General Election 2017 - Labour Manifesto: Stepping up the role of the public sector

Labour's manifesto, For The Many, Not The Few, proposes a major rethink of the role of the public sector.

At the core of Labour's 2017 manifesto is the role of the public sector. It has a place at the centre of all the party's ideas on how to rebalance Britain's economy.

Labour has promised to be "radical and responsible", to end the years of austerity but to do it "within our means", to address a "growing sense of anxiety and frustration. For the Labour leadership, as represented in this manifesto, that means rethinking the government's approach to public and private, and to restore the public element.

That puts Labour in stark contrast with the Conservatives, and fundamentally questions the government's approach - that would strip away the public in favour of the private. As Labour announced its plans in parts over the past couple of years, there was a surge of criticism for the idea of any policy that would see more public spending. The austerity thinking that public debt, government debt, is a burden that must be lessened has been wielded against Labour at every turn.

There remains a strong current, despite the slow discrediting of austerity economics, that clings to a fawning infatuation with the idea that public debt, not underinvestment, will blight the future and that the market is the great innovator. But, as the economist Mariana Mazzucato has argued, this is at best a half-truth.

In reality, public sector plays the role of innovator and risk taker, not just shaping markets but opening them. Meanwhile, private actors are aggressively risk averse, even stifling innovation, all while opportunistically exploiting the publicly-funded advances - taking the credit and returning little of the wealth created.

A New Public Role

This Labour manifesto seizes upon that idea: an innovative public sector that can take the initiative and intervene, without overbearing state management, to invest and promote growth and support innovation in the name of the common good.

It proposes a National Transformation Fund, for instance, that will invest £250 billion over ten years in improving the country's infrastructure, aimed at promoting and speeding along future economic growth. It pledges improvements to transport links, for renewable and low carbon energy, and an industrial strategy that invests in creating and enabling a high-skill economy.

And, of course, there are the pledges to 'renationalise' energy, rail and water. Having come upon this word, a moment needs to be taken to reiterate something. The word 'renationalise' has been used for Labour's plans, but isn't entirely accurate. The Left (as a positive) and the Right (as a negative) have both used the word, but to be clear: Labour's plans don't propose costly industry takeovers by the state.

Remember: state-ownership is just one form of public-ownership, but it is not the only form. There are municipal, community and co-operative models that are also public options that do not require or propose centralised state management - whether you think that would be a good thing or too overbearing and inefficient.

As for the cost of 'renationalisation'? Well, a rail franchise will lapse at no cost and new public rail and energy companies, while requiring startup, would have the capacity to be self-supporting. In short, 'nationalisation' is a crudely charged word that hides a lot of potential nuance.

In Labour's actual manifesto, the focus is on democratic ownership of the economy. For instance, the party propose a "right to own" policy that makes "employees the buyer of first refusal". So when the party says it wants publicly-owned regional water companies, there is scope to think co-operative and community, rather than state.

As for rail returning to public ownership: it's already publicly-owned. It's just franchised out in pieces for companies to turn a profit from it. Returning these franchises on expiry is not a major outlay, though it could take time, and they could become self-supporting, employee-run services rather than being state-run.

Likewise, the party's plan for public energy is much smaller in scale than the 'renationalised' headlines suggest. Rather than wholesale takeovers, Labour have announced their intention to set up local, decentralised, publicly-owned energy companies to compete with the big energy corporations and lower prices.

The new role for the public sector doesn't end there. The party propose a National Investment Bank, that will work with private investors, to make £250 billion available to lend to "small business, co-operatives and innovative projects" across Britain - offering "patient, long-term finance to R&D-intensive investments".

The NIB's work in getting credit flowing again may be assisted by breaking up the publicly-owned RBS into a series of smaller, "local public banks" - pending a consultation on the proposal.

In housing, there is a public role too. Half of the one million new homes that Labour are promising will be housing association and council homes for affordable rents, promises the manifesto - with higher standards being set for the quality of homes.

The clear purpose behind this is to restore a sense of social security and of communities owned by the people who live in them.

