Last night I went to a “meeting” of, oh, let’s call it “Citizens Gathering”. After 90 minutes I came away with a very small amount of new information (nothing that I couldn’t have learnt by reading a three minute blog post) and a lot of suspicions confirmed.
I have put the word meeting in scare quotes because we were not encouraged to, um, meet, anyone. Instead after three speeches (the second and third mercifully shorter than the first) the floor was open to… mostly more speeches and exhortations, declarations of faith. As for the question of what we do next – well, demonstrations, obvs. One on Saturday. Another in July. Then the Tories come to Manchester in October. There was some marginal acknowledgement that this was not enough, and that a recent thing had not gone well, but nowt concrete on what is to be done differently.
I could go on for hours, but instead I will quote one of the new Labour MPs, Marsha de Cordova
“I haven’t got the final figures, but turnout on some of our estates, among the more impoverished communities, increased massively. What’s really important is we keep these young people who have been volunteering involved and engaged, and all the CLPs have to be really opening and welcome. But I also want us to look at how we can change the dynamic and do different things to keep them engaged, because local party meetings can be pretty dry.”
It seemed to me that most (all?) of the people there were established activists (I base this on how people spoke, how they described themselves). I didn’t see any nervous/confused looking new people. Which is a relief, to me at least, because it would in my opinion have been an intensely alienating experience.
Basically, we have all the organisations we need. We need different habits of meeting that help new people integrate, that help us find out what each others’ knowledge and skills are, that make the creation of new relationships and ‘weak ties’ easier. Holding specific networking events, or doing it ‘in the pub’ is not adequate.
So, I made some predictions beforehand. I did relatively well (#fishbarrel)
My friend suggested three other criteria
| Prediction | Correct/Incorrect | comments |
| It will be very ‘dramatic with regard to language | Yep | |
| It’s gonna be the system’s fault | Oddly not! | A few mentions of ‘neoliberalism’, maybe one or two of capitalism, but mostly about Theresa May…. |
| “Planning” is only part of the title. Concrete, actionable, and actually game-changing plans will be absent. |
Other points
To be clear, I do not blame the facilitator – she did as good a job as you could expect. It was the format and the rituals of the meeting that were the damage. And that’s ALL our fault . Having one person speak and 26 listen is incredibly inefficient. It encourages people to use everyone else as ego-fodder to meet their emotional needs. But my effort to suggest a relatively minor innovation sank without trace, of course. Oh well.
At one point someone acknowledged that there will be more problems after a possible Corbyn Prime Ministership begin. And he said – totally incorrectly, imo- “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” Nope. We need to be building the structures to hold any future Labour government’s feet to the fire. Has the experience of living under the total Labour dominance of Manchester City Council taught us nothing? Seems not.
The turnout at this thing was mostly plus 40 (or 50). There were about 6 of the 27 there who were under 30 I reckon. Everyone white. Male to female ration 2:1.
marchudson.net 