Interview: Joe Fortune, the quietly powerful Co-operative Party general secretary

Joe Fortune (Photography by Elio Zhang)

Sienna Rodgers

@siennamarla

“I’ve watched an awful lot of expensive conversations from an awful lot of cheap seats,” says Co-operative Party general secretary Joe Fortune. It sums up his quietly significant role in Labour politics rather well.

Keir Starmer won a landslide on a manifesto that had Co-operative thinking, language and policy ambitions running through it. As the country waits to see how Labour really governs, those seeking early clues would be wise to take a close look at Fortune’s priorities. He may be the most powerful party leader you’ve never heard of.

“He’s got that very precious thing in Labour: he can speak to all factions of the party. That’s not a universal trait”

The Co-op is an independent party, regulated like any other, but one that has a unique relationship with its sister party, Labour. The two have an electoral agreement – which will mark its 100th anniversary in 2027 – that stops them from standing against each other and allows them to put up joint candidates.

The general election produced a historic high of 43 Labour and Co-op MPs, making Co-op the fourth-largest party in the Commons. Across the country, there are also more than 1,500 councillors, 15 of the 16 Labour police and crime commissioners, and most Labour mayors, MSs and MSPs.

To become a Labour and Co-op candidate, you must succeed in each party’s separate selection process. There is plenty of demand, and many more Labour MPs are members of the Co-op than there are MPs who stood on a joint ticket (two-thirds of the Parliamentary Labour Party are Co-op members). Those who choose to put both parties on the ballot paper usually do so as an expression of their politics; often they have been involved in a credit union or community-owned project of some kind.

Despite these numbers, the “Labour and Co-op” badge is little understood, even within Westminster and Labour circles. Lesser-known still is the man responsible for the Co-op’s recent increase in representation and relevance.

Father-of-two Fortune, 42, lives in south London. Friends characterise him as a family man. He was also recently described as “an actual giant of the labour movement” on account of his 6ft 5ins height, which made him the tallest person to address delegates at this year’s Labour Party Conference.

Raised in Liverpool by a deeply political Irish immigrant family, Fortune’s relatives were seamen. His parents were the first in the family to go to a polytechnic, with his father attending on a bursary from the National Union of Seamen. His mother was a librarian before going into higher education access courses, and his father ended up a successful university lecturer.

“I was brought up to understand that politics was an important way of expressing where we were from and who we were,” says Fortune. He joined the Labour Party aged 15 and quickly became the youth officer in his local party, Liverpool Wavertree, which he suggests was still recovering at this time from its internal battle over the dominance of Militant in the 1980s.

“It’s not always the case that you have amazing experiences in Constituency Labour Parties, but the Labour Party in Liverpool was coming through quite a tumultuous period,” he recalls. “They had these old activists around who had amazing experience of what it meant to be Labour through some of the hardest years that there have been.”

Were his parents, members of the same CLP, moderate as opposed to Militant? “Very traditional Labour. I would struggle still to put them on a spectrum that we use today… But they certainly keep me on the straight and narrow in my politics.”

After leaving home to study politics at the University of Leeds, he moved to London. He “did pretty much every voluntary position you could imagine” in Southwark, which then had Simon Hughes as the MP and a Lib Dem-run council. “The Labour Party didn’t have a councillor from Elephant and Castle all the way down to Peckham. We were on a rebuild.”

The Labour tribe in the borough included Kirsty McNeill and Andrew Pakes, both newly elected as Labour (Co-op) MPs this year; next door in Lambeth was Morgan McSweeney, now head of political strategy in No 10.

Fortune was employed in Parliament, then public affairs. It is while working on transport and infrastructure in those settings that co-operatives caught his attention; he still wonders today why there is no profit sharing nor passenger ownership in the UK rail industry. “There’s got to be a different way,” he remembers thinking.

In 2009 he started at the Co-op: first as parliamentary officer, then national political and policy manager from 2016, and finally general secretary since 2019. Over the last five years, membership has risen by 30 per cent and elected representatives by over 90 per cent – all attributed to this quiet man who keeps his cards close to his chest but whose relational organising skills are considered key to the Co-op’s success.

“He’s got that very precious thing in Labour: he can speak to all factions of the party. That’s not a universal trait, and he sees value in doing that, which I think is a good thing,” Labour and Co-op MP Alex Norris, now a minister, tells The House.

“In an SW1A context, people are very reputation-conscious, image-conscious. Joe is a rarity of someone who will just say it as it is. He’s very direct, sometimes to the point of being quite blunt.”

Norris adds of his friend and politically ally: “I’m going to be brave enough to say he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder.” Being “more workhorse than show pony”, when Fortune reckons others are being too flashy “he rolls his eyes a bit”, the MP explains. “For him, it’s not the personal, it’s the job.”

Indeed, The House is told Fortune is not interested in being an MP himself – he’s more of a backroom dealer. He appears a little surprised in the interview to be asked about his personal history, and is more comfortable talking about the value of the co-operative model.

