Though Cowards Flinch

The papers have been full of the notion of a Labour ‘fightback’.

This weekend in Skelmersdale, West Lancashire – the flat, wet bit roughly between Liverpool and Manchester and Preston - a very small group of Labour-cum-lefties have been trying, in their own small way, to organise a fightback.

The said lefties have not been doing the usual party political stuff of post-conference leafleting and canvassing.  Nor have they been doing the slightly less usual, but still pretty usual, door-to-door survey work, in which we claim to be really, really listening, but in fact in many cases are really just doing a more subtle canvassing job. 

Instead, the lefties have been really listening to people, seeking their testimony, reporting on reality, taking the very first tentative steps in a process of very un-New Labour concientization.

The germ of the idea for what’s been going on,  lies in the abortive attempts to set up LeftNewMedia in the winter of 2009-10.

The core group established to set up LeftNewMedia, principally leftwing bloggers, met a number of times in London to discuss ideas around creating a new online alternative voice of the left in a way which bridges the gap between ‘engaged’  journalism and blogging.   Initially the focus was to be on coverage of the G20 summit, with efforts made to report on what was happening both in and just outside the summit in London, but also to bear witness to the ‘voices’ of those people most affected by the decisions of the great and the powerful meeting behind the massed ranks of the police.

None of it ever happened.  The pre-Christmas enthusiasm turned to quite a lot of ’Im a bit too busy now’, and energies started to sag.   An application for funding to pay journalist fees and to mamage a LeftNewMedia to the Amiel and Melburn Trustwas turned down on the basis that the proposals lacked ‘relevance’, and the G20 summit came and went. A further application to the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust was turned down, on the basis that they, well, didn’t want to fund it.

And that might have been that -  another great plan hatched over a pint or six in London, another pipe dream dreamt.

But every pipe dream has a silver lining; even though we didn’t get it together at the time, the ideas set out. most notably by Comrade Dave here and here, were useful.

So when a different-from-the-commentariat-norm article turned up on Liberal Conspiracy, and I bothered to comment on it, the ideas that had come out of the abortive LeftNewMedia started to occur to me again, and things went from there

The article was by Kate Belgrave, a regular contributor to LibCon (and The New Statesman), and what marked it out was that it was original, on-the-ground reporting from a site of struggle, in which you could actually hear the voices of those involved.  This was committed leftwing journalism, which had infiltrated the blogosphere courtesy of Sunny Hundal’s good editorial sense, and the blogosphere was the better for it.

One thing led to another, and this weekend Kate was in Skelmersdale, a new town born of the 1960s Liverpool slum clearances, to record the authentic voice of the working class, pay witness to the struggle, and to start to set it in the context of a Conservative Council which has ignored the needs and aspirations of the people of the town for getting on for two generations now, happy to pander to wishes of the leafy suburbs and rural areas that make up the rest of the borough, safe in the knowledge that if it does this effectively, and uses its PR machine to full effect, it will retain what passes for democratic legitimacy.

The precise nature of the ‘voices’ that were heard during this first weekend of ‘proper’ journalism will need to wait till Kate has written up stuff, and her colleague Charles has edited and managed the photos, but what we can say already is that this will be a Skelmersdale that’s different from the Skelmersdale our local Tory establishment conceive, and very different from the Skelmersdale portrayed by the BNP (link to local press coverage, not to BNP site), in terms eerily reminiscent of early 1930s Nazi propaganda in Germany, in its recent website article, in which the people of Skelmersdale are portrayed as some kind of ‘untermenschen’ living in  faceless, decrepit estates, and with only themselves and ’their’ Labour government to blame for it.

This is the start of what we hope will be an extended set of articles and coverage about Skelmersdale, both online and in the press.  The first weekend was exploratory, and in several instances people were understandably wary of the motives behind the exercise – the town and its people have been written off and either abused or ignored for so long by those that govern that caution in front of a camera and a reporter is well warranted; this is the town that’s been promised a town centre for 40 years now, with ‘consultation’ exercises lasting for generations and costing many thousands of pounds in fees to outside consultants, but which yet again finds itself disappointed by the Tory Council’s over reliance on private sector developers, who have walked away now that the housing market has crashed and the potential profits lessened.

If this first weekend of real ‘LeftNewMedia’ is really to be develop into something good, there are challenges to meet. 

First, the testimony taken will need to be set in the context of the council’s actions (or inactions). 

Second, the coverage produced will need to be powerful and persuasive enough to combat the council’s and other agencies’ PR machines, which will be used to try and prove how the reality of the experience of residents and workers in Skelmersdale is at odds with, and thereby somehow less reliable, than the statistics and ‘findings’ that they are able to provide about their performance (for a look at some of the theoretical issues in this, look at this lengthy post on how this same council has manipulated the truth to date).

Third, and perhaps most important of all, is the challenge of making this ‘project’ last beyond the time Kate and Charles are able, as heroic volunteers, able to devote to it.  The challenge for people like me – local activists with insider knowledge but without the journalistic skills to get things started – is to establish a means by which local people can start to offer up their own testimony, to start to pick up some of the journalistic skills that Kate and Charles bring, and in so doing to start a real ‘concientization’ in a way which goes way beyond a Labour party leaflet drop, and becomes politics as it should be done.  Tips on how to do this are welcome, by the way.

As a by product, it’s also be great to see this kind of attempt at online committed journalism find its way into the blogosphere.  As Kate suggested as we moved between areas in Skelmersdale on Sunday, it would be good if, for example, if Liberal Conspiracy would commit itself to the publication of at least one ‘on the ground’ reporting story per week, and in time to develop a profile as a blog carrying not only comment but also original reporting from the grassroots.   This would build on the  renewed efforts by Dave, here at Though Cowards Flinch, to report on the reality of the struggle he and his comrades are engaged in where he lives in Canterbury.

Yes, all of this may all be a pipe dream, and the hegemonic forces against us may simply be too big at the moment.  But at least we’ve made a start, and for that I will always be grateful to Kate and Charles for putting this weekend where their mouth is.