HoratioCuthbert
Deep seated inconsequence
But they had really radical pictures of themselves mid-speech
Cost of Living Crisis: Enough is Enough Campaign
- Thread starter Smokeandsteam
- Start date
But digs towards the RMT will get my back up unfortunately.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Surely it's possible to be politically supportive generally and yet be also be a bit critical or poke some fun at organisations?
Apparently not when I just tried it!
I do like what Don't Pay achieved. I think the govt did respond to it in order to make it run out of steam but a response is a good result.
I'm just not buying all of this pretence that it was a genuine grass roots movement. That's ABC lefty bollocks.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Apparently not when I just tried it!
I do like what Don't Pay achieved. I think the govt did respond to it in order to make it run out of steam but a response is a good result.
I'm just not buying all of this pretence that it was a genuine grass roots movement. That's ABC lefty bollocks.
It was clearly started by people involved or with backgrounds in political stuff (although not entirely) but that doesn't make it 'not grassroots' surely? TBH I think the grassroots moniker is not very useful really anyway is it? All the big union stuff like the RMT is hardly 'grassroots' but that's very important and useful isn't it?
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Are you pissed atm? Your replies seem to be about stuff I haven't really been saying.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Can I try and summarise your 'argument'?
Some group is really behind Don't Pay...
Plan C/Angry Workers/someone else.
That makes it not genuine grassroots.
But they did some good stuff anyway.
But they're lefty ABC bollocks.
Even if a single group isn't behind them really.
And I like the RMT, don't criticise them.
Some group is really behind Don't Pay...
Plan C/Angry Workers/someone else.
That makes it not genuine grassroots.
But they did some good stuff anyway.
But they're lefty ABC bollocks.
Even if a single group isn't behind them really.
And I like the RMT, don't criticise them.
Fozzie Bear
Well-Known Member
Refusing to countenance any criticism of an organisation you belong to would also be lefty bollocks would it not.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Nothing or slightly more afaik, about the same as their attempt to fuck EiE with the workers economy stuff.
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LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Yet in my small town we had hundreds of people sign up for Don't Pay, most of them did the strike, and we had an active Whatsapp of about 70, nearly all of whom hadn't done anything like that before.
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
Contributed to a partial victory.
newme
Giant in Pastyland now
In what way? I saw a lot who didn't pay then ended up in trouble as a result. of course this could be different for your area and appears to be. Any victory is a bonus but I always wonder about the fallen.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
In what way trouble, and were they 'didn't' or 'couldn't' pay? We got threatened a load, but then paid a bit here and there, then paid in full when the campaign ended.
Will write more to answer how it turned out around here when have time. Some of us locally wrote a bit on it as well, I'll see if I can find it, might be on the Don't Pay thread as well.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Don’t Pay! What now & what next?
We are a group of people from Leeds, Calderdale, and Bradford who've been involved in Don't Pay organising over the last months. We’ve been active in our local postcode groups, the wider regional areas and a few of us have also been involved nationally.
Our activity has lapsed recently so we met to discuss why this was and what we were going to do about it. We decided that Don’t Pay was a brilliant idea that caught a moment, but for us the campaign has now lost its traction and likely its potential, so we are no longer going to be active on Don’t Pay. We wrote this to explain why, and to also hopefully help other people think through the last months.
The idea…
Although we know each other from previous struggles and movements, we found out about Don’t Pay independently in summer 2022. We were pretty excited about the idea and campaign and by the time we became active it had already gained a lot of impetus. This was something we hadn't seen for a good while: mass involvement aiming at directly challenging the daily material conditions of working class people. Importantly it was also a campaign that was not simply demanding something of the State, but both acted in a way that both exerted our collective political power and materially improved our lives.
We were really excited by the potential Don’t Pay had for organising in our areas; getting to know people and for creating and building general antagonism towards capitalism with them through the campaign. From the start this seemed very different from both the limited and compromised union organising that was happening at the time and the many single issue activist campaigns we've seen come and go over the years.
Our areas
We all got involved in our local areas; creating WhatsApp groups, meeting up in person, ordering and distributing fliers, door knocking, stickering, running stalls, etc. We set up groups in our localities, at first in postcodes but then moving to cover wider areas. This started off really well: we met up with old and new comrades, people with similar views to our own – and also some with pretty different ones!
