Gaian Economics

The Richness of Life

2008-07-22T09:07:00.005Z

I've just had the pleasure of reading Cider with Rosie for the first time. Like everybody else I'm amazed I never had the opportunity before - it was a school favourite everywhere except my school, it appears. The explanation must be to do with my Victorian schoolmistresses fears about the possibile influence on tender minds of the scene under the hay wagon. They clearly felt that the face-slashing reality of Brighton Rock was more suitable for pre-pubescent girls.

For whatever reason I'm glad that this gem has been saved for my middle years and now comes to me at around the same age Laurie Lee was when he wrote the book - and very nearly in the same place as well. The village of Slad is only a couple of miles up the road from where I'm writing this. And I have been spared the stifling, smelly, repressive atmosphere of school as a permanent association with the book.

Everything about Lee's writing is rich, as is the childhood he describes. People who live around here and who knew the author and still know his widow tell you that it isn't realistic. That he has rose-tinted spectacles on. The major criticism is that he doesn't portray the family as poor enough. The spendthrift single mother and her frequently bootless, snotty-nosed children as seen from the outside do not match the wealth that Laurie Lee clearly found in the Gloucestershire countryside.

I was listening to Haydn's Creation recently and for the first time - I think because it was sung rather than spoken - thought about the second sentence of the bible: 'The Earth was without form - and void'. This is how death feels to those who live close to the earth: an absence of the teeming, messy variety of life at this time of year. As we have used technology to gain mastery over nature so we have strangled and stifled this life.

The UK economy is based on financial services - 73% of our economy is now in the services sector, and most of this is financial services. What could be more alien to life than this 'industry' which lures us through life with the attraction of money, especially money via pensions (by which time we are really too old to enjoy it and life has passed us by) and persuades us (the insurance 'industry') that we can use money to prevent the accidental disasters that are an inevitable part of life. A paltry attempt to use the meaningless and worthless construct of money to keep life at bay.

Just Use It!

2008-07-17T08:32:00.001Z

As the recession deepens, businesses will fold. They will no longer be needing the resources over which they have exerted control in an era when money determined what happened in the economy. We need to shift towards an economy that responds more to energy - and the energy of local people rather than fossil fuel energy.

The recession will offer many opportunities. As car-sales operations fold, forecourts and salesrooms will be unused; the failure of shops will make lots of premises available on the streets of our towns and cities; paddock-owners will have no use for their fields without the profits earned by businesspeople being spent on children's riding lessons. There are opportunities here for using these resources to rebuild the local economy. But how will we deal with the money issue?

Money is the one resources that will be less plentiful - but that offers no problem once you step outside the capitalist economic paradigm. Within a capitalist economy you can't do anything unless you have money; in a sustainable economy money is merely a means to facilitate transactions. Other resources should be not left idle and useful economic activity should not be prevented just because of a historical anomaly.

Several years ago, when I still lived in Aberystwyth, a jaunty anarchist named Bob Maycock led a group that 'liberated' a local defunct night-club and turned it into the People's Palace. For six months we did as we pleased there - and did not need to pay anybody for the privilege. After that, the long arm of the law ensured that, as before the people's arrival, the premises were boarded up and left useless once more.

This clearly identified the law as on the side of the owners and of property. If not, it would permit the use of unused resources by those with genuine need - whether for homes or premises to reskill themselves and provide their own food and clothing. This was not always the case: under Roman Law if land had been left idle for a certain number of years, landless peasants were permitted to make use of it. A similar law applies in Brazil today. In Europe we pay farmers to leave their land idle.

During Argentina's disastrous economic collapse in 2001, empty factories were 'reclaimed' by their workers. They could not tolerate the illogicality of productive resources sitting around, while people were unemployed, and others wanted to buy the goods the factories had produced. This setting right the inefficiencies caused by an economy where money dominated has been documented by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein. It should provide inspiration for the next steps we will take to use our own recession to the advantage of local communities.

Time to Get Growing

2008-07-12T08:34:00.006Z

There is a lot of noise these days about the importance of food security - even the government have jumped on this bandwaggon, following after Jamie Oliver and the legion TV chefs. Suddenly, everybody is growing their own. Most of the chat in the media around the importance of locally grown food focuses on the climate impact of food shipments and transshipments - of the absurd, global conveyor belt of food that ensures we can have strawberries at Christmas and rambutan with our cheesecake.

I recently had the pleasure of hearing Paul Mobbs give his Less is a Four Letter Word presentation, which makes clear that eating from our local soil could eliminate getting on for one-third of all our carbon dioxide emissions. Growing your own food can make a more significant impact on climate change than any decisions you make about personal transport, assuming you have already given up flying.

And if you're wondering what to grow, it might be best to avoid the exotic salads and weirdly coloured beets and go for the humble potato. 2008 is the year of the potato and in an era of concern for food security I can really see why. The humble tuber is the vegetable equivalent of the downtrodden housewife - year after year it can keep us alive, healthy and happy and yet is never accorded love or respect. It is also uncomplaining about soil, although we have not been wise about breeding to deter blight.

While researching FAO statistics yesterday (the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation) I realised just how serious our food deficit really is. The difference between food imports and exports in this country is around the same, in terms of magnitude, as that in China. Both France and the USA - countries that we have harangued at trade negotiations for protecting their farmers - still have healthy trade surpluses in food. The map shows that some of our fellow EU members are just as vulnerable, although few have the density of population that we do.

As the global food market grows more competitive what do we have to trade in return for the staples of our existence? Those famous 'services' that now make up 73% of our economy. I wonder how many customers we will have for our financial services over the next year or two. Will we soon be asking how many investment analysts it takes to grow a carrot, rather than to change a light bulb?

What is Green Economics?