That is why a rethought public role goes hand-in-hand with promises of new rights and protections for renters, a National Education Service that brings childcare, comprehensive education and free higher and further education under one coordinated heading, putting more funding into social care, and taking steps to protect workers by tackling insecure and precarious jobs.

It also chimes well with the proposal to make active use of the national and local spending on procurement of services from the private sector. That means using a bill amounting to £200 billion a year to promote, and invest in, good jobs based in local economies at businesses run to high standards.

A £10 living wage, four more bank holidays, increased paid paternity leave and more secure contracts at work, indicate an intention to create a less precarious everyday environment. While funding ten thousand more police officers and strengthening laws around domestic violence and violence against women and girls, demands that these rebuild communities be safe spaces.

There is even a nod to restoring some judicial oversight to investigatory powers - though the word 'surveillance' does not appear - to ensure than individual rights and civil liberties are not weakened.

And the NHS, Labour's crown jewel, will also see a large injection of new money. The party's plan involves additional funding of more than £30 billion into the service "over the next Parliament", with the NHS also benefiting from the National Transformation Fund to make much needed upgrades to buildings and equipment.

To put Labour's ideas into action will require funding. Te main source for Labour promises will be a tax rise for only the top five percent of earners, all earning over £80,000. There will be higher corporation tax, with small businesses protected by a lower rates and less frequent paperwork.

In all these measures are estimated to raise the extra £50 billion the party needs for it's policies - though the IFS stresses that some of that is conditional on somewhat unpredictable factors.

There is one glaring ommission: the absence of a pledge to end the Tory working age benefit freeze, which has led to deep cuts with further restrictions to come. With the deep impact that welfare cuts have already made it is a remarkable gap.

At the manifesto launch, ITV's Robert Peston raised this point. He asked Jeremy Corbyn why, when there is clear evidence of the coming impact, that ending the welfare freeze isn't mentioned. It isn't in the manifesto, but Corbyn responded that there will be a review of the situation and there will be no benefits freeze. But the lack of costing here is notable.

There are provisions, though, to repeal cuts to the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), implement the court decision on Personal Independence Payments (PIPs) to protect those with mental health conditions, scrap the Bedroom Tax, scrap the sanctions regime and restore housing benefit for young people.

The Co-operative Party

And let's not forget that Labour is part of a century-long electoral pact with the Co-operative Party, with whom it stands joint candidates. Running and sitting as Labour and Co-operative Party, or Labour Co-op for short, the alliance has had and continues to have a number of well known MPs, such as Ed Balls, Gareth Thomas and Stella Creasy.

In addition to the Labour manifesto that these candidates will be judged against, the Co-op Party has also published its own priorities. These include expanded detail on both employees and consumers having a place in the shake-up of boardrooms, more localism and public services and utilities that are tied closer to their communities.

But there is very much something for the co-operative movement in the Labour manifesto. Along with backing for more democratic public ownership, there is a commitment to doubling the size of the co-operative sector with targeted investment - matching a Co-op Party aim.

In fact, there is a strong sense of the co-operative movement and of co-operative influence running right through the Labour Manifesto proposals. Everywhere the new role for the public sector come appended with 'local', 'regional' and 'democratic'.

Progressive Alliance

This election will not be, however, be a straight contest between the Conservatives and Labour. So the question is, what crossover is there between Labour and the other progressive parties on policy?

Well, there are plenty of crossovers, though cooperation at the party level will be unlikely. The leadership has made it's position clear and that sticks to Labour's longstanding attitude that it alone is the progressive party of Britain and everyone should rally to its standard.

There are, of course, also issues of disunity behind the scenes within the Labour Party itself - never mind between parties. There are many an "independent-minded" Labour MP who in 2017 are standing virtually as independents, disavowing Corbyn, and they look like they may finally be ready to split away - perhaps even to form a new party.

On one level, it might actually be a breath of fresh air, perhaps even making it easier for the two groups to work together in a more amicable fashion. But Labour's relationship with the Co-op Party and with trade unions could make a split a bit messy. And the party's legacy is something over which fights have been bitter.

