Neil Jameson, founder of the activist group Citizens UK, who has died aged 76, harnessed the power of community organising to achieve social and political change – most significantly as the driving force behind the living wage campaign. Citizens UK began in 1996 as a collective of east London churches, mosques and other community institutions called Telco (the East London Citizens Organisation), committed to trying to alleviate some of the social ills facing their congregations.
An early victory of which Jameson was particularly proud was persuading a local lard factory in Canning Town to install a filter, to alleviate the stench that was blighting the lives of local residents. But after a grassroots exercise identified poverty pay as the most pressing issue facing the community, the living wage campaign began to take shape.
Launched in 2001, it initially involved publicly targeting individual institutions that were employing workers from the East End, often through outsourced contracts, on wages that were legal, but impossible to live on. Jameson encouraged local people at the sharp end of London’s economy to become the campaign’s driving force.
At HSBC’s annual meeting in 2003, one of the bank’s cleaners, Abdul Durrant, politely confronted its chair, Sir John Bond, telling him, “we receive a whole £5 an hour, no pension, a miserly sick scheme. Our children go to school without adequate lunch.”
Barclays became the first City bank to agree to pay the living wage – but HSBC and many other corporates followed, and as Telco broadened its reach across the capital, eventually becoming London Citizens before spreading UK-wide, it began to turn up the heat on politicians.
Ken Livingstone adopted the living wage as London mayor in 2005, bringing the calculation of the rate into City Hall and rolling it out as a minimum for municipal workers.
In 2010, in a striking demonstration of the movement’s pulling power, both David Cameron and Gordon Brown agreed to appear before a mass rally of Citizens UK activists at Methodist Central Hall three days before polling day, at which low-paid workers gave moving testimony about their lives.
Jameson told the Guardian in 2015: “I’m most proud of reviving political assemblies as the political tool for non-partisan people to show their power … If you have a packed room, in a democracy, people have to come to you.”
Brown, whose frontbench career was about to come to an end, gave one of the speeches of his life, telling the assembled organisers: “If you fight for fairness, you will always find in me a friend, a partner and a brother.” Cameron, who would shortly unleash deep public spending cuts, told the assembled activists, “you are the Big Society” – and left having promised to look at capping the extortionate cost of consumer credit.
More than 12,000 employers are now accredited by the Living Wage Foundation – the body Jameson helped to create, which calculates the living wage for London and the rest of the UK annually.
In 2015, George Osborne paid the campaign the ultimate backhanded compliment when he boosted the minimum wage for over-25s, badging it the “national living wage” – though it was still well below the rate recommended by Citizens UK. Jameson and his colleagues felt what he called at the time, “a mixture of anger, flattery and concern”; but the number of companies signing up with the Living Wage Foundation continued to multiply.
In all, Jameson ran Citizens UK and its predecessor organisations for almost three decades. He was appointed CBE in 2016.
He had been convinced of the power of community organising since a Churchill scholarship in the 1980s saw him visit the US to explore the legacy of the Chicago-based activist Saul Alinsky. Telco followed an initial experiment in Bristol, funded by the Barrow Cadbury Trust.
Jameson was a committed Quaker, whose political outlook was deeply informed by his faith – though friends and colleagues say he wore it lightly.
He was a social worker and a local government official before moving to work for children’s charities – but became frustrated at the lack of opportunity to organise or empower the people he was employed to help.
Born in Tynemouth, North Tyneside, he was the son of Eric, a salesman, and Violet - the couple met as Sunday school teachers. Neil met his future wife, Jean Bird, when he was still at Solihull school, and she at the neighbouring girls’ school. She had the lead part in the schools’ joint production of Christopher Fry’s Curtmantle and he was selling the tickets. The pair went to different universities – Neil to Bristol to study social science – but stayed in close touch, and went on voluntary service overseas (VSO) together in Sudan after graduating. They married in 1970.
Later in his life, Jameson began to take a growing interest in the challenges faced by refugees, becoming involved in an organisation called UK Welcomes Refugees, which supports local communities in sponsoring new arrivals.
Just weeks before he died, he contacted his close friend Sir David Green, a former director general of the British Council, who was travelling in Pakistan, and asked him to go to Rawalpindi and meet an Afghan couple whose safe passage to the UK Jameson was trying to secure.
Despite a long-held scepticism of electoral politics, he became involved in the Green party in his final years, standing as a prospective parliamentary candidate in the east London constituency of Poplar and Limehouse in 2019 (he came fourth, with 3.5% of the vote).
He was due to stand in the recent local elections as a Green council candidate in Burrator in west Devon, where he and Jean moved after retirement. Jameson died of an untreatable cancer that was diagnosed only days before his death. In his Who’s Who’s entry, he described his hobbies as, “strengthening civil society, promoting democracy, tennis and optimism”.
He is survived by Jean and their four children, Ben, Ella, Will and Charlie, and seven grandchildren.
Neil Jameson, campaigner, born 25 November 1946; died 24 April 2023