gathering

The Political Revolution

The UK's Prospect Magazine published my long read on the Political Revolution of 2016. Includes stories from the frontline of the Trump, Brexit and Sanders revolutions (plus a sprinkling of historical perspective and a dash of status-quo-baiting). If you read just one thing I've written, make it this.

Taster below: 

Last year was Year One of the west’s political revolution—our 1989... After the Berlin Wall came down, western cosmopolitans and technocrats raced to claim victory. Yet beneath the euphoria of the New World Order, our own contradictions were festering—stagnant wages, gaping inequality and a feeling that most people had no real control over their lives. Another quarter of a century passed before the other shoe finally dropped. Only in 2016 did citizens in the west finally become agents of revolutionary change—for better or for worse.

The rules of politics have been upended, in no small part, by new communication technologies. Liberals who resent the Brexit vote and the election of President Donald Trump point the finger at social media, seeing in it an echo chamber that entrenched false ideas. I understand their growing alarm about how costly and sophisticated data analytics enable some plutocrats to buy influence from the shadows. But I am resolute that technology’s power to connect citizens, transform access to information and move them to action will ultimately prove to be an instrument of enlightenment and positive change...

Much as I wish this moment had arrived differently, I saw it coming long before the last 18 months, during which I’ve spent time behind the scenes with winning insurgent campaigns from Brexit to the US and beyond. After dedicating the first years of this century to work around Middle East peace, democracy and Europe’s doomed Constitutional Convention, I came to see that our whole way of doing politics was broken. A growing band of us started harnessing technology to reconnect people with power. I had the privilege to work on campaigns engaging tens of millions of people around the world. I helped to build the global civic activism online network Avaaz, co-founded the British campaigning community 38 Degrees and led the global growth of Change.org...

Increasingly, the new networks of politics are moving money as well as hearts and minds. My main work today is as co-founder of Crowdpac—the open platform that helps citizens to crowdfund campaigns that rival the power of big donors and their Political Action Committees. I am from the left, but another Crowdpac co-founder is Steve Hilton. We disagree on much, but share the belief that our democracies must be overhauled...

In the last year or two, for all their differences, Trump, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and the Brexiteers each achieved the apparently impossible. All of them were carried to unexpected heights by new movements, which harnessed technology to unleash pent-up reservoirs of energy—even if their leaders did not fully understand them. These insurgents are not a flash in the pan. Trump and Brexit are shredding the fabric of the western order... It has never been more urgent to grasp how and why the “outsiders” are winning.

Read the whole thing here...

Populist lessons for Labour

This piece was published in the Fabian Review in September 2016

Social democratic parties are crumbling all across Europe. Insurgent political forces are on the rise, from left to right. The US establishment was shaken to its foundations by the populist campaigns of Trump and Sanders, and new movements have also been making waves in southern democracies like India.

Knee-jerk elitists dismiss all populism out of hand, but this is short-sighted folly. Progressive giants like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Bobby Kennedy and Nye Bevan were passionate populists. Today’s economic and social insecurities demand a practical radicalism equal to their example. The frontlines of twenty-first century politics will be increasingly defined by competing populisms: even Theresa May’s Tories are getting in on the act.

European politics is being transformed by these forces. In austerity-ravaged southern Europe, the left have made the most progress, from Greece to Portugal and Spain’s Podemos. In central and northern Europe the right are ahead – governing in Poland, in pole position for the Austrian presidential re-run as well as in the Netherlands, and flourishing in both France and Germany.

Here in Britain, lightning has struck three times in the last two years. The Corbynite movement, the SNP takeover in Scotland and the Brexit insurgency each tapped into different social forces; but all shared anti-establishment DNA, familiar from my own experience of networked campaigning.

The global hollowing-out of Third Way and social democratic forces was decades in the making. Undertows came from the fragmentation of employment and social identity, growing inequality, and declining trust and deference. Political programmes suffered from timidity or triangulation. Campaigning and organizing decayed. Scandals tainted reputations, and leadership became increasingly technocratic and out of touch.

The financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent stagnation shook the foundations of the Western order. It undermined status quo politics, sowed sparks of anger and dissent, and incubated a new generation of movements. These insurgencies are now coming centre-stage.

The campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders illuminate similarities and differences. Both set themselves up as outsiders, tilted at a corrupt politics and a rigged economy, and claimed to be more authentic and trustworthy than their primary opponents.

Trump dominated the national conversation and decimated his primary opponents through aggressive, personalised media campaigning. By contrast, earlier this year I went on the road with the Sanders campaign to see them building a grassroots movement of millions, who powered his campaign with a flood of small donations, phone calls and doorstep conversations. The new right are often more ruthless at media cut-through, while the new left dominate movement-building.

