With the banking system in disarray and many savers fighting for their financial lives, now is the time to look at different ways of doing business.

Tom Hodgkinson argues that we must look back to the Guilds of the Middle Ages, when trade was carried out under the principles of co-operation rather than competition. To this end he has stopped dealing with shareholder-owned companies and switched to co-ops. Co-operatives share their profits with their members (the dividend) and are he claims, staffed by more intelligent, courteous and humane people than the `brutal capitalist monsters’ that run our PLCs.

Having torn my hair out dealing with BT, as well as my staggeringly unhelpful broadband service provider, I’m willing to try my luck with the Telephone Co-Op, It’s also easy to bank and buy food co-operatively. I am banding together with friends to bulk order from the health food co-operative, Suma, which offers great choice at a considerable discount too.

As Tom writes in this month's Ecologist:

`Co-ops make trade into a pleasure rather than a stressful process. Here is a movement that was started by the people, for the people. Not by governments. The Government has been curiously silent on the matter of co-operative approaches lately, engaged as it is on the ludicrous and hopeless task of trying to keep a dying system afloat. Clearly, then, we all need to disengage from any dealings with shareholder-owned companies and switch to co-ops. This is fairly easily done with food, banking and telecoms, but what about transport, which is every household’s highest weekly cost? Can we imagine petrol co-ops, car co-ops, train coops? We need urgently to get the Bransons and other greed-mongers out of the picture. We need to get the tax-eating politicians out of the picture. We need to recreate our own new systems, and the co-operative movement is a wonderful place to start’.