Solving our solidarity crisis is imperative for social democracy. To do so, Labour must draw on its heritage of membership-based movements. Only a rich politics of relationship can sustain the reciprocity and common endeavour on which both social progress and defeating populism depend.
Social democracy depends on social solidarity: the ‘common endeavour’ cited on Labour membership cards is only possible when people feel they are on the same team. Yet our national debate is conducted as if low growth, strained public finances, and hollowed-out public services are the only nightmarish inheritances Labour must confront. In reality, the unravelling of the ties that bind should animate us with equal enthusiasm.
Consider the challenges before us: addressing climate change, scaling investment to deliver both productivity and social justice, and meeting this generational moment for the security of Europe and the wider world. None of them can be overcome without a muscular state, but the state can only be as strong as the community spirit that underpins it. To thrive, we must rediscover a politics of relationships and reclaim the left’s heritage of solidarity.
We live in an increasingly atomised society. It is making us sick and sad. Too many of us, too much of the time, retreat behind our own front doors – engaged in what the sociologist Sacha Hilhorst calls ‘the radical domestication of existence’.1 There is, however, an alternative: a society where everyone has equal access to the relationships that make life worth living, and a left that both creates and is fortified by a new politics of membership and belonging.
Clubbing together
Much of social solidarity’s most interesting work is being done by people we will never hear about, in places most of the commentariat will never go. There is plenty to be said about policies that would build solidarity, but I am particularly interested in how we can sustain the nation’s network of social clubs – places where we learn the habits of participation, reciprocity, and simply having a good time with people outside our immediate families. These remain magical institutions, but they are under mounting pressure.
Half a century ago, around seven million people were members of working men’s and trade clubs affiliated to the Club and Institute Union (CIU).2Our parents and grandparents did not have to watch the American bar-based sitcom Cheers to learn about a place ‘where everybody knows your name,’ because they were already acquainted with club life.
If you have never been inside a working class social club before, imagine one part pub, one part community centre, and one part extension of the family sitting room. And then imagine it just around the corner. Add to that British Legions and ex-Servicemen’s clubs and you will begin to see the network of associational life that sustained working class self-help across Britain’s industrial heartlands for a century and more.
The benefits were not simply material – a place for a cheap night out and subsidised trips – they were also spiritual and political. But the same CIU that once issued around seven million membership cards now doles out just one million.3 That is not only because people are spending their spare time in different places; it is because we are spending that time in different ways. Increasingly, we are spending more time alone or with our nuclear families.
The implications are worrying: UCL Policy Lab, Citizens UK, and More in Common polling has found that 44 per cent of people in the UK ‘feel like strangers to those around them’.4 Furthermore, research has found that 6 per cent of us are persistently lonely,5 while 17-23 per cent of us see friends, family or colleagues socially once a month or less.6 These trends began before the pandemic, but lockdowns exacerbated them. After the first flush of community WhatsApp groups and social solidarity, we got used to staying at home.
As we spend less time socialising, we become more likely to fall ill and die early. In a 2010 paper, Holt-Lunstad et al. undertook a meta-analysis of 148 international research studies, and found that a person with poor social relationships is a staggering 50 per cent less likely to survive than a counterpart with a good social life.7 The former US Surgeon General warned that loneliness is as bad for us as smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day.8 Findings from Nesta conclude that the way loneliness impacts on us can be as profound, in mental health terms, as a bereavement.9
Think about that for a moment. We have organised our lives in a way that is as bad for us as losing a loved one. The tragedy is that we know all this, because so many intellectual, spiritual and organising traditions have bequeathed to us the knowledge that we are meant to be sustained by communities.
