Ed Mayo delivering the Salter Lecture Photo: Photo: Trish Carn
Salter Lecture: Raise the sails
Ian Kirk-Smith reviews the Salter Lecture by Ed Mayo
This year the Salter Lecture, hosted annually by the Quaker Socialist Society, was given on Friday afternoon in the Large Meeting House by Ed Mayo, secretary general of Co-operatives UK. He began by describing the present economic system as ‘failing, lamentably, to serve the needs of society’. In an engaging, lucid and wide ranging lecture, entitled ‘Raise the sails as the wind is changing – how radical and alternative ideas have become our economic lifeline’, he presented a powerful case for the benefits of alternatives based on the cooperative model. He illustrated and supported his argument by drawing widely on examples from Britain in the past and the present.
He asked whether we were moving towards a world of greater risk or of greater security. ‘We have to invest’, he said, ‘in imagination’ and described it as ‘the most powerful tool we have for social change.’ Imagination was especially important, he argued, with the challenge of climate change: ‘We can grow the economy. Or we can cut emissions. It is increasingly clear that we cannot do both’.
Throughout his lecture Ed Mayo made astute and thoughtful references to inspirational figures who had championed the cause of cooperative forms of enterprise and social justice, such as Robert Owen, John Bellers and Scott Bader.
He especially praised the work and legacy of economist EF (Fritz) Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful. An attractive feature of the lecture was the constant references made to a very diverse range of successful cooperative enterprises. He told the story of Becky John, who had set up Whomadeyourpants, cited Chapman’s fishcakes of Grimsby and highlighted Principle 6, the cooperative trade movement in America. These were excellent examples of how the model of cooperation was working in different sectors for the community.
Ed Mayo stressed the values that underlay good cooperative enterprises. They are owned by their members and enable people to have a say in a business and how it is run. He also raised a few eyebrows in the room by revealing that the cooperative movement has outperformed the economy in the last four years. There are some thirteen and a half million members of cooperatives in the UK today.
The movement, he explained, was also flourishing, internationally, in countries such as China, Russia, Brazil and South Africa.
Ed Mayo then presented a passionate and inspiring case for why cooperatives mattered. In reciting a short fable, he emphasised that cooperatives offered, essentially, a different way of life than contemporary capitalism. They had a different vision, both of the role of the individual and the community, and were founded on very different values. What they do well, he argued, was to create an ‘open space’ for different ways of acting. He explained how cooperatives, at their best, used this space to achieve benefits for both the individual and the community.
The values of equality, fairness and love were at the heart of his vision. If we believe in these values, he argued, then they should prompt how we act.
He strongly believed in a positive, utopian, vision. ‘I use the term socialist,’ he said, ‘in the sense of Robert Owen rather than Karl Marx.’
We need, he said, a boat, a compass, a crew and skill and he went on to explore these images in the context of his vision for the future of the cooperative movement. Ed Mayo concluded by celebrating the ‘spirit of possibility’ at the heart of the cooperative movement and argued that, at a time of challenge and denial, ‘we have to re-enchant the future – we have to raise sails and feel for its new breath coming’.
