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Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
The good news:
- An inventor has developed adjustable glasses which could bring better vision to a billion of the world’s poorest people: Josh Silver, a professor of physics at Oxford University has created glasses with lenses that can be “tuned” by the wearer using small knobs, eliminating the need for prescriptions or specialist equipment. Silver’s idea is stirring example of how simple technological interventions can sometimes be the most elegant. Small is beautiful after all.
- A campaign has been launched to encourage people in the rich world to donate 10% of their money to help the poorest people in the world. Once again proving that there are academics who venture beyond the ivory tower, moral philosopher Toby Ord (again, from Oxford University) has pledged to give away a third of his £30,000 a year salary this year, with 10% year on year after that. His new website – Giving What We Can – allows visitors to enter their post-tax earnings, to see where they rank in the global rich list, which is adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity. It then calculates the number of lives that could be saved or school hours bought with your donation, and suggests a handful of very effective and targeted aid agencies to support. Of course, at nef we believe that there won’t be a way out of global poverty unless we very quickly put a stop to climate change, and introduce fundamental changes to the global financial system. But working to change the economy shouldn’t stop us from donating to save lives here and now.
- There is still a chance of a climate deal at Copenhagen. Less than a day after Barack Obama announced that he didn’t think there was enough time to secure a global deal on climate change mitigation at the UN COP15 in Copenhagen, Chinese president Hu Jintao and Obama issued a joint statement promising to press for a deal next month.
The bad news:
- Peak oil is closer than we thought, due to deliberately distorted figures, according to a senior official at the International Energy Association. The Guardian reports that the whistleblower has accused the USA of forcing the IEA to “underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves”.
- The average global temperature is likely rise by 6°C by 2100 if no action is taken according to an international study from the Global Carbon Project. Mark Lynas, who compiled scientific research on this subject for his Royal Society prize-winning book Six Degrees, writes that amount of warming would “cause a mass extinction of almost all life and probably reduce humanity to a few struggling groups of embattled survivors clinging to life near the poles.”
- Lord Griffiths perpetuates the myth that inequality is somehow ‘good’ for us.The Conservative peer – who is also the vice-chair of investment bank Goldman Sachs – tried to justify the bonus culture of the City by telling an audience that “inequality is a way of achieving greater opportunity and prosperity for all”. Richard Wilkinson, of the Equality Trust, provided a rebuttal, while nef’s own research in The Great Transition shows that inequality could cost the UK alone up to £4.5 trillion over the next forty years, because of the social problems it causes.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
I am trying to make this a regular Friday thing…
The good news:
- The billions we currently spend on unemployment benefits could be used more effectively help deprived communities weather the recession. So says nef’s latest report Benefits that work.
- Breaking up the banks is no longer a marginal idea: it seems that everyone from Andy Haldane at the Bank of England to Alistair Darling now thinks that breaking up the mega-banks would be sensible. nef called for this earlier in the year in our report I.O.U.K.
- Age of Stupid director Franny Armstrong was ’saved’ from a mugging by Boris Johnson . The Mayor of London just so happened to be cycling past as Franny was being intimidated by a group of teenagers wielding an iron bar. Saving a green activist while riding a bike has got to be the act of eco-friendly Good Samaritanism par excellence. Let’s hope Franny managed to get Boris to sign London up to 10:10.
The bad news:
- Climate change could lead to a new era of global insecurity, so say the top military figures who make up the Military Advisory Council at the Institute for Environmental Security in the Netherlands (via New Scientist).
- Ed Miliband has admitted that the chances of a global deal at COP15 in Copenhagen is increasingly unlikely. The Minister for Climate Change and Energy said that a full treaty could be up to a year away.
- Lord Griffiths perpetuates the myth that inequality is somehow ‘good’ for us. The Conservative peer – who is also the vice-chair of investment bank Goldman Sachs – tried to justify the bonus culture of the City by telling an audience that “inequality is a way of achieving greater opportunity and prosperity for all“. Richard Wilkinson, of the Equality Trust, provided a rebuttal, while nef’s own research in The Great Transition shows that inequality could cost the UK alone up to £4.5 trillion over the next forty years, because of the social problems it causes.
