People aren’t ‘engaged’ with politics these days: gone are the militant mobs and the grand ideological narratives. Few belong to parties, or unions. People have woken up to ‘spin’ and see it everywhere. The MPs’ expenses scandal has dealt a fatal blow: nothing can be better calculated to produce cynicism than public goods being exploited for private ends.
Yet public cynicism is not the problem; it is the powerlessness of which cynicism is a symptom. Mechanisms no longer exist by which ordinary people can articulate their needs, desires and values. Town halls are used for weddings, not citizen gatherings. People write to their MPs, but MPs outside government are only slightly less powerless than ordinary people. The business of politics – policy wonkery, lobbying and so on – falls to a clutch of professionals, often in the pay of corporates. Voters are left to cast their vote in anger, if they vote at all, every five years. Tinker with reforms of parliament by all means, but the simple fact still stares you down: ordinary citizens are not organised. They have no power. And they know it.
A healthy democracy is not one that consists of the state on the one hand and atomised individuals on the other – a dubious legacy of the French revolution which still shadows much of the British left – but one which allows for the interplay of people’s organisations. These are alliances of institutions to which individuals belong – churches, mosques, unions, schools and fraternal organisations – which pressure politicians, businesses, councils and other power-holders to include them in the decisions which affect people’s lives. The capacity for that pressure is what we mean by ‘power’: the more there is, the healthier our democracy will be.
Community organising – the method behind what we do at London Citizens – addresses that very lack of power. Many on the left admire us for what we achieve: the London living wage (a London-weighted minimum wage), which has put £20m into the pockets of the lowest-paid; or the Strangers into Citizens campaign, which has persuaded the Conservative mayor of London to become the highest-profile advocate of our conditional citizenship programme for long-term undocumented migrants; or, more recently, our call for a cap on usurious interest rates.
But what is less often understood is that these campaigns are the result of ordinary people meeting in assemblies, not elegant policy work by professional lobbyists. They represent a people’s agenda, formulated in meetings and assemblies staged by professional organisers whose salaries are paid by the 130-odd institutions (mostly faith congregations, but also schools and trade union branches) which pay dues to London Citizens. We are independent of political parties, and take no government money. All across America, there are similar citizens’ organisations which are major power players in city and state politics. It was in one of these Alinksy-style organisations – an alliance of Catholic and other churches in Chicago’s south side – that Obama learned the art of politics. And it was by galvanising such organisations, distant from the Washington arena, that Obama renewed American democracy.
Does community organising hold the key to the renewal of British democracy? London Citizens persuaded Boris Johnson to back the living wage and a conditional amnesty because we deployed the power of ordinary people: we filled Methodist Central Hall with 2,500, in turn representing 10-times as many. The leaders of our alliance asked the mayoral candidates to respond to our agenda, a people’s agenda, voted in assemblies across the capital following a six-month listening campaign in which ordinary people were asked what they would like the next mayor of London to do for them, their families and their neighbourhoods.
This month we are doing the same at our member institutions across London, prior to putting our agenda on debt to the mayor, the Lord Mayor and the Treasury at a huge assembly at the Barbican on 25 November – ordinary people, exercising accountable power, demanding that banks no longer fleece them through usury. Here is the antidote to cynicism, and the possibility of democratic renewal.