Is Single-Issue Campaigning the Best Way to Change the World?

Lead photo by Alice Zoo

It can feel like there's no end of big issues to campaign against these days. The rise of right-wing populism and everything it represents, austerity cuts; a refugee crisis; climate change; racist and misogynistic media pundits; and Britain's shit show of a divorce from the EU. Reporting from The Women's March, the Stop Trump Banning Muslims protest and March for Europe rallies over the last six months, I met a bunch of people who told me they've never been involved with activism before, but felt like now was the time to do something. As we saw around the anti-Iraq War demos, the Occupy movement and in the wake of the multiple shootings of black men by American police, political outrage brings people out of their houses.

We've all heard the joke "activism is the new brunch", but if activism is having a "moment" it goes without saying that some forms must be more productive than others. Just as Malcolm Gladwell's famous New Yorker article "Small Change: The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted" took aim at the effectiveness of clicktivism in 2010, Jess Crispin's recent book, Why I Am Not a Feminist, explains how she doesn't want to be a part of a new trendy wave of feminism that is devoured as enthusiastically and thoughtlessly as avocados. Likewise, the new documentary Pride? shown at this year's BFI Flare asks, albeit more tentatively, how a political rights movement got diluted into an opportunity for brands to cash in on the LGBTQ community's "pink pounds".

Perhaps the most obvious example of a vague "umbrella movement", though, was the Women's March back in January, when six million people demonstrated in 673 locations worldwide, in a protest that sprung up in direct response to Donald Trump's election and ended up branding itself as a march for human rights. Responses to the Women's March varied: some were concerned the march was too broad in its message, or simply a "feel good spectacle"; others criticised it as an exclusive parade of white feminism. The organisers thought it was a great place for new lines of solidarity between different groups to form. On some level, I agree with all of these standpoints. But the question is: what did the march actually achieve?

"At a difficult political time, we need to ask: how do we keep our sights collectively on achieving real, marked change?" says David Babbs, Executive Director of 38 Degrees, a UK campaigning platform with millions of members. David remembers going to the anti-Iraq War protests in his early twenties and learning three things: that a large number of British people are willing to stand up for what they believe in, that the government can ignore those people and that the people turned out to be right and the foreign policy experts wrong. "Why did Tony Blair think he could get away with ignoring that march? He knew that people would go home and disperse. 38 Degrees was a thought experiment – what if everyone who went to that march swapped email addresses at the end and continued to stand up for the UK having better foreign policy?"

Zoe Hunter Gordon, of the campaign group 50:50 Parliament, feels similarly: "The older I get, I'm far more likely to volunteer my time and give up my energy to a movement that seems to have workable outcomes," she says. Zoe believes that, as humans, the way we engage with things is to "break them down into smaller problems", and that it's the same for any type of activist movement. Hence 50:50 – a group made up of feminists who specifically want to see better gender parity in our government. Their campaign, #AskHertoStand, encourages women who may not have considered a political career before to run as an MP. "Tangible results are important in a time as depressing as this right now for people who identify as liberal feminists," says Zoe.

In her personal life, Zoe has noticed a trend whereby the "performance of feminism" leads people to believe what they're doing is more political and meaningful than it is. "I have feminist friends who make brilliant feminist art or go on marches, but when I sit them down and say 'Do you volunteer, or campaign for a specific issue, or give money?' they don't. Maybe that explains why the political situation in the UK is how it is." She gives the example of The Women's March: "I personally found that depressing, the lack of a clear goal. I am aware that different women are at different stages, but I'm at a point with my own activism where I need to hear from women moving towards goals. I would be really interested to know how many women from that march followed up their actions in the next week."

50:50 is an example of single-issue campaigning, a form of activism that has been on the rise, particularly since people in Britain become more disenfranchised with mainstream party politics, and since the internet makes it easier than ever to run a cheap campaign. While coalition groups like Stop The War or Stand Up to Racism unite various campaigns under a broader goal, single-issue campaigns pick a single policy or issue and hone in on it. An example would be Focus E15, a group largely made up of single mums who were displaced from their houses in Newham and now fight housing cuts at large, or Sisters Uncut, the much publicised group fighting cuts to domestic violence services in Britain with stunts like a red carpet die in. Then there are those individual campaigners, like Poppy Noor, who raises awareness around social mobility; former VICE employee Daisy Hudson, who made a film about hidden homelessness; and Lucy Vincent, who's been campaigning for better food in prisons.

