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: you'll hear lots of praise, but rarely get an invitation to an important family dinner. That's a feeling underlined by the record of 13 years of Labour government. It's clear that times were better for the co-operative movement under Labour than the previous 18 under the Conservatives, but that's a very low bar. Like much discussion of Labour's record across the board, a list of successes does little to assuage the heavy sense of disappointment at what could have been done. Some co-operative initiatives were promoted, such as Supporters Direct but, unlike government legislation to reform the charity and company sector, changes advantageous to the co-operative sector were legislated in piecemeal fashion, through the lottery of private members bills. 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.