Learning Lessons: Reimagined Britain

This is the eleventh part of our ‘Learning Lessons’ series, which provides a space for candidates across England, Scotland and Wales to share what they heard on the doorstep and where they believe Labour should go next.

Political giants from Tony Blair in 1999 to Barack Obama in 2010 have suffered difficult electoral results after two years in power. What Labour experienced in the May 2026 elections is not, therefore, without precedent.

It is nevertheless sickening to see so many good Labour colleagues lose. The simple fact is that we are being buffeted on both sides by right- and left-wing populists, as well as, for the first time, nationalist control of Belfast, Cardiff, and Edinburgh.

We are left in a fight for the future of our party and country. The stakes could not be higher. The political and economic context is also profoundly challenging, with pandemic and war shaping recent years.

Mark Leonard’s new book proposes a C-4 explanation for why crisis now builds on crisis:

• “It has grown by gradually enmeshing all the countries in the world into a hyperconnected economy with global financial networks, supply chains and infrastructures that are increasingly fragile and subject to shocks, contagion and radical inequality within and between countries.”
• Carbon emissions have grown, “more in the past eighty years than the 800 million years before that.”
• “The exponential growth of our computing power which, in turn, is driving a technological revolution that includes genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and the construction of new materials … The fragmentation of our societies into filter-bubbles, the rise of fake news and the erosion of agreed ‘facts’ in public life are natural consequences of this.”
• “While Europeans and Americans made up just under a third of the population in 1950, more than eight in ten of the global population will come from Asia and Africa by the century’s end.”

From strengthening our supply chains, reducing carbon emissions and lowering energy bills to building artificial intelligence that works for workers – and deepening connections with rapidly emerging economies – I am adapting the West Midlands to this new C-4 world.

The more economically precarious a place, the less appetite there is for ‘steady-as-she-goes’ politics. For instance, in Sandwell, where weekly wages are £60 below the national average, I was saddened to see Reform take the council from Labour, while in Solihull, where weekly wages are £70 above the national average, Reform was held off.

Reform is most potent in places made economically precarious by deindustrialisation. These same places were hit hardest by the financial crash and then punished by austerity. This situation was compounded by Brexit: rather than helping these places back onto their feet, it knocked them down, allowing Covid to hollow them out further. More recently, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have deepened the suffering of these communities through rising cost-of-living pressures. Similarly, the Greens threaten places with a high proportion of economically precarious 20- and 30-somethings where opportunity remains scarce.

Ultimately, the economic dispossession felt by voters is the result of 40 years of wrong turns. Thatcher’s deindustrialisation was followed by Major’s privatisations, Cameron’s austerity and Johnson’s Brexit. At every stage, Nigel Farage cheered on the failures of the right.

We need a different way forward. Instead of putting power in Farage’s hands, we must put it in the hands of people and places that have seen so much opportunity stripped away over recent decades.

As mayor, I will work with the government to go further and faster – including on my priorities of more social and affordable homes; more skills to fill jobs in our region, including those created by the largest and most powerful mayoral development corporation (MDC) in the country; and strategic investment to secure safe, reliable and fast transport.

We will invest more directly in our communities and are listening to them to ensure money goes where it’s needed most. Pride in Place has been a good start. and has been supporting 400 of the most in-need neighbourhoods. This is crucial, as Liam Byrne writes in his excellent new book: “the resonance of the populist’s nostalgia is with the sense of something local that has gone.” Our communities and high streets need to be reimagined and renewed, with public services remade so they are tailored to meet the needs of people today. They need to inspire hope and stir aspiration backed by a preventative state that tackles upfront the problems of tomorrow.

May 2026 was a particularly painful set of results. By reimagining, remaking and renewing, Labour can recover. We must rise to the urgency of the times and bring the country with us, or face the tragedy of further decline and division.

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