Citizens UK rally: Cameron ducks out of meeting voters at the sharp end

PM declines to join Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband in hearing raw testimony from refugees and cleaners on minimum wage

“This is how politics used to be done,” declared an organiser, “and we wish it could be done like this more.”

To Westminster Central Hall, then, and the only election event at which you’re at risk of crying from something other than boredom.

Packed with 2,200 members of Citizens UK, the national community organising charity, the rally was akin to a chastening machine for party leaders who have spent most of this campaign in warehouses with their own activists.

Really, nothing says “Nick, we’re not in a hedgehog sanctuary any more” like a care worker on £6.50 an hour taking the stage, showing a picture of her three children and saying: “I am caring for other people’s families, but I do not have enough to care for mine.”

All the leaders are invited to attend, so we had Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband and Sajid Javid. Did you spot the odd one out there? Alas, in a development unlikely to send students of his work into shock, David Cameron confirmed he wouldn’t actually be turning up a mere 48 hours before the event – a refusal as courageous as it was mannerly.

It’s a shame the prime minister bailed, because he’d have got to meet some Whitehall cleaners who aren’t paid the living wage. He’d have got to hear the 13-year-old son of one of the cleaners declare: “My dad is brave. He does the right thing and that is why I am proud” – before turning to the deputy prime minister and saying: “Mr Clegg, you need to do more.”

For once, you can’t fault the emphasis on stage management, because this exceptional event places politicians a few feet away from people at the very sharpest end of their policies, who deliver testimony as raw as it is powerful. Community organising groups across the UK have spent 18 months working out four commitments they seek from party leaders – this time on ending indefinite detention of asylum seekers, paying the living wage, improving social care, and using 1% of banking fines to start a credit union foundation.

Any leader who fails to sign up to them is interrogated on that failure, live on stage, in fairly exquisite style. For instance, it’s quite possible Javid thought he’d got away with it after telling the story of his immigrant parents’ struggles with poverty and racist employment policies and attributing their victories over them to the power of community. But he hadn’t bargained on one of the organisers thanking him for his story, explaining she was a Bosnian refugee who’d slept with acid by her bed to stop her attackers raping her, and pointing out that there is no community for asylum seekers who have just arrived.

Further things Cameron passed up – other than the chance to tell his own riches-to-riches story to the people who vacuum his office at 4am? He didn’t get to hear an asylum seeker who had been indefinitely detained detail his descent into mental and physical illness. “I was taken to hospital and chained to the bed like a dog. People took photos on their phones.” He was followed by a victim of human trafficking whose indefinite detention led to psychotic episodes and a suicide attempt.

Who was in turn followed by Javid declining to end indefinite detention. “I think I’ve made it clear we don’t support a time limit full stop … A time limit would only encourage people …” At which point someone broke the “no heckling” rule.

Awkward doesn’t really begin to cover it. Spending an afternoon here is to feel as though you have tumbled down a rabbit hole to somewhere politics feels as it should do: a rare place where the vulnerable are sufficiently empowered to be able to hold politicians to account live on stage. There’s clearly something infectious about the gospel choir singing that punctuates proceedings because the politicians suddenly come over rather pastor-like.

“If he was decent,” Clegg shouted of George Osborne, “he would look the mothers and fathers of disabled children in the eye and tell them about his plans to make their lives harder!” Warming further to the theme of his coalition partners, he bellowed: “There’s nothing remotely decent about them!”

“Your cause is my cause!” hallelujahed Miliband, like a man who’d had … well, had a stone lifted from his shoulders for the afternoon.

He was received increasingly rapturously. “Your fight is my fight! Your struggle is my struggle! Your vision is my vision!”

It’s fair to say it’s an easier gig for Clegg and Miliband, who signed up to most of the commitments like men who hadn’t just spent five years nodding along behind Cameron in PMQs, or hadn’t just carved the words “CONTROLS ON IMMIGRATION” into a rock.

They both promised to come back in five years to be audited on their delivery of these promises. And Javid spent an uncomfortably long time declining to pencil it into Cameron’s 2020 diary.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/04/citizens-uk-rally-cameron-ducks-out-of-meeting-voters-at-the-sharp-end

He is such a bloody coward!