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David Boyle is a nef fellow, a writer and the editor of nef’s newspaper, Radical Economics.
The Building Britain's Future initiative won't work – we have to find ways of handing real power and responsibility downwards.
It is hard to tell, because the new Building Britain’s Future website says, as I write, “Error 404: Page not found”. But judging by the prime minister’s statement today, it doesn’t represent a meaningful shift towards localism.
That was the rhetoric – a shift from top-down targets to individual entitlements – but when it comes to localism, Gordon Brown is the victim of a huge misunderstanding. Targets are targets, Mr Brown: you don’t escape the huge inefficiencies they produce by having fewer of them, or by dressing them up as entitlements that people can enforce. And certainly not, as in the case of the NHS 18-week waiting list, by turning them into an obligation.
Quite the reverse. It will mean more administrators employed to shift people through the system and find creative ways of avoiding the various definitions, and it will reduce the money available for just doing the work. Targets are top-down, by their very nature. It doesn’t matter what you call them.
But the real problem is that politicians of all parties are very confused about localism. They gargle with the ideas, but believe it is something about giving people a little bit more, having fewer targets and setting up local committees. They get marooned in the narrow question of where each function of government should take place – a kind of parlour game for politicians before they lose the will to live. They miss the point.
The real problem is that centralisation is far more insidious than they realise. Not only does it make government and public services intensely ineffective, creating vast inhuman institutions – factory hospitals and monster schools – where professionals are constrained from using their human skills to make a difference. But it also reduces us from citizens to supplicants to vast organisations, public and private.
Westminster politicians still don’t get it. Their localism means lots of local administration, while the tentacles of economic centralisation stay intact. Local parish mayors are still supplicants to Tesco or vast hospitals, schools and distant mega-police forces. It means intricate webs of individual entitlements, when the public services we need still don’t work properly. They still treat us as units to be packaged, as potential legal minefields, as one-off bundles of need to be processed, without giving us the individual attention – via long-term relationships with professionals – that will actually make change happen.
Politicians urgently need to understand that localism also means devolving power to frontline public service staff, to give them back the initiative to make things happen. Or devolving responsibility to public service clients, delivering broader services alongside professionals, tackling our distant, burgeoning monster institutions, the huge schools, hospitals and jobcentres that manage us, and tackling the monopolistic centralisation of business.
Taken together, the implications of centralisation are that we have become supplicants to a combination of increasingly distant government systems, working with increasingly distant and monopolistic private corporations. That is the Supplicant State and one look at the key points in Building Britain’s Future shows that we still live there. This is all about what they are going to give us. Keeping us as supplicants isn’t going to work – we have to find ways of handing real power and responsibility downwards.
David’s new pamphlet, Localism: Unravelling the Supplicant State, is available to download from the nef website.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
The first number is 350. If you haven’t memorised the number 350 yet, then you probably should. Write it on your hand. Scribble it on every surface you can find. Put it in your phone. Paint pictures of it. Hell, tattoo it to yourself if need be. Three hundred and fifty is, according to NASA climate scientist James Hansen, the number which represents the safe amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere: 350 parts per million (ppm). If we exceed 350, we’re heading towards dangerous climate change. The fact that we’re currently at over 380 ppm is all the more reason to start doing something.
The second number is 24.10.09, which stands for 24th October 2009. That’s when the ‘doing something’ part really kicks off. Our friends at 350.org – the campaign headed up by Dr Hansen and Bill McKibben – have chosen 24th October as a day of global action on climate change. nef has some exciting plans for this day already (more of which to be revealed in due course), but for now, check out this little trailer and start dreaming up some actions of your own:
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
Regular readers will have no doubt wondered what has happened to the nef blog in recent weeks. Truth is I’ve been on holiday. Although perhaps ‘holiday’ is too strong a word, given that my colleagues have teased me for giving up my hard-earned annual leave to do a course in environmentally-friendly land management. Perhaps I should take it as a compliment: getting mocked for being too much of a greenie at nef of all places shows that I must be doing something right.
I mentioned a while back that the practice of permaculture might hold some answers to our present predicaments around energy, climate change and looming food scarcity. Now, having spent two weeks in the Forest of Dean actually studying the thing, I feel knowledgeable – or foolhardy – enough to attempt to explain it here.