Sanders and Trump also illuminate the continuing importance of leadership. Trump’s appeal to his party base has not translated into a winning general election strategy. Bernie’s strength was partly down to public approval ratings which far outstripped Trump or Clinton, in particular among independent swing voters; but his weakness among black Democrats proved his undoing. Yet while Sanders lost, he has radicalised Clinton’s economic agenda and changed the Democrats for a generation.

The most effective of the new political movements weave together grassroots organizing with broadly appealing leaders and professional media campaigning. Italy’s Five Star Movement is an impressive, if troubling, example. It has cultivated new political leaders and embraced direct democracy, recently won the mayorships of Rome and Turin, and is neck and neck with centre-left Prime Minister Renzi’s Democrats. Its values and its centralised management remain murky. Many around UKIP talk of copying the Five Star playbook to target Labour’s heartlands.

Popular competition will clearly be fierce in the coming years: the left has no monopoly on new politics. Beyond this leadership election outcome, Labour’s scattered factions must find a path to combine movement organizing with effectiveness and broad appeal.

The Corbynites stepped up their game during the campaign and proved effective at mobilising their base, including through crowdfunding on Crowdpac. But neither they nor their opponents have yet produced an electoral offering strong enough to beat May’s Conservatives.

How can Labour build a pluralistic winning coalition – in particular in England – and reach people who have voted in the past for Brexit, for the Tories or for UKIP? In the new politics, credible leadership, effectiveness in communications and campaigning, and a well-tuned strategy remain essential. No matter how many passionate activists you have, they need a compelling offer to put to voters.

While the Smith campaign embraced economic populism, it failed to mobilise a mass campaign or break the Westminster mould. It is past time for leaders right across Labour to begin practicing the new politics. They can engage with members and supporters or build bridges with Momentum, but they must also build other movements and channels to engage the diverse coalition needed to win.

Nationally and locally, Labour needs to renew its leadership and turn outward to the country. The opportunity was missed to involve millions more in this leadership contest. In future the doors should be flung open. More parliamentary selections also seem likely in the coming years: but in place of retro reselections, the party could experiment with more open primary contests to involve voters at large. The new politics needs to turn toward the future and the public, starting now.

 

Seven steps for Labour to win in England

Originally published by LabourList and the Fabian Society in March 2016, updated in January 2017

Six months before the 2015 general election, some of us identified the question of “how can Labour win in England?” as an existential challenge. MPs like John Denham, Jon Cruddas and Steve Reed, PPCs including Polly Billington and Rowenna Davis, local government leaders, and key Labour organisers were all actively advocating a proactive strategy for Labour in England. We saw Labour being squeezed on all sides – by a ruthlessly pragmatic Conservative party, by a populist UKIP appealing to older voters and the left-behind, by an idealistic Green party enlisting young and progressive voters. Anticipating wipe-out in Scotland, we argued that Labour needed to present a better offer to English voters.

We were ignored – but we were right. Labour won less than 32 per cent of the vote in England, while the Conservatives received 41 per cent and won more than half as many seats. Remarkably, the Tories made more gains in England than Labour did. Labour did best in safer seats with diverse populations, high levels of public sector employment, lower average income and higher-than-average unemployment. But in most of the key marginals, where it needed to surge, it suffered.

As the battleground shifts further against it, the Labour party will never again win a UK parliamentary majority unless it can transform its relationship with English voters. Here is a brief sketch of seven essential steps toward renewal – first written earlier this year in the run-up to the referendum, and updated only slightly to take account of recent events. Our hole has deepened, and the warnings sounded back in March have been painfully validated. But I will repeat them. Forgive me if I am blunt.

First, an English Labour movement must be established, to help renew our identity and how we connect in our communities. I argued previously for an English Labour party. But as this crisis has deepened, so has the risk of internal party machination dragging us down. At its moment of inception, the English Labour movement must be free to build a broad campaigning network, to face outward to the country and to engage the publics it most needs to reach.

English Labour could grow rapidly into a key pillar of the wider Labour movement, perhaps as a 21^st century socialist society. It should demand the right for local candidates and parties to stand under the banner of English Labour, and help develop the ideas, networks, campaigns and organising practices that will become the building blocks of victory. But it need not force itself into the shackles of already-creaking party bureaucracy. Turning outward to our communities and the electorate matters far more.

Second, I sounded the alarm over the European referendum, calling for a distinctive English Labour voice in the campaign, and warning that Labour risked ceding the ground of patriotism and opening itself up to an undertow that could last a generation. I wrote that the cosmopolitan case for Europe was complacent and insufficient.

