Reclaiming power together: can a politics of community renew Britain’s purpose?

This essay was originally published in the collection Britain Renewed: Labour and the Communitarian Tradition (2025). The full report can be downloaded here.

Right now, our country stands at a crossroads. Trust in politics is very low. People feel ignored, the places where they live neglected.

For too long, decisions have been made about people, not with them. Inequality has deepened. When people walk out of the front door, they see potholes in the roads and local parks overgrown. It feels like nothing can be fixed any more. As local councils have been cut, councillors have become more pessimistic and power more distant. It seems as though the system has been protecting the powerful while punishing the poor.

This is a crisis of politics but also of belonging, agency and hope. Fixing it requires new thinking, not business as usual. The big question now is not just how to win power, but how to wield it in a way that restores trust, dignity, and agency to communities long left behind. That means rebuilding a politics of community – rooted in collective power, mutual care, and democratic renewal.

This is why I ran to be Mayor of Greater Manchester. During my time in Westminster, I felt the growing disconnect between SW1A 0AA and the rest of the country. I left to try to build a new way of doing politics from the bottom up. One that starts with people and place, not point-scoring and party lines. One that believes in the dignity and wisdom of ordinary people; that places trust in them and their communities to lead.

Together We Are Greater Manchester: enabling everyone to live well.

In Greater Manchester, we are demonstrating what’s possible when we put our trust in each other and pull together, in the same direction – as residents, politicians, voluntary and community groups, public, private and academic institutions.

Our ten-year strategy, Together We Are Greater Manchester, is a decisive break from a model of public services that waits for crises and treats citizens as passive recipients. Instead, we’re building a prevention first approach, focused on the foundations of a good life: healthy homes, safe and strong communities, good work and opportunity, connectivity and mobility, and good everyday support in vibrant neighbourhoods. It recognises the contributions everyone can make to our collective thriving – if we invite, enable and trust people to play their part.

Our growing Live Well movement and model exemplifies this. It’s about joining up services around the person – not bureaucratic silos – taking a community-led approach. In neighbourhoods across the city region, local people work alongside paid staff to support their neighbours. It’s practical, it’s hopeful, and it’s working.

Take CommUNITY Little Hulton in Salford – one of our Live Well accelerator sites. There, volunteers and staff work side by side to help people with whatever they need, every day. Their T-shirts say it all: “Happy to Help! Live Well: Doing things differently with Greater Manchester Communities.”

This is Live Well: a whole-person support system delivered not by distant and extractive corporations ticking boxes and handing out sanctions, but by strong local government, trusted community organisations, and proud citizens working as one team. We’re working towards a universal Live Well offer, with Live Well spaces in every neighbourhood, each shaped by its community, each offering practical support for the issues that hold people back, like debt, poor housing, poor mental health, and isolation.

If we do this right, it can take pressure off over-stretched services and reduce people’s dependence on them. We estimate that about a third of people queuing up for GP appointments primarily have a social need rather than a medical one. Imagine what might be possible if the receptionist could immediately offer a Live Well appointment instead of a long wait to see the GP. You can see how a path to sustainable public services opens up.

This means reinvesting in the infrastructure of community – community organisations, hubs, youth centres, libraries, parks and civic spaces. Growing and spreading community wealth, health and power, not as a side project, but as a central strategy. Valuing paid and unpaid care in our communities. Recognising that people’s paths to recovery and to wellness are often nonlinear. Seeing the role of the public sector to convene, lead and support local people and partners – so together we can create the conditions for everyone to live a good life in a thriving city region.

This is what a politics of community looks like. It’s not abstract. It’s not nostalgic. It’s practical, radical, and rooted in the everyday. It’s about shifting power – real power – out of Westminster, and into the hands of people who know their communities best. 

Community power in action

Live Well builds on everything we’ve learnt in Greater Manchester over a decade of devolution. My time as Mayor has shown me that when power is devolved not just to regions but to people, it can transform lives and rebuild trust in politics.

Here’s the thing: when you trust people, when you give them power, they rise to the challenge.

Take our work on homelessness. When I said we’d end rough sleeping, people told me it couldn’t be done. But we didn’t accept that. We brought together councils, charities, faith groups, businesses, and – most importantly – people with lived experience. We established the Greater Manchester Homeless Action Network and created the scheme, A Bed Every Night. Together we’ve helped thousands off the streets. Through taking a Housing First approach, we’ve seen that when you set people up to succeed, they generally do.

