Myners Defeated

So, then farewell, Lord Myners. You were brought in to reform the Co-op and bring your political skills to bear, and then engaged in one of the most cack-handed processes to reform an organisation I’ve ever seen; less the action of a skilled operator and more a power grab in the manner of Senator Palpatine in the Star Wars trilogy with whom Myners shared an uncanny resemblance.

There was a huge constituency Myners could have engaged with to bring about reform, including people like myself who sit on Area Committees and who are deeply sceptical about the legacy of the Group’s democratic processes that have brought us to this point.

I went to the Area Committee I sit on in Sussex on Monday, where we discussed the proposals, which had been presented to Regional Boards the previous week. As has typified the whole process, Myners’ team were in no mood to engage, understand or compromise.

The notion of a two-tier board is one I’m not at all uncomfortable with, and have been arguing for something not a million miles away from that, but Myners proposals abandoned any semblance of democratic accountability.

The Board was to be elected in the way the Soviet Union offered citizens the chance to elect delegates — a list of approved candidates, with no possibility of adding or changing that list. That Myners thought this would be a bauble that would suffice to retain the democratic character required of a co-operative shows just how little he either understood or cared about them.

Members would soon cotton onto the pointless element of this (as they have in the Building Society world in which is is sadly common) and vote with their feet, and it was clear to me that this was less a reform to get the Co-operative Group fit for the 21st century than a staging post on a pathway to a demutualisation on the back of executive capture and ever-more disengaged members.

The task now is to ensure that in Myners exit, he doesn’t take the entire reform process with him. His petulance and bullishness have ill-served the process which he was brought into champion. That needs to happen not least because the syndicate of banks are nervous about Group’s debts and wish to see reform as much as many elected members and ordinary members do.

A new Group Board with 5 new faces have the means to drive some changes and the constituency who want to see them; what is unclear is how much time they have to do this, with terrible financial results due out in a weeks’ time, made worse by the wholly unnecessary write down this year of the goodwill from the Somerfield acquisition, which turns an awful set of results into a god-awful set.

That will trigger anxiety from the banks, and more risible comment like this from The Guardian and others who, despite considering the story worth writing about, see no reason to actually understand anything about it. It’s like seeing some write football match reports and continue to misunderstand the action by reference to the rules of cricket and with no knowledge of what formation the teams are playing in and what talents the respective players might have.