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Uhura's Mazda - List of Parliamentary Leaders of the Co-operative Party
List of Parliamentary Leaders of the Co-operative Party
1918-1922: Alfred Waterson [1]
1922-1950: A.V. Alexander [2]
1950-1963: Fred Perry [3]
1963-1976: Dickson Mabon [4]
1976-1983: Dick Taverne [5]
1983-1992: David Owen [6]
1992-1999: Alun Michael [7]
1999-2004: Nicholas Russell, Viscount Amberley [8]
2004-2014: Charles Kennedy [9]
2014-2015: Ed Balls [10]
2015-0000: Stella Creasy [11]
[1] - Waterson was the first Co-op MP elected to Parliament, out of the ten candidates who stood for the first time in 1918. It had been expected that he would take the Labour whip in the Commons, and indeed he voted with the Party on most matters, but he felt that the Co-op movement would be better served by an independent party. He narrowly lost his Kettering seat in 1922, despite the absence of a Labour challenger, but the avalanche he had started was growing: four Co-op MPs were elected in that year.
[2] - When thinking of the Co-operative Party, most people will hark back to the decades of leadership of A.V. Alexander, under whom the Party struggled on with seat numbers in the single figures but with ever-increasing numbers of candidates. In some circles, he is remembered as the man who served as First Lord of the Admiralty during the Second World War; while in psephological circles he is remembered as the man who convinced Churchill to implement the Alternative Vote system (hence his nickname) from the 1945 election onwards. Due to this reform, it was possible for people to vote for Co-op candidates without denying a seat to the Labour Party, and the Co-operators came out of the '45 poll with 23 seats, their highest total so far. Alexander resigned as leader in 1950, taking the Party's first peerage, on the cusp of the real breakthrough.
[3] - Fred Perry had spent the inter-war period as an international tennis star, and it had been assumed that he would retire into sporty obscurity after he came out of the US Air Force. But instead, he followed his father into Parliament, succeeding him as MP for Kettering in the Co-op Party's oldest seat. Five years later, he was Party Leader, and as the result of the 1950 had resulted in a hung Parliament, he led the Co-operators into a coalition with Labour. He became Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Labour, using his influence over the next year to bring in tax breaks to co-operative enterprises. But the following year, the Tories came back in, and Perry spent the rest of his career trying vainly to increase his Party's seat count against a seemingly permanent Tory government.
[4] - In 1964, again, Co-op's 19 seats were relevant to the outcome of the vote, and Dickson Mabon's support enabled Harold Wilson to rule with a bare majority. Mabon's tenure as Leader (and Deputy Prime Minister between 1964 and 1966, and again from 1974 to 1976) is generally regarded positively, although he is frequently cursed within Labour for not only blocking most of the left-wing red meat that they proposed in those Coalitions, but also conniving with the right-wing of Labour against the Tribune Group in a way that a member of a different party should really not have been involved in. All the same, this was the most relevant the Party had been since 1951. However, there was some frustration that the Co-op Party was on the edge of a decline, while the classical-liberals and Friedmanites in the Thorpe-led Liberal Party (which was now, just as Co-op was a natural source of second-preferences for Labour, a well of cross-over appeal for the Tories) were going from strength to strength.
[5] - The decline finally hit under Dick Taverne, who had, unusually, defected from Labour to the Co-operative Party just a few years before being elected Leader. He had no background in the Co-op movement and was trying to turn it into some sort of Social Democratic party, but this rebrand (together with frustration that the coalition with Labour in the late '70s hadn't done much good at all) caused a collapse in Co-op fortunes. By 1983, the Party was down to 7 seats, the lowest total since 1931, while the Liberals got almost a third of the popular vote. Taverne resigned in disgrace.
[6] - David Owen oversaw the beginnings of recovery, reaching 14 seats in 1992, and only resigning because of frustration at the failure of the broad left to make Kinnock Prime Minister (and himself Deputy, although that had absolutely nothing to do with it). He, like Taverne, had little experience or understanding of Co-operative concepts, and it was even said that he shopped at Sainsbury's, but he was less keen than either of his predecessors to intervene in Labour internal politics, even though it must have been very tempting to attack the Militants. But Owen realised that the only way Militant could be crushed was if they were crushed from within Labour. But his qualified support for the Poll Tax squandered any credibility he had accrued (he was at one point favoured as a PM candidate) and when he retired as Leader, all the promise of this beautiful and attractive progressive had been enough for just 14 seats.