2008-07-08T09:26:00.002Z

I recently consulted the wikipedia entry on Green Economics to discover that it has been eliminated. Somebody has translated it into a forwarder to 'ecological economics'. Whether this occurred through ignorance or political manipulation is not clear to me. What is clear is that we need to rebuild a decent entry on green economics. I'm going to start the process and would appreciate your support.

A rather glib phrase we often use as a short-hand for what green economics is about is 'Economics for People and the Planet' - what does this mean? For me a key difference between environmental, ecological and green branches of economics is that, while all three take the environment seriously (in contrast to neoclassical economics), green economics puts social justice at the heart of the discussion.

The typescript for my book which is also called Green Economics (imagination failure here I'm afraid!) is now with Earthscan and due for publication later this year. Producing it has made me think long and hard about what green economics might be, and I'm going to offer some tasters of the content of the book in this blog over the next couple of months.

So, to begin at the beginning, we need a definition. One that establishes why it is worth having green economics in the first place, and what distinguishes it from other branches of the subject. Here are some of the key pointers so far as I am concerned:

Green economics broadens the perspective of ‘economics’ beyond the concerns of the ‘rational economic man’. It seeks to include the perspectives of those who are marginalized within the present economic structure — primarily women and the poor of the world—as well as taking seriously the needs of the planet itself.

Green economics has not grown up as an academic discipline but from the grassroots. It is distinct from environmental economics, which uses conventional economics but brings the environment into the equation; and ecological economics, which is still a measurement-based and academically focused discipline. Green economics is rather about people and the planet.

Green economics seeks to move the target of our economy away from economic growth and towards flourishing, convivial human communities which do not threaten other species or the planet itself. In place of economic growth we should move towards a steady-state economy.

Green economics is the first significant alternative to capitalism that is not communism. It offers a different economic paradigm to challenge neoliberalism.

When do we want it? Now!

2008-07-02T09:52:00.004Z

The Joseph Rowntree Trust have produced some new research to attempt to determine how much money we need to live in a way acceptable to ourselves and our society. The outcome of months of number-crunching and a large investment of dosh is £6.38. That is apparently what the minimum wage should be raised to in order to prevent lowly paid Smiths falling behind Joneses next door.

This is a simplistic and frankly disppointing conclusion from a Trust who can usually be expected to ask deeper questions. It's years now since I published my paper 'Sen and the Art of Market-Cycle Maintenance' and yet those with a properly placed concern for the psychological well-being of the less well-off segments of society are still following their relative definition pf poverty.

Where does this definition come from? Who decides that we are deprived if we don't have a DVD player today? How long will it be before we need an i-player or foreign holiday in order not to be deprived? Surely it doesn't take much nous to work out that the constant increase in our 'needs' is determined by marketeers who are driving the relentless economic growth that is rapidly eroding the planet we rely on just to survive.

How did this research fail to take note of Richard Layard's work showing that it is not more stuff that makes us happy but better quality relationships?

Designing Nature's Way

2008-06-27T09:04:00.006Z

What would it mean to design products and processes the way Nature does? This is a question posed by the industrial ecology movement. According to their website:

Industrial ecology provides a powerful prism through which to examine the impact of industry and technology and associated changes in society and the economy on the biophysical environment. It examines local, regional and global uses and flows of materials and energy in products, processes, industrial sectors and economies and focuses on the potential role of industry in reducing environmental burdens throughout the product life cycle.

Jonathan Porritt argues the importance of encouraging businesses to ‘match the metabolism of the natural world’. By taking ecology into account when they create production systems designers can gear them to nature’s metabolism. An example might be making sure that all the unwanted by-products from production can decompose in a way that aids soil fertility. Or creating 'buildings that, like trees, produce more energy than they consume and purify their own waste water'.

Biomimicry - or deriving specific design ideas directly from nature - is another aspect of industrial ecology. The most famous product 'invented' in this way is Velcro, which was famously derived from the Burdock's 'burrs' which its inventor found in his dog's fur after a country walk.

A more interesting example is the tunnelling machine invented by Marc Brunel - the father with the bizarre choice in names - needed for his ill-fated project to tunnel under the Thames between Rotherhithe and Wapping between 1825 and 1843. He was impressed by the tunnelling properties of the wood-boring beatle that destroyed naval ships, the Teredo navalis:

He examined the perforations, and subsequently the animal. He found it armed with a pair of strong shelly valves which envelops its anterior integuments, and that, with its foot as a fulcrum a rotary motion was given by powerful muscles to the valves, which, acting on the wood like an auger, penetrated gradually but surely, and that as the particles were removed, they were passed through a longitudinal fissure in the foot, which formed a canal to the mouth, and so were engorged. To imitate the action of this animal became Brunel's study.

His explorations inspired the design of a machine based on this animal - a curse to the British naval fleet - which set the standard for burrowing, tunnelling machines. Brunel pere is also a fine argument for being liberal about accepting refugees. He arrived here fleeing from revolutionary France and invented machines to mass-produce pulley-blocks and soldiers' boots that were the unglamorous explanations for British victories in the Napoleonic Wars.

Post-Colonial Sour Grapes

2008-06-25T07:27:00.007Z

I can't believe I'm the only person who is sick to the back teeth with the wall-to-wall coverage of the non-election in Zimbabwe. Now don't get me wrong. I am as opposed as the next left-wing greenie with an over-active conscience to the beatings and oppression of the people of that country. But are they really worse than similar treatment meted out to the peoples who suffer under other dictators in other poor countries the world over? So why this particular focus on one African country of 13 million people?

There are two reasons we hear so much about Zimbabwe. The first is that it is a colony we didn't want to let go and the powers that be in this nation appear to still be resentful about that. The second is that the BBC, specifically, has been excluded from the country and can't get over the snubbing. Neither of these are good bases on which to decide the daily news agenda.

