Heart of England: Making a Song and Dance on our Birthday

2012 as well as being the UN Year of Co-operatives also has a special significance for my own Society. We can trace our roots back to nine ribbon weavers from Foleshill, now part of Coventry, who in 1832 formed the Lockhurst Lane Industrial Co-operative Society.

Well 180 years later and following a number of mergers we became in 2000, the Heart of England Co-operative Society, based in Nuneaton serving the communities of Coventry and Warwickshire, South Leicestershire and West Northamptonshire.

Today we are a well run profitable Society with trading figures that are the envy of many of our larger rivals with a broad portfolio from food to travel, non-food to funerals. Trading conditions are tough but we are quietly confident of the future. A long life and an illustrious past, even if that does mean being formed a good decade before the famous Rochdale Pioneers, however is no guarantee of success.

Co-operative Societies like any businesses have to keep renewing themselves and adapting making themselves relevant to the needs of their customers and members.

That drive and adaptation has since 2004 been lead by a remarkable man, Ali Kurji, the first and so far only ethnic minority leader of a major UK co-operative retail society. Ali’s story reflects well his ambition and drive and also ability of the co-operative movement to develop both his business skills alongside his desire to contribute to society.

Ali is quiet a character, on the surface an unassuming modest man but someone who is deeply determined, totally committed to doing the right thing with a very high level of personal integrity. Not characteristics you always find, it would seem, in some modern business leaders.

He was born in Kampala in Uganda and when he was just seventeen, left the family business to train in the UK as an accountant. Arriving in England in 1968 was a tremendous culture shock for a boy from Africa but soon things would get a great deal worse. Only four years after his arrival his family’s world in Uganda was turned upside down by the rise of Idi Amin.

His rule precipitated some very dark days indeed for the Asian business community in Uganda many fleeing the country with just what they could carry. For Ali there could be no going back. Having qualified as an accountant he worked for Manchester based, Appleby and Wood, who undertook audit work with co-operative retail societies.

Years later Ali was able to return to Uganda but only to sell up the family business donating the £35,000 proceeds to charity in India. For ten years he toured the country doing the audit sums for Co-ops large and small. This experience taught him that there was indeed a different way of doing business based on an ethical approach with a commitment to social justice. In 1982 he was offered a job as a management accountant with the old Coventry Co-operative Society a key part component of the Heart of England.

Since becoming CEO there is no doubt that today the Society reflects Ali’s personality, a tight control on costs and good business practice, continuous investment, alongside a strong commitment to the community. Unique in British retailing the Heart of England Board decided that they felt uncomfortable profiting from a product whose normal use killed those who used it. So over the last eleven years the society has donated the proceeds from the sales of cigarettes and tobacco products into a Helping Hearts fund to support local good causes, a fund that to date has dispersed some £636,000.

This year Ali has encouraged the Society to also adopt a corporate charity selected by staff. This year the Air Ambulance has been selected with positive effects and support form staff.

Ali however does not only support the societies charitable giving but he also carries out charitable work on his own behalf. One of the projects with which he is closely involved is supporting an orphanage in Iraq which sadly has currently plenty of work on its hands.

The Society has long standing commitments to an amateur orchestra and also to an amateur theatre operating from one of our old stores. However I have to say that for me the most pleasurable event that the Society has supported this year has been the Warwick Folk Festival. I feel the worlds of co-operation and folk music have a lot in common. After all being founded in 1832 means that a lot of folk music is contemporary for us!

The way folk festivals are organised and run has a terrific co-operative feel to it, people getting together with a common purpose not for personal gain but for the sheer pleasure of making a wonderful noise or having a good dance with all the proceeds being ploughed back into the making of bigger and a better festival.

Warwick this year was terrific, Eddie Reader was top of the bill, but there where many excellent acts and more importantly to be a true festival opportunities for people to participate in workshops for singing and dancing. John Plumb, Festival Chairman, said he was delighted with the support from the Society.

So after all these years the Society is in robust health and we are perfectly happy to be accused of making a song and dance of our 180^th birthday!

