Jon Bright (London, OK): OurKingdom has been trying to find out more about the Conservative co-operative movement since David Cameron announced its formation in November last year. Details have been very thin on the ground - while it was announced that Jesse Norman would be spearheading the movement, his personal website remains silent about the project, and many other senior Tories seemed to be only vaguely aware of its existence.
On Friday, however, Norman coughed up some details for the BBC. The movement, it seems, will initially about finding new ways to produce food:
We've got this mad situation at the moment where supermarkets control the roost. You get these big out-of-town shopping centres, high food miles, lots of suburban sprawl, the hollowing out of our high streets. You get this sense that no-one knows where their food comes from. Beef is something you find in a packet, not something you find in a field chewing grass.So food co-ops are a good way of getting good local food at affordable prices, so the possibilities are there of being green, socially empowering, fair to the farmer - they've got lots of really good characteristics to them.
He insists that there is no reason why co-operatives cannot be conservative, but argues that "This is not about the Conservative Party at all. This is about harnessing the power of Conservative ideas, of self help, community energy and getting people to improve their lives." In the same article, however, Peter Hunt makes the reasonable point that if it wasn't about the conservative party, Norman would join the existing co-operative movement, rather than trying to start his own from first principles (whilst also campaigning to become an MP). So - is this movement real, or just a PR stunt? The proof will be in how much importance Cameron attaches to it - and whether any more resources are allocated - for which we will have to wait and see.
