The Strange Rebirth of Co-operative Britain
I was asked to write a piece for Economia magazine (the in-house journal of the Institute for Chartered Accountants of England and Wales) on the growth in recent years of the co-operative and mutual sector. The piece is on their site, and is reproduced below.
read moreIt’s not my Party (and I should choose what happens to my co-op money if I want to)
The Guardian have published a piece I’ve written on how the Co-operative movement engages in politics, focussing on the link with Labour via the Co-operative Party. Writing in this section a few months back on the Co-operative Party, Greg Rosen wrote that “the co-operative tortoise is winning the race to find Ed Miliband a ‘big idea’”. The recent publication of a collection of essays edited by Jon Cruddas on the direction for Labour and its future manifesto suggests the tortoise is actually trailing by some distance,...
read moreHow to make the BBC democratic
I did a post some months back over at Our Beeb on how the BBC could become accountable to licence payers, and today, Tessa Jowell has said something similar in the Telegraph. When I wrote the piece, it was all a touch theoretical since the BBC’s governance wasn’t a live issue. (update – The Independent’s Steve Richards suggests there might be a link) I’m still not in any way convinced that the Savile and Newsnight affairs have any real and pressing read through to governance, but as we saw with the reform of the...
read moreCo-operative Cinemas?
The Guardian have published a piece I’ve written on Co-operative cinemas over on their Social Enterprise Network site. It was fun to write, learning about the world of cinema distribution and exhibiting. What there wasn’t space to discuss was the impact of the net, which we can transforms distribution chains wherever it meets them. In cinema, with only so many copies of a film printed for distribution for the big city cinema to have it meant the small town picture house couldn’t; exclusivity was a by-product of scarcity. Now...
read moreThe British Broadcasting Co-operative
I’ve just done a piece on how the BBC could become the British Broadcasting Co-operative, and why it should, as part of OpenDemocracy’s Our Beeb series. It draws on the references I make in my pamphlet on media ownership to the BBC. Now is absolutely the right moment to be querying the BBC’s governance. Just because people who beat up on the BBC seem to have an ulterior motive, and just because the cultural life of the UK would be much worse without it, that’s no reason for the rest...
read moreA funny kind of democracy
Back in the day when I was at Supporters Direct, I set up a google RSS feed to feature any mention of ‘supporters trust’, and it brought me this article on Monday, about events down at Exeter. This post isn’t about the League Two salary cost management protocol. It’s about what is meant by fan democracy. In the piece, current Trust board member Roger Conway is quoted saying: The Trust has made the decision to help the manager build a really good team to push for promotion out of League Two next year,” trustee...
read moreWould your football club be better run as a co-operative?
I’ve done a piece for The Guardian on football clubs and co-operation, making the case for why it’s the best form for them to take, what progress has been made in the last decade, and what challenges they still face to become a successful part of the landscape. Co-operatives offer a sustainable model for football clubs – just ask Champions League finalists Bayern Munich What’s the point of a football club? If we look at the motives of its owners, we’d get some...
read moreCo-operation and Media Regulation
Visitors landing here from Roy Greenslade’s piece in the Guardian about my report on media co-operatives should visit this page first! I was very kindly asked by Anthony Zacharzewski of The Democratic Society to contribute a piece to their series on media regulation. My research on media co-operatives is mainly focussed on the how they meet the challenge of the digital age, but there’s an important dimension in respect of regulating the media for the public interest. In his...
read moreCo-operative Business Studies
I gave two talks today to on co-operation to AS-level students at BHASVIC in Brighton. Co-ops do feature in the course notes produced for the students, but in the not-for-profit sector. As any co-operator knows, if you have no profits, you have no co-operative, eventually. What was noticeable is that in talking with students about the reason you might want to form a co-op rather than a private limited company, there was a need to talk about a wider set of values than are covered in the AS-Level Business Studies course; the value of labour, the...
read morePractical Options for Media Co-ops
Originally published on OpenDemocracy as part of their series examining media policy. The piece also has extra relevance given their own exploration of a membership scheme to their reader community as part of their own attempts to make their site sustainable in the medium and longer-term. For 11 years, I worked at Supporters Direct, helping to create mutual structures through which fans could run their football clubs, and in recent years, I’ve been drawn to the similarities between clubs and...
read moreMedia Reform @ Red Pepper
Red Pepper have posted a debate I took part in a few weeks’ ago under their auspices on reforming the media to better serve the public interest. I was there to give a co-op angle to a general discussion about media reform along with Dan Hind (author, The Return of the Public), Fiona Swarbrick (National Union of Journalists) and Aiden White (formerly of the International Federation of...
read moreMore Media Co-ops
The issue of ownership has been the absent part of the British media debate but there is growing recognition that the issue has to be on the table as the various strands of inquiry into the media resulting from hackgate start in earnest. I’ve written about why news should be produced co-operatively and why it would be more ethical, more responsive and more accountable, opening up new sources of capital in the midst of crisis and transformation in the economics of news. But how could it actually work, and what would a co-operative media...
read moreThe Case For Media Co-ops
Originally published on New Left Project in the wake of the hacking scandal to argue for using co-operative and mutual structures in media ownership, a project I’ve been working on with Co-operatives UK. The piece argues that ownership has always been thought of in terms of ‘who’ rather than ‘how’. It’s strange that in the renewed debates about UK media policy in the wake of the hacking scandal, the critical importance of the nature of media ownership hasn’t...
read moreWhy We Need Media Co-ops
First published on Liberal Conspiracy on the need to consider issues of media ownership in the context of how they are owned, not just who owns them, as the debate following the revelations of the hacking scandal focussed on News International and the Murdoch family. The plurality debate recognises that who owns newspapers matters, but says little about how> they’re owned; the regulation debate recognises that media need to be held to account but is focussed on external control, with...
read moreBarca – Co-operation & the Future of Football
Commissioned by Co-operatives UK for publication during Co-operatives Fortnight in 2010 alongside the first publication in the UK of the English translation of the club’s statutes. You can download a PDF of the pamphlet here, and a PDF of the statutes here. What is a football club? Before you can decide what a club should do, you really need to have a clear picture of what it is for. Such questions are rarely, if ever, asked in English football; such a failure may explain the fact that if we...
read moreOh, FC United!
Written for Supporters Direct’s quarterly magazine in 2006, reviewing life at fan-owned football co-operative FC United of Manchester, one year after their formation in May 2005 soon after the Glazer family’s takeover at Manchester United. When it was first reported that disgruntled fans of Manchester United were thinking of starting their own team, many in the football world scoffed. Some couldn’t see the point, whilst others couldn’t see that it would work. There was certainly...
read moreWimbledon Football Club is Dead; Long Live Wimbledon
Originally published in FourFourTwo at the start of the season in which AFC Wimbledon played their first game in the Combined Counties Leagues, two months after the FA Tribunal gave permission for the Milton Keynes move which the old Wimbledon FC’s owners had been agitating for in the face of fierce opposition from fans. It’s agony for the 30 Wimbledon fans gathered outside the FA headquarters as part of a vigil whilst an FA’s Commission meets to decide whether the club can move...
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