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Get back to our roots

A movement that started in east London could be a model for a community based politics of the future

Neal Lawson
Tuesday November 21, 2006
The Guardian

Some people can afford £500 for a night in a hotel and think they have the right to leave a disgusting mess behind. The people who clean it up can work six days a week and take home less than £200. It's a scene of yawning social division not witnessed in Britain for almost 100 years. There is a moral vacuum in our society and our hearts that allows one person to pay another much less than it costs to live.

The answer is not just to get mad but to get even. The vulnerable and the isolated can fight back, but only if they get organised. This is what the Citizen Organising Foundation (COF) has been doing for the past 10 years. The remarkable way it has operated tells us much about solidarity, democracy and political leadership. Its flickering flame of justice has burnt brightly in east London for a decade, under the East London Communities Organisation (Telco), but now spreads light across the capital and to the nation's second city, Birmingham.

The COF works by bringing religious and community groups, schools, student unions and trade unions together in local alliances. Lately, largely black youngsters have joined this grass-roots revolt against injustice. They start with energy and passion for community matters - usually clean and safe streets - but, as trust and confidence build, so do aspirations. It's a painstaking process of forging confidence among communities now cynical about any political promise.

The building block is the assembly, a large gathering of membership groups that makes a commitment to the next campaign and gives fees to employ organisers. Priorities are determined democratically and mutual ties fostered. You support someone else's cause, knowing it will be your turn next. COF's biggest triumphs have been on pay but it does what its members want on immigration, affordable housing and regeneration. In the Midlands, where many members are Muslims, it has carried out cultural awareness training with the police.

The banks in Canary Wharf have felt the full force of the COF. Sir John Bond, the chair of HSBC, said it was more than his job was worth to "buck the market" to pay cleaners a living wage. But, through its unity and high profile campaign stunts, such as turning up at the banks' AGMs and embarrassing highly paid executives, the COF did what Mrs Thatcher said was impossible - it bucked the market. The power of precedent means that many banks have taken cleaning back inhouse, and seven based at Canary Wharf now pay about £7.50 an hour. Five east London hospitals are also now paying a living wage. Next in the organisers' sights are the hotels. Ken Livingstone has set up a Living Wage Unit, and the same promise to pay people what it costs to live has been made by the Tory leader of Birmingham.

This approach to political change takes the left back to its roots in mutualism and cooperation. Instead of waiting for politicians, the time has come for us to do things for ourselves again. We must become the people we have been waiting for. The COF knows that nothing of value has ever been won without a fight, because nothing of value is ever given away. This is essentially the politics of class and the ability of Davids, Imrans and Lenkas to take on rich and powerful Goliaths by sticking together. The COF knows that what matters are the institutions that allow people to find their collective voice, and so it builds them.

That's the real prize. What's sustained the COF for a decade is not the victories, sweet as they are, but the relationships that have been built up across generational groups, faiths and cultures. People stay not just for instrumental reasons but for the joy of working together. It's the journey, not the arrival, that matters. It is the means and ends of democratic politics in action that count most.

The COF and New Labour were born at the same time but are very different responses to the ideological domination of Thatcherism. The COF prefigures a different world. What if its techniques were linked to the political orientation of a state that wanted to empower such self-help? That government pumped as much energy, commitment and resources into this type of local action as the current one does into choice, contestability and commercialisation. So socialism stops being a demand that the government delivers for us and starts being what it always should have been - something we do together, for ourselves, in our own communities.

· Neal Lawson is chair of Compass

Compassonline.org.uk