As tragedy unfolds across Britain, local communities have been stepping up to the task of serving their neighbours and protecting the most vulnerable. When Boris Johnson announced Britain’s nationwide lockdown on the 23^rd April, grassroots groups had made preparations for what was to come. Though the government had wasted five weeks of action, many in local community organisations had watched with horror as unmitigated disaster spread across northern Italy. The warning bells were ringing and the siren call was clear: get ready.

Where the government has been lacking nationally, local communities have picked up the slack. Our communities have organised to care for the vulnerable and provide for those in need, demonstrating that local people in their own areas do not need an external bureaucrat or politician to tell them what they need, given they know exactly what works for them and their neighbours. For too long our communities have been looked at as a nuisance and cast aside by the politicians who claim to represent them, whilst simultaneously shafting them in the interest of big business or large property developers. As this crisis dissipates we need to assert the idea that local communities should make decisions about their local areas from now on.

In London that means that we remake our City so that it works for Londoners. The capital cannot exist solely to maximise investment opportunities for major corporations or for overseas landlords. It should function first and foremost on the basis of the wellbeing of the people who live in our boroughs – providing us all with a real share in the wealth of our City. In receiving that share, we need to pass power to local community groups to distribute that wealth so as to deliver local solutions, whether it be repurposing empty land as new common spaces or community farms, or regenerating old buildings and repurposing them for leisure facilities or meeting rooms. There is much talk of a ‘new normal’ at the moment, but that new normal has to start locally and build its way up. Empowering the same communities that have responded to this virus with such determination is the best way forward. Falling back into old habits, or using the crisis to make planning and local decision making less democratic, is not. The current trend of destroying neighbourhoods and erasing the experience of local residents must be brought to an immediate halt. 

I recently revisited Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities and was reminded of the very simple idea that our communities should remain, as Jacobs would put it, a ‘mixture’ of functions. But more than simply debating space, Jacobs rightly argues that it is the way decision makers interact with communities that makes the real difference: “There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.” For too long London has been forced to accept the opposite, with the wishes of the developers of buildings seen as more important than the people who live in them.

In an email to Labour Party members the Mayor has made clear that we need a new settlement in London, noting that “Covid-19 has exposed the fragility in our society and deep flaws in our economy.” This is true, and we will need a serious plan for change. In acknowledging that our current system is broken, we need to ensure that the answer to this problem is the ceding of power to local communities. Today should have been an opportunity for these communities to cast their votes in local elections across the United Kingdom. As a candidate myself, I may have even been elected as a London Assembly Member. But instead, the coronavirus pandemic has postponed the May elections until 2021. We can only hope that by that time we will have emerged from this crisis with an ambition to rebalance the power of forces in our society in favour of the people who kept us going.