[7] - Michael, who was known to many as 'Tad', Welsh for 'Father', represented the South Welsh heartlands of the Co-op Party, and doubled the Party's seats in 1997. He was beloved in a way that no previous Co-op Leader had quite managed, but his time in charge was cut short: first by the fact that Labour had done so well in 1997 that they had no need of the Co-operators; and second by Tony Blair. Blair removed his popular rival by offering him the First Secretaryship of the new Welsh Assembly. He took this up in 1999, only retiring in 2012, when the dominant Labour Party finally got sick of kowtowing to a Party with less than a dozen seats in the Assembly.
[8] - Michael was succeeded by long-time Co-op activist, Nicholas Russell, who was the grandson of philosopher Bertrand Russell. By rights, Russell should have been the main winner from Blair's infamous invasion of Iraq, having been consistent in turning the Co-op Party into a pacifist and anti-nuclear movement more on the Left than in the Centre. Unfortunately, despite leading the Party to it's best-ever result in 2001 and doing very well in the polls after Iraq, he was challenged for the leadership in 2004 by the ambitious Gordon Brown, and despite fending off the challenge, he lined up a successor in Charlie Kennedy and resigned soon after, his leadership now being difficult to defend. But although often forgotten nowadays, Russell was the leader who really started the current phase of Co-op activity, taking a leaf from the Liberals by engaging in local Co-operative and Green solutions and putting genuine energy into campaigning for Parish Council seats and the like. This is the basis of the survival of the Co-op dream in 'The Gig Economy' of the 21st century, and it was laid by Russell.
[9] - Kennedy had been among the strongest critics of Iraq and the Blair Government in general (although he did give praise where he thought it was due when Blair took Britain into the Euro), but in 2008, with Labour's loss in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election removing their narrow majority, Kennedy and Brown were taken into the Blair Government as full coalition partners - the first time this had happened since the '70s. Regrettably, neither was really able to offer much in the way of policy initiatives due to the financial crisis. The only real success that Kennedy, Brown, Balls et al could point to in the end was the mutualisation of Lloyds TSB and RBS. Kennedy held on to most of his Party's seats in 2010, which was unusual for a junior coalition partner, but resigned due to ill health shortly before the next election, when the beloved statesman had been expected to do very well and replace the tanking Liberals as the new third party in British politics.
[10] - With Brown announcing his retirement the day after Kennedy's resignation, the stage was set for Ed Balls to take over - he beat Chris Leslie in the final round. But after a short leadership in which he was mainly known for looking a bit like Smithy off of Gavin & Stacey, he lost his seat to the Tories in the 2015 general election, and consequently resigned as Leader. However, he had been bigged up as a potential coalition partner for Ed Miliband during the campaign, which enabled the Co-operators to reach a larger audience and get a few more second preferences from centrists and metropolitan progressives - they won 24 seats, which was much less than had been hoped for under Kennedy, but a damn sight more than the Liberals got.
[11] - After nearly a century of white men, the election of Stella Creasy was a threshold for white women in Politics. She defeated Kate Osamor and Luciana Berger to the Leadership, in the first all-female leadership contest in British history. After a decent showing of 16% for Jeanette Arnold in the London Mayoral election of 2016, the polls have gone from strength to strength (although this is in tandem with an equal resurgence for the Liberal Party, both sitting on around 6%) although Creasy is frequently attacked for 'smugness', and it is no secret that the Co-operators feel that they ought to be doing much better than they are, considering that Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, is about as popular as 'Utgard96' (the Swedish-invented weapon which disseminates the HIV virus over a city-wide area and convinced the Norwegians to just close down the entire Nobel Institute because humanity is clearly beyond saving). But with Brexit, perhaps the era of communal sharing and working for the good of all in the community is simply over - certainly, the rise of the inexorable teal tide of UKIP since 2013 has taken the wind out of the sails, not only of the Co-op Party, but of liberal democracy itself.
