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DEMOCRACY

WORKS
Sue Goss
Published March 2023 by Compass and Unlock Democracy

By Sue Goss

About the author:

Sue Goss is a gardener, long-standing member of Compass and Co-Chair of


the Compass Council. Following a doctorate in politics from Sussex
University, she became a Labour councillor in Southwark, and went on to
work at Labour HQ under Neil Kinnock. For the past 30 years she has
worked as a coach, strategic advisor and facilitator to leadership teams in
local government, the civil service and the health service. She has written
widely about systems leadership, partnerships and coalitions, and the
relationship between the state and communities. Her latest book is Open
Tribe and she has previously authored Garden Mind: An eco-system view of
change and a different role for the state for Compass.

© Compass and Unlock Democracy

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the
purpose of criticism or review, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrievable system, or transmitted, in any form or
by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of Compass and Unlock
Democracy.

2 Democracy Works Powering Up


Please get in touch, join,
support and work with us.
Write to us at Freepost Compass
Email us at info@compassonline.org.uk
Follow us on Twitter @CompassOffice
Find out more about Compass at
https://www.compassonline.org.uk/

About the Powering Up Project


Unlock Democracy and Compass are working together on a Joseph Rowntree
Reform Trust funded project to build consensus around a new democratic
settlement. With a focus on the Labour Party, other progressive parties and civil
society campaigners, we are looking to create the conditions for a new 21st century
democratic settlement for our nations, communities and citizens. For further
information please contact Tom Brake or Neal Lawson.

About Unlock Democracy


Unlock Democracy argues and campaigns for a vibrant, inclusive democracy that
puts power in the hands of the people. We seek a democratic participative process
resulting in a written constitution that serves and protects the people. That
constitution would define the roles of, and relationships between, the Executive,
Legislature and Judiciary. It would determine how, and to what extent, power is
shared between representatives at local, national and United Kingdom levels, and
with international organisations. It would enshrine basic liberties and human rights
for all.

About Compass
Compass is a platform for a good society, a world that is much more equal,
sustainable and democratic. We build networks of ideas, parties and organisations
to help make systemic change happen. Our strategic focus is to understand, build,
support and accelerate new forms of democratic practice and collaborative action
that are taking place in civil society and the economy, and to link those with state
reforms and policy. The meeting point of emerging horizontal participation and
vertical resources and policy we call 45° Change. Our practical focus is a
Progressive Alliance, the coalition of values, policies, parties, activists and voters
which can form a new government to break the log jam of old politics and usher in a
new politics for a new society.
3 Democracy Works Powering Up
Contents
Introduction 5

The Flourishing of Deliberative Democracy 6

Devolution and Collaborative Working 8

Democratising the workplace 9

Democracy in communities 10

Why is Labour so Reluctant to Take This On in a Big Way? 11

Democracy is a Mindset 14

A Different Role for Government 16

A different role for local authorities 17

A Different Role for Citizens 20

What Next? 23

Endnotes 25

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Introduction
You would think that democratisation would be an easy sell to people on the
left. Democratic socialism was born out of an understanding that the only
power strong enough to challenge the power of capital was the collective
power of ordinary people. Working people organised throughout the 19th and
20th centuries; creating for themselves a network of social institutions that
seemed to be moving towards a more collaborative way of life, in which the art
of negotiation and sufficient democratic input where implicitly key.

But now, in the 21st century, that sense of collective power over our own lives
has all but crumbled away. We know that people are angry about being taken
for granted and hungry for a voice. We know that young people, in particular,
are losing faith in politicians.1 We know that people experience government as
distant and unresponsive. We know that, for many, work is difficult,
unrewarding and dehumanising.

We also know from our own experience that we commit to things that we have
helped to shape and that working collaboratively with others for collective
good offers a sense of empowerment, nourishment and growth that few other
activities do. For decades, many of us have been involved in initiatives that
demonstrate that a strong, social democratic society is one that moves
beyond voting; to include citizens and communities in shared decision making.

So why does it seem so hard to persuade good social democrats of the


urgency of moving beyond our broken political model?

The Brown Commission on the UK’s future has been important in


acknowledging that the UK state and machinery of government is not fit for
the future. Listening to Keir’s launch speech about “empowering our towns,
cities, regions and nations” I felt that Labour had begun to connect to what a
modern, democratic society could be like. The commission’s recommendations
on decentralising power to local government and communities are a vital step
forward and will need vigorous support if they are not to be side-lined.

