CO-OP PARTY SPEECH
25th February 2023
I was elected last May on the promise of restoring the pride, prosperity and purpose of our communities here in South Yorkshire.
Pride. Prosperity. Purpose.
Those are the values that far too many people feel we have lost, here and in communities like South Yorkshire across the country.
They also happen to be the values that the Co-op Party and movement champion.
That is no coincidence. I am not just here as South Yorkshire’s Mayor; I am here as South Yorkshire’s Co-operative Mayor.
The Co-op Movement’s origins are in championing autonomy, democracy, and a fair share in the workplace.
The Party’s role is to protect and promote that workplace democracy, and to extend those same values into our wider economy and society.
We don’t need to wait for a Labour Government nationally to start doing that work. Co-operators in power across the country are already delivering for our movement, and for our communities.
That’s perhaps most evident in the work we are doing to promote cooperation in the workplace, including here in South Yorkshire.
Over time, we have seen a decline in our worker-, employee- and consumer-owned economy. Just in the past few years, iconic employee-owned firms – like Forgemasters, our highest-end steel producer – have moved out of the sector.
(Though in that case it was for nationalisation, so the good news is that now we all own it.)
We must arrest, and reverse, that decline of economic co-operation.
Rachel Reeves committed at the Co-op’s Annual Conference to double the size of the co-operative sector. I couldn’t be more supportive of that goal.
In my manifesto, I committed to supporting and expanding the work of our pioneering Ownership Hub; and I stressed how co-operative firms will be the answer to many of the problems we face:
In our response to supporting freelancers in co-working spaces; in the housing sector and emerging opportunities we see in retrofit; and in sectors where poor working practices are endemic, such as social care.
I want to build a bigger economy for South Yorkshire, and a better economy.
That means that embracing new industries and commercial opportunities as they arise – in our advanced manufacturing sectors; creative industries; housing retrofit and modern construction.
And it means taking steps to ensure that the cooperative sector plays a major role in those industries.
In power here in South Yorkshire, we are putting those plans into action.
We are exploring how we can reinvent business support: moving away from no-strings-attached grants; and towards equity investment and loans.
We need to become even more radical.
The public sector should be an active partner in shaping our economy. That means providing advice, access to finance and bespoke consultancy support for workers aspiring to buy-out their firms too.
Our Ownership Hub brings this together, building a network of advisers and champions across South Yorkshire. Through this, we are building our links with those co-operative firms that and emblematic of what we want South Yorkshire business to look like – especially our advanced manufactures, like Gripple and Swann-Morton.
We are discovering what works. We need to build a movement for co-operation in our economy; finding champions in existing co-operative firms and establishing networks amongst them.
It’s no good just preaching to the choir: successful examples of co-operation need to demonstrate the benefits of change to others in their industry. My team will be supporting them as they do so.
But this goes beyond the economy.
Like all the political big hitters, I have a five-point vision for South Yorkshire. The first, as I’ve set out, is to build a bigger, better economy.
But cooperative values are just as important – if not more so - in a second theme: doing politics differently.
What is valuable about cooperation in the economy?
People see how their contribution directly shapes the wealth and prosperity they enjoy. Production becomes a community-driven effort - not just individuals acting bouncing around one another like atoms.
Cooperation is a way of running the economy that champions the creativity, autonomy, and the value of all workers. In short, it takes what makes us human, and turns it into an asset in the marketplace.
Those values – of universal decency, respect, honesty – do not stop at the door of the office or factory. They should inform how we act as public leaders.
That is why devolution cannot be about recreating a centralised, slow, unresponsive Whitehall machine in South Yorkshire - only with a nicer accent and better views.
Instead, devolution should be used as an opportunity to change how we do politics. Because the risks are all too clear if we fail to bring our communities along with us. It we do politics to people rather than with people.
New initiatives lack support; leaders and activists are discouraged from setting out a better future, fearing a backlash; our politics turns inwards, becoming petty, zero-sum; pitting people and communities against each other in a false competition.
A good example of that is playing out right now in South Yorkshire, in the debate around the ‘Fifteen Minute City’ - and associated policies like bus priority routes and clean air zones.
Where there is a lack of trust, well-intentioned and even sympathetic citizens and businesses may be sceptical that these reforms will deliver better health or increased footfall for their businesses.
At worst, opportunistic politicians use these moments of change to peddle conspiracy theories – as Don Valley’s Conservative MP Nick Fletcher has done in Parliament.
Cooperation is the antidote to that poisonous politics of distrust.
So let me tell you how we are putting cooperative values into practice in South Yorkshire in the three parts of my five part plan: fixing our public transport; rising to the challenge of our climate emergency; and making South Yorkshire the healthiest region in the country.
Our faltering and failing public transport system perhaps shows most clearly what happens when we give up on co-operative values.
Before privatisation in the mid-1980s, South Yorkshire had a progressive, pioneering bus network that was the envy of the world. Cheap fares, frequent services, well run across the region - and all democratically accountable. Public transport as a public service.