Permaculture was first developed during the energy crisis of the mid-seventies by two Australian scientists, David Holmgren and Bill Mollison. Its name stands for both permanent agriculture and permanent culture: a way of growing food and organising human life in a manner that is genuinely sustainable. Permaculture seeks to be fossil fuel free: while organic agriculture dispenses with pesticides and fertilizers, it still relies on diesel to run farm machinery and operates on a similar scale to conventional agriculture. When oil becomes expensive and scarce, even organic farms will feel the pinch. To many, it is hard to imagine how we could even grow food without the help of oil. We certainly wouldn’t be able to return to a life of hard physical labour to get our daily bread: most of the knowledge and physical strength simply isn’t with us anymore.
Ducks on slug patrol in a permaculture garden
Permaculture’s answer is a fairly simply one: rather than struggling against nature, either by hard labour or with big energy input, aim to work with it by designing food growing systems which mimic natural ecosystems. This means creating more or less closed systems, where human input is kept to a minimum (read: less work) and all outputs are used in a productive way (read: no waste). Permaculturists always avoids monocultures. Diversity – an important aspect of natural ecosystems – is used to create beneficial relationships between different plants, people, animals and other aspects of the land and living space.
Imagine you have a house at the top of a slope. You dig a pond beside it, because this will reflect light into the house, meaning you need to use less energy. And because the pond is at the top of the slope, you can use its water to irrigate vegetable gardens and orchards at the bottom of the slope. The pond will provide a habitat for ducks, who you will periodically invite into your vegetable garden so that they can go on slug patrol. You can also dig a trench coming out of the pond and fill it with reeds. This can be used to filter gray water (waste water from sinks, showers and baths), cleaning it for later use. In the pond you might also have some carp, who feed on tiny animals in the water, turning unusable protein into a human food (fish). On one side of the pond you grow willow, which can be used for fencing, decoration, craft materials and firewood, while on the other you dig out “chinampas” – fingers of land that jut into the pond. Here you can grow yet more vegetables, particularly those which need lots of water. Note how inputs such as water for the garden and food for the ducks and fish have been removed or minimised, and otherwise unused outputs such as light from the pond, waste water from the house and slugs in the garden become useful parts of the system.
By clever design and a keen understanding of the kinds of ecological relationships which animals and plants need to survive, permaculturists have been able to do some remarkable things. According to a documentary we watched on the course, the self-dubbed ‘rebel farmer’ Sepp Holzer has managed to grow figs, cherries and even kiwi fruits at an altitude of over 4,000 feet in the Austrian mountains, all by using permaculture principles.
Corn and squash, growing together
Permaculture is satisfying because its solutions are so elegant, so simple and yet also so ingeniously thought out. We tend to have the notion that “technology” must mean something complex, and yet we forget that some of the best technologies, the ones we use everyday without even noticing, are perfected in simplicity and need no further work. Witness the button, the stairs, the pencil. You reach the end of a permaculture course armed less with a host of facts than a way of thinking which informs a huge range of decisions you might take in your life.
And contrary to my colleagues’ jibes, the course did manage to hold its own as a holiday. Staying on an organic farm, with beautiful scenery, fantastic food, good company and regular camp fires, it hardly felt like I was doing any work at all. And that is a crucial permaculture principle. As permaculturist Andy Langford put it: “Ask yourself, as a permaculture designer, how many siestas can I easily take this week? If its less than three or four, be worried.”
Resources
- Patrick Whitefield – a pioneer of British permaculture, and the brilliant teacher of my course
- The Permaculture Association of Britain
- Permaculture Magazine
- The Agroforestry Research Trust – if its hard facts and practical research you want, you’d do no better than see the work of Martin Crawford.
- “High time agriculture got back to its healthy roots” – veteran environmental journalist John Gibbons, who recently completed a permaculture design course, writing in the Irish Times.
Sam Thompson is a researcher and a consultant at nef’s centre for well-being.
Not the sustainably-minded folk at The Naturist Society, that’s for sure. And if that whets your appetite, here’s a list of 30 green things naturists can do in the course of their naked lives.
Of course, here at nef we long since abandoned the wasteful, environmentally damaging practice of wearing clothes in the office. It’s good to see the rest of the world beginning to catch-up.
Sam Thompson is a researcher and a consultant at nef’s centre for well-being.
Much of the happiness and well-being research that you read about is based on answers to very simple self-report questions: How satisfied are you with your life overall? How happy have you been recently? How often have you felt miserable in the last two weeks? and so on.
Reliance on these kinds of measures has sometimes led to criticism. But there has always been plenty of evidence that even such apparently simplistic self-report questions can be potent indicators of physical and psychological well-being. A striking example is this new study, which tracked older adults over a five year period.
