We' are all in it together!

I have a confession to make I was a guest speaker at the Co-op Party Summer school held at the NASUWT conference centre at Rednal near Birmingham and I received £18 travel expenses. Not quite the 50K that went to Ed Balls Office and probably money better spent but I defend the right of the Co-op to spend its money how it sees fit. It is not as if private companies do not contribute money to political parties but they do out of sight with no democratic accountability.

The Co-op Union had a Parliamentary Committee as far back as 1881; the Co-op Party was formed in 1917 and has had an electoral arrangement with the Labour Party, the famous Cheltenham Agreement, since 1927.

It seems to have taken sixty six years for this totally open activity to be finally “uncovered” by the right-wing press. The Co-op Party is difficult to explain and many co-operators have been calling for reform. With the rise of New Labour some felt it was too much about selling Labour to the Co-op and not enough about building an effective Co-op voice in Parliament.

Current events have remade the case for an effective Co-op political voice. It is worth remembering, as we approach the centenary of the First World War, why the Co-op Party was formed in the first place.

When the First World War began the Co-operative movement did what is saw as its duty with the CWS selling its stocks of flour to the army at pre-war prices, as well as selling Danish butter lower than the market price and granulated sugar and tea as well as canned goods at less than government prices.

Individual Societies in fairness to their members introduced fair distribution schemes before the Government introduced rationing.

When rationing was finally introduced it was run in the interests of private traders with Co-op Societies not getting a fair allocation of controlled goods. The CWS had built a powerful production and distribution chain was far superior to any in private hands yet was reduced to delivering the same poor quality products and inefficient distribution of its competitors.

This bias can be seen by Lloyd George’s (he became Prime Minister in 1916) decision to appoint Lord Davenport (formerly Sir Hudson Kearley a man who had made his fortune in the grocery wholesaling business of Kearley and Tonge) as the Government Food Controller.  

When conscription was introduced the movement found it self in the hands of its enemies with Military Service Tribunals often dominated by private traders. One Society had 102 out of 104 men conscripted. Across the country Tribunals conscripted the Co-op Branch manager to give a better living for the private grocer.

The final straw was the Excess Profits Duty a tax on Co-op Society surpluses however these where not the profits of a private company but the mutual savings of the members. As far as the movement was concerned this was a fundamental attack on the whole idea co-operation. This tax would destroy the dividends of the members. In 1916/17 the CWS alone paid over £1million in excess profits duty.

Within the movement the argument raged about ‘political neutrality’ one of the Rochdale principles but as Arnold Bonner put it in his History of British Co-operation, “political neutrality in these circumstances might bring the same fate as the pacifism of sheep amongst wolves.”

At the 1917 Co-operative Congress in Swansea a resolution was passed which declared, “In view of the persistent attacks and misrepresentations made by the opponents of the Co-operative movement in Parliament and on local administrative bodies, this Congress is of the opinion that the time has arrived when co-operators should seek direct representation in Parliament.”

Today the Co-operative Party has a structure a bit like its sister the Labour Party. It has individual members in branches and it has affiliated societies. The biggest of which is the Co-operative Group.

The irony of the present Tory attack on the Co-op Labour link is that prior to this it was Ed Milibands proposals for the Trade Unions affiliated to labour that raised the biggest threat to the relationship between the Co-op Party and it’s affiliated Co-operative Societies.

The Affiliated Co-operative societies as institutions keep the party grounded in the real world of co-operative business. And just as Professor Keith Ewing has so eloquently argued about the role of trade unions in the Labour Party individualisation would break the institutional link between The Party and the Societies.  The present situation when that link is being attacked by the Tories and their mates in the media is hard to defend when Labour appears to have attacked it first.

It may not be as he meant it but what must be clear to everyone in the Co-operative Movement, the Trade Unions and the Labour Party is that ultimately David Cameron is right, “we are all in this together”.  And as working class institutions we have the right to determine our politics for ourselves.  

