The idea of a government-backed community organizing initiative was first mooted in the run up to the general election. At the beginning of April 2010, days after launching the idea of the ‘Big Society’ as a central plank of the Conservatives’ general election campaign, David Cameron visited the offices of London Citizens, an affiliate of Citizens UK, which over almost two decades has pioneered community organizing in the United Kingdom following the methods of Saul Alinsky. A month later, three days before the general election, Cameron together with Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg spoke at an assembly at Westminster Central Hall organized by Citizens UK and attended by over 2500 of its members. In
what became known as the unofficial ‘Fourth Debate’ covered by all of the major TV networks, Cameron spoke passionately about the work of Citizens UK and community organizing as representing a prime example of the Big Society in action. Given the track record of Citizens UK and in particular the work of its main affiliate London Citizens, it was widely expected that the organization would secure the government contract to 128 Paul Bunyan by guest on January 23, 2016 from train the new generation of community organizers. In the event, Citizens UK lost out to a consortium headed by Locality, a new organization formed by the merger of the Development Trusts Association and Bassac, the umbrella body for community organizations, which draws more upon the ideas of the Brazilian educationalist Paolo Freire. It is beyond the scope and remit of this paper to look at the relative merits of an Alinskyan versus a Freirian perspective or to speculate about the politics of the tendering process. Notwithstanding the irony of two radical protagonists being cited in a government tender in the first place, what can be said,however, is that over the course of the tendering process and since the decision was made about the organization deemed best equipped to spearhead the community organizing initiative, there would appear to have been a significant shift in emphasis in terms of the style and approach that is to be adopted. This, as will be argued in the final section of the paper, is potentially problematic in terms of the development of an agonistic community organizing approach which is overtly political and focuses on changing existing relations of power at a local and broader level, as the central issue.