Subscribe to our mailing list to receive regular email updates of ResPublica's work, upcoming events and recent blogs from the Disraeli Room.
History shows that leaders often turn to infrastructure projects at times of historic economic crisis. It normally pays off. Roosevelt’s dams, Churchill’s radar and Kennedy’s space programme all laid the foundations for long term economic advantage.
It was racial discrimination in 1960s London which led to the setting up of the first credit union in Britain fifty years ago. Credit unions have existed in the Caribbean since the 1940s, and immigrants to Britain from Jamaica and Trinidad decided upon their arrival in the UK to set up a self-help organisation so they could get the financial services they needed.
The General Election in 2010 saw a major landmark in the development of the Co-operative Movement. For the first time ever, the three largest political parties all made glowing reference to the role of co-operatives in British society and how they would support them if elected.
Mutual and employee-owned organisations (MEOs) are public and private enterprises, which have the potential to provide social, as well as economic, benefits. As a philosophy, mutualism is a set of ideas and principles governing the relations between individuals; as an organisational practice, mutuality is characterised by distinctive ownership and governance structures which express the values of equality, fairness and mutual respect through democratic decision-making.
As this collection of essays is published, The Co-operative Group is celebrating its 150th anniversary. Inevitably, it’s a moment to look back and reflect on where we have come from and what we have achieved.
Employee ownership has to overcome fundamental obstacles in order to become part of the mainstream UK economy. In 2012, Westminster and Whitehall acknowledged these obstacles and committed to working with the employee ownership sector and others to help dismantle them.
Employee ownership is now the most prominent and popular alternative to conventional forms of business ownership in the UK. Interest in it within business communities is increasing daily. It is currently growing at an annual rate of around 10%.
The UK has a competition regime, but still lacks some of the essential ingredients it needs for the nation to be competitive on the world stage in a tough economic climate.
Britain is in a global race for the jobs and opportunities of the future. We cannot afford to ignore the potential of co-operative and mutual business models to drive growth and help build a more resilient economy.
As we’ve stumbled our collective way into ‘The Age of Social,’ countless systems, across all parts of society have begun to look woefully ill-equipped for a world in which a single tweet may come to exert as much influence as the media moguls of the 20th Century ever have imagined possible.
42 Tavistock Street
London WC2E 7PB
020 3857 8310
For media enquiries, please email:
press@respublica.org.uk
ResPublica is the trading name of The ResPublica Partnership Limited
Company Registration No: 11068087 England and Wales
© The ResPublica Partnership Limited | Site by basemedia