Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

The alternative is to treat people as adults who can be engaged in
conversation and potentially persuaded of a different point of view. And
the emergence of a social movement means that the task of persuasion
can be taken up, not by a remote elite, but by your friends, family,
neighbours and colleagues. In workplaces, round dinner tables, in
pubs and cafes, every lying tabloid front-page can now be met with a
counterargument from a familiar and trusted voice.
Labour members can win the right to be heard by taking up a multitude
of local causes in communities up and down the country. And often,
attitudes can shift through the experience of these collective struggles. In
the late 1960s, London dockers marched in support of Nigel Farage’s
hero, Enoch Powell. But by 1976, some of those same dockers were
supporting the famous Grunwick strike, where a largely female,
immigrant workforce, together with union allies from the ‘white working
class’, put up a formidable fight against their common opponents.
Empowering the best aspects of British society is always a more
constructive path than pandering and genuflecting to the worst.
25
Labour as a mobilised mass movement can be a space where the
marginalised and the voiceless gain political agency, and build social
bonds with the rest of society. The single mothers organising childcare
so that more people can participate in Momentum meetings is just one
example of how this can work. A thousand local initiatives like this can
counteract social atomisation and division, and help foster the ethos
of kindness and mutual obligation that is the foundation of any serious
leftwing politics.
October 2016