Someone Has To

Across more than a hundred interviews with working-class activists in Britain, a pattern appears with such consistency that it constitutes a finding: political commitment begins not with ideology but with a concrete, local, usually personal injustice - and what happens next depends entirely on whether anyone shows up.

George Telford joined the union the week after a man died on his site. He was twenty-two. The man was a subcontract groundworker, struck by plant. The investigation that followed - the HSE inquiry, the company’s own process - was not primarily about understanding what had happened in order to prevent it happening again. It was primarily about managing the legal and insurance exposure. Telford watched that process close up, from inside the site and then from inside the subsequent weeks of institutional management.

GT: The death was predictable in the sense that the conditions that produced it - the communication failures across the subcontract chain, the safety culture in that particular company, the management pressure to keep the programme - were all knowable. Someone should have known and acted. No one did. The union is the structure that forces someone to act.

Not: the union is the expression of class consciousness, or the instrument of socialist transformation, or the vanguard of the working class. The union is the structure that forces someone to act when something wrong is happening to people who would otherwise have no recourse. This is Telford’s account of what he joined and why he joined it. It is also, replicated in different registers and different sectors across the interviews gathered for this book, the account of how political commitment begins for working-class people in Britain - not from ideology, not from reading, not from recruitment into an organisation with a programme, but from the concrete experience of something happening that is wrong and the realisation that it will not stop unless someone does something about it.

Tunde Ajayi’s entry point was a mate who was injured on the picking floor of the Amazon fulfilment centre in Nottingham at the age of twenty. Musculoskeletal injury, back. Six weeks off work. When he came back, he was at risk of not hitting the productivity metrics because he could not physically move at the speed the algorithm required. Management was making noises about performance management - the formal initiation of a disciplinary process that, pursued to its conclusion, would end in dismissal. Ajayi went with him to the HR meeting.

TA: I’d read the employment rights guidance - I’d been looking things up because I was curious - and I knew he had more protection than they were pretending he had. We got through it. And I thought: I need to know more. And the more I knew, the more I needed to do.

He has been in that warehouse for ten years. He has been organising in it for most of those ten years. He is a GMB shop steward and has spent the better part of a decade building the case for union recognition in a company that has contested every step of the recognition process through every available legal mechanism. The political commitment that drives all of this - the ten years of sustained organising in conditions that are actively hostile to organising - began not with an analysis of Amazon’s labour practices or the logistics sector’s strategic importance to capital. It began with a mate who hurt his back and needed someone to go with him to HR.

The pattern

Across these interviews, the pattern appears with a consistency that is striking precisely because the people exhibiting it would not necessarily recognise it as a pattern. They experience their entry into political life as particular and personal - this person, this situation, this specific wrong. But the structure of the accounts is almost identical across different sectors, cities, generations, and political tendencies.

Noah Carter was seventeen and still in school when a friend’s father lost his job. The man had worked in a supermarket for fourteen years. His section was eliminated in a restructuring and he was made redundant in a way that felt wrong, in a way that nobody around him knew what to do about. Carter started looking into employment rights - not because he was politically active or union-connected, but because he wanted to know whether what happened was legal. ‘I found out it was, technically. And I thought: if it’s legal and it’s wrong, something needs to change. And it doesn’t change itself. That’s how it started.’

Ayo Ogunleye was seventeen, in sixth form in Felix Moor, when there was a campaign around a youth centre in the neighbourhood that was threatened with closure - an austerity cut, one of thousands across the country in the early 2010s. He and a group of friends got involved in the campaign. It eventually saved the centre. One realisation that came from that campaign has, in his account, never left him: ‘Oh, this is what you can do. You can fight back.’

Mina Chen was in her first year at Leeds University, working in the campus café, when a colleague - a woman who had been there for twelve years - was being managed out on dubious grounds after she had asked about sick pay. Chen knew enough from her father’s world - the way academic institutions work, the way HR processes operate, the levers that exist within institutional bureaucracies - to know that what was happening to her colleague was wrong, and to know how to challenge it. ‘I did, with her. And it worked. And I thought: this knowledge I have - about how institutions work - is usable here. That’s where it started.’

Harpreet Singh became a union rep at twenty-four because nobody else wanted to do it. He had joined UNISON when he started his first nursing job because that is what people in his family did - you joined the union. Within two years he was a rep, ‘because no one else wanted to do it and I couldn’t watch what was happening to my colleagues without doing something about it. That’s the origin story. Not ideological conviction, though the conviction developed. Just: someone has to.’

Someone has to. This is the most common formulation across the accounts - not always in these words, always in this spirit. The political commitment is not primarily expressive (I believe in socialism and this is what socialists do), not primarily identitarian (this is what working-class people do), not primarily strategic (this sector is important for left politics and I have been placed here to organise it). It is moral and practical: something wrong is happening, it will not stop unless someone acts, and someone has therefore to be me.

What triggers it

The triggering events cluster around three kinds of experience, each producing the same basic structure of response.

The first is witness: seeing something happen to someone you know. Ajayi with his injured mate. Carter with his friend’s father. Singh watching his colleagues navigate HR processes without the support and knowledge they needed. Alicia Brown watching her mother - a nurse for thirty years, someone whose entire working life was given to the institution she worked in - face a workplace dispute with all the specific disadvantages of a band-five worker against the trust she had given her career to. ‘I had the legal knowledge to help her and could see exactly the mechanisms she was running up against. That experience made the abstract law concrete for me and I don’t think I’ve lost that concreteness since.’ The witness is not passive. It produces the impulse to act, and the question that follows immediately is: what can I actually do?

