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: 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. This may be because many of the people who make the decisions are unable to conceive of doing anything else, since they're often Labour Party activists, for whom the link is sacrosanct. As long as they're Labour, so will the Co-op be. They're upholding a long tradition of political retail co-operation, something stressed by correspondents to the letters page of the movement's trade paper, the Co-op News, who frame the debate as being between abandoning political engagement entirely, or funding Labour via the Co-operative Party in recognition of the fact that both were hewn from the same rock. But the five million members of the Co-operative Group, and the hundreds of thousands of members of other retail societies – let alone activists from the wider movement – would be unlikely to see the choice in such restrictive and unimaginative terms. They vote SNP, Green, Plaid Cymru, Liberal Democrat and Conservative, in devolved assemblies with forms of PR, and a good many may not even vote at all, being part of the growing numbers who are rejecting organised party politics for engagement in campaign groups looking to save local schools or cancel developing countries' debt.