In my first Progress strategy board article I attempted to set out some of the core democratic challenges that I think underpin Britain’s political health and how organisations like Progress can contribute to a radical improvement in the quality of the debate. In this piece I will try and link the events of the Arab Spring, something that I have been following closely professionally, with lessons for British politics that I think Progress would be ideally suited to further explore.

One of the key lessons from the Arab Spring to date is its rejection of top-down authoritarian politics achieved via networked and mass responses organised from below. The revolutions’ removal of established leaders – Ben Ali, Gaddafi, Mubarak– was always more about what the populations of these countries didn’t want rather than a clear and shared articulation of what they did. The subsequent counter-revolution by the military and uncertainties surrounding the newly empowered Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, for example, are evidence of the partial and incomplete, yet nevertheless historic, events to date.

Campaigning with energy and purpose around clear-sighted objectives, however ambitious, has reaped massive rewards and given genuine hope to millions of people who lived under the yoke of moribund dictators for decades. But how does this correspond at all to the politics of the UK?

From a local perspective here in Brent it can be summed up in three words: Kensal Rise library.

Often when I meet other councillors from elsewhere in the country, or attend Progress events, speak with MPs or other Labour figures they will immediately associate Brent with the controversial closure of Kensal Rise library. My focus in this article is not on the decision to close the library itself but rather on the amazing campaign to save it that sprang up spontaneously afterwards.

This campaign, from a standing start, has organised itself into a protest movement that has not only been able to take Brent to the highest court in the land to fight its case, but also has attracted global media coverage and managed in September to lodge a proposal to the Oxford college that owns the building for the community to run it themselves, complete with over £70,000 worth of pledges. The movement used an effective combination of local networking, traditional and social media combined with celebrity support. It was a clear campaign, energised and imaginatively focused.

Such clarity of purpose and creativity of manoeuvre can often seem in contrast with a local authority, burdened as it is by a massive range of statutory laws around the huge number of services they provide. Once legal obligations are accounted for, the unprecedented cuts by the coalition to local government finance (28 per cent in Brent) leave far less room for innovative and bold decision-making. What’s more, the most vulnerable parts of society, the families decimated by changes to their housing and council tax benefits, find it far more difficult to articulate and organise large-scale opposition to their plight.

One of the legacies of both the Arab Spring, the hopefully successful bid from local campaigners to run Kensal Rise library and even the Occupy London movement, is that Labour should look to place higher priority on articulating clearly expressed campaigns that can inspire people to action. Progress already has an excellent track record in this respect and can continue to use events and its magazine to amplify its campaigns. Critically, however, from a councillor perspective holistic campaigns have to be joined up to a national policy that looks to genuinely empower local authorities in future, rather than to devolve responsibilities with far fewer resources in the mode of the current government.

Even in opposition there are examples of how this kind of joined-up thinking can practically work.

Mathew Lawrence of Movement for Change has been working to tackle the spread of legal loan sharking in Hampstead and Kilburn CLP and to promote alternative forms of affordable credit in the area. He wrote to me explaining that recent figures from the Office of Fair Trading show the problem: there are six million people financially excluded or underbanked in the country; three million users this year alone of payday loan companies that charge as high as 36,000 per cent APR; 11 per cent of all single parents now regularly using them to cover monthly costs; 33 per cent of loans now being taken out to pay for food or heating. The list goes on. Mathew focused on the fact that you don’t need statistics to tell the story – a walk down the local Kilburn High Road shows the problem.

The campaign has the excellent support of Stella Creasy MP, and is sparking action in Westminster and locally across London, where boroughs such as Camden and Brent are looking to use new powers within the Localism Act to help curtail the activities of such legal loan shops. Prior to her election in 2010, Stella worked as head of campaigns at the Scout Association, and it would appear she has taken her campaigning skills along with her to parliament.

A huge range of protest groups, single-issue campaigns and charities have harnessed the potent combination of technology to achieve targeted change. Organisations such as 38 Degrees and Avaaz continue to act as powerful change makers, advertising themselves as global web movements bringing people-powered politics to decision-making everywhere. As a member of the Progress strategy board I would urge a full audit and expansion of the party’s campaign tools arguing for a networked approach that builds on Labour’s strengths on the doorstep, the lessons of the global Arab Spring and the very local story of Kensal Rise library.

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James Denselow is a candidate in the councillors’ section in the Progress strategy board elections 2012. You can find out more about all the  candidates at the dedicated Progress strategy board election microsite