Nick Plumb

@nickplumb.bsky.social

3182 Followers 821 Following

Director of Policy and Insight at @powertochange.org.uk Interests include: UK politics, trust, communities, localism, democratic reform, and inequality.

Modern community empowerment and social infrastructure building starts in Facebook groups, Signal and WhatsApp groups, Discord and Slack communities that fill the gap left by community centres, coffee mornings, and jumble sales. As documented in comedian Jayde Adams’ hilarious podcast, Welcome to the Neighbourhood, these groups include all kinds of life and opinions, from the extremely heartwarming to the extraordinarily petty and irritating, and have taken the place of all kinds of physical infrastructure, from noticeboards to street corners. Behind every local football team or running group or community garden there’s a WhatsApp conversation where real-world plans are made. In my South London neighbourhood, local forums are the places that get people along to community markets, fill empty shops, and unite people with nothing in common save their adoration of an adventurous local cat. They power an economy of favours, freecycling and recommendations – while also being home to plenty of moaning and challenging conversations about everything from ULEZ to flags. These forums are far from perfect – and there is another essay to be written about the economic and social impacts of Meta’s de facto monopoly on informal public communication channels – but they are places where people gather that are totally neglected in social policy. Local communities that band together to buy their local pub do so not only through meeting in person but via WhatsApp chats and crowdfunding websites. Empowering more communities does not need to be restricted to brick and mortar assets, it can start with active advocacy in these digital communities, and in creating opportunities that are accessible and realisable to people who want to do more than just chat on their phones but just don’t know how.
Party conferences can feel like a bubble, missing the voices of ordinary people with the ideas and experience of turning local pride into real change. Community businesses rebuild pride in place, strengthen local economies, and restore public trust. That’s why we’re attending Labour Conference this year with seven community business leaders – experts working on the ground to tackle the big issues of our time. We want their voices to be heard loud and clear at Labour Conference this year.
To put it simply, Blue Labour’s new programme is in danger of expanding an administrative state and a professional managerial class that Blue Labour openly disparages. This, then, is a contradiction, as well as a departure from the earlier approach taken by Blue Labour with its emphasis on more direct forms of working-class control of assets and firms.
Social atrophy in the brain is due to one of our most remarkable cognitive qualities: neuroplasticity, the way our brains adapt and reshape themselves. Neuroplasticity is a part of what allows for the incredible malleability and potential of human beings. Yet humans are not infinitely malleable. And do worse when socially isolated, losing their skills and abilities and spending more time consumed by fear and worry. To be meaningfully plastic – that is, transformable and capable of self-shaping – we need one another. We need a shared social and political life. In the company of others, we extend our brains and our minds and selves better than we ever could if we were mostly alone. And only through this kind of shared life can we also begin to do the work of improving the world.
This points to an important insight, not to mention a strategy for a better life. We should think of social life as something similar to physical exercise: an activity that we often don’t feel like doing even though a baseline is good for us. As we do more of it, however, it will also become less exhausting and less painful. People may still find different levels of social interaction desirable or even beneficial; but everyone’s baseline for health is likely higher than they expect. This approach sees social life as an intentional practice of self-shaping rather than something that comes easy from the start or always feels fun. We protect and expand our brains and ourselves through interacting with other people, even if it is exhausting at times. Knowing this can help to counter certain glorifications of “introversion” as in some way more intellectual or refined. It can help challenge harmful aspects of individualism (the belief that one is an island, or that others are naturally competitors) that attend some (not all) conceptions of an “introverted” life. Which is not to deny there are more introverted people with their own needs—rather, it is to decouple introversion from other more dubious assumptions and associations. Recognizing that all people need regular social contact to thrive also makes clear the slippery cognitive danger of the homebound, delivery-oriented, frictionless world that is increasingly made possible through new technologies and social norms. What is needed in this framework is likely a world of social infrastructure, of design that makes it not only easy but largely necessary to regularly interact with others. Finally, thinking about social atrophy fruitfully reorients us to collective questions of mental illness and wellbeing. Some psychological problems cannot, by their nature, be understood outside of the person’s social context. Social atrophy cannot be treated solely with individual-oriented solutions, like a combination of medicati…
A photo of the green Star and Shadow cinema, taken from across the road, with four people stood out front.
The loss of community spaces like the welfares has at least three significant and interrelated effects on social life: the displacement of politics, an intensifying sense of decline, and the radical domestication of existence. When I was speaking to mining families in Mansfield over the course of my research, one ex-miner explained to me that his social and political world had become narrower and more home-bound over time. Initially involved in politics via his union and in community life through his football team, based at the welfare around the corner, he had become disillusioned with his representatives and slowly retreated into the private sphere. “You can probably knock on that door for so long. And then if nobody answers that door, you think, why, why bother? And so I think that’s what some people get to a point. You know, and for us, I think, as long as our families are okay… That’s, that’s our main thing.” His wife nodded emphatically: “And I think everybody’s in that frame of mind now.”
