Jamie Driscoll was North of Tyne metro mayor between 2019 and 2024, making numerous progressive changes during his time in office. And at a recent conference, he addressed the issue of how to empower people with a hopeful vision for the future while challenging the increasingly powerful billionaire-led establishment.
Driscoll was a panellist at a Transform conference bringing numerous left-wing movements together to answer “How does the left respond to the rise of the far right?” And he focused on the importance of engaging and socialising more to build a fun, active movement.
We need people to invest time, and enjoy doing it
Jamie Driscoll began by challenging the leadership of his former party, the Labour Party. Under Keir Starmer, he said, the party is pointlessly sucking up to the far right and still “keeping kids in poverty, supporting genocide, and putting people in prison for expressing their democratic rights”. And he added:
If that’s the default, we need to be offering a better alternative.
However, he stressed:
The challenge is that the mainstream media is dominated by people who have a different kind of social power available than we have… If you’re a billionaire, you can maybe buy Twitter, fund a thinktank, own a newspaper. That’s how you get your message out. You bribe a few politicians.
It’s not an option for us.
That’s why, with any resurgent left-wing movement in Britain:
we’ve gotta build it in a way that gets people in who are gonna give a little bit of their time. And if we want people to be giving their time, we have to do it in such a way that it’s actually enjoyable to them… What you want is something where you go away from it thinking, ‘Hey, that was really good. You know what? I’ll bring my mates next time.’
That, in a nutshell, is what we’ve gotta get right
Jamie Driscoll: there has to be a “social element” to make people turn up
To sum up that message, Jamie Driscoll later emphasised that the rising left needs to be:
a socialist movement that has a social element to it
Locally, he says, efforts to “bring people in” include a film club and an assembly “where people come together, with food and music, and get a chance to talk about the news”.
“What we want is a way for people to come in”, he said, so they can “build a bit of affinity” and “feel part of a movement”. Then they can move to “outward-facing” activities where there’s actually contact with the general public.
These can include “flashmobs, public lectures, mass attendance at council meetings”. Regarding the latter, he stressed that “there’s nothing like turning up in the public gallery with a few dozen of you” because “turning up in numbers is what people understand”.
There also needs to be comradely networking.
Around the time of the far-right riots, Jamie Driscoll said “a WhatsApp press brief” helped to mobilise people to turn up in the street to preempt an attempt to riot in Newcastle, and “the far right never came back”. He added “We need to be there before the far right arrives, not just reacting afterward”.
Networking always needs to be on a “How can we help you?” level, though. That type of communication is what helps to build trust.
These are some of the strategies Driscoll is using locally with his Majority party, which recently united with other left-wing groups to offer people around Britain funding, training, and networking support in order to get active locally and nationally.
However, Driscoll has a clear electoral aim too. Because Majority is running candidates to contest the council seats of Newcastle and take it over:
We take control of a major city, people start to believe. Because that actually gets on the news in a way that our policies won’t. They will never put our policies on the news—we know that.
Listen to Jamie Driscoll’s full speech below:
Featured image supplied
