Renewal

Dear Subscribers and Friends of Renewal. We are delighted to announce this year's Rita Hinden Memorial Lecture will be given by Yuan Yang MP. Yuan Yang is the Labour MP for Earley and Woodley, and currently serves as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Before standing for Parliament, she spent eight years working as a journalist at the Financial Times, where she was previously FT Europe-China correspondent, and before that their Beijing deputy bureau chief.

“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.” - Andy Burnham, ‘Reclaiming power together: a politics of community to renew Labour’s purpose’, in UCL Policy Lab, Britain Renewed: Labour and the Communitarian Tradition (2025).

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Structural, political, and ideological failures have undermined devolution in Bristol and the West of England. Th e region’s woes highlight the fact that eff ective devolution requires political stability, collaborative leadership, and a coherent governing vision. In the 2024 Spring Budget, the Conservative government announced the expansion of devolved powers to a number of combined authorities, including the allocation of millions of pounds of additional funding for key ‘trailblazer’ areas.

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Solving our solidarity crisis is imperative for social democracy. To do so, Labour must draw on its heritage of membership-based movements. Only a rich politics of relationship can sustain the reciprocity and common endeavour on which both social progress and defeating populism depend. Social democracy depends on social solidarity: the ‘common endeavour’ cited on Labour membership cards is only possible when people feel they are on the same team.

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In the aftermath of the local elections, social democrats face a reckoning. Keir Starmer’s tepid, self-flagellating brand of managerial Labourism has hit an electoral wall, undermined by his persistent refusal to either define or defend the nature of his government’s project.

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