Title: The Co-operative party: moving beyond the Labour party | Guardian sustainable business | The Guardian
Headings: The Co-operative party: moving beyond the Labour party
The Co-operative party: moving beyond the Labour party
It's time members of co-ops got a say in how their money was spent in politics, says Dave Boyle

Content: The co-operative movement never benefited from the symbolism (and weight) that formal government business brings, nor did it achieve a long-advocated actual legal entity called a co-operative, with legal rights and responsibilities that work for the realities of modern and future co-operatives (although the government did find time to create a new legal form for social enterprise – the community interest company). That's understandable, perhaps, because, instead of being the party of the co-operative movement, the Co-operative Party has always been a creature of the retail co-ops that created it. The party's several thousand members provide just 10% of its £1m income, and it exists at its current scale because of the money provided by the Co-operative Group, which contributed nearly £800,000 in the accounting year to 2011. The rest comes from the smaller retail societies, although some – most notably Southern, Lincolnshire and Heart of England – don't provide any. No other country's retail co-operative movement has a direct political wing, and none is exclusively allied with the main centre-left party. Yet a great many of those other countries have, in varying degrees, more beneficial legal and policy frameworks, and many have bigger and more diverse co-operative sectors, from worker-owned enterprises of serious scale, to mutually owned public utilities and services. By contrast, the UK retail movement's enlightened support of the wider sector via the Co-operative Group's Enterprise Hub (which has led to more than 1,000 new co-ops being created) is a very modern phenomenon; for much of the last 100 years, dismissive condescension or active hostility was a more common attitude to non-retail co-ops. Ultimately, the real issue isn't whether the link with Labour is effective for the movement, or even for the Co-operative Group, but whether it's the only way in which the co-operative movement can be politically active and effective. That's a question one doesn't often hear when the party's funding is up for renewal.