By engineering a privatised system that delivers profits through cutting costs rather than delivering over social goods – we have lost that world class transport system.
Most of the staff in the Combined Authority I lead have spent an entire career being forced to explain why private firms make decisions that completely ignore the will of the community; but they have not been able to change those decisions.
Now, answerable – through me – to our communities and political leaders, that is changing.
In the past year, we have brought our tram network back into public ownership and public control. If I can raise the money, I now have the power to extend our tram network across the region; not just the hope of doing.
We have intervened to bring forward a £2 price cap for journeys across South Yorkshire; 80p for younger people – intervening in general bus prices across South Yorkshire for the first time since privatisation.
And earlier this month we announced Barnsley’s Ed Clancy, a four-time Olympic medal winning cyclists, as our new Active Travel Commissioner. All steps forward in fixing our transport system.
Now, change will not happen overnight. The franchising assessment process for our buses will take years to run, under existing legislation.
In the short-term, as you’ll have seen in last week’s papers, our bus networks face severe funding pressures and there may be further cuts without central government support.
But what we are doing here shows that an alternative is possible: a democratic transport network, run in the interests of our community; helping realise the diverse goals, ambitions and needs of our communities. Public transport helping deliver social value.
This about rewiring how our politics – and our economy - works. Where there is political will, we should be able to bring about public benefit. For some, that has been controversial. Not here in South Yorkshire, so long as I am Mayor.
And this goes beyond fixing our long-standing problems; we need to bring that democratic and cooperative ethos to rising to new ones too.
That’s why I am setting up a Citizens’ Assembly on climate change in South Yorkshire - so that everyone in our region has an opportunity to shape how we respond to the climate emergency. This will be a representative group, brought together to set out the principles and priorities that will guide our regional green transition.
We cannot take peoples’ support for net zero as a given. I have already mentioned the debate around specific measures like clean air zones. Culture wars will have to be fought; progressives cannot sit it out.
We need to be able to make persuasive arguments to maintain public support and legitimacy. Initiatives like Citizens Assemblies clarify how best to make those arguments – and at their best create advocates who can make the argument for themselves.
To take another example, I am committed to planting 1.4m trees in South Yorkshire. One for every citizen.
As you’ll know, a large chunk of South Yorkshire is covered by the Peak District. The easy option is for us to plant those trees in an under-used upland, which the overwhelming majority of our residents will never see; never think about.
If we do that, tree planting – for all its value as a carbon sink – will be invisible. It will have no impact on how people think about themselves, their world, and their agency.
That’s why I’m asking my officers to think differently about how we get those trees planted. How do we make sure that we not only plant 1.4m trees in South Yorkshire, but that all 1.4m of our residents feel a personal stake in that?
That means finding ways to get trees to ordinary residents who want one for their gardens. That means hosting and supporting community tree planting events and ceremonies.
We need to do that, not as a frivolous “nice to have” but as an essential reflection of our political values. Co-operative policy is about driving change with the community, changing hearts and minds in the process. Root and branch reform, if you like.
Finally – but perhaps most significantly - I am devoting a large amount of my time and energy to my fifth goal: making South Yorkshire the healthiest region in the UK.
I chair our Integrated Care Partnership, bringing together the NHS and local authorities in the region – the only Mayor in the country to hold that role. From that vantage point, I see the massive challenges facing our health and care systems.
As in transport, stalled or rigged reforms and a decade of austerity has left us with a health system that feels unresponsive to its patients, employees, and wider community.
Here too, co-operation must be part of the solution. As chair of the ICP, I am injecting democratic oversight at a regional level into the system.
But that democratic change shouldn’t stop with simply having the Mayor chair meetings. I am insisting at every turn that we focus on and learn from the experience of those who use and depend upon our health and social care services.
This means moving beyond engagement or consultation as a “tick box” exercise; it should be at the heart of how we deliver public services.
And of course there is a role for cooperatives in making that culture change stick. In my manifesto, I set out my ambition to expand cooperative businesses in the care sector in particular. I will be tasking my officials to develop a plan to radically transform care in South Yorkshire in my time as Mayor.
Across my five-point plan for South Yorkshire, I hope you’ll agree I’m beginning to sketch out how co-operative values can deliver social justice when used by those power.
If we take cooperative values as our North Star, we can restore faith in our politics; renew our economy; and give our communities confidence that they can contribute; that they have a stake in our future.
So I ask that - after you leave today’s Conference and go back to your workplaces or your political homes – you keep championing those values. Ask yourself: who’s voice are we neglecting? Are we giving everyone the opportunity to contribute? Who is feeling shut out?
I am proud to join you today as Co-op Party Mayor. I am proud of our history in shaping the Labour Party. In the mix alongside our colleagues in the trade union movement, the Fabians, Christian Socialists and more modern social movements, I see our coop party as the unifying spirit in the Labour movement.
It falls to all of us here today to sustain that spirit. I know you will.