PATRICK GRAY argues that the Co-operative Party has been fooled into supporting foundation hospitals.
I fear that cooperators will come to regret that the Co-operative  Party has been fooled into lending respectability to the government’s wrong-headed plans for foundation hospitals.
The will o’ the wisp promise of community control is completely meaningless. Mutuality may well be applicable [...]

SEAN CREIGHTON calls for a better understanding of the history of mutual organisations, and argues that their renewal should be a vital part of the government’s agenda for regeneration and social inclusion.
Labour’s aim of regenerating Britain’s rundown neighbourhoods, cities and rural areas faces some fundamental stumbling blocks. Alongside the increasing apathy and disillusion with the [...]

JONATHAN TIMBERS searches for the truth about foundation hospitals but is left with as many questions as answers.

The problem with the debate over foundation hospitals is that it seems to be full of opinion rather than fact. Many of us feel left in the dark by the media and politicians. Now the proposals are [...]

STEPHEN YEO argues that cooperative politics can help to address the democratic deficit.
As mainstream politics, including Labour’s, becomes more consumerist and less based on values and principles, the task of bringing cooperation into politics, rather than politics into cooperation, becomes more urgent. There is a growing democratic deficit in Britain, which cooperative and mutual enterprises [...]

MATTHEW BROWN reports from Lowick, where teachers, pupils and parents have battled local and national government to set up the country’s first community co-operative school.
In her book Reclaim the State (see Barry Winter’s review), Hilary Wainwright describes a number of ‘experiments in popular democracy’ from different parts of the world, attempts by local people to establish [...]

SEAN CREIGHTON traces the historical association of mutual organisations and the labour movement, and questions what the ‘new mutualism’ can offer to radical politics in the future.
Scarborough’s Central Public Library is housed in the Oddfellows Hall opened in 1840. From 1857 it became the base for the Mechanics’ Institute and its library. The borough council [...]

This issue of Democratic Socialist is dedicated to continuing the discussions and debates raised by the ILP’s weekend school, held in Scarborough at the beginning of May. Entitled ‘The Challenge of Mutuality’, the school brought ILPers and non-ILPers together to discuss the politics of cooperation, mutuality and social enterprise, and examine their relevance to the [...]

ANDY HANSFORD looks at the causes of social exclusion, and unpicks the government’s plans for regeneration.
A year ago, parts of the left press were highly critical of some measures coming out of the Social Exclusion Unit, which had recently published its ‘national strategy action plan’, called A new commitment to neighbourhood renewal. Neighbourhood super-managers were [...]

As the regeneration baton is passed from Whitehall to local authorities, ANDY HANSFORD calls for the people of our blighted neighbourhoods to be given real control.
Four years’ work by the government’s Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) have resulted in a practical strategy for neighbourhood renewal. It is challenging stuff, which might transform the life chances of [...]

The New Economics Foundation is influencing the government’s agenda with its ideas for democratising the public sector. MATTHEW BROWN spoke to NEF’s executive director, Ed Mayo.
Last year an “independent think tank”, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), published a small pocket book called The Mutual State: How local communities can run public services, which argued that [...]