NOVEMBER 2018

CO-OP PARTY
CONFERENCE:
Moving its ideas
to the mainstream
The Co-op Party held its annual conference in
Bristol on 13-14 October where delegates were told
their ideas were “shaping the political agenda”.
In his keynote speech, Vaughan Gething,
cabinet secretary for health, wellbeing and sport
on the Welsh government, said the Conservative
government had shown “an absolute dearth of
ideas” and it was time for co-operative policies.
But he warned that “families in poverty can’t
wait for a Labour government”, and stressed
the role of the devolved Scottish and Welsh
administrations, the network of co-operative
councils, and organisations like the Wales Co-op
Centre in bringing about change.
The Welsh government was committed to more
co-op housing in Wales, a national care service,
and an end to the scandal of school holiday hunger
for children in poor families, he said.
Opening the conference, Party chair Gareth
Thomas paid tribute to the achievements of the
co-op sector in Bristol, which has 11,000 credit
union members, Bristol Energy Co-op supplying
clean energy to 2,400 homes, and innovations on
community land trusts and co-op housing.
“What do we need to do to help these successful
co-operatives move from being trailblazers to just
the older part of a new mainstream?” he asked.
He highlighted how there were ways to quickly
grow the co-op movement – as part of the Party’s
goal of doubling it in size – such as turning the
privatised utilities into mutuals. And a large
number of small and medium enterprises are
approaching a transfer process as their owners
prepare to retire; these should be encouraged to
consider employee ownership, he said.
Other options include tax incentives for
worker-owned businesses, land reform to boost
community housing, and better access to capital
markets for co-ops. But there was still a battle
for ideas, he said, with resistance from big-state
adherents of the old left in the Labour party and,
on the right, from the business world. The place
to argue for those ideas was through the Co-op
Party’s relationship with the Labour Party, whose
leadership was increasingly supportive of co-op
ideas, he added.
Since the Brexit referendum, there has been
media speculation about a new centrist party but
Mr Thomas said this “would be an act of almost
criminal self indulgence that would guarantee
another decade or worse of Tory rule”.
Other speakers also stressed the importance of
developing policy for a Labour government.
Shadow business secretary Rebecca Long-
Bailey said co-ops and worker ownership were
a vital alternative to a corporate model that has
changed from one where share ownership lasted
for an average of six years to the current situation,
where they could be held for just a few seconds.
“Think what we could achieve with a government
that really put co-operatives at the heart of
business development,” she said.
And Jim McMahon, shadow secretary for local
government and devolution, said: “Our next
government won’t be Labour, it will be Labour
and Co-operative.”
In another sign of the Party’s closer links to
other movements, retail workers’ union Usdaw
has just affiliated to the Party. General secretary
Paddy Lillis told the conference the union has
45,000 members in co-op societies.
With retail workers suffering the effects of
closures and cutbacks, he stressed the importance
of the Party’s ideas for “an economy where wealth
and power are shared … many of the ideas you
have discussed fit well with our campaigns”.
Mr Lillis said one in ten low-paid workers uses
food banks, and called for minimum contracts
of 16 hours a week, and a minimum wage of £10
an hour. “I believe there is a special place for the
Co-op Party and the trade unions within the wider
Labour Party,” he added, arguing that they could
work together for improved corporate governance,
more investment in skills, and efforts to ensure
that automation is “an industrial revolution for the
benefit of the many”.
p Welsh cabinet member
Vaughan Gething
q Shadow cabinet
member Rebecca Long-
Bailey and Party chair
Gareth Thomas
NOVEMBER 2018 | 29