Introduction

In 2010, as part of its commitment to creating a ‘Big Society’, the newly elected UK Coalition Government announced a four-year programme to train a new generation of Community Organisers in England. After a period under the previous government in which, it argued, community programmes had been top-down and governmentled, this was one of a number of initiatives claiming to put power back in the hands of people and to encourage them to take a more active role in their communities.

However, these initiatives were introduced against a background of austerity policies, which were to have a disproportionate impact on low-income and working-class households (Browne and Elming, 2015). In this context, the Coalition's community programmes have been strongly criticised for expecting communities to substitute for a declining public sector and failing to address the root causes of disadvantage. Nonetheless, it is claimed that community organising, based on the work of Saul Alinsky (1971), has the potential to provide a more radical approach. The question is whether it has delivered on this promise and to what extent it offers the kind of class-based approach for which this book argues.

This chapter looks at community organising through the lens of the government-funded England-wide programme, which ran from 2011 to 2015, and explores the extent to which its approach has the potential to reintroduce a class dimension to community development practice in England. Much of its content is informed by interviews with a range of people who have direct experience of the programme.

The context

Some commentators (such as Carley and Smith, 2001, p.87) argue that traditional movements built around class cannot articulate the increasingly diverse interests in society today. The advance of the market, consumerism and individualism has redefined allegiances and identities and undermined solidarity. The changing structure of the labour market has fragmented workforces and destabilised working practices. Communities and the workplace are no longer bound together as they once were, and the organisations of the working class reflect these changes. The nonconformist chapels, the working men's clubs and the mechanics institutes, in which working-class culture was forged and reproduced and where working-class people got their political education (Thompson, 1963), scarcely exist. More recently, libraries and community centres have also disappeared.