However - all of the factionalism aside - on housing, on tax, on welfare and healthcare, there are plenty of crossovers and a lot of compatibility to be found between the Left and Centre parties.

For housing, their is a common consensus that Britain needs more homes that are more affordable, and that renters need far more protection and longer term contracts. Both Liberals and Greens match Labour in these ambitions.

As for public utilities, even the Liberal Democrats - seen by some on the Left as too far to the economic Right - maintain a strong vein of support for co-operatives and democratic ownership.

Local, community-owned utilities are no hard Left socialist experiment (as the Right would demonise it). They're a tried and tested system, with broad progressive support and proof of results.

And on health and social care there is broad support both for reversing Tory cuts and for taxation to pay for increased spending - which includes restoring dignity in welfare for people with disabilities and difficulties both physical and mental.

For a grassroots progressive alliance to work, voters need to be able to find common cause across party lines. Labour's pitch is clearly anti-austerity, clearly wishes to restore the public sector, and clearly wants the rich to pay a fair share.

Whether you like Jeremy Corbyn or not, there are plenty of reasons in this manifesto for progressives to vote Labour. But perhaps of more importance, there is plenty to make voting tactically for Labour more than palatable.

References

'For the many, not the few: The Labour Party Manifesto 2017 - A manifesto for a better, fairer Britain'; from the Labour Party; as of 16 May 2017.

'General election 2017: Corbyn launches Labour manifesto'; on the BBC; 16 May 2017.

Mariana Mazzucato's 'Let's rethink the idea of the state: it must be a catalyst for big, bold ideas'; in The Guardian; 15 December 2013.

'General election 2017: Labour pledges to build 1m new homes'; on the BBC; 27 April 2017.

Shehab Khan's 'Labour to pledge an additional £37 billion of funding for the NHS: Jeremy Corbyn is hoping to improve A&E performances and take one million patients off NHS waiting lists'; in The Independent; 15 May 2017.

'General election: Labour's '£7.4bn a year extra for NHS''; on the BBC; 15 May 2017.

Jessica Elgot & Peter Walker's 'Labour looks at new tax bracket for those earning £80k-£150k: Shadow chancellor says highest increases would be for top 1%, and only top 5% of earners would face rise'; in The Guardian; 7 May 2017.

'Labour manifesto: Extra £48.6bn in tax revenue to fund pledges'; on the BBC; 16 May 2017.

Stuart Adam, Andrew Hood, Robert Joyce & David Phillips' 'Labour’s proposed income tax rises for high-income individuals'; from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS); 16 May 2017.

Robert Peston's 'Will Labour end the benefits freeze? Corbyn says yes - and no'; on ITV; 16 May 2017.

'A Co-operative Plan for a Britain Where Power and Wealth are Shared: The Co-operative Party’s policy platform for the 2017 General Election'; from the Co-operative Party; as of 16 May 2017.

Paul Mason's 'It’s now clear what Corbynism represents – so what does the centre do next? Labour’s new manifesto is popular on the doorsteps and in the polls, and may accelerate the creation of a new party and new alliances'; in The Guardian; 15 May 2017.

'General Election 2017 - Housing: There is a progressive consensus that Britain needs more homes and more protection for renters'; in The Alternative; 15 May 2017.

Rail chaos opens discussion of alternatives: Mutuals and co-ops offer community a stake, instead of rentiers who extract local wealth and without Whitehall centralisation

Photograph: Brighton Station from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

One of the big issues in the past few weeks has been the Southern Railways shambles, that has again exposed deep problems with the British system of rail franchises - at least three rail franchises face major strike action in the coming weeks (Topham, 2016; Topham, 2016{2}).

The franchise system has faced plenty of criticism. At the core is that a rail franchise is little more than permission to set up a toll booth and start extracting rent, squeezed out with higher prices, cuts to staff and services, and limiting expensive maintenance (Chakraborrty, 2016; Woodman, 2012; Milne, 2012).