When Jimmy Reid, the great Scottish trade unionist, made his rectoral address at Glasgow University in 1972, it became known as the ‘rat race’ speech, because of his argument that we must reject the invitation to treat one another as competitors rather than compatriots. His most famous passage – reminding listeners that ‘we are not rats, we are human beings’ – led to his words being reproduced in The
New York Times, billed as the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address.10 11 Personally, my favourite part of the speech is as follows:
Man is a social being. Real fulfilment for any person lies in service to his fellow men and women […] The big challenge to our civilisation involves morality, ethics, and our concept of human values. The challenge we face is that of rooting out anything and everything that distorts and devalues human relations.12
Our crisis of connection and solidarity
The twin crises of connection and solidarity have their roots in a contemporary arrangement of life that distorts and devalues human relations. The digital revolution may have provided many benefits, but we simply are not wired to live alone while algorithms feed us suggestions about what to eat next, watch next, read next, hear next, buy next.
Think about the last really wonderful wedding you went to. You would not have gained as much listening to the band on a streaming service, nor savoured the food if delivered to you at home on a bike, nor laughed as hard listening to the speeches as a podcast. Those delivery mechanisms would all have been more convenient than schlepping out to a hotel or a town hall, but they would also have been a horrible facsimile of real life. Because the things that make life worth living happen when we spend time with others, attending to what happens in the spaces between us.
Philosophers call these things ‘relationship goods’, the benefits we can only accrue from being with others who love, value, or respect us. Whatever your politics, the decline in relationship goods should worry you, but I believe there is a special onus on those of us who would characterise ourselves as on the left to worry about the distribution of relationship goods – just as surely as we worry about the distribution of wealth and power. That means tending to how class and connection intersect, recognising that while our disconnection crisis is a universal experience, its effects are not uniform.
In a 2023 Carnegie UK report, 35 per cent of people said the cost-of-living crisis limited their ability to see friends and 34 per cent stated that the crisis had diminished their ability to participate in social activities.13 More in Common’s Shattered Britain report found that 43 per cent of people are going out less because they are strapped for cash.14 Most recently, a study by the Co-operative Party and anti-racist organisation HOPE not hate found that, of those who feel financially desperate, only around half felt that there were ways to get involved in their local community, with even fewer being proud of where they live.15
Simply put, people are being priced out of socialising, and in turn, priced out of the connections vital to their wellbeing. We now face a connection crisis that requires a prescription equal to the diagnosis. Attending to this crisis involves a politics focused on developing an increased momentum around memberships, not simply getting people out of the house.
Somewhere to belong
It is time for a renewed focus on our associational life – how we locate ourselves in webs of overlapping memberships that provide for us both opportunities and obligations separate from the state and from our private relationships. This is not a new idea. From medieval guilds to today’s supporter-owned football teams, we have always been drawn to clubbing together. And while solving the cost-ofliving crisis would certainly make it easier for people to reconnect, it will not be enough on its own.
What we need is an explicit plan for rebuilding memberships. Hence my focus on clubs and other member-owned institutions as a force equal to the populist moment we find ourselves in. Some London-based commentators I have spoken to have been dismissive, with one asking if ‘darts is really the way to beat Reform?’ My answer is an unequivocal yes. The clubs movement can trace its origins to the ‘rational recreation’ drive some 150 years ago, when social reformers and organised workers alike wanted local places for working class education and leisure. Despite its long heritage, it retains a profound relevance to the politics of the 2020s.
First, they create space for the formation and maintenance of relationships that the author Derek Thompson, writing on the so-called ‘anti-social century’ characterises as ‘familiar but not intimate’.16 By attracting regular visits from members, clubs become places, as Lyndon B. Johnson said of his own beloved Texas Hill Country, where ‘people know when you’re sick and care when you
die’.17
The same could be said, of course, of a local boozer with plenty of regulars. Indeed, in Penicuik, a town in Midlothian, one pub has a Christmas tree where every regular who has died that year is remembered with a bauble. It is a beautiful tradition and I wish it would spread. But while those relationships are wonderful, they are not rooted, as a membership is, in reciprocity.
