We can’t leave it up to Ed, we’ve all got a job to do to fix politics

I read with delight on LabourList yesterday that Ed Miliband is planning to tour the country and try to fix politics.

As admirable a task as this is, we can’t leave it to our leader alone to get out there and restore the reputation of politicians and politics.

In my own ward of Manchester city centre we’ve been working on this for some time. When the fantastic Lucy Powell was selected earlier this year as our candidate for the Parliamentary by-election we decided this was our opportunity to try a different type of campaign.

Manchester city centre is a difficult ward to work in the traditional sense. There is a huge residential population but much of it is transitional and all of it is in private apartment blocks, making strolling up to the door and knocking to have a chat somewhat difficult. Voter turnout is extremely low and apathy reigns supreme.

However my ward colleague Joan Davies and I have built up a contact list of several hundred residents through our work since I was elected as the ward’s first Labour councillor in May 2011. Wanting to move away from the transactional way we usually do politics – people contact us with a problem, we go away and fix it (well, we try…) and go back with the results – we wanted to work with residents on ways we could help them build networks and power and achieve change for themselves, with our support. My hope was that in the process we could start to change the way people view politicians and the political process.

With help from Mike Kane at Movement for Change and US community organiser Arnie Graf we organised a series of meetings to bring together residents from across the city centre. Some lived in the same buildings but had never spoken to each other before. All had different backgrounds and different stories to tell but all were united in their desire to improve our community.

We made clear from the outset that although we were organising it as the Labour Party, the events were for all residents – and we certainly had some vocal non-Labour supporters come along at the start and express their scepticism of the whole idea!

Three meetings later more than sixty residents had participated. Residents voted on the two most important issues they wanted to tackle – improving private sector housing in the city centre and campaigning for more green space – and established two resident-led groups to co-ordinate a campaign around each issue. The first of these groups looking at housing met last week with almost forty people turning up to share their stories, discuss campaign ideas and put their views to Hilary Benn in a special listening event as part of Labour’s policy review. The first meeting of the green group due to take place this week has thirty people signed up to attend.

We’re at the beginning of a long journey, but I received an e-mail yesterday from one of the outspoken critics who attended the first meeting which praised the work we’ve done so far and expressed hope for the future.

It’s not just up to Ed. Labour activists, councillors and MPs up and down the country need to start from scratch, campaigning in the community with the community for the community. Maybe this way we can begin to win back the trust of the voters.