So it proved. Our English revolt saw every region except for London voting out. The undertow is already fierce – polls show more than half of Labour Leave voters are drifting away. After this shock, many more are now recognising the need to re-ground their values and reconnect with the public. But too much of the response thus far has been reactive or triangulating. English Labour can best respond to the Brexit shock by building a positive, progressive agenda for Britain in the longer run.

Third, English Labour must be a plural movement. It must bring together its increasingly diverse constituencies in a bigger tent, unite them through far-sighted policy, shared values and projects, and lively and constructive discussions, and open itself up to allied movements and forces.

Labour cannot win in England without the suburbs, shires and market towns, as well as the cities. It cannot win if it alienates either Leave or Remain voters. It cannot win without the white working class; urban and cosmopolitan progressives; ethnic minority voters; or the striving middle classes in marginals. None of these constituencies can be taken for granted or ceded. An increasingly diverse coalition demands a far more open, pragmatic and plural way for Labour to manage its conversations and doctrines. Even and especially if it still aspires to majority rule, Labour cannot avoid some form of coalition politics in the 21st century.

Fourth, English Labour must be an open movement. It needs first and foremost to build a deep and authentic conversation with the English people whom it seeks to represent. Labour today is mired in tribal divisions, obsessed with various dying pieties, and failing profoundly to connect with the public. English Labour must turn outward again to understand and reconnect with its fellow-citizens. Strategies like participatory assemblies, online engagement and open primaries will help to renew the party and turn it outward. Only then can it win. Only then will it deserve to win.

Fifth, English Labour must be a networked movement. I know from personal experience how platforms like 38 Degrees and Change.org have been able to tap into and channel the democratic energies of millions more people than have joined the Labour Party, even after recent influxes. I spent time recently with the Bernie Sanders campaign in the US, which is powered by millions of small donors. It has taken networked campaigning to a whole new level, empowering hundreds of thousands of volunteers.

Labour’s failure to embrace these 21st century politics is chronic and shameful. Unless the party wakes up soon, other populist forces will take its place. This is not a matter of bolt-on techniques; it is a matter of fundamental political identity and strategy. Labour needs a swift DNA transplant: an evolutionary leap, rather than a factional tug-of-war. Its best hope is to anchor itself back into our diverse society by renewing its movement pillars, with a new English Labour at the forefront.

Sixth, English Labour must be a populist movement. The desiccated, technocratic language and behaviour of too many in Labour during the last two decades has left them looking like the few, rather than rooted in the many. English Labour must be unashamedly popular and populist – engaging with culture, with identity, with anger and passion. It must start to seriously challenge entrenched elites in the City and Westminster, while occupying and defining the radical centre rather than painting itself solely into a left-wing corner.

Populism need not mean dumbing-down, compromise or appealing to people’s baser instincts. It can be one of the most positive and transformative forces in politics, as we saw in America’s Roosevelt presidencies. Good populism begins with the apparently simple step of taking the people’s feelings and experiences seriously. It does not end there. It draws us into a collective journey, giving us agency so that together we can transform our society, institutions and values for the better.

The seventh and final step is this: English Labour must be a movement of radical common sense. Left-right ideological battles tacitly accept the status quo and turn off a wide swathe of the public. Common sense and radicalism are two of the strongest values and traditions of England, and they have never been so needed. If we harness them together, we can build a new political economy which is on the side of the people, and which deserves their passionate support. We must be fiercely for enterprise and human invention. We must reinvent an entrepreneurial and enabling state, and craft a new settlement for care and social needs.

People everywhere deserve a better life. But we have forgotten how to connect with them, how to serve them, and how to win. This is the challenge of 21st century politics. The stakes have never been higher.

It is increasingly clear that unless we do a better job of rising to this challenge, populist elites will seize power and hold sway – and we will have let them. They are growing stronger by the day, but they are growing into the space that we have left for them. So let’s take back our democracy and our future. Let’s start today.

Working with others to overcome poverty and suffering

Working for Oxfam is humbling and inspiring. And it takes up most of my time. Some things make it through to Twitter. The rest of the iceberg is below water for now!

Community: nostalgia, or project?

Was just re-reading my old article on the history of neighbourhoods in England for the Young Foundation's inaugural Porcupines in Winter collection.

In brief: tradition and institutions matter; openness and collective action matter even more. 