Those with self-reported depression [rating of agreement with the statement: "I felt depressed"] had a 5-year mortality of 30.2% versus 19.7% in those without self-reported depression [...] . This association persisted after adjustment for age, sex, education, functional status, and cognition
Subjective indicators will never tell the whole story and, as we set-out at some length in our National Accounts of Well-being, policy makers need to use multiple measures to truly understand how people feel and function in their lives and so make better decisions. But every now and again it’s nice to reconfirm that self-reported measures of well-being really do map-on to “hard” outcomes, and in a useful way.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
Once again, civil liberties and climate change are crossing paths in the news. This morning, the Guardian released footage showing two activists being brutally manhandled by police at last year’s climate camp at E.on’s coal-fired power station in Kingsnorth, Kent. The film shows two female protestors, Emily Apple and Val Swain, asking unmarked police officers why they aren’t wearing their numbers. When the pair start taking details and photos of these anonymous coppers, they find themselves wrestled to the floor, trodden on and even throttled. Apple and Swain, both single mothers with young children, were then arrested and held behind bars for four days, despite having made a perfectly legal request for police to identify themselves. Reports suggested the women were targeted because they are active members of Fit Watch, a group which attempts to monitor the activities of the Met’s Forward Intelligence Team (F.I.T.), a police unit whose sole job at demonstrations is to gather photographs and video of activists to contribute to a vast database which can later be used to drum up charges of conspiracy against arrestees.
Numberless: a police officer with something to hide
The police don’t like protestors to hide their identities. If you turn up at demonstration wearing a hoodie and have a hankerchief tied over your face, you can be sure they’ll make you reveal yourself. Some activists have given up trying to hide their identities from the ubiquitous eyes of the FIT, and actively court the coppers’ lens. But when protestors ask police to reveal themselves, it’s a very different matter. Although it is illegal for police to go unnumbered, empty shoulders are an increasingly common sight at high-stakes demonstrations.
But intimidation, secrecy and even violence on the part of the police is rarely enough to deter the most stalwart of activists, as the following story shows. A good friend of mine locked herself onto a biofuel refinery during the week of the Kingsnorth camp. The police ripped her violently from her chains as quickly as they could, leaving her hands and wrists bleeding and her neck sore. She was promptly served an injunction and told not to go anywhere near a powerstation or the camp. I’d been shocked by the photos of what happened, but nothing surprised me more than finding her behind the counter at one of the camp’s kitchens, serving up soup with a smile only hours later. It takes extraordinary courage, passion and, dare I say it, love to keep on going like this.
Civil disobedience has achieved some extraordinary things in our history, and with climate change the stakes have never been higher. You can pledge to take direct action against climate change by signing up at beyondtalk.net or at Greenpeace’s Big If page. And if scaling chimneys or boarding boats isn’t your cup of tea, there’s still a fantastic way to show that you’re not going to let coal power wreck our climate by joining the “Mili-Band”, a huge human chain around Kingsnorth, with a village fete afterwards. It’s being organised by nef’s friends and colleagues at the World Development Movement, Christian Aid, Oxfam, the RSPB, the Women’s Institute and a host of other groups. Book your place in the Mili-Band today!
Josh Ryan-Collins is a researcher in the Business, Finance and Economics team at nef.
The expenses scandal may not have cost Gordon Brown his job, but it has done a good job of helping everyone forget about the fact that the world is facing the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression.
The recent talk of ‘Green shoots’ is now looking distinctly optimistic. A recent analysis by economists Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O’Rourke suggests that the world economy is following a worryingly similar pattern to the Great Depression. One year in, global output is declining at roughly the same rate as it was in the 1929-30 downturn (Chart 1).
Chart 1: Global GDP, 1929 and 2009 (www.voxeu.org)
However, in terms of global trade, things are looking a lot worse than 1929-30 (Chart 2).
You may remember all the talk of how important it was to avoid protectionist policies for fear they would lead to another Great Depression. Well, there has hardly been a whiff of a trade tariff yet global trade has collapsed anyway.
This has resulted in the interesting phenomenon, as Paul Krugman recently suggested in his series of lectures at the London School of Economics, of major exporting countries such as Japan, Brazil and Germany, who had very little in the way of housing or other asset-bubbles, suffering more than the Anglo-Saxon bubble economies of the UK and the US. Meanwhile, developing countries dependent on foreign investment flows have been hit even harder. The Great Depression was global and global financial deregulation has made this one equally so.
Chart 2: World trade, 1929 and 2009 (www.voxeu.org)
Governments have been much more active in stimulating demand – through slashing interest rates and pumping money in the economy – than in the Great Depression of course, so things may pick up.
