Rising East Online

Plan views

Model London Citizens

Reverend Angus Ritchie

How one community group shows how local people can get things done, without selling out. What lessons for the Olympic bid?

It is hard to be against ‘community involvement’, ‘partnership’ and ‘empowerment’. So when statutory agencies approach faith communities, trade unions and residents associations inviting them onto Partnership Boards, Community Forums and the like, it can seem like an offer no reasonable person could refuse.

This article will examine one group who do precisely that: London Citizens, the capital’s first broad-based community organisation. (London Citizens began in the east of the city in 1996 as The East London Communities Organisation.) What is significant about London Citizens is that by rejecting many of the partnerships offered by statutory bodies, it achieves a striking level of community involvement and empowerment. I will conclude by looking at the implications of this for relations between community organisations and the state.

London Citizens were engaged in two key campaigns last year. One culminated in May with an Assembly in Methodist Central Hall in Westminster. There, 1,800 Londoners - largely drawn from the poorest boroughs in the east and south of the city - met in Assembly to present their ‘People’s Agenda’ to the leading candidates for Mayor of London. (This included a delegation of 25 from UEL’s student and lecturers’ unions.)

It was by far the best attended of the Mayoralty hustings. Most people in the room were from precisely the groups politicians are concerned to re-engage with the electoral process. Many were from ethnic minorities; many were poor; many were young; many were Muslim. Indeed, a striking number were all four. Delegations were introduced from dozens of institutions - Roman Catholic congregations, mosques, trades unions and student unions - each applauding and cheering the other as they pledged to work together, and hold the winner of the Mayoralty to account.

What set this Assembly apart from other hustings and ‘consultations’ is that the citizens were taking the initiative. The candidates for Mayor did not give speeches about their manifestos - each had to respond to direct and focused questions about the ‘People’s Manifesto’. This was a list of quite specific proposals (on areas such as Living Wage; affordable housing and safer neighbourhoods) which member institutions had raised, and then voted on, over the previous year.

All the leading candidates for Mayor agreed to the key demands. This included a commitment to bring a ‘Living Wage’ of £6.70 per hour to all those employed by the Greater London Authority and its associated institutions - and their subcontractors. Commitments around affordable housing mean London Citizens is now working with City Hall to pioneer community land trusts, giving people a long-term stake in their neighbourhoods.

London Citizens’ success challenges many current orthodoxies. It takes no funding from the government, sits lightly to formal consultative bodies, and is willing to take to the streets and use direct, non-violent action to achieve its ends.

The second key campaign regarded London’s bid for the 2012 Olympics. Again, London Citizens were deeply sceptical of the bid process - experience over several months leading to a suspicion that the aim was to ‘tick the box’ of community support, while key decisions were made elsewhere. East and south Londoners have experience of large-scale projects such as Canary Wharf and the Millennium Dome attracting huge government funding, with all too little local benefit. Consequently, London Citizens evolved a set of ‘People’s Guarantees’ to ensure the aspirations of the 2012 bid were grounded in reality. These were pledges such as a Living Wage for all who worked on the Olympics and their preparations; a local labour clause with training opportunities; and the reservation of the Olympic accommodation for affordable social housing after the Games.

By July 2004, the communities in London Citizens had had no direct answers on the ‘People’s Guarantees’. They were aware that the only stage at which local people had real power was when they could give or withhold support for an Olympic bid. If they did not get pledges now, it would be too late: the proposals would be set in stone, and warm words might come to nothing.

At a consultation event in central London, a team of London Citizens leaders confronted 2012 Bid leader Lord Coe face to face. UEL student Ali Babatunde spoke on behalf of the group - making clear that community support would depend on concrete commitments. In November, the outcome of these negotiations was the public signing of an agreement by Lord Coe, Mayor Livingstone and Gregory Nichols (a sixth-former at St Bonaventure’s, Forest Gate - a Catholic school in membership of London Citizens).

The agreement addressed the key issues of a ‘Living Wage’, affordable housing and local training, which London Citizens had raised. London Citizens’ case had been that the bid’s prospects with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) could only be strengthened by the extent to which it was shaped and owned by local people. London 2012 clearly agrees - for when the IOC visited East London, the group of four community leaders they met were three Borough Council Leaders - and Gregory Nichols.

The lessons of London Citizens’ work are clear: local people can be motivated to unite across diversity in some of the city’s poorest areas, when they have the prospect of real power.

