This is a transcription of a speech Peter Marland gave on the 26th September 2022 at the Win As One event at Labour Party Conference. You can watch a video on our YouTube channel. 

For everyone in the room who doesn’t know who I am, I’m councillor Peter Marland, the leader of the Milton Keynes City Council.  

As someone whose family is from Liverpool, if you’d have told me 20 years ago that I would be speaking in this chamber, that would be amazing to me. This chamber is however a great reflection on why our current politics doesn’t work because no one party state should never get in a situation like the Liverpool city council has got itself into.

A part of the change we need requires the Labour party being brave. Currently, places such as Buckinghamshire, where 25% of people vote Labour in the local elections gain only 2 labour councillors on Buckinghamshire Council. That can’t be right. This is a moral argument about PR, it’s about saying, ‘how can it be fair that somebody who votes Labour in Buckinghamshire gets absolutely no appropriate representation?’ 

Adopting Proportional Representation does though mean for some places like Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, or Stevenage, have a larger opposition. However, there is a functional argument, having challenges and having a better opposition leads to better governance.

That’s what’s happened to Milton Keynes where it’s perpetually a no overall control authority. There are 22 conservative councillors. There are 20 Labour councillors and there are 13 Liberal Democrat councillors. For the whole time that I’ve been leader of Milton Keynes Council, I’ve never had a majority. The approach to politics in Milton Keynes is 60% to 65% of the people in Milton Keynes continue to vote for progressive parties. It wouldn’t be right that the Conservatives, or anyone get a majority from only 35 to 40% of the votes. 

This means that as the head of an administration, we pay the real living wage. We banned 15-minute care visits. We don’t use the zero-hour contracts. We’ve upped our social contract. We put more into our economy through our procurement than Preston does, replicating and improving on their Preston model. I’ve done all that, and the council has done all this, without a majority.

This means the Liberal Democrats, who are our partners in the council, get what they want. What the Liberal Democrats want is grassroots politics. They want the potholes fixed. They want the weekly wheelie bins. They want higher recycling rates. And that’s fine. Because that’s what we should want too as Labour politicians. I don’t mind also having a conversation in Milton Keynes with our Green colleagues too, even though they have no councillors. As a Labour Council and a Progressive Alliance Council, we’ve committed to become carbon negative by 2050, carbon neutral by 2030.  

This is what other councils can do. If you’ve got no overall majority, form alliances with other parties of right-thinking and like-minded policies. I’m proud to be in the heart of a new Progressive Alliance belt in England. Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire, North Hertfordshire. Like Milton Keynes, they are all councils that in their history, mostly only ever known Conservative rule. Now they’re run by progressive alliances. 

 They work with Greens, with Liberal Democrats, with independents, who all know that delivering our core values is more important than who is delivering it and what colour is the badge next to that name when it comes to voting. 

At this conference, I think for the first time in a long time, there is an atmosphere that Labour Party thinks it can be the next government. For a long time, the narrative about Keir Starmer was he’s going to bring the ’Keir Factor’ that will sort of rebalance the party, but we’ll probably lose at the next election, and then we’ll get someone more dynamic who will take us to the next Labour government. But we will now, I think, form the next government.

So, now is not the time to go into our shell, go quiet, and shy away from some difficult decisions.

One of those decisions is PR, because it is not just about the system that we use. PR is about changing the politics of Westminster and changing the nature of our democracy. It’s about the nature and the fairness of our politics, this is what needs to change. 

We need to convince people in places like Liverpool, in Stevenage, Newcastle and Camden that represent the bulk of the Labour Party to adopt PR, because that’s where the Labour Party gets elected with massive majorities. It will be difficult for them to give up total power, but we need to convince them that giving up a little bit of power will lead to an overall better society with better outcomes, because that’s what a political party is all about. We as elected officials exist to improve outcomes for the people that we represent. If we don’t get elected, we cannot represent them. 

This requires us to redesign our system by taking it out of a centralised system. This does not mean just widening out into Wales, or into Scotland or into big, combined authorities. It means devolution right down to the very smallest of places, whether that’s in Milton Keynes or that’s in town and parish councils. These councils deliver important services that we may laugh at; dog bins or cutting bushes back. However, those are the services that when you knock on people’s doors to talk about, are the most likely to resonate with people. Devolution works to not just reach larger conurbations, it should go right down to local communities, local parishes, and local people. 

This change is not just about the system and PR, it’s about being part of politics in general, that absolutely is about making sure our politics delivers for real people. When I go on to the doorstep, that’s how I’m going to sell this. I’m going to say this is about change, ‘This is about you. You don’t think in Burnley, East Lancashire or in Liverpool that politics matters. Well, it does. The Labour Party now believes what you believe.’

Our politics needs to change. This is not a time for the Labour Party to sit back and not be radical. It must be radical in everything we do because the next opportunity is possibly the last chance, we get to really transform this country.

 

This is a transcription of a speech Peter Marland gave on the 26th September 2022 at the Win As One event at Labour Party Conference. You can watch a video of the speech on our YouTube channel.