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: 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. The overwhelming majority of these members are blissfully unaware that the Co-operative Party even exists, or that it – and thus the Labour Party – are funded via profits from their purchases in the shops. It's an arrangement that has much in common with the way trade unions funded the Labour Party, until legislation required them to secure the direct consent of their members. Those members should be given something the co-operative movement has always placed at the heart of its promise – democratic control – by allowing members to choose where they wish to allocate their funds. Members could be provided with an assessment of how co-operative-friendly each party is, and whether its platform and operations are in keeping with the movement's traditions of respect and equality. At a stroke, all parties and other groups looking for support would have a reason to think about co-operative principles seriously and how they will seek to further them in the future.