‘The future of left politics must start from a recognition that our current political representatives, at all levels, are not representing communities,’ says Andrew Feinstein, who stood as an independent candidate against Keir Starmer in the 2024 general election. ‘Often, the only interests they represent are corporate interests.’
Feinstein, a former African National Congress MP in his native South Africa, who has lived in Starmer’s Holborn and St Pancras constituency since 2001, notes that Starmer is ‘the first British prime minister in electoral history to enter 10 Downing Street having seen his majority reduced’. Feinstein came second against him in 2024 with 7,312 votes (18.9 per cent). Starmer’s support was down by 17 percentage points, with fewer than half the votes he obtained in 2017.
Like Feinstein, Jamie Driscoll stood as an independent champion of ‘open, honest and accountable politics’ against the official Labour candidate. In Driscoll’s case, it was in the 2024 election for the new post of mayor of the North East. Driscoll, who was the North of Tyne mayor from 2019 to 2024 but barred from standing for Labour in the new North East authority, also came second, winning 126,652 votes (28.2 per cent) against Labour’s 185,051 (41.3 per cent).
Neither Driscoll nor Feinstein believes that electoral politics are sufficient. ‘We have to go beyond state power and organise social power,’ Driscoll insists. He and his team have registered a new political party, Majority, to work with local campaigns across the country as well as support candidates backed by their community rather than by big donors.
Feinstein is building the Camden Community Alliance ‘to support communities to organise and empower themselves so that, in the words of Acorn, the community union, “We can take what is ours”, whether by occupations, demonstrations, or, learning from South Africa, withholding payments, if negotiations fail.’
Work and community
Driscoll’s view is shaped by an acute awareness of how much has changed since the last century, when the Labour Party was formed to represent close-knit industrial communities in which workplace and community were one. ‘We don’t live in that world anymore. Political power and workplace power no longer map onto each other geographically,’ he says. The expansion of the welfare state has also meant that the central issues of politics – social care, health, education, housing and transport – are about user or consumer issues that map much more closely onto a geographical area. Thus, ‘Locality is the basis for social power in late stage capitalism.’
Similarly, Feinstein sees the Camden Community Alliance developing to a point where it both delivers change through pressure on the council and also by doing things for itself and over time contesting state power. ‘To develop capacity for that, we intend to ask Acorn and others to train community organisers, so that we are able to organise ourselves and take action as communities.’
‘If we just create another party, the people who are fed up with politics are going to think we’ve just got more of the same’
Majority is not ‘a political party that says here is our programme, join us’, according to Driscoll, but rather ‘works inside and with community groups’, only then asking community activists to be Majority candidates. Driscoll points to recent industrial struggles, like those of teachers, doctors and nurses, to say that their political line has been about the services they provide. The unity of political power, workplace power and community power is more readily realisable in the public sector context, he argues. With increased automation and artificial intelligence, ‘Unions will have to work with communities in order to maintain the demands that we are going to need to protect the share of wages.’ Driscoll suggests this is already happening and cites campaigns such as the RMT’s ‘Save Our Ticket Offices’, in which the union mobilised members of the public to save staff from redundancies.
Majority is ‘explicitly a democratic organisation’ with a political values system ‘underpinned by a commitment to human rights and honesty, openness and accountability in public life’. Driscoll claims that his experience of office ‘is that if you bring citizens together and provide them with the evidence, they will come up with policies that in our current public debate would be described as left wing but I think are common sense’.
Electoral challenges
Unlike in previous decades, any electoral challenge from the left in the North East has more than just Labour to contend with. The last election, and current polls, suggest Labour’s vote in the region is unstable. Some recent polls suggest that education secretary Bridget Phillipson could lose her seat to Reform.
Driscoll suggests that Starmer and co are elitist and contemptuous, which only fuels support for Reform. He insists there are effective ways to counter its appeal: ‘Farage seeks to demonise others; it’s the politics of hatred. You cannot fight hatred with hatred. We have to show there is a better way. We have to capture narratives of hope – this is where the facts come into it.’ For example, he continues: ‘When there are debates on the cost of housing refugees in hotels, we should respond with how much water companies are costing us.’
Crucial to Driscoll’s plans over the next year is that ‘elections must be for representatives who will be accountable to their community, not the party. This is especially important when councils have very little power and there’s a danger of creating a layer of activists who justify the actions of councils rather than creating radical change. The councillor should be a shop steward for the community, not a cheerleader for the council in the community.’
‘Locality is the basis for social power in late stage capitalism’
While aware of the limits of local elected office, Driscoll believes that Majority successes across Tyneside councils, especially Newcastle, would be ‘earth shattering’ for a region electorally monopolised by Labour. ’People will believe,’ he says.
Both Driscoll and Feinstein are involved in discussions about some form of national independent political organisation. At the same time, however, they and their teams are meeting directly to learn from each other’s local experience. They both favour a process built from the local, through horizontal connections between different local communities.
‘If we just create another party,’ warns Feinstein, ‘the increasing majority of people who are fed up with politics as we know it today, who stayed away from the polls during the election, who think “why did I even bother to vote, given that we’ve just got more of the same?”, are going to think that these are people who got kicked out of the Labour Party who want their own party. They’re involved in politics as usual. They’re all in it for themselves. Whereas if you build from the local, from the grassroots up, you actually are saying to people, and illustrating to people, “You’ve got to own this process.”’
