elect to do so.
Why aren’t we sure?
We’re not sure because our councillors seldom formulate their beliefs clearly and fight hard and aggressively for those beliefs. I know many councillors will say they fight.
But has anyone recently seen some of our local councillors fight as hard as they did against their own party after the old guard was swept away in the election of the executive of the then Brighton, Hove and District Labour Party in 2016 or during the Labour Party conference last year?
I haven’t. I guess, to their credit, they have fight in them; they were just fighting all the wrong people.
The Greens will grab every opportunity they find to gesture toward their “greenness”. Even though you hate them — and I do — you know what they are trying to sell themselves to voters as.
The national Tory government is cutting school budgets, but when the parents of 38 pupils from the Varndean/Dorothy Stringer catchment area who had been assigned to schools outside their area were fighting the council — the so-called #Misplaced38 campaign — local Tories jumped onto that campaign, fought it aggressively, and won it for those parents.
We know that Tory councillor Robert Nemeth has been given all the credit for stopping the new fees on the sale of beach huts because he fought hard.
I do not have the slightest clue what the Labour Group at the council is trying to sell itself as.
I’ve heard that the message is “we’ve done well, now give us a majority.” But what was the organizing principle that “we” followed, which produced the good outcomes? I don’t know, and no one seems able to tell me.
Apparently, our councillors are not “ideological”. They are not “political”. Being ideological or political is for those cranky socialists at party meetings! They see their job as “managing” the day-to-day running of council services. And nothing more.
Too often, we’ve seen our council make a decision and when, challenged on said decision, refused to fight to defend it.
On funding for youth services in the last budget, on school allocations epitomised in the case of the so-called #misplaced38, and — most recently — on the new taxes on the sale of beach huts.
What I take away from these cases is that we have Labour councillors who have no character and lack any fight.
Fighting does not mean being unintelligent. But the fact that in all these cases our council has had to back down and reconsider means they have not necessarily been doing extremely well in the “being intelligent” department.
The options they were eventually forced into taking existed from the start, but they docilely went with the options the officers suggested. In the #misplaced38 case, for example, they should have worked with those parents and the schools to create a workable compromise from the start, and then — if it came to it — fought hard to defend their decision.
I want councillors who can ensure council services are delivered well and in time. But I want to know that they will fight for their (socialist, I hope) beliefs at the council when the opportunity presents itself.
Many councillors often act and speak as if they believe that both things are mutually exclusive — that, if you are clear about your ideological orientation, you couldn’t possibly manage services well. That logic is self-evidently wrong. You can be smart and strong at the same time.
If I’ll vote for you, I want to know what you believe and I want to know that when the time comes that you’ll stand up and fight for what you told me you believe.
I will vote for candidates that understand that being a councillor should be about more than just managing Britain’s austerity-induced decline
There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that Britain is in decline. The austerity policies of successive Tory governments have wrecked our communities almost beyond recognition.
More and more people are joining the ranks of rough-sleepers every day. And many die there.
Services that help young people have been cut. The NHS is being doled out to profiteers, piece by piece. Mental health services have completely been neglected, especially at a time when austerity policies in other areas are exacerbating the likelihood of people needing mental healthcare. People are turning to hard drugs at a massive rate.
Don’t even get me started on house-building, and renters’ rights. National government has completely failed young people and renters in this area. Food banks are now no longer a bug, but almost a defining feature of this era. Things are well and truly not good.
In the face of this reality, many councillors believe that, at best, what they can do is slow the pace of this decline by managing things well.
The image of the councillor as a council bureaucrat who just happens to be elected, pops to mind.
And — this is not meant to give offence — that’s what most of our councillors are like: elected council bureaucrats.
To be sure, such times as these require people who are, among other things, good at managing. But being good at management in such desperate times is just one of the basic requirements. “Desperate times require desperate measures,” they say. This means we need councillors who are not just good managers, but also creative and radical.
I have never attended a council policy briefing, except for one time as part of an delegation from ACORN, the renters’ union and anti-poverty organisation; we went to discuss the possibility that Universal Credit claimants who fall into rent arrears might be evicted from their homes. But I can say, with an incredible amount of certainty, that the options about what can be done and the ways they may be done put before councillors by council officers on almost any issue are almost certainly not the only possible options.
The cases I have pointed to above, where the council made one decision but was forced to do something else, illustrates this. The options they were forced into were always available, and legal, and possible under current budgetary constraints. But it is just common-sense.
