21st November 2011

Just when you thought that it couldn't get any worse, it does.

The New CEO of the Co-op must wonder what he did to deserve this.

I can only admire him for his confidence and positive rhetoric.

But privately .... who knows?

I am at the other end of the scale in the Co-op.

I am a member and an Area Committee Member, this is the first tier in the democratic structure, from the Area Committee members can be elected, by other Area Committee Members, to a Regional Board and from there to the Group Board.

This was the path taken by The Reverend Flowers.

In order to ensure that there is a level of competence committee and board members are required to undertake education and to hold a certificate in Co-operation.

Now in the wake of recent events the Governance of the Co-op is to be reviewed.

In addition to the CWS, I am a customer/member of the Energy Co-op, The Co-op Bank and The Phonecoop.

I believe in co-operation and mutuality I am also by nature and conviction a socialist.

But I see two things happening at the present time that cause me to review what co-operation might achieve and who should be co-operating.

The first is the success of the John Lewis Partnership which is an employee co-operative (partnership).

If the Rochdale Pioneers had so imagined it and if they had had employees, it might have occurred to them all those years ago that the basic partnership was between the employees of the enterprise rather than the customers.

In practise the consumer co-op is a clunky mechanism, first there is the inertia of the wider membership, on both elections when I was 'voted' onto the Area Committee no election was required because there were too few nominees and the number who actually voted was very low. Members meetings are generally poorly attended. And this year of course the Dividend has not been paid because there is no surplus to distribute.

An employee Co-operative by definition has an active  membership, although some will be more active than others, you only have to visit a John Lewis or Waitrose store to see the enthusiasm of the staff.

The second,  is a view that, the key issue facing poor people in Rochdale was food, which was costly to buy, often adulterated and buying it meant going into debt in the company store which was owned by the factory or Mill where you worked and where sometimes you were paid in vouchers only redeemable in the company store.

Food is still an issue of course, people facing a choice between heating and eating, the rise of Food Banks, Food security and food price inflation mean that food is still expensive but the Co-op finds itself in a race to the bottom, led by supermarkets with deep pockets, as they try to discount their way in a market dominated by some major players.

It may be that the hubristic charge to expand the business by taking over other co-ops, mutuals and businesses which has been the hallmark of the past few years should now be reversed.

In my budgeting, energy is a key expenditure and the mutual/co-op model is helping me exercise some control of  my budget. The next major expenditure is communication and again the co-op model appears to work exceptionally well, ensuring that costs for telephony and internet access can be managed.

So my thought is that those charged with responsibility to advise and support the new CEO should reinforce the positive value of a local as opposed to a national presence, the success of smaller co-ops bears this out, that the co-op model should be employed where the 'shoe is pinching for people' (it is tragic that one major casualty of the Bank's problems was the Insurance Business a classic example of where co-operation was of immediate benefit to customers) and that the way to re-energise the movement is change the rules in order to enable the employees of the Co-op to become the owners of the business not the customers.

12th November 2013

Before the 'Big Society' there were 'Active Communities'.

Or at least an expressed desire on the part of New Labour that communities should be encouraged to become active.

That initiative coincided with my taking on the role of Chief Executive of a charity dedicated to encouraging exactly that, active communities.

The charity was founded during the First World War by an Army Chaplain in Belgium and in the immediate post war years armed with the communion role from Talbot House, what today we might call a data base, he contacted all those on the role and encouraged them to become active in building a better society in response to the fact that they had survived and in memory of their fallen comrades.

The charity continues to this day trying to build better communities.

Unfortunately my approaches to the active communities unit fell on deaf ears, stony ground and ignorance of the charity which always aimed to do good by stealth, as the founder declared, do something useful every day, but don't get found out.

Also because it was almost a hundred years old it wasn't new or novel and of course Mr Blair always liked things to be new, as in New Labour.

I used to tell a joke about Tony Blair quizzing St Peter at the pearly gated entrance to heaven, welcome Mr Blair says St Peter, aah, says Mr Blair I was just wondering before I glottal stop by, this is the New Heaven isn't it?

Eventually active communities fell by the wayside of politics to be followed in turn by the Big Society, which has it seemed followed it into oblivion.

Now it seems, from Mr Cameron's recently reported speech, we are looking forward to the efficiency of the Small State.

Small Stateism is now the way forward.

More efficient and needing less tax pounds to run.

It means of course that there will be less folk tied up in running it. But, according to the speech less managers means more Doctors.

The problem with politics and politicians is that too often rhetoric replaces reality. Reality is what we experience as we struggle with the business of managing the indoor critic's MS, on a daily basis.

