Collective’s Sean Halsall: ‘we’ll only get a mass party of the left by getting off our arses and doing things’

At the launch party of Southport Community Independents (SCI) on 1 March, the Canary caught up with the group’s leader Sean Halsall, who has the backing of both Collective and Assemble. And he told us:

I believe there will be a mass party of the left – whether that is an umbrella organisation that shelters all these small community independent groups that can pivot and react quickly to the needs in their community, or if that is a mass party of the left.

I think we only get that, though, by getting off our arses and doing things.

Collective is aiming to “drive the formation of a new, mass-membership political party of the left”, while Assemble is focusing on putting ordinary people at the heart of politics via local assemblies. SCI is just one of numerous locally-rooted and locally-focused groups that could eventually become the constituent parts of a new national party of the left.

Sean Halsall: trusting and listening to local people is essential

Speaking about why “up and down the country, these independent groupings are springing up”, Sean Halsall suggested its because national parties have simply let people down too often:

There’s just been a dramatic failure of actually addressing people’s needs. We’re not speaking to people anymore, and not listening, which I think is the most important thing. No one’s listening to the electorate.

And rather than sitting around waiting for people in London to form another centralised organisation, community activists around the country are getting on with local organising themselves. Halsall stressed that:

I think too much on the left we sit around, form a committee, and spend six years discussing something, rather than just going out and doing it… Join local activists, and do it yourselves!

At the launch party, the attendees participated in an assembly, highlighting the issues most important to them. And Halsall highlighted the importance of listening to members of the community and using their words to create a local democratic mandate:

This is about building something that speaks for the community, from the community. And… I’m not gonna put myself in the same vein as Keir Starmer and tear up what these people tell me that they want. It’s about delivering for the people who live here.

He added:

This isn’t about left versus right. It’s about right versus wrong. And it’s about top versus bottom, and about challenging that status quo in politics and giving people a voice. I trust the people of this country to make rational decisions when you give them the proper information they need.

Starmer only leads us to division and authoritarianism. But communities can prevent that.

Halsall also highlighted why building democratic participation locally matters at a time when Keir Starmer’s Labour government is simply pushing the country into further division and authoritarianism. The promising level of local participation at the launch party, he said:

speaks to even how far we’ve come away from democratic structures in a year. With Keir Starmer being elected, people probably falsely had hope that things would change. But we’ve just seen anti-democratic, authoritarian stuff from him. We’ve seen the ripping up of his pledges that he made when he became leader, a manifesto built on sand – there’s nothing in there that’s tangible.

At the same time, he criticised the Labour Party government for pandering to the far right, insisting:

If you wanna try and win an election and you’re parroting far-right sentiment, people are gonna trust the far right with that – if you allow the battleground to become their battleground, you can’t win on that…

There’s not a person in this country who’s benefited from however many thousands of people we’ve deported. What we would benefit from is a functioning healthcare system, schools that aren’t crumbling at the seams, and people not having to rely on foodbanks.

Featured image supplied