Trade Unions and Co-ops

There was an internet discussion recently begun by John Merrit MD of Social Enterprise link Wessex about the relationships between Trade Unions and Co-ops. He saw some of the key philosophical differences between trade unions and co-ops pointing out that there are strong syndicalist tendencies in co-ops and democratic centralist tendencies in trade unions, despite the fact that co-op members and workers are very often the same people. It is indeed a pity that with a shared criticism of share holder capitalism, co-operators and trade unionists cannot find ways of working together to create new models of democratic ownership.

This is very important. Despite the evidence of the complete failure of neo-liberalism it still has the ruling class and its acolytes in its thrall. Look at the debate about whether the blood sucking leech that has the franchise for the West Coast Mainline should have a beard or not. Despite all the evidence of colossal waste the Labour Party cannot bring itself to state the obvious - that privatisation has been an unmitigated disaster and the railways have to be bought back into some form of public ownership.

As a co-operator I of course believe that the precise form of public ownership should be open for discussion to ensure railway workers, rail-passengers and the government get a say in how then are managed and run. In my opinion there is no scope for private ownership of key utilities they are natural monopolies that as well as carrying out key economic activities also have a social function. Private businesses can often be reasonably well behaved but fundamentally in healthcare, education and the criminal justice system, the pursuit of profit is inappropriate it distorts the outputs and eventually increases the cost of these activities. I remember listening to Gordon Brown railing at the electricity companies about their pricing structures. It is clear that whatever regulatory system you create the companies will use all their efforts to subvert it.

It was even worse when we had those devastating summer floods with Tewkesbury threatened with complete submersion. Brown demanded that private companies should give up profits and dividends and invest more in flood prevention measures. You may as well tell a dog to be a cat. What nonsense these are private companies, if you do not want them to behave like private businesses don’t make them profit seeking in the first place.

This year Co-ops UK have signed a memorandum of understanding with the TUC we have a common interest I believe in protecting the co-operative brand from dilution and reputational damage from the creation of pseudo public service mutuals. But whilst we can easily agree that key services and utilities should be firmly in the public sector that still leaves an awful lot of the economy where there is a greater scope for co-operative ownership models.

The Post Office for example which consists of a large number of small private businesses, the provision of council services like waste collection and grounds maintenance seem ideal for co-operative business models and you don’t need to hear me going on again about a greater role for co-ops in the provision of financial services. In the United States the largest worker co-op is Co-operative Home Care Associates whose two thousand members are represented by branch 1199 of the Services Employees International Union (SEIU). Their slogan is the provision of quality care through quality jobs. Not a message that seems to strike a chord with many of the UK private social care vultures.

Here in the UK UNISON have signed an MOU with the Schools Co-operative Society which promotes Co-operative trust schools. The NASUWT have also signed an agreement with them to ensure schools remain not for profit and democratically accountable. There is no doubt the ground is moving, the masochism of the Conservative cuts will continue whilst they are in power, despite the whining of the Liberal Democrats and if Labour wins the election despite Ed Milibands rhetoric about good and bad businesses Labour has still not woken up to the reality that the old ways have failed and new ownership models are needed.

One recently lost comrade Ken Coates who was the driving force behind the Institute for Workers Control, saw through Tony Blair early on, the removal of the old clause four from the Labour constitution confirmed his fears. For Ken workers control came from his views on poverty and alienation and the fact that people where disempowered. He said it was “not simply about the worker taking all the decisions; it is about the environment being such that human development is the crucial datum and not profit and loss.”

Tory austerity is about destroying any hope of development for the working class, about breaking us so that we are grateful for whatever we are given, the process of alienation runs deep and it is up to us as trade unionists and co-operators to map out an alternative future. As the great Jimmy Reid said in his University rectoral address in 1971,

“Alienation, is the precise and correctly applied word for describing the major social problem in Britain today… it is the cry of men who feel themselves the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. It is the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the process of decision making.”

It was true then and it is even truer today. More and more of us are the slaves of global capital and its lackeys prostituting ourselves in search of “investment”. Yet we have a choice - ownership really does matter - we can reverse this trend and find new ways of making capital work for people.

