On charity, solidarity & NGOs
Part of our ongoing series on ‘how the left has lost‘.
The last 25 years has seen a transformation of the architecture of the left which has been matched only by the speed of our decline.
In the summer of 1985 (the summer I was born), 2 things happened. The National Union of Miners finally gave up their strike, and the Rainbow Warrior was sunk in New Zealand by the French Navy – pushing Greenpeace onto every front page. This year was a mile-stone in the decline of unions and the rise of NGOs.
This shift in the architecture of progressive politics is matched by a rhetorical shift. And this is what I hope to explore here.
There are, I think, a number of problems with the contemporary NGO model, and maybe we’ll look at others later. But here, I’m going to look at one of these – the way we divide the country.
Because the language used by most large NGOs is not that of the unions. We don’t talk about enlightened self interest and solidarity, but of pity and charity. We don’t talk about making everyone’s life better together, but of helping the bottom 1-5%. And so we divide the population along a fault line that perpetuates a false split between those we need to unite.
Take, for example, Shelter. Shelter are a great charity who do really good work combating homelessness. But the truth is that people being homeless is only the fringe, most extreme and most terrible consequence of a housing policy which has failed millions in this country. As a young graduate with a reasonable salary, I live in a damp, mouldy bedroom. Millions suffer from our un-regulated, out of control, private rental sector. Yet there is no one organising us to demand decent housing. While Shelter do provide advisory services, their fundraising leaflets don’t encourage me to understand that, as a member of the young middle classes, the failure to build more council houses or abolish right-to-buy is one of the main reasons I pay most of my salary to my landlord. Instead they encourage me to empathise with homeless teenagers. I do. But ultimately, this casts my interests against theirs. It implicitly tells us that we are not in this together: it divides us into rich ‘donor’ and poor ‘victim’. And that leads to a political divide which puts most people on the wrong side. While the right use aspiration to encourage us all to share the interests of the rich, our use of the language of charity risks doing the same.
Or look at organisations campaigning on global poverty. I was in a discussion the other day with someone representing one of the main groups campaigning on development. They told us that we should tell people that, after the credit crunch, they are connected with the renewed poverty in many developing countries because we have got rich by making them poor – that we should be guilty.
Whether or not that is true, it accepts the same basic divisions that the right wish to draw – we share the interests of the mega-rich, and the poor – a minority in this country, foreigners if in other countres, have different interests. We should be good and gracious and giving, rather than expressing our collective solidarity, and desire to build a better society for all of us, together.
Our campaigns should show how the person we are speaking to has the same interests as the people who are suffering most – how better housing policy would help everyone who is screwed by the over-dominance of the private rental sector, including those without homes; how Britain’s bankers who wreaked havoc all around the world have also broken our economy; how we are all in this together, and a better world would be better for all of us. We should encourage empathy, yes. We should encourage mutual support, yes. But we must be careful, when doing so, not to
The NGO movement is the political wing of the charitable movement. We campaign like we fundraise – because it’s easy to ask someone to empathise with the most extreme examples of poverty. But people will never take the risk of changing the system which creates this poverty unless they see that it will also improve the lot of them themselves – and, just as importantly, their family, their neighbours, and their friends.
The network United Students Against Sweatshops, which organises on American campuses, has as it’s slogan a quote “If you are here to help me, then you are wasting your time. If you are here because your struggle is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
The political language of charity splits the country into a wealthy 95% and a poor 5%. This false demography is a massive barrier to true progress. And until we unite a majority around a vision for a future which is better for both them, and their communities, I don’t see how we can change this country.
You seem to basically be picking on their fundraising strategy – perhaps just some people you bumped into on the street – rather than looking at their wider work. As a former chugger myself, I can tell you that residual sob stories and sad looking animals work much better than broader political issues; depressing but true.
Have a look at their campaigns page, for example, where the fight for affordable housing is their top item:
http://england.shelter.org.uk/what_you_can_do/campaign_with_us
What about their recent advertising campaign showing how housing costs had risen so much faster than food and other household essentials? Clever juxtapositions of supermarket chickens vs. buying a house.
