Loanna Morrison: Nick Clegg's "right to request" plan could bring as much risk as reward

Loanna Morrison is Director of the Conservative Co-operative Movement and contested Bermondsey and Old Southwark at the 2010 general election.

While in opposition, David Cameron proposed a policy that would encourage public sector workers to create employee owned companies or co-operatives, along John Lewis lines, to take over their own services in the public sector.  He shared his aspiration that over a million employees could take advantage of this new right and said that it would be the biggest transfer of responsibilities since the Right to Buy. 

Francis Maude has already set up pathfinder groups and provided a budget of £10m; now the access created by Localism legislation will see employee ownership in this sector becoming a reality over the next few years. As the Localism Act has received Royal Assent and since it appears that DPM Nick Clegg has been entrusted with taking policy forward, it maybe opportune to reflect on David Cameron’s landmark legislation and the other interpretation being suggested by Mr Clegg.

The Conservative Co-operative movement welcomes the initiative to give tax incentives to companies that are employee owned or which seek to be. This is an area that has been extensively researched and promoted by Jesse Norman MP who chairs the APPG on employee ownership. I myself have sat in on a discussion with John Lewis and it is important to point out that their  ‘partnership’ is not as simple a structure as Mr Clegg would like to imagine. Shares held by employees, are only of benefit as long as they remain employees and only if the business makes a profit. However the advantage of his announcement is that it will lead to increased awareness of this model for financial institutions, which are approached to fund this type of business. At the moment they seem to lack knowledge of how employee ownership works or the advantages.

Loanna Morrison: Labour no longer has a monopoly on the co-operative concept

Loanna Morrison is Director of the Conservative Co-operative Movement and contested Bermondsey and Old Southwark at the 2010 general election.

Contrary to left wing propaganda, the Conservative Co-operative Movement exists, and is growing on solid foundations. Among our increasing membership are dozens of Conservative MPs.

We Conservatives recognise that co-operatives and mutuals can be and are, the fundamental building blocks for the Big Society. But not in the old, one for all and all for one Socialist dogma.

We believe as we square up to the sheer bad management and economic fecklessness of the past decade under Labour that co-operatives have the potential to revolutionise the way we provide goods and services.

Far from the socialist workers' definition of co-operatives, contemporary versions represent alternative complementary models of capitalism where risk and returns are distributed more equitably.

Loanna Morrison: It is Labour's failure to control immigration and its obsession with promoting "multiculturalism" that has allowed the BNP to re-emerge

Loanna Morrison is the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Bermondsey and Old Southwark.

“Britain is full,” declares Nick Griffin at every opportunity, and he is right. Labour’s total failure to control immigration has resulted in a London that long-term residents do not recognise; its relentless legislative drive towards ‘multiculturalism’ has created a society they are struggling to understand.

We no longer have neighbourhoods, but a warped mosaic of ‘communities’ as Labour and the Lib Dems have reconstructed that term: tiny colonies organised by skin colour, religion or nationality and forced into competition for resources. Mistrust, crime, extremism - these are the unmitigated and entirely predictable results of a decade of uncontrolled immigration and the multicultural project. I say this as the first black Parliamentary Candidate for the Conservative Party in Bermondsey and Old Southwark.

An openly racist political party can only flourish under a Labour government. In the 1970s under the previous one, the National Front clashed with immigrants on the streets of Britain. Thirty years later under New Labour they are clashing on our TV screens and legitimised as members of the European Parliament. Their resurgence finds its origins in the very same issues; fear of losing their national identity and the consequences of being flooded with ‘others’ who change the character of their towns and cities. In 1979, many of the these concerns raised by the National Front subsided after the Conservatives came to power, only to re-emerge today on the national political platform as the British National Party, again under, wait for it, a Labour Government!

Most readers will associate the constituency of Bermondsey and Old Southwark with the infamous by-election of 1983, in which the Liberal Democrats’ Simon Hughes gained the seat after one of the dirtiest campaigns of modern times. Those with slightly longer memories may also recall it as the setting of a vicious National Front campaign against the area’s black population during the dark days of the 1970s.
Bermondsey is an area of many ingrained prejudices as many generations of families living in the area have seen the demographic change dramatically under the Labour Government and the local Liberal Democrats who waste extraordinary amounts of money on promoting ‘diversity.’ But instead of eliminating this prejudice, they have entrenched it. Southwark is the only London Borough that has had either a NF or a BNP candidate at every election.

Loanna Morrison is the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Bermondsey and Old Southwark.

Loanna Morrison: This "ghetto Tory" doesn't care about the social background of the politicians caricatured as "Tory toffs"

Loanna Morrison is the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Bermondsey and Old Southwark.

I am angered by the constant taunts from the Left that Conservatives are "toffs". Some may be upper class – Eton and all that - but so what? Is it a crime to benefit from a privileged background and a brilliant education as a result of an accident of birth?

I am not a toff so perhaps voters would prefer a “ghetto Tory” running the country? If so, give me space – I'm coming. I am black, a single mother who lived in a council house and with no Oxford University degree to my name. I am also a Tory.

David Cameron does not need a qualification in poverty to understand the economic challenges facing Britain. Under Labour, the fat cats keep getting fatter and the required tasks for the future of our country are deferred and obfuscated while the chosen few cling to office and quango jobs.

If qualifications are needed, Gordon Brown is singularly unqualified. He has never held a job outside politics. No wonder he and his equally unqualified Cabinet have made such a spectacularly bad job of looking after the poor. Their idea of social mobility is to help only the favoured few climb the greasy pole. The rest of us can go hang. How many Labour ministers send their children to private schools, have private health insurance and take pride in their kids' courage on the field of battle in Afghanistan?

The first thing Tony Blair abolished was the Assisted Places Scheme. Thank goodness I have already used it. We all want our children to be given the best education, to become "toffs" in the best sense of the term – well-dressed, educated and able to take their place as responsible members of society. It is clear from unchallenged statistics that Labour is not capable of delivering.