Overview

Public services are in crisis. NHS backlogs, police forces in disarray and a housing crisis growing ever worse. Whole areas of our national infrastructure are in a mess including energy, water and rail. In this book, Sir Robin Wales and Clive Furness demonstrate how these issues are linked and what can be done to solve them. They reflect on the current frustration with public service bureaucracy and its failure to deliver as it should and demonstrate, with evidence and examples, what needs to be done to create public services which deliver on their original aspiration. They take readers on a rollercoaster journey through two successful decades in charge of one of Britain’s most deprived councils – highlighting how they changed the face of east London by overhauling political and social cultures and helping, in the process, to deliver London’s 2012 Olympic Games. Part autobiographical account of policy successes, part ode to the forgotten days of social democracy, and part critique of the Left’s current obsession with ‘woke’ culture, the authors draw on their vast experience and, with engaging humour, deliver 2023’s most important assessment of how the Labour movement can shake off its self-imposed shackles.

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9781915603937

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Sir Robin Wales joined the Labour Party in Scotland aged fifteen. Elected as a Labour councillor in Newham in 1982 he subsequently served as leader from 1995–2002 and then as the first directly elected Labour mayor in the country from 2002–2018. As a member of LOCOG he played a significant part in the 2012 London Olympics. Clive Furness joined the Labour Party when he was twenty-one and served at every level of his constituency party. He was a Newham councillor for twenty-one years. He spent most of his working life in the voluntary sector, working with homeless people and those with mental health problems. His thirty years of voluntary youth work saw him receive the BEM. He is a deacon of his church in Plaistow.

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