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Interview Campaigning as if change mattered

DEBBIE HICKS talks to the Star about The Stroud Red Shed, a campaigning group spreading a socialist message and community activism in the streets

STROUD RED SHED is a socialist, campaign and community group based in Stroud, Gloucestershire. It campaigns on a mixture of political and community issues, including raising awareness of the Grenfell Tower disaster, Jacob Rees Mogg and his comments on abortion, women and the LGBT community and recently on homelessness in Gloucester. 

Richard House [RH]:  Debbie, can you tell us how and why you first conceived of The Red Shed?
 
Debbie Hicks [DH]:  I’ve become increasingly frustrated about Establishment politics and the inability for mainstream politics to deliver change. Having lots of ideas and drive, I passionately wanted to put these ideas into action with like minds. 

After June 2017, people were clearly warming to that S-word, socialism. So I met other like-minded Stroudies to discuss creating a community for people sharing left-wing values and wanting to campaign for change.

We agreed to get out there with a proud socialist message and agreed on the name Stroud Red Shed. I even checked with comedian Mark Thomas and his manager said he didn’t mind.
 
RH: Can you say more about Establishment politics and the inability of the current system to deliver change? Is this anything more than what the late Tony Benn, Shadow chancellor John McDonnell and others have said about real change always coming from outside of the representative parliamentary system and necessarily being bottom-up?

Take Max Weber and Sigmund Freud, for example. Weber, in the sense of bureaucratic institutions having something intrinsically “anti-change” about them, and Freud, in the sense of the dynamics of power and ego-driven ambition swamping and deflecting from the change we all wish for.
 
DH: The Labour Party and governments have always been compromised by Establishment politics, and not just for bureaucratic reasons.

We’re up against a culture of norms and values that uphold and maintain the Establishment, and which are deep rooted. 

I agree with the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser that our public and private institutions reinforce and teach the values of capitalism — e.g. from an early age we’re taught subservience to authority and not to challenge people hierarchically above you.

So Labour is always limited in what it can achieve because even self-proclaimed radicals play by these rules, while arguing for and endorsing a different ideology, but you can’t change the system if you play by the same rules. 

This is the challenge a Corbyn-led Labour government will face. For genuine change, we must reject this rule book, including everything from choices at home in our child-rearing to what we do at work and how we “do” grassroots politics.

I don’t take either an economy-centred or deterministic approach to change or a “bottom-up” approach, as real change is both. Weber and Marx were right. It’s a mixture of both for both reflect and mirror each other.

The Dalai Lama said: “If you think you’re too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito in the room.”
 
RH: Yes, I love Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatus paper from 1970, a much-neglected classic that we can all still learn from. So you say that, if we really want to change politics, the way we do grassroots politics must change too. Can you tell us how your Red Shed initiative is doing this?
 
DH: Stroud Red Shed isn’t party-political, meaning that we can work very flexibly. We’re not constrained by rules and we can go with the flow. We meet to discuss current political and social issues and what we should campaign/work on and we invite people to our meetings through social media.
 
We don’t have a constitution, as this would change the whole objective of freely working on issues that mainstream political parties can’t or won’t touch. We’ve quickly evolved into a group beyond Stroud, taking our campaigns to wherever we feel there’s an urgency or where we can play a role in promoting activism.
 
Our approach is two-fold. We campaign with political street stalls and petitions and we promote community activism — the best way to get working-class communities engaged in politics and working towards social change.
 
In Stroud, for instance, we’ve been instrumental in getting one of our more neglected estates to become active. Within just a year, I’ve helped the community to run a summer street party, form a residents group and start a community cafe, providing advice on benefits, a low-cost, quality, new clothing stall for kids and meals for donations only.
 
Political parties have forgotten how to campaign and misunderstand the most obvious challenge — that working-class communities won’t engage with politics or vote because they’ve had nobody to vote for as no-one’s been listening.

Some left-wing, middle class activists seem to forget their working class roots and what poverty’s really like. Poorer communities are constantly stigmatised and patronised when in reality it’s them who really know what the solutions are for their community and how to implement them. 
 
RH: That all sounds like vital work and a strong antidote to over-professionalised Establishment politics of whatever party.

How does the institutional political world respond to your work? For example, does Labour see it more as a compliment or a threat to its own more mainstream political work?
 
DH: Well, Labour should see groups like Stroud Red Shed as a compliment and work with groups like us. And to be fair, there are many who want this different political approach.

We support what Jeremy Corbyn is trying to do, but we don’t want to engage in the old careerist politics and tribalism. They’re contrary to true socialism and are holding the labour movement back.
 
This is what the public hate and it’s why Momentum is so popular. We say to the minority in the Labour Party — relinquish the politics of fear and recognise just how much is at stake in today’s Britain and why we’re driven to spend all of our spare time campaigning.

Spend time with us and see what an impact we have, how much we learn from doing what we do and why Labour must work with others.
 
RH: Thank you, Debbie. I certainly feel an era of desperately needed post-professional politics coming on.

Let’s hope those you’re speaking to are sufficiently open to really listening and reflecting on what you’re saying. Completing this interview on the centenary of women’s suffrage, perhaps we should end with Margaret Mead’s inspiring quotation, which could have been written for Stroud’s Red Shed. 

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
 
Debbie Hicks is the founder of Stroud Red Shed and works with fellow local activists Terry Kevans and Paul Halas. Richard House is a Corbynista activist in Stroud, Gloucestershire.

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