
Q&A with Les Huckfield
This Q&A was first published in STIR Spring 2022, along with an excerpt from Les Huckfield's new book How Blair killed the co-ops: Reclaiming social enterprise from its neoliberal turn, published in 2021 by Manchester University Press.
JGF Your new book How Blair Killed the Co-ops explores a politically formative period from 1998-2002, which you claim accounts for a significant shift from democratic control and local accountability, towards opening up the third sector to social investment and marginalising an existing democratic enterprise sector. Can you briefly recap this period and its legacy?
LH The critical period between 1998 and 2002 has either been missed or misinterpreted by most academic and other commentators. Social Enterprise London (SEL) was first registered on 2nd February 1998 from the merger of London Cooperative Training and London ICOM (Industrial Common Ownership Movement). Yet by the time of its first Annual Meeting in October 1998 any mention of co-operatives had almost disappeared. Its first Chief Executive, Jonathan Bland, quickly moved SEL from co-operative and mutual structures towards more loosely accountable social enterprises. After the General Election of June 2021 significant policy input from Bland and others to Patricia Hewitt, who became Secretary of State at the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), led to the formation of a Social Enterprise Unit in October 2001 and ultimately to the DTI’s “Strategy for Success” in July 2002 as the Department’s first public policy statement on social enterprise. A last minute intervention from Gordon Brown meant that social enterprise surpluses would be only “principally reinvested” in the organisation, thus paving the way for external private investment. In September 2002, the Cabinet Office ‘Private Action Public Benefit’ sought to change third sector governance structures and the Treasury’s ‘Cross Cutting Review of the Role of the Voluntary and Community Sector in Service Delivery’ essentially formed a technical assistance manual for third sector procurement funding. Alongside this, Peter Lloyd’s further consultancy work for the Social Enterprise Coalition on funding and procurement meant that in the four years between 1998-2002, beginning with the merger of London co-operative organisations committed to democratic control and ownership, the basic elements of a third sector prepared for procurement and tendering in a competitive market were in place.
JGF While the book covers the commercialisation of the third sector and democratic enterprise, and the declining political capital of this approach within national and local government, you argue that this is largely limited to the ‘anglosphere’. Can you explain what is happening in places like mainland Europe and Quebec during this period?
LH Surprisingly, this UK third sector journey to a procurement market was directly contemporaneous with a totally different direction in Quebec and France. In 1995 in Montreal the Women’s March Against Poverty and in 1996 the Women’s March for Bread and Roses led to the formation of the government-funded Chantier de l’Economie Sociale as a new social economy framework. In France in 2000, a significant report from Alain Lipietz MEP to Martine Aubry as Minister for Employment and Solidarity recommended a new Social Economy for France, based on Work Integration Social Enterprises and the French Revenu Minimum d’Insertion work placement subsidy. Since Aubry is the daughter of Jacques Delors, who as President of the European Commission promoted the European Social Chapter, this was an important report.