The politics of Osborne's co-ops

Victor Southern

Quite radical for the UK but sounds similar to what the Soviet Union had in place - every workplace was a co-op.

Open doorway for massive abuses of trust and power.

Alun Reynolds

This is madness. Handing the full p&l control over to a bunch of Civil Servants. I have worked with them for many years. Their most senior people are incredibly stupid.

Civil Service managers are incapable of managing effectively, controlling costs or standing up to the all powerful public sector unions. We would be continually bailing out failing Departments and authorities.

Absolute Madness

hmmm

An excellent idea.

Decentralization and de-state-ization are to be encouraged in every shape and form.

toco

How refreshing to see there are still some politicians around who are capable of original thinking.Labour's response will be wholly negative because they do not believe in allowing people to take responsibility for their own destiny.

Publius

"If public sector workers are running their own institutions, then we know who's accountable when things go wrong."

Do you seriously believe this? Apply it to the only big hospital in town and see how it works. They kill your wife by mistake. Then what? How, precisely, are they "accountable"? What are you supposed to do?

Or they decide to award themselves big fat pay rises and treatment suffers. Then what? What are you supposed to do about it?

Look, if Sainsbury screw up, you go to Tesco or Waitrose or whatever. If your only hospital in town does the same, then what? Hand it to a new co-operative? Staffed by whom? Shut the whole place down? Sue the lot of them? What, exactly? The whole thing is rubbish.

Chris lancashire

You omit to mention that, apart from being good politics, it is also good management. Putting people in a position of control of their own destiny usually improves matters.

Fergus Pickering

Well, you know Alun Reynolds, I might characterise top civil servants as devious, self-serving, smooth as a baby's bottom, amoral, but I wouldn't have thought that the adjective stupid sprung readily to mind. Perhaps the ones you know are not top peple at all, but half-way-down people.

Vulture

Did anyone hear Ozzie's 'defence' of this ill-thought out nonsense when ambushed by Liebour's resident troll James Naughtie on this morning's Today?

The disgracefully biased nature of Nauthtie's interjections may have obscured the fact that this is a truly terrible idea, straight out of the Tony Benn 'Manual for Worker's Control' from the 1970s.

Osbers sounded as if he'd dreamed the wheeze up on the way into the studio. If this is the fruit of Dave's Red Toryism, God help us all. Bundle it back into the box PDQ before Liebour tear it to bits.

Ian Walker

Victor/Alun: In which case, they'll be exposed for the charlatans and makeweights that they are. What's the downside?

Schools could run excellently this way, especially under Gove's new voucher system. A village primary school run as a parent/teacher cooperative would be immune from closure at the arbitrary whim of a bureaucrat in County Hall.

Publius

It seems to me that a monopoly of any sort run as a co-operative will merely serve the producer interest.

(Why has my earlier post on this thread not appeared?)

John Bowman

Always best to let the lunatics run the asylums.

Prodicus

Picture it: Unite and Amicus accepting without so much as a whimper the ending of national pay structures negotiated by them; negotiations with new unions of the co-op worker-owners' choosing; decision-making on pay and conditions by intra-co-op plebiscite.

No more monoliths for Serwotka to dragoon. No more Simpson/Whelan millions with which to control the Labour Party.

Oops, sorry. Drooling, here.

stepney

If you had control of your own budget you wouldn't be wasting your time producing and planning cr*p like this:

Q. When a qualification is Accredited, what happens next?
A:
A qualification is Accredited by Ofqual and then passed to JACQA for funding eligibility scrutiny (if applied for) automatically via WBA. For National Route qualifications they are typically sent to DCSF Secretary of State (SoS) for a decision within 2 weeks of receipt after Accreditation on WBA. For Stand Alone qualifications they are typically sent to DCSF Secretary of State for a decision within 3 months of receipt after Accreditation on WBA.
All Stand Alone qualifications must be reviewed and a recommendation made by the JACQA Committee. A Committee meeting is held at least 3 times a year. After the Committee meeting, the recommendation is sent to SoS. After the SoS decision, Section 96 website will be updated to reflect the SoS decision.

David Lindsay

Schools, hospitals and job centres seem to be the wrong places for them.

And the Tories, not being proper Tories at all, are certainly not going to support them in the right places.

Alun Reynolds

Fergus: Academically very very bright I grant you. But for all practical purposes stupid. And I include a number of Permanent Secretaries in that category.

J H Holloway

This technique - handing over power to the lowliest worker - has been employed for years in Britain's post-BL car industry.

In today's car industry, any line worker can halt the production line is there's a fault. Workers are also allowed to design their own work station and even tools.

It's a brilliant idea because everybody has the power to make suggestions, improve their own situation and even halt the whole operation if they have cause to believe that the factory is producing something duff.

