Studs Terkel, the legendary Chicago journalist, was one of the world’s great interviewers. He specialised in oral history, capturing not just the voices and experiences of ordinary people but the eloquence of their speech and, often, the dignity and beauty of their lives.

Every one of his books is worth reading, but late in his life he produced the magnificent ‘Hope Dies Last.’ For Studs was not just a journalist, he was a lifelong progressive activist. He never stopped believing, he never stopped fighting but above all he never stopped hoping.

I’ve been thinking a lot about hope recently and I’ve concluded that the great disjunction in Britain is not between the people and politicians but between politics and real life.

Think again of the Norman Kirk quote – I know I’ve used it before, but great ideas are not exhausted in one reading. He said people want ‘someone to love, somewhere to live,  somewhere to work and something to hope for.’

Points which were systematically ignored in the autumn statement this week. Just go through them. We have a noisy debate in the UK about housing, but people don’t want housing – they want a home. That’s something completely different. We touch on it, almost accidentally, from time to time. Margaret Thatcher gave people the right to own their own home. John Prescott gave tenants new kitchens and bathrooms. Ed Miliband wants longer leases so kids can stay in the same primary school. Little things with human scale and human impact. But in politics it’s all about the numbers – the number of units or hectares or millions – and we don’t just lose the human, we lose the public too.

Or take love. What’s the government policy on love? Ask that question and you’ll be laughed at. We’re embarrassed about emotions so we reify them. I’ve got a friend whose sister still lives near their mum and dad. The parents are getting old, and a bit frail. So she pops in to see them. Helps with shopping. Sorts out problems. Ask her what she’s doing and she wouldn’t know what the question meant. Tell her she’s a carer and you have a package of support for her and she’ll exasperatedly say ‘I’m her daughter, what do you expect me to do?’ The same is true of being a mum or a dad. Political parties have agonised discussions about their ‘offer’ on ‘aspiration’. What do they mean? Ever heard parents say they are aspirational for their kids? Nope, me either. But they ferry them to football training, get them music lessons, read to them and love and nurture them in so many ways. ‘See’, says the politician, ‘you’re being aspirational’. ‘No’, says the parent, ‘I’m being a good dad/mum. What would you do?’

I remember one Monday morning when Tony Blair was very late for his weekly meeting with the top of the office. We exhausted football, then gossip and finally jokes. Then we started talking about what friends and family were moaning about – and it wasn’t anything that was on our agenda, instead it was food prices. Of course, most of us rarely shopped so we didn’t know. And this isn’t some mad rant about why politicians should know the price of a loaf of bread – I despise that McCarthyism – it’s more that I am interested in why some problems become ‘real’ and have to be ‘addressed’ while others are never tabled. That is, until they erupt – as the fuel duty protests did in 2000.

Partly it is because – paradoxically – our politicians have never been so accessible. Multi-channel and multi-platform. Able to take your issue and broadcast it for you. Tweeting, Facebooking, blogging, emailing, even writing to councillors on your behalf. Never have members of parliament been so busy and yet so pointless. Got a complaint? They are a useful forwarding service. Got a problem? They will solve it for you. And for the next person like you. And the next one. They have become the leopards in Kafka’s parable: ‘Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.’ Casework, inevitably, tackles the symptom, not the cause. The diligent MP becomes incorporated into a failing system – remediation or compensation is never offered until the portcullis-embossed letter lands. This is the consequence of the end of ideology. Politics ends not with a bang, but with Twitter.

Yet it is clearly systemic problems that drive real discontent. It has rightly been observed that the people who lean to support the United Kingdom Independence party are those who feel ‘left behind’. Beached by change – social, demographic, industrial. Is that their fault? Steel towns, coal villages, coastal resorts – they could all be being described in the lines of Robert Frost:

And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope.

Their feelings are fundamentally neither anger nor despair, they are dislocation. And why not? Remember what they know we’ve lost. They remember a time when if you didn’t think you were getting fair treatment at work you could walk out of a job in the morning and have a new one at lunchtime, or, as one Greenwich councillor told it to me, you’d leave a workshop and walk up the river until you found one that suited you. Houses were being built all around you – and you could afford to buy or rent them. That was the 1960s. And the art, music, architecture, films and fashion – the much-vaunted 21st century creative industries – were pretty good too. Society changed quickly too – in censorship, sexuality, lifestyles, tolerance and equality. It has taken 40 long years to beat out of us the knowledge that we can live like that – and live well.

The silent protest of those who want better because they know better has become a vocal one – they have a vehicle. Yet the political commonsense is that these voters are driven by, defined by, nostalgia. What’s wrong with that? Nostalgia is a form of dreaming; dreaming is a form of hoping. Maybe, just maybe, they spook us – the political classes – because they make a bigger claim on politics than we believe it can bear. They believe it can make a difference. We just pretend it can. Who’s really out of touch?

There’s a marvellous moment in the documentary ‘Harlan County USA’ about the 1973 strike for union recognition when one woman – a veteran of the 1930s disputes – says ‘If I got shot they can’t shoot the union out of me.’ The strike was lost. The unions in the United States, like elsewhere, are in retreat and in decline. But what is your response to her words – let alone when you see her in the film? As Mick McGahey said, anger is not enough, for if it were our forefathers would have won all the victories. Don’t mourn, organise. As an American community organiser once told me – you can’t make community leadership, you have to find it in practice. It’s true, and I reckon that there around 100 local leaders in every local authority ward in the country – they just don’t know it. They run toy libraries, one o’clock clubs, after-school clubs and breakfast clubs. They are on TAs and RAs and governing bodies of schools. They run Neighbourhood Watch and Friends of Parks. They are like Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain who was shocked to discover that he has ‘been speaking prose all my life, and didn’t even know it!’

Politics starts with solidarity and that begins with standing alongside others. That’s why Movement for Change is so inspiring. They organise locally, address specific issues and always bridge different sides to find a working solution. They’re part of a worldwide movement of progressives making practical change. Working Families, organised in six US states, and so important as a progressive party in New York that they can determine the Democrat nomination. Sydney Citizens that brings together membership organisations – from the mighty Australian Workers’ Union to the equally mighty Salvos – to achieve change.

This is the thing. We have lost the ability to hope but have the knowledge of how to achieve change. When Labour led England’s city renaissance there were four things we had to invest in: physical capital – housing, roads, city centres, public buildings; environmental capital – making places clean, green and safe; human capital – giving people the skills and education they need to get on; and social capital – supporting and refreshing the web of relationships that we make and which sustain us. As Ronald Reagan used to say, it’s not easy but it is simple.

We know we can do it, because we have done it before. How long did it take the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers to unionise gas works after Will Thorne and Ben Tillett founded the union? Decades. Why did they not give up? Because they knew they were right. And they were. How did Margaret Hodge win Barking back from the British National party? Street by street, meeting by meeting. Will it be hard work to build a future for the communities who feel they have been abandoned? Of course it will. But if the labour movement has one lesson it is that we get on by hard work and the greatest strength is in common endeavours. Never have we had so many resources or so much knowledge. Come on comrades, let’s prove Studs right – hope dies last.

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John McTernan is former political secretary at 10 Downing Street and was director of communications for former prime minister of Australia Julia Gillard. He writes The Last Word column on Progress and tweets @johnmcternan

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Photo: Richard Roche