But we should see them as a starting point for a wider, deeper discussion –
learning from the many thousands of initiatives that demonstrate how
collaboration, dialogue, participation, inclusion are important not just to make
good decisions, but to make more fulfilling lives.

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The Flourishing
of Deliberative
Democracy

6 Democracy Works Powering Up


A truly democratic government needs to engage in a permanent dialogue with
its people. Deliberative democracy has witnessed a renaissance in recent
years. The approach is founded on the principle that, with the right conditions
- enough time, information, good facilitation and meaningful political
engagement – citizens make judicious and thoughtful decisions that reflect the
public will. Typically commissioned by a local council, regional body or national
government; these deliberative processes take various forms. Citizens’ juries
are small-scale, usually for local or neighbourhood decisions. Citizens’
Assemblies (CAs) can convene 50 – 100 people over the course of several
weekends. Involve’s tracker has kept a tally of at least 38 CAs across the UK
since 2018. This is partly local councils’ response to a steep decline in public
trust and widely reported political disaffection.

The interest in CAs is growing because of a recognition that, when tackling


complicated policy questions – from urban planning to the climate crisis to
hate crime – conventional policy making usually fails. CAs are not about
consultation; they involve citizens in the hard work of political decision making.
We are learning that citizens bring experience, good instincts and wisdom, and
reach nuanced, thoughtful conclusions.

CAs have been responsible for serious shifts in policy, which enjoy greater
public consent because of the participatory way decisions are made. The
landmark legislation in Ireland that legalised equal marriage and removed the
ban on abortion were both the direct results of recommendations from CAs.
Closer to home, the UK’s National Climate Assembly broke new ground in
helping politicians think through the practicalities of their commitment to net
zero by 2050.

7 Democracy Works Powering Up


Devolution and
Collaborative
Working

8 Democracy Works Powering Up


Democratising the workplace
Democratising our lives is not simply about public services. There is consistent
evidence that workplaces where workers share ownership, or where they have the
autonomy and trust to shape their own work, are more resilient and successful as
well as offering a more nourishing working life. Co-operatives, employee-owned
businesses, value and purpose driven enterprises, voluntary organisations and
activist organisations are using self-organising principles to do work differently.

Organisations such as Sociocracy are supporting experiments in non-hierarchical


ways to manage work. For example, Outlandish, a media cooperative, has ditched
departments and organises work in circles that encourage constant learning rather
than management. Other organisations are part campaigning and part solution-
making, intent on protecting the environment, creating useful products out of
recycled materials, or better food. Frederic Laloux describes these ventures as
‘teal’ organisations - authentic, integrated, purposeful.3

There is increasing interest in employee ownership models (such as John Lewis) and
in co-operatives. According to Cooperatives UK, the UK currently has 7,237
independent co-ops with a turnover of £39.7bn, 13.9 million members and 250,128
employees. Many of these businesses are more resilient than traditional corporate
models with only 1.5% of co-ops dissolved in 2020 compared to 6.5% of businesses
generally.4 Similarly, a report from Cooperatives UK in 2019 found that almost
three out of four co-op start-ups (72%) continue to flourish after the difficult first
five years of existence, compared to only 43% in the case of new companies.5

And while there are many companies that are simply posturing as environmentally
friendly, socially aware or non-hierarchical – others are serious about change. The B
Corps movement works globally to provide a standard by which to assess the
commitment of organisations to work in different ways, measuring a company on a
number of metrics, relating to governance, treatment of workers, accountability to
community and consumers and protection of the environment. B Corp companies
change their legal status to demonstrate a primary duty, not to shareholders, but
to multiple stakeholders.6

9 Democracy Works Powering Up


Democracy in communities
We are seeing the flourishing of community self-organisation. The growth of mutual
aid groups during the pandemic demonstrated the agility, flexibility and speed with
which community self-organising can respond to a new need – and many groups are
surviving, growing and taking on new challenges.

One in four people volunteer. There are over a million civil society organisations,
most of them informal groups that meet in someone’s front room or a place of
worship, not an office. As well as the big charities and the prominent activist
organisations; there are hundreds of thousands of small organisations where people
work collaboratively to create the lives they want to lead, through sports clubs,
dance classes, book groups, gardening societies, volunteering to protect the
environment. The skills and experience of self- organising are all around us.

New social organisations and social enterprises are rethinking and redesigning
services to meet the changing needs at a speed and with a creativity that public
services can’t match.

