Ownership matters
It’s always gratifying when politicians catch up with the rest of us. So a seasonal cheer for Tessa Jowell’s Progress lecture this week.
Tessa has discovered mutuality, another of those so-called best kept secrets which aren’t secrets at all, as the millions of people who are members of co-operators and mutuals would be only too happy to tell you (and her).
But let’s not be churlish: this really is a big idea, of the kind that’s been missing from mainstream politics for a long time.
And, what’s more, in her speech Tessa showed that she, at least, has rediscovered an even bigger idea: ownership matters.
No matter that entire historical epochs (think feudalism, capitalism, communism) are defined by their property relations, in recent times it seemed that ownership was no longer important.
The assumption was that the ownership question had been answered, and the only answer was capitalist, private and corporate. In the new managerial era the only problem worth solving was - what works? Now we know that private corporate capitalism doesn’t work as well as it was supposed to.
Previous Labour Party thinkers could credibly say that state ownership – national and local – was in the common interest and would (though they never used the word) ‘engage’ people.
They were right: when the coal mines were nationalised in 1947 miners marched and cheered as plaques saying ‘this colliery is now managed by the National Coal Board on behalf of the people’ were unveiled. Hard to imagine now.
As Tessa says, we need a different kind of ownership to produce that kind of reaction, and we can take inspiration from the tenacity of co-operatives and mutuals which are once again thriving.
Putting big ideas into practice isn’t easy. The new Commission on Ownership will have to grapple with the kinds of complexity that political rhetoric can’t deal with: different types of mutual ownership (by employees as in John Lewis, by consumers as in the Co-operative, by a mixture as in Greenwich Leisure), the civil service’s risk aversion, the fact that size matters (it’s easier to be truly mutual and co-operative in a small organisation) and perhaps the biggest challenge of all: that collective ownership doesn’t automatically produce ‘engagement’.
We’ve all learned to be disengaged and it will take time and hard work to generate real engagement. But if we get it right, co-operation and mutuality can give us more equal, less fragmented, more satisfying, lives.
Posted on Friday, 18th December 2009 | This entry has 1 comments
VAUGHAN THOMAS | Sunday, 3rd January 2010 | 11:40 PM
Ownership is an over-rated principle as any leasing vendor will tell you but of even more relevance is that as owner you may still not have absolute power over that which you own. Michael Milken in the 1980’s found that it wasn’t the shareholders that dictated the fortunes of a company but the [Junk] Bond holders who the company were in hock to that in reality controlled the company. We have moved on from there now and I’d like to think that it is the consumers that are now….......about to….....going to get into the driving seat. With an annual UK Social Security budget of about £190bn, no prizes for guesssing what would happen to Tesco’s share price if this vast chunk of the economy was taken out. Unfortunately, the DWP is currently punching below its weight in the market place but by establishing a co-operative as a special purpose vehicle through which to channel all benefit payments, then we’d see real change in the market place and a change in the fortunes of the poorest members of society. I have proposed that Norwich City Council look at this idea, investigate and research into establishing a Community Discount Card to encourage greater community cohesion whereby the poorest members of society can be helped by those that are not via their daily purchases.