A century of experience tells us that you simply cannot trust the Tories or the Liberals to act fairly.  Just like in 1917 when “in view of the persistent attacks and misrepresentations made by the opponents of the Co-operative Movement”, we need political action to be able to defend ourselves.

Ed Milliband And Energy : Solidarity Begins at Home!

We British are so generous a huge chunk of the energy supply industry is now owned by foreign firms so we have the joy of knowing we are increasing the GDP of Germany, France or Spain every time we put the kettle on. And those who have stayed loyal to dear old British Gas or Centrica as it is now known will be cheered to be able to make a contribution to the £16,439,000 that was shared by their top five executives’ in 2012. The poor old Chief Executive Sam Laidlaw had to struggle by on just £4,959,000.

I bet the pensioner described by John Major has having to choose between eating and heating will be heartened to know they are making a contribution so poor old Sam can manage on such a paltry sum. Old-Etonian Sam’s dad was a former chair of BP so we have to keep Sam in the style to which he has doubtless become accustomed.

The reality is of course that this is a monopoly. A complex one but a monopoly just the same. This is not a real market most people have only one electricity connection to their house and if they are lucky one gas connection. What we have is a pretend market. The energy companies have different marketing, billing, accounting and head office functions that add costs to our energy bills then they pretend to compete.

Ofgem may claim that, “protecting existing and future customers is its first priority.” But in the second sentence of their objectives they give the game away, “we do this by promoting competition, wherever appropriate, and regulating the monopoly companies which run the gas and electricity networks.”

In trying to regulate these monopolies they have the power to fine them for abuse of market position which they do in 2010-11 to the National Grid was fined £15 million. Other fines include £8 million and a £4.3million from National Grid Gas, £4.5 million from EDF, £5 million from British Gas Trading, £2million from RWE N-Power. More recently Scottish Power has agreed to £8million compensation for its customers following miss-selling.

We clearly we have a crazy world when firms are being constantly fined huge sums for not pretending hard enough.

If the market is a joke so is government energy policy. When researchers at Cambridge University did a review of energy policy for the Consumer Association they came up with a grim conclusion.

“The UK faces an ‘impossible trinity’ of energy policy objectives: decarbonisation, energy security and affordability”, they said.

It is time we came clean and admitted the simple truth. There is no market solution. The privatization and dismembering of the industry has made things worse not better. The interests of the owners and as we can see often the managers are totally incompatible with the needs of both the environment and of the customers.

These policy objectives cannot be met in the current ownership structure. If Ed Miliband wants an energy price freeze as a prelude to bringing the industry back into social ownership then three cheers! However if he things we need more competition then that can only means more fragmentation more marketing and billing systems on top of the same monopoly infrastructure and can only increase costs further!

It seems to be taking a long time for him to get it. Maybe his personal energy choice gives us a clue. Apparently he has switched from E On to First Utility.

When  Ian McCraig CEO of First Utility heard Ed’s new policy he said that a freeze was impractical and could put him under. This is the firm that increased its duel fuel tariff by 18.6% in June.

In terms of its green credentials they are not brilliant either with over half their electricity coming from coal and just 8% from renewables. It prides itself on accurate billing because it installs real time meters in people’s homes this does not equate to higher customer satisfaction ratings mind as it is 11 out of 14 in Which’s customer satisfaction tables.

So Ed what is wrong with Co-op Energy? As a consumer/owner it works in your interests, over half its electricity is from renewables and it has a better customer satisfaction rating. It been a bit tough at the Co-op lately and Co-op Energy is one of our star performers.

What is more Co-operative Energy became the ONLY energy firm to support his policy. Ramsay Dunning, general manager said: “We welcome the pledge Ed Miliband has made, to freeze energy prices if the party is elected in 2015. A tough approach, like this, is required to tackle the spiraling profits the Big Six continue to enjoy and, most importantly, to create a fairer deal for customers who are struggling or in some cases, unable to pay their energy bills.”