On the other hand interest rates can’t be lowered much further and there remains massive questions over the amount ‘de-leveraging’ still required by the major banks (and shadow banks) before credit lines can really be freed up. Germany still refuses to go public with the results of its banks’ stress tests, no doubt for fear of the resulting stock market collapse. As long as US house prices and the mortgage-backed securities dependent on them continue to lose value, counting chickens remains ill advised. And then then there is the possibility of another oil shock of course.
Rather than looking vainly for green shoots, governments should be getting on with the job of creating a Green New Deal with reform of the financial system at it heart. Some progress has been made on tax havens, yet other structural reforms have lost momentum, or not even got going. There is little evidence of the UK or European governments seriously looking at separating retail from investment banking for example, or re-mutualising financial institutions, as proposed recently by nef. And there is a danger that stronger reforms issued by the EU – for instance stricter regulation of mortgage credit limits - will be blocked by an increasingly euro-sceptic Britain.
A Labour MP I quizzed last weekend suggested it was rather hard for Britain to take the lead on financial regulation ‘because we live in a globalised world and might lose out to other countries’. Funny how this doesn’t work the other way around – Britain has always been very happy to be the first to de-regulate.
As the FT suggested in its editorial on Monday, a return to ‘business as usual’ in the financial sector is simply not a viable option. Its time to get the financial crisis (or perhaps we should call it the depression), and what to do about it, back on the agenda.
David Boyle is a nef fellow, a writer and the editor of nef’s newspaper, Radical Economics.
“Future students of history will be shocked and angered by the fact that in 1945 the same monetary system that had driven the world to despair and disaster [in the Great Depression], and had almost destroyed the civilisation it was supposed to stand for, was revived on a much wider scope.”
So wrote the French economist Jacques Rueff in 1964. It feels much the same now: we would be insane to go back to the same disastrous banking pattern we had before the bail-out, but – thanks to the government – we probably will.
Only a miserable 0.6 per cent of the government’s stimulus package is going on green measures, to genuinely shift the way the economy works.
Lord Mandelson has come out as a born again defender of the financial status quo.
But worst of all, the latest Bank of England assessment shows that, despite everything, business lending to small and medium-sized businesses is down again. Differential interest rates and fees are both still rising.
Local bank managers who know their community well are largely a thing of the past.
It has become a lot more expensive to borrow money, even for the lucky few who make it through the approval stage.
One of the many tragedies about the Westminster expenses scandal, as Vince Cable pointed out last week, is that it robs MPs of the moral authority to tackle our dysfunctional banking system.
Ministers daren’t say anything too interesting, or too bold, in case heir colleagues assume they are throwing their hand into the ring for the Labour leadership. It is a miserable prospect, and it may guarantee a swift return to banking business-as-usual.
To start with, it is time we broke the all-party consensus that somehow the government can use their holdings in the big banks to kick-start local lending again. It hasn’t worked, and seems unlikely to work any time soon.
This is not only because banks won’t lend, but because they can’t lend using their current infrastructure and systems.
They have been consolidated to the point where they point towards the speculative economy and have little local lending infrastructure left. Their lending decisions are taken by computerised systems which, because we are in a recession, naturally recommend against.
There are no longer bank managers, or local staff with the authority to pick out the success stories, using their knowledge of their local economy.
Our businesses are now in a far weaker position than American or German competitors, and potential competitors, because we have no equivalent lending infrastructure. There are only 170 branches per million people in the UK, compared to 520 in Germany and 960 in France.
Now that the elections are over, this is what politicians need to do immediately:
- Break up the banks in government ownership, not just by dividing domestic high street banks from risky investment banks, but to rebuild an effective local lending infrastructure to kick-start local enterprise.
- Launch a new bank based in post office branches, along the lines of the successful postbanks on the continent and in New Zealand, using the latest mobile phone technology.
- Invest in a new generation of community financial institutions, funded by the big banks, as they are in the USA, under a British version of the Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act.
Why is this still not top of the agenda? I think this is partly because, in this country at least, people don’t understand the money system. Their mental map of it is nearly a century old: safe reliable Captain Mainwaring and vaults full of money.
I was assured some years ago by the Washington correspondent of a national newspaper (admittedly it was the Sun) that all money is based on gold. It hasn’t actually been since 1931.
This is my excuse for writing an accessible guide to the way money works: Money Matters: Putting the Eco into Economics.
