Never one to pass up on local democracy’s offerings, yours truly recently attended the new Lewisham council’s inaugural AGM.

I went partly because I pay council tax in Lewisham and like to clap eyes on the hapless schmucks in charge of it at the dawn of each municipal term’s disasters. There was another draw, though. It struck me that as one of Labour’s outright London wins at the recent elections, Lewisham had real potential as a pain in Cameron and Clegg’s mingled butt, particularly in the fight for local public services. Lewisham is a place where Labour could round on the coalition’s cuts programme, and begin to restore the ‘tacit covenant’ that Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford believe Labour must have with constituents – ‘a covenant about housing, work and security, a sense of neighbourliness and community.’

So it was that I arrived at Lewisham’s AGM with my tongue hanging out. Would third-term mayor Sir Steve Bullock be my kind of Labour? A frothing, Ted Knight-esque commie threatening sabotage and overspend to defend services seemed a bit much to hope for, but I thought Sir Steve might say a few fighting words about wrangling extra funds out of government for Lewisham’s poor. At the very least, he might pretend resistance.

Sir Steve and I began to go our separate ways in the ideological sense about a minute into his AGM address. It occurred to me that his speech sounded less like a warning to the Cameron-Clegg coalition than a job interview for it. Certainly, he evidenced distaste for a Labour rebellion against the coalition threat.

‘It would be easy to declare our opposition to the cuts the coalition is proposing,’ he began. ‘I intend to invite the leaders of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat groups to meet to discuss Lewisham’s relations with the government.’ Sir Steve hoped good relations with central government would ensue.

So far, so hopelessly civilised.

Like so many of today’s political visionaries, Sir Steve was eager to retail the notion that massive public spending cuts were crucial to the restoration of the national economy. ‘Whatever the outcome of the general election, severe cuts would have been made to public expenditure… unless we transform the way public services are delivered, the impact on our community could be devastating.’

The specifics of this transformation weren’t available at the AGM, so I got Sir Steve on the phone after it. I’ve covered local government for a long time now, and know all too well that the phrase ‘transforming the way our public services are delivered’ tends to present in real-life as abortive outsourcing initiatives, failed public-private partnerships, and/or replacing staff with useless web applications.

We had a nice chat, but didn’t get far with it. ‘It’s early days,’ Sir Steve pointed out. He assured me he was not an outsourcing zealot – ‘I’m not going to follow a privatisation agenda for the sake of it’ – but he’ll work with the private sector when there’s advantage in it. We’ll wait and see if any other ideas are in the ether. What we can say now is that cutting jobs, or sending them out of the borough would be disastrous. The council is the biggest employer in Lewisham.

Regarding local Labour’s relationship with the Cameron-Clegg coalition: Sir Steve expected respect. ‘One of the lessons of the past is that you consult local government [before implementing change], rather than implementing change and seeing what happens.’

I asked Sir Steve if the coalition had indicated it would consult. He said it hadn’t indicated that it wouldn’t. I told him tales of Tory Hammersmith and Fulham council, which keeps council tax down by charging the poor for homecare and meals. I’ve seen the H&F cabinet’s consultation process in action, too, at protest meetings: it largely involved running for it when furious meeting attendees went postal.

Sir Steve said he drew strength from a recent gathering of local government worthies, where new communities secretary Eric Pickles flashed a powerpoint slide that read ‘localism, localism, localism.’ Indeed. Tony Blair once had a slide that read ‘education, education, education.’ Powerpoint isn’t always a genuine read.

That’s it for now: post-election local Labour rhetoric as the party begins its fightback on behalf of – well, itself, mostly, on this early evidence, but hopefully others. Suffice to say for now that Lewisham needs local public services. It has high child poverty rates, high unemployment and problems with youth crime. Cruddas is right – a tacit covenant would be good. An explicit one would be better. I’ll hang out for either.