SACP Welcomes New Start for Co-op Movement in South Africa

There has been a strong commitment to co-operative development in South Africa since the end of apartheid. All the Tripartite Alliance partners (the ANC, COSATU & SACP) have a commitment to building co-operatives. As far back as 1998 the Alliance Summit adopted the program Unity in Action, which placed co-operatives firmly on the agenda.

It would be understandable if amongst the wider black population there was less enthusiasm for co-ops. For many years particularly in the agricultural sector they bolstered white power. Beginning in the 1910’s and 20’s, they focused on input supplies and joint marketing; and establishing processing co-ops. They became a powerful lobby holding a virtual monopoly in key agricultural sectors, backed by ready access to finance through the Land Bank, and controlling the Marketing Boards that regulated prices until this system was dismantled post-apartheid.

A classic example is KWV which came to dominate the wine and spirits industry. Formed in 1918, by growers in the Western Cape the Kooperative Wijnbouwers Vereniging van Zuid-Afrika became a giant in the industry. As apartheid collapsed so did its marketing and regulatory functions leaving behind a mistrust of the Co-operative brand amongst black farmers and wine growers that has taken a long time to change. Today there is a small inclusive co-op sector supported by fair trade and foreign co-operative organisations like the German Co-op Movement and the UK’s Co-operative Group who support the Du Toitskloof wine co-operative in the Breede River Valley.

The history of financial mutuals goes back further still. Old Mutual the South African financial giant was founded by Scotsman John Fairbairn in 1845 as the Mutual Life Assurance Society of the Cape of Good Hope it began with no initial capital other than the premiums of its first 166 policyholders. As you may expect at that time they where all white. Following demutualization in 1999 and a listing on the FTSE it has become one of the worlds leading financial businesses on the back of a dominant position in South Africa.

In its early days it enabled white farmers to build up their businesses offering insurance and savings to weather the ups and doubts of agricultural markets. What was wrong with these organisations was not their co-operative nature but their failure to adopt the key co-operative principle of open membership. The things they did to enable small producers to gain economies of scale and less affluent communities to gain access to finance are needed today more than ever. Co-operatives like trade unions are not inherently progressive. They have the capacity to be so but can be corrupted into advancing the rights of one group over another.

The concrete situation in South Africa today means that with now with the right legislation co-operatives can play a positive role in fighting unemployment and poverty. Despite the end of apartheid the economy is still dominated by largely white owned corporations and whilst Black Economic Empowerment has propelled a relatively small number of blacks into top positions in these corporations much of the black working class has been left behind.

It was a welcome move therefore in response to the UN Year of Co-operatives that last month SA Trade Minister Rob Davies addressing the International Co-op Day celebrations in Kimberley announced a new development agency would be established as a result of the Co-operatives Amendment Bill. A body for both financial and non-financial support "tailor-made for co-operatives", he said. "These will include administration of incentives, provision of training and improvement of working conditions in the co-operatives sector." He added, "The proposed institutions will then assist the government to reduce the mortality rate amongst co-operatives and ensure their sustainability."

Mangaliso Stalin Khonza, National Spokesperson for the Young Communist League said in response he hoped “That implementation will be speedy and not get delayed by bureaucracy. The co-operative agency will go a long way in ensuring that co-operatives do not remain an option only for cleaning, public school feeding schemes and other basic services. The Agency must ensure that the co-operatives are capacitated in terms of skills and resources to operate fully even in the commanding heights of the economy such as banking, mining and IT.” He went on, “It is well known fact that co-operatives can serve to curb the increasing unemployment particularly amongst the youth and will further ensure the communities are directly responsible in their own service delivery and development; unlike the corrupt entrepreneurial system which serves to illegitimately profit uncaring entrepreneurs.”

If any country needs its wealth spreading more fairly then it is South Africa. The country has a Gini Coefficient, which measures inequality, amongst the highest in the world and as the economy has grown wealth distribution has worsened. Whilst a larger and thriving co-operative sector cannot solve this problem alone it could make a significant contribution. There is an awful lot of work to do in changing attitudes and educating the people, I recently had the chance to see the work the UK’s Co-operative College is doing in training Co-operative trainers in KwaZulu Natal, the state with the highest concentration of worker co-ops in the country, this is impressive but it is a small program considering the scale of the task.