The other problem NGOs face, besides what sells on the street, is what sells in the media. Editors and many journalists like to divide complex topics like housing into little compartments – the homeless, poor people who need social housing, young people in their mobile private rented homes, adults with mortgages, etc. Very often an NGO’s impact is the product of that attitude, not the NGO’s efforts to take a more nuanced approach.
I just think you’re being very unfair on them. Sorry!
Have a look at Shelter’s response to the Government’s proposed social housing reforms today. That will show how the Government is trying to drive a big wedge between most of us and “the most vulnerable”, and how Shelter nobly resist them.
Hi Tom,
Yes, I agree that it’s very tricky, and that a fuller analysis of identity politics is needed. I also agree that unions are often terrible campaigners – I am not in any way claiming that the above is a comprehensive account of why the left has lost – it’s just one point.
On Shelter – yes they do a little work on these things – often very well. But, as I say in the piece, they don’t encourage people to join on that basis, and they almost never mobilise people around these issues.
Thanks,
Adam
Interesting post, Adam, but also rather one-sided 😉
Shelter, since you mention them, campaign on a wide range of housing issues including all of the issues you mention. A very brief look at their web site shows as much.
Unions are also often inward-looking.
Trying to engender a sense of common cause is definitely worthwhile, but hard. You need a fuller analysis of identity politics than blaming NGOs.
Thanks for the coments all,
Phil – I agree that failure to build houses has been a problem. But why the bizarre predjudice in favour of the private sector in doing so? When has that ever worked? Andare you really going to argue that de-regulated LA or Atlanta are great examles of how housig should work?
Duncan and Nishma, thanks – yup, FOES often seem to have led the way on this, and yes, I think this is as true of women as anyting else – charity can other women in the same way as mysogeny does, just as charity can other the poorest in the same way as the Express does.
Adam
The quote mentioned above is by Lilla Watson, an Aboriginal Australian activist who mainly campaigns on indigenous women’s issues (& visual art).
It would be interesting to see the same issues in these sets of articles be discussed in light of gender issues. I state this because so much of the work that USAS does has implications on constructed notions of gender, etc.
Good article as ever, Adam.
Thoughtful piece Adam. At Friends of the Earth Scotland we’re making deliberate efforts both to build mutual cause in Scotland (see for example 42% better: http://www.blog.foe-scotland.org.uk/index.php/2010/11/42better/), as well as talking the language of solidarity globally.
Not totally true, phil .. Planning authorities are required to zone a five and now a seven year land supply. What other market sets up supply five years ahead?
Since 1947 and the nationalization of development rights, we have had tides of mechanisms to capture the increase in land values for the public good, typically part implemented by Labour and dismantled by Tories. This has encouraged land hoarding in the expectation of higher and higher prices. And in the main this has been true.
Planning is necessary .. The alternative is worse … But we need robust mechanisms to capture uplift in land values for the public not private profit. And then we might have non speculative land values, decnt infrastructure and decent housing.
As a young graduate with a reasonable salary, I live in a damp, mouldy bedroom. Millions suffer from our un-regulated, out of control, private rental sector.
That’s not true: it’s not the lack of regulation that means you have poor housing, it’s the regulation — specifically planning controls that restrict the number of new houses that are built. This means that the cost of housing, for purchase or renting, is vastly higher than it would be in a market system, where it would only cost slightly more than the cost to build a house.
Yet there is no one organising us to demand decent housing.
It’s certainly true that none of the big parties — Labour, the Tories, the Lib Dems or the SNP — cares about this issue. For the Tories, that’s because they only care about the rich anyway, for the others it’s because they care more about old people owning over-valued houses than they do about young people paying a fortune to rent.
Good article. It’s also worth noting that Unions are ultimately member led, and however flawed it may be in practise, are in theory democratic institutions. Who elected Shelter’s trustees? How can they be held to account?