View source for Taking Stock of the Cooperative Economy in the UK


=Source=

* A chapter extract from The [[Cooperative Advantage]], edited by Ed Mayo and published in
2015 by New Internationalist.

URL = https://www.uk.coop/sites/default/files/uploads/attachments/taking_stock_looking_forward.pdf

=Excerpt=

Robin Murray:

"This book breaks down the landscape of the British economy into contours
that we can recognise. The great national aggregates of GDP, employment,
the rate of inflation and the balance of trade are the data of those who control
the macro economic levers in London. They obscure the specific character of
the economy of our daily lives – the shops, the buses, the farms and the
streets of a city. The chapters here come down to a human level, and
describe the hidden structures and forces that are shaping the economy as
we experience it. In doing so they allow us to think how things could be done
differently and map some of the promising paths opening up for co-operators
to follow.


''Three features of these sectors stand out'' when the chapters are read
together. 

'''First''' it is striking how many of them in Britain are dominated by a
few large firms. In energy it is the big six, in banking the big five as it is in
housebuilding. We learn that the 24 passenger rail franchises are in fact
owned by six or seven parent corporations. The top four supermarkets
account for three quarters of grocery sales. We would find a similar picture in
other sectors touched on this report – the oil companies, the press, book
publishers or pharmaceuticals. Economists refer to this as oligopoly. It
appears as an inherent tendency of market competition. In Britain it has been
naturalised as an inescapable way of life.

Here is the bind. We depend on these companies yet they abuse their
position. The banks are the overwhelming case not just for the calamities of
2008, but for the successive scandals of mis-selling and market manipulation.

The oil companies and the electricity majors have been intensifying the
problems of climate change not resolving them. In the press it has been the
scandal of phone tapping. British housebuilders have produced smaller
houses, at poorer quality and at higher prices than those in Holland and
Germany principally because the money in the UK is to be made in land.1 All
these companies have contributed in their own way to tax avoidance and the
growing inequality that, as Thomas Piketty records, is approaching levels last 
seen in the early 19th century.

There is a consistent pressure driving a
wedge between the public and the private interests.


The '''second''' striking fact is that in many of the sectors the traditional role of the
state of counteracting this divergence has been eroded. In some of the
sectors the wedge has deepened as a result of the privatisation of public
assets. The social care chapter, for example, shows how privatisation has
reached the point where the sector is now dominated by private providers,
many of them owned by private equity companies, that have cut pay and the
quality of service in order to generate their returns. In education we see the
emergence of large quasi corporate chains of academy schools. Public land is
being returned to the speculative private market in spite of the need for social
housing. Nearly two million council houses have been sold in the past thirty
years, and there has been a long-term shift to private renting. Now health care
is being opened up to a private market. The chapters give a picture of a state
that far from counteracting the wedge between the public and the private
interest appears bent on expanding it.

'''Thirdly''', the chapters report on the significance of new technology in shaping
the future of these sectors. In many of them a battle has already been joined
between the use of information technology by the old majors to strengthen
their position and new entrants with disruptive online alternatives. In banking
there has been an upsurge of on line banking innovation – so called Banking
3.0 – whose upstart companies threaten the foundations of the old banking
models, as they are already doing in Africa and the Far East.

In retailing, Amazon is surging into one sector after another, leaving traditional retailers
struggling to catch up. The Education chapter mentions the Kahn Academy
and Massive On Line Open Courses (MOOCs), which have the capacity to
transform school and university education respectively. There are similar
trends appearing in health care, in food production, and above all in energy,
where the relevant chapter records how renewable energy technology
provides the scope for each village and even each house to become its own
power station. Just as itunes has changed the record industry so these
innovations are threatening the foundations on which the old oligopolies have
been built.

There is a common pattern. The innovations open up spaces for distributed
production – where a multitude of small producers are connected through
common platforms, grids and protocols. Apple is a new giant, but it has
provided the platform for more than a million apps. Coursera, the first MOOC
founded 2 years ago, now has 10 million worldwide students receiving 839
free courses supplied by 114 institutions. The renewable energy co-ops in
Germany are now pressing for smart grids to support their local systems.

Solar technology is set to be even more distributed. The forecasts are that it
will be so cheap by 2030 that like the computer we will find it on every home
and building.

The picture that emerges from the chapters of this book is of a private
economy that is out of sync with the major issues of our day and in many
cases is making them worse. Climate change, the relentless growth of
hazardous materials, pollution and waste, of chronic disease and obesity, of
inequality, and most starkly the wider uncoupling of well being and growth –
all these described by those within them as time bombs – are intensifying
rather than being defused.

To put it mildly, this is not an economic system at ease with itself. And the
state faced with mobile capital and an eroding tax base appears paralysed,
insisting on seeing the problems of ever increasing corporate economic and
political power through the prism of 19th century free trade market liberalism. It
has all the marks of a Shakespearean economic tragedy, the principal
characters unable to escape from their tragic flaw."
(https://www.uk.coop/sites/default/files/uploads/attachments/taking_stock_looking_forward.pdf)

==The [[Growth of the Cooperative Schools in the UK]]==

Robin Murray:

"When the history of co-operation in 21st century Britain comes to be written,
the remarkable growth of co-operative schools over the past 6 years reported
in the Education chapter of this book may have the same inspirational place
as that of the Rochdale pioneers in the mid 19th century.

There is the same sense of wildfire growth in them both, of a model that is at
the same time visionary and practical, one that is tangibly of the moment. The
co-operative movement has from the first highlighted the importance of
education. It is the fifth of the seven co-operative principles. The new cooperative
schools in England have taken all seven principles and embodied
them within the educational process itself. In 1844 the necessities were bread,
butter and porridge. Today’s necessities in the information age are the values,
the capacities of thought and creativity, which are the bread and butter of a
school.

The first co-operative school at Reddish Vale – significantly in Greater
Manchester like Rochdale – had no idea that it would be the spark that led to
a wildfire. Those who started it did not have a sector strategy, anymore than
did the first 28 pioneers in Rochdale. What they had were strong values, and
a model of how a self-governing school could work. They had a keen sense of
unfolding the future. At each stage Reddish Vale and the many schools that
followed moved forward along the paths of possibility, establishing new
initiatives, as they were needed. Some were within the school and their
communities, some with other co-operative schools.

Where might this remarkable contemporary story of co-operation lead? There
will certainly be more schools. The Education chapter points to the
opportunities for the extension into other spheres of education, particularly for
further education colleges (some of which are already partnering with their 
local co-op schools). But the possibilities go wider. Education is only one of
many relational services. In a relational service the quality of the service
depends critically on the relation between the front line staff (the teacher in
the case of a school) and the user (the pupil). It also is shaped by the
communities in which each are involved (the home and its communities, other
users, and the service professions). Multi-stakeholder co-operatives are
proving to be a remarkably effective model of governance for services of this
kind."
(https://www.uk.coop/sites/default/files/uploads/attachments/taking_stock_looking_forward.pdf)


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