Co-operatives can make a difference in undertaking work contracted out by local government where there has been a huge problem with corruption. In his address to the SACP’s 13^th Congress on July 12^th Blade Nzimande, Minister for Education and Training and SACP General Secretary said that to help the sector grow, the SACP is.. “calling for effective state support for the co-operative movement, including setting aside certain functions in the state (eg. school nutrition, cleaning services, etc) exclusively for cooperatives.”

A strong commitment by the SACP means this new found commitment to co-operatives has a chance of working and I look forward to a thriving co-op sector that serves all of South Africa’s people.

Co-operation, Cricket and Class

The perception of co-ops in Britain has changed tremendously over the last few years. There is a clear generational demarcation in the perception of co-ops particularly as a retailer. For my grandparents they fed and clothed them through the war and they could, until they became customers of Co-op Funeralcare remember their divi-numbers, for my parents they where old fashioned and closing down, yet now for the young people I teach in the University they have in some cases like the Co-op Bank, John Lewis and some of the funky new co-ops become sexy.

Not a term many of us in the movement have had applied to us very often, if at all.

As well as this generational difference in attitudes towards Co-op’s and co-operation there also seems to be a class difference. I was thinking about this because the Government of posh boys is always going on about the John Lewis model or employee ownership but rarely use the term’s co-op or co-operative.

This is ironic because often it is the better off that nowadays seek to co-operate to improve their lot whereas it is much more difficult to get those who really need the benefits of co-operation lower down the social and economic pile to do so.

Internationally co-operative housing, for example, is a common form of tenure yet in the UK housing co-ops have failed to take off often because they are lumped into the social housing space and have historically gone into battle, as a more complex form of tenure, for investment with housing associations, which at least to outsiders appear to be doing similar work.

The truth is that for investors and tenants the co-operative housing model is a terrific way of taking the risk out of housing for many people who for whatever reason cannot engage in, or do not want, the hassle of owner occupation.

Compare this with the situation in the United States where some of the world’s most exclusive housing is in co-operative ownership.

Indeed some of the famous New York Co-op Boards that select tenants are notoriously picky. Well known figures such as Madonna, Carly Simon and Calvin Klein have in recent years been turned down for membership of some of New York’s more exclusive housing co-operatives.

This class issue once again came to mind when I read that the Marylebone Cricket Club was consulting its members on a new structure. This follows an acrimonious debate within the MCC about the redevelopment of the ground. The project was called “A Vision for Lords” and it involved the building of luxury flats at the nursery end of the ground.

This however was not a vision shared by the membership of the club who rejected it. As a result of this row one prominent member of the project committee, Sir John Major, resigned complaining about the way the decision had been taken.

One thing the potential development highlighted was the sheer precariousness of the club’s existing legal structure. As an unincorporated association the club is not a corporate entity and cannot therefore own property, including the ground itself, and the members are joint a severally liable if they ever get sued!

The club have put forward a solution to this legal weakness and have decided that they should ask the Queen for a royal charter of incorporation a bit like the way Universities are established. A rather complicated and rather long winded solution you might think.

Of course there is another way forward, one that does not require any grovelling to Buck House, and that is taken by virtually all of the other county cricket clubs in the country.

That is to form an "industrial and provident society", or a co-op in a letter to members they say, "Although some first-class county cricket clubs have chosen this method to incorporate," they add somewhat sniffily, "the working party thought that such a method would not appeal to members of the club. Traditionally, this route was used to incorporate working men's clubs."

Well this method is also the one that is the legal basis across the river of Sir John Major’s beloved Surrey County Cricket Club, one of the UK’s top one hundred co-op’s. So I would like to think this is why Sir John fell out with the clubs management, although I doubt it.

The Industrial and Provident Society , the co-operative model, is the legal form of the Club I am a member of, Leicestershire, and a quick check tells me it is the legal form too of the following County Cricket Clubs, Kent, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Glamorgan, Lancashire, Gloucestershire, Essex, Yorkshire, Somerset, Derbyshire, Sussex ,Hampshire and Nottinghamshire.

To add insult to injury for MCC members it is the legal basis of Middlesex County Cricket Club. Many MCC members are also members of Middlesex who have the privilege of sharing Lords with the MCC.

