Tough on populism, tough on the causes of populism

New Statesman​

19-07-2025

Illustration by Dom McKenzie
The end of this month will bring a pair of horrible anniversaries: of the murder of three small girls in Southport, and of the disinformation-fuelled riots that followed. As the fledgling Labour government sought to work out how to respond – beyond its immediate, strikingly decisive crackdown – one Starmer aide was quoted declaring that it was time to be 'tough on populism, tough on the causes of populism'.
But what are those causes? One, it seems clear, is anger about immigration. Last month, an Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion was launched to tackle the divisions exposed by the riots. But as the Guardian reported in September, there was something else at work as well. Its in-depth study confirmed that many of those rioting lived in areas afflicted by high levels of deprivation, poor health and low educational attainment.
And around the time of that report, another independent commission – this one focused on neighbourhoods – was already getting to work, tasked with developing a strategy to address the deep social and economic malaise that has long blighted the so-called 'left-behind' areas of the country. The work of the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods (ICON) took on an added urgency by the riots. Then came May's local elections, and Reform's unprecedented surge. Voting for Farage's party is hardly an indication that you're about to take to the streets and start throwing things at the police – but neighbourhood decay is clearly a driver of both kinds of disaffection.
So what if people in these areas could work to rebuild their communities and the social bonds that hold them together – and what if government steered a path between dictating and disappearing, and instead chose to help them? Might restoring people's sense that they have some power to improve their lives, and the places where they live, reinstate trust in mainstream democratic politics?
If Labour is to make such a thing happen, it has a big psychological barrier to clamber over first. As I argue in a new paper commissioned by ICON, Starmer's party is haunted by the sad spectre of David Cameron's Big Society. There seems to be a lingering fear that any attempt to revive neighbourhood bonds would simply amount to reanimating a failed Tory project – Cameron's own effort to distance his party from Margaret Thatcher's infamous claim that there was 'no such thing' as society. But this isn't just needlessly cautious; it's historically amnesiac, forgetting more than a century of the labour movement's own achievements.
This is not to suggest that, in some pre-liberal golden age, community politics simply 'happened.' Working-class communities were often shaped as much by nuclear family, rigid gender roles, and mistrust of neighbours as by anything more heart-warming. Political activity depended on a part-radical, part-common-sense idea: that ordinary people shared common interests and a collective identity, and that they could exercise agency by organising around that.
This was the world from which the Labour Party emerged at the dawn of the 20th century – alongside a rich flowering of other civil society groups. By 1900, the co-operative movement had over 1.7 million members, and a Women's Co-operative Guild had been founded to push issues affecting married women up the political agenda – not least the price of food and the maternal mortality rate. Like the trade unions, such organisations created pathways for people to represent their communities, as councillors and in other roles, without becoming distant, alien figures. Sidney Weighell, later general secretary of the railwaymen's union, recalled how in the 1930s, his father – a leading local figure in both his union and in Labour – turned their front room into 'the place to go if you lost your job or your home or needed advice.'
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In 1945, when Clement Attlee – long-time community activist and former Mayor of Stepney – led Labour into its first majority government, he brought with him a deep faith in working people's political abilities. However, in the wake of the wartime expansion of central government, a more Fabian belief in state planning began to take precedence. Today, the achievements of post-war governments in building homes look enviable, and for a time the new estates seemed to foster a more egalitarian country. But eventually, the credibility of patrician planning attitudes began to crumble – literally so, in the case of Ronan Point, a local authority tower block in Newham, where a corner section collapsed in May 1968, killing four people. When the council attempted to rehouse residents in a similar building, they organised a committee to resist the move, as the historian Holly Smith has documented, only to be patronised and misled. As one of many letters to the resulting inquiry put it: 'Give us ordinary people a chance to prove our worth.'
In response to the growing problem of urban decay – which was supposedly exacerbated by immigration – Harold Wilson's Labour government decided to do what that letter-writer recommended. A series of Community Development Projects (CDPs) were established in run-down areas of Coventry, south London, Glamorgan and Liverpool; more followed, mainly in northern England. The aim, as Wilson's Home Secretary Jim Callaghan later wrote, was 'to encourage those living in the most poverty-stricken inner-city areas to recognise that they themselves possessed the capacity to manage the affairs of their neighbourhoods, reduce their reliance on outside help, and in the process, achieve greater control over their own lives and more satisfaction from them.'
