Labour came to power promising unprecedented support for the co-operative sector. Eighteen months on the prospect remains more a taunting hope than the driving force of social and economic change many had wished for. CHRIS OLEWICZ & STEVE THOMPSON chart the progress so far, but fear a genuine grasp of co-operation’s transformative potential is...
The cost of living crisis requires bold action by the state to prevent severe hunger, says CHRIS OLEWICZ. Perhaps today’s ideological government could learn from the ‘national kitchen’ and ‘British restaurant’ initiatives of war-time Britain....
CHRIS OLEWICZ calls for a revival of the consumer co-operatives that once formed a vital pillar of the Labour movement and could play a crucial role in our crisis-riddled times....
It is more than 40 years since a radical TV series pointed the way to a more humane, computer-based society. CHRIS OLEWICZ wonders why today’s Tory government is still resisting the true potential of new technology to transform our working lives....
The left needs an economic re-set, a more radical aspiration of empowerment, says CHRIS WILSON. Can co-operatives help put the ‘social’ back into socialism?...
How would society change if no-one needed to work to stay alive? That was the question Edward Carpenter set out to answer almost 130 years ago in an essay titled ‘Transitions to Freedom’. Would it hail a new collectivist phase? And would that then lead to full individual and social liberty?...
Sheffield-based co-operative resource centre Principle 5 has published a valuable online directory of the Sheffield Co-operator, the local Co-op Party newspaper that was printed monthly from May 1922 to July 1939....
Principle 5, the Sheffield-based co-operative resource centre, has published the latest in its series of re-discovered pamphlets from the history of the co-operative movement, called The Future of Co-operation, written originally in 1927 by Alice Honora Enfield....
A long forgotten pamphlet by Edward Carpenter extolling the virtues and advantages of co-operatives has been re-published by the Yorkshire Co-operative Resource Centre, Principle 5....
CHRISTOPHER OLEWICZ celebrates the arrival of a new addition to the co-operative movement, one based on the same vision and principles as the 19th pioneers. A ‘new Rochdale’ is within our grasp, he says. ...
CHRISTOPHER OLEWICZ examines an inside account of Preston Council’s much-hailed ‘model’ for local development, and casts his mind back to the 1980s when his own local authority tried to resist the march of Thatcherism with bottom-up regeneration and municipal enterprise....
CHRISTOPHER OLEWICZ looks back 90 years at Fenner Brockway’s ground-breaking report on destitution in 1930s Britain. With the current cost of living crisis, he asks, is ‘literal starvation’ once again stalking the nation’s poorest communities?...