ON May 3, we could have a socialist metro mayor for Newcastle and the North of Tyne. 

This is one of the metro mayor deals. It’s not about running the bin collections or managing social services. It’s a new role: economic development. 

It doesn’t have much money — £20 million a year. This was a Tory deal, after all. Local councils have suffered six times that amount in cuts. 

But it does have something important. The Tories designed these metro mayor deals with a swashbuckling businessman in mind, cutting through red tape and crushing local planning objections. 

When I read the devolution document, it occurred to me that its authors never thought a socialist like me would get elected to this position. 

With a paucity of funds, we’ve had to examine the structure of the economy. Who owns it, who controls it, and where the money flows. 

Under the Localism Act of 2011, the mayor has the power to do anything an individual can do. 

We can establish a people’s bank. We can build community housing co-operatives. We can create a green energy company. And they can all be collectively owned. 

We have to leave behind the New Labour ideology of taming capitalism. Neoliberal capitalism is a rigged system that is long past its sell-by date. It squanders human talent and wrecks our environment. 

A people’s bank would be co-operatively owned, one member one vote. It cannot be privatised. It will offer a full range of services — current accounts, savings accounts, mortgages and business banking for local firms. It’ll take us a couple of years to complete the regulatory process. This changes the rigged system — the banks are one of the biggest extractors of wealth from our economy. By keeping the profits reinvested locally, we can support local and worker-owned businesses. 

Community housing co-operatives are social housing. Built from carbon-negative, engineered timber, with built-in solar panels, they’re great places to live. 

Crucially, they are not owned by the state. They are owned collectively by the people who live there, and so exempt from right-to-buy legislation. We can have fair-rent, socially owned housing now. The profits can fund local community projects and maintain green spaces. 

I’ll declare a climate emergency on day one, including a mass engagement with the public to create a plan to be carbon neutral by 2030. 

We’ll set up a community-owned green energy company and use planning laws to shift to a more sustainable way of living. A green new deal is about sustainability in all its forms: environmental, social and economic. A society that is run in the interests of all its people. 

This works because we’re already spending money on these things. Instead of local wealth being siphoned off into the tax-havens of billionaires, we keep it in our communities. 

This means higher wages and more jobs. More worker-owned businesses. This means more spending power, which supports more jobs. And so the cycle continues. 

Add into this the community wealth building strategy that’s made Preston the most improved city in Britain, and we can use the Social Value Act to implement the real living wage and tackle inequalities in diversity, closing gender and ethnicity pay gaps. 

The last 40 years of the labour movement have been the experience of defending the legacy of the past, mainly the 1945 Labour government. 

We’ve fought for more money, to restore our public services, more teachers, more health workers, to defend our pay, which has been falling in real terms. 

In January alone, in just one foodbank in Newcastle, 1,826 children needed food parcels to stave off hunger. We’re at the end of the second decade of the 21st century, and people are sleeping on the streets. 

People with disabilities are forced to take up work that is killing them. Women over 60 are being told to take up apprenticeships because their pensions have been pulled out from under them. 

But money is only half the battle. The Blairite model was to allow the neoliberal economy to flourish, and divert some tax revenue to public services. And it worked, for a while: teachers really were paid more, hospitals were rebuilt, Sure Start centres set up and funded. 

But with it came PFI, and instead of wealth redistribution, we got working tax credits. When the asset-bubble economy did what was inevitable all along, it wasn’t the neoliberal elite that lost out, it was the ordinary working people whose wages were so low they needed tax credits. 

That’s what’s so significant about my platform. What makes all this possible is the realisation that we’re already spending all this money — just the profits are being extracted by corporations run in the interest of distant shareholders, and not the people who create the wealth or use the services. 

We’ll still be operating against the backdrop of austerity, and subject to the tides of the global economy. 

This won’t herald a promised land or the end of poverty. What it will show is that a new municipalism is possible. That local democratic ownership outcompetes neoliberal free markets, at least from the perspective of ordinary working people. 

The Tories are going big on the personal attacks, joined by an “independent” candidate who owns a PR company. 

They have big money and full page ads; the Tory donation email asked: “Can you pledge £500, £1k, £5k, £10k?” 

If you want to help me win, and be part of a grassroots campaign, get onto our social media and comment: Facebook and Twitter.

The election is tomorrow. 

If I’m elected mayor, I won’t be able to end arms sales to dictators. Or renationalise the railways. Or scrap tuition fees. 
What I will do is plant the seeds of a democratic economy.

Jamie Driscoll is Labour candidate for the first North of Tyne metro mayor election.