We have now reached the bizarre situation where we are asked to celebrate the fact that China - that well-known bastion of democratic rights and freedoms - has supported a UN Security Council motion condemning the lack of freedom and fairness in the Zimbabwean electoral process.

Zimbabwe is not playing by our rules and is therefore paying the price of economic sabotage. The land redistribution is not fair - the land goes to Mugabe's supporters - but it is politically right. If it were to succeed this would be noticed by landless black farmers in neighbouring South Africa.

For my part, whenever I hear another news item about Zimbabwe - it is even invading the sports news now - I wonder what news is being masked by this. What is happening in secret rooms where the powerful of the global capitalist economy make the rules we all have to live by. What are they stitching up to allow this corrupt and rickety system to go staggering on, enabling them to continue to profit at our expense?

It isn't news that the news isn't really news any more. You can now only learn about world affairs by reading between the lines. By the time news about Zimbabwe fades into the background we will know that the new financial regime we will be required to live under - without any chance to vote for it - has been established.

Refuge from the Global Economy

2008-06-17T20:00:00.000Z

Yesterday I was listening to Victor Jara's beautiful songs, which made the tedium of an unavoidable car journey a pleasure. For those who don't know, Victor Jara was a Chilean folk-singer and national hero during the left-wing movement that led to the election of the world's first Communist President, Salvador Allende, in 1970. (The novelist Isabel Allende is his niece.)

This was a time of hope, which was captured by Jara along with his love ballads (try this example of his most famous song, which combines both themes). But the hope was short-lived. The forces of fascism, defending global capital against a viable, democratic and just alternative, moved in for the kill. The Chilean coup - the reason I remember September 11th, for that was the day it happened in 1973 - was sudden, violent and bloody. And supported by US corporations including ITT. (See Aled's new blog for some reflections on how '9/11' is being used to enhance their global power, including by reducing our legal rights.)

Along with thousands of other 'enemies of the state', Victor Jara was arrested and violently murdered. Another of those arrested was somebody I later came across in Oxford. His name was Jaime Baez - hence his Latin American friends always called him Joan. He had been put in jail because he was the only person in his village to own a typewriter - an obvious indication that he was a dangerous revolutionary.

These thoughts come back to me now this Labour government is creating laws to allow arbitrary detention without legal justification, which was the origin of the horrors of the Latin American guerras sucias, while simultaneously making life harder for the refugees that this sort of illegality creates.

After knowing Jaime I worked at the Refugee Studies Programme in Oxford - an organisation that attempted to provide some kind of advocacy for their growing numbers. The common factor amongst the refugees I met was sadness - a deep sadness and nostalgia which nothing could shift. They played with other people's children and joined family parties with a longing which they could not hide.

The refugees' choice had not been between wealth here or poverty in Afghanistan, or Uganda, or wherever their lives still belonged. Their choice had been between life here or death there. To treat them with anything less than the utmost compassion and care is a gross violation of humanity.

Low Carbon High Life

2008-06-16T08:14:00.011Z

To compete with phrases such as 'the lean economy', downsizing, voluntary simplicity and so on, a friend in the Transition Stroud group here in Stroud has come up with the slogan - 'Journey to a Low Carbon High Life'. Rather than giving up things in a painful process of self-denial, our slow shift towards a sustainable life will involve finding more creative and inspiring ways to meet our real needs.

A simple life does not mean a life empty of pleasure or meaning. In the Tao Te Ching, a work of Chinese spiritual wisdom written by the sage Lao Tzu as long ago as the 6th century BCE, the philosopher describes the world of the everyday as the world of 'the ten thousand things'. The hustle and bustle removes the possibility of peace and enjoyment of nature and our friends and family.

A small country has fewer people.
Though there are machines that can work ten to a hundred times faster than man, they are not needed.
The people take death seriously and do not travel far.
Though they have boats and carriages, no on uses them.
Though they have armor and weapons, no one displays them.
Men return to the knotting of rope in place of writing.
Their food is plain and good, their clothes fine but simple, their homes secure;
They are happy in their ways.
Though they live within sight of their neighbors,
And crowing cocks and barking dogs are heard across the way,
Yet they leave each other in peace while they grow old and die.

Reading this sort of passage brings home to me more forcefully the fact that all the stuff that we buy and all the scurrying around we do for work or 'holidays' not only destroys the planet but removes our ability to experience relaxation and joy. The more you remove yourself from these systems and choose natural local systems instead, the more they lose their attraction. It is not a choice to deprive yourself of something - more a gradual loss of interest.

But this doesn't mean the loss of beauty - in fact quite the opposite. You feel more inclined to wear exotic colours and eat delicious local food with slow enjoyment. Why don't you start with enjoying the abundance of perfumes from flowering trees at this time of year?

A Common Treasurer

2008-06-13T09:38:00.001Z

I am the Green Party's economics speaker. In some of my wilder moments I imagine this might put me in some position to be the Treasurer in the first green government - if only I could live that long! More realistically I think it does give me a responsibility to think about green policies as though they were going to be implemented and to take the economic implications seriously.

If, as Greens, we believe the earth is 'a common treasury', what would a common treasurer look like? What role would we play in allocating the wealth from Nature's cornucopia. Surely we would have to conclude, as green economists do, that the wealth must be fairly shared.

All natural bounty would be viewed as 'commons'. Those who enjoy the benefit of it would pay tax and that would allow us to share the wealth with those who do not or cannot access it directly. The foremost example is land - the primary wealth of any nation and the source of most government income in a green economy.

