David Cameron’s cooperative love needs to go beyond John Lewis. We have a prime minister who has shown today how committed he is to the idea of cooperatives with the announcement that the government will be putting a new Cooperative Act on the statute book in the current parliament.
The majority of legislation that will be consolidated was passed into law over the past decade as part of the most comprehensive package of legislation ever for cooperatives and mutuals, fought for by the Cooperative party.
It is hard to do anything but congratulate the prime minister – this consolidation is indeed a step in the right direction.
The emphasis that was put on cooperatives in his speech this morning would suggest that this is a business model with all the answers.
A business model – the problem is that that is all it is to Mr Cameron. It is one way to get employees feeling more involved in their workplace.
What it isn’t for him is a place to live with a fair rent and a say in how the housing cooperative is run and the environment that residents live in.
It isn’t a cooperative trust school run using values and principles, giving students, parents, staff and the local community a voice in how the school is run.
It isn’t a Football Supporters’ Trust offering fans an opportunity to have a voice in the running of the club that they care about so much.
While the worker cooperative model is obviously a great model, which does offer a brilliant way of giving staff a real stake in a business, this is also just one small part of the UK’s varied and broad cooperative movement.
If the prime minister is serious about creating a cooperative economy in this country, firstly he needs to understand the breadth and depth of the cooperative movement and the impact it could potentially have. The impact of cooperatives in the economy won’t be felt fully just by worker cooperatives – it is going to take a move towards cooperatives of all different shapes and kinds for our movement to really provide cooperative solutions to the problems that we face within society.
He secondly needs to convince his conservative colleagues that cooperatives offer something towards the new form of capitalism that he talked about this morning. George Osborne obviously wasn’t too convinced by the idea to give Northern Rock back to British taxpayers through the remutualisation option put on the table by the Cooperative party, choosing instead for it to be sold to Richard Branson.
And while it is indeed true that the prime minister himself launched the Conservative Cooperative Movement in 2008, the fact that he has only managed to convince 40 of his 306 Conservative parliamentary colleagues to join their own ‘movement’ tells its own story.
While I welcome today’s announcement, my biggest issue is that in reality Mr Cameron isn’t really putting anything new on the table. He might make it slightly less bureaucratic to become a cooperative, but if he is serious about building a better economy with cooperatives at its heart, then a rehash of old legislation just isn’t going to cut it.
We need to see new measures on the statute book such as the Cooperative party’s plan to enshrine cooperative housing in legislation. That plan, which is in a bill put forward by Labour and Cooperative MP Jonathan Reynolds, would establish for the first time cooperative housing tenure in law and update the current feudal arrangements.
This is the type of ground-breaking cooperative legislation that I want to see if David Cameron wants to be known as the prime minister who ‘never knowingly undersold’.
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Alexandra Baker is a member of the Cooperative party National Executive Committee
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Is this “a step in the right direction”. The truth will be in the detail. At the moment the Coalition is defining a mutual as a company/organisation where the majority (ie, 51 per cent) of workers are shareholders.
But another important question arises. Laboutr had an excellent record on co-ops (leisure facilities, schools etc) but never talked about it until the very last period of the government. We will not know where Labour is going until we ask ourselves how it was that a Labour government was so shy about a form of ownership which stretched back to its own history and was, through the Co-op Party and sponsored MPs, a live element within the modern party.
” cooperatives offer something towards the new form of capitalism ”
It is this potential that will deter the government and (probably a significant section of the PLP will be with them on this) from putting anything new on the table.
Don’t expect Cameron and Osborne to get at all enthusiastic about ditching their traditional business supporters nor their extra-parliamentary ambitions.
And if Labour is going to propose “building a better economy with cooperatives at its heart” then we’ll have a programme far more radical than anything seen before. All the effort expended on winning credibility with big business will be brushed aside at a stroke.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that it isn’t the right thing to do though.