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| The Tricorn Centre, Portsmouth. Photo - Wikipedia |
Reading about food deserts and so many of us cash-starved, I've often wondered about that stall where I bought brown rice, lentils, chick peas, mung beans, all very exotic to a girl from Surrey in the 1970s. At 18, the only takeaway I'd had was chips and my family didn't go out for meals.
During lockdown I was guilty of panicking about food. I registered for and put in a bulk order with a wholefood supplier for wholemeal flour, red and green lentils, seeds (sesame, sunflower, pumpkin). I asked friends if they wanted any when the order arrived. Filling plastic bags, I was reminded again of the Tricorn centre, the street I lived in of short-life housing (also destined for demolition), our sense of community.
This is a lot of background to the question in my head of what happened to co-ops and mutual aid. I mean the Rochdale Pioneers and others like them. Coops haven't disappeared, it's just that we don't hear about them because we don't hear much at all about practical ways out of poverty and how we can regain control over how we live, determine how we want the future to look. Later this year a report's coming out from the International Cooperative Alliance and a European research institute that will provide evidence of change from beyond this small island.
Charities like Oxfam, and supermarkets, have long used the story of small worker co-operatives in marketing for chocolate, coffee, tea etc. You know the kind of thing, a smiling person holding a hoe. I don't see these images from Cardiff, Brighton, Newcastle....yet co-ops do have a record in employment and housing and I wonder if it's their time again, if only because none of us understands hedge funds and how they've squatted at our kitchen tables as mysterious, uninvited guests, so perhaps we can ask them to leave and do our own thing. Yes?
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