Solutions to what are natural monopolies is not a simple matter. As a result much was made of Jeremy Corbyn's 2015 leadership election promise to renationalise the railways (Mason, 2016) - a brave decision for a party all too easily beaten over the head as centralising, bureaucratic, exorbitant spenders with a disdain for free enterprise (Kellner, 2014).

The latest round of railway chaos put Corbyn's policy of renationalisation on the table for a Readers' debate in The Guardian yesterday (Marsh & Walsh, 2016). The nature of the discussion was interesting to watch.

There was positivity towards renationalisation to be found, with some pointing to the more than a few good examples of public run transport services around Europe. In Paris, or in Germany, there are well maintained railways that are run for considerably lower fares than in the UK (Williams, 2015).

However, it was particularly interesting to see the perception that the only options being offered came in the form of a polarised dynamic, limited to either privatisation under greedy rentiers or nationalisation under inflexible Whitehall bureaucrats.

In fact commenters even went beyond that to observe that the railways in Britain are actually both and neither. That the railways are a kind of national-corporate cartel, with infrastructure nationalised while profit-making services were privatised - even more confusingly, often into the hands of state-owned companies from other countries.

What was clear in people's thoughts was that by some means the running of the rails needs to be decentralised, either with more lines or with more options. That no one interest should be given too much leverage, whether trade unions or rentier investors. And that responsibility for the rails should not be separated from the train services.

That combination, of well run public service and the need for decentralisation, in fact plays into the actual substance of Corbyn's policy, which was for public though not necessarily state railways (Connor, 2015). What Corbyn actually called for was to mutualise the railways as worker-consumer coops.

In mutualism, there is a path that has cut across progressive party lines. From Labour, and obviously the Co-operative Party, to the Liberal Democrats, the idea of workers taking a greater stake has a deep history. Whether as worker-management co-operation, workers on boards, or share-ownership schemes, at least a low level version of mutualism has long been proposed by those on all sides. But the present crisis in Britain's services calls for a deeper commitment.

There is much that mutualism can offer, even within the slow to change framework of capitalism. Autonomy, not least, for people to exercise power over their own working lives. And equity, a meaningful stake in the product of their own work. Between the two, you have a model that challenges both the lopsided struggle between workers and management that often leads to exploitation, on the one hand, and the extraction of wealth, on the other.

Fear of alienation by bureaucratic centralism is understandable in the running of essential services, from housing to energy and transport. But so is the pain caused by exploitative, extractive rentiers, and it has been clearly stated. Too much is taken out of communities, extracted as profit by rentiers (Milne, 2014) - who use wealth to step in and set up toll booths on essential local services. Little is ever fed back into the communities from which these private taxes are levied.

Mutualism and cooperation present an alternative. Working examples are already out there, tying the product of a community's resources to those communities, serving the common good without overbearing central control. But they need support to break through public-private corporatism and that means government to rethink how it intervenes - to be smarter and willing to decentralise.

Conservative Energy Bill changes energy priorities at exactly the wrong time

After a rapid expansion, new community energy projects are in retreat as Europe's governments focus their energies on other problems. Photograph: Solar Panels (License) (Cropped)

Only a month ago, David Cameron, on the UK's behalf, signed the Paris Agreement (ITV, 2015). Those accords, however vague, nonetheless committed Britain and 199 other countries to the reduction of carbon emissions and to work towards a target of zero emissions (Vaughan, 2015).

However today, even as this weekend a senior UN official has praised the agreement for showing that the world can come together (Goldenberg, 2016), Cameron's government is promoting an Energy Bill that is leading the UK away from those goals.

The government's Energy Bill, in the Commons for its second reading, has been criticised for prioritising short term economic gains over the long term picture of sustainability (Lucas, 2016). The bill has been accused of encouraging the pursuit of coal and fossil fuels instead of leaving them in the ground and for failing to address fuel poverty - the scandal that as many as one in ten struggle to afford basic warmth.

