Progress With Unity

Although I am fairly sure that the correct form is not "Your Worshipful", Rupa Huq writes:

John Major has done it in Lambeth as has Malcolm Rifkind in Scotland, Charles Clarke in Hackney and James Purnell in Islington. None of the current holders of great offices of state have bothered with it, and of the five vying for Labour leadership, only Diane Abbott can lay claim (in Westminster in the 1980s). I'm talking about serving in local government, the selfless calling to represent your local community. The issue has become central to my own life: in recent weeks I have become deputy mayoress of the London borough of Ealing. The result has been an eye-opener as some of the vestiges of pomp, ceremony and patronage seem to be alive and well – despite our 13-year entanglement with the non-hierarchical, New Labour-induced New Britain.

While the circus that is the 24-hour news channels and the national press have been obsessed by the Con-Dem nation we now live in, the somewhat overlooked local election results of 6 May provided some cheer for the left, demonstrating that suburbs often written off by the urban intelligentsia as politically and culturally backward are in the progressive vanguard. As well as both Newham and Barking and Dagenham becoming all-Labour councils, with Respect and the BNP wiped out, Labour took Harrow, Hounslow and Ealing – my new status being a consequence of the latter.

I haven't been given a job description and my role is unremunerated, but there are a couple of perks. If the mayor and mayoress are not using it, the deputy mayor and I can command a Jag with the council crest on top complete with driver for official business. The mayor and his deputy even have old-school Speaker of the Commons-style robes. I get a sold silver version of the borough crest on a chain for wearing to functions. When I had it attached round my neck it for the first time by the mayor's secretary in the mayor's parlour (where else?) I was asked if I had a safe in my house. It all does seem slightly surreal. I actually cycled to my first full council meeting. In these cost-cutting times, the car can't be cheap to run.

It is often the suburbs that have felt the pinch most during the current economic downturn. Some austerity measures being introduced at our town hall would make George Osborne proud. In a mirror of central government action, Labour in Ealing will be both freezing the council tax for the next year and councillors' expenses for the next four. I predict not a single duck house will be claimed for, ditto moat clearance. Tapping into a populist vein of anti-banker sentiment, our borough manifesto promised to cut the bonuses of senior officers.

The continuing of the mayoral team, to whom the correct form of address is "your worshipful", and all their staff might seem somewhat anachronistic against this backdrop of "hard times", but there is an argument that its pomp and splendour might be a good thing for people to rally round. The mayor's alternative title is "first citizen of the borough", which on my calculations makes me fourth, but there are some important functions that come with the post, such as representing the borough outside its boundaries and charity fundraising. This year we have plumped for Age UK, fittingly given the UK's ageing population as a whole and the Con-Dems' plans to work everyone to the grave before they have a sniff of any superannuation.

The borough mayoral role as far as I understand is ceremonial. Contrary to the optimistic questions of my friends, I cannot get anyone off their parking fines or effect any other miracles. But there is a need for a non-political figurehead at the top of every local council without the partisan encumbrances of say Boris Johnson or his Bullingdon mate David Cameron. To date I have used the official vehicle just once but the head-turning that it caused among old and young alike has made me think again about its utility. Above all it's the borough motto I like best about it. "Progress with unity" – can't say fairer than that, can you?

From about the Seventies, and especially the Eighties, onwards, this sort of thing was unpopular in vocal parts of the London Labour Party, which the "national" media assumed to be typical. Such attitudes could not have been further removed from the history and culture of the Labour Movement in the days when it actually delivered social justice, and in any case never played at all almost anywhere outside middle-class London. It is good to see them dying out even there. Truly, New Labour is at an end, although, as it intended, it has taken the Labour Party down with it. The question now is what comes next.