ABSTRACT
The Co-operative movement of Great Britain has more than ten million members, who represent a substantially greater number of individual consumers. The Co-operative Store is a familiar feature in almost every town and in a considerable number of villages over the whole country, and the Co-operative delivery van is met with very frequently in the streets. British Co-operation is, indeed, a very big affair, with which at least one-third of the adult population is connected in one way or another. The programme of the Co-operative Party, indeed, had for a long time included advocacy of the nationalisation of the basic industries and services to which the Labour Government applied its measures after 1945. The Consumers’ Co-operative movement has, indeed, a curiously compartmental structure. The system of ‘lay’ control which dominates Co-operative organisation is in form highly democratic.
