Novara media praise the Unit for ‘radical’ ideas
A critique from Novara Media describes our campaign for community power as a ‘cynical power grab’, rehearsing tired lines about the ‘Big Society’ handing liabilities, not assets, to communities.
We address this head on in our report ‘Trusting The People’:
‘We need to move from a passive, optional ‘rights’ approach (rights to provide, rights to buy, rights to transfer, rights to challenge, rights to neighbourhood plans, etc.) to a ‘do’ approach, where community power is the standard model.
‘A Conservative Government must invest in changing that culture, creating institutions which can teach and encourage people to play the role they want to.
‘…trusting the people is not a big bang, but will be a long term project which will require Whitehall to change the way it works and listen to local places…’
Novara Media do, however, concede that our report contains powerful ideas:
‘Driven by the pursuit of new sources of capital accumulation, lurking in the background is the intuition that asset ownership must be remodelled…
‘Yet, in places — intentionally or not — the report hints at something more radical. It argues, for instance, that we “need to remodel our economic institutions to put the values of ordinary people, rather than the abstract forces of finance, at the centre of decision making”’.
The author’s most important point is this:
‘The left must avoid the temptation to cede this ground to conservative forces and fall back on centralised nationalisation as the only marker of leftwing policy. To do so would be to abandon one of the most strategically important grounds for rebuilding a powerful left.’
Competitive ideas are politically irresistible and the battle between left and right over community power between in Westminster bodes very well indeed.