We worked together to organise a demo in Bradford where we burned bills, talked to loads of passers-by and made the local news, and we had a prominent presence at two Enough is Enough! events in Leeds. We had local and regional meetings, and at the point of the 1st October demo and strike deadline there was a broad group of people reasonably actively involved.
As well as being politically important it was also something really enjoyable to be active on, something that sadly can be rare in politics. It felt like a really positive campaign on the street and door knocking, and the conversations with people were inspiring and exciting – although obviously the reality of poverty for many was also terrible.
What didn’t work
From October 1st onwards, it became hard to sustain this energy. Activity on the Whatsapp groups diminished and meetings stopped happening. We tried to regroup by merging postcode Whatsapp groups so that people in all local postcodes had a group they could join. Lots more did, but there was little appetite for face-to-face activity, and quite a bit of random (and at times very problematic) Whatsapp messages to manage. It was also hard to keep up links between the local groups and national organising.
In our view, a key reason for this loss of motivation was that there was a good bit of confusion about when and under what circumstances we would strike after the delay of the October 1st strike. We found that even fairly active members were confused. The change of message from, ‘We’ll all strike on 1st October’ to, ‘We’ll all strike when we reach a million pledges’ wasn’t clear and the change from a definite deadline to a non-specific future date was too vague for most of the people who had previously shown interest.
A second key factor was the government’s September announcement of the ‘energy price guarantee’. This promise to help households with their fuel costs definitely took the wind out of the campaign’s sails. The campaign rightly took this as a partial win, but it made it harder to continue to sell the strike. This contributed to our failure to reach a million pledges by the beginning of October, in turn forcing the confusing change in tactic and message mentioned above.
With less publicity and more confusion we found that starting the strike in December was very difficult. A significant added problem is that if you miss a deadline any new commitment to a revised deadline inevitably has less credibility. By this time many people were also starting to experience real fuel poverty. Leafletting on the streets led to heartbreaking conversations, but many people we spoke to weren’t convinced that a strike would be successful and now were quite fearful. This was in contrast to the earlier anger and optimism we generally had encountered.
A proposed shift in tactic by the national group to ‘claim the credit back’ didn't manage to gain traction and also felt to us like it was excluding those in greatest need. Our impression was that there was also a subtle shift towards London activists and those in larger cities with already established ‘activist’ circles, or people who had been previously already engaged in other activist projects. Both locally and nationally it felt like we had lost people who hadn’t been involved in anything like this before, and that also felt demoralising.
There were also limitations to the online pledge idea, which probably got more problematic as time went on. Pledging online is a very low bar for involvement and it was hard to know how much this would translate into actual non-payment. We know for sure that in our areas that the pledge mostly didn't translate into a willingness to be more active in the campaign and local groups. Such active involvement would have been essential if we were to have any chance of creating the community defence networks that would mobilise to physically defend non-payers from debt collectors. We think that this leap from online activity to face-to-face activity is a difficult one to deal with, and of course it’s not limited to Don’t Pay, and as it is something we’re sure will come up again we need to think through ways of overcoming it.
This made it harder to challenge the idea of energy debt as a private problem, as well as making it harder to feel confident in our power to mobilise and support each other with practical solidarity. There are of course structural reasons for this too (namely four decades of neoliberal ‘reforms’) which we cannot control. For us the great comparison and inspiration is the anti-poll tax struggle of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But with that, budgets were set at council meetings where we could protest and everyone also received their bill at the same time and in the same way. With energy there are multiple suppliers, tariffs, payment options, billing dates, etc. and bills come in a different way and at a different time for everyone. It’s a tension inherent to struggling as ‘consumers’ rather than workers for example, but it’s also another problem we also need to address with campaigns like this.
What next?
We want to stress again that we think Don’t Pay was a brilliant idea. A small number of people attempted to do something extremely ambitious in a very short period of time and in a context in which many other organised political groupings were openly critical. They spread the idea and it caught imaginations across the country (and world!) and catalysed a broad cross-section of people to take political action. It was amazingly well executed, the aesthetics of the campaign were perfect, and the spokespeople we saw on national media did a great job.
