A BLOG FROM A MEMBER OF LEEDS TAKING SOUNDINGS
Welcome to the Leeds for Change Blog. When you’ve signed up to the site, please post your own blog. This one gives you some background on the discussion between Taking Soundings, Tidal and Together for Peace since the Spring of 2012 about building a hub website for all the progressive organisations and individuals in Leeds. Why and how have we done this? Why is it such an important venture?
Taking Soundings started in 2008. We organise monthly public events, with a relatively well-known speaker, which aim to stimulate debate on politics and culture. We are not armchair socialists; we are also interested in practical politics, and as individuals, all the TS committee members do much more than sitting around talking. About 450 people have joined our newsletter and we know that most of them are activists of one sort or another.
We’ve always been aware of the huge number of organisations there are in Leeds that, like us, want to make the city, and the world, a better place – more equal, more just, more ecologically viable, more tolerant, more diverse, more free but with more solidarity.
In 2012 we began to think about ways of encouraging people in Leeds to become more aware of the work these organisations are doing. How could we make it easier for people to get involved in one, or more, of the excellent progressive initiatives happening in the city? The obvious idea was a hub website.
We already admired the work that Tidal and T4P were doing. Like us, they are non-sectarian, aiming to build progressive movements for change. It turned out that they had both had been thinking on similar lines. We applied to the Lipman-Miliband Trust for a start-up grant of £1,000 for the ‘change hub website’ project and were successful. That led to us getting further small grants – including lots of individual donations via the crowdfunder site.
All the time a group of us from the three organisations were meeting at least monthly to work out both the content and the technicalities of this site. Mark did some excellent consultation for us. Bill from wingfinger was our indispensible webdesign guru. Laura from Tidal has been our marvellous coordinator.
I mention these practicalities because they give some idea of how much work has gone into building this site, and how we went about it. It’s taken us two years to get here. Collaboration, consultation and networking have been key to our success. We were able to convince a wide group of people, including our funders, that this was a good idea and that we were a credible group.
All this is important not simply in the practical sense of linking us together and helping build the numbers for each event you see on the site. This works exemplifies important dimensions of contemporary politics and culture.
There’s a paradox about politics today. The contempt for orthodox politicians is at its height. The dissimulating ‘ordinary bloke’ Nigel Farage gets welcomed because he manages to convince the unwary that he is not an orthodox, right-wing politician.
On the other hand, the myriad of progressive groups in Leeds, the thousands of people who are on the newsletters of Tidal, T4P and Taking Soundings, and the variety of grass-roots activity challenging the government all indicate that the city contains a significant bedrock of radicals interested in new ideas and willing to take action. As it grows in members, this website will make visible just how big we are, and how powerful we could be.
We are forging a new culture for politics. We aren’t very interested in the splintered discussions about the minute details of political line – the ‘what went wrong/who sold us out’ debates of old. In Taking Soundings we do believe that it’s useful to know what socialism has produced in its 500 year history. (Like Tony Benn, we would probably start with the Levellers.) But we want to know this in order to apply it the new situation of the 21st century: the era of neo-liberalism.
The culture we are trying to develop is one which welcomes friendly, respectful discussion of the ideas we need for today. These are ideas which will help us win support, even among those disillusioned with ‘politics’, for a 21st century type of socialism, free of the shackles both of so-called communism in the east, and of the statist, centralising socialism that has so discredited the labour parties of the west.
In the Taking Soundings committee we have differing views on the political parties of the centre or the left, but we are vigorously opposed to those of the right. We put great emphasis on the role of the social movements – feminist, anti-racist, green, for sexual liberation, in the neighbourhoods, among the rank and file of the trade unions – in developing ideas and pushing progressive agenda.
But we do see the need for these to link up more often, to exchange ideas and to develop common platforms wherever they can. This poses both cultural and political problems. Culturally, these movements are diverse and it can be challenging to open up to people who dance to different rhythms. The political ideas and demands within these movements are also highly varied.
Bringing us together – sometimes in joint action, sometimes in convivial discussion, sometimes for celebrations – is the challenge we must rise to. In its small way, this website wants to assist that process. Please blog your views when you feel so inclined!
(This was written in a personal capacity by Max Farrar, who is a member of the Taking Soundings committee. He has been part of the group developing this site. This blog does not represent the exact views of the TS committee.)