In the heart of London’s financial district, The Guild Church of St Katharine Cree is providing something precious for a mainly Latin American congregation drawn from the City’s migrant workforce: the space to collectively organise.

Leadenhall Street in the City of London, home of St Katharine Cree.

Few pilgrims visit St Katharine Cree, a church in the City of London, one block east of The Gherkin, with no parish and no fixed congregation. Some drop by to inspect a model of the RMS Lancastria, others come to ring its six bells; a few wander in simply because it survived both the Great Fire and the Blitz. But those who remain — often for hours, sometimes for whole days — are here for none of that. When the bells fall quiet, you can hear a burst of ‘¡Lucha y no te rindas!’, and, just above eye level, a red banner that interrupts the Jacobean woodwork: a clenched fist and three downward-angled arrows edged with the words ‘Independent Workers Union’.

In the final months of the Covid-19 pandemic, St Katharine Cree began a relationship with the cleaners’ branch of the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB). It started with English classes and, soon after, with Spanish-language masses — many members are Latin American and identify as Christian. As these ties deepened, the church took on the rhythms of union life. Eucharistic services were planned around branch assemblies; names on the church’s English for Speakers of Other Languages registers quietly matched those on the membership roster; and the volunteer cook, once accustomed to turnip soup and summer melon gazpacho, found himself buried in mountains of chicken and rice, empanadas and arepas, and, at Easter, guaguas de pan, a traditional Ecuadorian sweet bread.

One could say this is a story about charity: a priest who helps those in need, the good shepherd who forgets no sheep. It might seem odd that a church should strike up a relationship with a union: these are groups that most consider to be at odds. All in all, it might be chalked up to Christian neighbourliness.

But while appealing to some, this view would be misguided. Framing the story as one of benevolence flattens the agency — often constrained, but never surrendered — of those increasingly pushed to the margins of British society. What is happening at St Katharine Cree reveals how migrants, low-wage workers, and those who are both — like most members of IWGB’s cleaners’ branch — can fight for their dignity today. As labour is weakened and immigration regimes tighten, hopes of working through the state give way to the strategy of occupying civil society instead. It is these institutions — churches, unions, community groups — that provide the space to exist. Where they are open, as at St Katharine Cree, power is shared. Where they are indifferent or obstructive, they will be pressed, reshaped, and, when necessary, taken over. These spaces offer not only the material support the state increasingly withholds, but also a form of political membership once thought fundamental to any dignified life.

The Workers’ Church

To understand how a Jacobean church became a home for twenty-first-century trade unionists, it helps to trace the paths that brought the IWGB’s members to its doors. The cleaners’ branch was founded after the disputes over the conditions of cleaners at the University of London.

Since its foundation, the cleaners’ branch — overwhelmingly made up of migrant workers — has become one of the central forces within the IWGB, alongside its couriers’ branch. Together, these parts of the union have taken on the task of organising workers in the gig economy, who require a form of organising that must account for a near-total absence of collective space, of knowing one’s colleagues, and of visibility itself. This is especially true in the City, in the buildings surrounding St Katharine Cree.

In large part, this is how the relationship between the church and the union began. After being handed a church that had long been either empty or leased as office space, two Anglican vicars and a group of community organisers from East London set about reclaiming it. St Katharine Cree had, since the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire, a long association with workers. As a guild church, the Diocese of London had once dedicated it to the City’s livery companies — stonemasons, shipping brokers, fishermen, grocers, and others. Yet when the new clerics arrived, they sought to renew and expand that tradition. Workers in construction, security, and cleaning — those, in their words, ‘hidden from view by the City’ yet forming its most populous sectors — would become its new congregation.

Those who revived the Aldgate church drew on a familiar East End tradition of radical clergy working alongside unions and local groups. In the late nineteenth century, such figures organised among what they called capitalism’s ‘residual waste’: the men and women left behind as the docks closed and industry moved elsewhere. But St Katharine Cree today is more than a revival of the old model of the parson-organiser. As Reverend Josh Harris, the church’s priest-in-charge, told me, there is a convergence of forces. Both the union and the church, he said, are only as strong as their weakest part — and both, in turn, attain their identity in the whole that each part generates.

