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Stella Creasy: 'You can see a perfect storm coming'

The Labour MP for Walthamstow has made a name by campaigning against payday loans an example of her traditional approach to fighting for the dispossessed, she says
D ecca Aitkenhead guardian.co.uk, Sunday 8 April 2012 20.00 BST

Stella Creasy in her local pie and mash shop, L Manze, in Walthamstow, east London. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Stella Creasy is possibly best known to date for being shooed away from a members-only lift in the House of Commons by a Tory minister who refused to believe that this "blonde woman" could be an MP because she looked "too young". His confusion strikes me as rather surprising when we meet for, at 34, Creasy could hardly be mistaken for a schoolgirl, and everything about her manner brisk, focused, articulate, forthright suggests a very capable, very busy young politician. From the way she begins the interview, if she could be mistaken for anything I would have thought it would be for a young Cameroon. "There's a very traditional model in politics," Creasy says, talking very quickly, "which is that people come to us who are dispossessed, and we fight for them, and we make their lives better. And everything I have learned, everything I have been involved in, has been much more about, how do I give you the power and the authority because that's fundamentally more egalitarian. Frankly, sometimes I think it's quite challenging for people on the left to think it's not their job to fix things for people, but to help them get to a stage where they can fix them for each other. I f you look at the inequalities in society, the idea that you're going to fix them from Whitehall or Westminster or even my town hall doesn't stack up to me." The words could have been lifted straight from a big society handbook or, for that matter, a Louise Mensch speech. The Labour MP for Walthamstow, in east London, is certainly passionate about reforming the role of government, and wants the state to do things differently. But any similarity with the Tories ends right there because before she has even reached for her coffee, she delivers one of the best critiques of the big society I have heard. "The problem with the big society is it confuses purpose with process. The big society kind of thinks: well, as long as people are taking part, whatever happens will be good. Well, the EDL [English Defence League] are taking part in their local communities and I don't think what they're doing is good. The big society doesn't see the state as having responsibility. The big society is like 'fat-free' it's one of those terms people use, but it doesn't really stack up. I mean, there's a Conservative Cooperative Society! You couldn't make this stuff up. I t frustrates me, because the background I come from in politics is about working with people and empowering them. The big society idea deploys that language, but doesn't take responsibility. I absolutely take responsibility as the MP only working alongside people rather than just for them."

The Tories would argue that it's precisely because MPs assume responsibility that many individuals fail to help themselves. "That's not an argument to get rid of the MP," Creasy shoots back. "That's an argument to change what the M P does." For example, she says, a tower block in Walthamstow was being refurbished last year and eight cookers had to be condemned. "I t was just before Christmas, and I said: 'What are we going to do about the cookers?' And I was told: 'Well, the tenants can all go to Bright House [the chain that sells electrical appliances on credit].' And I was like: 'No, no, no, no, no! Collectively, we can bargain for a better price on the cookers; collectively, we can help people to know where to get the cookers from. And we can set up a scheme with the local credit union so when this happens again in future we can say here's what you can do and here's how it all works.'" After the granny tax, pastygate and a cabinet minister's casual assumption that everyone in Britain owns a garage, it is a relief to hear poverty discussed by a politician who sounds as if she actually knows what she's talking about. I t is even more of a relief to hear a Labour politician advocate for a 21st-century version of socialism that cannot easily be caricatured as either old or New Labour. For example, she is fighting against healthcare cuts, "but not because I think the healthcare system we have at the moment works". Thanks largely to its own success, an NHS still organised around a 1940s and 50s model, "when people were dying of infectious diseases", no longer makes any sense when people are dying of lifestyle diseases instead. "So the idea that the future is all about having hospital beds waiting for people to get ill that's not progressive to me. Progressive to me is tackling the causes of diabetes in my local community because that's going to keep people well, and the health inequalities we have in our society are to do with those lifestyle issues. So if you're thinking about how to achieve that more progressive outcome which is less people dying of a disease that is eminently preventable, especially people from poorer backgrounds it calls for different methods. I t does call for users to be involved. That's why I say sometimes that I think it challenges people on the left, because it's something that is about control. But it completely disagrees with the right, because you just can't get markets to do this stuff." I t's the failure of markets that informs most of Creasy's work as a new MP. Elected in 2010, she is gaining a name for herself in Westminster as a highly effective campaigner against what she calls "legal loan sharks" meaning the payday loan companies such as Wonga and the pawnbrokers chains that have sprung up on high streets all over Britain since the credit crunch began and charge interest rates of up to 4,000%. Research carried out late last year found that 3.5 million Britons planned to borrow money from them in the coming six months; more than two thirds of existing customers were unable to get credit anywhere else, and most used the money for food and bills. "I was very conscious in the last couple of years of just how much the picture had changed. People had been in debt, but they were in a debt they kind of knew about, and they were coping with arrears. That sort of debt is something you can help them manage their way out of. Suddenly you were just seeing a level of debt and a level of fear that I haven't really seen before."

Creasy, on a walkabout of Walthamstow market, is constantly stopped by constituents. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian She drew wide support for her 10-minute rule bill demanding regulation of the industry, but one Conservative MP told Creasy bluntly that the problem wasn't the loan companies it was the people who used them. "Well, they should just spend less, shouldn't they," he told her. To which Creasy had to reply: "You really don't get it, do you?"

