Single-issue campaigns

When does cooperation become a movement?

Political lobbying can be more effective when people or groups with different worldviews support the same outcome on a particular issue, even when they actively oppose each other on other fundamental questions. Sometimes they campaign separately. Sometimes they work together on the shared aim. Sometimes they form an organised coalition.

For example, anti-war campaigns can include peace groups, different religions, socialists, liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. So can campaigns for marriage equality, abortion rights, assisted dying, drug law reform, and criminal justice reform. The Brexit campaign included economic libertarians, sovereign nationalists, social conservatives, and left-wing Euro-skeptics.

I’ve been involved in many such campaigns. I’ve worked with secular liberals and religious pluralists for contraception, divorce, marriage equality, abortion rights, assisted dying, and an end to blasphemy laws. I’ve worked with Atheist Ireland, the Evangelical Alliance of Ireland, and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community of Ireland for secularism in Ireland and against religious persecution in Pakistan.

I worked with Nationalists and Unionists against Republican and Loyalist terrorism in Northern Ireland. While doing this, I joined Republicans and Loyalists to oppose ‘shoot-to-kill’ actions by the State and media censorship of Sinn Féin and the UDA. Similarly, I’ve chaired my local neighbourhood watch while campaigning against miscarriages of justice like the Tallaght Two and Nicky Kelly. Supporting effective policing does not require defending every police action.

In all of these campaigns, everyone understands that no one person or group endorses the wider worldviews of the others. Indeed, the breadth of support across opposing worldviews shows that the issue transcends those differences, and therefore does not rely on any one of them for its legitimacy.

If you want to oppose an outcome that different people want for different reasons, you have to show why the position itself is wrong, based on its own merits. It’s not sufficient to try to discredit some people or groups, by pointing to others who want the same outcome for different reasons. You can of course make points about strategy or impact, but you should primarily address the substantive issue.

Obviously, cooperation can affect political advocacy. Relevant questions include: How strong is the evidence for any given single-issue cooperation? Does it amount to different groups working separately on similar aims? Are there tactical alliances, advocacy coalitions, or a coherent movement? Whose wider worldviews do they strengthen? And when is it fair to describe them as a movement?

The Amnesty UK Report

Amnesty UK understands this principle perfectly in its own operations. It works with trade unions without endorsing every economic or political position they take. It endorses agreements with businesses while correctly criticising corporate violations of human rights. Similarly, during Pride events, mainstream LGBT organisations work with multinational corporations that they may disagree with on business issues.

Amnesty UK also has a faith network of affiliate groups which it says includes representatives from all major religions across the UK. These religions have contradictory theological worldviews, and often oppose Amnesty on issues like marriage equality and abortion rights. Yet Amnesty rightly treats their campaigning and fundraising as cooperation on human rights aims, not as evidence they and Amnesty form one movement.

Despite this, Amnesty UK recently labelled conservative Christian groups and gender-critical feminist groups collectively as ‘an anti-rights movement’. I’ve addressed this report and how it came to be written in these two articles.

• When human rights clash: Amnesty should protect, not undermine, equal rights for all

• How Amnesty got it wrong: How it wrote its withdrawn report on ‘anti-rights’ groups

The Sally Hines Report

Sally Hines makes a related argument in ‘Hands towards the right: UK gender-critical feminism and right-wing coalitions’. Thank you to AndOrNorLyn on Bluesky for linking me to this report.

It’s an interesting read. It discusses how the language of sex, gender, ‘gender ideology’, and related terms has evolved, and makes a distinction between rights and protections. It argues that Conservative politicians, the far right, and the media are fuelling a moral panic about transgender people as part of a wider attack on issues including marriage equality, abortion, and sexual liberalism.

It documents some instances in which gender-critical organisations have cooperated with conservative Christian groups. For example, in the US, the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition (HATAC) was founded in 2017 to bring together radical feminists and conservative Christian groups on the single issue of ‘gender identity ideology’. And various groups from both worldviews have co-signed UN submissions on transgender issues.

With regard to gender-critical groups in the UK, the report refers to Fair Play for Women, LGB Alliance, Object, Transgender Trend, and Women’s Human Rights Campaign. It also mentions some individual activists and politicians. It does not come anywhere close to replicating the list of fifty gender-critical groups that Amnesty UK labelled as part of an ‘anti-rights movement’.

Hines’ examples of cooperation concern opposition to gender self-identification, aspects of gender recognition reform, and gender-affirming healthcare. She does not suggest that they cooperate on such issues as abortion, marriage equality, contraception, or wider LGBT rights. Indeed, she accepts that some gender-critical activists oppose the right and far-right.

But she argues that cooperation and ideological overlap on transgender-related issues links gender-critical feminism to a wider ‘anti-gender’ movement that also campaigns against those other rights. She writes that gender-critical activists are reproducing ideas that appeal to, and are themselves reproduced by, right-wing forces. She therefore concludes that it is ‘impossible to divorce gender-critical thinking from gender and sexual conservatism’.

What does single-issue cooperation show?

It is normal and practical for groups with opposing worldviews to cooperate together, in good faith, on single issues where they want the same outcome for different reasons. I have given many examples of this at the start of this article. Nobody reasonable would conclude that such groups share all of the other aims of the other groups, and indeed they often actively oppose them.

The next question is how strong the cooperation is. At the weakest level, two groups can separately support or oppose the same policy. At the next level, they can actively cooperate on a single-issue campaign. They can jointly sign letters, share platforms, and coordinate lobbying. At the next level, they can form an ongoing advocacy coalition. They can cooperate on related issues over many years.

Finally, they can form a social or political movement. Members would typically identify as being part of this movement, promote it together and individually, and cooperate across multiple campaigns. That’s the level of cooperation I would expect to see evidence of, if people argue that groups with opposing worldviews are part of a movement. I don’t see it in these reports.

I want to end with two related observations. It is unfair for Amnesty UK to label groups as ‘anti-rights’ where they are campaigning on issues where there are contested rights, or at least contested claims of what rights are affected. The gender-critical groups cited in both reports view themselves as promoting the rights of women, gay people, and children.

Finally, where there is cooperation, both reports seem to assume that the political impact of such cooperation would flow only one way: that the cooperation would add strength or legitimacy to the conservative Christian groups’ positions with regard to other issues such as marriage equality or abortion.

It is also possible that the cooperation would add strength or legitimacy to the feminist gender-critical groups’ positions on those issues. Or that both sets of groups might come closer to each other. Or that neither sets of groups’ positions on these other issues would be strengthened or weakened. That’s an area where we could benefit from further research.