The planet's atmosphere is also a common wealth. At present this is being greedily hoarded by the Western nations, who use it up with their industrial pollution, especially carbon dioxide. The Contraction and Convergence response to the problem of climate change takes the idea of commons seriously and assigns the right to pollute the atmosphere on fairly between the world's citizens.

How should we share this wealth? Richard Douthwaite proposal Cap-and-Share - we all receive licences to pollute which we can sell to generate our citizens' income, or give to companies we would like to support, or destroy if we want to support the planet at our own expense. Other variants of the policy suggest national governments should receive the licences and do the selling, passing the money on to citizens equally.

Perhaps most important of all is to take control of our own money. A common treasurer would, I am sure, have no objection to this. As in the 19th century local authorities would issue legal tender and invest the benefit in local infrastructure projects. How else would they have paid for the civic buildings and sewers we are still using - because since the privatisation and centralisation of money creation we haven't seen the benefit of it as citizens.

We are planning a monetary empowerment in Stroud. One thing holding us back is coming up with a good name. Others are so lucky. In Llandovery they have the Black Ox Bank, the progenitor of the black horse, set up as a drovers' bank by one Mr Lloyd. Fishguard are creating the Bluestone Bank, named after their famous rock which was so valued that it was transported to Salisbury Plain to build Stonehenge. We haven't come up with anything so resonant yet. Or even something funny. I am so envious of Transition Scilly folk, one of whom I met last weekend - their money will be a blast won't it?

Gambling while others starve

2008-06-10T15:16:00.003Z

Whatever explanation you've heard for why food prices are rising it probably isn't the real one. Now that the housing market is staggering to a standstill it appears that those who have been using to making easy money from speculating in a fundamental human need for shelter have now moved on to playing the same sordid game with our even more basic need for food.

Testimony recently given to the US Senate Homeland Security Committee came from a former Wall Street investor who decided to blow the whistle. Here is a brief extract:

You have asked the question 'Are Institutional Investors contributing to food and energy price inflation?' And my unequivocal answer is 'Yes'. In this testimony I will explain that Institutional Investors are one of, if not the primary, factors affecting commodities prices today. Clearly, there are many factors that contribute to price determination in the commodities markets; I am here to expose a fast-growing yet virtually unnoticed factor, and one that presents a problem that can be expediently corrected through legislative policy action.

The news of famine in Ethiopia, again, more than 20 years after Bob Geldof blasphemed to no purpose on national TV is, again, being blamed on bad governance or the weather. The usual distractions offered us to avoid the obvious conclusion that 'It's the exploitative, capitalist, post-coloniast, globalised economy - stupid!'.

And what about the row over crop-based biofuels? Competition for land is a significant and growing concern for anybody interested in green economics. But can we be sure that what is being knowingly explained in terms of the competition within free markets isn't actually a commodity price bubble being manipulated by those who will profit from it?

Take me to a Free University

2008-06-02T09:34:00.004Z

I was talking to a colleague recently about my disappointments at work and the struggle for academic freedom. She responded with a joke. A hijacker rushes to the cockpit of the plane he is on, points a gun at the head of the pilot and demands 'Take me to a free country'. The pilot responds 'Sorry, mate, this is an aeroplane not a spaceship'.

Years ago I made a plan - budget and all - to set up a Free University in Aberystwyth. We even had a building organised. It would have worked, creating half a dozen part-time jobs on reasonable salaries, charging the kids £3,000 a year. It makes you wonder what happens to the money in the universities we have. Of course if you work in those universities you know - most of it is wasted on prestige projects and administration.

A colleague recently made me think by telling me I wasn't a real academic because I write in an accessible way. I have, in the past, tried the obfuscatory prose that is the entry card to the best journals. I have to admit I can't do it very well but mainly something in me just won't do it. Why use five-syllable words and complex concepts when the ideas can be expressed in everyday language and thoughts? To justify those big, fat salaries presumably.

So, in my bioregional utopia, what would the higher education sector look like? I'm fairly sure universities would be organised as co-operatives. Since the exchange is between learned and learners the infrastructure need be fairly minimal - making it possible to have a much more fulfilling educational experience at a much lower cost. No value extracted for administration, management or buildings maintenance.

The institutions of learning would respond to their local environment and the leading industries where they are based - much as Glamorgan University was once the School of Mines. The homogenising of HE has followed the homogenising of the globalisation process so what is taught in management schools in Beijing is much the same was what in taught in management schools in Belfast.

In Stroud we specialise in sustainability so our Communiversity will showcase our achievements in this area, backed up by the necessary theory. An alternative is the proposal to create a Sustainability University of the Valleys. This proposal grows out of the permaculture principle of using the waste of one system to create the fertiliser for the new system. In this case the University will train the unemployed, working-class men of the Valleys communities to build a sustainable utopia. High hopes worthy of what calls itself higher education.

Rare Earth

2008-05-29T09:28:00.004Z

I've had this week in my diary for a few months now, blocked off as 'beach week'. This gives me a thrill of liberation - the sense of getting off the treadmill and lying in the sun. In reality I've spent two days in a windswept campervan and two days at home hiding from hyperactive emailers. But in my mind I'm on the beach - and that does count for something.

And what a beach! Why would anybody travel further afield when the beautiful, mystical county of Pembrokeshire lies so tantalisingly close. I was camped at the walker's equivalent of the edge of the M4 - right next to the coastal path where hardy walkers tramped through the worst of the gales.

Welsh nationalists claim their country as the first colony. I would beg to differ. In fact it was Pembrokeshire that was 'England''s experiment with expropriation and oppression, although at that time of course it was Norman not Saxon England. This explains the lower rate of Welsh speaking in Pembrokeshire.

