A people-powered insurgency

How we can overcome populism by rebuilding agency and faith in the future

What would it take to put together a positive, people-powered insurgency that comes together to rebuild our faith in a better future — in the process, heading off the threat from radical right political parties?

In part 1 (here), I explored why civil society is struggling to do this. In this post, I want to focus on what we can do about it, looking at three key areas:

1. What we should be trying to achieve;

2. How we can build power; and

3. Who needs to be part of the insurgency (and why they might come on board)

This post is not a complete strategy. These are hard challenges, and I’m not pretending I have all the answers! But I think we can still start to sketch out some broad contours of what it might look like for us to rise to this moment.

1. What should we be trying to achieve?

Saying no to the Reform Party isn’t enough. Because while the party’s leadership is hard right — conspiracist, racist, bigoted, attacking human rights, undermining democratic processes — most of the people who just voted for them (and even some of their newly elected mayors and councillors) are not.

Instead, much of the radical right’s support stems from how many of us feel powerless, like everything’s broken and we can’t do anything about it. Which means it’s not enough just for things to get better. We also need to feel powerful in the process — that we’re the ones making it happen. Voting every 5 years doesn’t scratch this itch. Neither does signing petitions, or writing to MPs, or paying £8 a month to a charity. So what does?

Jon Alexander has it right: we’re at our best when we’re citizens, not consumers. We all love the sense of solidarity and purpose we feel when communities come together, like in the early days of the pandemic when Covid mutual aid groups were sprouting everywhere.

When we come together like this, there’s nothing we can’t do. I love the story of the Lawrence Weston estate in Bristol, where a “very ordinary and somewhat neglected suburb” (their words) built a massive 4.2MW wind turbine — and then used the income to construct affordable homes.

This kind of place-based people power will only become more important as we slide further into the ‘long crisis’. Central government is already punch drunk as it tries to play whack-a-mole on so many fronts. We need a much more distributed approach, with all of us paddling together as we shoot the rapids.

So we need to start with places. What about politics? At one level it’s simple: keep the radical right out, and more fundamentally, build a more hopeful future.

But it’s also where things get complicated. You and I may both dislike authoritarian populism, but still have very different ideas about how the future should look. If the next election is about that disagreement, rather than what we agree on, then Reform could win.

So to start with, we need to identify the issues where potential anti-Reform voters broadly agree, fight to make them the key battleground issues in the next general election — and use them to open up political space for more transformative change.

Economic issues — especially rebuilding public services, but also things like a wealth tax on the richest 1% and going faster on net zero — have lots of potential to bring voters together. (Reform have spotted this too; it’s why they’re busy making pledges on things like the winter fuel payment and the two child benefit cap, even as they try to divide us on climate change.)

Everyone can see that the economy is broken, after all. We’ve had decades of wages stagnating, prices surging, food bank queues lengthening, public services crumbling, child poverty spiking, emissions rising, and inequality exploding — and that’s before the impacts of AI kick in. At some point we have to say: these are not blips. They’re what happens when you run an economy on these lines. Sorting them out is going to take much more fundamental change than Rachel Reeves’s focus on “growth”.

All of this makes fixing a broken economy a brilliant candidate for a big picture agenda that transcends single issues and brings together campaigning organisations from lots of sectors. (We also have a tonne of excellent research on how to tell this story — like this.)

Another big agenda that transcends single issues: global resilience. Look how many of the risks we face are international. Tariffs. Pandemics. Extreme weather. Financial crises. War in Europe. All issues where global cooperation is essential; all issues where authoritarian populism makes us more vulnerable.

And make no mistake, global cooperation is in bad shape. The UN is teetering on the brink of financial collapse. NATO faces an existential crisis. Funding for humanitarian emergencies faces a staggering shortfall following brutal aid cuts by the US, UK and others.

All of which suits leaders like Trump and Farage just fine. But the rest of us have to make the case for collective action to manage global risks. Not just defence spending. Not just aid to fragile states. Not just climate action. Not just pandemic preparedness. All of it.

And what about issues that are highly polarised — especially cultural issues, like immigration, asylum or ‘identity politics’, where we see the largest values divides between ‘Progressive Activists’ and the rest of the country?

These issues are not good election battlegrounds. The more salient they become, the easier it is for Reform to win over socially conservative voters who might otherwise vote for economically progressive policies. (Heaven knows, then, why Keir Starmer thinks it makes sense to go full Enoch Powell, but there we go.)

