Compass started out like many good organisations do – with a letter in the Guardian. It’s been a journey to find a new politics ever since. In the first 5 years of Compass we created a vision of a good society and acted as a hub for the democratic left within the Labour Party, agitating for it to become more radical. We won some concrete battles; stopping the 90 day detention without trial, halting the privatisation of Royal Mail and persuading the Government to levy a windfall tax on banker’s bonuses.
Having previously been just for Labour members, Compass members eventually decided that shared values and ideas were more important than party allegiances, and they voted to let people in from all parties or none, to ensure that no progressive voices were shut out from our movement. This is just one of the examples where our members have decided our course in a fundamental way.
Today we look to where the real energy and creativity is. We see emerging collaborative practice bubbling up in civil society, the social economy and in local government. Our task now is to join all this up, to amplify, aggregate and accelerate the desire and demand for participation we all want and all feel in our increasingly networked society.
Our members are driving this counter-cultural shift in our politics. They’re political pioneers and that’s why they’ve joined Compass. They have the vision to understand that the future can and must be negotiated and they’re here to do that work.
They’re not afraid of big ideas or thinking outside the box, they want to confront the challenges we face head on.
When we say the future will be negotiated we mean it. And we mean for it to start right here, with us. We are never apart from our members. We’re engaged in the work and the conversation together – they’re co-conspirators rather than passive consumers.
Their role isn’t just to stand to the side and pay money for professionals to solve all the problems. They are part of the change, they want to buy into a project and a vision that gives them a sense of hope, home and purpose.
“I keep supporting Compass today because it’s a refuge in our political environment…It’s the culture of Compass, it’s about asking difficult questions and acknowledging there will be differences, but actually those differences are a strength not a weakness.
It’s where I get my political sustenance from and it means a lot to me to be part of that community.”
– Clive Lewis MP, Norwich South
Compass Members and Local Organisers, including Clive Lewis at an event in Lewes in 2022.
That means being invited twice a month onto a live recording of our podcast It’s Bloody Complicated to bring their own questions to our guests – the widest range of voices in the progressive movement.
It’s Bloody Complicated has hosted international thinkers like Yanis Varoufakis and George Monbiot, UK politicians like Dawn Butler, Caroline Lucas, Lisa Nandy, and Andy Burnham, and organisers working on the ground near you.
Being a member means being at the heart of our local groups. It means access to our Slack Community with people from Surrey to Sheffield, Cambridgeshire to Cumbria, connecting on how to make change exactly where you are.
Our members are organisers – to support that we hold training and have dedicated support like training and office hours for members. The first Monday of the month we gather and share our take on the national picture, campaign updates, and hear from our members on the ground.
It means being part of our party groups – organising action against factionalism and spreading the word through the party structures to their members looking for a break from the gridlock of the old politics.
“What drew me to Compass is the fact that it’s cross-party and it’s also not a party.
I really wanted to see parties working together and we have people that are politicians, MPs, Trade Union leaders etc. and it’s quite level, there’s no big hierarchy, it’s quite an honest open space where people come together. It’s actually let’s find a solution to the problems that we have and let’s do it together.“
– Compass Member, Eliza
Click to find out more about what members are doing in LGs.