That drive towards fossil fuels follows on the heels of cuts to subsidies for community green energy projects, which where allowed to lapse (Harvey & Vaughan, 2015; Vaughan, 2015{2}). Under the Coalition, the Liberal Democrats had encouraged these community projects (Davey, 2013). Their government research showed that community energy projects were sought out by the public to keep costs down, as well as fight climate change and to help in disadvantaged neighbourhoods - making a difference on many social and economic fronts.

These cuts to community energy subsidies and encouragement of fossil fuel recovery would seem to be a drastic change of direction for the government's public stance on energy. However, this disappointing shift in policy would not be the first. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the government had long been undermining its own commitment to clean energy (Monbiot, 2015; Monbiot, 2014), with a previous bill encouraging the maximization of exploitation of fossil fuel resources.

At the time when is there a need not only for clean and sustainable energy but also for a way to take power over the energy we consume out of the hands of big energy companies and despotic states, to increase competition and reduce the cost of energy, support for decentralised clean community energy should be a priority.

Community utilities providers have a proven track record of success in Germany and the US (Thorpe, 2014; Heins, 2015). With community projects still taking their first steps in the UK and the municipal movement in Spain acting as an inspiration across Europe, now is the time to be encouraging communities to get engaged with civic life in pursuit of the common good.

As the Conservative Housing Bill faces criticism, Spain's municipalism movement offers hopes for an alternative way forward

The housing crisis in the UK is deep rooted and impacts on everything around it. Photograph: Regency Houses from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

The housing crisis is one of the biggest challenges facing the UK. On Tuesday, the Conservative government's attempt to address it, the Housing and Planning Bill, returns to the Commons for its third reading.

The bill aims to introduce one of the government's priority manifesto promises, namely the extension and expansion of rent-to-buy (Foster, 2016). The Conservative plans, including forcing local authorities to sell-off high value vacant properties, have however faced criticism and protests.

Progressive critics have warned that the Conservative plan will only exacerbate problems, risking simply shifting housing out of the reach of the poorest (Chakrabortty, 2016). The dangers of the direction in which the Conservatives are heading only highlights the need to explore other avenues to find creative, positive alternatives - the most promising of which appears to be the new municipalism movement.

The Housing Crisis

Britain's housing problem is extremely serious, but can be boiled down to two main factors. First, a shortage, and second, the exorbitant cost. Recommendations call for at least 200,000 new homes to be built each year to keep up with demand (Rutter, 2014). Yet building is not even keeping up with the sell-off of social housing into private hands and costs, for buying or renting, continue to rise far beyond the reach of ordinary people (Williams, 2016).

In the face of these problems it is of the utmost importance to stress that Britain's housing crisis is at the root of so many other problems and is the impediment of so many paths to reform. Britain's housing crisis is central, not least, to the struggle to arrest the cost of living, which is afflicting both businesses and individual citizens. To name just one problem, welfare reforms, whether progressive or conservative, are hindered by the huge cost of housing benefit.

Nor is it an exclusively modern problem. The large and integrated problem of housing is a long term issue, even being pointed to as the weak link in William Beveridge's analysis and his attempts to build a flat-rate, contributory, subsistence system of social welfare (Birch, 2012).

"The attempt to fix rates of insurance benefit and pension on a scientific basis with regard to subsistence needs has brought to notice a serious difficulty in doing so in the conditions of modern Britain. This is the problem of rent. In this, as in other respects, the framing of a satisfactory scheme of social security depends on the solution of other problems of economic and social organisation."

Amongst the impediments to fixing Britain's housing problems is the matter of buy-to-let (Gallagher, 2015). Alicia Glen, New York's Deputy mayor for housing and economic development, remarked in 2014 that one factor undermining efforts at establishing affordability was the small scale of private rented housing in the UK (Murray, 2014) - an inefficient and expensive system that ignores the benefits, particularly reduced costs, of operating at scale.

