Gan Grace Bailey
On the 14th of March 2026, the new Together Alliance held their Cymru launch in Cardiff. This event was advertised as a discussion of “how we stand up in unity against hate in Cymru” and was well attended, with a turnout of well over a hundred people.
The opening plenary had six speakers: Beth Winter (former Labour MP and current Independent MS candidate), Raki Ayola (BAFTA-winning actress), Kwabena Devonish (from Stand Up To Racism Wales), Hussein Said (from Black Lives Matter Cardiff), Chloe Rees (from Trades Union Congress Cymru) and Clive Haswell (from Palestine Solidarity Campaign Wales). Each speech addressed the rise of the far right and the threat of Reform, and was applauded by attendees. Some speeches emphasised community organising approaches, while others focused more on advertising the upcoming Together march in London (scheduled for the 28th of March).
Raki Ayola argued that it’s vital we understand the root causes of Reform’s popularity, suggesting that the genuine grievances of deprived communities are being twisted and misdirected into hatred and discrimination. She emphasised that as self-serving politicians leave people struggling with bills and work alone, they create a vulnerability that the far right can exploit. In this context, Raki cautioned against writing off all Reform voters as committed fascists. She encouraged attendees to confront discrimination and violence face-to-face but also to build dialogue where appropriate.
There was a sense of anxiety in the room regarding the possible consequences of a Reform victory in Wales, not only due to the damage they will inflict on community infrastructure, but also due to the way it could embolden the far right. A Reform government in Cardiff Bay could do a lot to amp up the violence that the far right are already committing against marginalised people in our communities. Soothing that anxiety a little, such a busy event does provide a sense of reassurance that something is being done by someone, to fight back against the far right. To an extent this can be a problem, however, if people take from that reassurance that they need not take much action themselves. This is one of many reasons that people who feel they have committed views (e.g. committed anti fascist) might not ever act on those views (e.g. organise with other local people, engage with community, empower people who have been forced into the edges of society etc.): because they feel someone else is “doing the work”. There will always be dedicated and hard working activists in these spaces, but their dedication and hard work could be much more effective if every single person who cares about these issues was actively involved in organising for the changes we need to see.
Following these six speeches attendees took part in four workshops, first choosing between “Liberation not oppression: women and LGBTQ+ rights” and “Against empire: from Gaza to Tehran”, then between “No planet B: racism, refugees, and the climate” and “Fighting the far right: at the ballot box and on the streets”.
I first attended the workshop on women and LGBTQ+ rights. Following a number of panel talks that highlighted the need for an intersectional approach, the room was divided into breakout groups which each tackled a different question. My breakout group was tasked with discussing women’s role in fighting the far right. We touched on how online discourse favours regressive views, particularly on how online reactionaries dress up bigoted views in progressive-sounding language as a way to gain access to leftist spaces. Refocusing our energy on building local, in-person groups was put forward as a way to combat this tendency, and the group was very receptive to this idea. It was argued that offline methods can help us avoid toxic and unproductive online discourse, and that they facilitate better engagement with local people.
Community organising, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the process of gathering local people with common interests together into an organisation where they can develop collective power and fight for collective demands. This approach involves wide distribution of responsibilities and aims to develop community members into leaders. Community organising is a strategy that focuses on taking action within the community and aims to build something lasting there, something with deep roots. It was a subject heavily discussed in multiple groups at this workshop, and yet was left curiously absent from the post-discussion feedback until this oversight was mentioned by attendees.
The second workshop I attended was the ”fighting the far right” option. Although this was titled “fighting the far right, at the ballot box and on the streets” the conversations in my breakout group again mostly talked about organising: this time organising around political education. We discussed how initiating conversations can help our communities understand how and why Reform weaponises fear of threats to people’s jobs, homes, families etc. – and what alternatives we should be fighting for. Taking things beyond a purely electoral framework, the group looked at political education as a whole and the reasons why it is necessary to share our knowledge about political systems and at a wider societal level. There was a clear understanding in the room that radical change is needed to fix our decaying capitalist societies.
