Co-operatives 2010

On Friday, I was at this event in Plymouth. The basics of it are pretty well covered by John Atherton’s blog post. I led one of open surgeries on use of Social Media, which I’m going to try to summarise and expand into an interactive briefing note on the website of our co-op. If you’ve hints and tips, or questions you feel I should cover, please leave me a comment here.

Other than that, I was trying to help support the event (as I’m one of the steering group for co-sponsors Co-operatives SW), so I was carrying some kit around and videoed the Question Time. That and some other clips should find their way online next week, along with some other thoughts triggered by the presentations. It was a pretty interesting and productive day, worth the ticket price in my opinion.

Happily, we launched the new Co-operatives SW website from a train at 9am Friday because of some unforeseen events and it seems to be working fairly smoothly. Please be gentle with it. I like the Members News section, but then I would, wouldn’t I?

IT Taxes

I just want to flag this one up as a special interest: the telephone tax is killed off before it starts. Yippee! But now we get to wait and see how “the government will support private investment” to get universal provision of fast broadband. I’ve no problem with tax relief for the video games industry being scrapped - why should any type of software get special treatment?

VAT up 2.5% to 20% from 4 January 2011

This seems bad for everyone. It’s a bit less bad for our co-op because we have some international suppliers, whose sales tax rates won’t change, but we buy a lot from the UK too and it hurts all our workers.

Personal Taxes

The basic income tax allowance rise of £1,000 is welcome, as is restoring the pension-earnings links. More widely, the freezes in various things, increase in Capital Gains Tax and drop in cider tax all seem broadly good ideas. The housing benefit £400 maximum is a bit mixed - how bad it is may depend how lenders react when borrowers get into difficulty.

Business Taxes

At a time when a VAT increase is called “unavoidable”, it stinks a bit to cut corporation tax, extend the 10% capital gains tax allowance and raise the employers’ National Insurance threshold. Of course, our co-op pays none of those, so it also hurts us by giving our competitors an advantage.

Business Incentives

George Osborne said he wants to tackle regional economic differences, but the big change in this budget is bad for all existing businesses outside London, the South-East and East: National Insurance exemptions for new businesses. Once again, existing co-ops take it in the neck from another government obsessed with capitalism and employment instead of businesses and work. Meanwhile, increasing the Enterprise Finance Guarantee props up debt-laden business and a new Growth Capital Fund encourages capitalist businesses, while both appear useless to good co-ops at first glance. I don’t mind being ignored, but could we please elect a government which doesn’t actively hinder co-ops? Where’s the fabled “commitment to fairness”? Promises around the Green Investment Bank and Green Deal sound good, but are in the future.

Council Tax

Council Tax will be frozen for a year. I wonder if that applies to parish councils, because our village planned a cut after a one-year project-based increase last year. The Budget Document has pretty much no detail.

So, how was it for you? Have I missed some friendly changes?

Less illustriously, MJR will be visiting Plymouth to run a social media surgery as part of Doing business the co-operative way on Friday 25 June (tickets £25 or £75 – email now). I’ve a few good ideas for what to cover if people are interested but don’t have specific questions (and I’ll post a few of them here later), but what tip would you give to a new social media user?

First, we listened to Dr Gabriel Scally, Director of Public Health for the South West NHS, as he spoke on fat, exercise and transport… He’s a keen cyclist, so I asked for suggestions of how to get better parking at health centres and hospitals. Sadly, he had no easy answer. One tip: Primary Care Trusts control most money, so they’re probably the best ones to persuade.

The second keynote address was First Great Western’s Projects and Planning Director Matthew Golton. He spoke about railway development, unsurprisingly. Rail is vital for co-operatives in the South West, as it’s a greener way to travel the 250 miles length of this peninsula and avoids our poor congested roads.

The big news is that class 150s (Sprinters) will replace the Exeter area 142s (Pacers/Railbuses) and there will be grade-seperated junctions at Reading by 2016 to reduce congestion between the various routes that converge at that point. There’s bad news on the Intercity Express Programme and HST2 being delayed until after the election, but the original High Speed Train fleet should continue as reliably as ever.

After lunch, there were a series of “Just a minute” comments on topics including: west country commuter services, staffing, Taunton nhs parking, axminster peak times, a TransWilts meeting.

Finally before the reports and forum came the third and final keynote from Mike Lambden, head of corporate affairs for National Express Group. He outlined their plans including longer coaches, but asked for better coach stations. One strange mistake had been increasing the leg room on some coaches so much that they got complaints from shorter passengers that they couldn’t reach the footrest any more – oops!