When I ask Lucy what the pros and cons have been around focusing on a tight cause like food in prisons she explains that "the advantages were I felt like I got knowledgeable about a subject very quickly, and people who are so relevant have got in touch with me, women who worried about husbands, ex offenders, guards… press also comes quick because you have an automatic angle". She says she didn't feel uncomfortable becoming the one voice of the issue because she's so passionate about it: "I quite like the idea." The downside, she said, was that a lot of people couldn't see how her focus connected to the broader picture of reducing reoffending; "I've had quite a few people negatively saying to me 'prisons aren't holiday camps' or 'why are you not improving food in hospitals?'" She'd even get some quite serious or personal criticism online, asking: why do you care about prisons?

The answer is that Lucy fell into the prison food campaign by accident. She had a full time job and was writing on the side, and an article she penned about how improved diets in prisons could improve prisoners' behaviour and mental wellbeing caught the attention of the press, people who worked in prisons and nutritional experts. "I had such positive feedback, I think because most other news about prisons was on crowding, understaffing and deaths," says Lucy. She quickly made a website, wrote something for The Guardian, went on the BBC and started meeting with relevant governors. Then she hit a road block: "After the press, it was like, 'Where do you take this next?' People who could change things or fund me got in touch with me… but I felt really out of depth at that point. I just didn't have the experience, time or resources." At the moment, Lucy's still having meetings, figuring out what to do next.

50:50 have effected more change, partly by working with all the main political parties to see what they can do about getting more women in seats. How do they gauge that change, though, I ask Zoe. "By gathering signatures for the petition, which has been going for about four years," she says (the petition on Change.org has over 50,000 signatures). They've also helped women stand as MPs for the first time. "Hearing about women who've done that feels very tangible – women who stepped forward in a constituency who never would have done so."

Zoe attributes their success not just to focusing on a single issue, but branding that well: "50:50 says it all," she comments, "If you can stick to one thing and give people a website or a petition, for me I hope that's something they can follow up on more easily than telling them to google lots of different things. There's just too much." The upshot of that, however, is that sometimes, within the feminist community itself, it can feel like you're "battling against each other", Zoe explains. "That depresses me because no one is saying these issues are more or less important than one another. Just because right now I'm talking about representation in parliament it doesn't mean I don't care about domestic abuse."

Could this be the downfall of single issue campaigning? That it doesn't account for the way different issues are connected, better known as intersectionality? How do we get more women into Parliament without improving perceptions of women in the media, for example, or talking about the particular forms of oppression faced by women of colour? Just as white feminism puts relatively privileged women first, in the hope that their gains – more easily won – will "trickle down" to women who are more oppressed, doesn't single issue campaigning go for the low hanging branches? And is there also an issue with one person becoming the poster boy or girl for a movement that one single voice cannot possibly represent?

David from 38 Degrees believes that having an individual with a strong story to tell can generate more media coverage and make the issue easier for the public to understand – something Lucy's campaign exemplifies – but he reminds us generally that "there's a difference between a person seeing themselves as a catalyst for other people getting involved or a saviour who can do it all on their own". The latter is just ego, he says. What 38 Degrees seeks to do is give a large number of people a hub where they can organise themselves and pool their resources, explains David, whether that means social networks, cash or experience. "The reality for most of us is, unless you're Rupert Murdoch, the amount of power, strings, influence you have is not great enough to overcome the big forces in society – government, companies, structures – but if we come together, people start paying more attention."

Then, of course, he points out, there's the question of how relevant single issue campaigning is today. "A lot of people in the UK don't see themselves in one single issue department; they make the links and they want to get involved with different stuff." Yes, there are a shit ton of campaigns on 38 Degrees' website – almost a daunting amount – but the idea is not that every 38 Degrees member will be involved in every campaign, says David: "It's a broad church of people, from a range of perspectives, all over country and all walks of life sharing values and looking for ways to put that into practice – whether it's local campaigning, fundraising in response to a disaster, plugging away consistently on funding of the NHS… it depends on the moment, but it's bigger than one individual action – they all join up."

Ultimately, 38 Degrees is a load of single-issue campaigns housed in one place – which tries to reconcile the problem between narrow focus and seeing many issues as connected. They've had various specific successes – they got George Osborne to do a U-turn on cuts to Tax Credits (although he later kind of snuck them through the back door anyway, which raises questions about this kind of activism's long-term impact); they helped to save Lewisham Hospital; and raised hundreds of thousands of pounds towards the Ebola crisis. However, go on their website and there are so many campaigns – almost 10,000 – it can be totally overwhelming.

The question remains, then, of whether it's more effective to put all your activism eggs in one basket, or scatter them across several. There are unfortunately no easy answers; political campaigns need to be ideologically coherent while garnering press attention to grow. And perhaps that's no surprise: if there were easy answers on how to enact change, we wouldn't have so much to protest.

@millyabraham