Social clubs give people a sense of belonging
5 min read
A thriving social club can go a long way to boosting community cohesion.
“This village used to be the place where I stay. When I joined the club, it became the place where I live.” Like many of us, Ross doesn’t live in the same place where he was born. Joining his local miners' welfare club provided him with an entry point into his new community, helping him get to know his neighbours in double quick time.
That’s not just good for him. In a recent paper, Demos cited a literature review of 148 international research studies, concluding that strong ties have a huge bearing on our longevity — it’s good for all of us. When a neighbourhood has a club, it’s a key indicator of the strength and cohesion of the surrounding community.
There has been lots of debate, not least as we approach the anniversary of last year’s far-right riots, about whether our relationships are as strong as they need to be to face the challenges in front of us. Social clubs are a huge part of the answer here.
I am an enormous believer in collective assets of all sorts: a strong community needs its libraries and sports centres and green spaces and thriving pubs. Clubs, however, provide something special in the mix. That’s because they aren’t simply places we go but places we belong.
The membership structure of social clubs means we all have a stake and a say. That is what makes them feel different to anywhere else — one part pub, one part community centre, one part extension of the family sitting room.
My own constituency of Midlothian has a number of miners' welfares, a reflection of our proud mining heritage. Elsewhere in the country, the patterns are different, with trades clubs, working men’s clubs and British Legions being more common. What they tend to have in common — and where the magic happens — is that they are member-run and owned. They provide exactly what the members want because we wouldn’t have it any other way.
I have been working with the Co-operative Party and the Centre for Democratic Business on a campaign — Club Together — to support working-class social clubs. We have done sessions with club members all over the country, teasing out just why these institutions matter so much. A few common themes emerged.
Firstly, people like the mix of exclusivity and openness. Clubs are, by definition, selective. When you sign up, you affirm the value of a set of rules and join a collective which intends to enforce them. Membership confers a status in a fellowship. Clubs really are places where ‘we’re all in this together’. On the other hand, the barriers to entry are not very high, and so clubs tend to see quite a high degree of social mixing. As one club member said of their local trades club, “it’s a place where people of all generations and backgrounds come together for everything from union meetings to birthday parties to music gigs to religious worship. It’s one of the only affordable and welcoming places to meet in person in our community.”
Secondly, there is a strong sense of pride that the movement has survived as long as it has, despite all the changes in demographics, consumer behaviour and technology that our society has seen since 1862, when the drive to create working men’s clubs began. Clubs are adapting, innovating and toughing it out, but there is no doubt that there are challenges. The Club and Institute Union (CIU), the central co-op which supports the clubs movement, issued around 7m membership cards every year half a century ago. Now it is about 1m.
Tomorrow (Tuesday, 15 July), I am bringing those perspectives right to the heart of government by hosting a delegation of club members from across the UK with minister Alex Norris from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. We want to know what sort of support they need from our Labour government and what it will take to ensure they can thrive long into the future.
Ours is a government that is backing communities all the way, and in our forthcoming Communities Strategy and the Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, we will be transferring power to local levels like never before.
The Co-operative Party, Labour’s sister party, has informed and inspired a lot of this through our Community Britain campaign — an effort putting practical, community politics back at the heart of our national life. We have heard so clearly that people do want to feel more control in their individual lives. But they also know that there is strength in numbers and that the quality of our relationships really matters. They are hungry for exactly what clubs provide — the shared nights that turn strangers into friends and build the kind of trust that means we have people across the fence we would trust with a spare set of keys.
Social clubs cannot solve all of our problems, but their survival creates the conditions for so much else. Everything really is easier when we club together.
Kirsty McNeill is the Labour and Co-operative Party MP for Midlothian.