All these examples begin to shape an emerging collaborative alternative to our


exhausted threadbare, centralised public services and the privatised nightmare of
‘computer says no’ - one that is as radical as the innovations that bubbled up from
Labour local government in the 1920s, or the white heat of technology Labour
offered in the 60s.

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Why is Labour so
Reluctant to
Take This On
in a Big Way?

11 Democracy Works Powering Up


Why have these ideas - commonplace in left-of-centre governments across the
globe, increasingly taken up by local government, in Wales and Scotland, and in
companies and social enterprises - not played a bigger part in Labour’s thinking
about the future?

In part, it could be because of the history of the Labour party.7 The socialist left in
Britain didn’t begin as centralisers. In the late 19th and early 20th century, working
people created a vast independent network of friendly societies, women’s co-
operative guilds, trades unions and co-operative societies. At that time, a different
image of a socialist society was imagined - one of decentralised organisations co-
operating at a national level. But at a crucial moment in the 1930s, Labour’s
leaders, influenced by both Fordist production lines and the vast Soviet machine
being created in the USSR, turned towards a more centralised, industrialised vision
of a socialist society. Because the UK had no constitutional crisis to resolve, the
balance of governance between local and central government was never really
discussed and, slowly, via successive governments (mostly, but not always
conservative), power and resources have been stolen from local government and
returned to the centre.

The top-down, hierarchical political system that concentrates power in Whitehall


and Westminster impacts on the mindset of the politicians that find themselves
within it. Leaders begin to imagine that they have to govern alone in their sealed
bubble, and no longer have the time to learn from experience elsewhere. This
tendency to close-in is made worse by the dominant ‘retail offer’ approach to
politics – that sees the public as ‘consumers’ who must be offered a smorgasbord of
tempting policies (tested on focus groups) which can be delivered from the centre.8

And, of course, our ‘first past the post’ electoral system creates a sense of ‘all or
nothing’ – a mad dash to power. In a new Labour government, we will have ministers
that have spent so long waiting, have climbed so hard, that it must seem to them
paradoxical, almost criminal, to give their little chance of power away. Labour has
been in government so seldom, that one can see how much, once politicians feel
their grip on the levers of power, they want to cling onto them. What makes this
tragic is the unexplored belief that these levers work, that they are connected to
something, and the state is something you can just slide inside and start pushing
buttons. In reality, nothing changes because you make speeches or publish papers,
or even launch initiatives. Change always happens on the ground, somewhere,
because people do stuff. So unless change is built alongside the experience of people
on the ground, constantly adjusted and reviewed it is unlikely to work.

12 Democracy Works Powering Up


Democratisation, with the implicit requirement to devolve power, is seen by some
as dangerous, because it fragments power. The argument goes that state power
needs to be concentrated to be able to tackle the power of capital and to prevent
abuse. Local authorities and local communities in a global world are seen as simply
not powerful enough to make an impact. National leaders fail to take account of the
possibility of collaborative power: sharing and combining power instead of losing it.

Some socialists worry that putting too much power in the hands of local
communities might lead to a defensive selfishness which could undermine efforts on
climate change or to reduce inequality, with memories of the local residence
qualifications that barred immigrants from council housing, or local campaigns
against housing development, windfarms and travellers. Labour, as a movement, is
so unused to participation within its own ranks that it still doesn’t feel comfortable
with the techniques, behaviours and skills that are now well-developed to ensure
that shared decision-making is fair, equal and respectful.

For some, socialism is still equated with big state public services. The involvement
of volunteers, residents and community activists has sometimes been seen as
undermining the status and protection of public sector workers, and our citizen
entitlement to services we pay for through our taxes. There is a fear that
volunteering requires resources and energy that the poorest people don’t have and
is yet another stealth version of cuts of public provision.

And many people are concerned about a post-code lottery and worry that if power
and resources are devolved to local areas regional inequalities will grow. There is a
comfort offered by the idea of nationally enforced minimum standards; even if, in
practice, outside the NHS, there is little evidence that they work.

These are valid concerns. In public policy there are no risk-free options. There is
public support for greater public participation, greater accountability, devolved
decision making, more control over our lives. But the public, because they are wise
and careful, express some of the same doubts and concerns as politicians - will it
cost more? How will it improve outcomes? Will I have to spend my life in boring
meetings? How do we stop bullies taking over? How do we make it fair?

