David Lepper

Labour Party | Brighton Pavilion

Co-operative News, Westminster Diary

Well, it's all over and, with a few sad exceptions, Labour has done what it set out to do in the general election - hold the seats won in 1997. In the south we even picked up one in the uncharted territory of Dorset South.

The mood is very different, of course, to that of 1997. Rather than flag-waving crowds in the streets its more a case of “getting on with the job”. There are huge tasks ahead, like revitalising our public services, and issues to be confronted – the Single Currency and the UK's response to Bush' s National Missile Defence programme among them.

But for Labour-Co-operative MPs in this new Parliament and for the Co-operative Party in the country getting on with the job must also include building on the work of the Co-operative Commission- a Commission initiated by Tony Blair.

The Labour Party's election manifesto Ambitions for Britain provides us with the spur for that work because it not only welcomes the Commission's recommendations for co-operatives and the mutual sector but promises to “examine them with a view to strengthening these important parts of our economy.”

Significantly that statement comes in the section on Supporting British Business and alongside statements about modernizing company law to promote transparency, reducing burdens on small businesses and promoting long-term success.

Co-operatives and mutuals are seen as part of the mainstream of the country's economic life – as they should be in view of the size, success and support for the retail sector, the Co-operative Bank and the Nationwide and other building societies, for instance.

Over the years some of us could have been excused, perhaps, for feeling that our bigger sister party saw us as peripheral – at best having a social role to play in regenerating communities but not as part of the mainstream of the national economy.

There have been signposts to a changed attitude – the “new “clause 4 is about co-operation and mutualism, the debate on the “Third Way”, the Commission itself and – as a practical step – funding by Chris Smith's Department for Culture, Media and Sport for Supporters Direct; a new way of organizing the football business usually dominated by conservative patterns of ownership and economics.

Our own Co-operative Party Manifesto for the 2001 election sets out some goals to aim for –

· extending support for employee share-ownership and the rights of individual share-owning employees;

· first refusal for employees in company buy-outs;

· consumer participation in new ownership structures for monopoly utilities;

· mutual models for public service provision;

· a stronger mutual and social enterprise voice in regional assemblies;

· support for leasehold resident management and commonhold companies;

· with tenant agreement local authority housing stock transfers to community organizations;

· support for community land trusts to provide community solutions for housing and other development issues.

The framework for achieving some of these things is already in place or a part of the Labour government's programme – regional development agencies, the best value procedures in local government, housing legislation, the commonhold and leasehold reform bill. The challenge will be for representatives of the co-operative movement – in particular our councilors and members of RDAs to use the opportunities.

The new open system of policy debate and formation in the Labour Party through its policy forums at local, regional and national level provide us with another means of promoting those policies we want to see Labour endorsing. I suspect that across the country the Co-operative Party is not using to best advantage the opportunities provided by the system of policy fora.

In Co-operative News recently Peter Hunt explained how Communicating Mutuality and its research and publishing wing Mutuo aims to provide the evidence and the arguments to back our case.

But central to realizing Labour's commitment to strengthen the co-operative and mutual sector must be legislation to modernize the rules for co-operatives and mutuals. The Parliamentary group should seize on what is in Ambitions for Britain to renew its arguments for a new Co-operatives Act so ably put by Ted Graham and others since 1997 and before. It looks as if the Labour government is inviting us to do just that.