Comrade Dave gives power to the workers
Oops, he did it again. Having spent years giving the impression of being all “grand narrative and no radical policy,” David Cameron is on a roll. He recently announced plans to publish every government contract, a genuinely radical change. And now he has announced something even more daring: giving all public sector workers the right to take over the body in which they work (reaction from Conservative Home is here, and Phillip Blond’s original idea proposing something very similar to this is here. ) Three thoughts:
The media are on a Tory crisis trip, which looks increasingly odd. The Guardian, unless I’m missing it, haven’t written this up. (George Osborne was on the Today programme talking about it.) Very odd, especially given how yesterday Toby Helm wrote in the Observer that Cameron was beset by a “growing sense of
Thomas Haynes
Dear James,
Thanks for this article. The Conservative Co-operative Movement acknowledge your point about public sector workers possibly needing extra training before forming their own co-operatives.
To this end, the Conservative Co-operative Movement will be contacting the Co-operative College to discuss the potential for a partnership to develop new training programmes, should the Tories win the election, in order to facilitate a large-scale uptake of this morning’s public sector co-op policy.
Yours faithfully,
Marjorie Ellis Thompson and Thomas Haynes
Conservative Co-operative Movement
55 Tufton Street
London SW1
Conor Ryan
James – this is all fine in principle, and indeed could happen with Gove’s existing policy or Labour’s competitions. Some of the school-promoted academies are brilliant, as I’m sure are teacher-led charter schools. However, what Osborne is promoting is different. It would allow teachers to bid to take over existing schools. They might do so if they didn’t like the head’s way of running things or how the governors operated. Or if a school faced closure – perhaps to make way for a new academy. Teacher-led schools are a great idea, but allowing militant staff to turn existing schools into workers coops is the stuff of SWP dreams and parental nightmares. Remember William Tyndale….