Community organising: check direction before use

Freethinking with Rob Marchant

David Miliband, a man for whom I have great admiration and would like to see back in front-line politics sooner rather than later, is a politician with considerable achievements to his name. However, and despite its noble motivations, it is tricky to see how Movement For Change, his scheme to bring Obama-style community organising to the labour movement, is one of them.

As Dan Hodges pointed out some time ago, M4C turned out to be a distraction rather than a unifying focus for his leadership campaign, which even some of his closest supporters felt was one of its less attractive aspects. However, an agreement was later made between him and his brother to make it a central objective for Miliband senior: aside from it being something he felt a passion for, it was also a convenient way to give him an important task which he could do from the back benches without ruffling feathers.

This culminated in the report surfacing a couple of weeks ago in the Guardian that 2,000 community organisers will be trained as part of a program to reach out into Britain’s communities. On the one hand, this is not mentioned in the heads-up summary about Refounding Labour, and is down from the faintly ridiculous figure of 10,000, also predicted by the Guardian back in January. The question: in what direction is this all heading?

To be fair, Labour is not the only party getting in on the act: the government announced a state-sponsored programme for 5,000 community organisers in February as part of the Big Society. Some of the following applies to them, too. But they have (a) considerably more resources at their disposal, (b) a strong desire for a Big Society PR exercise, and (c) one suspects that they have much less to lose than Labour from a negative outcome.

Let’s assume, for a moment, that the Guardian is right. On the one hand, it is excellent news to see that Labour is looking outside its membership to its wider supporter base. That is a vital part of rebuilding the coalition which we need to get elected, as the original Labour Supporters Network idea found. On the other, if we are about to get serious about reaching out, there are some deep concerns about the chosen medium being community organising.

The first is straightforward. Obama himself left community organising, as his biographer Anthony Painter observed at Labour Uncut, because he did not see a future in it as a vehicle for change. Whether it is useful as an end in itself is still to be seen.

The second is related to its US roots. We have a tendency, ever since the seminal New Labour expedition in the mid-1990s, to take everything which the US Democrats do as a lead for what we should do in the UK. Sometimes that has been spot on: the success of the Clintonites in modern media management was replicated ruthlessly here and changed the game. But not always. Viewed close up, there are important things which do not translate so easily. The US political machine swills around with astonishing amounts of money: ours, thankfully, does not. American election campaigning is all about fundraising and TV ads: ours is about billboards, limited free TV and door-knocking. In short, community organising is not necessarily going to be the next big thing here because it was the next big thing there. And it is also important to note that US inner-city politics, already more religious, has historically been split along markedly cultural and ethnic lines; full-on identity politics, which it is certainly debatable whether we would want to emulate in the UK.

The third is the apparent lack of definition. Party organisers have a fairly tightly-defined role. But what is a community organiser, and for what matter, what is a community: is it geographically, ethnically, culturally or religiously based? Who decides who is the leader of that community and therefore the right person to engage with? A disturbing phenomenon of recent years has been the surge in self-appointed “leaders” of ethnic and religious communities, which politicians often accept without question. And these aggregate groups are only a little different. That is, London Citizens may have elected members: that does not mean all Londoners feel represented by them.

Fourth, if the Guardian report is correct, the logistics will be difficult, to say the least. In the run-up to the 2001 election, Labour’s Organiser Academy trained around a hundred new organisers. It worked, but it was a hell of a job on a tight budget. This scheme expects to train twenty times that number before the next election, while maintaining the quality of candidates, the quality of the training and an adequate level of control over how these people, who ultimately will be linked with the Labour Party, interact with their chosen communities. I am sure there will be additional resources ploughed in from other sources such as supportive unions. But all this makes it very difficult for Labour to keep political control over an organisation to which it will be joined at the hip. Politically, any problems with it will immediately reflect badly on the Labour Party. Many people do not realise that the party staff numbers about 100-150 people at this point in the electoral cycle. 2000 community organisers would easily dwarf this, and it’s not exactly clear how accountability back to the party would work. If, that is, there is to be any.

But the fifth reason is possibly the biggest risk. Those of us who lived through the 1980s became so good at spotting entryism that it was largely stopped in its tracks through the 1990s and 2000s. Now consider the following: you recruit a large number of community organisers in a very short space of time, linked to an over-worked, under-resourced, party machine. If someone from a far-left or Islamist group wanted an “in” on the labour movement, where would be the ideal place for them to target?

Sounds a little paranoid, doesn’t it? It isn’t. London Citizens already has Junaid Ahmed, a known Hamas supporter, on its board. Entryism is hardly unknown in East London: ask Jim Fitzpatrick. And frustratingly, clever, decent people like David Miliband and Jamie Purnell (also on the board of LC) seem unperturbed by this. They shouldn’t be. Unless dealt with, people like Ahmed can and will bring down the whole scheme, and Labour’s credibility with it. And it’s not just London Islamists we should worry about, nationally their far-left friends in Respect and Stop the War Coalition are known to pursue entryist tactics.

If this is to be a way of reaching out to communities, at the very least it needs to be thought out in a highly meticulous and controlled way. That does not, on the face of it, appear to be the case.

A runaway, transformational success for the party? Or Labour lovingly nurturing its very own albatross? Some common-sense judgements need to be made on which this is likely to be, and soon.

Rob Marchant is an activist and former Labour party manager who blogs at The Centre Left.