Progress: Where did the idea come from to follow the community organising training with London Citizens?

James Purnell: I’ve got to know them over the last few months, firstly through a really interesting academic called Maurice Glasman who works with Neil Jameson and Matthew Bolton at London Citizens – who are both brilliant organisers. I really am in awe of their work.

They do the training a few times a year, and it is training for community leaders rather than organisers. The difference is that organisers are paid, whereas leaders are people who are active in their community: on my course, there were pastors, rabbis, Muslim youth volunteers, a Catholic nun, a student union leader. A good number of religious representatives – community organising doesn’t focus on individuals, it concentrates on organisations, and faith organisations are one of the remaining strong intermediate groups. In a way it’s very constructive from an interfaith perspective and this sharing of viewpoints. We had evangelical Catholics, Baptists, Muslims, Sunni and Shiite, Anglicans, Jews and people of no faith all discussing matters. It has the indirect advantage of bringing people together who wouldn’t meet otherwise, and helping them to find interests that unite them, rather than divide different faiths.

P: What did you expect to learn from the week, and what in the end did you learn?

JP: I expected to understand community organising better and I did! After a week you’re not a trained community organiser but you do get a much greater understanding of the way organisers create coalitions of people in civil society to give people power. This is about remembering that we need civil society, as well as the market and state, but that civil society will only be powerful if it’s organised. So it includes actions such as, for example, in relation to big banks paying a living wage, local government campaigns or for improving the lot of hotel workers who have no status nor even receive the minimum wage. It involves getting people to come together to be powerful, and through devoting a huge amount of time to one to one meetings, and then developing a shared agenda and acting together, it becomes reality.

I wanted to see how you can make empowerment something meaningful on the doorstep, not just something that’s talked about in seminars.

P: What can the Labour party learn from community organising?

JP: Essentially it’s what the Labour party did and fought for 100-150 years ago: people coming together to not be bossed around by the bosses. And I think there’s two mistakes you have to avoid when thinking about community organising. First is that traditional party politics has no role, but second that organising is the only answer. They’re separate things – and sometimes the Labour party will work with these organisations, but sometimes we’ll have different interests. Being grown up about power is also about having the courage to disagree.

P: Saul Alinksy is someone you’ve quoted favourably. He was instrumental in Chicago where Barack Obama was a community organiser. What is it about his approach that you like?

JP: Alinksy has an iron rule in organising: never do for anybody what they can do for themselves. I think this gets to the bottom of some of the debates in the last few years within the Labour party. If you follow that iron rule then you avoid the danger of robbing people of the opportunity to solve their problems. If, on the other hand, you want to do things for people, then, even with the best intentions, you take away their dignity and infantilise people.

I’ve always been interested in giving people control in public services. The argument against this is that sometimes people won’t be able to use them, but community organising shows that that doesn’t have to be true and it also gives means of making sure that’s not true. It’s about respect for the dignity of the individual, not about treating individuals as consumers but encouraging participation in a very bottom-up way.

But community organising also shows that public service reform needs to involve civil society – we need to share governance wider than just the company providing the service.

P: Having announced that you are stepping down from parliament, aren’t you sending a strong signal that being thoughtful, and a politician, is incompatible in today’s politics?

JP: I hope not. For me it’s just a very personal decision. Right now I’m sitting in my office in parliament which is about 50 yards from the first office I worked in four days after finishing my finals. Having been in Westminster 20 years this year, I feel the need to broaden my horizons. I don’t agree with much that Tony Benn said but I do think it’s possible to leave parliament to spend more time doing politics, as he said. I do think it’s possible to get lots done in parliament, but for now I want to do politics outside of Westminster.