So come on Ed solidarity begins at home!

 

The End of Co-operative Banking?

I don’t know if you have seen the Danny Boyle film 127 hours. Even if you haven’t I am sure you will be familiar with the story. It is the story of the terrible accident that befell Aron Ralston who when climbing in south-eastern Utah fell and trapped his arm. Stuck for five and a half days under a dislodged boulder he was forced to amputate his own right forearm with a sort of blunt Swiss army knife.

This may sound melodramatic but this is the way I feel about what has happened to the Co-operative Bank. I feel like someone has cut off one of my arms.

May 9^th 2013 will stay long in the memory for many co-operators. It was the day of reckoning for the Co-operative Bank. It was the day the great unravelling began, the day ratings agency Moody downgraded the Bank's debt rating to "junk" status. It said that that the bank was vulnerable to potential losses and warned that the bank may need "external support" if it could not strengthen its balance sheet.

In a massive piece of understatement the Bank said it was "disappointed" by Moody's decision.

The news preceded the resignation of chief executive, Barry Tootell, and the collapse of the bid to buy 631 branches from Lloyds Banking Group.

This unraveling has now ended with the enemy inside the gates. US Hedge Funds sometimes described as “vulture funds”, Silver Point Capital and Aurelius Capital Management now have significant stakes in the Bank. Presumably intending to do to us what they usually do with the distressed assets of developing economies.

Now Moody’s ever helpful in these matters say that the Bank will be forced to “take the axe” to costs. It is worth pointing out that the issues the Bank faces are not dissimilar to those faced by the rest of the banking sector and that had the collapse of 2008 not happened we would not know be talking about it. Or if the ludicrously low interest rate regime had not been in place ever since that has destroyed the margins in conventional retail banking.

Some Banks have had to be nationalised all have had to be recapitalised. So the environment for banking has certainly worsened dramatically. We also know that some of that crisis in the banking sector has been caused by bankers themselves.  By their ridiculous growth strategies and reckless lending of their taking on of risks and of products that they themselves did not understand in a mad greed driven feeding frenzy.

We had prided ourselves that we where different that the mutual sector or at least what was left of it had weathered the storm better than the joint stock banks. We encouraged people who had an ounce of ethics to “switch their money”.

Now we find according to no less than the ex CEO of the Co-operative Group and even the current chair that there is a crisis of governance at the Group.

I think we need to unpack these comments because governance has several elements to it. Clearly there is the structure of the organisation, is there something inherent in large scale co-operatives that makes them difficult to govern? Was there a healthy culture at the Group ie was there an open and respectful relationship between those who represented the interests of the members and the professional management? And what where the qualities of the key personnel, the senior executives of the Group and the Bank and the lay chair of the Bank and the Co-op Group?

Before we can answer these questions there is a review underway by Sir Christopher Kelly, Chair of the Kings Fund and former chair of the Committee for Standards in Public Life. His job is in looking at the trail of poor decisions that lead us to this situation “to look at the management structure and culture in which those decisions were taken; lines of accountability which governed those decisions; and the processes which led to them” and “To identify lessons which can be learnt to strengthen The Co-operative Bank and the wider Co‑operative Group, and the co-operative business model generally.”

Clearly we should wait until the results of that report which will be available at the Group AGM next May. In the meantime I am full of praise for the way; despite the dreadful hand his has been dealt, Euan Sutherland the current CEO of the Group has handled this situation.  There are nonetheless a few things I think that are now obvious.

Firstly that we should have no confidence in the advice from Group Chair Len Wardle or ex-CEO Peter Marks about what to do next. We should have stopped listening to them a long time ago. And it is inconceivable to me that Len could contemplate staying in the Chair until May he should have already gone.

Secondly a “Co-operative Bank” with a minority member’s stake maybe “ethical” in intent but it is evidently not, in my personal view, a Co-operative. And if it persists in using the name it should be asked to desist just as the brand Co-operative Travel which the Group sold to Thomas Cook has to disappear after a certain period.