Sitting in the waiting room yesterday waiting for our appointment with the Neurologist I read an article in Enable Magazine about the effect of Government cuts on the disabled.

It quoted Mr Cameron: 'Fairness means giving money to help the poorest in society. People who are sick, who are vulnerable, who are elderly - I want you to know we will always look after you. That's the sign of a civilised society'.

Was Mr Duncan Smith present for this speech I wonder?

Since making that speech in 2010, the disabled as a group have seen Disabled Living Allowance replaced with Personal Independence Payments, ATOS assessments introduced and the bedroom tax, resulting in a £500M drop in global income for those relying on the extra support needed to cope with their disabilities, whilst Local Authority care budgets have been cut by £2bn.

Fair?

Looked after?

Civilised?

Active Communities were deactivated, the big society has been reduced to the small state.

Promises have been broken.

5th November 2013

There are two names synonymous with radical change in the UK.

Robin Hood, Jim Wallis' favourite historical British character, as he told me when I interviewed him for BBC Radio Newcastle some years ago, who robbed the rich to give to the poor.

In fact on that visit to the UK Jim advised me that he had taken a detour in order to visit Sherwood Forest.

What he would make of the actions of the con-dems its fairly easy to imagine, but the real or imagined actions of Robin Hood hold out the possibility that in time good will prevail and the unjust receive their just deserts, so we can only hope.

The other name is of course Guy Fawkes, sometimes described as the only person to enter the House of Commons with honourable intentions.

Today we remember the Fifth of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot.

It just so happens that it is also my mothers birthday, who had she lived would now be 97, sadly she died in 1980 of secondary cancer following an earlier diagnosis of and surgery for, Breast Cancer, I still miss her.

Today is also the wedding anniversary of my youngest daughter, so happy anniversary to her and her husband.

It can be useful to mark these personal and family anniversaries with what is happening in the wider or 'bigger' society. A way of taking the temperature of the world we inhabit with its challenges, its gifts and its blessings.

Certainly the present Government represents to a greater degree than any before, the challenges.

Shades of Thatcherism as we privatise more, sell off our social housing, invest in a potentially inflationary policy of housing subsidy and seek to cap benefits so that the poorest in our society bear the greatest burden of addressing the long term structural inequalities built into the fabric of our society.

In effect robbing the poor.

So much has been and is being written to challenge the negative impact of policies that in effect simply reward those at the top. The reason that so much is written and so many campaigns are launched is because we know who ate and are eating the pies, leaving just crumbs to fall from the rich man's table.

But the real tragedy of the these years of austerity (at least for some) is that it was not, and is not necessary.

A recent report demonstrating the richness and economic benefit arising from those who come to make their home here, completely undermining the false claim that immigration is always negative.

If money was fairly and evenly distributed throughout society then we would all be so much better off than some of us are, even if others might feel that the rewards they receive for their work could be higher. But a recognition that there should be a relationship between the highest paid and the poorest in any company, without the need for the Government to subside via the tax system, employers who pay poorly

Comparing the society in which I am growing old compared with the one in which I grew up is almost impossible, there is no comparison, shopping with my mother in 1950's Britain with rationing and ration cards, eking out the house keeping as best she could in order to feed her family, was soul destroying.

But there was community, there were networks of family support and over time we began to prosper as a family as society generally began to benefit from the great vision of social justice, of public ownership, of health care free at the point of delivery introduced by the first Labour Government.

Now, that system is being consciously and actively dismantled giving rise to increased pressures imposed through changes to the benefits system, job losses and the high cost of buying and heating a home.

For the thousands who now have to resort to food banks to feed their families even the 1950's, that previous decade of austerity, would appear to be, halcyon days.

Nye Bevan fought the 1945 general election on a programme which would effectively lead to the 'complete, political extinction of the Tory Party'.

His vision was for a society built on justice in which working people had power and in which the individualistic competitive society based on capitalist hedonism was replaced with socialism.

It was about the test of what makes a good society, it has been well characterised as the 'Kingdom of Bevan'.

On Thursday a new co-op will open in a new development opposite where I live.

It is a measure of the potential to continue to hold onto that vision of a better society promoting the 'common good' that my mother would have recognised the co-op as not only a place to do her family shopping but one in which , as an owner, she had a personal and valuable stake, represented by the 'Divi'.

So as Robin Hood continues to inspire and Guy Fawkes continues to challenge we must continue to hold out for the possibility of changing society for the better, as The Tunes sang, Truth, Justice and the Mancunian Way.