As the dust settles on the General Election and the new Labour government takes shape, it is left to Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves to pick up the pieces after years of disastrous Conservative rule - from Brexit to Liz Truss’s ‘mini-budget’.
They don’t have an easy task, but I wish them well in it and hope for a brighter future ahead.
Something we heard very little about in the national press during the campaign, but badly in need of sorting out, is local government finance.
Councils have struggled to plan over the past few years, with last-minute short-term funding settlements and the costs of social care spiralling.
While the Lib Dems made sorting out funding for social care a key plank of our campaign (which would have helped councils as a knock-on effect), Labour was frustratingly silent on these absolutely crucial issues.
Keir Starmer’s plan to say as little as possible on the campaign trail - an understandable, though uninspiring tacti - has brought success and the keys to Number 10 - albeit with the same vote share as under Corbyn in 2019 and a lower turnout - but now he needs to bring forward tangible solutions, and desperately quickly.
To me, one of the upsides of a new Labour government is that our Labour Council administration will finally have the tools they say they need to get to grips with the issues in our borough (though they’ve already been in charge for over 70 years!)
I hope one of their first acts will be to lobby their own government to properly fund councils - it will certainly be one of the first things I write to our own new dramatically increased number of Liberal Democrat MPs about.
Looking ahead to 2026, I am confident that local Lib Dems will emulate our national counterparts, who made significant gains last Thursday, but in the meantime, we will continue holding the current Labour administration to account.
Haringey has been run by Labour locally since 1971 and was this year ranked as the 11th worst council in the country.
Now, despite having run the borough for over 50 years and through two previous Labour governments, they have what they say has been holding them back from real change locally: a national Labour government in place.
So with no one to hide behind for the actions they take anymore: let’s hope those actions are the right ones for Haringey.
- Luke Cawley-Harrison is councillor for Crouch End ward, Haringey Council and leader of the Liberal Democrat Group.
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