The colonial mentality continues. Pembrokeshire is a place the wealthy English refer to as 'little England beyond Wales' and you have to endure their horse-faced complacency around the towns and villages. The nation's major oil refinery is placed on the wonderful coastline at Milford Haven, leading to oil spillages like that caused by the Sea Empress and allowing the countryside to be desecrated by a pipeline that rips through it to supply the economy with energy.

It is also a major site of 'defence' establishments - although quite what is being defended from whom remains unclear. A walk along the coast path is interupped by booms from the artillery range at Castlemartin. The navy's arms dump at Trecwn is just nearby, as is the air force's training establishment at Brawdy.

This incursion of 21st-century warfare and destructive capitalism into the peace and mystery of the land of Celtic saints and bronze-age monuments seems incongruous. But perhaps it is best that we are reminded of the consequences of our unbalanced and unjust economy even on holiday. The destruction of nature is a necessary consequence of our lust for energy, just as the need for armaments and warfare follows inevitably on our inability to share fairly.

Sharing the knowledge

2008-05-24T07:42:00.004Z

Now that universities have become corporations and higher education is just another sector of our globally competitive economy, why should we co-operate with each other and share our knowledge. Shouldn't we rather be hoarding it and selling it for the highest price?

This is a particularly disastrous strategy for knowledge management at a time of crisis when knowledge about how to manage our affairs sustainably needs to be spread as rapidly as possible. A recent conference of researchers exploring the Transition Towns in the UK came up with an answer to this problem: the knowledge co-operative.

Many well-motivated researchers laugh in the face of intellectual property law and proudly proclaim their willingness to give away their knowledge. This is missing the point in two ways. First, if you have signed a standard university contract your knowledge doesn't belong to you anyway. Even though all our best ideas arise in the bath or on the bus everything you have ever thought belongs to your employer.

More seriously, if we don't try to maintain control over this knowledge, then others probably will. Just like the neem tree, vital insights into how sustainable communities actually work could be controlled by corporations and sold back to us - just as our research papers are. Nothing could be more iniquitous than the fact that we review each other's work for free, edit our own work, format and typeset it - but then cannot gain access to each other's work without subscribing to journals whose profits go to publishing corporations.

The sustainability knowledge co-operative will be a membership organisation which academics and research centres can join. They will undertake to share knowledge freely with others in the co-operative who will not make a profit from it. Their own contributions can be protected by creative commons licences so that if somebody is likely to make a profit from their ingenuity then they can negotiate a share. Some knowledge will be so important that - like Volvo's three-point seatbelt or pencillin - it will be given to the world for free, but it will not be available for others to copyright.

Knowledge is a common resource, and knowledge created by publicly funded universities should belong to the public. However, in a free market, we cannot leave this knowledge floating freely. We need to constrain it legally in a way that facilitates its sharing and empowers those who create it rather than the corporate knowledge factories which employ them.

Time to do the Maths

2008-05-17T08:54:00.005Z

The last estimate for the amount of public money going to Northern Rock was £50bn. For that price we've bought ourselves a bankrupt bank. It isn't clear how many of the other banks are also teetering on the brink but the government is sufficiently concerned to oblige us to buy their worthless assets (euphemistically known as 'mortgage-backed securities') to the the tune of another £100bn. or so.

These numbers are nice and round. If we round the population of the UK to 50 million we can see fairly easily that we have recently spent around £3000 per head on bankrupt banks. This does not feel like a very good long-term investment that is going to serve the public interest.

Let's compare it with the post offices. Here we paid Adam Crozier £1.3m last year and bonuses to board members came to £4.5m. in total. This is a reward for closing 20 per cent of our post offices this year - 2,500 are due to close by the end of 2008. One of those is my local post office in Uplands. It is a profitable business but post office managers have closure targets to meet in order to receive their bonuses this year so it is on the list.

The cost of keeping my post office open is a mere £24,000, so if I could find eight other people and ask them whether they would rather give their £3,000 to keep the post office open or keep some degenerate banks afloat I could raise the cash in half and hour or so. Of course, although we apparently live in a democracy, we don't have that choice. Instead, we are probably going to have to put our hands in our pockets as a community here in Stroud to subsidise our post office.

At least our postmaster is resisting the hefty bribes on offer for redundancy packages. Many others, especially the old and tired, are taking the money and creeping off to retirement. As with the pit closures, they are being offered a good deal now and told they will get nothing in the future if they refuse it. Our money is being used to bribe people out of their livelihoods.

This week we saw Housing Minister Caroline Flint having to remind herself that she should put the interests of the British people first. Just like the rebranding of the Post Office as 'the people's post office' this sort of doublethink is only necessary becase it is no longer the truth. What is happening with the Post Office is symbolic of what is happening to our democracy - we are allowing it to be stolen from us by profit-driven corporate executives. And the solution is the same too: use it or lose it. If you vote for one of the parties that have prostituted themselves to corporate interests (or don't vote at all) you only have yourself to blame.

Timelessness is Bliss

2008-05-14T07:40:00.002Z

Having studied philosophy at university I tend to shy away from it now. However, it seems we need to have a little think about time. The woman who taught me philosophy was actually a specialist in the philosophy of time. She dwelt at the top of a flight of concrete steps in a brutalist building in my college grounds. She was immensely small with an oversized head and nobody has ever better exemplified for me the philosophical thought experiment of the brain in the vat.

Imagine our amazement when she upped and left one day - ran away with a male philosopher she had met at a conference. Whispering sweet nothings about Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein had clearly led on to more bodily interests. Good for her! And perhaps she was on to sometimes that I wasn't able to grasp as an opinionated 21-year-old.