I hope (no small ambition this) that it might help dispel some of the bizarre mystique that bankers continue to exercise over the minds of the English. Because what we really need to do is abandon the idea that our current useless system was somehow placed there by God, and demand the new local banking infrastructure we need.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
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Here at nef, we like to talk about the triple crunch: the interlinked crises of climate change, economic meltdown and diminuishing supplies of fossil fuels. But that’s not the whole story. The breakdown in economic consensus in the wake of the credit crunch points towards other crunches: evapourating trust in established politics and a coming ’social’ crunch, as the gap between rich and poor gets wider.
Our friends at Compass will be exploring these latter aspects of our current predicament at their major conference No Turning Back happening later this month. The aim is to forge a new political and economic settlement for the 21st century with democracy, equality and sustainability at its heart.
nef will be joining the fray. Our policy director Andrew Simms will proudly commit what he calls ‘the final heresy’ by questioning the justifications behind economic growth. Juliet Michaelson, a researcher at nef’s centre for well-being and one of the brains behind our National Accounts of Well-being, will be talking about work, happiness and democracy. And finally Dr Stephen Spratt, nef’s chief economist, probably won’t be grieving too much as he joins a panel on The Death of the Free Market.
Non-nef highlights include Jon Cruddas MP, Chukku Umana, Billy Hayes of the CWU, Prof Richard Wilkinson and Dr Kate Pickett (authors of The Spirit Level), Polly Toynbee and John Harris of the Guardian, Nick Hildyard from The Corner House, and plenty more besides.
Tickets for the conference are going quickly, so make sure you book as soon as possible if you want to be there.
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
Ten months have passed since pointing out that we have, at best, 100 left before a new, far more dangerous phase of global warming begins. The “chatter” of concern is getting louder. But at the same time, the political system in Britain has been wracked and absorbed more by its own inadequacies than by this fundamental threat to civilisation.
Current government measures to tackling climate change are little more than fiddling while Rome burns.
The fall of the Roman Empire was due to a large extent, writes the historian Adrian Goldsworthy, to a system of government that became inward-looking and weakened by internal dissent. Gone was the singular focus from the golden days of the Republic, when a small, trusted coterie of around 1,000 administrators ran the whole empire efficiently.
In its place was a bloated, inefficient and suspicious bureaucracy of 35,000, seeking power and personal advantage. Worst of all, gripped with self-obsession, they took their eyes off the Goths at the gates, and paid a devastating price. Any similarities to actual people alive today and current political circumstances are, of course, entirely unintended and circumstantial. Goldsworthy points out that every age can project its own experience onto the Romans, which just goes to show how much they did actually do for us.
In the last ten months, support for needing to take radical action over countdown period has been far and deep. Nobel prize winners from Rajendra Pachauri of the IPCC to Wangari Maathai of the Kenyan Green Belt movement have leant support, thousands of individuals have too, along with groups whose memberships run into the many millions. Even “spiderman”, in the form of French free climber Alain Robert, has risen, literally, to the cause.
Yet, in spite of the support that investing in the great transition could give to a weakened economy, the new and additional resources being made available are paltry compared to the support given to the financial sector. Around the world, as states become more acutely aware of the threats to food and energy security stemming from our ecological overreach, they are taking action. But they are just as likely to be eyeing the natural resources of other, weaker states to meet their rising consumption, as they are to be changing consumption patterns to live within their environmental means. Land grabs for food and biofuels seem to hit the news with growing frequency.
Can new engineering such as this "cloud-seeding" really keep the planet habitable? With the clock running in the climate change countdown, post- Enlightenment faith in technological fixes may not be enough.
Technological optimism is all around us. “You cannot predict the future and unimagined solutions come along; they always have done,” we are reassured. Whenever there is a great problem, human ingenuity finds a techno-fix. Who could have predicted the chemical fertilisers for our food system, which thwarted Malthusian pessimists? The problem is, with the timeframe to act on climate change, those solutions that are meant to allow us to carry on as usual should have arrived years ago and be in place now. Now, with at best 90 months left on our clock, we have a challenge that will be a bit like the first time a child jumps from the top diving board into the swimming pool.
Both terrifying and thrilling, we need to brace ourselves for the fastest descent in the use of fossil fuels that a society like ours will ever have faced. It will need technology, behaviour change and regulations to ensure fair shares and equity on the way down. We don’t know everything that will happen on the way down. But if we get it right, I suspect that we will rediscover several important things along the path that have been largely lost or forgotten: something about the importance of community, about our own ingenuity and ability to do things for ourselves, and something also about how deeply connected to, and ultimately dependent on nature, we really are.
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