Alas, amid the political ructions of the 1970s, the conflict became a battle between Whitehall and the increasingly left-wing CDP teams, each side castigating the other for haughtily ignoring the actual residents. Nonetheless, a report on the project highlighted a problem on which both sides might have agreed: with the collapse of the economic foundation of these inner-city areas, 'the skilled, the mobile and the young moved out,' and 'the traditional family and community networks which had previously provided support for local people were badly undermined.' This left behind 'concentrations of poor people.' The problem wasn't simply that more people were now on benefits, but that 'the ways in which they had formerly cared for each other were breaking down.'
In the years after Ronan Point, other, more grassroots attempts at community action found greater success – campaigning on issues ranging from transport to childcare. Activists established housing co-operatives and organised opposition to long-standing post-war plans to carve a motorway ring road through London's working-class neighbourhoods. An unemployed forklift truck driver from Liverpool led a project to build new homes on the site of a derelict factory. On London's South Bank, the Coin Street Action Group campaigned for seven years to purchase a derelict site slated for office development, ultimately creating Coin Street Community Builders to spearhead the successful creation of riverside gardens, shops, and cooperative housing.
The National Child Care Campaign led to the creation of community nurseries. Around 1975, this movement evolved from insurgency into cooperation with local government, as younger councillors won office and welcomed community activists in from the cold. As historian David Ellis writes, community groups 'ran adventure playgrounds, established advice and information centres, provided training for the unemployed, offered adult education, delivered arts programmes, planned new public developments, and operated community transport services.'
Left-wing authorities' willingness to fund activist groups and include them on committees had its downsides: witness the endless 'loony left' hullabaloo that echoed through the pages of 1980s tabloids. But in the face of today's disaffection, it's worth remembering Stuart Hall's praise of the Greater London Council's approach as 'the sound of a real, as opposed to a phoney and pacified, democracy at work' – with the state providing resources but giving those with local knowledge greater say over how they were used.
The hullabaloo gave the Thatcher government the justification to halt much of this activity. Yet curiously, her alternative – a combination of outsourcing and Whitehall control over local authority budgets – did little to transform run-down neighbourhoods. In 1998, Tony Blair declared that 'the crude individualism of the Eighties is the mood no longer.' The new 'spirit of the times' was 'community.' In what was, in many respects, a better-funded revival of the CDPs, New Labour launched the New Deal for Communities (NDCs), targeting 39 areas with an average population of around 9,900. The aim was to bring levels of crime, housing quality, education, health, and worklessness in these places closer to those in the rest of the country.
Like the CDPs, this was a top-down effort to foster local initiative. In typical New Labour fashion, the project was infused with management consultancy thinking, but it was also a serious attempt to enable community action. NDC executive boards received full funding only after involving communities in developing regeneration plans. At least half the members of 31 partnership boards were local residents, and dedicated teams were deployed to engage other community members. The programme's relative largesse allowed for the provision of everything from facilities for parents of young children to food co-operatives aimed at improving health. An academic assessment found that the project succeeded in closing gaps with the rest of the country, particularly on issues related to place.
From Cameron's arias about the dead hand of Labour big statism and the promised joys of the Big Society, you'd get little sense that any of this had ever happened. Yet, it achieved far more than he did – precisely because it actually empowered communities, rather than just talking about it.
Drawing on this tradition, and particularly the New Deal for Communities, ICON has advocated for hyper-local investment in hundreds of 'mission-critical' neighbourhoods furthest from meeting government targets. As the Times noted in May, in local elections held in these areas, Reform won 85 percent of councils, over 60 percent of which had previously been Labour-held. Then, in the spending review, Rachel Reeves announced billions in funding for neighbourhoods, including a £500 million investment in 'trailblazer neighbourhood' pilots. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said these pilots 'will support improvements people can see on their doorstep, champion local leadership, foster community engagement, and strengthen social cohesion.'
The question now is how this money will be distributed: will it go directly to communities themselves, or to councils? History shows that, in some cases, the two can collaborate successfully. But it also suggests something more fundamental. To overcome the entrenched sense of disempowerment afflicting these communities today, this funding must become a symbol of trust – trust that local people are capable of leading the improvement of their own areas. After all, if the government does not demonstrate that trust, why should it expect anything but ever-deepening distrust in return?
[Further reading: Why Labour has embraced class politics]
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