18th June 2015

I became a student at Salisbury Theological College in 1966.

On one occasion I remember Canon Paul Oestreicher being invited to address the students and as part of his talk he mentioned the importance of reading newspapers, both as an aid to prayer but also to preaching and my memory of that occasion is that we were encouraged to read one of the broadsheets, possibly The Times and The Daily Mirror.

It was important we were told to have a sense of not only what was happening in the world but how that news was being reported.

'I read the news today, Oh Boy
40, 000 hole in Blackburn Lancashire'

By the time that I arrived at Salisbury aged twenty two, I had been working for five years and had spent time in Durham at The Bernard Gilpin Society undertaking what today would be described as an access course.

I left school at he invitation of the Headmaster of my secondary school earlier than planned clutching my one certificate for an 'O' Level in Woodwork.

School ended on Friday and on the way home I saw an advert in the window of the Normeir Tyre Company I called in and applied, interviewed and started my first job working as a tyre fitter/trainee salesman on the Monday following.

It has become clear to me that, whilst I didn't realise it at the time, this was possibly the most responsible job I would have. 

Fitting tyres safely is crucially important and I always tried to make sure that if the were accidents that it was not due to the tyres that I had fitted.

But whilst the job had its rewards I decided to move on after a year and apply for the open competition for entry into the Civil Service as a Clerical Assistant.

It was at this point that I was advised that if I wished to succeed in the examination that I should read The Times Newspaper, especially the editorials, and seek to replicate the style of the leader writers in my answers to the questions posed in the examination.

So I started to read The Times aged 16 or so and have continued to read it for the past 54 years until the recent election.

I had always thought of The Times as a balanced newspaper but I became so appalled by the views expressed in the leaders and indeed in certain of the opinion pieces that I stopped reading the paper altogether and turned instead to The Guardian.

However I soon realised that having your prejudices reinforced by a left leaning newspaper whilst somewhat less stressful than raging at the prejudices presented as news, opinion or editorial comment in The Times was not entirely helpful in making an informed and considered response to the events that were unfolding not only nationally but internationally.

I needed another view point.

As a curate in Hatfield, South Yorkshire in the late sixties I used to call on an elderly, retired miner I rather think that we enjoyed each others company, I certainly enjoyed his, he was a socialist, he had been a deputy at the Hatfield Main Colliery and had some interesting and robust views on Church, Politics and the industry from which he had retired.

I happened to call on him one morning only to find him, with his morning coffee on the side table, reading The Telegraph.

I was astonished and challenged him, why read the 'torygraph'?' I asked.

Well, he calmly answered, if you want to know what they are thinking, how they are planning to undermine everything that we have fought for, worked towards and value, then it helps to know their thinking and analyse their prejudices.

I found myself thinking about Mr Lawrence recently as I pondered what my Newspaper choice to partner The Guardian, should be.

In Hatfield I used to take The Times and The Morning Star to achieve the kind of considered balance I felt I needed, as Paul Oestreicher had encouraged us, to inform both my prayers and my preaching.

Today, there is less preaching but nevertheless I felt that I should be reading another newspaper alongside The Guardian so I took out a free subscription to The Telegraph.

Fifty years of prejudice are now being challenged by a series of forthright articles most of which, as is only to be expected, applaud the dubious policies being promoted by the current minority conservative government.

But there are other article and features which are challenging the thinking that is being articulated, The Telegraph, I discovered to my amazement, is not a simple, biased, cheerleader for the Tory Party.

In some ways I now realise that is only to  be expected.

If you are in the political mix with a Government chasing austerity and shifting wealth to the wealthiest and debt to the poorest, then because you occupy the same political space as The Telegraph does, then you can engage in the kind of warm. generous disagreements that can happen in families and serve to make them stronger.

So I have overturned some 50 years of prejudice, and whilst The Telegraph challenges my prejudices and The Guardian reinforces them, I find that my daily diet of news is both balanced and enriched by the opinions I read, whether agreeing or disagreeing, I am challenged to think more logically using both my heart and my head.

And, as a bonus, I now have two crosswords to complete rather than six (or more) impossible things to believe, before breakfast.

2nd June 2015

Like Ed and Nick I wasn't elected.

It wasn't the unfairness of the electoral system because the election used the single transferable vote but the boundaries were redrawn to the disadvantage of anyone living in the constituency for which I was standing.

Cumbria doesn't fit neatly into anyone's constituency.

The south of the county looks to Manchester, the North of the county looks to Newcastle.

So in the previous dispensation the Co-op had South Cumbria firmly in the North West and North Cumbria in the North East.

In local government terms this makes sense, just, but in terms of where our TV comes from and where our NHS is located Cumbria splits, unevenly and raggedly, into North West and North East.

The Co-op in its infinite wisdom has decided that Cumbria is in the North West so immediately those standing for election to the new Membership Council were disadvantaged as both unknown and far away and with a total unbalance in terms of population spread.

So like Ed and Nick (and Nigel) I wasn't elected.

So far so sad.

But there are bigger issues lurking in these muddy waters.

I had always thought that Lord Myners was right in his analysis. The democracy of the Co-op was flawed, although I suspect his view that one member one vote was critical to his analysis was somewhat biased.

But the deed is done and the newly elected membership council will have its work cut out even if it was elected by members with one single transferable vote they did not elect the board and it is the board that has the power and the membership council will find itself constantly playing catch up as the board moves not only the goal posts, but the rules of engagement and what it means to be a co-operative.

I was told by one observer that the new chairman was an excellent choice because his father was a co-op store manager.

I pointed out that my father was a Manchester Corporation Bus Driver but that didn't qualify me for the role of chairman of Stagecoach.

The co-op already feels diminished, much of the business has been disposed of, 'pharms' and 'farmacies' have gone and it seems to me that the big American Funeral businesses are watching closely to see whether the funeral business is also offered 'to the market'.

The new Chair made his reputation with Asda, he made it a more valuable business and then sold it Walmart, his chairmanship of the Post Office had the same result with the business privatised.

One can only hope that the Co-op which is in fact owned by its members now has the robustness to resist what I can only see as inevitable drift to market privatisation, if you want to weaken something, to make it malleable, the thing to do is hack away at the flawed democratic structure and then replace it with an unwieldy group a hundred strong trying to make sense of and understand change and control a board that has been hand chosen and may well appear even more self selecting in a few years.

What is happening to the Co-op seems to me to be symptomatic of what is happening to our current social and political settlement.

The tectonic plates of our social polity are drifting right wards just as the great stones in Carlisle's Rickerby Park carry the legend of when Carlisle was on the equator and the sediment was laid down and compressed, limestone, gritstone and granite slowly shifting over time to where they now rest.

So the post war settlement with its homes for heroes, its education reform and welfare reform a product of both liberal and labour aspiration for men like Attlee, Beveridge and Keynes is slowly slipping away from us as the market is invoked as the only true arbiter of value.

The vision of the Co-op's founders known as the pioneers after the title they chose for their co-op society, the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, was the creation of a store in, in response to the poverty created by the industrial revolution, to allow members to buy unadulterated food that they otherwise could no afford.

The store opened in 1844 with a meagre stock of butter, flour, oatmeal and a few candles, within three months they had added tea and tobacco and established a reputation for price and quality.

As the last election demonstrated and as the Electoral Reform Society has reported the rightward drift of our politics is sanctioned by a voting system that is essentially unbalanced, my only hope is that under its new governance, which despite assurances to the contrary is every bit as flawed as the system it replaces, the new Membership council even with its hands tied, will be able to channel the spirit of the Rochdale Pioneers and keep the Co-op, co-operative under the ownership of its members.