Yesterday, a big victory was won against pay day lenders

With attention focused on the formation of the Prime Minister’s election war Cabinet, it nearly went under the radar that the Labour movement won yesterday.

After the campaign stretching back 3 years, #Sharkstoppers’ historic victory to ensure there is a cap on the cost of credit came to fruition in the form of the Financial Conduct Authority’s announcement of what that cap would look like.

A 0.8% daily interest rate cap. Maximum penalties of £15. Rollover loans limited to two. And, perhaps most significantly, a rule ensuring nobody will ever pay back more than double what they have borrowed.

The Movement for Change Sharkstoppers campaign working with trade unions, the co-operative movement and community groups brought together people who have been trapped in cycles of debt with pay day lenders. They have fought in their localities to curb the spread of high interest pay day lenders whilst bolstering other forms of fair finance. The power of those local campaigns was propelled into a national campaign that, at last year’s Labour Party Conference, won a public commitment from Rachel Reeves that a Labour government would cap the cost of credit in front of over 300 people at a Movement for Change action.

As it happened, this combination of an organised ground force in all four nations of the United Kingdom, Labour movement organisations like trade unions, and Labour parliamentarians in the Lords and Commons, forced the current government’s hand. We didn’t even have to wait for a 2015 Labour victory.

We are out of power, but we didn’t need control of the levers of the state to win this one; the Labour movement was powerful enough.

The cap is far from perfect, as Carl Packman has explained. And we still need to keep the pressure on the FCA. If this rate doesn’t work, they need to ensure they revise it. They also need to curb the advertising of these companies, banning them before the watershed and keeping them away from children.

But when the new rules come into play in January, people’s lives will undoubtedly change.

Movement for Change activists who have built and lead the campaign have experience of needing to pay back 7 or 8 times as much as they first borrowed, while rollover loans kept compounding their debt. The burden that these predatory companies created became inescapable, with every life decision made through the prism of expecting the next phone call or knock at the door from a collector. Every notice of a new penalty or a newly-hiked repayment amount made life that much harder for people under-or-unemployed, still reeling at the effects of a financial crash that was not their doing, but has kept their wages down while the cost of living grew ever greater.

While the Government trumpeted an economic recovery, people listened on puzzled. It wasn’t being felt in the pockets of the most vulnerable, but in the offshore bank accounts of the companies making their lives a misery.

That those companies’ capabilities to exploit the poorest will be severely curbed is life-changing for many people.

And the way it has come about should not be ignored.

This was a victory for community organising projects across the country, merged into a national campaign alongside Labour elected representatives. It was the Labour movement in its truest form, with issues being identified by listening to people in their communities, and fought through organised action. From the people, to parliament. This was an expression of democracy from the most powerful and successful democratic institution Britain has known. To the working week, maternity and paternity rights, the NHS and the minimum wage, add the cap on the cost of credit to the list of transformational Labour movement victories.

Labour has shown it is developing into a new era of politics. Centralised delivery can no longer be the only way we engage the country in what Labour, and politics, means. Community organising puts our politics back in the hands of the people.

Those who have fought for this victory know they are now just a few months away from a policy that they have a stake in. A change that will make their lives better and that they have ownership of. That is the future of Labour politics.