Articles in the Co-ops & mutuality category:

Architecture and anarchy: another world is possible

August 25, 2023

Sometimes a chance experience draws you in to exploring an idea. This happened to me on my first visit to my elder daughter’s new home in Edinburgh. I thought I knew the city well, I lived there briefly in the early 1970s, but she has a wee flat in one of Edinburgh’s ‘colonies’, a distinctive […]

A strong green and mutual vision can help Labour engage new voters

May 6, 2017

For the past few months I’ve been out campaigning as Labour and Co-op Party candidate in the Oxfordshire county council election in the Oxford suburbs of Kennington and Radley. The division is just outside the City boundary and has no Labour tradition. It is a Lib Dem seat and I won’t win this time round. […]

New Lanark: the ‘great experiment’

October 14, 2016

I visited New Lanark, social reformer Robert Owen’s experimental village on the banks of the upper Clyde in the summer. It is almost forty years since I was last there. The magic of the place hasn’t changed but the ‘visitor experience’ certainly has.  New Lanark now gets almost half a million visitors a year – […]

Co-operation still matters

December 17, 2013

The meltdown of the Co-operative Bank after its unwise merger with the Britannia Building Society, its botched take-over of part of Lloyds Bank (Project Verde) and the shenannigans of its former Chairman the Revd Paul Flowers, have been something of a field day for the enemies of cooperation and mutuality. The reputational damage both to […]

Is this the golden age of co-operatives?

October 30, 2012

  As we celebrate the end of the first ever United Nations International Year of Cooperatives, there is a sense of the dawning of a ‘golden age’ for co-operatives in the UK. All the main political parties are signed up to co-ops. The buzzword is ‘responsible capitalism’ and there is a realisation that the existing […]