At Future Yard in Birkenhead on the Saturday before Labour Party conference, flippy haired teenagers with guitars are heading home after band practice in the studios upstairs. Down in the café, a listing of upcoming gigs is displayed, along with a trans rights sign and a small poster supporting Medical Aid for Palestinians.
The building – formerly a night club – boasts indoor and outdoor gig spaces, a warren of practice rooms, offices and dressing rooms, and offers courses aimed at starting people off on a career in music, as well as playing host to innumerable gigs and events.
LabourList is here, instead of doing pre-conference reconnaissance in the ACC, because the whole place is owned by a community interest company (CIC), one of the models of shared and community ownership that the Co-operative Party is keen to promote and, hopefully, spread. Joe Fortune, the party’s general secretary, is getting a tour of the premises from Craig Pennington, Future Yard’s director.
Progress in government
“What we try to do is develop really deep and lasting relationships with our local community, and use the work we do with young people and children as a way of either developing a lifelong love of music with all of the social, personal, mental health benefits that that brings, or ideally, [getting them] starting to play music, as a pastime, as a hobby, or as something that potentially will be a career”, says Pennington of their work (their programme for very young children is called “mosh tots”, he tells us).
Pennington had a long career in the Liverpool music scene, running magazines and putting on festivals, before being one of the people involved in Future Yard festival in 2019, which ended up becoming more permanent with a short-term lease of the building. With support from partners including the Paul Hamlin Foundation, Power to Change, the Arts Council, Kindred, Nesta, that short term rent became ownership by a CIC in just six months.
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That ownership provides an invaluable stability, Pennington says, and beyond its direct activities supports a huge amount of potential growth. “94% of music venues in the UK are basically on leases – they don’t own the buildings”, he explains. “I firmly believe that independent, grassroots music venues like this are basically the R&D, the talent pipeline for UK music, which is a £6bn a year industry, £4bn export sector. And you’ve got the pipeline on a really precarious, short term basis… you can’t imagine that scenario playing in any other sector”.
What Pennington and his collaborators are doing with Future Yard – which has plans to expand onto a disused railway track that runs alongside the building – is something the Co-operative Party hopes to see more of. Under the new government, they stand a good chance of seeing this hope realised.
The party has 13,000 members and, Fortune tells me “1,600 shared elected representatives. Those shared elected representatives make up 1 in 4 of ever Labour elected person in the country”.
Founded in 1917 (but with an electoral agreement with Labour in place since 1927), the Co-operative Party exists to champion common ownership and democratic control; it currently has 43 MPs and a record 4 cabinet ministers (Anneliese Dodds, Jonathan Reynolds, Steve Reed and Lucy Powell are all Co-op MPs: “These people represent us as much as they represent the Labor Party”, Fortune stresses) and a number of ministers – including, notably for their common ownership agenda, energy minister Miatta Fahnbulleh.
Appetite for change
Far from unrelatedly, the party managed to secure a manifesto pledge from Labour to double the size of the co-operative economy (this covers a range of forms of common and democratic ownership, from CICs like Future Yard, to larger mutuals like Nationwide, and many between). How did they manage to get a financial commitment from the notoriously tight-fisted Treasury team, I asked Fortune?
“I think politics understands that it isn’t able to touch community, touch alternative business in the way it should”, he tells me. “I think it understands that markets are failing, that the country is feeling further away from one another. I think that there is a basic view that politics isn’t serving something that it is there to do.
So I think there’s an appetite, fundamentally, for our type of ideas.” Aside from the Co-op’s elected representatives in cabinet and on the front bench, one person likely to have an appetite for their type of ideas is Downing Street’s head of politics, Vidhya Alakeson – formerly the CEO of Power to Change, a charitable trust backing community businesses, which helped Future Yard and many similar enterprises get off the ground.
Fortune thinks that recent circumstances have lent an urgency to the co-operative agenda. “We know how important community responses to hate and division are because we saw it after the riots this summer – communities coming together to clean up the mess and support each other in really simple but powerful ways”, he says.
“It’s common sense that communities need to be part of the government’s political response to the riots, and for us that means building and supporting community power, enabling communities to more easily own the assets that matter most to them. We think giving people a stake and a say in what’s around them is what builds stronger, more resilient communities.”
The party will be cheering on – and lobbying for more – Labour action on issues like community energy and easier registration of assets of community value. But beyond the more obvious ownership remit, I’m interested in knowing a bit more about the ideology of the Co-operative Party; what separates it from Labour– what does it mean to have co-operative values, to be a co-operator?
Fortune grants that it is not just about “co-operative solutions”, and that co-operative values extend beyond co-operatising things: “I want there to be services closer to the service user. I want there to be better voice for worker and user in all sorts of delivery models”, he says.
Recap on all of the news and debate from party conference 2024 by LabourList here.
When asked if co-operativism ever butts up against Labourism, Fortune – a Miliband-era PAd who has led the party since 2019 – is light heartedly dismissive (“Labourism and Labourism butt up against one another – let alone different traditions within socialist thought”), but is drawn to talk a bit more about his party in contrast with Labour, and how their agenda could cement Labour achievements. “There is a schism within Labour around how they understand ownership, right? Really fundamentally – private ownership and state ownership. And it’s a very simplistic way of looking at Labour politics, to my mind, [but] it is a predominant discussion within Labour Party circles. Is that publicly owned? Is it privately owned?”
“Well, what I think we provide is an ownership model and a way of thinking about politics which takes you into some very different spaces…. I always read the old Co-op party documents, and what they will talk about from the ‘45 government is the short-term nature of the ownership they instituted. So [the documents] say that the ‘45 government brought forward a method of ownership in crisis, but they understood that that ownership model wasn’t built there to last, that it needed to evolve.
“It needed to be put into a more, dare I say, co-operative space in order so that what then follows doesn’t happen. Another group comes along, another party comes along, another government comes along and says, you know what, we’re going to sell it. So I think that our model provides like that logical extension of how you embed ownership, and make it work for a majority.”
It’s clear Fortune feels genuinely enthused by his afternoon at Future Yard. As Pennington shows us the roof space onto which they intend to extend their building, the general secretary stresses to me that even with the many difficulties today’s systems present, people around the country are doing what Future Yard does – enriching their communities with co-operatively owned assets.
He is clearly optimistic that with the support the government has pledged, there will be many more Future Yards. He describes himself as “hugely ambitious” for the party he leads: “I think even the first few weeks of the Labour government, we’ve had conversations with ministers about areas above and beyond in different sort of spaces than what’s covered in the manifesto”.
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