Aleksi Knuutila is a researcher in the Valuing What Matters programme at nef
Some commentators believe that the worst of the current recession is behind us. Whether this is true or not, we can be sure that its full social consequences have not yet been felt. People are still losing their work, and unemployment may well rise to 3 million next year. Drastic cuts in spending may make this harmful trend worse.
As previous nef research expected, the recession increases the gap between wealthy and poor areas. Recent research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation the communities that already had highest unemployment have suffered the largest losses of jobs. These areas don’t suffer only from a lack of employment. The downturn has also forced over half of local authorities to reduce their staff and cuts services. The poorest neighbourhoods suffer from both job losses and a cut in the services that support them.
In the form of benefit payments, billions of pounds are spent on these areas. These resources succeed in keeping their recipients out of the gutter. At the same time, benefit payments constrain claimants’ possibilities to improve their lives. Our social security functions more like a trap than a ladder, and is fuelling the deprivation of poor communities.
Welfare reform has for long focused on making work pay. nef’s new report, Benefits That Work, shows that purely financial calculations don’t capture what matters to the unemployed. Benefit claimants are above all concerned that accepting work will make their life more insecure. Benefits systems are function like an on-off switch; either you are on it or not. This makes it insensitive to the fickle and uncertain nature of today’s labour market. Taking up a job with irregular hours and no employment protection risks leaving people penniless.
The benefits spend could be channelled so that it allows people to improve their own communities while helping them to move towards employment. Benefits That Work presents an Social Return on Investment (SROI) analysis of an innovative scheme to make the happen. With the Community Allowance, community organizations would be able to hire unemployed people to work with them for the good of their area. The participants would have their benefits secured for a year, and would be able to earn a small, capped income on top of them. Protecting the current level of benefits would allow the claimants, with the support from the community organization, to focus their efforts on moving towards the labour market.
What makes the Community Allowance effective is that it plays up the strengths of the claimants. Many employment schemes offer subsidized work placements for the unemployed. They often leave the participants feeling stigmatized, as if they would not be good enough for the work without government footing the bill. In contrast, Community Allowance engages the unemployed in work that they are best placed to perform, due to their close connections with the neighbourhood or their capacity to act as positive role models.
Our SROI analysis of the Community Allowance shows that for each £1 invested into it, £10 of social value is created. This extra value is received by the participants, their communities and families. The state is likely to recuperate more than the resources necessary to run the scheme. Channelling the benefits spend so that it works for the good of deprived will take the edge off the ruin of the downturn.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”
A map from Thomas More's Utopia
“Progress is the realisation of Utopias.” Can you imagine Peter Mandelson saying that to the CBI? Would Gordon Brown produce such a quip at the World Economic Forum? Even Barack Obama might have problems with this level of political lyricism. Progress might be the realisation of ambition, enterprise, or even dreams, but not utopias.
Utopianism tends to be a pejorative term these days. It’s associated with religious and political myths which we now might find naive and old-fashioned: be it the New Jerusalem of Christianity or the promised revolution of Marxism. The quotation from Wilde comes from his 1891 essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism‘, a political polemic with a curiously evangelical and redemptive tone.
We’ve witnessed too many failed or dangerous utopias to be taken in by such rhetoric anymore. How many of the 20th century’s worst atrocities started with a vision of a perfected world? And even when they haven’t ended in totalitarianism, utopian mindsets have collided with the wall of reality sooner or later. The global financial crisis of the last eighteen months has put paid to the neoliberal belief that history “ended” with the rise of free market capitalism.
Today we’re inclined to agree with the political philosopher John Gray, who writes that “utopia is the projection into the future of a model of a society that cannot be realized.”
And yet, somehow, I still have some sympathy with Wilde’s vision. Even once we accept the danger of utopianism and see through its mirages, we still need to chart a course for our societies to follow. We will always need some sort of compass to guide us.
The sociologist Stephen Lukes came up with the idea of a ‘concrete utopia’. Unlike John Gray’s definition, the concrete utopia is based on ‘the knowledge of a self-transforming present, not an ideal future’.