But that doesn’t mean sweeping these issues under the carpet. Instead, it means that we need to focus on bridging our divides, in a way that not only prevents Reform from weaponising our disagreements to its advantage, but also — more positively — searches for ways forward on issues that really matter.

Which brings us to our second question. How do we build the power to drive deep change — both where we agree, and where we don’t?

2. How do we build power?

Building power in places

Community organising is what makes real change happen. Both in the places where we live, like the amazing work of Grapevine in Coventry, and at bigger scale too. Organising is why slavery and child labour ended. Why we have the vote. Why we have weekends off. Why being gay is no longer a crime. Why sub-postmasters finally got compensation.

But it’s patchy. It’s painfully underfunded, receiving just 0.2 per cent of grants from the UK’s biggest foundations. Many front line organisations are overstretched or frazzled. Too little is being invested in leadership pipelines to train tomorrow’s organisers. Above all, there’s the question of how to make community organising more than the sum of its parts, so that it can shape national outcomes.

More money would be a good start, especially now that funders can channel cash into the Civic Power Fund. But it doesn’t all have to come from foundations: as Act Build Change point out, transformative movements have always been funded primarily through regular membership dues from ordinary people (the way trade unions and faith communities still are) — not just for cashflow, but to put us in control.

Big charities and NGOs could help, too. Many used to have regional offices. Some — like Friends of the Earth, Amnesty, and the Wildlife Trusts — are now building their organising capacity back up. Imagine if large charities went even further by letting go of top-down control and focusing on supporting community organising, not just with money, but also with training and tech.

And while we’re talking about tech: this could be a crucial X factor that helps us to organise nationally without becoming top-heavy. I love the story of how Audrey Tang, a ‘civic hacker’, used open source technology to unlock a self-organised response to Covid in Taiwan, with one of the lowest death rates in the world — and no lockdowns. Imagine that kind of infrastructure applied to organising.

Building power in how we work through our differences

What about issues that are highly polarised — which, as noted earlier, create opportunities for divisive parties like Reform to flourish? I think the key point here is that when we fail to work through our differences, we give away power.

Like when we only talk about narrow single issues, refuse to engage with the trade-offs between them, hand them over to government instead, and then whine when we don’t like the results.

Or when we stay in our tribes of the like-minded on and off line, fail to bridge divides, and leave ourselves out as fresh meat for the populists, culture warriors and tech bros who feed on our disagreements.

But here’s the good news: we have incredible resources to help us work through our differences. Some involve cutting edge tech, like Pol.is, a digital bridge building platform that Audrey Tang has championed (and which is now being used to imagine new futures in Grimsby), or Iswe’s community assembly platform.

Some have been around for a little while, like participatory budgeting, where citizens get to decide on public spending. I experienced this for myself back in 2010, when my council in London asked us how to deal with austerity cuts, through a website that walked us through the trade-offs. (“Want to spend that much on parks? Cool — but FYI, this is what happens to libraries in that scenario.”)

And some are as old as time, like curious conversations where we show respect, listen first, find emotional common ground, and each side comes away with deeper understanding of the other. This is how equal marriage was won. How abortion got legalised in Ireland. How Daryl Davis — a black man — helps white supremacists out of the KKK. How Dave Fleischer and his team in LA talk people out of bigotry using deep canvassing. To return to a point from earlier: this is how we can work through the issues where we don’t yet agree.

Imagine if we started doing all this at scale. If places all over the country started running their own citizens’ assemblies. If bridge-building became central to community organising. If millions of us started having conversations with people who see the world differently — especially if they voted for Reform last time. If we created a mass movement for renewing our democracy. It’s all within reach.

Building power in elections

Elections have extraordinary power to galvanise national organising infrastructures. One of my favourite examples: Barack Obama’s astonishing 2008 campaign, which built a grassroots army out of self-organised groups that brought together nearly a million people.

Not that I’m suggesting we all line up as silent foot soldiers for a particular political party, mind. We should make them work much harder for our votes than that, even as we organise to see off the authoritarian populist right. What might that look like?

While big charities can’t endorse political parties because of Charity Commission rules, as I noted last time, us citizens can do whatever the hell we want. Endorse parties, vote tactically, trade votes, you name it.

Where this gets really subversive is the point at which we start to act collectively. I love the story of the South Devon Primary, where local people ran a series of hustings and a primary election, picked their preferred candidate, and then voted for her en masse (in the process electing their first non-Conservative MP in 100 years).

