Political Penguin

While the Tories go about their constant attempt to smear the Labour Party by claiming it has used their policy I thought it might be prudent to drop this little one into the mix.

Yesterday David Cameron launched something that as a Cooperator myself appears to be something of a contradiction; the Conservative Cooperative Movement. The problem is that Conservative and Cooperative don’t go together. Putting aside the damage the Tories did to the Cooperative movement when they were in power, putting aside any kind of ideological difference between the collective and mutual perspective of the Cooperative movement and the selfish individualistic doctrine of the Tory Party, it just doesn’t seem right for the leader of the Conservative Party to be talking about Cooperatives.

Of course we’ve been in this territory before. Davey boy turns up to make some speech, tailored to say one thing to those people that day while happily saying something else the next day. We’ve come to expect this kind of duplicitous behaviour. We’ve also come to realise that David Cameron isn’t too hot, or probably more likely, his back room team aren’t too hot on doing prior research.

That is of course an exception in this case because Cameron’s speech which you can read in full here, has some really good examples of how cooperative principles can be enacted within the education sector and good on him too because he cites examples from overseas, specifically Spain and Sweden where there is a longer history of cooperative structures of school management.

There’s only one slight, or to put it more accurately, big problem with this policy that Cameron attributes to Iain Duncan Smith. It’s been nicked, pinched, pilfered, call it what you like because back in September Ed Balls launched the Cooperative Party Education Policy. (Please note, this is a rather large PDF file and may take a while to download).

It’s the Cooperative Party’s proposals for the greater involvement of Cooperative management structures in schools and gives exactly the same proposals that Davey boy is passing off as Tory ideas. Not only that, you know Dave praises how well they’ve done on this in Spain and Sweden? Well guess which countries are highlighted as the examples of this practice from an international perspective in the Cooperative Party document? Yep, that would be Spain and Sweden then. Anyone would think David Cameron, sorry Iain Duncan Smith after all it’s apparently he who is the mastermind behind this new Tory policy had been having a little butchers through the Coop Party’s policy document.

Sorry lads, we were here a long time before you lot when it comes to these policies and incidentally, if you want to be really radical, instead of just proposing that parents can take over the local LEA run school, how about extending it to all schools? If the parents of the local Grammar or private school feel their kids would be better served by cooperatising the school then surely you’d be in favour of enabling them to do so? It is parent choice after all that’s the determining factor here isn’t it? Nah, didn’t think so.