As one member of Eastbourne Working Men’s Club put it, this is ‘a members’ club – it’s not all take, take, take, you have to give as well.’ 18 Local Trust research has shown what is obvious from everyday life: access to community spaces is a necessary precondition for developing relationships beyond our families.19 In turn, non-familial reciprocity is at the heart of any functioning society.
There is another side to this: reciprocity assumes equality. When you walk into a club you belong to, even if you are seeking support, you do not do so as a ‘client’, a ‘beneficiary’, or a ‘service user’; you are there on equal terms with everyone else, in a spirit of self-help and mutualism. Nobody is going to patronise or judge you because the kind of community groups that use clubs – whether food pantries, men’s sheds, or playgroups – are groups that working people have built for themselves. Crucially, all this give and take occurs between people with different backgrounds, enabling the kind of low-pressure dialogue which can stop division taking hold.
Clubs, of course, were not created to develop social cohesion – but they do deliver it. Public support for places where different communities and generations can ‘meet and mix’ remains high (indeed ‘places to meet’ is the number one thing people in low-income neighbourhoods think would improve their areas).20 Likewise, researcher Paul Bickley argues that ‘neighbourhood resilience relies on […] social capital (local voluntary action and leadership), physical capital (common space), and spiritual capital (a neighbourhood’s […] identity and meaning-making)’.21 Clubs deliver all three, and as a result provide a powerful antidote to polarisation.
Clubs both shape and reflect my politics: they remind us that strong relationships do not need to be rooted in the ways we are the same – merely in the ways we afford one another reciprocal respect.
Everyday democracy
Clubs make plain their relevance to today’s politics in another important way: their governance structure. That they are generally co-operatives or member-owned charities means we do not simply belong to social clubs, they belong to us. That makes them both harder to sell off (as has happened to so many other venues) and turns them into places where we cultivate democratic habits of mind. If we want to make a change to our community space, we need to persuade others with whom we share it. That has enormous implications for our democracy.
Research from Power to Change has found that someone involved in an ‘associational organisation’ (defined as membership-based and generally non-profit) is ‘16 percentage points more likely to trust British governments to place the needs of the nation over their own party.’22 This trust-generating effect is particularly potent for members of working men’s clubs, 27 per cent of whom place ‘a great deal’ of trust in government to put nation above party, equalled only by people involved in a local parent-teacher association.23
From the very beginning, the club movement gave working people experience in self-help and collective ownership. It should therefore be no surprise that club members today trust in institutions, given their own role in sustaining them. Membership-based institutions thus do something more powerful than just giving us the chance to meet. Many charities organise befriending services and fun days and activities so that people are not alone. But that is neither the same, nor as powerful, as supporting people to belong, something that is inherent to membership models.
In promoting this work, I have encountered three main objections. The first is the idea that encounters are enough. There are indeed lots of interesting experiments about how you can encourage people to speak more – you can change the design of bus shelters so people face each other, or turn supermarket caffs into ‘chatty cafes’ where people put a sign on the table if they are up for a natter with a stranger. These are great ideas but even if those experiments were scaled nationwide, they would not get to the heart of this crisis.
Although a fleeting conversation with someone might relieve the tedium of the day or reduce loneliness for a moment, it does not mean we have someone we would trust with a spare set of keys, or to watch the kids while we visit someone in hospital. It certainly does not mean we have learnt enough to disrupt and dispel any prejudices we might hold about a group that is different to us. For that we need repeat contact and a sustained relationship.
The second objection concerns the role of technology. On the one hand, some people say the connection crisis is inevitable because it is downstream of changes in technology. Sociologist Robert Putnam famously argued that technology does indeed play a role: he traced much of the decline of American civic life back to the spread of the car and the invention of television.24
It is notable, however, that Putnam does not think technology makes our disconnection inevitable, merely more likely.