The forum was a scary discussion of rail under-provision planned in our region. Even if we only continue to grow rail use at the last decade’s rates, overcrowding will increase.

The forum ended with applause for all the hard work done by TWSW and the next meetings will be 9 October 2010 in Taunton, 5 March 2011, 1 October 2011.

Our national body Cooperatives UK has gathered the commitments from 18 manifestos and summarised them in a PDF. The first 7 pages deal with the five biggest English parties.

One striking thing is how many gaps there are in the Labour, LibDem and UKIP policies, while it’s not really clear to me that the Conservatives or LibDems really understand cooperatives. The Conservatives seem to suggest council-controlled co-ops (which wouldn’t normally be co-ops if they lack autonomy), while the LibDems mention employee trusts more often than worker co-ops.

I’m sulking at Labour after several recent schemes that subsidised private competitors and excluded worker co-ops – and I don’t believe Labour can win in Weston-super-Mare. That would leave the Greens, who probably can’t win but do seem to get it, except that there’s no Green candidate where I live because he stood aside and recommended the LibDems (as I understand it). Drat.

So, only a few hours to go before the start of the ballot and I’m still an undecided voter.

Yes, you read that right: the TUC’s chief exec wants digital economy workers to be arbitrarily disconnectable in response to allegations of file-sharing by large competitors. If I’m being charitable, I think he was duped.

That stupid article was in response to yet another set of filesharing-will-fankle-us scare figures which carefully only included “the creative industries most impacted by piracy” (see second paragraph of introduction). See pages 12 and 14 of the full report to note that businesses that don’t depend on profit from copyright licensing were not even included!

So, these are not the creative industries. They are the KEA and WIPO definitions of copyright industries. Of course they are hurt by copyright infringement and have little to lose from over-zealous copyright laws, but they are not the creative industries.

I contacted the TUC to basically ask why they were so against digital economy workers in this way. I received an anonymous answer from “TUC Information Services” that was almost helpful:

“The current policy of the TUC on this issue was decided at our annual congress last autumn.” and directing me to Composite Motions 18 and 19 (PDF) and the verbatim report of the conference (PDF) pp. 107-9

Composite Motion 18 seems largely innocent. In fact, its call for social inclusion, a Universal Service Obligation and digital inclusion could be seen as an instruction to oppose non-judicial three-strikes, because allowing so-called “Kangkaroo” courts run by private-sector transnationals to decide who may use the internet is basically incompatible with inclusion and universal service.

The NUJ-supported Composite Motion 19 is the dangerous one and I’m alarmed that the claims around piracy are completely without evidence or justification in the verbatim report of the conference. Were references supplied, or does the TUC adopt positions based solely on reference-free argument?

How does the TUC reconcile contradictory motions for inclusion and universal service and for exclusion through private courts?

Their answer?

“The TUC does not, as a rule, enter into correspondence with individual union members [...]“

Oh great(!) You are in a maze of twisted union organisations and none of the ones which are screwing things up are accountable to you.

Thankfully, I have happier Digital Britain news from another source which I should write about soon.

Conference

Bank of England

The first speaker was Geoff Harding from the Bank of England, who talked through topics in their agents’ summary and related news.

One interesting graph showed a steep rise in the percentage of household income being saved. Answers to questions suggested that more of that goes to mutuals and building societies, but they find it difficult to be competitive while the banks are keen to increase their balances.

There was mention of “employment hoarding” – businesses short-time working, redeploying or shutting down temporarily to keep trained workers under contract, rather than make them redundant and rehire later.

People from both the Federation of Small Businesses and the Hoteliers’ Association made strong comments about the banks claiming to government that they are willing to lend, but still offering deeply unattractive depth-of-recession rates and terms. If the regional agents get details of such cases, they pass them to the central bank.

South West Regional Development Agency

The second main speaker was Ann O’Driscoll, who covers business development for the “West of England” (what many people call CUBA – Councils that Used to Be Avon). She introduced their four strategic priorities:-

1. Low Carbon Economy – apparenly our region has good wind, wave and solar experience. However, Vestas were mentioned and I know that when Vestas closed the UK’s only wind turbine blade factories in August 2009, the RDAs were criticised for not acting against “the subsidy-chasing, socially irresponsible conduct of Vestas” and related companies continue to worry workers. If Vestas is one of the praised companies, I wonder whether we’re attracting sustainable work to the region.

