Andrew Feinstein insists a new left-wing party must be rooted in community engagement

At a recent conference, Andrew Feinstein spoke alongside other left-wing voices to answer the question “How does the left respond to the rise of the far right?” And he emphasised two key points. First, he stressed that strong “engagement with local communities” is key to building a popular mass movement. Secondly, he insisted that it’s essential to be rooted in a community and to work actively to support local people with the problems they’re facing.

Standing in solidarity with other independent left-wingers in the 2024 election, the anti-racist and anti-militarist campaigner challenged Labour Party leader Keir Starmer in his constituency, reducing Starmer’s majority significantly. And speaking on the panel at February’s Transform conference, he pointed out that having a main opponent as “extraordinarily dislikable” as Starmer really helped. A member of the community apparently told him when campaigning that Starmer “makes it easy for us” because “we don’t have to try and figure out when he’s lying, because every time his lips move, we know he’s lying”. He also explained how:

because Keir Starmer has been such an absent MP for almost 10 years now, people think I’m their MP. So if I’m going to the shops, people come up to me and want to tell me about their problems and ask me how I’m going to solve them for them.

As a result, he needs to clarify for them that:

our MP is actually the person who’s the prime minister and creating a lot of the problems they’re talking about

Andrew Feinstein: community engagement is the key

Andrew Feinstein has been supporting efforts to build a mass left-wing movement to fill the space Labour abandoned once and for all when Starmer took over as leader. And in order to build a movement, he stressed that people need to be enjoyably engaged. While connecting with people via independent media and social media plays a role, he stressed:

Nothing replaces the engagement with local communities.

However, he also asserted that:

we need to ensure that these community initiatives are linked to a national electoral party because there is obviously such logic to them. Because you challenge your council and, I would argue, your MP locally, but then you also in parallel challenge them electorally when the opportunity arises.

He added that, while planning strategies and policies carefully is often the focus when building a new movement, that means nothing if a strong community connection isn’t there:

People are going to see another party as, ‘Oh my goodness, it’s just the same old political stuff again’, whereas if you’re actually working in those communities and doing things for those communities, the perception of the entity that you rooted in our communities establish will be fundamentally different from the perception of the other political entities.

To resist the far right surge, we need to talk more ‘to people on the ground who don’t share our views’

Regarding the resurgence of the far right in the UK and elsewhere, Andrew Feinstein believes that talking to people is the best way we can fight back. He said:

the most important thing we can do is just talk to people on the ground—people who don’t share our views, people who believe that the Nigel Farages of this world are part of the solution rather than the problem.

And talk to them in very immediate terms about why the problems exist and why Farage, et al. are a part of the problem, not the solution.

He described one experience he had speaking to quite a right-wing group. Some people argued that Jews or Muslims controlled everything and that immigration is the country’s biggest problem. But he kept his calm. And he told them clearly that he himself was not only an immigrant, but also “Jewish and married to a Muslim woman”. He then added:

The reality is, we control nothing.

And it’s this kind of interaction he believes has an impact. As Andrew Feinstein asserted:

sometimes, you’ve just got to go to areas where you can just talk to people in a very immediate, person-to-person way and deal with some of the prejudices that have been built…

in our tens of thousands, we need to get out on the streets across this country and be talking to people about the realities of the situation we find ourselves in, the reasons for it, and what the solutions might be.

Build strong community roots and bring the left together nationally

Andrew Feinstein also issued a rallying call, saying:

People shouldn’t be downhearted. I think the fact that there are so many initiatives at the moment politically is brilliant.

I think what the next 6 to 8 weeks need to bring is how we bring together all of these various initiatives into a movement that is rooted in our communities but has massive impact electorally, locally, and nationally—because the country, and I would argue the world, has never needed it as badly as it does now.

Listen to Andrew Feinstein’s full speech below: