In 1844, a group of Rochdale weavers got sick of paying over the odds for poor, adulterated and expensive food. So they pooled their pennies, took a room on Toad Lane, and opened a shop they ran themselves. Before long people were travelling from all over to see how they’d done it. That shop is the reason the modern co-operative movement exists, and it opened down the road from where I grew up, on a council estate in Spotland.

I carry that history into the Commons every day as Rochdale’s Labour and Co-operative MP. The question it always brings me back to is ownership. Who owns the things we all rely on, and who do they answer to?

That instinct is being written back into law. This year the government put a new Community Right to Buy onto the statute book, giving local people first refusal when a treasured pub, shop or community building is put up for sale, along with the time and the backing to raise the money. Its Pride in Place programme puts real funding behind the same idea, so communities can take on and revive the spaces at the heart of where they live. For years these places were sold off over people’s heads. Now the law is on the side of the people who use them.

The same is happening with money. Credit unions are owned by their members and rooted in the towns they serve. Ministers are reforming the common bond rules that decide who is allowed to join one, so many more people can save and borrow somewhere that answers to them rather than to a distant shareholder. The government promised to double the size of the co-operative economy. This is what keeping that promise looks like.

It also means standing up for the people behind the counter. The Pioneers were shopworkers. Today too many shopworkers are abused, threatened or attacked simply for doing their job. There is now a law making an assault on a shopworker a specific criminal offence, something the Co-op movement and the shopworkers’ union fought years to win. It matters.

And none of this is a Rochdale eccentricity. Our new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has been a Labour and Co-operative politician his whole career, from nine years leading Greater Manchester to Number 10. The movement that started here is about to reach Downing Street.

The weavers on Toad Lane worked it out for themselves. My job is to help the people of this town do the same.