May 1st election results

May 1 was a very bad day for the Labour Party in Derby. It signaled the end of an era and the start of a new one as the Liberal Democrats replaced Labour as the largest party on the council.

Of course it’s worth remembering that 19 of Derby’s current crop of councillors were elected on the Labour ticket. Had two of them not betrayed their former comrades, and the people who voted them in as Labour councillors, Labour would have remained the largest party.

But that is cold comfort. Even if Labour had been left with 19 rather than 17 councillors, May 1 would still have been a disastrous day for us.

Three years ago we regained control of the city following a famous by-election success in Abbey ward when Asaf Afzal’s victory gave us an overall majority on the council.

But as I watched the votes being counted in the early hours of May 2 I knew the game was up. The euphoria of that by-election seemed a distant memory. This year’s election turned out to be Labour’s worst defeat in Derby for 40 years.

As I left Moorways with my partner Maggie, I was thoroughly depressed. We switched on the car radio as we drove home to discover that Labour had suffered a similar fate all over the country. That news provided a kind of perverse reassurance that Derby’s result wasn’t entirely a verdict on our stewardship of the city; rather we had been hit by a political tsunami.

I’m not saying we didn’t make any mistakes, but I think the policies we developed have started a process of transformation in our city that is essential if Derby is to rise to the short, medium and long term challenges that lie ahead.

Political opportunism, insular parish pump politics and a failure to embrace change will leave the city exposed to the competition. That will have an impact on jobs, services and facilities in the city. And make no mistake that competition is fierce with cities from the rest of the UK and Europe vying for the investment to maintain and improve the standard of living of their citizens.

That is why I was so keen to move the city forward. Maybe we tried to do too much too quickly. Maybe we didn’t properly explain what we were doing. But as Harold Wilson once said: “He who rejects change is the architect of decay” and we felt that transformation was essential to bring Derby out of the shadows.

That transformation wasn’t just about improving Derby’s city centre, although the £2bn city centre masterplan will provide better, modern facilities, the redevelopment of derelict sites and up to 15,000 new jobs. The opening of the Showcase cinema complex in the Westfield Centre is the latest manifestation of the city centre improvements we wanted to bring about.

The transformation was also about modernising public services through our neighbourhood agenda, which is designed to make all public services, not just those provided by the council, more responsive to local people. Neighbourhood forums have now been established in every ward all over the city and we were planning to devolve more spending decisions to local areas to make it easier to address local priorities.

Our transformation agenda included taking steps to make the city more environmentally friendly and ultimately self sufficient in clean green energy by 2025. I had started the process of building an alliance that included both public bodies and major private sector companies to sign up to this 2025 vision. In November 2006 the council agreed a five year goal to reduce its carbon footprint by 25 per cent. These actions have positioned the council at the forefront of local government action against climate change.

Raising the city’s aspirations was perhaps the most significant change we were bringing about. The examples I have given in the preceding three paragraphs illustrate our desire to encourage people to believe that it’s possible to create a better future.

We were putting measures in place to ensure that everyone shares in the success of Derby’s economy. This is essential if we are to tackle the inequality that still exists in our city. Too many youngsters are still not reaching their full potential and some local residents are still living in poverty.

Of course employment can be a pathway out of poverty, but we have to give people the means to take advantage of the jobs that are available through training and education. That was why, in partnership with Derby College, we wanted to create two new academies at Sinfin and Bemrose schools.

The Conservatives’ decision to let the Lib Dems run the city for the next 12 months means that Derby’s future direction is now uncertain. The council should play a pivotal role in facilitating the city’s economic success and, crucially, in ensuring that everyone shares in that success.

My advice to the Lib Dems would be don’t retreat into the small town mentality that is a feature of your political propaganda otherwise Derby will decline and stagnate. You would do well to heed the words of the great US president, John F Kennedy, who said: “Those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future”.

The Labour group will use the coming months to generate a citywide conversation with local people about Derby’s future direction. This will help us develop a programme for change that people can believe in and encourage them to come home to Labour.