If the members of the MCC have any brains and really want to protect the club from the toffs who think they own everything in this country they should vote for the co-op option. Importantly it protects the club’s democratic nature, maintaining member control and ownership. After all it has served many businesses well over the years some of which have been around almost as long as the MCC.

Oh and yes it is also the legal basis for many Working Men’s Clubs and if it helps for many Conservative Clubs too!

MUTUAL AID 150 YEARS OF CO-OPERATION IN LINCOLNSHIRE

Book Review

150 Years of Lincolnshire Co-operative by Alan Middleton, Published by Lincolnshire Co-operative Ltd 2011. ISBN No: 978-0-904327-11-3



I love histories of Co-operative Societies although they are of variable quality so I was delighted by my first impression of this book as it is a stunningly produced illustrated history of one hundred and fifty years of retail co-operation in Lincolnshire. Having read it however I see it also contains a very important extended essay, using Lincolnshire as a case study, of the ingredients for successful retail co-operation. Author Alan Middleton and Editor in Chief Ursula Lidbetter deserve credit in producing a book which not only marks a significant milestone but is also an important contribution to the thinking about the future of retail co-operation.



The story, whilst told in relatively few words, sets the formation and development of the society in its social and economic context yet does not avoid the challenges along the way. It is one of continuous development but there is no sense of inevitability about it. It is clear that at key moments the Society could have taken a different road and there are important lessons for the way in which decisions where taken and how those vital relationships between managers and members where fostered and how together they overcome difficulties in maintaining growth and development.



A recurring issue that would not have concerned the pioneers but has been vital to the society’s success – is the importance of good corporate governance. Alan Middleton who served the Society as a director for 40 years, a good part of the society’s history, is a champion of good governance for co-operative societies and through this history he explores its importance as a driver of success.



There is insufficient space in a short review to describe all the twists and turns in this history but what we can see is that from its inception it is a Society that is both fiercely independent and yet deeply embedded in the community it serves. From when the Lincoln Equitable Industrial Co-operative Society was founded in 1861 by Thomas Parker a joiner from Gainsborough and began trading from 1, Napoleon Place Lincoln, when goods where sold only for ready money and after the first quarter they had 74 members and where able to pay out a dividend of nine old pence, the society’s mission was the “domestic, social and intellectual advancement of its members.”



In 1863 the society asked its members, “to have faith in the lovely principle of co-operation and cast your mountain of woe unto the sea.” By 1876 they had established an education committee and having raised £18 from concerts and readings opened a reading room twenty years before Lincoln’s first public library. By 1898 when Peter Kropotkins, Fields, Factories and Workshops was published the society was mentioned in passing for its work in horticulture and in rural areas an issue which commands a couple of chapters in the book and marks its expansion from the City of Lincoln to the wider county.



Today the Society is still deeply committed to its locality not just by sourcing local produce but by also using its property portfolio to drive countywide economic development. In modern times the Society has thanks to that good corporate governance been blessed by outstanding leadership in the form of Keith Darwin, another Gainsborough boy, and Lincoln born Ursula Lidbetter. Between them since 1992 in just 20 years they have thoroughly modernised the Society taking the turnover from £130million to over £270million, tripling the profit to over £20million and enabling a fourfold increase in dividend to £4million.



Mere statistics however undervalue the importance of the Society to the life of the county. In a spirit of Kroptkin’s Mutual Aid the Society established and continues to support Lincolnshire Co-operative Development Agency and the Society has ensured his other work the Conquest of Bread with its own bakery which supplies bread to others as well as its own stores.



So to what do we attribute the society’s success? Alan Middleton offers the following, “The Board of any co-operative society is key to its success or failure. With the introduction of professional management in the 1940’s it became necessary to establish the correct balance between them and the board. It would take many years to get this to the very best level. However, more than anything it is the willingness of the Lincolnshire board to do its job and only its job, and to do it well, that sets it apart from so many boards of societies long gone.” A lesson for consumer co-operators everywhere.