The second is being directly subjected to the wrong oneself. Dwayne Richards being stopped on Coldharbour Lane, again and again and again, for no reason other than being a young Black man in Brixton. ‘I’ve lost count of how many times.’ The repeated subjection to a power that should not have that authority, performing the compliance that survival requires - swallowing the rage, staying calm, making the officer comfortable - and the political formation that accumulates from that performance over years. Reece Shaw seeing what was being done to the apprentices he started with - ‘some of them being taken advantage of in ways that were quite clear once you knew what to look for’ - and the anger that knowing what to look for produces. Darren Cole learning the pick rate and feeling in his own body, over months and years, what the metric does to the people subjected to it.

The third is recognising the gap between what an institution claims and what it delivers. Carter discovering that what happened to his friend’s father was technically legal. Jade Okafor watching bail conditions applied in ways that were not neutral across class and race lines, that gave the lie to the formal equality the legal system asserts about itself. Chloe Bennett fighting a deposit dispute with her first student landlord through every official channel - the university, the council, the courts - and discovering at each stage that the channel was designed to manage the conflict without resolving the underlying power difference.

CB: These institutions are not designed to help me. They’re designed to manage the conflict without resolving the underlying power difference. And the anarchist conclusion - that the power has to be built between the students themselves, not granted by institutions - that came from the experience, not from Kropotkin.

The politics follows directly from the experience in each case. It does not require a prior theoretical formation to become available. It requires only that the experience be present and that someone is there to think through it with - to name what is happening, to explain what options exist, to make the connection between the individual situation and the broader structure that produced it.

The role of presence

This last point is where the pattern of individual political formation connects to the larger questions about left politics that run through this book. Most of the people interviewed here became politically active not because a political organisation recruited them but because someone was present at the moment when the wrong was happening - someone who had knowledge they could share, who knew something about what the options were, who was willing to show up.

Telford’s week of thinking after the death on his site needed someone to make the union a legible option - the union rep who was visible on the site before the crisis arrived, who had built the relationships that meant the workers knew they could call. Ajayi going to the HR meeting with his mate needed the prior knowledge that employment rights existed and could be exercised, even if that knowledge came from his own independent reading rather than from an organisation. Carter looking into employment rights needed some prior introduction - however indirect - to the idea that the legal framework could be used rather than simply being done to you.

What the left has most consistently failed to understand is that political formation in working-class communities is not primarily a matter of ideology or communication. It is a matter of presence. The organisation that is present at the moment of the wrong - that has a rep in the workplace, a contact on the estate, a network that can be called when the situation becomes live - is the organisation that can offer a framework for the anger that the wrong produces. The organisation that arrives afterward with a leaflet and a meeting invite is not.

Hannah Doyle’s anti-eviction work in Liverpool makes this explicit as practice. The bailiff watch - showing up at the property before the bailiff arrives, being there when the tenant is most alone and most afraid - is not a tactic adopted primarily because it is strategically efficient, though it often is. It is a tactic adopted because presence itself is the politics.

HD: The presence is the thing. The tenant is not alone. That has practical legal and logistical effects. It also has a human effect - I’ve seen what it does to someone to have people there on the worst day. That matters too.

That matters too. The human effect of not being alone on the worst day - the bailiff in the hall, the bin bags by the door, the children - is not separable from the strategic effect. It matters to the person in that hall. And it is also, in Doyle’s account, what builds the political relationship that makes everything else possible. The community that shows up for each other is the community that can organise together. The showing up comes first.

What ideology does and doesn’t do

None of this is an argument against theoretical formation. Several of the people in these interviews are sophisticated analysts who draw on Marxist frameworks, labour history, legal knowledge, and feminist theory to develop their organising strategies. But the interviews are consistent in the role they assign to that theoretical formation: it comes second, as a framework for what experience has already taught, not first as a precondition for political action.

Ajayi discovered Marx after years of warehouse organising and found recognition rather than revelation. Doyle’s politics came from two cultural transmissions - the Irish republican tradition her mother carried from Derry and the Liverpool working-class stubbornness of her father’s family - neither formal ideology, both providing political orientation before any theoretical formation arrived. Farah Khan, who runs a mutual aid network in Lozells, Birmingham, arrived at Kropotkin after years of doing mutual aid. ‘I got to the material analysis second. I started from: what are communities actually doing for each other, and why does the state and the market undermine that?’

The implication for the left is direct and uncomfortable. The model of ideological recruitment - find people sympathetic to socialist politics and bring them into organisations where they develop their analysis - is not wrong. But it is partial. It misses the much larger population of people who have already developed sophisticated practical analyses of their own situations, who have already acted on those analyses in specific and concrete ways, and who what they need from the left is not theoretical development but organisational infrastructure: the union rep available in the moment, the housing organiser on the estate, the legal contact who can be called when the situation becomes urgent.

RS: The best organising in the construction trades happens at the workplace - at the gate in the morning, in the welfare cabin, on the tools. The union meeting in a community centre doesn’t reach the lads I work with. Getting into the workplaces, building the relationships there, showing up in the spaces where working class people actually are - that’s the organising that works.

Showing up in the spaces where working-class people actually are. Not arriving with a programme and waiting for people to come to it. Not communicating better to an audience that does not feel addressed. Showing up: at the gate, at the welfare cabin, at the property where the bailiff is due at seven in the morning. The political formation that follows from that showing up is not guaranteed and not automatic. It depends on what is available when the person who has just experienced the wrong reaches for something to do about it. But it is more reliably generated by presence than by anything else the left has tried. Someone has to be there. The people in these essays others decided that someone had to be them.