Reclaiming everyday power matters more than starting a new party

The National

23-07-2025

We were talking, of course, about Labour, the deepening void in British politics, about a country where public services are crumbling, where opposition feels hollow, and where the political space once occupied by hope seems to have disappeared.
It's not a cynical question. And it deserves more than a cynical answer. So I gave it some thought. And to be honest, I surprised myself. Because even though I agree with the premise – that Labour no longer offers a political home for many – I didn't feel excited. I didn't feel much at all.
And that feeling stayed with me. Not because I'm disengaged from politics, but because I've been trying to make sense of what a new party could be for. What it could meaningfully offer in the current landscape, not ideologically, but structurally.
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When the news broke of a new initiative involving Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, my reaction wasn't negative. But it wasn't hopeful either.
Oh. There's a new party in town. That's it.
There's a contradiction here. It's possible to agree that a political alternative is needed and still not feel particularly moved when one arrives. And the more I think about that contradiction, the more it seems revealing, not of the new party's flaws, but of a deeper problem in political life.
Because the real question may no longer be: Do we need a new party? It might be: What can people do? And more crucially: What do people feel they can do?
At this point, any honest reckoning has to contend with a widespread sense of powerlessness. Not apathy. Not disinterest. But the quiet despair that comes from not knowing where to begin, or what could possibly make a difference.
That's why Hilary Wainwright's recent piece in Red Pepper magazine felt so relieving to read. She writes about the left's 'fatal attraction to shortcuts' – the belief that if the right party, with the right leader and the right policies, comes along, transformation will follow.
But as she reminds readers, this logic has a long track record of disappointment. From Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party to Respect to Left Unity, new parties have emerged with high hopes, only to fade without leaving a lasting political infrastructure behind.
Wainwright doesn't argue against new formations. But she insists that the work must begin elsewhere: in the slow, patient construction of popular democratic power. In local initiatives, people's assemblies, and independent councillors building relationships of accountability not with a party headquarters, but with their neighbours.
That kind of politics isn't a shortcut. It's a long, sometimes frustrating path, but it might be the only one capable of lasting.
That perspective helped clarify my own. A new party isn't irrelevant. But in a context where people no longer believe their actions matter, where politics has become something external, alien, remote … it can't be the first step.
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I've started to realise there may be a thread running through much of what I've been writing in this newspaper over the past few years. Whether I've been looking at childcare, housing, or the slow degradation of the NHS, I keep circling the same question:
How do people reclaim a sense of power over their lives – real, collective, material?
What connects so many of these crises is the deep belief that nothing we do will change them. And that belief, I think, is one of neoliberalism's greatest successes.
Neoliberalism has often been described as a decades-long experiment in outsourcing. Services, care, governance: all handed over to markets, contractors, consultants. But it also outsourced something deeper – the sense of shared political responsibility.
The message was that someone else, an expert, an algorithm, a market force, would take care of it. And we citizens, would be seen, first and foremost, as consumers. And gradually, that logic seeped into our idea of politics itself.
Politics, too, came to feel like something best left to professionals. Not a shared, daily practice of negotiation and solidarity, but a technical domain of experts and spokespeople.
People didn't give up on politics. They were taught it wasn't theirs to do. And that teaching was reinforced everywhere; in the design of services, in political narratives, in the retreat of collective spaces.
We learned to see politics as something external; something you observe or vote in (a choice to be made, a bit like a marketplace actually), not something you build or change.
You can see this disempowerment very starkly in housing. Rents rise, quality falls, and entire developments go up that ordinary people will never live in. Homes become assets. What was once a public good becomes a private commodity.
And the experience of trying to access housing, like trying to find childcare, or dental care, or mental health support, becomes a kind of battle: exhausting, bureaucratic, humiliating.
That's disempowerment. Not as a vague feeling, but as a daily reality: paying more for worse, navigating systems that no longer serve, feeling that no matter how hard you try, it's always slipping further out of reach.
And over time, that doesn't just impact housing or health, it shapes how people see the world. It hollows out belief. It makes politics feel like something that happens elsewhere, in a different language, for other people.
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Some of the most meaningful political acts I've observed recently haven't taken place in formal spaces at all. They've unfolded in nurseries, where parents start questioning fee hikes and demand accountability. In blocks of flats, where neighbours create mutual aid systems. In conversations between mothers about birth trauma in overstretched NHS wards.
These are not isolated complaints. This is the work of building collective understanding, and sometimes, action.
This is where politics lives – not in manifestos, but in people's attempts to name what's happening to them, and to resist it, even in small, fragile ways. That's where power can start to grow again.
And if a political party is to matter, it will have to come from that, not speak down to it, or try to replace it.
Emancipation, autonomy, sovereignty; these are not abstract goals. They are needs, expressed through the daily grind of trying to live with dignity in a system that often treats people as expendable.
A new political project must respond to that hunger, not with slogans or personalities, but with structures that allow people to act together and be heard.
That is what Wainwright means, I think, when she says there are no shortcuts. And it's what I mean when I say: a party can't do it all.
A political party can support. It can amplify. It can defend. But it cannot substitute for the deeper, harder, slower work of rebuilding the very idea that politics belongs to us.
So when someone asks: 'Do we need a new party?' I no longer rush to answer.
I want to ask: What's already happening? Who's organising? Where do people still feel they have a voice?
Because maybe the real work is there – not in founding something new, but in noticing what already exists, and helping it grow.