Getting organised in Brighton

The Labour movement is off to the seaside at this week for the annual Labour Party Conference, this year held in Brighton. With this in mind, it seemed like a good time to write about what Labour, working with Movement for Change, has been doing in the city with community organising before the cameras and set piece speeches take over.

Before I turned up on the platform of the station in Brighton in April this year, I’d never been to Brighton. Since then, I’ve met people from across the city, and across the three constituencies of Hove, Kemptown, and Pavilion. Every time I met someone, I asked all of them the same question: what makes you angry about your city? And everywhere I went I got the same answer: housing. ‘It’s too expensive’, ‘landlords rip people off’, ‘everything is just getting run down’, ‘rents are too high’, ‘letting agents fees are a scam’. These problems have been causing misery for individuals both personally and financially as they struggle to find a property that you can afford and actually want to live in. It is damaging the character of neighbourhoods as people become more transient as rents go up and letting agents refuse to renew contracts. There is real anger that these things are happening. That is why we’re going to do something about it.

Our organising has begun with a listening campaign across the city to find out what people think the problems are. We’re making it fun, interesting, and innovative by having our very own inflatable sofa and Home Sweet Home ‘Living Room’ where we’re inviting people to come, sit down, tell us their stories and ideas about housing in Brighton, and how it could be improved. We’re collecting these stories through twitter to highlight the problems facing real people. This is drawing people in and building the strength of our campaign, and highlighting the issues to those who aren’t directly affected. The testimonies we are gathering are evidence that action has to be taken. The next step is planning those actions.

Using community organising we can deliver wins right now on the issues we find. No, we can’t solve all of the problems facing us, and yes, we do need a Labour council and a Labour government to make all the changes we want to see happen. But we can achieve things today by building relationships in our communities, bringing people together to build power, mobilising that power, and directing it against targets to achieve specific goals. In Cardiff, organising from the bottom up has led us to taking on landlords using direct action to pressure them to improve their houses. In Walthamstow, we’re putting pressure on letting agents to come clean about their practices and coming up with ideas for a community code of conduct. And we will do the same in Brighton by coming together and working collectively on pragmatic solutions to some of the problems we find. And we can do it all with Labour Party members leading the way.

Organising offers Labour a number of opportunities as a party and a movement, and this is true with our work in Brighton.  Firstly, Home Sweet Home is a demonstration of our Labour values to other people in our city. Through the work that we are doing, people get to see and understand a little more about what we as the Labour movement stand for. Our campaign acknowledges that a basic need of all people is shelter, but also that that shelter should be of a certain standard to allow people to have more than housing, that everyone deserves a home.

Secondly, organising allows us to realise our values with actions that show we have a vision. Sure, we want everyone to have a decent home, but what does that look like? Home Sweet Home is at least a partial answer to that question. And finally, it shows that we are committed to really doing something to realise that vision. With Home Sweet Home we prove that these are not just values that we stand for, these are values that we are fighting for.

Jack Madden is a Community Organiser with Movement for Change