A United Society, not a Big Society: How Obama’s past could be Labour’s future

By Sam Bacon

From Barrack Obama to Oliver Letwin (try finding another sentence those two can happily share) the contribution community organisers can make to our politics and our society is steadily being recognised. But exactly what a community organiser does, and how our society, politics and party could be adapted from their experience hasn’t really been discussed properly.

So in this, the first of two articles, I’m going to try to explain why, despite having a great idea at the heart of their ‘Big Society’ vision, the Conservatives have still got it wrong. In my second article, I’ll be looking at what community organising can directly offer our party and our campaigns if we fully embrace its principles.

We started this election campaign as ‘fighters and believers’. If anyone was a fighter – and a believer – it was Saul Alinsky. So having read Hilary Burrage’s article on Wednesday, whilst agreeing with parts of it, I was troubled by her implication that the time for Alinsky-like behaviour is long gone. Personally, I think we need it now more than ever.

Dedicating his life to fighting injustice, Saul Alinsky remains a radical and, at least for some of us, inspiring figure. The difference he made, and continues to make through the generations of organisers he trained, and the methods he taught, transform communities, neighbourhoods and lives in a way that many of our government welfare, health and poverty policies fail to achieve.

Allow me to give an example. Whilst in the USA, I worked for a group called ESOP, a community organising charity in the state of Ohio. Having started as a two person operation in a church basement, they are now a statewide organisation with offices within 60 miles of anywhere in Ohio. They work mostly with people at risk of losing their homes due to repossession. Through their determination and hard work, ESOP have a success rate of 80% in keeping families in their homes and stopping repossession. To put that in perspective, that’s almost double the success rate for any other charity, state or federal housing organisation in the entire US. And in absolute terms, in just two years they’ve helped over 3,550 families keep their homes.

The reason they are different is because they combine housing counselling (helping homeowners to work out a budget and realise what is affordable) with community organising. They now have formal agreements with 15 of America’s largest banks, but they only got this by inspiring and empowering residents at risk to take action and demand a better outcome for themselves and their communities. They are directly descended from the Alinsky model.

So the type of organising Alinsky promoted wasn’t about just delivering change for people, it was about firing them up, and empowering them to fight for the power to fundamentally change their own situations. He didn’t simply lobby politicians to enact change, he ensured people had the rights and the tools to deliver change for themselves.

But of course, this was Chicago, and this was the 1940s. Life was hard, and even now the American welfare system lets people slip through its net and live in conditions even the poorest in Britain can thankfully avoid.

But why are we different? What separates the very poorest of the UK from the poverty of the most vulnerable in the US?

It’s the welfare state. The gift that Labour gave to Britain in the NHS. And it’s the hard work and progressive policies that a Labour government has given to this country for the past 13 years. We can all be very clear on one thing; regardless of it’s failings or problems (of which there have unfortunately been many) without the past 13 years of this Labour government, the very poorest in our society would be much worse off.

So if we have a welfare state that prevents the poorest from hitting ’40s levels of poverty, can Hilary’s point be true that the heart of the Conservative ‘Big Society’, community organising and civic engagement, is unnecessary and dated?

For a moment, just imagine combining the empowerment of Alinsky, the passion, vision and civic engagement that organising our neighbourhoods and communities could bring, with the benefits of a value-driven Labour government. Instead of having to fight for communities, organisers could work with politicians, local and national, to deliver grassroots-driven change.

If our Party’s history has taught us anythingg it is that when people come together they can make a difference; rights can be won and lives improved. So in actual fact the idea behind the ‘big society’ – that we need to reinvigorate our communities, to organize those passionate but non-political people who are desperate for change and a better life for themselves and their families – is a fantastic one. But we should be criticising it for not being radical or far reaching enough, and for lacking the support of the services that would help it truly revolutionise this country. We need a society joining the state and its people to truly move in a new direction. The future is not people or government: it’s both. A United Society, not just a big one.

Getting this right could develop a dynamic Labour Party responsive from the ‘bottom up’, capable of taking the necessary macro-steps the country needs, and investing and believing in the public services that can help direct it, but also better placed to solve the difficult and still entrenched problems our country faces at a community level.

So we should absolutely point out the smokescreen that the Conservatives are trying to deploy with the ‘Big Society’ idea – that is, ‘you do services so we don’t have to’. But with the right amendments, and the right party in government, the idea they’ve used as a decoy could just be the idea that leads a progressive government to a better, fairer and more equal tomorrow.