This week I am in Paris for the General Assembly of Co-operatives Europe. The key action from this year’s meeting is the creation of a Young Co-operators network. I think this is important for Britain as — let’s face it — after the last few years a bit of humility about our comparative performance with the continental cousins is in order.

All of us, not just our young people, can learn from the operations and performance of European co-operatives and their achievements have been remarkable considering the economic conditions they have faced..

Most importantly they have not been beset by the purported governance failures that have filled the headlines here in Britain.

The co-op sector I am most involved in, retail, is pretty big across Europe — indeed if it was a single business it would be as big as the largest European retailers like Tesco or Carrefour.

In Switzerland, Finland, Denmark and Italy it is the dominant retailer. Co-op Italia is the most popular brand in that country, ahead of Ferrari and Prada.

In Finland the Co-op has more than the legally allowed market share at 43 per cent and has 9 per cent in next door Estonia. I have never been able to understand why Britain’s Co-op Group has never joined with Europeans in a buying group.

Eroski the largest co-op retailer in Spain claims it can only compete against Carrefour by jointly buying with other co-ops.

The Finns who have a remarkable co-operative sector talk about it as their “globalisation insurance.” Around 3.5 million Finns out of a population of 5.5m — 64 per cent — are members and the sector provides employment for about 90,000 people.

Indeed the Finnish lesson is an important one. They have two aspects to their economy, the export orientated sector — mainly a combination of silicon technologies and forestry — which must compete in global markets, and the other the domestic market sector in which co-operatives, mutuals and customer-owned industries provide quality and reliability to their member-owners with low-cost producer pricing.

It is interesting that in our general elections the question of ownership never comes up. Instead we get trivial responses to globally driven changes in food, fuel or housing prices that carefully avoid the issue.

Interestingly, in Finland housing prices are not determined simply by the demand for homes but by the cost of capital.

Yet it must be obvious that if we are to protect ourselves, in Britain, from huge global corporations and the volatility of international markets we need a larger proportion of our economy in social ownership.

I enjoyed the leadership debates on the TV. It’s great to see someone call the bluff of the austerity agenda at peak time on national television. Just a pity that it was not Ed Miliband.

The Tories have laid out their store as the party of capital, of those who own most of the assets and want the government to make it easier for them to access more of them as well as give them tax relief on what they already hold.

We desperately need our “globalisation insurance.” The key is a revival of those institutions that help individuals join together to challenge the hegemony of capital.

First of course we need powerful, free and effective trade unions, that is the way to see off low-pay and zero-hours contracts. Laws that no-one enforces are no substitute for effective unions.

We also need programmes to help family-owned businesses transfer to employee ownership, together with mutual and co-operative financial institutions and policies to promote co-operative and mutual ownership more generally.

And where appropriate as in the NHS straightforward nationalisation.

It must be clear now to everyone what a con “austerity” is when it is only for the poor.

Coalition economics have gone from “trickle down” to “pour up.”

As Danny Dorling pointed out in his splendid book, Inequality and the 1% (Verso 2014), since 1980 the share of total income received by the top 1 per cent of British earners has almost doubled, reversing a three-decades-long trend towards greater equality.

This was easy to ignore when all boats where rising, when an average wage bought a bit more every year and credit was easy. In the past six years, the purchasing power of the average British wage has fallen by about 10 per cent — and a chunk of what remains has to pay off that easy credit.

Oxford economics professor Simon Wren-Lewis points out that George Osborne’s economic miracle amounts to making the average household £4,000 worse off.

So today when a rising tide lifts all yachts or as Karl Marx pointed out in Capital: “He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.”

Fed up of taking a hiding let’s take the smirk off their faces on May 7.