Assembly Project

This is the second of what’s really a two-part post. In my previous post, I discussed the wider need for assembly democracy in the world. This one is about the more direct benefits of a people’s assembly in your local area, and why you should start one.

As discussed in my first post, a people’s assembly is a meeting open to all within a local area, which aims to hear a wide range of views and have a positive, bridge-building debate. You should aim for it to be able to organise and fund itself and decide its own agenda.

There are four benefits they can bring:

1. They can advise local councillors and politicians.
2. They can connect people for campaigns and voluntary action.
3. They’re a positive experience for those taking part.
4. They can promote assembly democracy.

I’ll discuss each of these benefits in detail, then finish off by discussing what to do next.

#1: They can advise local councillors and politicians

This one speaks for itself, but there are a few warnings. One issue is that the assembly may be unrepresentative of the local population. Commonly, the participants overrepresent the old, the affluent and those who are already highly involved in the community (the communitati as I jokingly call them).

This is why it pays for an assembly to reach a wide consensus on its decisions rather than a minimal majority. If a proposal has a minimal majority, it implies that the result could’ve been different if the assembly had been more representative. But it is harder to make that case if majority is very wide (e.g. 80%).

Another issue that is more specific to the UK is that local government is relatively powerless and cash-strapped here, thanks to years of rate-capping, funding cuts and centralisation. There’s no point in badgering local councils to do things they can’t do.

Finally, you can’t guarantee that councillors will listen to a people’s assembly. It is worth a post of its own to discuss how to handle relations with councillors, because this partly depends not just on the intentions of your councillors but also how well you work with them. Some councillors have welcomed assemblies and appeared at them to provide insights and advice, while others will be suspicious. Most of the former and even some of the latter can be useful allies, but you have to understand their position. A councillor may have valid reasons to be unsure about an assembly that has just sprung up, and you cannot expect them to turn into a robot who does the assembly’s bidding.

Some assembly organisers aspire to stand independent candidates in elections. The threat of this may prompt your councillors to work more closely with the assembly. However, you may have to wait years for a chance to get rid of an uncooperative councillor, and there’s no guarantee you’ll win. It may also be cheaper and easier to form a strategic alliance with a political party. Whatever your goal for the long term, advising the council is a better goal for the short term.

#2: They can connect people for campaigns and voluntary action

This potential benefit is often overlooked by assembly organisers, whose first thoughts tend to be national politics and local councils, but it is often the quickest and surest way an assembly can do something with real, tangible benefits.

By meeting people at the assembly and talking about what affects their area, they can learn about groups they can join with, benefiting both themselves and the group. Even in the early stages of this project, I’ve been surprised to hear of things going on in my area which I’d never heard of, such as a conservation group.

Assemblies can also set up initiatives of their own. One of the few times that people’s assemblies became widespread in recent decades was during the 2001 economic crisis in Argentina. Often overlooked because they didn’t have a noticeable impact on national politics, the real successes of those assemblies were their local initiatives, such as saving local factories and creating support networks. More recently, an assembly in Hull started a weekly ‘pay what you want’ meal.

#3: They’re a positive experience for those taking part

Organisers and participants speak positively of their experience. In an article for Positive News, an organiser in Hull attests to how they are “empowering and healing”.

These also reflect the experience encountered at protest assemblies such as Occupy Wall Street, as well as citizens’ assemblies. An organiser of a Polish citizens’ assembly described how, “There is a lot of smiling, hand-shaking, and hugging.” One woman enjoyed going to its meetings so much that she came to one straight after being discharged from hospital.

There is more evidence to support this than mere anecdote. One study found that compared to a control group, participants in a citizens’ assembly showed more “political trust, political efficacy and political participation among participants” and less susceptibility to conspiracy theories.

The impact of grassroots neighbourhood assemblies haven’t been studied so well, but again, research into the Argentine experience suggests it tends to be positive. As one participant described it:

My relations with people changed. Before, I had a kind of truly individualistic vision of life. I was a cool computer engineer, earning money […] the usual story. […] [W]hen you start participating in an assembly, you meet people, you become more or less friends […] So, when one of them has a problem, with his job, his rent or anything, I am going to help him. He is not a stranger to me, he is a neighbour.

It is likely that a neighbourhood-based people’s assembly you start can produce similar positive experiences. Notably, the studies do not imply that a citizens’ assembly has to demonstrate genuine power for those benefits to work.

#4: They can promote assembly democracy

While people’s assemblies are not randomly-selected like a citizens’ assembly, they can encourage more councils and governments to embrace assembly democracy, and therefore set up more citizens’ assemblies. Moreover, by experiencing assembly democracy firsthand, it will likely encourage people to support and listen to citizens’ assemblies.

Citizens’ assemblies have increasingly been discussed as a possible fix to our current political woes. In the US, little of this debate has reached the public. Here in the UK, many people I have spoken with have heard the story of how one in Ireland reached a wide agreement on the difficult issue of abortion. But too often it’s treated as an intriguing story, and what’s missing is any real drive to employ assembly democracy here. Whenever a controversial issue is being discussed in the news, a citizens’ assembly is only sometimes discussed as a possible solution. In recent months, the concept has been criticised several times in the right-wing press. One could argue that any publicity is good publicity, but it also represents the headwinds they face.

Moreover, holding a citizens’ assembly has not always been enough. The French Citizens’ Convention on Climate was widely followed and supported by the public and came up with some excellent ideas — but most of them went unactioned by a cautious and distracted government. A British one held around the same time fared even worse, as it was not officially endorsed by the government and largely ignored by the media, despite an appearance from David Attenborough.

If people were more familiar with assembly democracy and its potential, citizens’ assemblies would be more widely used and listened to, whether run by the government or an NGO. The best way to do this is to let them experience it firsthand, and hopefully tell friends and family about it.

What next?

There are of course more thinking that people’s assemblies can do in the future, such as:

• Endorsing or standing election candidates.
• Organising protest movements.
• Becoming a decision-making organ of the local government.
• Reimagining the possibilities of politics, just as other democratising innovations like universal suffrage did in the past.

But it’s important not to get carried away from the four ones discussed earlier. You don’t want to give the impression that you see a people’s assembly as a tool for your own goals, rather than something that will benefit the community and decide its own course. You especially don’t want to give the impression that they are for partisan goals, since these assemblies work best when they represent the whole spectrum of views that people hold.

If this all sounds good, that leaves the question of what to do next. In the UK, a campaign group called Assemble is the best place to call. They have freely-available training videos and materials. You can register with them to get in touch with others interested in starting an assembly in your area and talk with them on the welcome call, which is currently (as of March 2025) being run every week. If you are outside the UK, most of Assemble’s training videos and materials will still be useful. I will most likely post more on this in due course.