Debating Political Education - Part 2 - History

 History Is Political Education

As a historian who has been involved in local affairs in Croydon, Lambeth, Merton and Wandsworth and in a variety of national issues over the years, I see community, trade union, co-operative, women’s , Black & Asian histories, history from below, hidden histories, people’s history, as ‘political’ because they all seek to redress the balance of the political way in which the teaching of Britain’s history has downplayed the roles of ordinary people and their organisations and the struggles to influence the political decision making that shapes our daily lives. For me ‘political education’ should be integral within, for example, community organisations.

In the 1990s I organised the workshops at the annual conferences of Community Matters, the national association of community associations, which examined not just issues involved in running them, but also ‘the use of history’ and the relationship with Government policy. In the early 2000s I was a guest tutor on the community work course at Goldsmith College. An important theme was developing an understanding of the local community context and how, why and by who it is shaped. Both sets of activities involved a mix of training and education as discussed by Colin Waugh.

While working at BASSAC 2000-2 my involvement in the discussions on the role of community organisations in neighbourhood renewal and reviewing civic engagement led me to argue that there was a lack of appreciation of the role of community and voluntary organisations of the long tradition of ordinary working people creating organisations to meet particular needs, and engaging in collective activity to influence their lives and lobby for economic, political and social inclusion and justice.

‘Community history is not some abstract concept outside our own lives. Activists in political and community campaigns help make it. The personal is not just the political but the historical. All history is ‘political’ in its broadest non-party sense.

Community history activity can contribute to writing back into history the stories of ordinary people, their struggles, redressing the imbalance of more official and establishment histories. All historical specialisms and approaches are useful routes into the historical picture. Large numbers of people want to protect and celebrate the historic local environment. 

The friendly, loan, building and co-operative societies, and  the trade unions:

*        provided a glue that linked people together at work, and because work and home were often close, between work and community

*        built an amazing infrastructure of social welfare and income support in the absence of a Welfare State

*        were seedbeds for building experience in running organisations and in participative and representative democracy

*        forced a response that made Britain more inclusive in electoral politics, and moderated the worst effect of economic forces through social and employment reform

The militant trade unionism of the period 1888 to 1892 set in motion a new social and economic agenda based on the eight hour day, fair wages, direct labour and the public service role of local government, an agenda which continued through to 1976.

The trade unions created the Labour Party in 1900 as a political vehicle to represent the interests of working people in Parliament. Together they became a major electoral force, and in the 1945-51 period brought in the building blocks of the modern Welfare State, including the National Health Service and the expansion of public services. It is no coincidence that in 1945 community associations received a boost with the formation of the organisation now known as Community Matters, and black organisations came together at the Manchester Pan-African Conference.

The pursuit of social and economic justice has never been easy because of the effects of economic cycles and the resultant changes in types and location of jobs. Once the movement began to win control of local and Central Government it had to face the problems involved in policy implementation and management. In the process all kinds of mistakes were made.

In my view the biggest mistake in the post-war period was the 1976 International Monetary Fund deal under which the Labour Government began to roll back public services, paving the way for the Tory monetarist destruction from 1979.

From 1979 there was a great increase in poverty and deprivation and the abandonment and betrayal by private and public services of the needs of the people living in the large number of what are now called deprived neighbourhoods. In the process individuals, families and whole communities experienced hopelessness and brutalisation. One of these is Glasgow's Easterhouse Estate.

Easterhouse is symbolic. It has its own Community Champion in Bob Holman, the Christian Socialist academic who went to live there and work with local people. But no amount of collective self-help community organisation has been able as yet to tackle the mountain of neglect, the need for good quality job creation and investment, and to fundamentally address the underlying problem of low incomes and means-testing dependency.

Tackling the legacy of this deprivation was at the heart of the Government's Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy for England. The Strategy fitted uneasily within a set of tensions within Government policy:

·         central control versus decentralisation and democratisation

·         acceptance that it will take 15-20 years to achieve fundamental change, versus the need to be seen to deliver results in the short timetables dictated by the electoral cycle

·         impatience with the time it takes to deliver noticeable change, versus a recognition that it takes time to achieve the massive cultural change needed by local government, health authorities, private business and the community and voluntary sector to work together 

·         co-option of the community and voluntary sector to the Government's agenda versus a recognition of its independence.

However neighbourhood renewal will not be achieved just by beavering away in one's own silo activity. Part of the social glue function of community organisations should be to build a common sense of justice, understanding, and positive interaction between all the different sub-groups and interests within the neighbourhood community. There needs to be activity that brings people together, especially in those areas where adversely affected by racism and ethnic segregation.’ (1)

That remains a challenge particularly now that the COVID pandemic has highlighted the extent of inequalities and the Black Lives  Matters movement the extent of racism.(1)          My discussions on mutuality, regeneration and radical politics for Independent Labour Publications  in 2001 and 2002 can be seen at

www.independentlabour.org.uk/2009/01/22/collective-action-and-the-sustainable-renewal-of-britain

www.independentlabour.org.uk/2009/01/22/mutuality-and-radical-politics

Part 3 follows on the next posting.