On the other hand, tech optimists suggest online communities can make it easier for people to solve problems and meet likeminded folk – especially if a disability, caring responsibility, or rural location makes it difficult to attend in-person gatherings. I would agree that some online platforms and communities – like Mumsnet, or 38 Degrees – have a role in helping people combine their insights or their efforts with people who are on the same wavelength but not physically proximate. That is important. But do we honestly think entirely virtual experiences can or should be a substitute for real contact – where tears can be wiped, hugs exchanged, and hands held?
The third objection is more fundamental – that connection is just not that important. We do indeed face huge challenges both at home and abroad. Before entering parliament, I spent nearly a decade at Save the Children, and so I do not dismiss the grotesque inequalities and injustices which disfigure our world. Almost 500 million children are living in a warzone,25 with thirty-one killed or maimed every day.26 Around 750 million people are living in hunger,27 with forty million children acutely malnourished in a world of plenty.28 And there were about forty-five million people displaced in 2024 by natural disasters,29 with a predicted 250,000 additional deaths per year in the 2030s caused by the climate crisis.30
In the face of all this, I can see why some people argue that fighting for a bingo hall or a youth club feels inadequate. I continue to believe, however, that connection is foundational. I do not think it is possible to detach the crises we are facing globally from the crises many of us are facing personally. Alex Evans runs an organisation called Larger Us, which works on where our states of mind and the state of the world meet. He puts it this way:
I used to think the answer was about what happens ‘out there’, in the world of policy, finance, emissions and so on. I spent the best part of two decades working on global risks – as a special adviser to two cabinet ministers, in the UN Secretary-General’s office and as a consultant for organisations like the US National Intelligence Council.
The more time went by, though, the more I realised that actually, the future is made ‘in here’ – in our mental and emotional states, our hopes and our fears, the stories we use to make sense of the world. Because it’s here that our behaviours – everything from what we buy and what we share on social media through to what we demand from our political leaders and how we vote – get decided.31
So do not let anyone tell you that this so-called ‘inner work’ is an indulgence in a world on fire: it is the very thing that allows you to remain clear-headed enough to douse the flames.
Moreover, our forebears in the trade union and co-operative movements well understood that giving people a taste of everyday agency is a precondition for – not a diversion from – engaging them in a more transformational politics. As an experienced trade union organiser once told me, the best bit of advice he was ever given was ‘don’t go talking to people about a revolution if you can’t get a microwave in the staff canteen.’
If we want both more richly textured local democracies and a wider talent pipeline for our national politics, we should be looking for more people with experience of getting people real results in the places where they live and work. The clubs movement, community campaigns, the cadre of union shop stewards and the best of local government are all teeming with talent that knows how to do the tough, layered work of building trust and delivering results over prolonged periods.
None of this will be easy: the platforms who profit from our attention have done a brilliant job of pulling us deeper and deeper into the world of apps and algorithms, streaming and scrolling. I am not immune from the lure of retreating to a screen-based life. That path is easier, but it is also fatal for progressive politics and for our wider democratic culture.
The academic Hahrie Han has a lovely phrase that sums this up:
If democracy is this challenge of people coming together to figure out the kind of shared lives they want to forge, then the behaviors that they use to negotiate difference are going to flow from the commitments they have to each other. So when my husband and I fight, we fight like we want to stay married.32
Living together well means fighting like we want to stay married. With populists on the march and division taking hold, it is time we all focused on joining things bigger than ourselves, and then living – and fighting – like we intend to stay in them.
Kirsty McNeill is the Labour and Co-operative MP for Midlothian and Minister for Scotland in the UK Government
Notes
1. Sacha Hilhorst, Places to come together: Rebuilding local solidarities against the far right, Institute for Public Policy, 2025, pp8.
2. Pete Brown, Clubland: How the Working Men’s Club Shaped Britain, Harper North, 2023.
3. Ibid.
4. UCL Policy Lab, CitizensUK and More in Common, ‘This Place Matters: reimagining community cohesion in Britain’, p7.
5. Office for National Statistics, ‘Public opinions and social trends, Great Britain: personal wellbeing and loneliness’, 7 January to 1 February 2026 edition, 2026.
