Andy Burnham is a Labour and Cooperative MP, and as such will be the first ever to become prime minister.
Two previous Labour PMs have had strong links to the Cooperative Party and movement – Ramsay MacDonald and Gordon Brown. But Burnham will be the first official Labour and Cooperative MP to become prime minister.
So what does the “and Cooperative” bit mean? Does it have any relevance to how Burnham might govern and what policies he might pursue?
Let’s start with the existence of a separate party to Labour. Founded in 1917 the Cooperative Party was formed to seek parliamentary representation for the growing co-operative movement. They won their first seat in Parliament in 1918 and in 1927 concluded the Cheltenham Agreement with the Labour Party not to stand candidates against one-another. This later morphed into standing joint candidates in some, but not all, areas. And the Co-op Party ceased standing candidates on their own, but Labour still does.
Fast forward almost a century and currently there are over 40 Labour and Cooperative MPs – one in ten of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The proportion of joint Labour and Co-op representatives is even higher in English local government – about one in four Labour councillors. The Co-operative Party is still registered as a separate political party with the Electoral Commission.
You can be forgiven for not knowing any of the above. The political media and academia largely ignore the existence of the Co-operative Party, of Labour and Co-op elected representatives and indeed the very existence of the much larger cooperative economic and social model and movement.
Last year, for example, was the UN International Year of Cooperatives but got hardly a mention in the UK. The Labour government elected in 2024 included in its manifesto a commitment to double the size of the co-operative and mutual sector – but again, it was almost completely ignored.
Despite being the spiritual home of the modern co-operative movement – see the Rochdale Pioneers – the UK is something of a laggard in the international development of the member-owned business sector.
Many international bodies, including the UN itself, the International Labour Organization, the OECD and the EU, have been involved in promoting co-operatives and the broader “social and solidarity” economy. The latter is usually considered to be in-between the private and public (state) sectors of the economy, operating under different ownership models, governance, purposes and values to both private and state sectors.
According to Co-operatives UK, the umbrella or ‘apex’ body for UK co-operatives, the 2025 income of over 10,000 ‘democratic economy’ entities was £179bn, with 1.5 million employees and nearly 70 million memberships (many people are members of more than one such body – I am a member of several for banking, insurance, retail, etc).
According to the main international body for co-operatives, the International Cooperative Alliance, more than 12% of humanity are part of over three million cooperatives world-wide. The combined turnover of the largest 300 cooperatives and mutuals turnover was US$2.79 trillion in 2025. Coops employed 280 million people, about 10% of the global workforce.
Invisible cooperatives?
Given the cooperative movement has been with us since the mid 19th century and is such a large a part of the economy and, in the UK, of Labour politics, why is it so invisible in public discourse?
Part of the answer lies in the legal and, by implication constitutional, status of cooperatives and mutuals. Or rather their lack of an independent status.
They are clearly not state-owned entities. Neither are they “not for profits” or charities. So like every other economic entity that is neither, they are lumped into the privately owned, for profit, sector of national statistics.
They are not alone in this regard. UK universities, for example, are included in the private sector side of national statistics for the economy and employment, despite the fact some of them are registered as charities. But they are not owned by the state (as in some other countries) so they are regarded as private sector entities.
So the cooperative sector is literally not visible in many of the statistics that form the basis of political and public policy debates. Very crudely those debates often get reduced to how big the state or the market should be.
An interesting example of the problematic nature of these “in-between” organisations has been highlighted in Wales.
In an attempt to exclude ‘for profit’ organisations from children’s care the former Welsh Labour government inadvertently excluded social care co-operatives from such provision, along with privately owned and private equity companies. Because cooperatives are classed as for-profit businesses, it was deemed by the Welsh governments lawyers that they should be excluded. This has been contested. Given the UK Labour government is also debating excluding profit-extracting enterprises from the care sector, this is likely to become an important issue.
Cooperatives incoming?
So what are the implications of having a first Labour and Cooperative prime minister? Some commentators already seem to think it is of no significance and continue to ignore the cooperative bit. They are unwise to do so.
I write for the monthly Cooperative News magazine, the house magazine of the UK and international cooperative movement (founded in 1871). Going back over the past decade (when Andy Burnham became mayor of Greater Manchester) one thing stands out. Mr Burnham features in news stories about cooperative ideas and initiatives more than any other British politician.
Reading through these articles, it rapidly becomes clear cooperativism is not a detail or merely formal affiliation with little substance for our new prime minister. It is fundamental to his approach to political economy and political governance. The Labour manifesto commitment to the cooperative sector, which has been somewhat underwhelming so far, is likely to receive rocket-boosters from a Burnham government.
The implications are not entirely clear yet but along with other changes to our political, electoral, policy and general rebalancing of Britain he favours, cooperatives, mutuals, and the social and solidarity economy are like to be getting a lot more attention than hitherto. Watch this cooperative space.
Colin Talbot is emeritus professor of government at the University of Manchester and a research associate at the University of Cambridge