When people ask what the movement is, the honest answer is that it is about four hundred people who keep turning up. That is not an inspiring sentence and it is the true one. Here are four of them.

Ellen, who counted

Ellen Marsh spent the spring of 2024 with a clipboard, checking 2,300 households in Ashcroft against the electoral register. She is 71 and she did about a third of the doors herself.

What she found was that 19% of eligible adults in the ward were not registered, and that two thirds of those believed they were. That second number is the one that changed the campaign’s position. We had been planning a persuasion effort. Ellen’s clipboard told us the problem was administrative.

“I didn’t set out to prove anything,” she said afterwards. “I set out to find out. Those are different jobs and people mix them up.”

Tomasz, who read the papers

Tomasz Bielak works nights and reads council papers in the morning before he sleeps. He is the reason we know that thirty-nine of the district’s 118 decisions in 2024 were taken on same-day urgency papers.

Nobody asked him to count. He counted because he kept noticing the same word, and noticing turned into a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet turned into an argument the monitoring officer had to answer in writing.

Fola, who asked the awkward question

At the March surgery in Lower Fairmount, Fola Adeyemi asked why the campaign’s clinic proposal named three neighborhoods and not four. She lives in the fourth.

We did not have a good answer. The three had been chosen from a 2019 dataset that predated the Marchwood development. She was right, we were wrong, and the proposal now names four.

This is the least comfortable item on this list and the most important one. A campaign that cannot be corrected in public by a resident at a surgery is not running surgeries; it is running a roadshow.

Devon, who made the tea

Devon Clarke has made the tea at the Ashcroft surgery for nine years. He also knows every family on the Kelvin estate, which means he knows who has stopped coming and why, and he tells us.

It is not a glamorous role and it is load-bearing. Half the casework that reaches the surgery reaches it because Devon mentioned to somebody that they should come in.

What the four have in common

None of them joined anything. Each of them noticed one specific thing and did one specific piece of work about it. That is the entire method, and it is available to anybody with two hours and a question.

The next surgery is on the second Saturday. The kettle is Devon’s.