I have spent much of my life in places where people gather to learn something about their own capacities. In union education, these places were often practical rooms: the kind with mismatched chairs, a kettle in the corner, and a noticeboard that told you more about the community than any textbook could. In universities, the rooms were different, cleaner, more formal, but the conversations were not.
In some ways, the contrast reflected a wider Labour story. Many of us arrived in higher education through institutions that no longer quite fit contemporary assumptions about class and opportunity: grammar schools, technical colleges, the older routes into the red-brick universities. We often found ourselves moving between worlds. The distance between a union branch meeting and a university seminar was real enough, but so too was the continuity.
In both settings, people arrived carrying the weight of their own experience, and the sense that politics was something happening elsewhere. What struck me, again and again, was how deeply people’s political instincts were shaped by the conditions of their everyday lives. Confidence, in this context, was not a personal trait but a social one. It grew when people recognised their own stories in the stories of others. It faltered when they felt isolated, or when the language of politics seemed designed to exclude them.
In union classrooms, confidence emerged through shared accounts of work, of struggle, of small victories. In universities, it emerged when students realised that theory was not a distant abstraction but a way of naming what they already knew. Academic language, at its best, did not replace lived experience. It gave people another way of understanding it.
This kind of confidence is fragile, because it depends on recognition. And recognition is not evenly distributed. Many people have been taught, consistently if not deliberately, that their own judgement is provisional, that political understanding belongs to others. They know they are capable in their own worlds, but they doubt their capacity in the public world. Politics becomes something like a specialised craft, requiring a particular tone, a particular vocabulary, and a particular distance from ordinary life.
When people feel this distance, they tend to choose the safer path. They look for leaders who promise to carry the burden for them. This is not apathy; it is a shared disposition, a structure of feeling shaped by decades of political centralisation, economic insecurity, and cultural devaluation. It is a way of managing uncertainty.
This structure of feeling shapes political parties as much as any formal rulebook. It shapes leadership contests, internal debates, and the rhythms of party life. And it shapes the Labour Party especially, because Labour has always contained two traditions: one that speaks of representation, and one that speaks of participation. The first says, We will act for you. The second says, We will act with you. These are not merely organisational differences; they are differences in how people imagine their own place in public life.
In recent years, the representative tradition has been dominant. The party’s leadership has become more centralised, more managerial, more concerned with the appearance of control. This is often described as pragmatism, though the word has come to mean little more than the avoidance of risk. Pragmatism, in this sense, is less a method than a mood: a way of narrowing the field of possible futures until only the safest one remains. From a distance, this looks like stability. From close up, it looks like a system designed to minimise the number of people who need to feel confident. Decisions are made elsewhere; messages are crafted elsewhere; responsibility is located elsewhere. The public is invited to approve, not to participate.
The participatory tradition struggles in this environment. It asks people to trust their own judgement in a culture that has taught them not to. It asks them to speak in a language that has often been used to silence them. It asks them to believe that collective action can achieve what individual leadership promises to deliver more efficiently. And it asks them to recognise themselves in a political world that rarely reflects their experience.
Yet there are counter-currents to the dominant trends of recent decades. One aspect of Andy Burnham’s approach in Greater Manchester, for example, treats the local community not as a symbolic presence but as a structural actor: shaping services, influencing investment, and providing accountability. The community is not simply invited to comment; participation is built into the structure itself.
That expectation is confidence-building. It tells people that their judgement is not provisional but necessary. In Raymond Williams’s terms, this is a different structure of feeling: the experience of being inside the machinery of decision-making rather than adjacent to it. Each time a community decision produces a visible outcome, confidence accumulates. Each time accountability is exercised locally, the sense of agency deepens. This is not consultation; it is culture. And it is precisely the kind of culture in which participatory politics can take root. The deeper difficulty, then, is not organisational. It is cultural.
Participatory politics depends on a shared confidence, a sense that people can act together, and that their action matters. Centralised politics depends on a different confidence, a belief that someone else can act on their behalf. When the second belief is stronger, the first cannot easily take root.
And so the party continues to move between these two traditions, without fully acknowledging the cultural conditions that shape them. But if one pays attention, in union classrooms, in community meetings, in the quieter corners of university life, the pattern becomes clear. The real divide in Labour is not between left and right, nor between pragmatists and idealists. It is between two ways of imagining the public: as a body capable of acting, or as a body waiting to be acted upon. Everything else follows from that.
David Marshall
Nottingham