There is no doubt that we are currently in a ’self-transforming present’. Thanks to a century and a half of industrialisation powered by fossil fuels, the world’s climate is changing – not somewhere else or at a future date, but right here, right now. The biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression has shaken all economic and political orthodoxies. And as inequality has risen in developing countries, so too has social instability and unrest. If we do nothing about these things, the present will transform itself for the worse. nef has calculated the costs of carrying on with ‘business-as-usual’ until 2050: the UK will be faced with a £1.6 to £2.5 trillion bill for climate change, and a £4.5 trillion bill for social problems arising from income inequality.
In order to steer clear of these threats, we’ll need something like a concrete utopia. Our new report The Great Transition attempts to put in place some clear steps towards the kind of economy which works for people and the planet. The Great Transition is undoubtedly utopian in spirit: we call it ‘the tale of how things turned out right’. But its recommendations are based right here in the present moment. There are things we can do immediately to tackle climate change, restore economic stability and create a more equal human settlement.
For the concrete utopian, it isn’t enough just to draw utopia onto Wilde’s map. First, you have to do some scouting, to see if that country actually exists, to glimpse its shores, even from afar. At nef, we’ve been able to do so through the vast array of practical projects we’ve been involved with over the years. Timebanking, complementary currencies, new methods of participation and democracy, Transition Towns, our BizFizz project for budding entrepreneurs, co-productive public services and barter economies all constitute, as we said in our pamphlet From the Ashes of the Crash, part of a ’sleeping architecture of a new, diverse and resilient local financial system’, human-scale and low-carbon. And it’s on these foundations that we’ll start to build our concrete utopia.
If you’d like to glimpse the beginnings of the Great Transition, and help make it a reality, make sure you head along to The Bigger Picture: Festival of Interdependence, this Saturday 24 October, at the Bargehouse, South Bank, London.
of a new, diverse and resilient local financial system
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
We live in bittersweet times. On the one hand, we face multiple challenges, crises and threats, from climate change, economic instability, growing social inequalities and resource depletion. On the other, we’ve got a real chance for change in the way we think about economics, the things we value and what really matters to us as societies and communities. It’s with this bewildering and complex dynamic in mind that I bring you Friday’s over-simplistic Good News, Bad News.
This week, the good news is:
- Carbon emissions have decreased by 3% from 2008 levels, because of the recession. This is the sharpest fall in emissions for 30 years, according to the International Energy Association.
- E.on will not be building a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth, at least for now. While pressure from climate campaigners may have had a impact, the company cited the recession as being the main reason for shelving the plans.
- Income inequality is now coming under the political radar of the Conservative Party. The painstakingly thorough work of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett of the Equality Trust has shown that countries with less inequality are generally stronger, safer and happier places to live. nef held fringe events on inequality, featuring Dr. Wilkinson, at all three party conferences.
The bad news:
- Peak oil is still likely to hit us within the next ten years, despite recent discoveries of new fields in the Gulf of Mexico, says a new report from the UK Energy Research Centre.
- British people say they wouldn’t give up their flights to help the climate. A study conducted by Loughborough University found that fewer than 20% of people said they were trying to reduce the number of flights they took.
- The Conservative Party are putting corporate lobbyists up for parliamentary seats. An investigation by the Times newspaper found that over a fifth of the Conservative Party prospective parliamentary candidates most likely to gain seats in the next election are or have been involved in corporate lobbying or public relations.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
Who really picks up the bill for climate change? (Hat-tip to Climate Safety)
It’s always the poorest who end up paying, even though they’ve enjoyed very few of the things which have contributed towards our burgeoning ecological debt.
Debates about population growth and climate change continue to make headlines, despite all the evidence which puts the blame squarely on rich world consumption levels, rather than fertility rates in the developing world. nef recently published The Consumption Explosion, a report which seeks to ‘defuse’ theories about population explosion by showing the ecological costs of trade and consumption in the rich world.