Now we are taking this further, harnessing the power of the whole system to tackle the root causes of homelessness – poor housing supply and standards, insecure and unaffordable tenancies, and lack of support. This includes the launch of our Greater Manchester Good Landlord Charter, bringing together landlords, housing providers and local authorities with tenant groups, to improve rental standards for private and social tenants. The Charter sits alongside a commitment to build 10,000 new, energy efficient homes for social rent by 2030, and a drive to improve temporary accommodation standards. 

We’ve applied the same approach to safety. Our Violence Reduction Unit and Wellbeing Hubs bring together public services and community partners to prevent harm before it happens. In the last two years, neighbourhood crime is down by 17%, violent crime down by 7%, and knife related hospital admissions down by 30%.

GM Moving, our movement for movement, has been pioneering a whole-system, place-based, community led approach to addressing physical inactivity and health inequity more broadly for more than 10 years. This demonstrates the greater impact public money can have, when we resource and trust local partners in the voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise (VCFSE) sector to deliver. Whether it’s a walking group in Failsworth, Oldham, or a boxing club in Moss Side, Manchester, these are spaces where community and belonging is built, and hope is restored. Our creative health movement is bearing similar fruit, as is the local BeeWell programme, co-produced with young people, ensuring their wellbeing is central to our decisions.

It’s energising to see the system now galvanising around the development of the MBACC (the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate), bringing together employers, educators and families – giving every young person a clear path and line of sight to good jobs and training opportunities in the city region. For the first time in a long time, we are talking directly to young people not on the traditional university route about our ambitions for their life chances.

These are not just policy interventions. They are expressions of a deeper belief that everyone has a right to a stable home, safety, meaningful work, a fair chance, and health – and that this can be achieved when we take a bottom-up approach and work together as more than the sum of our parts.

My lessons from Westminster: dignity and justice

During my time as an MP and Minister in Westminster, I saw first-hand the failures of a centralised model of power. I became convinced that an alternative is urgently needed. In my home and constituency of Leigh, I saw how honest hard-working people – doing their best – were being left behind by successive governments, which didn’t share the same ambitions for their town and the North of England as a whole. They didn’t want handouts or slogans – they longed for respect, agency, and equal treatment.

During my time in Westminster, and since, I’ve repeatedly witnessed the critical importance of a politics of community and collective power to rebalance the state. Whether it’s Hillsborough, the infected blood scandal, Grenfell, the Post Office scandal, nuclear test veterans – our politics must learn truly to listen to the voices of ordinary people, and trust them.

Communitarianism and the Labour movement

Such collective action and communitarianism isn’t a new idea. It is etched deep into Greater Manchester’s long history and story.

It’s the lesson of the Rochdale Pioneers, the Manchester cotton workers who refused to handle slave-picked cotton, and of the reformers and the suffragettes.

It’s the story of the Covid pandemic, when neighbours looked after each other, and it’s what we saw and felt as a city region in our collective response to the Manchester Arena bombing in May 2017.

It is also a lesson that the Labour movement needs to relearn. In recent times, we have again lapsed into an instinct to be too centralising, too controlling. We need to rediscover communitarianism afresh as a defining but often overlooked strand of the Labour tradition. From the co-operative movement to trade unions, Labour’s greatest achievements have come when it has empowered people to work for change from the bottom up for the common good.

And it’s the future of the Labour Party – if we’re brave enough to embrace it.

This isn’t about going back. It’s about going forward – towards a politics that feels real. A politics that says: you matter. Your voice matters. Your community matters.

Labour’s opportunity: a politics that feels real

No one is coming over the hill to save us. The challenges we face are too deep and wide for any one leader to fix. But that’s not a reason to despair – it’s a call to action.

To the extent that we have an answer, it lies in the full devolution of power. That is the route to a new political context. It is time for Labour to drop its equivocation about it and fully embrace what it means – trusting people and places to do what is right for themselves.

We’ve seen what’s possible when we come together. When we organise. When we believe in each other and in the places we call home. The country is crying out for change. But not just any change. People don’t want more promises from on high. They want to be part of something. They want to be seen, heard, and trusted.

In all parts of Great Britain there are examples of community-led change: people forming tenants’ unions, running food co-ops, setting up community banks and energy projects. These acts of hope show that people are not apathetic; they’re hungry for agency and connection. Labour must meet that hunger with vision and courage. We must reject the false choice between technocracy and populism, and instead offer a politics rooted in solidarity, justice, community and action.

In a few years, the whole of the North will have devolution deals and combined authorities. This is the new architecture of the British state and it offers us a life raft. To carry us to safety, it must be matched by an equally radical shift in culture – one that trusts people, values place, and puts community at the heart of everything.

This essay was originally published in the collection Britain Renewed: Labour and the Communitarian Tradition (2025). The full report can be downloaded here.