Unlike the old East End missions, where charity drove service, it is now need that drives activism. The IWGB’s members are not the passive recipients of aid; they have given life to an institution that had lost its way. That St Katharine Cree can now be called a ‘workers’ church’ is thanks to the workers — and their union — who remade it in their own image. It is, in the fullest sense, political membership adapted to the exigencies of the present.

Beyond the Core

The workers’ church takes on an even sharper meaning when set against the pressures bearing down on the people who have remade it. The same migrants who have built a place of belonging in Aldgate now face an accelerating assault on their access to membership from the state itself. Only a few months have passed since the British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced plans to make it harder for asylum seekers to enter — and even harder for them to remain — in the UK. The most visible change is the extension of the route to settlement from five to ten years: a bureaucratic tweak framed as one of ‘fairness’ and ‘order’, but which fundamentally transforms the meaning of asylum. It does not target only those whose arrival provokes tabloid panic; it also encompasses those whose claims are recognised, who are deemed ‘licit’ refugees. Even they will have only a tenuous foothold: after nine years and eleven months of working, paying taxes, and raising children in Britain, they may still be sent back.

Mahmood’s intervention makes explicit what decades of policy once implied but never stated: presence, labour, and social ties no longer guarantee membership. Refugees must now prove that their attachment to Britain exceeds the ordinary bonds of life in a society. Contribution is no longer sufficient; it must be continually justified. Her comments on asylum reflect a broader logic shaping the treatment of anyone considered different. Migrants, ethnic minorities, and those outside the imagined white, nominally Christian core face mounting restrictions: family-dependent visas are tighter, English-language requirements are rising irrespective of age, skilled-worker thresholds increase, the care-worker route narrows, and access to welfare may in future require citizenship rather than settlement. Long-term presence, once a path to inclusion, is now treated as provisional.

This shift aligns with public attitudes. A recent National Centre for Social Research survey, published on 3 November 2025, found that a large majority of Conservative and Reform voters see diversity as a threat to national identity; even among Labour, Liberal Democrat, and Green supporters, over a third agree. Around 42 percent of Britons endorse enforced deportations — higher than in the US. The message is clear: membership is increasingly reserved for those who resemble Britain’s imagined core. Economic arguments, such as the Bank of England’s warning that growth depends on sustained migration, barely register against this cultural gatekeeping.

Historically, migrants’ rights were constrained — unequal welfare access, limited voting rights, conditional recognition — but lawful residence could progress to settlement, and settlement to citizenship. That trajectory is now fractured. Mahmood’s policies, together with the wider suite of restrictions, signal a state that reserves the right to treat long-term residence as temporary, long-term contribution as conditional, and long-term presence as insufficient. Existence, however sustained, no longer secures membership; Britain is remaking itself into a polity of selective, provisional inclusion.

Organising Sociability

The tightening of Britain’s citizenship regime does more than close a legal pathway: it hollows out political membership itself. If membership entails the capacity to act, participate in collective decisions, and hold standing in a shared world, those denied settlement or placed on perpetual probation are excluded from it. What remains is life without a place in the polity. In this vacuum, civil society becomes more than a buffer between individuals and the state; it becomes a site where those cast outside can fashion practices of participation the state refuses to recognise. To see this clearly, we must loosen the familiar liberal conception of civil society — as a set of voluntary organisations that ‘represent’ pre-existing constituencies —and recall an older, now obscured tradition: civil society as the domain in which sociability is made, sustained, and defended.

St Katharine Cree exemplifies this in practice. Here, ordinary social life is rehearsed by those pushed outside formal membership. Union members are not represented by the church in any conventional sense; they inhabit it. Decisions, obligations, and shared routines are worked out face to face — through meals, disagreements, and the slow choreography of cooperation. These are not the gestures of a constituency lodging its interests in a sympathetic institution; they are the practices of sociability through which fellowship emerges, possible only when people negotiate presence with one another rather than seek permission from outside. What takes shape in the nave and side rooms is not advocacy but the lived experience of membership itself, sustained and improvised through civil-society spaces that still allow such relations.