Lastly of course I hope this amputation stops the bleeding and it protects the body of the Co-operative Group from any further liabilities.  It is sobering to remember that none of the demutualised building societies have survived the transition.

      

 

Wild Welcome for Co-op Students!

Co-op activists and thinkers will be hanging out together next weekend for the UK society of Co-operative Studies Conference at the beautiful Gilsland Spa Hotel near the village of Gilsland, half way between Carlisle and Hexham, very close to Hadrian’s Wall in Cumbria. At 700ft above sea level, the hotel commands spectacular views over the Cumbrian countryside. To the east of the Hotel are the heights of South Tynedale with the Pennines to the south. To the south west are the mountains of Cumbria and the Lake District and to the north are the rugged moors.

A pretty isolated place to find a Co-operative Hotel and Conference centre you may think. The Hotel itself been on the grand tour for many years famous visitors included Robbie Burns and Walter Scott when it was the Shaw Hotel and later the Gilsland Spa and Hydro but it came into the co-operative family when the Co-operative Wholesale Society (as the major shareholder) and a number of retail Co-operatives took over in 1902 and ran it as a convalescent home. Members of those co-operatives used the hotel for convalescence until during the First World War the hotel was taken over by the Military Authorities as a provisional hospital. Many soldiers were able to take advantage of the peace and quiet of Gilsland Spa to recuperate before being sent back to the carnage on the front line then during the Second World War it was used as maternity hospital.

This chequered career was revitalised in 1972, when the property was established as the Gilsland Spa Hotel and has been progressively developed as a family holiday centre. The ongoing investment programme has made all the bedrooms en-suite, with central heating throughout the hotel. The bars provide the ideal ambience for that relaxing drink or bar meal and the latest addition, the Orangery, allows it to offer superb wedding, conference and banqueting facilities. The Conference is supported by The Northern Region of the Co-operative Group who have a very close relationship with Gilsland.

Despite the bucolic scenery there is much going on in the co-op economy for conference delegates to chew over. There are keynotes from Chris Herries the very first woman Chair of Co-operatives UK, Eric Calderwood of Stirling University and Bob Yuill Deputy Chief Executive of the highly successful Scottish Agricultural Organisation Society. Topics for the weekend include important sessions on the future of co-op retail, developing growth strategies for co-op enterprises with case studies from the agricultural sector, lessons from a new business history marking 150 years of the CWS, as well as a roundup of the current state of the co-op sector. You can tell that the conference is starting to come of age because people want to add their own things to the agenda developing its own fringe.

These include the recently formed Students for Co-operation. In many parts of the world many of the services that students need as well as their accommodation is held co-operatively even in the USA the Harvard Co-op had a turnover last year of $45 million the 33,000 paid-up members received $856,000 amounting to a dividend of 8% on purchases its Harvard Square bookshop was voted the best bookshop in Boston. This is not unusual and yet here in the UK students are having a double whammy of higher fees and the squeeze of the private rented sector.  There is huge scope for co-operative solutions to the challenges students face and students in many parts of the country have made a start.

Another session that I am sure will be of interest to Morning Star readers is a session on Co-operators in the Spanish Civil War. Chaired by Ian Hewitt grandson of Nottingham volunteer James Feney and with contributions from historian Richardson and author David Ebsworth (the pen name of former T&G Regional Secretary Dave McCall) whose Agatha Christie style novel the Assassins Mark set in the Spanish Civil War ahs as its lead character s reporter from the great co-op newspaper the Reynolds News. 

There are also session covering life in a small one shop Co-op Society at Grosmont in North Yorkshire and the history of Co-ops in Cumbria, as well as more technical sessions covering Industrial and Provident Society law. Anyone who has even the vaguest interest in co-ops and lives between Carlisle and Newcastle will be welcome to drop in and will be sure to something to enjoy and find a great co-operative place to do it in!

