CWU MEMBERS, like all of us, are facing a cost-of-living crisis caused by an economic system based on the extraction of wealth, a system that enables oil and gas companies such as Shell and BP to post record profits while our members face a 54 per cent increase in their energy bills.

Our members have worked tirelessly throughout the Covid pandemic keeping our country connected and delivering huge quantities of mail on levels never seen before.

Employers need to recognise our members’ role and commitment during this past period and must provide financial stability in upcoming pay negotiations to combat the cost-of-living crisis. 

This, however, will not be enough. Immediate emergency support from both the Westminster and Scottish governments is also required to get money into workers’ pockets now — but the full solution we need is economic system change, otherwise we will go from the current crisis into the next.

That’s why the CWU is supporting Community Wealth Building initiatives across the UK, including the ambitious programme under way here in Scotland at Labour-run North Ayrshire Council.

Our union believes that Community Wealth Building must become the main approach to local economic development adopted by Labour council groups across Scotland and the rest of the UK, ensuring more of our economy is democratically and socially owned.

North Ayrshire’s Community Wealth Building approach, led by socialist leader Joe Cullinane, demonstrates that another economy is possible if ambitious councils, working alongside other public anchor institutions, use the economic levers available to them to support the economic regeneration of their communities.

Take renewable energy as an example. While the SNP in Edinburgh has sold Scotland’s offshore wind potential to foreign capital, the Labour council in North Ayrshire is using publicly owned land, such as their former landfill sites, to invest in municipally owned renewable energy, locking in the short, medium and long-term benefits of the projects for their communities.

Generating 277 per cent of the council’s future energy needs, North Ayrshire Council’s renewable energy projects won’t just fully power all the council’s operations, but it will generate excess energy that will be used to raise new income streams that can be reinvested in the local community.

This is what public and common ownership of infrastructure, and the local economy, delivered through Community Wealth Building, can achieve. 

It’s why today at Scottish Labour Party conference the CWU will be moving a motion seeking to make this level of Community Wealth Building ambition the prerequisite policy position of the Scottish Labour Party in advance of May’s local government elections in May.

We don’t want Scottish Labour councils that are plagued by timid managerialism, comfortable about delivering small incremental improvements but ultimately setting for the status quo. 

We want Scottish Labour councils that are ambitious, visionary and bold in their pursuit of a radically different economy and society. 

Local manifestos are currently being developed for May’s council elections and we are demanding that Community Wealth Building be placed at the core of every Labour manifesto in Scotland.

Labour councils should adopt, as a minimum, progressive procurement policies in support of unionisation, decent work, zero-carbon public supply chains and democratic ownership.

They should be building more inclusive and democratic local economies by supporting the establishment of worker-owned businesses, co-operatives and municipal enterprises.

Rather than sell off publicly owned land to developers, Labour councils should be using publicly owned land and property to generate wealth for their local communities, like North Ayrshire is doing on renewable energy.

And Labour councils should be working with trade unions to improve terms and conditions of workers, not against them, as is currently happening in Coventry. 

Labour councillors, as employers, should be adopting workforce policies that counter in-work poverty, not ones that exacerbate it. 

That means delivering fair pay deals for local government workers, promoting the Real Living Wage to local businesses, supporting access to trade union membership to all workers across the local economy and acting against workplace practices like zero-hours contracts.

If Labour councils are ambitious in their application of the principles of Community Wealth Building, the CWU believes that together we can help to address the everyday issues facing our members and their communities through worker-owned Post Offices, local input into broadband provision delivered by CWU members and an expanded role for postal workers.

And it is the same for workers in other sectors of the economy too. That’s why it’s important that trade unions are involved in the design and implementation of Community Wealth Building strategies, supporting the practical application of it to democratise local and regional economies, influencing the wider transformation of the economy nationally.

It is stating the obvious to say that Scottish Labour has struggled to carve out its own distinct political offer to the people of Scotland among the noise of nationalism from the SNP and Scottish Tories. 

But, in North Ayrshire it has demonstrable examples of how practical socialism can and does assist in improving the lives of people when socialists intervene in the economy with a view to sharing the proceeds equally. 

The only problem is that the leadership of the party isn’t doing much to promote it.

It’s therefore over to conference this weekend. Support for the CWU’s motion could inject the political vision that the party in Scotland so desperately needs. 

By placing common ownership of wealth at the heart of Scottish Labour’s local and national policy agenda, and shouting about the practical examples of its application in North Ayrshire, the party could start to develop a distinct political programme that neither the SNP or Tories can, or will, offer the people of Scotland.

Craig Anderson is CWU Scotland regional secretary.