It’s Time to Act

By Kevin Peel / @kevpeel

I’m angry.

I’m angry that Labour lost the election.

I’m angry that we’re being blamed for the mess caused by reckless bankers operating in a global economic system.

I’m angry that the Tory-led government is using the financial crisis as a smokescreen to roll out an unprecedented level of cuts that will hit the most vulnerable the hardest.

I’m angry about the impact of these cuts on people I know – my friends and family and people in my community.

Until this week I was angry about all of these things and felt totally helpless and frustrated with my inability as a citizen and member of the Labour Party to act.

What changed this week? I attended a two day training course organised by Movement for Change on community organising and learnt how to channel that anger into action in my neighbourhood to affect change on issues that matter to me and my community.

Movement for Change will be the lasting legacy of the leadership campaign. It was the brainchild of David Miliband, who realised that the route to renewing the Labour Party lies in reconnecting the party with our communities using the principles of community organising.

There’s nothing new or flashy about community organising. The principles of self-organisation and action for the common good which lie behind it were practiced by people like Thomas Clarkson in the anti-slavery movement and our very own Keir Hardie, founder of the Labour Party.

The most important lesson of community organising is that building relationships precedes taking action. This is something I feel we need to rediscover in the Labour Party. We bounce from electoral cycle to electoral cycle, relentlessly pursuing a strategy of identifying and targeting voters using complex marketing systems which box people into categories based on their age, sex, consuming habits, occupations, family situations and wealth and only ever knock on doors and actually speak to people to check whether they’re voting for us.

People haven’t disengaged from politics, politicians and political parties have disengaged from people.

Community organising offers something different. It’s not about replacing traditional campaigning methods but complimenting and reinvigorating them.

As Labour Party activists we need to be in and of the community. We need to identify existing and potential future leaders within the party and in our communities – local religious leaders, the chair of a residents group, a local school, charity or voluntary sector group – and build relationships with these people through 1-2-1 meetings.

The purpose of a 1-2-1 meeting is to get to know each other, find out what makes someone tick and agitate them to get involved and take action. These people can identify other potential leaders within their own groups or congregations and do the same, who can identify others who can do the same and so on and so forth.

This snowball effect means that by identifying, meeting and building relationships with a handful of key figures in your community, you’ve created the seeds of a whole movement of people below who are engaged and passionate about affecting change on issues in their community. I witnessed the real power of this in a meeting in Walthamstow this week. It was the annual assembly of The East London Communities Organisation – 72 organisations from across Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest who come together in common purpose to affect change for the people of East London. What I saw on stage changed my view of how politics is done entirely.

To the backdrop of a hall of 700 people (I had never seen anything like it but the organisers were disappointed as this was apparently their lowest ever turnout), I heard moving testimonials on issues such as low pay, housing and the impact of the Olympics. Ordinary people from organisations which would have little power on their own had the power of the room on their side and used it to negotiate their aims with politicians, business leaders and senior figures from the Olympics organisations.

Those 700 people were in the room because of relationships that have been built, starting with the community organisers leading through to leaders in those organisations and cascading down. They were passionate about these issues and finally, by coming together in a group with other groups from across East London, they felt like they were powerful enough to deliver positive change in their communities.

People left that meeting excited and energised and with a real feeling that they had done something good – when was the last time any of us left a Labour Party meeting feeling that?

Labour needs to embrace this model for organising up and down the country, embedding the party in local communities, identifying leaders, building relationships and taking action.

We’re not going to solve the huge, seemingly insurmountable problems like the global financial crisis, climate change or child poverty, but we can break these problems down into issues on which we can take local action and deliver change in our communities.

The Movement for Change was started by David and to him we should be grateful. But in order for it to continue it cannot be seen as belonging to any one figure. It must be embraced by and working with the whole of the Labour Party to rebuild the fabric of our movement and our communities.