whatever happened to the Conservative Coops?

So, its party season again, and with a general election looming, every sector seems to be vying for attention with all the separate parties to become the solution that they’re each hoping to find that’ll help them to deliver on all their aspirations but won’t bankrupt the economy in the process...

One such sector which every party (at least in recently history) has embraced and talked up are co-ops: marrying social justice with economic independence and free market economies, they seem too good to be true and have often been cited in many a politician’s speech as to their ‘fab-ness’. Recently, co-op sector bodies such as Co-operativesUK have also started to more explicitly publish the ways in which co-ops can help each party deliver on their conference promises too.

But how far can we really hold faith in these political parties’ interest? Historically, government and political parties were so anti-coops that the movement formed its own political party to ensure that the sector wasn’t discriminated against in parliament! In more recent history, the Conservative party launched its own co-ops initiative. “The Conservative Co-operative Movement” (CCM) to capitalise on politicians’ interest in co-ops and to help keep this sector at the heart of parliament and to their policy and thinking. And they even set it up as a co-op society! (Intrigued, I even became a Member of this society, despite my father being a Labour councillor and a Co-op party Chair...)

But fast forward 4 years. In that time as a Member, I’ve had 3 general emails; 1 item of post (with postage underpaid on it); no notifications of Members’ meetings (or minutes from them); and I also spotted that they’ve been identifying themselves by another co-op society’s registration number in their stationary. Their website seems to have disappeared and I’ve not been able to get any response to messages I’ve sent to contact details I have.

What can I conclude from this?

In the absence of any response that may suggest otherwise, it seems like the CCM were an opportunistic political attempt to cash-in on the integrity and hard work of the co-op sector over the last few centuries. It’s obviously not understood what it means to be a co-operative by not acting as one. And it doesn’t seem to notice when it stops being able to deliver what it was set up to do.

Some might say the above analysis and conclusions are reflective of this wider political parties approach in general, but I couldn’t possibly comment...