Tomorrow (Wednesday) we launch the first publication of the Conservative Co-operative Movement. It’s at 12.30 pm at the Ideas Space, Clutha House, 10 Storey’s Gate, London SW1. All CH readers are invited—and, yes, there will be refreshments.
The new book, called Nuts and Bolts, is not a weighty policy tome or academic treatise. Indeed it’s not a political book at all. It’s a book about food—and citizenship. It gives readers pretty much everything they need to know to set up a food co-op, presented in a very friendly and accessible way. There's a good trailer for it by David Cameron at the NFU Conference yesterday.
But why is this important? What do food co-ops have to do with politics?
Co-ops are not just about self-help, or entrepreneurship, or community empowerment, or a more creative approach to delivering public services—though they are all of these things. Think of them instead as a demanding expression of active citizenship, of direct democracy, of power flowing up from local people and local organisations and challenging the unreflective, top-down statism of current politics.
In Compassionate Conservatism I made the case from first principles for a horizontal, not a vertical politics: a politics based on diverse, free institutions, devolved power and the idea of a connected society. It’s nice to be able to take a small, but direct, step to move this idea forward.