Even within the particular statutory and budgetary circumstances of today, councillors can say “don’t tell me that it can’t be done, tell me how it will be done.” I believe that if there is enough of a will to find a legal and feasible way to achieve an important goal, a way will be found. Council staff don’t have a monopoly on knowledge of our statutory strictures. There is an army of professors and PhDs in this city’s universities that I imagine would be happy and willing to take a look at plans. There are members of our party at these universities.
But, just as importantly, these times require councillors to go out to the community and work from there upwards.
People in communities are already devising solutions to the problems created by this Tory scourge. I will vote for candidates who will give those communities voice, and not treat them as adversaries.
The council’s treatment of homelessness campaigners has often been quite terrible. Their lack of interest in engaging with representatives of the gypsy/traveller community is sad and disappointing, often playing into the hands of anti-gypsy racism that is rampant in portions of this city. And the twitter feuds with “Bins in Hanover” are disheartening.
Doing this is not likely to always be easy. But I want to vote for candidates that see the value of having a crack at it.
I will vote for candidates that support Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party as well as his vision for Britain
Believe it or not, I don’t believe that people should simply uncritically line up behind Jeremy Corbyn and his vision for Britain. After all, part of Corbyn’s appeal is in the fact that he refused to line up behind past Labour leaders he didn’t agree with. People should be able to respectfully disagree with the leadership of the party, even fundamentally so. Our party is a broad church and that means people get to hold differing views and express them freely, without compunction.
Here’s the rub: I do not want to vote for a candidate who fundamentally disagrees with Jeremy Corbyn in an internal Labour Party contest, when people who embrace his vision are also on offer. Neither should any pro-Corbyn member. (My understanding is that there are pro-Corbyn slates in every ward. Find out about them and vote for them, if you’re pro-Corbyn.)
Being a broad church does not mean that everyone in the Labour Party agrees with everyone else in the Labour party. Yes, it means that I would vote for Labour candidates I disagree with in a contest against Tories or Greens. But, no, it doesn’t mean that I should also vote for them against candidates I agree with in a Labour Party contest.
I believe that Corbyn’s vision is right for Britain and I will vote only for people who agree with me on that — and loudly so.
I will not vote for someone who merely pays lip-service to the idea that Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of the party at this moment and therefore deserves our respect. No. People can admit this (and most of our current councillors do — repeatedly) and yet be completely at odds with his vision for Britain.
Take the example of the contract for performing repairs to council buildings, which is now under consideration, because the old contract expires soon.
My understanding is that our councillors are considering a number of options, one of which is outsourcing that contract to another company. Of course, this is shrouded under the façade of exploring all the options to determine what would be the best “value for money”.
But councillors who were committed to Corbyn’s vision for Britain would not be considering taking the service in-house as one option among many. That would be the only option. They would rather be considering different models for delivering the service in-house to determine which model would offer best value for money.
To be sure, there is no shame in believing that the market can do it all, or that the market should have an important role in the delivery of public services.
I believe that either of these views is wrong. I believe that it is in the interest of the public that the profit motive, in whatever form, not be allowed into the delivery of public services, because it is likely to undermine the quality of those services since companies have an incentive to cut corners to save a buck (a fact for which evidence abounds); because citizens cannot exercise any direct democratic control over the day-to-day delivery of those services; and because market delivery of public services is antithetical to transparency, because the terms of the contracts private companies have with (even) the government are considered protected trade secrets and are therefore exempt from Freedom of Information requests.
This notwithstanding, the belief that the market should have an important role in the delivery of public services is perfectly respectable. Candidates who hold this belief should not hesitate to make a case for it to members, as should candidates who believe that the market doesn’t have an important role.
It is clear to me that only the latter is consistent with Corbyn’s vision. Candidates need to be honest with members and allow members who prefer Corbyn’s vision to make their choice accordingly. No fudging. No smokes and mirrors.
I will vote for the candidate who espouses Corbyn’s vision. And if you support Corbyn’s vision for this country, you should do the same.
Now you know my criteria, what are yours?
Johnbosco Nwogbo is a member of Hollingdean and Stanmer Branch Labour Party in Brighton and Hove; he is also a prominent campaigner with ACORN Brighton, the renters’ union and anti-poverty organisation. He is also a member of Brighton and Hove Momentum’s steering committee. Follow @LeftofJesus.