Balance at the BBC?

Battling bias on the BBC is much more difficult than in the corporate press.  They do portray themselves as providing a spurious balance. The coverage of economic and business matters is the area of the media subject to more spin than any other and the BBC seem to fall for it all the time.

So there can be little surprise that BBC Economics Editor, Stephanie Flanders, is now off to work for the US’s largest bank J.P. Morgan. Is this by any chance the same J.P.Morgan managed by Jamie Dimon who met US regulators following investigations into whether they misled investors last week?

The US media reported that they could agree to financial penalties of several billions of dollars to pay back investors who lost money through transactions relating to mortgage-backed securities. Apparently a sticking point in the negotiations over a settlement centres on an admission of wrongdoing, which could open the bank up to a flood of lawsuits.
Is the the same J.P.Morgan that agreed to pay $920m to settle charges relating to the "London Whale" trading scandal? And in 2011, did they not settle similar charges relating to misleading investors about mortgage-backed securities with, the Securities and Exchange Commission? Agreeing to pay $153.6m in June and $296.9m in November.

So buying up Stephs ‘balance’ and PR skills may be a good move.

I see also that after his stroke Andrew Marr is back to smooch politicians. His bias is even more difficult to combat as his history films and books are promoted by the entire BBC machine with its incredible reach as a broadcaster and publisher giving them tremendous authority.  

Now I rarely agree with Charles Moore of the Daily Telegraph but when he wrote that Marr’s History of Modern Britain was, “ignorant and patronising” I had to let out a little cheer.  Its not just that Marr gets his facts wrong, the publishers paid out a "significant sum" in damages to Erin Pizzey after the book mistakenly linked her  to the 1970s terror group the Angry Brigade. Macmillan pulped thousands of copies and issued an “urgent” stock recall notice citing legal reasons.
Pity we cannot issue a similar recall notice for the omission of socialists, trade unions and co-operatives from the Building of Modern Britain. It is bad enough that current left wing ideas and campaigns are ignored by the BBC. Being written out of the future is bad enough but to be air-brushed out of the past is intolerable. Ken Loach was not the only one to find Marr’s defence of Mrs Thatcher’s and the swallowing of her odious ideology as distasteful.
Now Robert Peston, the BBC News’s Business editor, the man who bought down Northern Rock, has decided to give us his history of shopping. This is what Time Out calls history “written by the winners”. There is little or no analysis of the consequences of some of the changes we have seen on the High Street with Peston it is very much in the Marr mould of shaping the facts to fit the story.
Let me just give you a few examples of how by getting the facts wrong he distorts the true history of the period he describes. Firstly his assertion that Marks and Spencer was the first large scale retailer to launch its own brand. The Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) was making own brand products in 1876. Crumpsall Biscuits being the first.
Marks and Spencer’s was not formed until 1894. He suggests that M&S was the first to introduce own branded goods to escape retail price maintenance. The CWS did this far earlier using its Pelaw’s Pharmaceutical Works. In 1906 a group of patent medicine manufacturers decided to boycott co-op stores for paying a dividend on their products, which they saw as a price cut rather than the return of profits to members. The CWS responded by expanding the output from their Pelaw Drug and Dry Saltery Works, founded in 1902, thereby producing their own medicines to fight the boycott. This process was repeated with the famous Defiant Radios in 1933.
Dixons was featured for its innovation as a photographic retailer in the 1960s. The CWS had been selling cameras and photographic supplies to co-operatives through its Manchester, Newcastle, and London operations in the 1920s, and on a national basis from 1931. By 1933 the CWS was producing and marketing its own brand of photographic film.
He also claimed that Sainsbury’s opened Britain’s first self service store in Croydon in 1950. This of course can only be true if you ignore the first purpose built Co-op Self Service store opened by Portsea Island Society in 1948 and that there had been self-service departments within London Society stores even earlier.
The point is that you do not need competition and free markets to generate retail innovation but this does not fit the story so gets ignored. These may appear to be minor errors. But this is part of systematic blind spot on the role of the Co-op in our history. I am dreading the portrayal of the Co-op – or the lack of it in the First World War with next year’s commemorations.
The systematic ignoring of the positive role of trade unions and co-operatives in our past helps to deny us a possible role in the future and needs to be challenged.

