Matthew Brown - Paint Your Town Red: How Preston Took Back Control and Your Town Can Too

Published by Repeater Books

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A Repeater Books paperback original 2021

Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

Copyright Matthew Brown and Rhian E. Jones 2021

Matthew Brown and Rhian E. Jones assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

Front cover image: The Democracy Collaborative

ISBN: 9781913462192

Ebook ISBN: 9781913462222

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At a time of compounding economic, social and environmental challenges, Paint Your Town Red offers a powerful and detailed roadmap for how local public authorities, institutions and citizens can leave deprivation behind and rebuild their communities.

G AR A LPEROVITZ & T ED H OWARD , C O -F OUNDERS , T HE D EMOCRACY C OLLABORATIVE

Paint Your Town Red provides activists and campaigners with a critical insight into how they can transform their local economies from the ground up.

G RACE B LAKELEY , AUTHOR OF S TOLEN

Of all the political experiments tried in the UK over the past decade of painful austerity, whats happening in the city of Preston ranks easily among the most daring and intriguing. This is an honest story of how it began, and the lessons it can teach the rest of us.

A DITYA C HAKRABORTTY , S ENIOR E CONOMICS C OMMENTATOR , T HE G UARDIAN

A very useful tool to describe how cities and towns can assess their current socio-economic paradigms and formulate new social transformation models based on economic democracy.

I BON Z UGASTI G OROSTIDI , M ONDRAGON C ORPORATION

This book is everything we need right now. Informative, clear, passionate and thoughtful, it should be mandatory reading for all socialists.

O WEN H ATHERLEY , AUTHOR OF R ED M ETROPOLIS

Paint Your Town Red is a timely reminder that despite years of austerity and neoliberalism, there are now genuine economic alternatives emerging in many towns, cities and regions across the UK.

J OHN M C D ONNELL , L ABOUR S HADOW C HANCELLOR , 2015-2020

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

This book explores the ways in which you can have an impact at a local level, and by doing so take part in a global phenomenon of larger transformative currents. Across the world, there is a growing awareness of the need for a new kind of economy. The 2008 financial crisis, the climate crisis and the previously unthinkable government interventions in response to the Covid-19 pandemic are proving that national governments can step in to change how the economy works. These developments, despite their devastating effects, have also meant that a new economic and political space for exploration and experiment has been opening up. The challenge of community wealth-building is for this transformative moment to work for the benefit of local communities rather than global corporations.

In Britain, the US and beyond, voices from all parts of the political spectrum agree that we need to find a new way of addressing the major divides in wealth and opportunity between and within regions. Decades of deindustrialisation and austerity have depressed many communities and decisions made by increasingly remote central governments have made people feel that they have little power to influence how things work in their own lives.

of this book looks at some of the history and thinking behind the idea of community wealth-building and why it is becoming so important in addressing these problems, as well as considering some of the issues, particularly around democratic engagement, that will also need to be addressed if community wealth-building is to successfully fulfil its potential.

In the UK, the city of Preston has emerged as an example of what can be done with ideas of community wealth-building. Its success shows that these ideas can work in practice and have the capacity to achieve a meaningful transfer of wealth and power back to local communities. Looking at the Preston Model in detail, as we do in of this book, makes it clear that Preston is just one of many ways of thinking about how local economies can be transformed and economic relations realigned.

Preston should not be thought of as a one-size-fits-all blueprint that can be easily replicated elsewhere; instead, it demonstrates how local communities, movements, businesses and organisations can develop their own strategies to address their own situations. of this book looks at the eclectic and exciting ways that this is being done across Britain at national, regional, city, community and neighbourhood level.

At the heart of community wealth-building is the belief that ordinary individuals and groups are capable of taking ownership, direction and control of their own resources in order to improve their own lives. At a time when there is little prospect of economic transformation coming from Westminster, local action is an even more important source of hope and change. The book therefore ends by compiling existing and potential information and resources for the reader, ranging from getting involved in your local authority to starting your own cooperative project. We hope the examples and ideas outlined throughout the book will provide a blueprint for universalisable localism, through advice and inspiration both for those already engaged in the process and those who are looking to take part for the first time.

PART ONE

ENDS AND BEGINNINGS

GETTING OUT OF THE MESS WERE IN

In 2019, a former adviser to the UK Treasury admitted with surprising bluntness that: The free market experiment has just about run its course, and after four decades what we can see is that the result is fairly dismal. Low productivity, regional inequalities and a system that doesnt respond to long-term risks or the need for long-term investment.

However refreshingly frank this statement, it will hardly come as news to many of us. The current crisis has been decades in the making and is rooted in the past forty years of economic strategies which have overseen a rolling back of the welfare state, deindustrialisation, attacks on wages and working conditions, and weakening of local civic infrastructure. All of this has been exacerbated by the austerity imposed in response to the financial crisis of 2008.

Following the 2008 crisis, the UKs government entirely failed to attribute its effects to its true cause: the recklessness and dysfunction of a deregulated financial sector. Instead, like governments across Europe, it adopted a programme of austerity, increasing financial pressure on those least equipped to cope with it, placing further strain on underfunded public services and causing a visible rise in homelessness and the use of food banks. Single mothers, the unemployed and recipients of disability benefit were blamed for depleting the countrys financial reserves through claiming state welfare, while the actual architects of the financial crisis in the City of London were never mentioned. Meanwhile, post-industrial areas continued to be left to rot while the financial sector in London and the South East continued to accumulate wealth. In 2019, a report commissioned by the UN described the effects of a decade of austerity in the UK as a deliberately imposed and unnecessary social calamity, involving systematic disadvantage inflicted particularly on women, children, people with disabilities, older people and BAME communities. In and beyond the UK, the widening division between a struggling and crisis-hit population and the profits made by investment banks and stockbrokers is ever more glaring.