According to its website, Citizens UK is “the primary broad-based organising movement in Britain and Ireland", enabling "communities to work together for the common good.”
Inspired by Chicago thinker Saul Alinsky, the group has a solid achievement to its name in the form of the Living Wage Campaign, which has to-date pulled over 6,500 families out of working poverty. In the UK over 13 million people live in poverty - around one in five. The campaign calls for every worker in the country to earn enough to provide their family with the essentials of life. An important part of the campaign has been to highlight the fact that it's not simply those on benefits who are poor, but that there are hundreds of thousands of people in paid work languishing in poverty due to low wages. Such a campaign should be applauded by the left, not least for raising awareness of an issue ignored by successive governments in their reluctance to confront powerful employer's organisations.
Having recently had the pleasure of listening to a talk by an enthusiastic member of Citizens UK at City University, I came away feeling both encouraged and uneasy. Encouraged by the stories of people at the bottom of society getting involved in politics - they do care, they just feel alienated from the parliamentary process - but uneasy at what appeared to be yet another attempt at non-confrontational, no-content progressivism. Citizens UK's raison d'être is ostensibly the "common good" of the local community. While rhetorically music to the ears of most people, this style of politics shies away from asking the really difficult questions. Outside of 19th-century religious notions of welfare, nor do they propose any genuine solutions.
There is a well-founded suspicion on the left that behind such rhetoric about consensual politics are the poor being told they should not demand too much in the way of help from the powerful. Unfortunately for the Citizens UK model there are groups in society who's interests are directly and irreconcilably opposed; and it is only through confrontation that such conflicts of interest may be resolved. It is simply not enough to say the wealthy can be persuaded their best interests lie in paying out higher wages or increased taxes - much of the time, they don't.
However good the intentions of Citizens UK may be they also unwittingly accept the proposal of the right that the state has somehow failed the poor, when in reality much of the state's inability to provide adequately for those at the bottom is due to the rich being increasingly permitted to contribute as little as possible in taxes. The state compels poor people to abide by laws protecting the property of the rich, but when the idea of compulsion is evoked to collect the taxes of the wealthy, the trend is increasingly moving towards a form of volunteerism. No mention of this on the Citizens UK website of course. Their approach seems to be to take Alinsky, strip out any radical Marxist content, add religion to the mix and repackage it as an antidote to the ills of the poor - an oxymoron of change at the bottom without threatening the interests of the top.
It comes as little surprise then to find on the Citizens UK website an endorsement of the big society. After all, they fit very nicely within the big society narrative - that of do it yourselves, because we don't care. Rather than challenge this outdated 19th-century dogma, Citizens UK are attempting to work within it. That should not sit comfortably with anybody opposed to the notion of consensual politics and the idea of community empowerment as detached from society as a whole.
THE deaths of two people who were waiting for appeals to be heard against the loss of benefits has prompted calls for a fairer assessment system.
ReplyDeleteThe two claimants, both from West Dunbartonshire, died from the conditions which caused them to claim Incapacity Benefit (IB) while waiting for appeals to be heard against cuts to their benefits.
One was deemed fit for work during a work capability assessment, despite having a deteriorating chronic illness, and lost both incapacity benefit and disability living allowance.
When his support worker appeared at the appeal tribunal she had to report her client could not be there because he was dead. The appeal was upheld and the backpayment will become part of his estate.
The other had a congenital condition which caused difficulty in walking but was assessed capable of work and his incapacity benefit was withdrawn. He was waiting for a date for an appeal tribunal when he died.
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If your disabled at the moment then of course your not even human
I have similar mixed feelings about Citizens UK. As well as the Living Wage campaign, their achievements include the Strangers into Citizens campaign, the Justice for Cleaners campaign, a citizens; inquiry on the Border Agency in Croyden, some really inspiring work with schoolkids in my neighbourhood on stopping street violence, and some interesting campaigns against usury in the East End. Some of this has led to very concrete achievements. At least one university (Queen Mary in East London) has totally changed the way it hires and pays its cleaning staff. Getting Boris Johnson to sign up to the regularisation of undocumented workers, to pay for a pretty decent feasability study that showed it would make economic sense, and to actually to continue to argue for it against party discipline, is another achievement. Arguably, this would not have been possible without the involvement of faith groups and the use of Alinsky methods. The people invovled in Strangers into Citizens included quite vulnerable people who would not normally be touched by the standard left campaigning.
ReplyDeleteThey had a major influence on the Big Society idea, via some of the East London and church-based Twitter Tories and Red Tories who have attempted to act as Cameron's gurus, so it is not simply a question of them jumping on the bandwagon as them helping get the bandwagon started. The Cameron promise of 5000 commnity organisers (now whittled down to 500) and a Big Society Bank are both partly inpsired by them.
I think everyone thought they had the contract to train the Cameronian community organisers tied up, but instead the contract went to the more old-fashioned Development Trust Association. I have read and heard that this represents a backing off within the Conservative Party from Citizens UK's potentially disruptive radicalism, and is likely to mean a bigger emphasis on "social enterprise" rather than Alinsky-ite community organising.
Incident
And that's essentially why you have such a broad range of people singing their praises. I don't wish to overly criticise Citizens UK as I think some of things they do are really very positive. The problem is that when a group attracts such a broad range of sponsors it cannot by default be proposing anything far-reaching, radical or revolutionary - to do so would inevitably make enemies. Any meaningful change will by its very nature involve a conflict of interests. Look at the furore when even a slight increase in the top rate of tax is proposed. Consensual politics can only exist if you persuade certain sections of society to take action in opposition to their real interests - i.e. "consent" to policies which in effect harm one's own interests. Citizens UK are a bit like an attempt to fill a bucket which has a hole in it with water. While important not to let the bucket run completely dry, it's probably better to try and fix the hole itself.
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