Ecofeminist Teresa Brennan has said that ‘nature is the source of all value, and ultimately of all energy, but the inherent dynamic of capital is to diminish this value and this energy in favour of time and technology.’ This seems to imply that if we spent more time in country walks we would begin to see through the hollow sham of our technotopia and probably find we had more time on our hands too. I can't be the only person who finds that when I work less I feel as though I had more time - and sometimes get more done too.

Rethinking time is valuable when it comes to rebuilding a local economy. It is clearly irrational, if you take time for granted, to bother to do anything for yourself at all. The rational response is to work a large number of hours, for the highest rate of return you can negotiate, and purchase everything in the market. Thus a fixation on time strips everything of value out of human lives.

E. P. Thompson pointed out that one of the hardest things for the early capitalists was to train people to respond to factory time rather than natural time. Like laboratory rats they were trained to respond to a system of bells and whistles. Over time this seeped into the culture: we were trained to believe that 'time is money', we were softened up for having our lives stolen from us via working time directives and by the Time-Life Corporation.

In 'The World as Will and Representation' (great title!) Schopenhauer wrote that 'the will transcends time and space, which together constitute the principle of sufficient reason of being. Time and space are conditions for manifestations of the will, but the will itself is unconditioned by time or space. The plurality of things in time and space is an objectification of the will.' And remember he also had a dog called 'World's End'. Nothing helps to re-evaluate time like an awareness of how short our span on earth is.

From ethical to bioregional consumption . . . and production

2008-05-10T07:58:00.011Z

As we move towards a world of less trade we need to be thinking about how we will get hold of the things we really need. We can start making the adjustment now in our own consumption. This has two big advantages. First, it means that when the changes come - and they may be sudden and rapid - we will already be mentally prepared. Secondly, we can support the development of the markets offering the kind of goods we will be buying in the future, thus easing the transition.

Here are a few examples. I have a beautiful mug that I bought at a Christmas fayre. The local potter had just dug a hole near the college where she teaches and burrowed out some clay. She had spent a long time refining it and then turned it into a mug. This is an exceptional mug because she usually buys in clay from Staffordshire. She was as delighted as I am to see the exact colour of pottery made from Stroud clay. It is also unique since she only made one.

I also have a rush hat made by Sheila Wynter. Sheila goes every year in the right season with her son to the river Avon just above Tewkesbury. Here they dabble in the mud and cut the rushes. She brings them home and dries them in her workshop before weaving the hats. They have a curious rustic look which my daughter points out is just the look of the hat worn by the artist in the famous Van Gogh portrait.

For me these items exemplify everything about bioregional consumption. Obviously the first and most important factor is that they are made locally with local inputs. But there is the depth of relationship between me and the person who made the item that fills me with delight every time I have a cup of coffee or go out wearing my hat. Of course for me they are also object lessons which people I meet - unfortunately for them - cannot escape.

Perhaps most importantly of all, they are expensive. In the global economy you seek the lowest price. In the bioregional economy the adman's slogan 'reassuringly expensive' may be a better guide. My rush hat cost £24. Given the amount of work for Sheila in cutting the rushes, preparing them, and weaving the hat this is an absurdly small amount of money. But if it had been made by a Chinese slave it would have cost a fifth of this price. So when you consume bioregionally you will have much less stuff, but it will be of vastly better quality.

It's not just about consumption; it's also about production. I came to know Sheila because I am learning basket-making from her. If you are the sort of person who bemoans the fact that there is so little available to buy from local producers you can start by choosing to buy what there is and paying a just price. But the next step is to start making something yourself - the guidelines are that it should be something that is genuinely needed in the community and that you can find the materials locally.

And remember the other hint from Robinson Crusoe: use what the global economy has already invested energy in to the maximum before you resort to buying new of any sort. So patching and mending and buying from charity shops is a good solution for stuff your local economy doesn't provide yet. Why not go for showy, artistic patches: make a political statement with your darning!

Vegetable virgins

2008-05-03T16:00:00.001Z

There is a line in Look Back in Anger where anti-hero Jimmy Porter tells somebody that, having never seen a dead body, they are suffering from a rather serious case of virginity. I share that virginity - as I've blogged elsewhere, watching the death throes of chickens was the closest I've come and that was horrifying enough.

It seems to me that a more serious case of virginity is being suffered by those who have never grown a vegetable. And a much more dangerous one too. As food prices rise around the world, the rush to get hold of an allotment has turned into a stampede. But the consequences of always buying your food in a plastic bag may run deeper than having to tolerate the vagaries of the global marketplace.

A dear friend I've met through the Transition process here in Stroud, Helen Pitel, works at a closed hospital for the criminally insane. She is a permaculture gardener, a pioneer of the Centre for Alternative Technology, and she is employed to share her love of growing living things with the inmates. I was concerned that they may be mad, bad and dangerous to know but Helen says that are rather torpid and hard to raise from their chairs to lure into the garden.

She told me of the amazement many of them have when they first understand that a small seed, placed in dirt, will produce a lettuce, cabbage or carrot. This complete dislocation from their natural environment seems to go a long way to explain their mental disorientation - a total lacking of grounding must surely lead to madness as well as badness.

I have a soft spot for Jimmy Porter, odious and self-pitying though he is, because it was via him that I learned what is still my favourite word: pusillanimous. I wonder whether he might have been a little bit less angry if, instead of going to grammar school, he had spent more time with his father on the allotment?

Housing Entitlement Day

2008-04-30T07:48:00.001Z

Shelter's annual affordability index, published earlier this month, shows how disastrous the house price increases have been for most people in the UK. It indicates that the price of a first home has risen from £52,674 to £159,494 over the past ten years, with house price to income ratios rising from 1.72 to 3.4. Mortgage repayments now represent 21 per cent of household income compared with 12 per cent a decade ago. This cash is returned as interest payments to wealthier home-owners and bank shareholders - another redistribution of wealth from poor to rich.

