An Activist

Some years back I was awarded a DPhil for an original contribution to knowledge based on two pieces of published work written some twenty years earlier. The first revealed a structure for presenting a defence of nurses accused of wrongdoing. The second revealed a structure for engaging public-sector workers in discussion around a major shift in government policy. Though very different in form, they shared something important. Both worked.

That may seem an unremarkable observation until we ask why. In the tribunal cases there was a recognised hierarchy. Everyone understood the authority of the process. Everyone understood the rules of evidence. Everyone knew their role. Disagreement could be intense but it took place within a structure capable of containing it. Power was present. It always is. Yet it was channelled through procedures that were accepted by all participants. The structure held.

The second case was very different. There were no tribunals and no formal hierarchy. Instead there emerged a process that ultimately involved more than 650,000 public sector workers attempting to make sense of a significant change in government policy. The scale was immense. Yet the same underlying conditions were present. People recognised each other as participants in a shared activity. They listened not simply because they agreed but because they understood themselves to be engaged in a common process. Opinions changed. Consensus emerged. Not because someone won an argument but because people persuaded each other through participation. The structure held.

Looking back, I can see that both situations rested upon assumptions that at the time I barely noticed. Argument was meaningful. Persuasion was possible. Norms were broadly shared. Participants recognised each other’s legitimacy. Power existed but remained largely contained within structures accepted by those involved.

At the time I thought my work was about tribunals and consultation processes. In retrospect it was about something else. It was about conditions. Throughout my career I have repeatedly encountered the same pattern. Before any intervention can succeed there is a prior question that must be answered. Before teaching, facilitating, negotiating, organizing, campaigning, or persuading, we must first understand the environment within which those activities will take place. Methods do not exist in isolation. They depend upon conditions.

I learned this lesson most painfully through work that I later described as Tackling Racism. Those experiences brought me into rooms where many of the assumptions I took for granted were absent. The expectation that people would listen. The expectation that they would recognise the legitimacy of others. The expectation that participation itself carried obligations. The expectation that the structure mattered. In some of those rooms, certain participants quickly adopted a familiar role. They sought strategic seating locations; small groups assembled at entrances and exits, while others stood lining the walls of the hall where the meeting was held. Through rehearsed interventions and frequent interruptions that suck the oxygen out of a space, it was the physical refusal to yield even an inch of the table to anyone else.

These were not always misunderstandings arising from distance or lack of knowledge. Many of us have experience of prejudice that can be challenged through contact conversation and shared experience. Important work has been achieved in precisely that way. This was different. The behaviour was often intentional. Attempts to engage became opportunities for further abuse. The same patterns could be observed both inside and outside the room. The structure that was intended to facilitate discussion became something to be exploited rather than respected.

I responded as many practitioners would. I searched for a better method. A better structure. A better intervention. A better argument. Years of experience had taught me that progress often emerges through participation. Surely there must be a way to create the right conditions. Yet the more I tried the more apparent a different lesson became. The problem was not the quality of the intervention. The problem was my diagnosis of the environment. I was applying methods developed under one set of conditions to a situation in which those conditions did not exist. No amount of improvement could resolve that mismatch.

Slowly and reluctantly, I came to understand something that now seems obvious. The success of any method depends less on the method itself than on the conditions within which it is applied. The first task is therefore not intervention. The first task is diagnosis. What structures exist? What norms are shared? How is power exercised? What assumptions are operating? What incentives are present? What are participants actually trying to achieve?

Only then can we begin to understand which actions might prove effective. When the diagnosis reveals that the foundational conditions for dialogue are entirely absent, the answer is rarely to refine our arguments. Instead, the task must shift from facilitation to power-building, using organizing, pressure, and direct action to reshape the environment until the necessary conditions are forced into existence.”
This lesson extends far beyond tribunals, consultation exercises, or anti-racist work. Activists learn techniques. Organisers learn strategies. Facilitators learn processes. Teachers learn methods. All of these have value.

But none exist independently of the conditions in which they are deployed. A skilled practitioner does not begin by selecting a tool. A skilled practitioner begins by diagnosing the environment. That may be the most important lesson my career has taught me. Argument is not a universal tool. Nor is facilitation. Nor consultation. Nor education. Nor participation itself. Each depends upon conditions that cannot be assumed. Remove those conditions and the question is no longer whether a method has failed.

The question is whether the conditions for its existence were ever present at all.

People gather in rooms for all kinds of reasons – to learn, to organize, to make sense of their own experience. I’ve spent years in those rooms. Union classrooms, university seminars, community meetings. Difference furniture, same atmosphere; people arriving with the weight of work, family, responsibility and the quite knowledge that comes from having lived a life.

What always struck me was the shift that happened when the conversation turned towards public life. Confidence that felt natural in one part of life suddenly hesitated in another. Politics seemed to belong “elsewhere”. Conducted by people who spoke a different language, lived in a different world, and were somehow better equipped to interpret it.

No one said this outright. It was more like a background hum: what I know doesn’t quite count here.

But then something small would happen. Someone would describe a dispute at work. Someone else would recognize it instantly. A frustration in one town would echo a frustration in another. What felt private would reveal itself as part of a pattern.

Nothing dramatic, no revelation. Just recognition – and with it, a kind of confidence that doesn’t arrive through instruction, but through companionship. We hear our own experience differently when someone else nods.

Over time I began paying attention no only to what people said, but to the assumptions beneath the saying. The quiet architecture that makes certain arguments feel natural before they’re even spoken.

One assumption imagines public life as something done for people. Expertise is concentrated. Decisions are delegated. Responsibility is entrusted upwards. The public grants authority, waits, and judges.

Another imagines public life as something done with people. Judgement is widely distributed. Experience is not incidental but essential. The public is not an audience but a participant.

Most institutions carry both tendencies. Most of us work within them. But once you notice the distinction, it appears everywhere – in debates about leadership, democracy, community, representation, consultation, participation. Arguments that seem to be about one thing, often turn quietly on this deeper question.

Of all the divides that shape our politics, perhaps the most consequential is not left versus right, or idealism versus pragmatism, but the way we imagine the public itself: As a body capable of acting. Or as a body waiting to be acted upon. Everything else follows.