In April this year, leader of the Labour group on Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council Pete Lowe resigned from the Labour Party. He recently helped launch The Black Country Party with five other councillors in the borough who had either left or been expelled in protest at the austerity policies of Labour nationally. The Socialist spoke to him about his motivations for doing so, and where he sees the struggle for working-class political representation going.
I was willing to do all I could to get Labour elected. And then what I found was no sooner had we got a Labour government elected, that things weren’t changing.
Working-class people were still on the receiving end of all the issues that were going on. We saw the manifesto overturned on the pledge to support the WASPI women. Then we saw the two-child benefit cap stay in place. Then we saw winter fuel payments cut.
And then finally for me was when I looked at the welfare cuts back in March. Only two weeks before I’d been condemning the Tories in Dudley for their £42 million cuts impacting on the most vulnerable people within our community.
I started to re-evaluate my place in the political world, and I came to the conclusion that I needed to put the people that I represented over the party that I represented – that I needed to put principles before power.
So I left the party. I didn’t seek to take people with me, but three other Labour councillors left. With one of my colleagues who’d been expelled a month before and another who had left at that time, we formed a group of six with the very simple premise of being an anti-austerity party that unashamedly represents working-class people in our local community.
Trade union voice
The first thing we’ve started to do is say to the local trade unions, unashamedly, we’ll be your voice in that council chamber. If you want us to put a resolution forward defending your members, defending your community then we will do that.
And then wider than that, it’s about how do we actually start that proper grassroots campaign? How do we reach out to those 72% of people in Dudley who don’t even vote at local elections?
We’ve already had successes there. One example would be we fought tooth and nail that the leisure centres shouldn’t just remain open, but they should remain under council control. And then the second one was around the closure of dementia services. We managed to get 3,000 names on the petition to get it aired in council, and then we won.
Through its policies and procedures, I think the Labour Party has demonstrated it can no longer claim to be the party of the working class.
On our badge, proudly underneath we’ve got working-class people. Because class is always where we need to go back to for the answers that bring about fundamental change.
Too often politics looks towards dividing society, whether that be by the colour of their skin, the person that they love or the place that they work. And we are basically saying, actually no, no, no. We are going to unite with our common purpose.
Of course, anti-austerity isn’t just a slogan for Dudley. I’ve developed really strong links already with some of our brothers and sisters in Liverpool, in Broxtowe, in the North East and down in London.
What we’re looking towards is working with all like-minded people to see how can we raise a proper left organisation beginning in the Black Country, working with others across the country to create something radically different?
In the past, with the best of intentions, that has often been top down. One of the things within the Black Country Party is we don’t need a whip, other than you need to be pro-working class, you need to be anti-austerity. You need to be pro-public services and trade union. But other than that, we campaign for what the issues are in our local areas.
We’re no longer constrained by Westminster parties telling us what to do. We are now free to say what we want, when we want, and the only people we are accountable to are our local communities.