In Fields, Farms and Factories Kropotkin wanted to reunite the brain worker and the manual worker which he felt had been separated by the division of labour. Lincoln shows how workers by hand and brain can be successfully united and I warmly recommend this book not only as a beautiful embellishment to any co-operative coffee table but as an important education tool for how to run a modern retail co-operative society.

Anglia Regional Co-op Back from the Brink!

There was a debate within the Co-operative retail sector about the merits of national versus regional societies. To put it crudely the idea was that to be competitive the movement needed the economies of scale of a national society to compete. The other side of the argument was that our key competitive edge was in being close to our stores, communities and customers and that was more easily achieved in a regional setting.


It is because those ideas have never been resolved and the spate of mergers that have taken place mainly into the Co-operative Group that we have the current patchwork of national and regional co-operative retail coverage today. They have in common however the need to constantly to turn over their assets to ensure they have the kind of offer their members and customers want to use.

A Society that exemplifies these issues and the dramatic changes the movement has had to face over recent years is the Peterborough based Anglia Regional Co-operative Society.

Its roots go back to 1876, when a travelling salesman from the north sold tea from a canvas covered area in Peterborough. To help the widow of a local railwayman he gave five per cent of his takings to the widow, selling 1,400 lbs of tea that night and raising her £12. He also gave out coupons to his customers which they could exchange for gifts. His rival traders argued that this put him in breach of the Lottery Act and, although magistrates sentenced the man to two hours’ detention, his actions inspired the locals.

The very first meeting of the Peterborough Co-operative Society took place in his tent!

That story highlights three issues the movement has always faced, hostility from capitalist traders, the often inadequate legal basis for co-operative business and crucially that if you want to return something to the community you have to make a surplus!

More recently the modern Anglia Regional Society was born of a merger between the Greater Peterborough and Waveney Regional Societies in 1987.

Why the history of this society is so important is because it was central to another key argument over trade should we concentrate on food or non-food? With the formation of the Co-operative Group it took the key decision to pull out of what is called non-food. I am sure many readers have fond memories of Co-operative Department stores selling clothes and furniture. For decades they were the symbol of co-operative retailing. Until very recently Anglia was a champion of this type of retailing with stores as far north as Berwick and as far south as Cinderford.

They were convinced that there was a future in the town centre department store model. There was a perception that if the society could grow sufficiently large there was a point at which this type of retailing could be profitable. Their peak was reached in 2005 when the Society took 9 stores off the Co-op Group to add to the twenty plus it already had.

Sadly customers and member’s tastes changed, out of town retailing for furniture and clothing took hold and the point of profitability disappeared into the distance. You could not say however that they did not try to make the format work.

Then the credit crunch and in austerity Britain there came a point when the debt that the stores where racking up and poor trading where endangering the whole of the Anglia Society. Clearly some radical surgery was needed but everyone in the movement was caught out by the boldness of the Anglia management team’s approach.

With a thousand jobs at risk Anglia came up with an imaginative solution. Whilst keeping the freehold of the stores it has transferred nineteen of the department stores to Beales PLC. Whilst trading under the Beales brand the stores will continue to operate AHF furniture and carpets, Co-operative Travel, Anglia Co-op Optical and Stylistics hair and beauty concessions with Beales being committed to honoring the co-operative dividend.

Then later in 2011 the other part of Anglia’s non-food estate Anglia Home Furnishings (AHF) was transferred to its staff as a going concern. This single transfer made AHF amongst the largest workers co-operative in the country. With nine stores of its own and trading through ten department stores and an online presence this is a business, with a turnover of over £14 million.

All three elements have been freed to concentrate on what they are good at. Beales is good at department stores, AHF has pioneered new store formats that have set it off to a flying start and Anglia has been free to focus its full attention on the core businesses of Food, Funerals and Specialist Retail and most importantly ensuring value for the members. In the first half the Society overall achieved an Operating Profit of £2.65m. This may not seem much but is a huge advance on the loss of £0.2m at the same time last year. During the period the Society has again significantly reduced borrowings and are now opening new stores and growing again.

