The Labour Party should be comfortable about the idea of working with the Co-operative Party in formulating its manifesto as reported in today's Guardian. That is as long as no one else makes the mistake that Minister for London Tessa Jowell made recently of trying to brand mutualism as 'New Labour'. The Co-op Party pre-dates 'New Labour' by some 70 years and the principles which it promotes pre-date the Labour Party itself. Hardly new.
BTW I'm not sure the brothers and sisters will be too happy about the Prime Minister Gordon Brown lauding the John Lewis Partnership as the corporate model of the future. If my memory serves me right JLP has a distinctly frosty attitude towards trade unions, prefering the paternalistic staff association model of controlling guiding industrial relations.