Political parties hate this kind of thing, because they lose so much control. (The Lib Dems’ chair for England wrote to all candidates to tell them that “under no circumstances are you to take part” in processes like this, threatening them with deselection. Their South Devon candidate ignored him, and won.)

Imagine how much more we could do. If we ran local primaries like South Devon’s all over the country. If we took the results from representative local citizens’ assemblies and demanded local candidates actually represent them. Or if we used tools like Pol.is to come up with national policy platforms, and then demanded that national parties use them as the basis for manifestoes. Imagine the fun we could have.

Building power in moments of shock and crisis

One last thing. We must get better at using moments of crisis, when — for just a few days or weeks — previously unimaginable amounts of political space open up.

Because we keep wasting them. The financial crisis. Brexit. Covid. There’s a quote from the monetarist economist Milton Friedman that I use so often it’s more or less tattooed on my brain:

“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

The hard right are so good at this. But we can be too. Years before the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005, my friend Richard Chartres (then Bishop of London) was part of a group of leaders from all faiths who developed a plan for an immediate vigil in Trafalgar Square if London was ever attacked, where they’d say together that the attack was abhorrent to all of them. They did it. It worked.

We can learn from this. If we — civil society — invest just a little time and energy in gaming out what we might do in different crisis scenarios (economic, environmental, social, political, security, technological), then we’ll be far better prepared to seize and use the political space that opens up in their wake, suddenly but only briefly.

And with apologies for the bum note, that work includes preparing for a Reform government. Obviously we need to do everything we can to prevent it. But it could still happen. If it does, we have to avoid being a rabbit frozen in the headlights as civic space slowly implodes. So let’s fight for the best; but also prepare for the worst.

3. Who needs to be on board and why will they join?

Here’s my starting point: we need to be a larger us. I know, I would say that, but hear me out. We need to be a larger us:

• …as opposed to a them-and-us. Reform thrives on culture wars. Those of us who want something more hopeful need to focus on ending culture wars, not winning them — because trying to win just feeds the division the hard right thrives on.

• …as opposed to just “me”. This is an emergency — an all hands on deck moment. But let’s be real here: everyone’s exhausted. At the end of another frantic day, a lot of us would rather scroll our phones than haul ourselves off to some meeting.

• …as a broad, diverse coalition. We can’t win with just the 8-10% of people who are ‘Progressive Activists’. We need way more of a cross-section of society on board if we’re serious about breakthrough change.

For all these reasons, a vital question for our insurgency is how we make it welcoming, including (especially!) to people who see the world differently to us.

Want to see this done well? Come to my local church. You will be swept up by whoever is on welcome duty, who will proceed to do everything they can think of to make you feel at home. When was the last time someone did that for you in politics?

Want to see who else does this well? Reform. Nigel Farage’s blokey, bitter-swilling bonhomie may be an act, but it works. The message it sends: we’re normal guys. We’re just having a laugh. Come and have a pint with us. (Literally. They’re opening pubs.)

So we have to stop with the purity tests, virtue signalling, and calling out. And let’s be wary too of more subtle ways people can be made to feel excluded. I still remember going to an Extinction Rebellion action with a non-activist friend who leaned over and muttered in my ear, “It’s all a bit Glastonbury x Waitrose, isn’t it?” Savage. But not wholly unfair.

Above all, let’s have a brilliant story about who we are, what we’re for and why you should join us. Not a story of single issues. Not a story of collapse. Not a story of blame. But a story that’s positive, hopeful, and urgent.

Love is a great place to start. It’s universal. It insists on kindness. And although there’s a bright red line between love and fear or hate, this isn’t the kind of dividing line that excludes anyone — instead, it invites people in. (Want to know the name of the most successful pushback ever against authoritarian populism? Radical Love.)

We need to talk about safety, too. Things are scary in the world right now. Lots of us are constantly in and out of amygdala hijack — and the more that happens, the harder our job gets. So we need stories that help us to steady ourselves, make sense of what’s happening, come together with others, and find our way through.

And let’s talk about Donald Trump. One thing Brits agree on (even Reform voters) is that we loathe him. This can be hugely powerful, as Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese just showed in elections in Canada and Australia. Keir Starmer may not be willing to follow suit. But that doesn’t have to stop the rest of us from reminding everyone — several hundred time a day — of who Trump’s BFF is.

All in all: we’ve got our work cut out for us. We have so much to figure out and do between now and the next election — and beyond. But we’re not starting from scratch. We have a tonne of inspiring real world work to build on. Above all, we have each other. I think this is going to be our finest hour.