Unsung heroes

posted by: Nick Lowles | on: Friday, 10 April 2009, 08:21

One of the great bits of my job is meeting local activists and volunteers – people who give up their spare time to combat the politics of hate. I'm lucky. I get paid to do the job I love, but others have to fit it in around the rest of their lives. And they are on the front line too, often operating in challenging situations.

Last night, while most people were beginning their well-earned Easter break I was sitting in a pub in Manchester putting the finishing touches to our North West campaign with Jason Hunter. He definitely is one of the heroes of our movement. He has worked tirelessly to reduce the BNP threat in his home town in Burnley and is now helping to orchestrate the anti-BNP campaign in the North West for the public sector union, Unison. In his spare time, when he is not out leafleting, he works closely with me in organising our North West campaign.

And what a campaign it is shaping up to be. We will be producing at least 900,000 HOPE not hate/Mirror newspapers for the North West region alone, customised for each key area and union. One of our tasks last night was to work out how we were going to distribute the 150,000 newspapers in Manchester alone, and 300,000 papers across Greater Manchester more generally. It really is a big task but we are confident that we can do it with the network we are building. We think we have already allocated teams to lead in 26 of the 31 council wards in the city. At approximately 6,000 properties per ward that already takes us 156,000 newspapers – in excess of our original target.

What is really exciting is that we are bringing in new groups. A Manchester NUT branch has offered to do one ward, a group of local residents in Moss Side – none of whom have been involved in politics before – have promised to do their local area, and faith groups are blocking out other areas which they are committing to cover. Students from Manchester University and Manchester Met are taking six wards between them, the Jewish community another couple and other trade unions several more.

All this is happening across the North West, and indeed across the country. Earlier on in the day I was in Stoke-on-Trent, where I linked up with some people from the local NorSCARF group. Between us we mapped out a strategy to target every single ward in the city on one day in May, which will be far in excess of anything they have done before.

We face a massive task to keep the BNP out but with people like Jason, and the dozens of others like him around the country, we have a real chance for HOPE to defeat hate.