But holding onto approaches that have been proven to fail is the riskiest of all. We
are all beginning to recognise how broken UK government is, and the impossibility of
governing well with such an over-centralised system. If Labour’s leaders understand
that over-centralised government is ineffective and inefficient, as well as
undemocratic, then we may yet become bold enough to achieve radical change.

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Democracy is a
Mindset

14 Democracy Works Powering Up


Democratisation is a mindset as much as it is a process. At the heart of democracy
is trust. Democracy trusts that citizens are wise enough to weigh up complex
issues, and make difficult compromises, and that an elite is not more likely to make
good decisions. But good democracy requires effort. If we are to tackle the difficult
social problems that confront us, we need to recognise, understand and respect our
differences and learn to make room for each other. We need to recognise that the
poorest, the most excluded, people – about whom we make cheap assumptions and
whose views go unheard - are offered least control under the present system.

Democracy assumes that many voices will be better at solving complex problems
than a single voice, that people have a right to be part of conversations about their
own lives and that autonomy and freedom to shape our own lives is a human right.
Democratic practice involves being eager to listen and being open to views different
from our own however challenging they are to our own assumptions. Public services
are a test of a society’s values. If they are top-down, controlling, forbidding and
excluding then that is the type of society they create. If at work we have no power
to shape our work or to solve problems then a huge part of our lives becomes arid
and stressful.

In Finland, policy makers, academics and government have been working to craft an
approach they call ‘humble government.’9 They argue that conventional
policymaking works well for maintaining routine state functions but are inadequate
for solving complex social problems. The current approach, they argue, suffers
from political short-termism, a siloed institutional structure, a culture of infallibility
and a failure to understand how societies work.

Humble government works from the assumption of government fallibility.


Government starts by inviting a broad and open-ended group of people with first-
hand knowledge of the problem to join in a deliberative problem-solving process.
Actors can begin solving a problem as soon as they have reached a ‘thin consensus’
about common direction and initial exploratory approaches. As learning develops,
the consensus can thicken, as some approaches are seen to work better and others
are discarded. Top-down direction is replaced by a continuous process of
experimentation - resetting goals in the light of new information as it arises from
the ground.

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A Different Role
for Government

16 Democracy Works Powering Up


Crucially, Labour in government needs to change what Westminster and Whitehall
think they are for; and what they do. As the Brown Commission acknowledges, “The
UK is the most centralised country in Europe.” (p6)

We need strong government at the centre; but we need it to do different things.


The UK government has the power to raise and redistribute resources and to
regulate and control. This power can be used to create the conditions in which
desirable actions are encouraged and harmful actions are penalised. These powers
are consistently underused, while governments fritter away attention and resource
on short-term initiatives. If government used its powerful regulatory and legislative
powers to change the social and economic climate, very different solutions could
flourish.

Government should stop trying to design and deliver detailed policy solutions.
Instead, it should set policy direction; and work with others with depth and breadth
of experience - with the four nations, with local government, with civil society
organisations, with communities - to find the best solutions. The role of a realistic,
generous government would be to create the infrastructure that enables shared
working to flourish. Not ignoring the risks but creating spaces where alternatives
can be explored, and mitigations proposed. It requires a different way of thinking –
not that government ministers have all the answers, but that through collaborative
work, exchange, learning, and experimenting, consent can be built for more creative
approaches.

The role of government is then about creating the conditions for a democratic
mindset; ensuring all voices are heard, paying attention to power imbalances and
preventing the abuse of power. The legitimate role of politicians would be to set the
rules and tone of the conversation and model the behaviours that make agreement
possible.

A different role for local authorities


Leaders at local level have been quicker to understand the changes needed.
Delivery must be devolved to local level since it is only there that the complex
interface between different policies of different government departments can make
sense. Only at local level can efforts to improve the local economy, reduce poverty,
improve air quality, build housing, improve education, care for the vulnerable and
create parks and green spaces be balanced and integrated. But devolving power to
local authorities doesn’t mean local politicians take over the role of directing and
controlling from national politicians.

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“Modern local leaders are relationship makers, fixers, brokers, entrepreneurs,
peacemakers at times and most importantly hard wired into the community they
represent. They need to act as convenors and arbiters between individual and
community interests which can be conflicting. They must articulate and navigate
through this with clear values at the heart of their work, taking people with them.
Local leaders need to work hard to understand and identify those who need
advocacy and create the space and make that case confidently even when this is
sometimes harder in the short term.” 10

Local leaders are learning how to convene difficult conversations between people
who don’t agree; to bring together divided communities, as Jim McMahon did in
Oldham, and to empower vulnerable people as Georgia Gould does in Camden. They
are able to share power with local communities without letting go of the legitimate
roles they have to ensure fairness, kindness, integrity and due process.