Many years ago, Spencer Fitzgibbon, a former external communications supremo for the Green Party who has now retired to write novels, came up with a brilliant policy which he called 'housing entitlement'. The idea was they we chose a day and made it law that, wherever people were living on that day became theirs.

This was a brilliant stroke - a thought experiment that requires you to question what home ownership means, and whether something as fundamental as the need for a roof over your head should ever be subject to the vagaries of the market.

So what would it mean for different groups in society? Those with mortgages would lose them instantly - no need for the stress of working to pay for housing. Those who were renting would suddenly gain home security and an asset to allow them onto an equal footing with the more prosperous members of society. These would be the winners.

And what about the losers? Mutual building societies would no longer own assets and would have to begin again by taking deposits from savers before they could lend. Private banks would also lose their assets - which would impact severely on the indirect absentee landlords who make up their shareholders. Landlords and landladies would also lose assets - the more they owned the more they would lose.

The great thing about this thought experiment is that your reaction depends entirely on where you find yourself in the present housing hierarchy, but the reality is that the majority of this people would, on average, find their well-being improved by such a policy. The overall losers would be quite a small number of very rich people.

Every now and then the government could name a new housing entitlement day. It could be about every 40 years or so - like biblical jubilees - about the amount of time it takes the greedy and unscrupulous to distort the ownership system enough for goodly citizens to really be suffering.

Thomas Atwood Award 2008

2008-04-25T10:16:00.004Z

On Tuesday Austin Mitchell received the 2008 Thomas Atwood Award for his services to monetary reform in putting forward EDMs about public credit. I was able to say a few words in support of the award and reproduce them here.

The ceremony took place at the Palace of Westminster in a committee room. While we waited the Chancellor and other cabinet ministers passed by. We felt right at the heart of power, yet it is astonishing how the ideas we were talking about, which are the key ideas of our age, are marginalised from political debate.

So here is what I had to say:

For those of us who have spent our lives awaiting the collapse of capitalism these are interesting times. I work in a Management School and have lived for many years with the slogan that a threat is also an opportunity—suddenly that banal aphorism has taken on an exciting new life!

Capitalism is an economic system that focuses around money. It is a twisted game where the power to control money allows a minority to extract the energy (usually in the form of work) of the majority and of the planet itself for their own exclusive benefit. If the money system fails the game falls apart. Suddenly we are all equal—we become limited only by our own expectations.

To remake the world along just and equitable lines we need two things: a plan and the courage to execute it. It is because Austin Mitchell has demonstrated the wisdom to choose the right plan and the courage to publicly stand by this choice that he is being given the 2008 Thomas Atwood Award.

Courage is a personal matter—a matter of the heart. If we believe in something better we must overcome censorship, embarrassment and fear and stand up for that belief. But the plan is always changing as we learn more and our ideas develop: open minds are invited to engage. I will spend the rest of these few words discussing the outline of plans to change the way our money system operates at three levels: personal, national and global.

First, at the personal level, what should we do about our need to have a bank account and a credit card? There is an easy solution here, since the Co-operative Bank offers both, and other mutuals such as the Nationwide also provide bank accounts. The same applies to other financial services such as insurance and mortages, which can be switched to CIS and the mutual building societies. It is no coincidence that they are not facing the same instability and are rather having to close their doors to new business because of rising demand. Co-operative businesses do not exist to maximize profits but to provide services, and their financial services are more reliable and more ethical than those of their private-sector competitors.

At the national level, we need to be arguing for the reclaiming of the system of money creation so that it is democratized, rather than left to the vagaries of the market and the profiteering of the private sector. Banking also needs to be decentralized, so that local banks can profit from the creation of money to be invested in their local economies, as they did in Atwood’s day. To build resilience in our local communities governments should encourage the flourishing of local currencies through exempting them from tax—at least in the initial phase. And government should take on the major role for the creation of money, as Austin Mitchell’s various EDMs have argued.

Finally, at the global system, we need to go back to the drawing-board, or rather the Bretton Woods conference table. We need to renegotiate an international financial system that uses a neutral currency, as Keynes argued in 1944, and that links to a balanced international trade system. We can go further than this, and by linking the currency to carbon dioxide emissions, use it as a means to tackle climate change as well as global poverty.

We know that the money system we have is flawed, that it is breaking down. Even in its heyday it created massive inequalities and pressurized the planet; now it is failing even in its own terms. What I am proposing here is a massive, radical change and it is easy to lose heart. But the manifest failings of the existing system should give us the courage to believe that we are right.

I would be happy to work with others—especially those with political power—to discuss and develop these ideas. Together we have to decide on the model for money that we want: they we have to just do it.

Our national bank lies in ruins

2008-04-20T07:32:00.005Z

The Bank of England is actually misnamed. This name suggests a bank that works for the benefit of the citizens of England. This is not its role; rather it works to support the interests of global capital. The creation of money, a fundamental requirement of a complex economy, is not under political control.

Leaving aside the fact that only England's interests are named - an anachronism that should surely be changed as part of a plan for the Bank's future - what would we propose as a new structure for an institution that has so clearly failed to protect the interests of the majority of our people?

In evidence that this is the case I offer the fact that the Bank has lowered interest rates without requiring the banks it lends money to to pass those lower rates on to customers. Instead retail and corporate bankers alike are charging higher rates on money they lend, and using the difference to inflate profits.

This is obviously greedy and immoral - but it will also prevent the positive impact of cheaper money from easing the operation of the real economy. Shareholders will continue to extract maximum value, but businesses which cannot afford credit will fold, and jobs will be lost.

We have private banks, being supported by a privatised national bank, working in the private interest. When times were good banks made the profits; now times are bad the public is expected to bear the loss. Vast sums are being added to the national debt - our children will be working to pay back money created to be put into the pockets of present-day shareholders.

