On taking (back) control: lessons from Community Action in 1970s Britain.
| Author | Ellis, David |
| Position | AGAINST NOSTALGIA - Essay |
Community action transformed British politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Its successes suggest how a radically reformed social democracy--more participatory and flexible--might have been crafted out of the troubled Keynesian, corporatist model of the 1970s. We should not be nostalgic for the social democratic settlement of the postwar years; but we can learn from the ways that community activists wanted to transform it.
Community action is now an ordinary feature of the political landscape. With some noteworthy exceptions, it is greeted with warm platitudes by politicians across the spectrum. It was embraced by New Labour as part of its strategy for the Third Sector and, more recently, by David Cameron via the Big Society agenda. It is, therefore, easy to overlook the political excitement generated by the explosion of community action in the 1960s and 1970s. While local neighbourhood activism had antecedents in the early twentieth century, the scale and impact of the grassroots mobilisation after 1960 was unprecedented. By the mid-1970s, there were scores, if not hundreds, of community action groups in every major British city and thousands in the London area. They were campaigning on issues as diverse as council housing, playgrounds, historic buildings, public transport, childcare and adult education. In the bi-monthly publication, Community Action, community activists had a national journal and information exchange platform. (1)
In 1976, Peter Hain, then a Liberal and anti-apartheid activist, waxed lyrical about the energy and scope of community action:
It is impossible to pick up a newspaper these days without reading of people up in arms about some community issue. This may be a planning decision, housing problem, traffic jam-up, children's playspace, environmental destruction, or any other of the countless problems afflicting local communities. The cumulative effect of this eruption of activity has been to signal the emergence of a new style of political action, constituting an alternative to orthodox party politics. The community action movement has challenged local government, swept aside the pontifications of politicians and promised new hope to the poor, the dispossessed and the powerless. (2) Hain's analysis captured the view, shared by a diverse range of scholars, professionals, politicians and activists, that community action was a disruptive political insurgency capable of overhauling politics and the British system of government. (3) This optimism was not misplaced. Community action was a potent force and its challenge to the postwar social democratic settlement and to established modes of governance was as far-reaching as it was innovative. Its accomplishments hinted at how a radically reformed social democracy--more participatory and lithe--might have been crafted out of the (increasingly troubled) Keynesian, corporatist model of the post-war decades. My focus here is to sketch out what the history of community action between the 1960s and 1980s can teach us about the crisis of social democracy in this period and to explain what it reveals about pragmatic alternatives to the social democratic model which were developed in this period.
Community action is a purposefully broad term which encompasses a variety of campaigns, organisations and methods. (4) Few community activists were interested in theorising their activism and community action attracted people from diverse political traditions alongside the formerly apathetic. At its core, community action describes activism practised by highly localised groups campaigning on issues that affected them as residents of a neighbourhood. Community activists were concerned with improving the welfare of their neighbourhood--its services, institutions and social networks. Beyond their short term goals, community action groups sought to extend the influence of local people over the governance of their neighbourhood. Unlike political parties, community action groups did not seek to win elections and, unlike trades unions, their campaigning was not centred on the workplace. While community action had much in common with the new social movements of this period--and many feminists and ecologists participated in community action--community action groups were rooted in a particular locality, rather than a social identity or ideology. In this sense, their activism was similar to the current wave of community organising practiced by groups like Citizens UK, an approach to which we will return later. (5)
The ideas, rhetoric and objectives that constituted community action campaigns can be distilled into a single basic claim. This was the argument that policy making and administration had become too remote from citizens and service users. Community activists welcomed the principle of collective provision in healthcare, housing and education, controls on development and market regulation; but they contended that there were too few opportunities for democratic participation in the political process. This mattered because political parties did not always understand the views of their electorate or even their core supporters--and Labour was often the chief culprit in the urban...
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