But this is not the case everywhere, and there is further to travel. What is
experienced, repeatedly, is the collision of two different working logics. The friendly,
but informal, relationships in community and the loose, tentative, pragmatic trial-
and-error of self-organisation comes up against the rigid rules and dull process of
bureaucracy.

Communities, when they do self-organise, find themselves having to demonstrate


‘neediness’ and social failure in order to attract funding from short-lived
government initiatives. They are forced to conform to requirements set by the
centre when what they are trying to do is to demonstrate strength, self-confidence
and generosity. The state often tries to take over – turning them into ‘volunteers’
in a government led project.

Local government is having to rethink their own ways of working; to respond with
kindness to match the excitement, energy and speed of communities on the move.
By recognising the validity of both systems, we can fashion tools for a creative co-
existence.

But, for that to happen we need a deeper shift of thinking; to change working
practice inside organisations. Public servants need the freedom to work
collaboratively with each other as well as with residents; the autonomy to think on
their feet and try things out. They need a work environment that gives them time
to think, to draw on their own values, to challenge, discuss and co-create new
solutions. Different channels of communication would enable front line staff to be
heard.

18 Democracy Works Powering Up


Public bodies could recognise that community-based initiatives don’t last forever,
that community leadership comes in waves, that leaders grow tired and difficulties
arise, seeing this as an inevitable process, rather than failure. When things go
wrong, we should expect local authorities or government to step forward with
wisdom and compassion, offering help, bolstering local efforts, creating a backstop,
providing resource. Their role becomes that of supporter and guardian, rather than
provider and commissioner.

Even the most progressive councils are only at the beginning of a challenging
process of change. These changed relationships are almost impossible to sustain as
isolated islands of creativity when the wider system is hostile. Valiant leadership
can only hold onto experiments for so long before they crumble under the onslaught
of government directions and targets. Unless national government learns to
change, these initiatives will continue to be short-lived and often reversed.

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A Different Role
for Citizens

20 Democracy Works Powering Up


Communities have always organised themselves. After all, the state’s role in welfare
is barely a hundred years old. People have always had to form themselves into
groups to make change happen, either as protest or as ‘solution making.’ Humans
are naturally collaborative. The neoliberal view of us as simply ‘homo economicus’ -
self-interested individuals only interested in earning and making money, is false. But
if we are to make space to contribute to our communities as part of our everyday
lives, we need lives that enable us to do so. We need a society that doesn’t think
that work is the only thing that matters. It is no accident that young pensioners are
the people who volunteer the most in our communities. Changes such as a universal
basic income and a shorter working week could support the democratisation of
society, giving us all the space to contribute.

Communities build themselves through doing. They create a sense of belonging and
identity through the process of working together. Jon Alexander, in his recent book
Citizens, distinguishes between citizenship as ‘status’ – in which we argue about
who is or isn’t entitled to be a citizen – and citizenship as ‘practice’ - it is something
we do. In John’s analysis, citizens are people who do citizenship. And the practice of
citizenship is something we can learn and develop through doing.

If self-organising is to become part of our lives, we need to equip ourselves with the
skills to do it well. We need our schools to skill up our children, enabling them to
practice by working collectively to address their own dilemmas. Collaborative
leadership should be part of the education of all public officials and politicians. We
should all be able to facilitate a meeting, to reduce the heat in a conflict, to help
build a consensus. In self-organising, as anywhere else, people can behave badly and
things don’t always go according to plan. We need to develop a ’literacy’ in self-
organising, so that all of us feel competent to take the appropriate balancing
actions, or to rebuild relationships. These skills are as necessary for online
communities as they are in physical communities.

Part of the problem of the relationship between government and community is the
extent to which community organisations rely on public sector funding. This could
change. Local and regional wealth funds could provide capital for community
endeavour. The profits made on land and planning could be used to find capital
funding for projects in perpetuity – land could be granted or buildings handed over
to communities. Community Trusts are being adopted in a number of places to
ensure that community organisations can develop the way they want to.