1918-1922: Alfred Waterson [1]
1922-1950: A.V. Alexander [2]
1950-1963: Fred Perry [3]
1963-1976: Dickson Mabon [4]
1976-1983: Dick Taverne [5]
1983-1992: David Owen [6]
1992-1999: Alun Michael [7]
1999-2004: Nicholas Russell, Viscount Amberley [8]
2004-2014: Charles Kennedy [9]
2014-2015: Ed Balls [10]
2015-0000: Stella Creasy [11]
[1] - Waterson was the first Co-op MP elected to Parliament, out of the ten candidates who stood for the first time in 1918. It had been expected that he would take the Labour whip in the Commons, and indeed he voted with the Party on most matters, but he felt that the Co-op movement would be better served by an independent party. He narrowly lost his Kettering seat in 1922, despite the absence of a Labour challenger, but the avalanche he had started was growing: four Co-op MPs were elected in that year.
[2] - When thinking of the Co-operative Party, most people will hark back to the decades of leadership of A.V. Alexander, under whom the Party struggled on with seat numbers in the single figures but with ever-increasing numbers of candidates. In some circles, he is remembered as the man who served as First Lord of the Admiralty during the Second World War; while in psephological circles he is remembered as the man who convinced Churchill to implement the Alternative Vote system (hence his nickname) from the 1945 election onwards. Due to this reform, it was possible for people to vote for Co-op candidates without denying a seat to the Labour Party, and the Co-operators came out of the '45 poll with 23 seats, their highest total so far. Alexander resigned as leader in 1950, taking the Party's first peerage, on the cusp of the real breakthrough.
[3] - Fred Perry had spent the inter-war period as an international tennis star, and it had been assumed that he would retire into sporty obscurity after he came out of the US Air Force. But instead, he followed his father into Parliament, succeeding him as MP for Kettering in the Co-op Party's oldest seat. Five years later, he was Party Leader, and as the result of the 1950 had resulted in a hung Parliament, he led the Co-operators into a coalition with Labour. He became Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Labour, using his influence over the next year to bring in tax breaks to co-operative enterprises. But the following year, the Tories came back in, and Perry spent the rest of his career trying vainly to increase his Party's seat count against a seemingly permanent Tory government.
[4] - In 1964, again, Co-op's 19 seats were relevant to the outcome of the vote, and Dickson Mabon's support enabled Harold Wilson to rule with a bare majority. Mabon's tenure as Leader (and Deputy Prime Minister between 1964 and 1966, and again from 1974 to 1976) is generally regarded positively, although he is frequently cursed within Labour for not only blocking most of the left-wing red meat that they proposed in those Coalitions, but also conniving with the right-wing of Labour against the Tribune Group in a way that a member of a different party should really not have been involved in. All the same, this was the most relevant the Party had been since 1951. However, there was some frustration that the Co-op Party was on the edge of a decline, while the classical-liberals and Friedmanites in the Thorpe-led Liberal Party (which was now, just as Co-op was a natural source of second-preferences for Labour, a well of cross-over appeal for the Tories) were going from strength to strength.
[5] - The decline finally hit under Dick Taverne, who had, unusually, defected from Labour to the Co-operative Party just a few years before being elected Leader. He had no background in the Co-op movement and was trying to turn it into some sort of Social Democratic party, but this rebrand (together with frustration that the coalition with Labour in the late '70s hadn't done much good at all) caused a collapse in Co-op fortunes. By 1983, the Party was down to 7 seats, the lowest total since 1931, while the Liberals got almost a third of the popular vote. Taverne resigned in disgrace.
[6] - David Owen oversaw the beginnings of recovery, reaching 14 seats in 1992, and only resigning because of frustration at the failure of the broad left to make Kinnock Prime Minister (and himself Deputy, although that had absolutely nothing to do with it). He, like Taverne, had little experience or understanding of Co-operative concepts, and it was even said that he shopped at Sainsbury's, but he was less keen than either of his predecessors to intervene in Labour internal politics, even though it must have been very tempting to attack the Militants. But Owen realised that the only way Militant could be crushed was if they were crushed from within Labour. But his qualified support for the Poll Tax squandered any credibility he had accrued (he was at one point favoured as a PM candidate) and when he retired as Leader, all the promise of this beautiful and attractive progressive had been enough for just 14 seats.