Here are a few highlights --

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Neighbourhoods have a lot to do with the ideal of organic community, but they should never be confused. Neighbourhood means something at once less nostalgic and more practical: living together in a particular place…

When change inevitably struck, Bethnal Green could not shape it, any more than the un-enfranchised English could prevent the eighteenth-century enclosure of the commons. The community was disassembled by slum clearances, people scattered into estates and high-rises without consideration for social ties. Mid-century Bethnal Green was acutely vulnerable. Lacking architectures for common purpose and action, it couldn’t organise to survive.

In this age of ‘BBC Neighbours from Hell’, we may feel we’ve lost the neighbourhood of the past. But we can’t just resurrect it. We have to find new seeds for neighbouring…

We can learn from our history. ‘Natural’ identity is a potent brew, in particular when organic community starts to fragment. By nature it shuts people out. But it is not the only starting point for togetherness in neighbourhoods.

Instead we can begin from the living realities. We can explore neighbourhood’s social patterns, the common threats and opportunities, the spaces where conflicts flare and accommodations are reached. Understanding and building on the common ways a neighbourhood shapes residents’ lives can provide practical grounds for coming together to transform it…

 “Love thy neighbour as thyself” is followed in Leviticus by a less-remembered challenge, “love the stranger as thyself”. Are they so different today?

Revisiting Georg Simmel’s description of the stranger, I am struck by its relevance to contemporary neighbouring. Simmel finds the stranger not outside but within the local group. At once near and far, he is a “potential wanderer: although he has not moved on, he has not quite overcome the freedom of coming and going.”

The vital foundations of neighbourhood in today’s Britain are proximity and commonality. A more open kind of neighbourliness between people who begin as strangers can be hard – in particular should unfamiliar sights, smells and noise assail the senses. But it is starting to look increasingly relevant and viable. It involves recognising that alongside the friction of immediate proximity, we share with our neighbours something absolute and human and something locally common. (Often also something small and surprising: a love of geraniums, a TV soap, high blood pressure.)

When the possibilities of commonness stretch to the horizon, the emerging human way of coping is to identify and affirm a handful of those possibilities. The choice of neighbouring proves both appealing and practical.

About two-thirds of us say we feel a real sense of belonging to our neighbourhood, meaning also that we owe something of ourselves to it. A similar majority say they want to participate in making their locality better.

Community can be built afresh, as this testimony about Telegraph Hill indicates: “I love it here. I had a rootless childhood, and I love the very strong sense of community that the children have. It’s like a village in the centre of London, it has that kind of support system.” (I live there now. It's true.)

Almost forty years ago, researchers described Sparkbrook in Birmingham as a twilight zone. But in Balsall Heath (one of its ethnically diverse neighbourhoods and for long a prostitution hotspot), campaigning, mutual aid and governance have built common norms and institutions over two decades. Through neighbourhood wardens, community gardening, volunteer street-cleaning and reopening the front desk of the local ’nick’, people are starting to take responsibility for their proximity. (I saw it for myself. Extraordinary.)

As we start to explore our interconnectedness, a kind of "individual solidarity" may be emerging - a far side of individualism, with real strengths in comparison with the past. "You asking me what I think of Bethnal Green is like asking a countryman what he thinks of the country... I suppose when you've always lived here you like it," said one Family and Kinship interviewee.

Today we may be less rooted in our neighbourhoods; but like Simmel’s stranger, we are more inclined to query. Residents praised the Walsall neighbourhood offices because they “started people asking questions”.

Rather than organic communities tied together in a ‘small corporate life’, we can aspire toward welcoming neighbourhoods home to a kaleidoscope of individuals and groups, each with the opportunity to come together and shape what they share for the better.

In neighbourhood two exciting possibilities are writ small: peaceful co-existence, and systems of public authority that are genuinely public, meaning swift and effective response to the hopes and interests of society. We find ourselves on the first rung of a long ladder. Recognising what they have in common, neighbourhoods can live together in a neighbourly fashion. Nations live in neighbourhoods too, from border conflicts to cooperating regions.

Ideals of welcoming, mutual aid, respect and shared stewardship all have purchase on the global stage. But we can start by just sorting out the muddy local common.

Read the whole thing.

 

Network movements

Were the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia simply a consequence of the internet and its mysterious powers? Or was New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell right to argue, in a widely read piece, that today's networked activists are trivial and ineffective by comparison with the courageous sit-in organisers of the civil rights movement?

As someone who has spent much of the last decade harnessing the internet to organise networks and movements for change, I find myself taking these questions personally. But they also miss everything that is really interesting about the ferment of social change today.

What is really going on is much richer and more interesting. It has seismic implications for the organising models of NGOs and political parties – and even corporations and governments. It heralds both danger and promise for the future of global justice and human development.

In a time of turbulence, the lessons that a rising global generation of activists draw from recent events – and the movements they build – matter. Let's begin with some basic common sense.