“There was a good time for the Co-operative Party to a degree towards the end of 2009-10, because we were coming through a financial crisis where people realised that we couldn’t rely on the same type of ownership. We couldn’t rely on the same type of models for the country to be in a stable place,” he says of his early years working at the Co-op.

After the tail end of New Labour came opposition, first under Ed Miliband’s leadership, then Jeremy Corbyn’s. The latter was keen to talk about different models of ownership but nationalisation, rather than mutualisation, dominated. Was he frustrated by that?

“Frustrating isn’t a way I would see it. I think it helped me in my politics at that time,” Fortune reflects. “I’ve watched an awful lot of expensive conversations from an awful lot of cheap seats. Through that period, it allowed me to see how politicians, whatever their tradition or wherever they were from, would interact with the concept of new ownership models.

“We were always very steadfast in that we believe our model is more productive, more long-lasting, and undervalued in the UK, so that didn’t ever change. But to watch people struggle to define new ownership models was interesting.

“It came back very quickly to ‘Oh, it’s the 1970s’. And I knew there was something else out there that goes back to 1844, let alone the 1970s.”

The Corbyn years were “a very important period for the Co-op Party to go through”, he says. “It wasn’t pushed around and at the whim of wider Labour family arguments. We stuck to what we were there for.”

“It’s much harder for a co-operative or a mutual to grow, to take on finance or investment, than it is for a normal company”

In 2017 Fortune came up with an ambition for the movement: to double the size of the co-operative and mutual sector. (The party says there are currently 15 million members of co-ops in the UK, and 79,000 co-ops, which generate over £40bn.) It is a policy that made its way into the 2024 Labour manifesto. It is also one that was adopted in South Korea, and achieved there in five years, after Fortune made it a focus. 

“I didn’t know South Korea were doing that at the time, I’ll be honest,” he says. “Maybe they learnt from us, I don’t know!”

Starmer has talked about pursuing “a politics which treads lighter on our lives”. Is there a contradiction between that aim and the policy of encouraging co-operatives, which require active participation from people who may have already full lives? “I wouldn’t see that as some sort of competing aim by any stretch of the imagination. Our movement is a very practical one, in which communities and individuals take a lead and take ownership themselves,” Fortune replies. “That isn’t a heavy piece of political intrusion in life, in any way.”

This government has promised not only to double the sector’s size but also introduce a new community right to buy and “the biggest expansion of community-owned energy in history”. Co-operatives are at the centre of Great British Energy’s ‘local power plan’.

Appropriately, our interview takes place at the Pimlico HQ of the Energy Garden, a society that generates community-owned solar energy and installs gardens at railway stations. 

“The model is that you can generate renewable energy – we’re here at a place which does an awful lot of solar, but it doesn’t have to be solar; it can be tidal, it can be wind, all manner of different aspects of renewable energy production – but it is one owned by the community. It’s not owned by traditional, larger companies. It’s not owned by a state. It’s owned by individuals who believe that this is important to them,” Fortune explains.

“The ambition is for there to be 8GW of community-owned renewable energy being produced here in the UK. That would mean thousands of new community energy schemes; up to – in the Co-op Party’s work – a million owners of energy here in the UK.

“A million owners of something over which the country needs and wants sovereignty and independence. Something which can’t be bought and sold. It’s not at the whim of others. It’s not generating for shareholder value. It’s generating for community value, and it’s community-owned. I think it would be a remarkable legacy.”

Fortune sees co-operatives being part of the answer to the social care crisis too. “They aren’t profit-making. They’re not owned by other companies with other ambitions for that particular asset. They are often organisations who can, in my view, deliver more personalised care, stronger care.”

Above all, he wants the state to make starting a co-operative as easy as starting a small business. “The country does a really good job in understanding how to help you start a small business. You can do it in £8 and 15 minutes, and there’ll be someone at the end of the phone for you to speak to. Now, is that the case for adopting a mutual? In my view, it’s not,” Fortune says.

“You’ve got regulators who don’t really understand and are not incentivised to understand the uniqueness of the model or the way in which it works, so that they can well-regulate them or encourage them through regulation... It’s much harder for a co-operative or a mutual to grow, to take on finance or investment, than it is for a normal company.”

This is crunch time for Joe Fortune. Forging a path for Co-op policies to reach the manifesto was just the start – now comes the risk of missing his party’s biggest ever opportunity. They are clearly serious about exerting influence: the Co-op’s hiring of former Yvette Cooper adviser Caitlin Prowle as its new head of politics shows as much.

Fortune is making regular visits to departments, shaping the ideas of Cabinet ministers who are giving thought early in the term to what their legacies could be. The party hopes that the co-op model’s durability – not being as easily reversed by a future government as nationalisation – means it will be heavily favoured by Labour. And if Starmerism means anything, perhaps it is this: the co-operative approach to the economy, energy, and perhaps housing, social care and early years too.

“I know that this is a huge opportunity – I’ve lived through times where there aren’t big opportunities,” the general secretary says. “For the Co-op Party, we have to be focused on doing whatever we can so that our movement and our sector has the ability to take advantage of a political opportunity which exists now. That’s something I feel pretty viscerally.” 

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