Whilst these changes may have been forced on Anglia due to changes in the trading environment they have been made sensitively with the minimum impact on employees. Meanwhile the Society has been using the advantages of the electronic membership system to good effect in rewarding customer loyalty. The system also allows members to donate their ‘divi’ to the Anglia Co-operative Community Fund (ACCF). As I write over £700,000 has been awarded to good causes. So from 1876 to today the principles of giving members good value and supporting those in need still holds true!

Co-op's in Higher Education

Like co-operators everywhere I was saddened to hear of the death of Elinor Ostrom. Elinor, or Lin, as she was known was remarkable; the only woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for economics. Her Prize was for her analyses of how individuals and communities can often manage common resources – ranging from activities as far apart as irrigation systems, fisheries and information systems – better than markets or the state.


Her most influential book was the 1990 work, Governing the Commons, in which she examined numerous local management systems overturning the conventional wisdom of resource management. This was the work that lead to her Nobel laureate and Time Magazine, earlier this year, to list her as one of the world’s top 100 most influential people.

I was thinking about her when I attended the Co-operative Education Trust Scotland (CETS) conference, Co-operation and Co-operatives in Higher Education, which bought together teachers, lecturers and students from across Scotland, in the Institute for the Formation of Character, the school founded by Robert Owen, at New Lanark.

Despite the work of great minds like Elinor’s neo-classical economics, has higher education in a death grip. It is like a religion, in the sense that its belief in markets is based purely on faith when all the evidence points in the opposite direction.

Like many abstract ideas they work very well in theory but not only do they not work in practice they simply do not exist. For neo-classical economists co-operatives are a result of market failure and the thing do when markets fail is to make the market work better with yet more liberalisation and deregulation.

The fact is that markets always fail because they are an abstract idea and take no account of the way people actually behave. The only way they can be made to work in the interests of people is by some degree of co-operation. But today co-operatives have almost completely disappeared from the economic text books.

When the subject of economics had its original name of political-economy co-operatives where well represented in the text books with co-operatives being presented in great detail with important contributions from Robert Owen, Proudhon, John Stuart Mill, Charles Gide and the Webb’s.

Come the rise of the neo-classical thinking however and all this disappeared.

The question we have to ask is why? Is it because co-operatives are less important? If anything co-operatives are more important now than a hundred years ago. In the European Union countries co-operative membership to total population is between 20 and 30 % and in North America it is even higher. By any measure the importance of co-ops globally has increased over the period with more members of co-ops than shareholders in private firms, 1.4 million co-ops international employ over 100 million people 20% more than all the transnational companies put together.

Is it therefore ideological? There is no doubt during this time economics has become even more abstract. That early analysis was of economic institutions today the worlds is bent to match the theory with the role of government reduced to getting out of the way creating perfect spaces for markets to operate in eliminating any need for co-operation.

This is why it is so important to get the study of co-operatives and co-operation back into Universities and Business Schools. The complete failure of the pure market model to reflect the needs of the real world means we have a new co-operative opportunity. But it will be stillborn if students and policy makers have no idea what co-operatives are, how they work and how they can be encouraged.

This ignorance also enables charlatans to fill the space with all sorts of outlandish business models called co-operatives or mutuals when no meaningful control in the enterprise is exorcised by the members in the form of customers, suppliers or workers.

It is for this reason it was great to be in Scotland and to see the excellent work that CETS are doing. They now have three levels of qualification approved by the Scottish Qualifications Authority. Beginning with Co-operative Enterprise the Democratic Alternative, history of the movement, practical activities and an international perspective, this is a huge step in the right direction.

It was also a delight to be at the launch of Democratic Enterprise a fantastic new educational resource. Developed jointly between CETS and the University of Aberdeen it is designed for undergraduate students and provides an open access, introductory-level analysis of democratic models of enterprise, ie co-operatives and employee-owned businesses. A supplement to any course or module that deals with these topics, it also stands alone as a template for academics who wish to incorporate material on democratic models of enterprise into their courses or modules.



This is a completely free resource so any teacher or lecturer can get hold of this material at: www.abdn.ac.uk/cets/resources/democratic-enterprise. So no excuse for university teachers to ignore the topic, Dairmuid McDonnell, who has worked on this for CETS deserves the plaudits but this is just a start of the education and educational tools we need to take co-operatives and co-operation out of their intellectual ghetto.