6. Beatrice d’Hombres, Martina Barjakova and Sylke Schnepf, Loneliness and Social Isolation: An Unequally Shared Burder in Europe, Institute of Labor Economics, 2021, p7.
7. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy Smith and Bradley Layton, ‘Social relationships and mortality risk: a met-analytical review’, PLoS Med, Vol. 7 No. 7, 2010, p14.
8. Kathyrn Armstrong and Bernd Debusmann Jr, ‘US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recounts bout of profound loneliness’: www.bbc.co.uk, 2 May 2023.
9. Darren Hilliard, Patricia Beloe, Lucy Turner-Harris and Lauren Bowes Byatt, Investigating the impact of loneliness and social isolation on health, Nesta, 2024, p11.
10. James Reid, ‘Bang the Bell, jack, I’m on the Bus’: www.nytimes.com, 20 June 1972.
11. The Scotsman, ‘Scottish quote of the day: Jimmy Reid, Glasgow University, 1972’: www.scotsman.com, 17 May 2012.
12. James Reid, Alienation, Rectorial Address delivered in the University of Glasgow, 28 April 1972.
13. Amy Baker and Hannah Paylor, The long shadow of the cost of living emergency, Carnegie UK, 2023, p14.
14. Luke Tryl, Anouschka Rajah, Ed Hodgson and Sophie Stowers, Shattered Britain: Making sense of what Britons want in a country that feels broken, More in Common, 2025, p43.
15. HOPE not Hate and The Co-operative Party, ‘Holding on to HOPE: Lessons from Community Britain’: www.party.coop, 2025, p10.
16. Derek Thomspon, ‘The Anti-Social Century’: www.theatlantic.com, 8 January 2025.
17. Doris Kearns Goodwin, ‘The Divided Legacy of Lyndon B. Johnson’: www.theatlantic.com, 7 September 2018.
18. Jonny Gordon-Farleigh and Oliver Holtaway, Social Clubs, Community Power, and Political Participation, Centre for Democratic Business, 2025.
19. Alistair Ross and Grace Pollard, Community Buildings: strong foundations for renewal, Local Trust, 2026.
20. Zoe Billingham, Stephen Frost, Ryan Swift and Jonathan Webb, Parallel lives: Regionally rebalancing wealth, power and opportunity, Institute for Public Policy, 2023, pp21-22.
21. Paul Bickley, People, Place and Purpose: Churches and Neighbourhood Resilience in the North East, Theos, 2018, p10.
22. Josh Westerling, Linda Hein and Nick Plumb, Closing the void: Can we reconnect politics with associational life, Power to Change, 2025, p17.
23. Ibid., p29.
24. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster, 2000.
25. UNICEF, ‘Not the new normal’ – 2024 ‘one of the worst years in UNICEF’s history’ for children in conflict’: www.unicef.org, 28 December 2024.
26. Save the Children, ‘World more dangerous than ever for children with crimes in conflict at highest level in 2023’: www.savethechildren.net, 31 October 2024.
27. World Health Organisation, ‘Hunger numbers stubbornly high for three consecutive years as global crises deepen: UN report’: www.who.int, 24 July 2024.
28. Save the Children, ‘Child hunger and malnutrition’: www.savethechildren.org.uk, October 2025.
29. United Nations: Climate Action, ‘Causes and Effects of Climate Change’, www.un.org.
30. World Health Organisation, ‘Climate Change’: www.who.int, 12 October 2023.
31. Alex Evans, ‘Welcome to the Good Apocalypse Guide!’. https://goodapocalypse.substack. com/p/welcome-to-the-good-apocalypse-guide, 17 September 2024.
32. Sam Pressler, ‘Building societal structures to hold the messiness of our relationships’: www.connectivetissue.substack.com, 3 October 2024.