Ben Paige has never done this before. "It's a bit unnerving, a bit awkward" he admits, but squares his shoulders and politely stops the man walking towards us with the question; "Excuse me, are you concerned about the NHS? Would you sign our petition?"

Paige, 35, is a care worker, and was never particularly politically active. "I used to sit in the pub and moan, go on long self-righteous rants but never actually do anything, and I just got really sick of it," he says. But five months ago, infuriated by what he was hearing from the coalition government, Paige did a search on Facebook for "anti-cuts group" and signed up for half a dozen. A couple of weeks ago, the Brighton Stop the Cuts Coalition sent him a message asking for volunteers to spend a day gathering signatures for a petition.

Within hours it had received hundreds of hits, and a few days later the BBC was in contact, promising to work with Pesky People to revise its disability awareness training. Smith says: "Social media is so important for disabled people because it opens doors and gives us a voice, it reduces our isolation. Collectively we can come together and be listened to. It's visual and instant and reaches a mass audience quickly."

Hundreds of similar groups continue to spring up across the UK, bringing together trade union groups with people who have never campaigned before but, like Paige, have felt forced to act because of their opposition to government policy.

Butcher says: "UK Uncut showed how campaigners could use social media to go from 0 to 60 in a few seconds. [It] is allowing people to network and liaise in a way that would have been infinitely harder - even impossible - 10 years ago."