Five quotes

Robin’s ability to infect was like that of a smile spreading smiles, an enabling virus of hope.

I want to endorse the award made by the RSA in the form of five quotes, quotes that I suspect might bring that gentle smile to mind, among those of us who knew Robin.

1. Professor Ian MacPherson says of values that “one can never expect to achieve perfection. The ideal will always be beyond one’s grasp and that is partly what creates the special kind of entrepreneurship one can identify with co-operatives.”  

In 1985, Robin co-founded TWIN with Michael Barrett Brown. TWIN was rooted in the values of: democracy, and the labour and co-operative movement. For all its success, TWIN also became an enduring teaser for Robin, asking how do you organise if your business is social change?  

2. Stephen Yeo comments that Robin’s own achievements were “always drowned by his enthusiasms for what his friends and comrades had done”.

Alongside a host of distinguished affiliations, such as the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Young Foundation, Robin was an Associate of Co-operatives UK from 2010. He pointed me to the Greater London Enterprise Board’s Industrial Strategy - saved by he and Michael Ward. (Frances can confirm, but I understand they were stacked like bricks in his cottage in Cumbria, keeping out the cold).

He would have been pleased to know that one of his recommendations to the movement, the establishment of a co-operative university, is being moved forward at a Co-operative College event in Manchester.

3. Hilary Wainwright said that “Robin exuded vigour and hope. And he infected those around him with his mood”.

Robin’s ability to infect was like that of a smile spreading smiles, an enabling virus of hope. In this, he was an organiser. He was modest enough to be a joiner, in his local co-op in Hackney where he lived, or Cumbria, where he rested.

We are living in an age of ‘I’, where individual action and lone social entrepreneurs are lauded as the way to make change. Not so for Robin. He sought out the ‘we’.

His ideas were both hands-on and birds-eye. In one of our last exchanges, he categorically rejected the fashionable left notion that practical action amounts to no more than ‘folk politics’...

“There may be some who remain happy to remain at the micro (a proud anarchist tradition) but most gain their macro picture from their experience of their particular grains of sand and are inspired by it. There is also a confidence that there are others doing it and their practice together supports the general case for new policy in the battle against the old order who will always argue that the new policies are practical and their conventional ways are the only way. Once you leave that root into practice, you are in the world of the unrooted intellect.”

4. My fourth quote is from the nineteenth century co-operative champion and thinker, George Jacob Holyoake, casting back to an Owenite tradition that Robin would have been happy to locate himself, and I think Hilary and Geoff too.

“Knowledge is greater; Life is longer; Health is surer; Disease is limited; Towns are sweeter; Hours of labour are shorter; Men and women are stronger, fairer; Children are happier; Industry is held in more honour, and is better rewarded; Co-operation carries wholesome food and increased income into a million homes where they were unknown before, and has brought us nearer and nearer to that state of society which [Robert] Owen strove to create—in which it shall be impossible for men to be depraved or poor.”

This is what we strive for.

5. My fifth quote, for Robin would always look forward, is from Robin himself.  

“The information economy is growing with the speed and diversity of a tropical forest. It is informal and astonishingly inventive. It shares many of the same values and practices of formal co-operatives, and opens up numerous possibilities for a meshing between them. William Morris’s News from Nowhere depicted a world based on mutualism that, for more than a century, was seen as utopian. But in the last decade it has emerged as a reality not on the banks of the Thames but in the world of the web.”

Here on the banks of the Thames, we can celebrate his insight and his gift of creating narratives that can fast forward social change.