Each for All and All for Each

It is one hundred years since William Martin Murphy, owner of the Dublin United Tramway Company and the Irish Independent newspaper sought to purge his companies of Jim Larkin’s ITGWU. Along with virtually all the employers in Dublin he called for workers to give up their unions. They refused and as Irish historian John Dorney says, “Some terms in history are undervalued by overuse, and one of them is ‘class war’, but there could be no other term for the bitter ensuing struggle”.

Workers on this side of the Irish Sea realised what was at stake and sought to help. The TUC agreed to support the Dublin workers, and with the Co-operative Wholesale Society (the CWS) to send food relief.
The CWS took just 48 hours, to load 30,000 food parcels, consisting of 10lbs of potatoes, 1 lb of tinned fish, 2 lbs of sugar, ¾ lbs of margarine, ¾ lbs of tea, and 2 lbs of jam, onto the first ship, the SS Hare.
When the ship arrived in Dublin on 27 September, the union lifted the strike and distributed the rations to 25,000 families.  “A tremendous cheer for co-operation echoed across the Liffey from the meeting on the Sunday afternoon.  For it was realised that it was not trade unionism alone, or co-operation alone; but for once a great common effort of the people.  And of a great common effort the story will be told and re-told, amongst trade unionists and co-operators, this year and for many a year,” reported the Wheatsheaf.
During the Lock Out almost two million loves, 700,000 ten pound bags of potatoes, and half a million packs of margarine, as well as jam, cheese and coal where shipped by the CWS to Dublin.

Co-operation held an important place in the ideology of both Larkin and James Connolly.  Emmet O’Connor suggests that these ideas were embedded in the syndicalist and co-operative movements of the Irish left at that time and part of an attempt to produce a ‘counter-culture’ to the values of British capitalist modernization.

The then assistant editor of the Daily Herald, W. P. Ryan, linked Larkinism with the idea of the Co-operative Commonwealth. He hoped that Larkinism, the co-operative movement of Horace Plunkett together with politico-cultural forces like Sinn Féin, marked a resurgence of the Gaelic primitive communism romanticized by James Connolly in Labour in Irish History.

There is no doubt that Larkin was attracted to the syndicalist idea of underpinning the socialist struggle with a working-class counter-culture based on collectivist values of sharing and solidarity.

Despite the failure of Larkin, and the ITGWU, the Co-operative Movement did not turn its back on Ireland holding the Co-op Congress in Dublin at Whitsuntide, 1914. Big Jim referred to this event when he was made President of the Irish TUC in City Hall on June 1^st 1914.

“In this City at the present moment, the annual congress of the British Co-operative Movement is being held. It is attended by men and women from all parts of the earth. It would be news to many to know that we here in Ireland had been pioneers in co-operation long before the Rochdale Pioneers. There had been a communistic colony down at Usher’s Quay, but it was crushed out by jealous and restrictive laws. Like every good thing Ireland ever started, England made it its business to put a stop to it.

The working class of Ireland would be compelled to understand the worth of co-operation. Through its agency we could supply all that life needs by ourselves for ourselves. It needed no argument to favour it. Life itself was co-operation in its truest sense. Man himself was a social animal and lived by co-operation. We had a great opportunity this week to see the in the Co-operative exhibition in the Rotunda what could be done by co-operative methods.”

In a few weeks the world was plunged into World War, a disaster for the working class everywhere, and for the SS Hare which was sunk by a U-Boat in 1917. Retail consumer co-operation was stillborn in Ireland but the co-operative movement proved its worth to the British nation in that war, and was unjustly punished for it, leading to the formation of the Co-operative Party to defend co-operative interests. But that is another story.