That'd be useful in many areas of the public sector...

stephen

Boy George:

How about getting down to serious work like showing the Electorate you can run the Economy. Gimicky ideas maybe for backroom boys like you used to be! Coops and Green Banks are just ideas and no more than that! There are other more pressing policies. Also your performance on the Tories getting the decimal point wrong was lamentable!

strapworld

Another word for all this, is of course 'Collectives'

Will J

Publius is surely right: cooperative monopolies will unavoidably serve the producer interest. As such, there will have to be some political oversight. The missing point in this discussion is that for this to be a genuinely devolved system that oversight needs to be the responsibility of the local authority, not a quango of the central government. Indeed, that should be the case whether or not a cooperative system is introduced. It is well known that school "independence" often means little more than increasing the power of central government quangos at the expense of local councils.

Of course, what we really need are sensibly sized district authorities which can provide the necessary political oversight on a properly local and democratic level. But no one is proposing that.

Tim Carpenter LPUK

Wrong headed if all you do is replace a State-run monopoly with a co-operative run monopoly. It is less accountable, too, but wait, I guess the Tories will still keep them on a leash so as to remove some of the (few) advantages.

Schools as co-ops need to be truly free from central control and in a truly competitive, pluralistic environment. Hospitals, likewise. Efficiency needs plurality and competition to keep players in check with barriers to entry not constructed by the incumbents*.

It might be better to think about dismantling hindrances for Not For Profit organisations across the board and just let things happen, rather than trying to manage it centrally.

But this is the Cameron Conservatives we are talking about here.

* Witness the mobile companies FINALLY sorting out application support now Apple have shown them how utterly restrictive, grasping and backward they were.

TGF UKIP

Most Coffee Housers of course get this dead right. It's so bonkers it could only have emanated from Clevinger or Loopy and as for endorsement by Bright, Montgomerie and Crabtree (who he?) I would have thought coming form a gang of London-centric opinion formers and purveyors, that really was the kiss of death.

Go back a few decades and there were hundred of co-ops in this country and the smaller they were the worse they were. Just ask anyone who had the misfortune of having to deal with the sods like I used to have to do.

There's one thing this episode like the similiarly bonkers concept of localism does. It demonstrates that not only have Dave and The Clique been a fucking useless opposition they'd be even more of a fucking disaster as a government.

Tory competence is being sacrificed for Tory modish gimmick. The Mekon must be involved somewhere.

Chris Cook

@ TGF UKIP

I think you'll find that the Co-ops you found so dreadful - and I have to say my experience was similar - were nominally owned by the customers.

Worker owned co-ops are a very different kettle of fish, and that is in fact what is being discussed here.

Paul B

What worries me is the lack of profit. Profit unfortunately is swear word to many in the UK, but it is essential to drive us forward. By this I mean, better products and services delivered when the customer needs and at a price that is right. Come on down. Of course there has to be competition as well and this is another fault in the scheme Osborne proposes as Tim Carpenter rightly identifies above. However, those points raised, the policy is not without merit and anything that breaks the dead hand of state control has to be welcomed. Hopefully it will be an incremental change, with profit and competition (in the not distant future) being allowed. If that's the case, it has the chance to be as fundamental change as Maggies privatisation and break up of the state utilities was in the 80s

Tim Carpenter LPUK

Customer owned co-op? The State? Metronet? Figures.

Dennis Churchill

The Conservatives should be making the arguments for a low tax economy by publicising how our taxes are used such as this story in today’s Express;
http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/158400
Is this really how you want your money spent?

Paul B

In fairness, I have had good experiences of Co-ops. The local Oxford-Swindon supermarket, is excellent.Offers a wide range of products, good quality and at a good price.

Not all collectives are bad, Building Societies, John Lewis are shining examples. Its about competition and profit, setting goals for the workers.
and rewarding them. Bonuses, despite the current downer on them, are essential and incentivise people to work harder and better, knowing that if they are successful, they will share in the success.

Osbornes ideas, are small step, but they are step in the right direction. Its all very well pointing out the mistakes and being idealogical pure, but DC & GO have to take the electorate with them. So yes, I applaud GO for this policy.

Ron Whitehand

A good idea on the face of it. But will Turkeys really vote for Christmas? That is to say will the incumbents who are handed these businesses really have the skills, leadership and right motivations to make the changes needed.
Let's see what the details of the deal are.

OldS.B.

".. And that could be all the pressure necessary to get them to up their game.."
Or sufficient excuse to simply sack them when it gets into trouble - as it surely will! - and replace them with 'placemen'?

Chris Charlton

I like the idea of public sector cooperatives, but dont really understand how the finance side of it would work. If a cooperative becaomes more profitable, where does the extra income go? If it loses money who foot's the bill?