London: The Labour movement behind Andy Burnham has a message for Australia about the reforms they will unleash if they have the chance now that Britain’s new prime minister has finally taken power.
Burnham, who took office on Monday, has promised to restore public ownership of essential services in a bid to end decades of steep price rises after the privatisation of water, rail and energy assets.
The solution, says his Labour ally Andrew Pakes, is to embrace the co-operative ownership model that helped create some of Britain’s biggest enterprises – and has also thrived in Australia.
Pakes, the Labour MP for Peterborough in regional England, is in Australia this week to speak to Labor Party members at their conference in Adelaide about the lessons for both countries in achieving serious economic reform and improving basic services.
“There’s a huge appetite to look at how we can build a purpose-driven economy, which puts communities into the equation, not just profit and loss,” he says.
“We’re looking at new areas for co-operation and social enterprise, like adult social care, like expanding affordable housing to address the housing crisis.
“It’s about how we can use the co-operative model in our supply chains, particularly in things like food and agriculture.”
Pakes is a member of a group within the Labour Party that traces its history to the Co-operative Party formed in 1917, and which has been joined with Labour since a formal alliance in 1927.
Burnham is a member of the same group, called Labour Co-op, and is a believer in its core principles. Even today, members of Labour Co-op seek approval from this group – a kind of party within the party – before they run for parliament.
So when the new British government talks about public ownership, says Pakes, it is building on foundations already known to millions of consumers who are members of a mutual organisation.
These include the Co-op supermarket chain, which is owned by 5 million members, and the Nationwide Building Society, owned by 16 million members, and the John Lewis department store, owned by its 74,000 employees.
This is not new to Australia, given the co-operative model underpins member-owned banks, farming groups, housing organisations, and giant mutuals for motorists such as the NRMA and RACV.
“One of the central purposes of my visit to Australia is to share that Labour Co-op ambition with Australian government colleagues about how modern governments can do economics differently,” says Pakes.
“Millions of people in the United Kingdom are members of a mutual organisation, even if they don’t know it.
“Largely, that’s through building societies, which have grown up as one of the main long-term lenders for mortgages and safe borrowing for working families to get them on the housing ladder.
“We’re looking seriously at how we can leverage some of that financial firepower.”
While Burnham may end up sharing policy ideas with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, they have some things in common already. They were both raised in Catholic households and went to Catholic schools before university. They are both devoted to rugby league. They both joined their parties at the age of 15.
(Albanese, famously, refers to his “three faiths”: the Catholic Church, the Labor Party and the Rabbitohs. If this were applied to Burnham, he would need four: as well as the Leigh Leopards rugby league team, he supports Everton in the Premier League).
Pakes, speaking to this masthead in London before his flight to Australia, says one of the lessons for both countries is that the mutual model could be used to tackle the housing shortage.
“I think in both countries, there’s a sense that the younger generation feels locked out of some of the privileges that their parents and grandparents had,” he says.
“Affordable housing, and good-quality housing close to places of work, is a challenge in both countries.”
Pakes entered the House of Commons in 2024 after many years as a Labour policy adviser and councillor, defeating the Conservative Party in a constituency with high immigration and modest incomes compared with wealthier cities nearby, such as Cambridge.
While the Burnham government has only just taken shape, the overall policy direction appears to favour public ownership and local control over mammoth privatised utilities. There is no policy detail, however, to indicate exactly where the new prime minister and his cabinet will start – or whether their ideas will work.
Pakes is confident the co-op model will feature in this policy plan over time, and that Australia and Britain could end up learning from each other.
“Andy Burnham is a politician who comes from the heart of the British co-operative movement,” he says.
“This is the biggest opportunity for there to be a co-op moment in the revival of the UK Labour movement and the Labour government.”
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David Crowe is Europe correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X or email.
