Never mind the ballots

Ian McCartney is tired. As far as he is concerned the general election has already been announced. “To be honest I just want it to get into it now,” the Labour party chairman says in a rare quiet moment while being photographed outside the Houses of Parliament on a sunny afternoon two weeks ago. The MP for Makerfield, Greater Manchester, has just come from lunch with another journalist in a club in Pall Mall, central London – and even that was only a temporary respite from his gruelling schedule of strategy meetings, cabinet sessions and press conferences. If that wasn’t enough, the diminutive McCartney has just completed what he describes as a “raising the morale” tour of every UK region with his mentor deputy prime minister John Prescott.

Now the election has been called, McCartney is in the thick of the daily campaigning cut-and-thrust of briefings, denials and accusations. Sitting in his sweltering office he says he came into politics as a “socialist idealist” – in his speeches he refers to Labour party activists as “comrades” – and still “brims over” with a desire to change the world.

It may be his reforming zeal that drives him on, but McCartney does not deny that he also loves locking horns with opposition politicians. Although he displays an almost Herculean grasp of social policy across the various government departments – housing terminology trips off his tongue like a veteran director of housing – he fills the hour-long meeting with attacks on the Conservatives and, occasionally, the Liberal Democrats.

Karen Buck, Labour MP for Regent’s Park and Kensington North, says of her party chairman: “His reputation within the party is good – he is a fixer who can do deals with unions and get things done. He is one of the voices of the working class in the Prescott mould – an alternative to the smooth men in suits. But he is not Old Labour – he is very open about the need to continue to turn the party away from what it was in the 1970s.”

Although his reputation is as a bustling Old Labour firebrand – largely as a result of his unashamedly thick Glaswegian accent and union background with the T&G – five minutes in McCartney’s company convinces you that he is in fact at the heart of many of New Labour’s recent reforms. And when he is persuaded to raise his eyes from the election and look beyond to a historic and likely Labour third term, 53-year-old McCartney paints a vivid picture of the changes that social landlords can expect over the next five years.

“I am one of the strong advocates in government in modernising the public services. We have to be innovative,” he says, brushing his unruly hair out of his eyes.

“It’s not just about improving what we’ve got – it’s creating new ways of delivering public services but at the same time engaging communities in that. These things are not easy.”

Pressed for examples of what this might mean in terms of actual policy, McCartney returns – as he does frequently throughout the interview – to the constituency where he has lived for the past 25 years and has represented in Westminster since 1987.

It’s not just about improving what we’ve got – it’s creating new ways of delivering public services but at the same time engaging communities. It’s not easy

He talks of the “single-site walk-in service centre” that is being built in Makerfield which “has within it a primary school, child care, a parents’ centre, a library and IT centre, a housing centre – facilities from zero to 100 for the family to use”. This is precisely the sort of service McCartney would like to see reproduced across the country, and it is an extension of the Communities Plan philosophy: involving the private sector and more than one government department to make a scheme financially viable.

Getting the better of his tiredness, McCartney clicks into full politician mode, enthusiastically throwing out ideas such as a string of “older people’s campuses” across the country where all the services such as shops, entertainment and medical care are provided on site; and meetings with residents where “redundant property and land” will be brought back into use to be “owned and run by local communities”. It is likely that all of these ideas will fit within the loose framework set out in People, Places, Prosperity, the second of two five-year plans announced by John Prescott in February (HT 4 February, page 7).

McCartney sees a “big role” for social landlords in driving this community empowerment in a Labour third term.

Yet despite McCartney’s obvious enthusiasm, there is little notion of how these ideas will differ from what has gone before or indeed how they will be any more successful.

Before any of that can happen, however, McCartney urges all public sector workers to vote, as you would expect, for Labour. Taking his prompt from the bulletpoints set out in a black folder marked “cabinet minister” that is opened out in front of him, he raises the spectre of the £35bn less that the Conservatives would spend than Labour each year – or “cuts” as he calls them. Despite the petty rhetoric and point-scoring that has surrounded this issue, it masks something more important and something which McCartney says housing professionals should consider very seriously before casting their vote on 5 May. “[We are making] major investments tackling both public and private sector failure in areas like the [housing market renewal] pathfinders and the Thames Gateway,” he says. “But to do that you have to sustain your government. This has to be a huge, year-on-year sustainable programme of work – that is why it is so important in many ways … The Tories’ £35bn cuts are real.”

The change in McCartney from the start of our interview is palpable. The charisma of a successful politician has returned and he is even relaxed enough to allow himself a little nostalgia for the eight years he has spent in government – two as part of the cabinet. “[What I enjoy are] the little things you do as a minister. Little things for one individual who has been done down in one form or another. Nobody will ever know about it but they do … It’s putting the good ideas together, putting the resources together and holding your nerve sometimes that means you can make a difference and make a change … In the jobs I’ve done as a minister I can truly say that every day I have gone home feeling that I have helped someone today.”