Community campaigning

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Community campaigning
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The primary threat in 2015

• UKIP
• Politics of division

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What is wrong with UKIP?

• Poisoning the national discourse
• Dividing communities
• At a time when the far right (potentially
  more violent than ever) and the jihadis
  want to exploit and recruit from community
  tensions

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Real issues are lost

• Housing
• NHS
• Education
• Jobs/Low wage economy
• Poverty in our communities
• Environment
• Deficit

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Short term objective

• Keep UKIP out of office and
• thereby reduce their political power by
• Challenging their soft support and
• Turning out the anti-UKIP vote

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Long term objectives?

• Building strong, inclusive communities that
  are resilient to the politics of division
• Establish deep and meaningful alliances
  across traditional barriers

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Young people
Students
Trade unionists
Building a local Progressive alliance
Faith com-munities
environmentalists
Tennants groups
LGBTcommunity
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Key campaign elements

• Voter registration
• 1 million lost from the register
• Disproportionately young
• Least likely to vote UKIP

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Campus call-out
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Souls to the Polls
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Transport Tuesday
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Community and trade union organising

• It is not new
• Role of trades councils
• Traditional relationship between trade
  unions and the Labour party

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The moral authority that London Citizens has
given to the London living wage has been
extraordinary ... this should not be
underestimated we would not have been able to do
what we have done without this leadershipthe
moral authority of London Citizens has been
devastating in its impact. Jack Dromey, former
Unite Deputy General Secretary
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Practical steps

• Know what you are organising for
• Choose your partners strategically
• Hackney Unison and Disability rights network
• Undertake power mapping
• Hackney Gazette and BNP advert

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Practical steps

• Build relationships to last
• Think outside trade union culture.
• Put in at least as much as you take out
• Have some fun

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Use your members
We dont look at our members outside the
workplace. Time and again I have encountered
people through London Citizens who are there
through their church or through their mosque or
through some other organisation, and then they
turn out to be a union member.
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Summary

• Community organising takes time
• It involves building reciprocal relationships
  of trust
• It is about understanding power and leverage
• It provides opportunities to mobilise
  communities and people

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So much of the debate around union organizing
strategy never leaves the realm of jargon and
abstraction, its important to spell out what
organizing the whole worker means. Life was
changing for these people. They were constituting
themselves as a class. They were bargaining with
their bosses, not begging. And they were winning
everywhere. They were fundamentally building
workers power, and it was an experience of class,
race, faith, and personal liberation.
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