Zoe Williams on the citizen's groups bringing light to this election
Another UK national election, this one conducted on the most reductive terms... We're preparing our response with our fellow networks and activists at the moment, and will announce something shortly.
But in the meantime, A/UK is delighted to be mentioned by Zoe Williams in her round-up column today - along with Compass's Progressive Alliance and Paul Hilder's CrowdPac - on the citizen activism that will stop this being "the election of doom".
Even though anybody who said they were ready for this election would be lying, there is organisation, fundraising and campaigning in the service of a broad left coalition: Compass’s Together We Win, Paddy Ashdown and Martha Lane Fox’s More United, Pat Kane and Indra Adnan’s Denmark-inspired The Alternative. The old-school part of me wants them all to merge, or cede to the best-organised, but that is not the post-networked political way: if you look at the US, different movements, such as Knock Every Door, Black Lives Matter, and the Women’s March use distributed organising methods. I’m not 100% sure of what that means: I think, broadly, that you choose your big goal, pursue it single-mindedly, but always stay open to alliances where your goals intersect. “People step up to big goals,” Hilder says. “They’re not very interested in marginally alleviating bad things.”