What we’ve written above is not a criticism of any of the people who initiated the campaign, developed it and kept it going. We’ve written this to share our own feelings about the campaign and the reasons we think we’ve got to where we are now and our own reasons for stopping being active with Don’t Pay.
Don’t Pay offered us all some important and inspiring months in an often grim world; it has invigorated us politically, shown us some inspiring ways of organising, let us meet new people, given us some hope, and reconnected us with comrades from years past. We hope that we can take all that forward to whatever comes next, because there’s plenty of struggle ahead…
- West Yorkshire Don’t Pay organisers group and some friends, Spring 2023.
We are a group of people from Leeds, Calderdale, and Bradford who've been involved in Don't Pay organising over the last months. We’ve been active in our local postcode groups, the wider regional areas and a few of us have also been involved nationally.
Our activity has lapsed recently so we met to discuss why this was and what we were going to do about it. We decided that Don’t Pay was a brilliant idea that caught a moment, but for us the campaign has now lost its traction and likely its potential, so we are no longer going to be active on Don’t Pay. We wrote this to explain why, and to also hopefully help other people think through the last months.
The idea…
Although we know each other from previous struggles and movements, we found out about Don’t Pay independently in summer 2022. We were pretty excited about the idea and campaign and by the time we became active it had already gained a lot of impetus. This was something we hadn't seen for a good while: mass involvement aiming at directly challenging the daily material conditions of working class people. Importantly it was also a campaign that was not simply demanding something of the State, but both acted in a way that both exerted our collective political power and materially improved our lives.
We were really excited by the potential Don’t Pay had for organising in our areas; getting to know people and for creating and building general antagonism towards capitalism with them through the campaign. From the start this seemed very different from both the limited and compromised union organising that was happening at the time and the many single issue activist campaigns we've seen come and go over the years.
Our areas
We all got involved in our local areas; creating WhatsApp groups, meeting up in person, ordering and distributing fliers, door knocking, stickering, running stalls, etc. We set up groups in our localities, at first in postcodes but then moving to cover wider areas. This started off really well: we met up with old and new comrades, people with similar views to our own – and also some with pretty different ones!
We worked together to organise a demo in Bradford where we burned bills, talked to loads of passers-by and made the local news, and we had a prominent presence at two Enough is Enough! events in Leeds. We had local and regional meetings, and at the point of the 1st October demo and strike deadline there was a broad group of people reasonably actively involved.
As well as being politically important it was also something really enjoyable to be active on, something that sadly can be rare in politics. It felt like a really positive campaign on the street and door knocking, and the conversations with people were inspiring and exciting – although obviously the reality of poverty for many was also terrible.
What didn’t work
From October 1st onwards, it became hard to sustain this energy. Activity on the Whatsapp groups diminished and meetings stopped happening. We tried to regroup by merging postcode Whatsapp groups so that people in all local postcodes had a group they could join. Lots more did, but there was little appetite for face-to-face activity, and quite a bit of random (and at times very problematic) Whatsapp messages to manage. It was also hard to keep up links between the local groups and national organising.
In our view, a key reason for this loss of motivation was that there was a good bit of confusion about when and under what circumstances we would strike after the delay of the October 1st strike. We found that even fairly active members were confused. The change of message from, ‘We’ll all strike on 1st October’ to, ‘We’ll all strike when we reach a million pledges’ wasn’t clear and the change from a definite deadline to a non-specific future date was too vague for most of the people who had previously shown interest.
A second key factor was the government’s September announcement of the ‘energy price guarantee’. This promise to help households with their fuel costs definitely took the wind out of the campaign’s sails. The campaign rightly took this as a partial win, but it made it harder to continue to sell the strike. This contributed to our failure to reach a million pledges by the beginning of October, in turn forcing the confusing change in tactic and message mentioned above.
With less publicity and more confusion we found that starting the strike in December was very difficult. A significant added problem is that if you miss a deadline any new commitment to a revised deadline inevitably has less credibility. By this time many people were also starting to experience real fuel poverty. Leafletting on the streets led to heartbreaking conversations, but many people we spoke to weren’t convinced that a strike would be successful and now were quite fearful. This was in contrast to the earlier anger and optimism we generally had encountered.
