Michael, aged nine, had just come back from a meeting with the bosses of London City Airport.
“We told them about how many hours and different jobs our parents had to work to make a living, and how tired and stressed they were,” he told me. “And how if they paid them fairly, we could see them again, and have hot meals and birthday presents.”
It was one of the first times I’d seen TELCO (The East London Citizens Organisation) in action. Confronted by the children from the local Catholic primary school, St Antony’s, City Airport agreed to become a Living Wage employer – meaning a £1,500-a-year pay rise for contractors, including cleaners and security staff.
I am thinking about Michael and his school friends today, the day the memorial of Citizens UK founder Neil Jameson takes place.
It’s rare for someone to have changed so many lives, but Neil was a rare person – and Michael’s is one of the lives he changed.
Neil died from cancer aged 76 in April. His extraordinary legacy includes everything from the Living Wage Foundation which has since accredited over 13,000 employers, to Citizens House, an 11-home permanently affordable housing project in Lewisham.
He took on everything from opponents to a lard factory in Canning Town to pay-day lenders, and the Government over child refugees.
He didn’t do this alone, but by harnessing community power through Citizens UK – the people-centred movement of 550 civic organisations he founded.
He was, as Matthew Bolton, the current executive director of Citizens UK, says, “a visionary who offered communities a method for listening, building power and public action, which in turn strengthened relationships across civil society and made our democracy stronger.”
Born to a working-class family in Tynemouth, North Tyneside, the son of two Sunday school teachers, Neil became convinced of the power of community organising after winning a prestigious Churchill scholarship in the 80s.
His studies led him to Chicago and the legacy of activist Saul Alinksy – whose radical work as an organiser also inspired a young Barack Obama. Returning to the UK, he began to build Citizens UK – work he described as “reweaving the fabric of society”.
When Nathan Chan joined St Anthony’s as a teacher, Citizens UK were already organising in the local community. A survey of school students highlighted brutally low wages as a blight on the lives of local families.
Nathan, who led the school choir, co-wrote a song with his pupils called “Realise, Wake Up, Pay Up” that went viral. City Airport agreed to meet the kids.
“A choir is a good model for community organising,” Nathan, 37, says. “Nobody acts alone. You are literally a voice for the voiceless.”
He laughs. “It was pretty surreal going to London City Airport with a bunch of nine-year-olds to talk about wages. As a primary school teacher that’s not a normal day. But it feels like something tangible, getting our children involved in this work. It puts them at the top table with the decision makers. They get to redesign the world that they live in.”
Neil’s legacy is felt in tens of thousands of pay packets across the UK thanks to the Living Wage campaign lifting many thousands out of poverty.
In Lewisham, South East London, it’s cemented in bricks and mortar. Citizens House has transformed an area of lock-ups into 11 sustainable homes built by the capital’s first community land trust.
“My parents were Windrush generation,” says Janet Emmanuel, a local assistant head and Citizens leader. “People didn’t want to rent to them so there was overcrowding, unfit housing. They couldn’t get mortgages.
“We’ve come full circle. We are facing a situation where teachers are moving out, and families are living with mould and overcrowding. So we ran a listening campaign locally, and out of that came Citizens House,”
There, prices of the 11 homes are set at rates accessible to people on average incomes in Lewisham. And when residents move out, they must sell at a similar level, giving new local families the same opportunity.
“Citizens House has been transformational for residents because the structure Neil and others have built relies on a belief in community and genuine engagement,” Janet says. “The community even chose the architects and the building firm.
“The pandemic has left people very inward-looking. A lot of people lost their confidence. We need to give back active agency to people. With Citizens you are not one person but five, eight, 50, hundreds. It’s building power from the ground up.”
In 2014, TELCO began a campaign to get HSBC workers in East London the living wage, after a child wrote in his schoolbook that his mother was “dead”. It turned out he meant that she was working so much that he never saw her.
Neil and others bought shares in HSBC to attend the shareholder meeting and leapt up to demand a living wage for cleaners. Nuns were encouraged to bring heavy church collection plates into the bank, tying up bank tellers for so many hours that bosses agreed to a meeting to talk about wages.
The TELCO campaign gave children back their parents.
In 2018, Neil left Citizens UK to dedicate himself to UK Welcomes Refugees, the community sponsorship campaign he was instrumental in creating – bringing Syrians, Hongkongers and others to safety.
In March, I found myself sitting opposite him at a Persian New Year event welcoming refugees. We chatted over a beer and a shared meal, and he was as dynamic and engaged as ever.
It was a shock to everyone when he died suddenly in April of an untreatable cancer diagnosed only days before his death.
Neil’s loss is, of course, unimaginable to his family and colleagues – his wife Jean and their four children, Ben, Ella, Will and Charlie, and his seven grandchildren.
His ideas are needed more than ever as we face both climate breakdown and ravenous algorithms that feed on division.
But he will live on in the generations who thrive at Citizens House, and in the safe sleep of thousands of refugees who are here in the UK because of his brand of pragmatic compassion, and in the hot meals on family tables tonight.
Meanwhile, perhaps his greatest legacy was to prove there is such a thing as society – that we can win when we act together.
As nine-year-old Michael told me that day: “What Citizens means to me is that we get to create justice when there is a lot of injustice in the world.”
* Neil Jameson’s memorial takes place today in Central London.
