Sunderland ’til I die: Labour’s Jonathan Reynolds on reviving the Red Wall
The highlight of Jonathan Reynolds’ Westminster office is a 1960 election poster of John F Kennedy that hangs above his desk. JFK sits over Reynolds’ shoulder as we speak as a kind of liberal guardian angel to the shadow work and pensions secretary.
“Not a perfect President, but he brought hope and optimism,” Reynolds says.
“I think that’s a really important lesson [for Labour] going forward.”
It’s fair to say the Stalybridge and Hyde MP, who goes by Jonny to everyone except his mum, has needed a heavy dose of hope and optimism in the past two weeks.
Labour’s landslide by-election defeat in Hartlepool, a constituency the party had never lost, came alongside the net loss of more than 300 local council seats in the 6 May “super Thursday” elections. The party did have more luck in some of the mayoral races where it won upset victories in the west of England and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough elections, while also retaining London, Greater Manchester and Liverpool.
The results were particularly painful for Reynolds, a Sir Keir Starmer loyalist, who grew up 25 minutes up the road from Hartlepool in the outskirts of Sunderland.
“It’s painful to see the people where you grew up, and the areas you love, voting Conservative,” he says.
“But you can’t expect parts of North East, for instance, to vote Labour simply because they remember how much they hated Margaret Thatcher and the miners’ strike.
“You talk about left behind areas, I think these areas have moved on and it’s Labour that’s been left behind.”
Reynolds had a near perfect Blairite resume before becoming an MP in 2010. He was vice chair of the Blairite campaign group Progress, while also serving as a staffer for ex-work and pensions secretary James Purnell who left parliament at the 2010 election.
It was alleged in the lead-up to the 2010 poll that Reynolds’ selection to stand in Purnell’s constituency was stitched up by New Labour grandee Lord Peter Mandelson in the face of union opposition.
Despite his impeccable New Labour credentials, Reynolds was chosen to serve on the Jeremy Corbyn frontbench on two occasions. The economics and finance-minded MP was particularly at home in the shadow City minister brief.
“One of the things that was wonderful being the shadow City minister is you could go around the whole financial centre and basically approach anyone and say I’d love a chat to learn a bit more…and actually people, whatever their politics, really appreciate that engagement,” he says.
He doesn’t explicitly say it, but it’s clear Reynolds is far more comfortable under the leadership of Starmer than of Corbyn. One giveaway is that he was chosen by Starmer to sit on Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee (NEC).
He describes Starmer as “one of our assets”, despite the leader’s poor set of election results and plummeting poll ratings, while he describes Labour under Corbyn as “radical, but not realistic”.
He attributes Labour’s recent defeats to Boris Johnson’s especial personal popularity and brand of high spending Toryism, combined with the leftover toxicity from the Corbyn years.
“Compared to 2019 when people were slamming their doors in our faces sometimes, people are now willing to listen to us but that doesn’t mean they’re ready to vote for us yet,” he says.
Reynolds says the path back to electoral victory in Labour’s disintegrating northern Red Wall is “a core message about work and wages”.
“I think there is a sense from people, rightly or wrongly, that we’re interested in issues not part of that core economic agenda,” he says.
“People look at a party and ask: ‘Is this party focused at the things that matter for me?’ The harsh thing from a result like Hartlepool is no, they think we’re not.”
Part of his goal in shadowing work and pensions secretary Therese Coffey is to get people more interested in their own pension fund and what it means for their future. A topic he recognises isn’t particularly sexy for the average person.
“It’s really about the adequacy of pensions and finding a way for people to be more informed about their pension, be in more control of it, understand better the level of saving they need to support the retirement they have in mind,” he says.
He calls Gordon Brown’s implementation of auto-enrolment into occupational pension schemes as “without exaggeration one of the public policy successes in modern UK history” and adds that “there’s no one who doesn’t think” the current minimum 8 per cent minimum contribution should be lifted.
Reynolds also says he’s open to having a discussion about easing regulation to allow pension funds to invest in higher-risk venture capital and private equity firms.
“In terms of the regulatory regime if there’s ways to allow them to do things, especially returns in more varied asset classes, I’m definitely up for that – I think they can for instance play a huge role in tackling climate change,” he says.
“But what we’ve always got to be first and foremost thinking about is the person who spent their working life working and deserves a decent retirement.”
On the welfare side of things, Labour is still committed to scrapping Universal Credit – a policy the party took to the 2019 election without having a replacement system mapped out.
He says this was “not good enough” and that he was now looking at things like “child care, council tax support and how Universal Credit interacts with work and low paid work”. The two-child cap will also go under a Labour government, which he calls “the single biggest driver of child poverty”.
He bristles at the much repeated claim that Universal Credit has acquitted itself over the past year and held up under an avalanche of Covid-related claims.
“The Universal Credit we’ve had in the crisis is not the Universal Credit we’ve had before it,” he says.
“The level of support has been different, because of the uplift, the sanctions have been suspended, some of the technical things are important like the minimum income floor for self employed people.
“If you’ve had to invent all these extra features to get through the pandemic you’re admitting there have been major gaps.”
His brief is also deeply personal for him. Reynolds’ eldest son has autism and has had extensive experience of the current benefits system. He believes Universal Credit has made “disabled people worse off” by not replicating the severe disability premium.
“We have to move away from the punitive approach and give something that really supports people,” he says.
“It’s an approach that says there is work for everybody – we’ve just got to be quite punitive to people to get into it – that’s just not true.”