A proposed shift in tactic by the national group to ‘claim the credit back’ didn't manage to gain traction and also felt to us like it was excluding those in greatest need. Our impression was that there was also a subtle shift towards London activists and those in larger cities with already established ‘activist’ circles, or people who had been previously already engaged in other activist projects. Both locally and nationally it felt like we had lost people who hadn’t been involved in anything like this before, and that also felt demoralising.
There were also limitations to the online pledge idea, which probably got more problematic as time went on. Pledging online is a very low bar for involvement and it was hard to know how much this would translate into actual non-payment. We know for sure that in our areas that the pledge mostly didn't translate into a willingness to be more active in the campaign and local groups. Such active involvement would have been essential if we were to have any chance of creating the community defence networks that would mobilise to physically defend non-payers from debt collectors. We think that this leap from online activity to face-to-face activity is a difficult one to deal with, and of course it’s not limited to Don’t Pay, and as it is something we’re sure will come up again we need to think through ways of overcoming it.
This made it harder to challenge the idea of energy debt as a private problem, as well as making it harder to feel confident in our power to mobilise and support each other with practical solidarity. There are of course structural reasons for this too (namely four decades of neoliberal ‘reforms’) which we cannot control. For us the great comparison and inspiration is the anti-poll tax struggle of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But with that, budgets were set at council meetings where we could protest and everyone also received their bill at the same time and in the same way. With energy there are multiple suppliers, tariffs, payment options, billing dates, etc. and bills come in a different way and at a different time for everyone. It’s a tension inherent to struggling as ‘consumers’ rather than workers for example, but it’s also another problem we also need to address with campaigns like this.
What next?
We want to stress again that we think Don’t Pay was a brilliant idea. A small number of people attempted to do something extremely ambitious in a very short period of time and in a context in which many other organised political groupings were openly critical. They spread the idea and it caught imaginations across the country (and world!) and catalysed a broad cross-section of people to take political action. It was amazingly well executed, the aesthetics of the campaign were perfect, and the spokespeople we saw on national media did a great job.
What we’ve written above is not a criticism of any of the people who initiated the campaign, developed it and kept it going. We’ve written this to share our own feelings about the campaign and the reasons we think we’ve got to where we are now and our own reasons for stopping being active with Don’t Pay.
Don’t Pay offered us all some important and inspiring months in an often grim world; it has invigorated us politically, shown us some inspiring ways of organising, let us meet new people, given us some hope, and reconnected us with comrades from years past. We hope that we can take all that forward to whatever comes next, because there’s plenty of struggle ahead…
- West Yorkshire Don’t Pay organisers group and some friends, Spring 2023.
What is a genuine grass roots movement?Apparently not when I just tried it!
I do like what Don't Pay achieved. I think the govt did respond to it in order to make it run out of steam but a response is a good result.
I'm just not buying all of this pretence that it was a genuine grass roots movement. That's ABC lefty bollocks.
Not sure I can be arsed arguing about it 3 months later.
crossthebreeze
Well-Known Member
In my local area we did some well- attended training on dealing with debt and community resistance. We're continuing the community resistance training in our local organisation (that came out of our local covid mutual aid group) to deal with debt more widely - we've already used similar tactics to resist evictions.
We also have local solidarity funds that redisributes £30 a time to people, a member"s food parcel service, - and offer solidarity food parcels to non-members taking part in strikes etc, all if which will have helped.
We also have local solidarity funds that redisributes £30 a time to people, a member"s food parcel service, - and offer solidarity food parcels to non-members taking part in strikes etc, all if which will have helped.
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
People who aren't generally politically active I think. Those who are generally politically active aren't genuine grassroots you see.
Sometimes I wonder why we never see grassroots political activity in this country
Pretty bang on the money tbhPeople who aren't generally politically active I think. Those who are generally politically active aren't genuine grassroots you see.
Sometimes I wonder why we never see grassroots political activity in this country
but I’ve changed my stance. I was thinking of when some activists point to Trot groups having fronts to pretend it isn’t a Trot group but doing similar themselves. But meh whatever.Similar threads
