This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Organisers of the Labour conference fringe are planning to facilitate a series of political education events around the country to inspire debate among Jeremy Corbyn supporters who are unable to attend the party’s main annual event.

The World Transformed will help activists organise political events to discuss “complex topics” from Brexit to British colonialism, and collect and curate some of the material generated on a revamped website.

The initiative has the backing of the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, who argued that if his party were to make it into government it would need the intellectual backing of a mass political movement.

“We can’t just be a bunch of politicians who take ministerial positions; the beating heart of Labour in power will be a movement of ordinary people who understand our history as the working class and what socialism can achieve,” McDonnell said.

The organisers of The World Transformed believe that political education on the left in the UK is fragmented and that they can help and support people to organise local events by suggesting speakers and providing practical know-how.

Festivals have already been held this year in Derby and in Southwark, south London, and a string of others are planned for a revival in political education that it is hoped will draw on the tradition of organisations such as the Left Book Club and the Workers’ Educational Association.

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Deborah Hermanns, an organiser with The World Transformed, said that the aim was to equip members “with the tools to analyse our political and economic system and to engage in all levels of the Labour party, as well as helping them to develop radical ideas on housing, education and social justice”.

Videos of events and reading materials will also be collated on The World Transformed website over the coming months, in effect creating a virtual thinktank. McDonnell added: “The Labour movement has a rich history of working class self-education and because of new platform technologies we’re able to revive and expand on that tradition like never before.”

The World Transformed fringe at party conference has been credited with helping revive Labour’s annual gathering, which had become increasingly corporate until the election of Corbyn in 2015.

Over 6,000 people attended around 250 hours of World Transformed sessions in Liverpool. Keynote speakers included Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftwing French presidential candidate, and young charismatic US activist Julia Salazar who is running for a state senate seat in New York.