Conservative Opportunism

Into the breach have stepped the Conservatives, with plans that represent an attempt at a fundamental shift, not only from public to private but also from rental to ownership (Allen & Parker, 2015). However, Conservative plans to increase housing stock in the private buyers market - by opportunistically siphoning homes out of the social housing sector - so as to drive down prices through competition, will not by itself tackle the crucial element of affordability (Williams, 2016).

In fact, critics see it as only further alienating ordinary people by taking away affordable rented housing and consolidating more of the UK's housing within a market house price bubble - far beyond the reach of those earning around the national average (Chakrabortty, 2016).

For the Conservatives, the point seems to be to complete the plans of Thatcher and theories of Willetts from the 80s and 90s (George & Wilding, 1994). Those efforts focussed on dismantling the welfare state in favour of purely market systems - which included privatised social insurance and privatised housing.

From the perspective of a progressive, the obsession with subjecting the public welfare to competition for 'earned privilege', in a kind of conservative meritocracy that ignores preordained advantages but also, of course, disadvantages, is distressing. In a system that seeks to marry negative liberty, the removal of obstacles, with selfish conservative elitism - pursuing market solutions which look for cost cutting 'competitiveness' even at the expense of livelihoods - social security would begin to look fragile.

The fact that the conservatives are ascendant and have the majority necessary to impose their ideological system makes it urgently necessary to develop a realistic, alternative progressive solution.

Better Ways

In opposition to the Conservative response to the crisis is Caroline Lucas of the Green Party (Lucas, 2016). Her Lucas Plan calls for a serious rethink of the UK's housing model. It addresses the escalating rents by calling for a Living Rent - with a clear cap that not only tightens the reins on out of control rents but seeks to reduce the cost of housing down to an accessible level.

Lucas combines this with the need for getting on with plans for building new 'eco-fit' homes and renovating existing housing to be more energy efficient. These steps could together help to tackle two of the key elements in the battle to arrest the cost of living: the cost of housing and the cost of energy.

However, there are other questions around the issue that cannot be ignored in an effort to rethink the housing model. How should these homes be built, owned and run? There is a clear divide, with scepticism being poured from one side to the other for the idea of centralised authorities holding monopolies over something as fixed as land and shelter - whether that be scepticism towards the state or the exclusionary and elitist actors in the private market.

Hope for a new way forward might be found in the new municipalism movements (Gutierrez Gonzalez, 2016). In Spain, a number of cities have elected administrations born from the 15M Indignados protests, affiliated with Podemos. These local based projects are finding new ways to organise and operate, including massive horizontal co-operation between different city administrations (Shea Baird, 2015).

In Barcelona, for example, the new Barcelona En Comu led city council is making headway in tackling their housing shortage with a plan to use empty, privately owned houses for social rent properties (Rodriguez, 2016). The plan has already secured the use of 150 properties, with maybe 100 more soon to be added - with the owners compensated - which has provided secure, social rent accommodation for 450 people.

This has been achieved at the municipal level, an example of what might be achieved in cities where citizens learn they can run their own public spaces for the common good. Where citizens learn that they can lead radical administrations towards creative solutions. Exactly that kind of active and participatory concern on the part of citizens in the common good, embraced alongside a decentralisation of power, is not beyond the UK's ability to adopt.

In fact, the UK has already seen this kind of co-operative movement with community energy projects. In the UK, there have already been community owned and run green energy projects which have sought to install wind turbines and solar panels (Vaughan, 2015). However, what little support there has been from the government in the form of tax relief has been slowly cut away (Voinea, 2015).

That move has angered those on the Left who believe that community energy represents a way to a sustainable, affordable future that can oppose the power of big energy corporations (Lewis, 2015). Yet, even under attack, community energy has shown that this kind of civic action is possible in the UK. That they are possible, at least, should be an inspiration to those looking for fresh solutions to the problems of housing and energy in the UK.

On the housing front, the Lucas Plan, backed by a renewed appreciation for housing associations and an embrace of giving residents, citizens, and the community a greater stake, offers the outline for a progressive way forward. One that combines smart legislation and regulation with decentralised municipal action in pursuit of smart, creative ways to ensure availability, affordability and sustainability.

