After the elections: Where next for the Labour Party?

Against all odds and predictions, the Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell secured a much better result in the general elections on 8 June 2017 than expected. Considering the resulting hung parliament and the Conservative minority government of Theresa May having to rely on the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) as well as Conservative party internal tensions over Brexit negotiations, many observers point to the likelihood of renewed elections in the near future. What does this mean for the Labour Party? In this blog post, I will reflect on the potential labour strategy for the next months and year.

Workers’ Cooperatives: The British experience in the 1970s.

The 1970s in Britain were a decade of contestation and polarisation. Following a leftward shift amongst the labour movement, groups such as the Institute for Workers’ Control (IWC) supported the concept of industrial democracy to suggest a new direction for a worker-oriented economy. In this guest post, Daniel Burridge reports on the formation of the so-called “Wedgwood Benn cooperatives” (Oakeshott 1978: 108), the purest expression of the industrial democratic ideal from the perspective of the IWC. These were located at the Triumph factory in Meriden, the Scottish Daily Express printing factory in Glasgow and the Fisher Bendix factory in Kirkby, near Liverpool. The new tactic involved buying out the factory sites and equipment of jaded private ownership and running production on the democratically-decided terms of the workers.