For the closing of the event there was a closing plenary which consisted of speeches by Zack Polanski (current Green Party leader and MLA), Sumayya Ahmed (from the Muslim Association of Britain), Leanne Wood (a former Plaid Cymru MS and party leader), Sioned Williams (current Plaid Cymru MS), Kwabena Devonish (from Stand Up To Racism Wales) and Anthony Slaughter (leader of the Wales Green Party).
While big names like Zack Polanski show there is national energy towards progressive electoral politics, they can drive focus away from community organising and onto short term and sporadic mobilising strategies: strategies that ebb and flow in tandem with the electoral cycle. Leanne Wood, by contrast, came as a representative of the Community Energy Wales / Ynni Cymunedol Cymru project. It’s clear that Wales does have effective, impactful and sustainable community organising groups people can put their effort into, and that resonated with the mood of the day’s workshops.
The tension between “organising” and “mobilising” approaches was a theme throughout this conference. The conference ending was no exception to this pattern, and calls for everyone to attend the demonstration on the 28th were a common refrain in these closing speeches. This is the contradiction at the heart of the Together Cymru launch: that most attendees argued that grassroots local communities should be the heart of our strategy when opposing Reform and the far right, and yet the event itself was organised primarily to gather support for a march in London. One bold speaker attempted to bridge this divide by arguing that this London protest is itself a form of community organising. It is hard to tell what people made of this, but some cynics in the room saw this as an attempt to redirect energy away from community organising and into the national march.
Of course, we can walk and chew gum at the same time – we can build local community action against the far right and mobilise for local or national demos. It’s obvious that a well-organised national march could have a lot of influence on how the public sees issues of anti-racism and anti-fascism. Stating that national demos are examples of community organising, however, shifts the two strands of actions into one. Practically this means relegating community organising to a secondary consideration, undermining what should be a key weapon in our arsenal.
Community organising builds sustainable, local and powerful campaigns that empower local people to take an active role in their political lives; it takes more time and effort to build, but the outcomes are far reaching and can last decades. National demos can have significant impacts on the zeitgeist, both on the left and the right, but they only require a very shallow level of engagement from attendees and risk fizzling out after a day of excitement. Leaving one’s community to attend a march in another country seems almost the opposite of community organising. Comrades will have a variety of different opinions about how we fight the far right and Reform, but it shouldn’t be necessary to throw community organising under the bus in order to bolster the attendance to national demos. While we can do both (and many more) types of action, in order to defeat the far right we need to build sustained and informed communities that can tailor their resistance to the far right based on local conditions. Beyond that defensive role, community organising is a great way for us to develop the skills and relationships we need to create the society we want to see.
The elephant in the room here, one people usually dare not name, is the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Their methods, which focus heavily on entering other organisations and steering them towards the tactics of protests and mobilisation, are often thought to have heavily hampered the effectiveness of groups like Stand Up To Racism (SUTR). SWP members were in attendance at the launch of this organisation too, both in the audience and on the speaking platform. Gossip on the left (which is never wrong) is that SUTR’s poor reputation is one of the reasons that Together (an organisation with a rather similar premise) is being created in the first place. It is perhaps a rather bad sign that this backwards interpretation of community organising, something that was also present in SUTR, has made its way into Together Cymru’s founding conference.
Overall the event was a good opportunity to meet with local people who are organising in many different ways throughout Cardiff and the surrounding areas. The event was well run (understandable to overrun with the number of attendees needing to move rooms for various workshops and speeches) and well attended, it felt like a positive day and affirmed the appetite for progressive politics and willingness to fight back against Reform. I think the day would have been improved if less time had been spent on speeches and more time had been available for the workshops. What the left needs now more than anything is space to discuss local ideas and start connecting communities together to facilitate deep organising. Organising an event primarily as a way to mobilise attendance for a national demo felt like a wasted opportunity as a result. There were numerous people I recognised at the conference from an enormous variety of local organisations, from choirs, to charities, to trade unions, and it would have been invaluable for these groups to make practical plans together, engaging over shared goals and creating a shared strategy. There clearly remains a strong desire for community organising, one that could flourish if we took the time to nurture it. Hopefully people on the coach to London will at least talk about what they’re going to do when they get home.