   On a related note, North Somerset Council and NS Enterprise Agency are organising a Climate Change forum on 1st April, but it’s at Cadbury House Hotel, which is awkward to get to except by car: no footpath to the door, a mile-and-a-half walk along a busy road from a train station, bad roads for biking, wheelbending speedhumps on the drive, I can’t remember if there is bicycle parking and its website doesn’t say…

2. Successful Businesses – SWRDA funds our rather poor Business Link service. Does someone in the South West have some good news about Business Link? If so, please leave a comment on this article.

3. Prosperous Places – intervention in areas like south Bristol or central Weston.

4. United Approach – co-ordinating with other regional groups.

The main activities introduced were:

• Area Action Forces – eight of these facilitate the closure of branches by large private-sector employers, gathering the various government departments and agencies together to help find the workers other jobs or fill out social security application forms. It probably helps, but I was surprised there wasn’t any example of a regionally-owned “phoenix” company arising from a branch closure to continue the service was mentioned.
• Talent Retention Project – finding new employment for unemployed specialists in their own sector in this region. New startups were mentioned briefly. Not one mention of helping those specialists to co-own existing businesses.

The questions were fascinating, except for mine. The best one was probably about the forthcoming election and the Conservatives pledge to shut down the RDAs and Business Links. The answer was that much of the work will still need to be done somehow, so it’s more a question of who will do it, rather than what the name on the door says. So I don’t think axing RDAs is going to achieve more than shuffling people between organisations.

When allowed to ask a question, I got too excited and ranted a bit about how the Co-operative Group’s co-operative enterprise hub is doing work that Business Link should have been funding, but the RDA doesn’t understand social enterprise and treats it as a ghetto service. I’ll try to take that up in a more coherent form later.

Overview

I think Cooperatives-SW were invited to the North Somerset Initiative largely because of pressure from software.coop for co-ops to be represented better in the Local Strategic Partnership, which has treated us badly. NSI holds one of the three business places on the partnership board, with the other two being held by NSEA and Bristol International Airport.

I think it’s a bit off that a private company and an enterprise agency are both represented by other groups and also have their own board seats while co-ops don’t even have a collective seat, so that pressure for a representative organisation for co-operatives and mutuals to have a board place (in line with national government guidance) should continue, useful though the NSI meetings seem to be.

The other thing which would really help is some funding for co-operative business development specialists to work in North Somerset at strategic tasks like this, instead of it being left to ordinary workers from other sectors. I don’t know where that funding will come from and until then, I’ll continue to try my best. We need to make sure that local strategy at least does no harm to the sector.

The review is intentionally wide ranging. It covers areas for innovation in methods of co-operation and its promotion, and ways in which the movement connects, reflects and supports itself in the era of the web. The aim is to prepare a report with recommendations and a plan for discussion during Co-operative Fortnight in June.

Anyone with ideas about the challenges and opportunities you feel the movement is facing, and what can be done about them – please email evidence to robinmurray AT blueyonder.co.uk by Friday March 5th for a first summary of the issues on Tuesday March 9th.

For IT workers, this is easier said than done. It’s difficult enough to find more sustainably-produced products, let alone fairtrade ones. Our co-op has failed to achieve full marks on “Prioritise and promote Fairtrade and other ethical and sustainable initiatives” so far and I don’t expect us to reach 100% any time soon.

Just last Friday, Greenpeace International reported on more toxic electrical equipment, which shows that IT’s environmental sustainability is far from a solved problem. Meanwhile, it doesn’t seem like the fairness side is being addressed much yet. There are no fairtrade electrical product standards yet. Isn’t there demand for fairer as well as greener production?

Anyway, if you’re looking for faitrade products this fortnight, you could try some fairtrade chocolate from the New Internationalist worker co-op. Food is further along, which is a good thing because it’s pretty fundamental to life…

If you have satellite television, you can watch it live on SFinfo at 13e (schedule). There’s more detailed listings on Klack. In previous years, English audio has been on one side of the stereo channels. It looks like almost none of the SFinfo coverage is live this year. Maybe they’ve noticed comments like mine from 2005:

“I am convinced that if more people watched it for themselves, there wouldn’t be any need to publicise against them. Without the soundbiting and polishing of TV news, these people are scary. They’re less slick than the European Social Forum, too.”

If you find live coverage on any other stations, please could you leave me a comment here?
In that vein, BBC News has Ten things you didn’t know about Davos (thanks Policomm). Amongst other things, this isn’t the 40th WEF and Bill Clinton was the first sitting US president to attend, so its influence is a fairly recent mistake.

Once again, there an official programme, as well as @davos which seems to be talking much more than listening… seems appropriate for WEF, no?

To close with a quote that’s also in the VIRUS article:
‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’
-Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (Puffin Books, 1946)