There�s more to politics than parties
AFTER my defeat in the 2003 Holyrood elections, people often asked me what I was doing now that I was out of politics. They were usually surprised when I replied that I now worked for Oxfam and was as much involved in the struggle for political change as I had been in my 20 years as councillor, MP and MSP.
Many take "politics" to mean "party politics". Yet there is a mass constituency of activists out there, campaigning not for any particular party, but for their fellow human beings oppressed by poverty, injustice and inequality.
No political party in Scotland today is capable of putting 100,000 supporters on the streets. Yet in 2005 the non-party Make Poverty History coalition put close to a quarter of a million on the streets of Edinburgh, with another eight million people across the UK wearing white bands to show their support for the campaign's core demands.
A lot of the marchers in Edinburgh were marching for the first time in their lives, with only a small minority under party political banners. No political party today could deliver an equivalent impact. Indeed, in the year ahead, it is clear that popular campaigning against global warming and climate poverty will be led not by political parties but by a broad coalition of environmental, development and civil society organisations under the banner of Stop Climate Chaos.
Of all the changes I have witnessed over 30-odd years of political activism, it is this change in the nature of popular mobilisation that has been the most striking. Civil society rather than political parties has now become the main driver of popular engagement for progressive change. I can remember demonstrations in the 1980s and the 1990s where the strength of each party's turn-out could be judged by the number of party and trade union banners. People marched then because their party organised them but not any more.
The internet has massively widened access to information and opened up a bewildering choice of alternative campaign centres. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, political parties are struggling to command attention. Popular protest and campaigning remain as strong today as ever. Protest simply looks different because times and people have changed. What never changes is the human desire for justice and fairness and its obverse, the human capacity for injustice and oppression. While both those sides of human nature persist, so too will the need to campaign for change.
