On the eve of Labour's local government conference, the
party's environment spokesman talks to Paul Anderson
“I understand how difficult it is to be a councillor,"
says Jack Straw, Labour's environment spokesman. "I was a councillor
myself 20 years ago in Islington."
Not that things are quite as they were in the early
seventies. "The only problem we faced was spending money fast
enough," he says. "We used to have urgent housing meetings because
the deadline for spending money was running out."
Straw, now 46, has been MP for Blackburn since 1979 and a
Labour front-bencher since 1980. But he is new to his current brief: from 1987
until John Smith's Shadow Cabinet reshuffle last summer, he was Labour's
education spokesman. Many saw him move to environment as demotion, particularly
as it was announced that he would be concentrating on local government, leaving
the big green issues to Chris Smith. Bryan Gould, the previous environment spokesman,
had dealt with global warming as well as refuse collection.
Straw thinks otherwise. "Local government is a key
power base for Labour," he says. "We run urban Britain, quite a lot
of rural Scotland and Wales and a bit of rural England. Since we've been out of
power nationally for 14 years, it's the main experience people have of Labour
making decisions. How we run local government is central to Labour's survival
and success."
He admits, however, that most people find the experience of
Labour in local government less than glamorous. "Partly as a result of the
denigration of local government by the Tories and partly because local
councillors have had to manage their services in a defensive way, councillors
have been seen to have a very prosaic role." As well as exposing the
Tories* attacks on local government, he says, he wants "to make local
government exciting to people and relevant to what they think they can get out
of their lives. Local government is more than just a service provider for poor
people. Apart from all the services that everyone uses, the urban environment
is something that affects everyone."
Straw rejects the idea that the Conservatives have so
reduced the autonomy and powers of local government that it has ceased even to
be the "dented shield" that Neil Kinnock talked of in the
mid-eighties.
"I understand the problems," he says. "But at
any level of service, there's an efficient, sensitive way of delivering it and
an inefficient, insensitive way. Even within the current constraints, there are
lots of ways in which Labour makes a difference. They may appear limited but
they can be very important." He goes on to mention councils' roles in
education and social services and the ways in which their planning decisions
and initiatives on transport can transform the built environment.
At the moment, however, his most immediate problem is not
selling the idea that local government makes a difference but convincing a
sceptical public that Lambeth, currently rocked by a giant corruption scandal,
is not typical of Labour councils. "I'm damned if we're going to be
tarred with the brush of Lambeth," he says. "Especially as we cleared
out the 13 semi-Trotskyist councillors. It is since the new leadership has been
installed that action has been taken." Labour will be using Lambeth to
warn people of the dangers of "ultra-left" politics, he goes on.
"Corruption, wherever it happens, whether in government
or private business, needs to be stamped on firmly. It rips people off. There
are at least as many examples of corruption in central government and in Tory
authorities as in Labour authorities. The insinuation that Labour equals
corruption is completely untrue." All the same, he reckons that the
Lambeth scandal should prompt a "thorough review" of local government
accounting systems and that a new statement of ethics for councillors and
officers needs to be drawn up.
.
In the longer term, ways of improving the quality of
councillors need to be found. Labour should take seriously all the options, from
paying full-time councillors to introducing American-style elected mayors, says
Straw. Rather than defending existing local government structures, he says,
"We must not forget that the status quo is a status quo created by the
Tories."
On policy, however, he is prepared to accept two of the key
changes introduced by the Conservatives in recent years. Compulsory competitive
tendering and the council tax would be retained by Labour, he says. "There
is wide acceptance that the division between contractor and provider that CCT
has produced has been sensible. It has meant that in areas of basic services
there are now clear definitions of what services should be provided. But, while
I have seen the case for CCT for the provision of basic services such as
refuse collection, I'm very sceptical about using it for core management
functions. I'm not in favour of following the Tories' agenda. They want wholly
contracted-out public services.”
He takes a similar line on the council tax. "The
underlying principle of council tax is OK - it's a property tax. But some of
its practice is bad. We’ll be working out how it can be changed so that it becomes
much more like what we wanted in the fair rates system."
In particular, Labour would ditch the "capping"
system to control the level of council tax. "On that Fm, absolutely
clear," says Straw. "Central government should not have control over
what local authorities raise locally. What I want to see is a system in which
central government makes its allocation of grant based on what it thinks is
needed and, beyond that, what an authority raises is a matter between it and
its electors." There should be annual local elections, and their timing
should be changed so that voting takes place immediately after council budgets
are set.
+++
In recent weeks, of course, Straw has been making the
headlines not for his pronouncements on local government finance but for
speaking out on the monarchy and on Clause Four of Labour's constitution, which
commits the party to social ownership.
He says that he is amazed at the reaction to his speech
calling for a Scandinavian-style monarchy, a conclusion he came to after
reading Diana: Her True Story by
Andrew Morton, "a remarkably subversive document that exposes a deeply
decadent and detached system for which we are all paying”.
"It hadn't occurred to me before that the royals were
at the apex of a separate society of extremely rich people," he says,
adding that he has had as many supportive letters as critical ones in the fortnight
since his speech.
On Clause Four, on which he has been writing a "small
treatise", he complains that he has been misrepresented. "It doesn't
follow that if you mention the words and suggest that there should be some
alteration that you have the blood of the traitor within you. I passionately
believe in the role of public ownership and control within the economy.
"But we have to develop a much deeper analysis of the
defects of free markets. We ought to have the confidence to develop from that
analysis a new set of words to express our beliefs for the next century. What I
want to do is stimulate a debate about ideology, and Clause Four is at the
heart of the argument about what the party stands for."
Straw's willingness to rethink Clause Four caused the Sunday Times to describe him as
"the leader of Labour's new radicals" but on several of the key
issues now facing the party he is what Wapping journalists usually describe as
a conservative. Although he reckons that there is "a fair amount" to
learn from Bill Clinton's campaign in the United States - the Democrats won
middle America, concentrated on the economy and responded quickly to
Republican attacks - he is no uncritical admirer of the American President or
his programme. "Workfare is just barmy," says Straw.
Similarly, on the thorny question of Labour's relationship
with the unions, he favours "close constitutional links", while on
electoral reform he is a bitter enemy of anything smacking of proportional
representation for the House of Commons. On Europe, he is one of the most
sceptical members of the Shadow Cabinet.
So is Straw inconsistent? Perhaps, but the real problem is
the categories used by the Sunday Times
(along with the rest of the media and much of the Labour Party) to describe
Labour's current arguments. As Straw himself says, "The debate is damaged
by the tendency to pigeon-hole people and issues and come up with pejorative
terms for them. What we need is a cool debate, not one conducted in slogans and
with megaphones.”
