The New Statesman has discovered Preston and touted it as an example of Labour in practice. I fact a lot of this is related circulating in the Cooperative Party and the Cooperative network of Councils, of which Preston is a member. Some people actually welcome Brexit in the belief that the kind of procurement policies followed in Preston will be easier, although of course everything that is going on in Preston at the moment is compliant with European Union rules which are a lot more flexible than some people seem to realise.
Brexit, and the extended stagflation that seems likely to follow, will actually limit the scope for imaginative local government as it will hit economic growth and hence UK finances as a whole. It will therefore push the UK's procurement more in the direction of the Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) of the 1980s and 1990s and away from more modern values based approaches. For some of the hard right supporters of Brexit, this is the main attraction, that it will force the UK into stripping away the regulations that they believe hold the economy back, but which many of us value.
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