The motto of Larkin’s ITGWU ‘Each for All, and All for Each.’ was also the motto of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society.  

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Thirty Years of Ethical Trading for Dublin Food Co-op.

 One of my favourite Irish writers is George Bernard Shaw. I have been known to travel long distances to a catch performances of his lesser known plays. He was a staunch vegetarian becoming a convert in his early twenties. He attributed his long life and good health to his vegetarianism. It was not only economical but also aesthetically more satisfying as vegetarianism was an extension of his humanitarianism.  “A man of my spiritual intensity,” he said, “does not eat corpses.” 

Today in Dublin is an Institution celebrating an important milestone that I am sure Shaw would have wholeheartedly approved. A place one can buy all the vegetarian wholefoods one needs for a healthy diet and most of the other things required for the good life.

That place is the Dublin Food Co-op which is celebrating its thirtieth year. It dates back to 1983 when there was a campaign in Ireland to stop the building of a Nuclear Power station in County Wexford. Coming out of that campaign a group of friends came together to save money by bulk buying vegetarian wholefoods and other sustainable products.

Within a short time they where trading weekly from a hired hall at St. Andrew's Resource Centre on Pearse Street  where they remained for more than twenty years.

The Dublin Food Co-operative Society was formally registered as an Industrial and Provident Society in 1991 interestingly the legislation on Co-operatives and Friendly societies predates independence going back as afar as 1893 so Irish and British Co-ops have a common ancestry.  
Long before the rise of farmers' markets in Ireland they pioneered organic and local produce. They soon outgrew Pearse Street and began to look for a new home eventually finding it at 12 Newmarket, near St Patrick’s Cathedral. The new base was formally opened by the Minister for the Environment John Gormley in October 2007 to coincide with Ireland's National Organic Week.

Being a co-op its democratic structure includes a co-ordinating body elected at the annual meeting; the new chair is Niall Haslam, a research scientist, who serves with Eileen Fitzsimons as secretary. There are also various working groups to oversee different aspects of its activities including the protection of its ethics and governance. Much of the work to open and develop the Newmarket site was the volunteer labour of members.

The vast majority of food they sell is organic but they also sell fairtrade and environmentally-friendly produce. Stallholders extend the range to include organic vegetables and fruits, organic cheeses, eggs and dairy, organic wine, baked goods, organic clothing, books and other non-food items. At the end of last year the Co-op had almost 900 members, who receive a 5% discount on purchases, which increases to 15% if they also volunteer on a rota system to help in the co-op.

They operate like a wholefood department store with other like minded small producers trading under the same roof. This strikes me as a very interesting piece of co-operative innovation.

They open Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays and they organise and host many events. The 30^th anniversary year has been marked by a series including, co-operative games for kids, a poetry reading, a commemorative walk and a dinner with special guest Pauline Green President of the International Co-operative Alliance.
Doubtless the food at the dinner was excellent the Thursday Café has a very high reputation in Dublin for the quality and variety of its vegetarian dishes.
The Co-op is a vibrant community that goes far beyond food. Surplus funds are used wholly to benefit members by reducing prices and improving services and facilities. 
Driving the Co-op today is General Manager and expatriate Newcastle United supporter (a burden thankfully we do not all have to carry) Norman Rides, a longstanding co-operative champion. Norman joined the Co-op last year and says he is, “looking forward to developing and strengthening the Co-op through increased turnover, membership and influence. Although agricultural co-ops and credit unions are well-established in Ireland, there are very few consumer co-ops so there is not the same social and cultural capital available. In many ways we are writing the manual as we go along.”
In his great play about the relationship between Britain and Ireland, John Bull’s Other Island, Shaw say’s that “An Irishman's heart is nothing but his imagination.”
Thank goodness for those Irish, men and women who had the imagination to see the potential in co-operation and congratulations to thirty years of  the Dublin Food Co-op.