The introduction to IPPR’s Condition of Britain report is incredibly clear about what the objective of the next Labour government ought to be: redistribution of power as well as wealth. Calling for a ‘a wider dispersion of power and responsibility across society’, the report recognises that far too many of Britain’s social problems stem not just from a lack of access to material resources, but in failures of accountability and democracy that prevent ordinary people from having a say in how resources are allocated and services delivered.
The report’s agenda echoes Ed Miliband’s Hugo Young lecture earlier in the year in which he recognised that ‘unresponsive state’ can be as frustrating and disempowering as the untamed market. But if neither states nor markets alone provide the answers, then what does?
IPPR’s report points to the way ahead for revitalising both our society and social democracy more widely. Its approach to tackling complex issues such as financial exclusion, anti-social behaviour and early years care is at its core, a mutual and co-operative one.
From neighbourhood justice panels to give local people a more direct role tackling anti-social behaviour to an affordable credit trust to back the expansion of fairer community-based lenders such as credit unions, the report’s recommendations represent a real shift. This is an approach that understands the limits of centralised service delivery and cash transfers and finds new solutions that make the most of local knowledge, community relationships, joint responsibility and mutual support.
As the report recognises, institutions are ‘places where relationships between people are formed, loyalties accrue, professional practices are nurtured, and traditions take shape. They put down roots in society that are hard to pull up.’
It was of course precisely this belief in mutual action that brought together a group of low-paid traders in Rochdale in 1844. Held up as the first modern co-operative, their shop was fundamentally a means of pooling the knowledge, drive and limited resources of the local community to create a better life for themselves and their families.
The practicalities of making this happen is where I passionately believe that we as the Co-operative party have a contribution to make. In the United Kingdom, we work to advance the co-operative movement, which includes thousands of enterprises from multi-million pound businesses to community-owned pubs and worker-owned start-ups. Each of these, in their own ways are physical embodiments of the kind of mutualism the report calls for.
And if the past 12 months of the co-operative movement have taught us anything, it’s that redistributing power can be trickier than it looks. The dividends (both financial and social) can be significant, but there are also practical questions.
How do we keep members and service users engaged in governance so that those in charge remain accountable? How do we fulfil the need for specialist expertise in delivering complex services like railways, large retail chains and hospitals with the desire to involve ordinary people? Most crucially in terms of social exclusion, how do we build the capacity of deprived and disempowered communities to ensure that wer are not simply transferring power from one section of the existing elite to another?
Some of the questions are inextricably linked to the future of our political system itself: how do we reimagine democratic participation in an era of plummeting voter turnout and disillusionment with models that fail to reflect the kind of society we are now?
These are vital questions, and all too often abstract ones. But if we want to make the vision of a less centralised, more open, accountable and participative society a reality, then we need to ground them in the experiences, ideas and yes, sometimes lessons of the mutualism that already exists.
Whether passionate discussions about the governance of Britain’s largest co-operative, debates among football supporters’ trusts about raising share capital to save the club they love or hard reflection on improving staff and patient participation in foundation hospitals – each provides clues as to how redistribution of power can work and look in practice.
Working in partnership with the Labour and grounded in the thousands of co-operative enterprises across the UK, we will be working to ensure that the values, lessons, ideas and – most crucially – passion of the co-operative movement is at the heart of the next government’s agenda.
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Karin Christiansen is general secretary of the co-operative party
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Photo: Sludge G