The idea that this is about poor people's profligacy dumbfounds her. "I mean, this is how people are making ends meet. You could see there was this kind of perfect storm coming, where prices are rising and people are losing their jobs or getting their wages frozen. So even if they were good with money, it just eats everything up." The coalition agreement did pledge to look at consumer finance. "And to be honest, when I first looked at it I thought that's a good idea. But then when I looked at the detail I was like: 'Oh hang on a minute, you've missed out something.'" The coalition appeared to think that as long as companies made sure customers were told the APR on a loan, that should solve the problem. "They were saying, well, you know, it's just about consumers knowing the prices. But that's missing the point. That's like saying that they have a choice to make that choice. That's like saying," and she starts to laugh, "there's a train coming round the corner. Now you know you're definitely trapped, you are tied to tracks. But you do know the train's coming." She shakes her head in despair. "The consequences are horrific, and that's what we're starting to see now." The Times's business editor, I an King, wrote in January that these companies "enjoy levels of repeat business", which proves they cannot be "as bad as she alleges". This, Creasy says, exposes a comprehensive misunderstanding of how the lenders operate. They don't want to lend money that is then paid back. "They want to lend you money at an extortionate rate, then have you pay back some of it, and then be able to roll the loan over and to increase the interest." So borrowers get trapped in an escalating nightmare of compound interest, paying up to 82 for every 100 they borrow. "You remember all those horrible Tuesday afternoons in maths where you used to talk about compound interest? That is the horror that people are getting into. That's why it becomes such a cycle. Because people are taking out loans to pay off loans they can't afford to deal with any more." But where will people turn if not to the legal loans sharks? "Such customers will," warned King, "head to unregulated lenders whose complaints management procedure involves not the Financial Services Authority but baseball bats and snarling dogs." Doesn't he have a point? No, Creasy says, this is a false choice; if Britain were to promote credit unions in the way countries such as Canada do, where 40% of the population are members compared with 2% here, we wouldn't have to turn to loan sharks. The coalition has, she acknowledges, taken action to reduce crippling bank charges for unauthorised overdrafts. "The fees have now gone from 25 a day to 12 a day. But if you're in debt, 12 a day is still a lot of money!" Besides, the poorest in the country don't even have bank accounts. She argues that until the government is willing to put a cap on the interest short-term lenders are allowed to charge, the problem is not going to go away. Most European countries have some sort of upper limit on the cost of borrowing, and 16 states in the US have either banned payday lending entirely or limited the charges on small loans. The reason this government doesn't want to, Creasy says, is very simple. "The big problem here is it's an ideological dogma that's stopping them doing anything about this, because they're saying: 'Oh, we don't like the concept of regulation.' They will say: 'OK, we accept there's a problem but we don't accept the solution, because the solution is about regulation, and we think the market will resolve itself.' "But they're missing the point about this industry. Because, fundamentally, this is an industry that makes a lot of money. A lot of these companies are foreign-owned. They go, 'Oh, we're going to the UK because of the lax regulatory regime, so we can make a lot of money there.' All these companies see a window in the UK where they are massively expanding their operations and they're quite clear that they see the UK as easy money. They are the growth industry in this current economic climate. So that's why we've got 10 of them in Walthamstow now. Everywhere I look, there's a new one." We take a walk through the market in Walthamstow and she points out the shops, which she leaflets once a month with volunteers. I t is hard to make much progress, though, because she is constantly being stopped by constituents, and I 'm struck by the easy intimacy of the contact she makes with them all pensioners, mums, stallholders, teenagers. The photographer makes her stand in the middle of the market for ages while he shoots, which is obviously embarrassing, because everyone stares. But she is stoic and obliging, doing her best not to let the self-consciousness show and, as I watch, the

thought hits me that I 'm almost certainly looking at someone who is going to be a big political player for a very long time. I t's a surprising thought to have about a 34-year-old opposition backbencher elected less than two years ago. The daughter of politically active parents her mother was a teacher, her father an opera singer they moved from M anchester to Colchester when she was a child, and she joined the Labour party at 15. "I was the archetypal kind of curious, nosy teenager, going: 'What's going on there?' and 'Why's it like that?'" After graduating in psychology from Cambridge she worked as a researcher for Douglas Alexander and Charles Clarke, while completing a PhD at the LSE and serving as a councillor in east London. There is something unexpectedly old-fashioned about Creasy. She talks a lot about coming from the "co-operative tradition" of Labour politics, worked for the Scouts until the 2010 election, and and is honorary president of her local Royal British Legion branch. Neither a militant nor a post-feminist, she seems to carry her good looks lightly, with a straightforward sort of practical femininity that makes me think of the Fawcett Society in the 1950s. She says Tory resistance to all-women shortlists from which she was proud to have been selected speaks volumes about the party's purported conversion to feminism. "The Tory women have got themselves into a tangled mess, because they say [female representation] matters, but then they say: 'Oh, but we don't want to do anything about it.' You can't just will the end, you've got to make it happen. And I was very struck by the Top Totty stuff," a recent controversy about the Commons' bar selling a bottled beer called Top Totty. "Frankly, it was a classic first test for the Tory feminists. And they were all going, oh I 've got a sense of humour, I don't care. And people were like, no seriously, you are defending [ a drink labelled with] a cartoon of woman with bunny ears in a bikini in Parliament as a bit of harmless fun? I f that's the little thing that reflects the big thing about how women are seen, that is the challenge here." Creasy's nickname in Westminster is apparently St Ella, and you can sort of see why, because her politics do feel like a vocation; "I absolutely want to change the world, that's why I do politics. That's why I got involved," she says. But the nickname implies a priggishness I don't detect. She won't tell me how many hours a week she works, "because if I answer that question, I sound like I have no life," and I can't imagine she has much time for much of one away from work. But there isn't a hint of political anorak about her, and I come away feeling more optimistic about Labour's future than I have for quite some time. "I say to people in Walthamstow," she grins, "I 'm your worst enemy as your MP because I 'm going to get you involved. Because that's how we are going to change things."

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