As the film makes clear, the carbon footprints of people in rich, industrialised nations – such as Germany, the UK or the US – dwarf those of developing nations. A man or woman living in the United States will, by 4am in the morning of 2 January, already have been responsible for carbon emissions equivalent to what someone in living in Tanzania would generate in an entire year. A UK citizen would reach the same point by 7pm on 4 January.
New Scientist’s Fred Pearce, who contributed to The Consumption Explosion, writes:
the world’s richest half billion people – that’s about 7 per cent of the global population – are responsible for 50 per cent of the world’s emissions. Meanwhile, the poorest 50 per cent are responsible for just 7 per cent of emissions. One American or European is more often than not responsible for more emissions than an entire village of Africans.
Every time those of us in the rich world talk about too many babies in Africa or India, we are denying our own culpability. It is the world’s consumption patterns we need to fix, not its reproductive habits.
And if you think you don’t fall into the richest 7% of the world, it’s always worth checking.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
Robert Webb and David Mitchell contemplate dark days ahead.
There’s a fantastic sketch in a recent episode of That Mitchell and Webb Look. It’s first-century Pompeii, and the city consul Robert Webb has called his most trusted soothsayer Quintillius, played by David Mitchell, to discuss the dark smokey clouds that are hovering over his city. Having established that the forecast is hardly rosy, the consul suggests making an offering to appease the angry gods.
“Exactly,” replies Quintillius, “I’ve been having a bit of a think about this, and I reckon I’ve got it. We sort out our rubbish into separate bins. Green glass, brown glass, mosaic, papyrus all in separate bins – a sort of devotional thing. Once a week before going to bed on a Monday night, I reckon.”
This “futile time-consuming ritual”, promises the soothsayer, will be all that is necessary to make the atmosphere return to normal. “You know gods,” he says, “They love all that shit.”
David Mitchell is fortunately more perceptive than his Quintillius alter-ego. In his Observer column yesterday, he pointed out the ridiculousness of Ed Miliband’s promise to “protect air travel for the masses” while also pledging to cut carbon emissions:
Otherwise, [Miliband] said, it would mean “you would go back to 1974 levels of flying”. Well, if he thinks that’s the worst the environmental future could hold, he hasn’t been doing his boxes. “I don’t want to have a situation where only rich people can afford to fly,” he continued. Who does? But then it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Whereas …
For us Brits, it seems, no environmental catastrophe is “half as terrifying as losing our easyJet privileges.”
Apparently we feel there’s no point keeping the planet habitable unless we’ve still got quick access to Disney World and Ibiza. This is bizarre and depressing. It makes me need a holiday. Are our existences so miserable that we’re only living for two weeks of escape?
Mitchell is absolutely right. It is completely baffling why we sacrifice a habitable planet for disappointing hotels, crowded beaches, jet lag and inevitable family arguments. But we also need to ask which Britons are doing the escaping. Are they, as Miliband seems to think, “the masses”? Or are what Mitchell calls “easyJet privileges” exactly that: a perogrative of one particular elite?
Research by nef and the World Development Movement, published last autumn, revealed that the “democratisation” of foreign travel by cheap air fares is a myth. Only 8 per cent of cheap flights are taken by people on low incomes, and yet those people make up 32 per cent of the UK population. It’s actually the richest people who use cheap flights the most. 40 per cent of cheap air fares are bought by people in socio-economic categories A and B, who make up only 24 per cent of the population. Sorry Ed, but protecting air travel doesn’t make you a crusader for the poor. It makes you the defender of stockbroker mini-breaks.
At the end of the sketch, Webb’s consul complains that Quintillius’ rubbish-sorting scheme amounts to little more than, well, “pissing in the wind.” Politicians, it seems, have lost a certain perspicacity in the last 1,947 years.
Eilís Lawlor is the acting head of the Valuing What Matters team at nef.
Denham is relaxed about the filthy rich, and now, it seems, about inequality too.
Imagine you are a Government minister whose party is dogged by accountability scandals, trailing badly in the polls and squarely in lame duck territory from a policy perspective. Imagine as well that you had recently taken (or been thrown) the reins of the department responsible for narrowing spatial inequalities but under which they had in fact widened. How would you frame a speech to set the tone for your tenure in this role?
