'Community organising is the answer'

Neil Jameson of London Citizens is speaking to the Fabian/Webb centenary conference at LSE in the session on how coalitions for change are built. 'We only speak at living wage campuses - so we can only speak in London here at LSE and at QMW', he said.

Jameson made a passionate and effective pitch for community organising's role in

'We have found nirvana. Community organising is the answer to globalisation. It is the answer to the collapse of politics. The issue for us is the governance of the city. Public-facing is what we do. We are not particularly focused with governments or with policy. But we are obsessed with civil society'.

The election of a community organiser to the White House has increased the interest of the media, but mainly in America, he said. A new move in the UK was the creation of a community organiser's guild.

The pockets of power in society needed to be connected together - and faith communities and institutions would often provide the glue, he said.

The institutions of faith and the institutions of labour are the last surviving remnants of a democratic society, along with the charities and voluntary organisations. But the voluntary organisations are the weakest of the three; the trade unions are the next weakest. Faith is, pragmatically, strong. These are pockets of power, and if you can connect this Church to this Church to this Mosque on the things they agree on, then you can connect those pockets of power'

'What they agree on is never ideology, of course', said Jameson. 'What we have pioneered is the politics of assembly. There is no problem of disengagement from that politics. If you get a full room, then you can make things happen'.

This would, Jameson said, bring back the spirit of progressive politics of the late 19th and early 20th century.

'In the Webbs' time, women had no vote. All they could do was march up and down with banners. It doesn't have to all be about Westminster.

And he argued too that the Webbs had a major impact but depended on the tensions created in society since the 1880s. "The Webbs did the business and seized the moment. We must honour consistently too the labourers, the workers, the priests who created the tension which allowed politics to change", he said.

Townsend: Refocus on inequalities and World Bank

Veteran anti-poverty campaigner Peter Townsend said after looking at domestic banks and their weaknesses, it was time to look at the inextricable links between the domestic and international economies.
There were examples of this every day, he said, just this week there had been the announcement of job cuts in Swindon because of the problems going on with Honda in Japan.
Townsend said the key organisation that he would like to "take a bit of stick to" was the World Bank, and part of his interest has arisen because of work on child poverty around the world.
If you took a look at the GDP of the 53 low income countries in the world it was less than the total of the income of the five biggest international companies, he pointed out in a speech that identified the weaknesses of the World Bank.
The World Bank had not achieved reductions in child poverty across the world, he said at the Fabian conference.
Then he went on to point to an increasingly lack of transparency about the actions of transnational companies, partly because of the dismantling of three UN bodies that used to track this, he argued.
Townsend, a LSE lecturer, also argued for decent labour conditions down the line, among subsidaries of big companies, and public awareness of this.

Change depends on convincing society, not just government

"You achieve enduring change by shifting the public and taking the public with you", says Tim Horton, Fabian Research Director, arguing at the Fabian/Webb Memorial Trust centenary conference at the LSE, that the progressive left has forgotten how it achieved its major successes in the early 20th century.

Tim quoted Beatrice Webb's diary entry of her 1909 encounter with Winston Churchill, a member of the Liberal Cabinet.

He did not altogether like the news of our successful agitation. ‘You should leave the work of converting the country to us, Mrs Webb, you ought to convert the Cabinet’. ‘That would be all right if we wanted merely a change in the law, but we want’, I added, ‘to really change the minds of the people with regard to the facts of destitution, to make the feel the infamy of it and the possibility of avoiding it. That won’t be done by converting the Cabinet, even if we could convert the Cabinet – which I doubt. We will leave that task to a converted country’

"Beatrice Webb’s insight was that successful campaigns need to be public facing. But when we look at political campaigning, despite some excellent examples, far too many progressive campaigning institutions are govermment-facing and argue to government for changes of policy. It now seems that the right understands that better than the left. The way the anti-European movement changed Britain from a more pro-European to a more Eurosceptic country: it wasn’t by targeting the government or the Conservative party, it was by shifting public opinion. That is how the Taxpayers’ Alliance drives anti-taxation sentiment

So we need public facing coalitions. But this is not just a message for campaigners. It is a message for politicians too. Margaret Thatcher knew this: 'The economy is just the means; the aim is to change the soul'.

