Speaking up for employee-ownership

To Salford (or more precisely “MediaCity UK’) this lunchtime to participate in the R4 You & Yours discussion on co-operatives. Some very interesting comments from my fellow panellist Caroline Murphy of the family construction form Murphy as to why she’d strongly favour the business becoming employee-owned. She was taking part down the line from London, unfortunately, otherwise I would have wanted to continue the discussion with her off-air afterwards. The programme is available as always on the BBC website – we’re about thirty minutes in from the start.

On corruption and delusion

As I think I’ve mentioned, I’ll be at the cooperative conference in Manchester on Friday May 16th, called by Co-operative Business Consultants and others in the movement to help pick up the pieces and rebuild.

I’ve begun to think about the presentation I’ve been asked to do for the workshop which bears the title corruption v. transparency. I’ve said before that a very valuable – if depressing – piece of work for a cooperative historian would be track the story of corruption in cooperative societies from the nineteenth century through the dog days in the second half of the last century and up to our own times. Why would this be valuable? Because it would warn us how not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Jo Bird, one of the conference organisers, drops me an email to discuss the workshop and makes a very valid observation. She writes of Johnston Birchall’s recent report for Co-operatives UK on governance in large co-ops which lists several examples of corruption in UK coops: “Corruption and malpractice is not talked about enough. Birchall’s list was such a contrast to the unwritten but prominent co-operative value of delusion . Delusion manifests in attitudes such as ‘we are all good guys and rarely do wrong’,” Jo says. I think she’s right.

You and yours and coops

BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours lunchtime programme has been looking at coops this week, and doing so, I’d say, in a balanced and intelligent way.   There have been packages on three very different cooperative businesses, the venerable wholefood shop and cafe 8th Day in Manchester, Clansman Dynamics in East Kilbride (an employee ownership venture which engages in some serious manufacturing work) and  Snaith Salad Growers in east Yorkshire, an interesting agricultural coop which I hadn’t come across before but is worth checking out.

I’ve been asked to appear tomorrow (Fri) on the programme for the final round-up discussion (the feature should be going out about 12.30pm).