Third, we shouldn’t underestimate their impact on politics and democracy. A 1920s survey showed that social club members accounted for 178 Members of Parliament. At a more local level, members of social clubs were a common feature of different tiers of local government at this peak. At Power to Change, we are researching the decline in involvement in all manner of local, civil society organisations and how this interacts with trust in politics and democracy, and uncovering significant interplay between the two things. We should see saving our nation’s social clubs as part of this bigger fight to bolster our democracy.
The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill will introduce a requirement on all local authorities, in England, to establish effective neighbourhood governance. The main goal of neighbourhood governance is to move decision-making closer to residents, so decisions are made by people who understand local needs. Additionally, developing neighbourhood-based approaches will provide opportunities to organise public services to meet local needs better. The details of the obligations on local authorities will be set out in regulations that will be made after the Bill is in force. Before those regulations are made, government will be undertaking a review as to the best way to achieve the aims including speaking to the sector to ensure they have the opportunity to contribute and share existing good practice. Local authorities can still set up town and parish councils, and town and parish councils which exist now can continue. Our guidance will say how neighbourhood governance structures can work well with town and parish councils. Town and parish councils are independent of local authorities. We want to make sure that all local authorities have a way of working with people in their neighbourhoods, so they are not relying on town and parish councils to do it.
Though Labour may not want to admit it, there is a future in which Farage and Tice romp to victory in 2029. Miliband’s push for a “collective energy future”, insiders tell me, is intended to future-proof net zero from Reform-led attempts to dismantle it. This is because community energy projects, as opposed to those led by the public and private sectors, are two times less likely to go bust within their first five years of operation. If Reform takes power in 2029 these projects will have got off the ground, ending the UK’s reliance on imported natural gas, and therefore lowering energy bills. If these projects deliver the benefits Miliband says they will (lower bills, more jobs, increased prosperity), it will make little to no sense for Reform to undo them. That’s the logic, anyway.
Third, our strategy would want to give communities more power. We could strengthen existing community rights, as Power to Change and others have recommended. We could also adopt the Innovation Unit’s idea of a ‘right to innovate’. This gives councils a way to request that a rule be suspended so that they can experiment. Maybe we could go further than this and adopt a more general principle of ‘seek forgiveness, not permission.’ This would mean reclassifying certain rules as breakable if a council or keystone charity is confident they could later justify having done so. There would be guidance in the form of principles, interpreted through case law. The aim would be to relax the grip of the centre on innovators at the edges.
Reform UK’s local election success has brought to the fore the populist discontent that threatens even Labour’s landslide majority. More in Common’s Luke Tryl recently described focus groups where “the disillusionment was the worst I’ve heard, in every group it was anger, despondency or misery about the state of Britain that doesn’t feel sustainable.” Number 10 know they need a response to this; one that closes the gap between politics and people, and builds a collective sense of agency, where we feel we can tackle the challenges our country faces together. The good news is we have precisely this agenda, rooted in Labour’s Fabian tradition and fleshed out in the policy thinking and practical experimentation of the last decade and a half. It’s time for the left to move it from the margins to the mainstream as the core means of achieving its mission in 2025 and beyond.
"It’s not just farmers who are aggrieved by Labour. Nigel Farage’s Reform has led several opinion polls and may win the Runcorn and Helsby by-election on 1 May (“I’m not going to write that one off even at this stage,” Reed told me). But rather than denouncing Farage as a Thatcherite or a Putin sympathiser – as Labour often does – Reed offered a more reflective perspective. “Reform have been doing better as people’s trust in politics has been broken; they are a symptom of that… This government has to rebuild that broken trust and until there are visible proof points of change, I don’t think people will be prepared to give that trust back.” As our conversation ended, Reed recalled his recent visit to Windermere where he vowed to end the sewage discharges that have turned the lake green. “This beautiful, iconic lake will once again be pristine and full of fish… It’s by focusing on the politics of place that we can start to rebuild trust and address the challenge from the extremes.”
We believe a supercharging of the practical beauty and power of co-operative, mutual and community-based economic growth is a vital step in rebuilding for the age of uncertainty we have entered. Stronger local co-operative economies mean that, when economic shocks hit, communities are better prepared, with more control and autonomy over their local place and their local economy. And putting the co-operative model at the centre of our drive for economic growth ensures that growth never feels like a distant, unrelatable concept for working people, but something they can genuinely see and feel in their community.