Saul Alinsky - who pioneered this form of organising in the 1930s - was clear that power was only ever transferred after a struggle (Alinsky: 1973). With the best will in the world, those who hold power will never cede it to local people unless they are organised, and are willing to inject tension into the process. Ken Livingstone should know that well: for his own experience of becoming Mayor involved struggle with a government committed on paper to a devolution of power to an elected London leader - but in practice seeking to control the Labour nomination, and hence the likeliest winner.

While London Citizens’ work displays a willingness to confront, it is also proving to be a constructive partner in dialogue. Its work with the Mayoralty on the implementation of the ‘People’s Manifesto’ and the positive engagement with the 2012 Bid during the IOC visit have allayed many of the suspicions that this is simply a form of destructive, angry populism.

There are lessons here for community engagement in the regeneration process - and indeed the government’s enthusiasm for co-opting charities and community groups into the service delivery process. In 1993, the Home Office published a report called Voluntary Action. Its author, Barry Knight argued that there was a tension between the role of these groups in promoting values and vision - and their development as service providers (Knight: 1993):

‘Organisations that follow the state into new contracting arrangements can no longer think of themselves as sufficiently independent to warrant the title “voluntary”. They could call themselves “non-profits”… or part of the “third force” repeatedly described by senior civil servants as forming an important partner with state and private organisations in regeneration arrangements. “True” or “authentic” voluntary bodies will remain independent… This will be the “first force” of voluntary action, in the sense that it is primary, nearer to the root definition of voluntary action… of being undertaken out of free will for a moral purpose - policy driven, rather than resource led.’

The report caused a minor political storm, being publicly attacked by the then prime minister, John Major, opposition parties, leading charities, and some religious leaders. In an article written ten years on, Knight suggested the furore had been because ‘there is no more dangerous animal than a wounded holy cow’ (Knight: 2003).

How would it affect, for example, the ability of a charity to campaign for elders’ rights, if they were also responsible for the delivery of ‘meals on wheels’? Their ability to challenge statutory policy would be compromised by their contract bid - and their role in relation to the recipients of the services would be deeply ambiguous.

The authors of Voluntary Action have reason to feel a certain vindication. Experience shows that the tensions highlighted in the report cannot be evaded in a welter of bromides about ‘partnership’ and ‘empowerment’. There is a need for a statutory sector and not-for-profit service delivery group (Knight’s ‘second’ and ‘third’ forces) but also for an independent ‘first force’ which not only has independence from the statutory sector in terms of funding, but which is able to take the initiative in shaping a neighbourhood’s future.

London Citizens cannot be the only mode of community engagement with the statutory sector. It is appropriate for statutory bodies to want representatives from ‘the community’ within their governance structures. But if community organisations spend too much energy on this latter activity, power and initiative remain far from the grassroots.

What is at issue here is a conception of public space. The statutory sector inevitably perceives this space from above: it needs to be co-ordinated, consulted - and ultimately managed. Community organising perceives this space from below: from the perspective of those on the receiving end of public policy - who struggle to form the relationships and build the power to have any real purchase on the machinery of governance.

It would be fatuous to argue that somehow organising represents an alternative to the statutory sector. Rather, its strategy is to organise the groups that the statutory sector often fails - and maintain a creative tension between the two. ‘Consultative processes’ can fall into the easy assumption that it is the managers of public space who must be the instigators of dialogue. In the case of both the Mayoral elections and the Olympic bid, what is intriguing about London Citizens’ engagement - and what caused the initial institutional resistance - was that it was the grassroots groups wanted to make the running.

Local groups have to make hard decisions about where they deploy their limited energies. These trade-offs need to be made with open eyes - and with serious reflection on how different choices do or do not express an organisation’s core values. Liberation and contextual theologies have challenged communities of faith as to where they are positioned in public space (for example, Gutierrez 1974, Esack 1996). Trade unionism likewise faces questions about its current strategy - and how it relates to its founding values, and the interests of its members.

Public space will always be contested. The challenge is for this process to occur in a manner that is peaceable and constructive - but where peace is not bought by the silencing of the poorest and most marginalized groups. London Citizens offers community groups the opportunity to deploy their energies in a process committed to transferring power and initiative to the grassroots. It is a process that is proving increasingly fruitful.

Revd Angus Ritchie is Director of the Contextual Theology Centre at the Royal Foundation of St Katharine, Limehouse.

References

Alinsky, S., Rules for Radicals (Random House, 1973)

Esack, F., Qu’ran, Liberation and Pluralism (Oneworld, 1996)

Gutierrez, G. A Theology of Liberation (SCM, 1974)

Knight, B, Voluntary Action (Home Office, 1993) and ‘Voluntary Reaction’ in TheGuardian, 1 October 2003.

Return to top

---

© 2004·05