Well if you are John Denham you clearly abdicate any responsibility for this fact by trying to claim that people don’t care about inequality anyway. Representative democracy has been brought low in recent times and many think it is on its knees. A cloying and calculated attendance to ‘middle class voters’ interests is hardly the shot in the arm it requires. The irony of Denham’s comments is that measures to tackle inequality under New Labour have been overwhelmingly focused on the poor because it was seen as more politically saleable, they were even famously (and oxymoronically) ‘intensely relaxed’ about people becoming ‘filthy rich’. Anyone who suggested otherwise was patronised into the political wilderness.
The hardest and arguably most important role a politician can play is to lead people where they fear to go, to promote a sense of shared purpose and collective responsibility amongst their constituency, even if the benefits are not immediately obvious. We know that inequality is bad for us all, rich and poor alike. John Denham and his advisors most likely know it too but don’t care to share it with the rest of us. There is a risk afterall, an inspirational speech on the issue might lose even more votes to the Conservatives. No, better to out-Tory them, appeal to narrow self-interest and perpetuate untruths about why redistribution matters. That’s the way to restore our faith in party politics.
Josh Ryan-Collins works on sustainable procurement and commissioning at nef.
These are truly astonishing political times. A Conservative Shadow Chancellor is criticising a Labour Prime Minister for planning enormous working and middle-class tax cuts. Meanwhile, the combination of tax cuts with a big expansion in borrowing threatens a currency crisis, with sterling already having fallen by a quarter against the dollar in the last three months.
The UK’s many creditors, mainly Asian investors who have lent with confidence to our high rolling banks, are starting to get itchy feet. UK debt is now priced considerably higher than German debt and there is a real danger of currency speculation leading to a ‘rout’ of the pound as Will Hutton suggested in the Observer yesterday. Brown and Darling are rumoured to be at loggerheads over how big the cuts and borrowing package will be, with the Chancellor taking over the role of Prudence against a bullish Prime Minister.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the Liberal Democrats who seem to be offering a more sensible solution to the current problem. They are also offering tax cuts to ‘working people’, 4p off the basic rate of income tax, but funding it through taxes on the very rich and green taxes, hence keeping the public debt, and hopefully currency speculation, in check.
The question is why on earth Labour is not making similar arguments. If there was ever an opportunity to make a robust economic case for a progressive, re-distributionary tax policy, this it. Labour has, of course, been redistributing “by stealth” since they came to power but have singularly failed to build a moral and political case for redistributive policies, a failure many on the Left have attributed to a deference to the City.
Well, any deference to the Masters of the Universe has now disintegrated and it’s time the government got serious about tax. Not least because of the well-documented development, under their stewardship, of a new cadre of ‘super rich’ who increasingly have nothing at all in common with the middle classes.
nef’s Happy Planet Index showed a strong link between well-being and economic equality. Put simply, well-being is relative, so that countries with more polarised income and wealth distributions have lower well-being than those with more even distributions, even if they have higher average earnings.
So raising income tax for the highest earners and perhaps also examining a wealth and land tax (not to mention an even more politically palatable windfall tax on energy companies), combined with green taxes, could satisfy both uncertain creditors and voters. Gordon Brown has shown no reticence in abandoning his golden rules on fiscal policy in recent days; if he wants to save his reputation for prudence, it might be time to take an equally aggressive approach to progressive taxation.
Eilís Lawlor is the acting head of the Valuing What Matters team at nef
Results may not have been as bad as expected but still made for dismal reading in last week’s OECD report on inequality. At a time when the rewards of the rich are being called sharply into question, the UK still has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed world and social mobility is static. The rate at which inequality has widened is slowing, which is not the same as the gap narrowing. What we already knew has been confirmed: the proceeds of the global economic boom that is now unravelling have gone disproportionately to the already wealthy.
Any equalisation of incomes, however small, is to be welcomed but the media coverage of this missed the most salient point of the report: the gap between rich and poor has grown in more than three-quarters of all OECD countries over the past two decades. Have we and our media become so complacent with wealth accumulation in the hands of the few that this is considered positive, or are we just desperate for some good news?
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