“THEIR ideology prevents a recovery.” Laura Pidcock is not convinced that Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s six-month minimum wage placements or £10 eating out discounts are going to stop the scale of post-lockdown damage.

“I’m so sceptical,” the former North West Durham MP, now national secretary of the People’s Assembly, says. “There is huge insecurity because the messages from the government and the schemes it puts in place don’t correspond with the behaviour of employers.

“And all the issues around PPE [personal protective equipment], the inadequate PPE, the inability to manufacture our own, the impact of privatisation meaning we just don’t have the capacity to commission and deliver PPE.

“We are living out the cost of austerity during a global health pandemic. And they come out with something like this week’s eat out to help out gimmick — it’s very difficult to live on people’s wages, to feed a family when you’ve lost so much income, and then you’re offered a tenner off a meal out. They should have a concerted plan around wage increases and the eradication of in-work poverty, a huge job creation scheme that raises people’s confidence to spend, not these kind of tokenistic gestures, but their ideology prevents it.

“Because of course they won’t intervene on how much people are paid apart from the basic minimum hourly pay and they wouldn’t keep that if they thought they could get away with it. They’re just not able to intervene in a way that will really help us recover. When we look back there will be an immense amount of rage, especially for those who have lost a loved one.”

That rage needs to be channelled into action to address the way Covid-19 looks set to impact on jobs and how it provides unscrupulous employers opportunity to fire and rehire staff on worse contracts — meaning further downward pressure on wages that are already too low.

“This is the question of our day,” Pidcock says. “And if Labour is to reconnect with working-class communities it can’t treat working-class people as an object it relates to. We are them, and we are in workplaces where these things are taking place.”

But can Labour reconnect with working-class communities without resolving the problem of being seen to oppose implementing the EU referendum result, when it is led by the chief architect of the second referendum policy that did such damage?

“Brexit was certainly a huge factor on the doorstep,” Pidcock agrees, “but there were lots of other things going on too. People’s perceptions of Labour local authorities, which had obviously battled with vastly reduced budgets and operated in a very restrictive environment that needed them to be creative about what a local democratic institution can do, especially when the government designed many cuts so it could pass the blame down.

“And there was an anti-Establishment feeling that meant, for people who already had a very low regard for politics, adding another barrier to withdrawal from the European Union was a final straw. So in the run-up to the election it didn’t matter how many surgeries I did, or how brilliant the team were on case work or how present I was at everything the community, at the end of the day people thought that.”

Too many people are keen to portray Labour’s base as divided by culture wars, she believes. “You know, people who think someone’s not experienced exploitation because they drink a latte. Or that everyone in the north was only interested in sovereignty, or immigration.

“Living here you know there is a huge appetite for change, in Durham as much as Deptford, people care about affordable housing and decent wages, and how we are going to fund the NHS — people here want public services funded properly.

“And we are in love with the countryside. There’s a real big green movement in Durham, because people appreciate that we live in such a beautiful place. So if Labour isn’t fighting for those policies then it isn’t representing our class.

“For me the biggest challenge is connecting the industrial with the political. How do we make the argument that this is actually a matter of control, of power, not over borders but over the workplace.

“That how much power you have in the workplace is directly related to how much money you have in the bank at the end of the week.

“And here I see a real synergy between the tasks of the Labour left, the extraparliamentary movement and the trade union movement. There’s a crossover between all three, many of the same people are active in all three.

“There’s been a weakening of the link between workplaces and communities, but this is about the movement being prepared to act in defence of workplaces, within communities.

“The movement needs to map workplaces under threat in different communities and organise around job losses. Put pressure on employers and government or join workers on picket lines if it gets to that stage. 

“Organise meetings on behalf of workers, invite workers to come and speak and alert the community to what might be happening in that workplace.” 

Job losses being announced because of the coronavirus crisis are ripping the hearts out of entire areas, with towns such as Derby or Crawley facing economic collapse. Pidcock sees developing “a proper strategy where we are active in all communities” as the job of the People’s Assembly and says it is working alongside people in political parties and the trade union movement towards a day of action that would put the local fallout from the economic crisis centre stage.

This is the work she would urge on comrades who are thinking of leaving Labour. I put it to her that the stream of departures has become a torrent since Keir Starmer sacked Rebecca Long Bailey, relieving the Labour left of any shadow cabinet influence.

“When there’s a change in leadership there’s going to be a change in how you feel in your relationship to the party. But remember that Jeremy Corbyn constantly repeated that the leader isn’t the whole party. 

“There are thousands and thousands of socialist and left members in the Labour Party, many more than before Jeremy was leader, and the left is in a better place in Labour than it was a decade ago. 

“I don’t think people should be judged for having made the decision to leave, nor can we just sit and hope for them to return. It’s about showing that this is a long, long project: we want a Labour government, and we want to organise to build as much influence as we can have over what policies the Labour Party stands on. 

“If Labour’s programme was pertinent in 2019, when we had 14 million people, 4.3 million children in poverty, then it is even more relevant now. We need an even more ambitious proposal given there is collapse in some parts of the economy, huge sectoral damage in others.

“There’s a really uncertain future for work, a climate catastrophe, a health pandemic, and these are the issues that members want to organise on – around the Green New Deal, employment rights. So the idea that the right will be able to launch an all-out assault on these policies with no kickback is misguided. We need to ensure we don’t cede ground on the climate targets, on the fiscal commitments such as to the Waspi women, on collective bargaining. That’s the job of organisations like Don’t Leave, Organise, which I’m involved in and is a coming together of lots of left groups.”

Pidcock has been selected for the left slate of candidates endorsed for election to the party’s national executive committee by the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance, an umbrella group including Momentum, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and others.

This weekend would usually see her speaking from platforms and rallying the troops at Europe’s biggest labour movement festival, the Durham Miners’ Gala, but lockdown means the Gala is cancelled and a series of online events are being put on instead. Does she have a message for all the comrades she won’t be able to catch up with this year?

“We’ll miss the Gala. It’s so special to the County Durham communities, even people who aren’t so intensely connected to the labour movement, it brings everyone together.

“If you’re wondering what you can do, I’d say, please become a marra” (as the Friends of Durham Miners’ Gala are known). “The whole movement must continue to support the Gala.

“The consequences of coronavirus are going to be extremely challenging and when things are really difficult, personally and politically, the only thing we can draw on is solidarity from each other. That’s what makes the Gala so powerful, the music, the art, the warmth of the whole day, but above all the human connection with other people who want to fight for a better world, so let’s fight for the Gala to be bigger and better than ever in 2021.”