[7] - Michael, who was known to many as 'Tad', Welsh for 'Father', represented the South Welsh heartlands of the Co-op Party, and doubled the Party's seats in 1997. He was beloved in a way that no previous Co-op Leader had quite managed, but his time in charge was cut short: first by the fact that Labour had done so well in 1997 that they had no need of the Co-operators; and second by Tony Blair. Blair removed his popular rival by offering him the First Secretaryship of the new Welsh Assembly. He took this up in 1999, only retiring in 2012, when the dominant Labour Party finally got sick of kowtowing to a Party with less than a dozen seats in the Assembly.
[8] - Michael was succeeded by long-time Co-op activist, Nicholas Russell, who was the grandson of philosopher Bertrand Russell. By rights, Russell should have been the main winner from Blair's infamous invasion of Iraq, having been consistent in turning the Co-op Party into a pacifist and anti-nuclear movement more on the Left than in the Centre. Unfortunately, despite leading the Party to it's best-ever result in 2001 and doing very well in the polls after Iraq, he was challenged for the leadership in 2004 by the ambitious Gordon Brown, and despite fending off the challenge, he lined up a successor in Charlie Kennedy and resigned soon after, his leadership now being difficult to defend. But although often forgotten nowadays, Russell was the leader who really started the current phase of Co-op activity, taking a leaf from the Liberals by engaging in local Co-operative and Green solutions and putting genuine energy into campaigning for Parish Council seats and the like. This is the basis of the survival of the Co-op dream in 'The Gig Economy' of the 21st century, and it was laid by Russell.
[9] - Kennedy had been among the strongest critics of Iraq and the Blair Government in general (although he did give praise where he thought it was due when Blair took Britain into the Euro), but in 2008, with Labour's loss in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election removing their narrow majority, Kennedy and Brown were taken into the Blair Government as full coalition partners - the first time this had happened since the '70s. Regrettably, neither was really able to offer much in the way of policy initiatives due to the financial crisis. The only real success that Kennedy, Brown, Balls et al could point to in the end was the mutualisation of Lloyds TSB and RBS. Kennedy held on to most of his Party's seats in 2010, which was unusual for a junior coalition partner, but resigned due to ill health shortly before the next election, when the beloved statesman had been expected to do very well and replace the tanking Liberals as the new third party in British politics.
[10] - With Brown announcing his retirement the day after Kennedy's resignation, the stage was set for Ed Balls to take over - he beat Chris Leslie in the final round. But after a short leadership in which he was mainly known for looking a bit like Smithy off of Gavin & Stacey, he lost his seat to the Tories in the 2015 general election, and consequently resigned as Leader. However, he had been bigged up as a potential coalition partner for Ed Miliband during the campaign, which enabled the Co-operators to reach a larger audience and get a few more second preferences from centrists and metropolitan progressives - they won 24 seats, which was much less than had been hoped for under Kennedy, but a damn sight more than the Liberals got.
[11] - After nearly a century of white men, the election of Stella Creasy was a threshold for white women in Politics. She defeated Kate Osamor and Luciana Berger to the Leadership, in the first all-female leadership contest in British history. After a decent showing of 16% for Jeanette Arnold in the London Mayoral election of 2016, the polls have gone from strength to strength (although this is in tandem with an equal resurgence for the Liberal Party, both sitting on around 6%) although Creasy is frequently attacked for 'smugness', and it is no secret that the Co-operators feel that they ought to be doing much better than they are, considering that Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, is about as popular as 'Utgard96' (the Swedish-invented weapon which disseminates the HIV virus over a city-wide area and convinced the Norwegians to just close down the entire Nobel Institute because humanity is clearly beyond saving). But with Brexit, perhaps the era of communal sharing and working for the good of all in the community is simply over - certainly, the rise of the inexorable teal tide of UKIP since 2013 has taken the wind out of the sails, not only of the Co-op Party, but of liberal democracy itself.
- Uhura's Mazda
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