It’s been a full week campaigning – but we’re making a difference

The Sam Tarry / @SamTarry Campaigns Column

This week has been seriously busy; even for me its taking a toll. I write this at 11.30pm on a train back from Manchester where I was running my third Organising Academy of the week for Hope not Hate. I have run one in London, one in Leicester and another in Manchester this week with the final one coming up in Thurrock on Saturday morning.

Teaching people the basics of community organising so they can self-organise expands the capacity of what we can achieve as a campaign with limited staff and limited budgets. With 150 potential winnable seats for the BNP in next year’s council elections, plus 5 possible parliamentary seats then this is really crucial to stopping them making a major breakthrough by winning a Westminster seat or control of a local authority – certainly on the cards in Barking & Dagenham and Stoke-on-trent.

Trade Unionists and Obama Organisers will be familiar with the election-focussed organising model we use – mapping communities, bringing them together through shared interest and self interest and carrying messages by trusted community figures and peer-to-peer campaigning. The idea that the best person to convince another of their argument as to why the BNP are bad news for them and their family is someone from that community, someone who is trusted: a vicar or a mosque leader, a trade union shop steward, a parent, a teacher – each person trusted by the community they are involved with and trusted to pass on a message. I’ve been teaching the basics of organising people to take action; building contact lists, using online tools, finding key community endorsers, making the ‘ask’, planning days of action and so on. If you want to learn more you’ll have to come on one of our Organising Academies!

But looking ahead to next weekend’s Hope not Hate National Weekend of Action, linked in with remembrance Sunday, we are holding 50 events across the country. Showing that building capacity in ordinary people to self organise is key to growing and expanding the campaign. Maybe I will see you on the Hope not Hate campaign bus picking up activists from across East London?

This busy week is following on from last week where I spoke at a debate with the Green Party and Compass at the University of East Anglia. Cracking stuff – think I showed young environmental and left wing activists that there is life in the Labour Party yet and that industrial actions like the Vestas dispute show how traditional organised labour and the environmental campaigners can unite around a shared agenda in creating new jobs in a new green economy.

I managed to squeeze in a visit to Cardiff on Tuesday night to speak at a Cardiff Labour Students meeting alongside local Labour PPC Jenny Rathbone. That was a great opportunity to get out there and meet other Young Labour members and hear their ideas to go into a Young Labour mini manifesto – and to hear about their concerns about youth unemployment and bankers bonuses and how we campaign to take on those issues.

I’ve also done plenty of local campaigning, as I do most weeks, in Barking and Dagenham. I’m happy to have led my local action team’s contribution to Dagenham and Rainham CLP’s 7,500 Labour contacts in two months, which puts us ahead of the pack across the whole of London.

I’ve also picked up quite a lot of casework and we’re getting Labour councillors onto it with a rapid response team. All casework will be both taken up and successfully completed. This micro-level campaigning even saw us launch, at 48 hours notice, a survey and campaign about a local off-license’s opening hours – from doorstep to design to letter box delivery – forcing it to be reviewed again by the council. Another campaign I may be taking up with a certain local MP is hitting back at bandit car clampers, who make a racket out of some very dodgy practices. Watch this space. Fighting it out street by street and showing local people we’re genuinely on their side will make all the difference come next summer.

Earlier in the week, I came across a great example of a community campaign led by Labour councillors. It took Dagenham residents to Downing Street to Stand Up for Local Housing. The Labour council here wants to break free from the current housing subsidy system which costs the people of Barking and Dagenham more than £20 million every year – money which could otherwise have been spent on building new council houses. A huge group of residents, young and old alike, joined by the MP and Tenants Association activists to take that message and a petition of thousands direct to the heart of Government.

Getting out on the doorsteps to take up residents’ concerns and stand up for Labour’s positive local record – including some of the most improved schools in the area, like the school I’m a governor at, Warren Comprehensive, which has seen a record jump in GCSE 5 A-C grades over the last two years and the Building Schools for the Future investment without an academy in sight – always leaves me feeling that there is far more support for positive social democratic action and policies than many would have you believe.