21 Democracy Works Powering Up


The big social foundations are beginning to rethink their own role. The lottery fund
is experimenting with giving £1million to 150 communities to transform their lives
without rules or requirements.11 Lankelly Chase is a foundation leading work to
rethink the role of funders – and funding imaginative local community activity that
tackles inequality and injustice. Local businesses can support community
organisations. A vibrant locality, with a sustainable local economy, is a partnership
between the local authority and public sector, local businesses and social
enterprises and community organisations.

22 Democracy Works Powering Up


What Next?

23 Democracy Works Powering Up


A progressive government would understand its role as creating, protecting and
modelling the values that underpin a more democratic culture. Keir Starmer and
Francesca Klug wrote about the need for a 21st century state to operate through a
set of shared values that bind state and citizen alike. The state needs to live those
values, ensuring that it is not seen as ‘above the law’ or able to get away with cruel
and thoughtless actions. They argued that the values espoused in the Human Rights
Act offer a working definition of the relationship between the state and the
individual: “a relationship defined by the entitlement of everyone to be treated with
equal respect and dignity… underpinned by a duty on the state to protect the most
vulnerable” 12

There is much in the current relationship that has become cruel and destructive.
Hard work, and a change of culture will be needed across government to change
this. The recommendations on devolution in the Brown Commission will play an
important part in this, but not implemented ‘top down’ but through a conversation
with local government, the four nations, communities and citizens – taking them as
a starting point for a wider and deeper exploration of what it might mean to
become a vibrant, future-facing democracy. If these are the values we carry into
our practice of citizenship, then the state and citizens must work together to craft
the rules and frameworks that underpin our interactions with each other.

To do this would mean a different sort of politics, a different approach to leading,


and a conversation, within the Labour Party, between left of centre parties, across
civil society and between party leaders at local and national level – about what a
different sort of relationship would be like, and how to make it happen.

A first step would be to create the space now for these conversations, so that a
future Labour government would have the skills, the understanding and the ways of
working that would enable it to create a more democratic society.

24 Democracy Works Powering Up


Endnotes
1. Helm, Toby. 2022. "Young Adults Have Dramatic Loss Of Faith In UK Democracy,
Survey Reveals". The Guardian, 2022.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/10/young-adults-loss-of-faith-in-
uk-democracy-survey.
2. Goss, S. and Reed, S. 2015. "Restoring Trust". In Finding Our Voice - Making The
21st Century State, 13. Compass. Finding our Voice - Making the 21st Century State -
Compass (compassonline.org.uk).
3. Laloux, Frédéric. 2014. Reinventing Organizations: A Guide To Creating
Organizations Inspired By The Next Stage Of Human Consciousness. Paris:
Diateino.
4. Harvey, Rebecca. 2021. "A Resilient Co-Op Economy". COOP News.
https://www.thenews.coop/155388/sector/retail/a-resilient-co-op-economy/
5. Voinea, Anca. 2019. "UK’S Co-Ops Turned Over £37.7Bn In 2019". COOP News.
https://www.thenews.coop/141786/sector/uks-co-ops-turned-over-37-7bn-in-2019/
6. Miliband, E. 2021. Go Big. London: The Bodley Head.
7. See also White, S. 2022. Labour, Pluralism And Creative Constitutionalism.
Compass. https://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/labour-pluralism-and-
creative-constitutionalism/.
8. For consideration of how committing to democratic reform is actually an
essential part of Labour’s ‘retail offer’ in the next election, see Garland, J. 2022.
The Electoral Case For A Deeper Democratic Approach. Compass.
https://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/the-electoral-case-for-a-deeper-
democratic-approach/.
9. Leppänen, Juha. 2022. "A Time For Humble Governments". Edelman.
https://www.edelman.com/edelman-trust-institute/rebuilding-trust/juha-leppanen -
:~:text=In Finland, we started to develop the humble,COVID-19 is a great example of
practical humility..
10. McMahon, J and Wright, S. 2015. "Political Leadership In The 21st Century".
In Finding Our Voice - Making The 21st Century State, 18. Compass. Finding our
Voice - Making the 21st Century State - Compass (compassonline.org.uk).
11. https://localtrust.org.uk/big-local/.
12. Klug, F. and Starmer, K. 2015. "Values And Standards: The Individual And The
State". In Finding Our Voice - Making The 21St Century State, 16. Compass. Finding
our Voice - Making the 21st Century State - Compass (compassonline.org.uk).

25 Democracy Works Powering Up


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2 Basic income and sovereign money

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