Stella Creasy is in a position to be a mediator and, through the co-operative movement, bridge the widening gaps between Labour Party factions

Stella Creasy, the Labour Co-operative MP, has put herself at the front of progressive campaigns - from support for local credit unions to campaigns opposing violence against women. Photograph: Stella Creasy at the launch of LAWRS' anti-violence campaign by Macarena Gajardo (Licence) (Cropped)

Jeremy Corbyn's victory heralds as much change for the Labour Party as it does for British politics. His election through a process of mass, popular internal democracy broke a century of control over the party by a largely middle class establishment of economists and lawyers - as former Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell put it (from Bogdanor, 1983):

'We, as middle-class socialists, have got to have a profound humility. Though it's a funny way of putting it, we've got to know that we lead them because they can't do it without us, with our abilities, and yet we must feel humble to working people.'

Yet Corbyn's rise has not healed the deep stratification within the party, but rather exposed the rifts. The fact that the Islington MP should need to build a coalition of groups within his own party (Kuenssberg, 2015), which is riven with rumours of splits (Peston, 2015), may be an indication that it's about time that the Labour Party began to act like the broad coalition that it very clearly is.

One MP, and parliamentary group, that would benefit from a clearer organisation of Labour MPs, more than most, is Stella Creasy and the Co-operative Party.

Corbyn, and the Trade Unionist 'Left', don't have a great deal in common, beyond their common allegiance to Labour's party and movement, with the Brownite 'Moderates' and the Blairite 'Modernisers'. They have shown themselves, however, to be capable of finding common causes and working together.

The Co-operative Party is one group that could hold them together. Long sitting in parliament with candidates put up jointly with Labour, they have supported members that have played roles across the Labour movement. From former ministers like Alun Michael and Ed Balls to shadow cabinet figures like Chris Leslie and Lucy Powell, many leading Labour figures have been elected as Labour Co-op.

If Labour's internal factions would start to organise themselves - rather than splitting off to form new parties or join others - there could be some consolation for deputy leader candidate Stella Creasy. Despite losing to Tom Watson (Mason, 2015), she would be in one of the, potentially, more powerful positions within the party.

Now one of the most visible women in the parliamentary party, Creasy has the makings of a future Labour leader (Blackburn et al, 2015). But first, as a visible figure in the Co-operative Party, she could lead a fully coherent, organised, internal faction - one that would be able to reach out to all sides and bring them together.

Arguably, the Co-operative Party has never been in a stronger position within the Labour Party.

With the new leadership committed to public ownership and the Labour mainstream having just begun to fully embrace neoliberalism, along with its vast reductions in public spending and role of the state, just as it was swept away by the Corbyn-tide, ideas are needed in which each side can see its values.

Co-operation has the capacity to fill that space. The Corbyn faction has expressed openness to the public ownership they have championed coming in the form of worker and customer co-operatives, rather than control by the state (Voinea, 2015) and New Labour at times embraced mutualism during their time in power (Wintour, 2010).

In those discussion, co-operative voices would have a strong role to play and Creasy and the Labour Co-op MPs could help to bridge the factional divide. As for a leading, mediating, figure, Creasy herself has been a vocal champion of feminism and women's rights (Bryant, 2014; Creasy 2012) and championed credit unions in opposition to pay day lenders - both progressive causes around which even the most disparate wings of the party could unite.

The idea of economic co-operation itself might also have an even bigger impact than just holding together the Labour coalition. It could also be one of the pillars upon which an electoral alliance of Left-wing parties could be built. While it is unlikely that the Liberal Democrats could get behind a program that would see Corbyn pushing state socialism, there has long been a liberal commitment to co-operatives. Small crossovers of this kind can be the foundations for much larger agreements.

Labour is in need of a means to hold its broad coalition together. It is also very much in need of visible female leaders (Moore, 2015). Stella Creasy is in a position to play mediator, along with other Labour Co-op MPs. Played right, its is a role that could see her leading a much wider movement in the future.