This stands closer to an older understanding of civil society. Its purpose was not to aggregate interests but to organise sociability — through regular contact and shared obligations, to cultivate the ability to live with others. In the early nineteenth century, French writers— disheartened Catholics and hopeful Saint-Simonians — worried about the loneliness and fragmentation unleashed by the Revolution. Intermediary bodies were not spontaneous expressions of identity but intentional constructions teaching coexistence. Clubs, unions, guilds, and mutual-aid societies were spaces where habits of cooperation were produced through rules, offices, rituals, and disagreements. They were formative institutions, not mere channels for interests.

This vision faded with the post-war settlement. Across Western Europe and North America, civil society’s incorporation into state structures was hailed as a victory, yet it depoliticised the associational sphere. Organisations spoke for members rather than with them. Everyday practices that once built shared life — festivals, assemblies, deliberation, slow-moving conflicts — were displaced by the need to produce coherent policy demands. In France, the late-nineteenth-century betrayal of Saint-Simonian experiments showed the danger: after creating emancipatory sociability, their associational life was absorbed and neutralised by the state. Post-war Britain, Germany, and the US repeated this pattern on a larger scale.

The consequences are visible today. Civil society’s institutional remnants are too thin to provide genuine membership: too bureaucratic to generate obligation, too formal to cultivate trust, too bound to the state to protect those it excludes. This helps explain why Mahmood’s policies encounter little resistance. Migrants have no durable place in national associational life; spaces where they might become indispensable — where their presence would be felt and defended — have atrophied. Exclusion is treated case by case, ignoring the relations, work, and communities they sustain.

This is why St Katharine Cree matters. What appears to be a curious scene — union members at a bilingual service, a feast day adorned with empanadas and candles, a priest haltingly shifting between English and Spanish — is a reconstruction of a sociable world. The union does not merely use the church; it occupies it, practising fellowship. Over the year, the choral services organised by cleaners, improvised processions, and shared meals turn the sanctuary into a communal hall. These gatherings do not merely express preferences; they enact the capacity to organise time, ritual, and decision. The priest learns Spanish because he is folded into the rhythms migrants have built, not as an act of charity.

What emerges is not an alternative to political membership but its reconstruction under hostile conditions. Membership is not only a legal status but a social practice that requires a home. Where the state refuses, civil society — when it recalls its deeper purpose — can provide it. In the relations forged among union members, clergy, volunteers, and newcomers, we see the slow return of a sociability that turns strangers into collaborators and institutions into shared worlds. Under exclusionary regimes, this is not a luxury — it is the precondition for any life still capable of calling itself political.

Reimagining Civil Society

In the last issue of Tribune , Grace Blakeley argued that the persistent marginalisation of socialism by Britain’s institutions demands a reassessment of strategy — one that begins outside the state. In the same issue, Jeremy Corbyn’s reflections on protest underscored the depth of this democratic socialist tradition: movements shaping his life, reshaping Britain, and furnishing the content and context of the Left’s imagination. The story told here belongs to that lineage. What is needed is a reconstitution of politics that does not wait for the state’s permission but stands apart from it, and when necessary, against it.

The workers’ church — a union that becomes, in effect, the beating congregation of a parish — reveals what this requires. In an age when a politics of exclusion cloaks itself in the language of compassion for the native-born while displacing hardship onto the outsider, resistance cannot rest on the assumption that membership still exists as a stable good. The democratic task of returning to the state through civil society must reach deeper than redrawn battle lines and repopulated party platoons. It must rebuild sociability itself: the everyday practices of cooperation, identity, and trust that austerity, managerialism, and exclusion have eroded. It is precisely because these practices grew fragile that states, associations, parties, politicians, and even parsons have drifted toward exclusionary stances.

The Left’s strength once lay in reimagining how people might live together — in households, neighbourhoods, schools, and the institutions they shaped. In a moment of crisis for all, that task returns with urgency: to guard and extend the practices of membership that the rest of political life has been so quick to cast aside.