A bold future beckons for the Cooperative party in alliance with Labour
The Cooperative party, whose new general secretary will be announced imminently, faces an unparallelled opportunity. In electoral alliance with Labour for 85 years of its 95-year existence, too often the Cooperative party has hidden its light under the proverbial bushel. The habit formed during the 1960s when several union bosses objected to Cooperative party candidates beating their own favoured sons in parliamentary selections. It was reinforced during the 1980s by a sustained assault from Labour’s hard-left, for whom the Cooperative party was insufficiently ‘statist’.
The Cooperative party stands proudly as Britain’s only political party never to have seen the state as the default vehicle for collective public action. It was, after all, the Conservative party model of the ‘public corporation’, deployed first by Stanley Baldwin’s government with the BBC in 1927, that was adopted by Labour. In contrast, the Cooperative party insisted nationalisation was not always the best model for improving services and secured pledges in Clement Attlee’s 1950 election manifesto for the mutualisation of life assurance instead of nationalisation.
With serious questions being asked about the effectiveness of the state as a deliverer of public services, it is to the Cooperative party and the intellectual tradition to which it is guardian that progressives surely should turn.
In opposition, the left has all too often focused on the ‘must’ and ‘should’. It is easy to say that the next Labour-led government ‘should’ and ‘must’ tackle poverty. ‘How’ is tougher – and the delusion that the clever civil service machine in Whitehall will work it all out for us has time and again derailed Labour governments. In 2010 the daily media diet of waste and bureaucratic failure undermined voter confidence in Labour’s competence to efficiently deliver better public services. Yet ministers allowed themselves to be corralled into defending vested interests, whether Network Rail or NHS supercomputer commissioners.
The state, on which Labour governments have depended for ‘building a better Britain’, has repeatedly proved ‘unfit for purpose’. It can be reformed and improved, but as the Cooperative party has shown, there are better ways than the age-old dichotomy between state provision and privatisation. Take ‘making the trains run on time’: the Cooperative party’s detailed plan to transform Network Rail into a fully fledged mutual would give public accountability to an organisation which is currently accountable only to itself, creating a more genuine ‘people’s rail’ than the Beeching-tainted British Rail ever could be.
It is the same for cooperative housing, which can provide affordable homes, even in the downturn, and free people from a precarious mortgage market. The Cooperative party has ideas for giving control of public services to users, of schools and hospitals, and of canals and rivers too through the mutualisation of British Waterways, and the power for passengers to get themselves a better train service through government support for mutually run trains. It would also give us all more power over our cultural institutions like English Heritage, the BBC, football clubs, and, if local people want to do it, the power to run local leisure services and even the village pub.
Ed Miliband is telling voters that he would lead a government which is ‘on your side’. Unless we are to presume that this can be achieved by willpower alone, and somehow by ‘better’ intentions than the previous Labour government, it must bring progressives back to the ‘how’ question. The Cooperative party has at least part of the answer. The opportunity for the new general secretary is to help the wider Labour movement embrace it.
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Greg Rosen is author of Serving the People: Cooperative Party History from Fred Perry to Gordon Brown