When the Bank of England accepts worthless assets in return for government bonds this is the consequence. We might support such a policy to prevent the collapse of our banks, but only if we take ownership and control of the banks as part of the deal. The high-street megaliths could be broken up into a series of regional, mutual banks with members of the community sitting on the boards and all surpluses reinvested in community projects.

The current crisis is the consequence of allowing banks to operate outside political control. The global financial system is crumbling, our national bank is in ruins: it is time we proposed a nationalisation of the whole money-creation system.

Can advertisers sell us less?

2008-04-16T17:12:00.006Z

Many years ago advertisers used the slogan 'Less is more' to sell us unnecessary items, a famous example being the Apple Powerbook laptop series in 2004. As the reality of ecological limits begins to bite into the confidence of late capitalism we are going to see this sort of double-think with increasing regularity.

I recently noticed an offer that Oxfam are running in conjunction with Marks & Spencer where you can take the clothes you were persuaded to buy as a result of the latter's advertising into the charity shop. They will sell your 'unwanted goods' with the proceeds going to the poor world - and in return M&S will give you a £5 voucher to buy more unnecessary items.

Since you cannot buy any clothes - probably not even knickers these days - for a fiver this is M&S giving you a small amount of money in order to receive more back. They presumably gain kudos from being associated with a development charity, but I wonder if they are also seeking 'green sheen'? Could this be sophisticated market positioning to back up M&S's dubious claims of carbon neutrality?

Perhaps the argument is something like: 'we know that you are going to engage in retail therapy and be persuaded to buy clothes that don't suit you and that you will never wear. Don't change this attitude, just make sure that rather than sending those clothes to landfill you donate them so that somebody benefits!'

Since ethical awareness removed M&S as a possible source of high-quality knickers, regular readers of this blog will know about my quest for the source of this elusive item. I recently found a card advertising a site that may have been invented just for me - Green Knickers. Apparently they sell 'pants that don't cost the Earth!' and they do come in other colours too.

Poetry vs. Greed

2008-04-05T13:30:00.000Z

Shelley wrote extensively on a very modern theme: the way scientific and technological advances are used not to create the earthly paradise for all but to generate profits for the few:

The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and combining labour, to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind? From what other cause has it arisen that the discoveries which should have lightened, have added a weight to the curse imposed on Adam? Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.

If we substitute a word like ‘imagination’ for what Shelley called ‘the poetical faculty’ this quotation has immediate relevance to our political project.

Shelley was not alone in his revolutionary interests. Other poets of the so-called the Cockney School, including John Keats, shared his anti-capitalist views. Robert Southey, who later joined the establishment and became poet laureate, wrote a poem in praise of Wat Tyler in 1817. Coleridge and later Wordsworth joined Southey in brainstorming ideas about an ideal form of just and egaliatarian government they called ‘pantisocracy’. The aim of all these poets, now termed romantic but more accurately revolutionary, was to rekindle the energy that had led to the French Revolution around the time of their births. The group revolved around Leigh Hunt and bears his name:

The Hunt Circle believed that one could subvert power by undermining the intellectual, emotional, ideological grounds for its appeal. If one could not literally assault the Bank of England, one could raise questions about the use of paper currency and ultimately the economic system it underwrote.

This revival was successful, resulting in political unrest in the UK leading to the Peterloo Massacre, the Chartist movement and the Great Reform Bill of 1832. Several of the revolutionary poets had already predicted that an extension of franchise would be granted rather than a reversal of the economic changes which had led to wage slavery and were their real target. Rather than this message being heard the poets have been sidelined into nature-lovers and creators of beauty. The message from their verse with the greatest staying power ‘A thing of beauty is a job forever’ (written by Keats in 1817) has been transmuted into an appeal for consumption rather than the rallying call of a movement bent on restoring mankind to its natural paradise on earth, as it was intended.

Stand-up economist

2008-04-03T09:47:00.004Z

Here is a guy that makes economics look as farcical as it really is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVp8UGjECt4

What a horror story that we are still teaching this stuff to our impressionable young students.

Ta Ta to the British car industry

2008-03-31T15:39:00.004Z

Now you wouldn't expect me to be sad to see the back of a car manufacturing plant - and I'm not. But I am a bit confused about why finance companies can be bailed out to the tune of many billions, when the last of our manufacturing industry is allowed to pass into foreign ownership with no concern - from government or the unions. Why are the unions not creating a fuss about this? Because Tata have agreed not to send any jobs to their home base for the next five years. There is nothing to tie them to that promise.

At last we have heard the words 'food security' cross the lips of government ministers, but they don't seem to see a strategic role for steel, or cars, or even explosives. It is only just over a year since Ta-Ta bought what remains of British steel for a couple of billion - a small fraction of what we (as taxpayers) have sent the way of Northern Rock. In the same week that they bought Jaguar and Rover the UK's last military explosives factory - the Royal Ordnance Factory near Bridgwater - also closed. Again, not a favourite of mine - but surely a strategically important industry? How long can we rely on the Chinese for explosives?

As my colleague Richard Godfrey (from whom I stole the title for this blog - the Western Mail didn't want it!) pointed out in an august national newspaper last week:

'The UK is often described as a post-industrial nation and yet we still derive 20% of our income and £150bn. worth of exports from manufacturing.'

Yet manufacturing is expected to survive in the free-market jungle while those who do little of value beyond gambling are bailed out when their business plans turn out to be more like fairy tales.

The spectacle of reverse colonialism - whether in the UK car and steel industries or the buying of US companies by sovereign Welsh funds - is amusing, but the loss of our ability to produce basic products may not be for long.