The counter-example is Bill Clinton. He did good things in too office, but did not make public case to shift the argument. His policies could be easily reversed and were like footprints in the sand”.

The new right was ready for the 1970s crisis: the left is not ready for this one

Hetan Shah - formerly of NEF and Compass - challenged Nick Bosanquet's rejection of universalism.

We need a narrative which is about us all being in this together. That was in the minority report: universalism. The policies that will take us forward are universal policies. Can we have free social care and bring the middle-class into that extension of the welfare state?

But he also wanted a more self-critical left, which was not ready to seize a political opportunity in the way that the New Right had been in the 1970s:

There is no shortage of policy ideas. What there is a shortage of is political will.
The economic crisis is an opportunity to rethink the economic model: we now that the neo-liberal economy doesn’t work. The danger is that there is little sign that we are going to take those steps.

...

The trouble is that there is no sign that we are going to take that step. Part of the fault lies in the progressive community: we have not been organised enough intellectually, and especially politically, to take advantage in the way that the right was at the time of the oil shock of the 1970s.

Both Hetan Shah and Sian Berry thought there were important shifts - particularly around the idea of a 'green new deal' - in the US and in Britain and Europe.

'The welfare state is a tragedy of good intentions'

Too often, think-tanks risk inviting speakers who agree too much with each other and confirm their own and their audience's prejudices. The Fabian/Webb Memorial Trust centenary conference at the LSE is hearing from a panel which has been challenged to think heretically, as the Webbs did in 1909, and come up with a new 'politics of the impossible'.

Among those taking up the challenge is Nick Bosanquet - drawing on his family link to Helen Bosanquet, Beatrice Webb's chief antagonist on the Royal Commission as well as his own shift away from Fabianism (he was a chair of the Society in the 1970s; and co-edited studies on the Labour government's equality record with Peter Townsend, who is sitting next to me on the conference floor) to the low tax politics of the think-tank Reform. Bosanquet has contributed to the new Fabian collection 'From workhouse to welfare', writing in favour of the Majority Report.

He defined his task as to make common cause and get Fabians behind a common agenda for the low tax and small state politics.

And this was his message to us.

We see you as well-meaning and well intentioned people who have been taken for a ride. The welfare state is a tragedy of good intentions.

What has happened is that a number of key interests in society have fallen on the welfare state like famished animals. One is big government. Second, monopoly professions. Thirdly, big contractors. Fourthly, the mass media

The tragedy of the welfare state were dependence effects; inequitable funding (once direct and indirect taxation were taken into account) and intergenerational unfairness.

"The welfare state has created more problems than it solved", he asserted.

Bosanquet argued that an agenda focused on raising personal capability; reducing taxes; and refocusing public services around choices and personal budgets.

But he also argued that "the better off should contribute to the cost of their own services ... the welfare state came across the rails when it became a middle-class entititlement programme, and not a poverty programme".

Many of the other speakers have argued that universalism is essential to build coalitions to tackle poverty and inequality. Bosanquet's argument is that universalism is part of the problem.

"Greens need to understand campaigns on poverty and environment go hand in hand"

"There's not a shortage of policy ideas, there's a shortage of political will," according to Hetah Shah, at the Fighting Poverty event.
During an economic crisis there was an opportuntity to refocus on environmental sustainability and well being, he said.
Shah, chief executive of educational charity DEA, said there was a lot of misunderstanding around poverty and inequality and a major education campaign was needed to address that.
He was concerned that the narratives that were emerging were divisive, not universalist.
If you were looking for an activism model then progressives should look towards the green campaigners. Those on the progressive left had to reach out to those campaigning on green agendas and convince them that campaigns about sustainability and poverty went hand in hand, he said.
The Green Party's Sian Berry said the ideas of a green new deal were now gaining more political hold, as investing in green industries and sustainability were now being discussed in the mainstream as a way of creating more jobs.
"It's great to hear this sort of thing being discussed in America. it's great to hear Gordon Brown talking about it."

Roy Hattersley's Speech to the Centenary Conference

The 'Wordle' above is a visual representation of Roy Hattersley's speech to our Centenary Conference, delivered this morning by the former deputy leader of the Labour Party. It gives greater prominence to words that appeared more frequently in the address and provides a quick impression of the themes and emphasis he tried to get across. You can click on the picture to get a closer view of the language Hattersley used.