First, social change is made by human beings, not by Silicon Valley. Anyone relying naively on technology is likely to find themselves isolated. The disciplines that matter most are timeless: spotting unmet needs or injustices, working with the social grain, and coming up with an effective, empowering and sustainable response.

On the other hand, by making new things possible, visible or attractive, technology has repeatedly inspired changes in how we organise our societies. It all depends what we do with it. Different things work in different contexts. The challenge is to learn, innovate and adapt, combining the experience of the past with the reality of the present and the promise of the future.

Read the whole thing at The Guardian.

Networks and conversations

It was 2000. The beginning of a new millennium. The last flourish of the dozen-year interval after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

A transatlantic West was telling itself stories about a new world order. The dotcom boom was approaching its bust.

I was 25. Working as a strategist in a government agency, moonlighting with friends in dotcom incubators, playing with the design of online communities and networks. It was four years before the birth of Facebook.

That was when, at the suggestion of a friend, Anthony Barnett came to me with a proposal. “Power and Democracy”. An online magazine called PAD.  

So I started talking to him about networks.

A year later, after what began to seem like an endless round of business plans, pitches and brainstorms, with the words “this will never work” ringing in our ears, we decided to launch openDemocracy anyway.

It was a lesson I will never forget. The best way to show people that the impossible is possible is by doing it.

Read the whole thing at openDemocracy.

The Power of Food - TEDx talk

I gave this talk to the London event in a global MDGs TED series organised with Melinda Gates. It gets a bit personal, but sometimes that's good. 

 

Avaaz clips - millions of citizens taking action together worldwide!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contentious Citizens: the past, present and future of campaigning

There are three possible scenarios for the future of campaigning:

- The undertow of individualising social trends could slowly triumph over civil society organisation, leaving campaigning at best fragmented into marginalised interest groups.

- Existing institutions could be renewed through energy, innovation and collaboration, as has happened with some churches and with the Service Employees International Union over the last two decades in the USA and Canada.

- New civic mediating institutions could emerge and provide fresh roots for sustained campaigning.

In fact, all three scenarios are unfolding in parallel today. Human action through social dynamics will determine their ebb and flow, establishingwhich scenario is most prominent and when, where and how.

The undertow of social individualisation cannot be dismissed. On average across Europe,membership in trade unions and political parties has been dropping steeply while membership in voluntary organisations has also declined. This isparticularly the case for public issue organisations which are likely to engage in campaigning. Levels of religious affiliation are also declining overall in Europe, despite countertrends such as the rise of Islam.

There is evidence that the rise in campaigning is due disproportionately to the activities of the middle classes, and the organisational capacity of a socially excluded and disenchanted underclass may actually have been declining. Sentiments of global solidarity and local community provide only a weak countervailing force.

Although we have seen a boom in campaigning, its most prevalent practices from the late twentieth century to the present day have been celebrity-endorsed or media driven campaigning, professional efforts by organisations, and occasional massive and spectacular mobilisations of discontent. The overall effect may be extremely dangerous.

If social campaigning fades and fragments, it can risk degenerating into conflict and interest group politics, making it more easily dismissed or marginalised by centres of power in states and corporations, in turn breeding widespread dissatisfaction and hindering social progress. State and market institutions suffer too when their credibility and responsiveness are not renewed through social challenge and debate.

Civil society challenges the very power of the state by calling for the reallocation and re-distribution of resources (such as debt relief), or challenging attitudes and“received wisdoms”(for example wider social movements suchas feminism). The success of these campaigns will often find expression in legislative changes, even though a series of checks and balances exist in most democratic systems precisely to defend the state from such challenges and to uphold parliamentary democracy. As a result, tensions between the state and such movements have always arisen.

Furthermore, as the historical narrative shows, these tensions will always occur – mainly because the campaigning work of civil society is never done, due in part to the fact that democratic institutions will never be fully responsive to people’s needs.In short, the limitations of state democracy explain why we will always need the creative energies that are found at society’s political edge.The innovations described in this report in consensus-building, coalitions and network campaigning are of considerable interest, not only because they can accelerate the gathering and exercise of popular will on key issues of social concern, but also because they can help to consolidate it through lasting civic infrastructure.

Civil society organisations pioneered the consumerist model of campaigning. They may also play a crucial role in developing and implementing campaigns that centre more effectively on the needs and priorities of citizens and communities. Like other organisations, they will need to consider how to evolve to take advantage of these opportunities. Unless they do, their social position is far from assured.

Read Contentious Citizens, the full-length report for the Young Foundation and the Carnegie Trust.