The redundant steel worker wore a black armband. He was 58, he said, and would never find another job. He was one of 1,600 in Redcar, on Teesside in North East England, whose jobs have been axed by Corus, which since 2006 has been owned by the Tata Steel group of India. On Thursday evening this week I watched ‘Question Time’ on BBC TV, coming from Teesside, and felt that an impotent anger afflicted the audience. Teesside makes high quality steel, but the Redcar plant does not fit into Tata’s strategic plan.

The steel industry has been globalised. Who are the winners? The owners of Chinese factories making metal goods for sale around the world? The directors of the most aggressively profit-seeking steel companies? The bankers who lend them money? I cannot think of many other ‘winners’, but there are millions of losers. Just on Teesside, 1,600 lost jobs mean at least 2,250 or so more people affected in the immediate families of the redundant workers, on the basis of the national average 2.4 people in a household. So we have about 3,850 people directly affected. Then there are the enterprises that depended on the steel plant for their livelihoods. A typical multiplier in manufacturing is 2.35 or so. That would mean 3,760 consequential job losers, in turn affecting about 5,265 more people in their households,  an additional total of 9,025 persons experiencing the repercussions of the plant closure.

So the end of steel manufacture at plant employing 1,600 may well result in the economic impact of worklessness affecting, in a short time, the lives of 12,875 people.

We are told that our future as a nation depends on us offering a highly skilled workforce to the world. We are successful in weapons manufacture, but that is because  security and defence are the only industrial sectors exempt from the free trade — no quotas, no tariffs — mandated by the World Trade Organisation. It’s no surprise that the defence company BAE Systems is the UK’s largest manufacturing company, because BAE and similar defence (weapons) companies are exempt from the open competition rules.  This means that our economy, and jobs, become over-dependent on the arms business.

We have been conditioned to accept global free trade as both desirable and inevitable, but it is neither. It has proved to be an excellent method for transferring resources from the majority to a tiny minority of global super-rich. As a supposed democracy, we have the capacity to challenge the ‘common sense’ that unfettered free trade benefits peoples and nations. That ‘common sense’ was carefully constructed, and can be deconstructed given sufficient effort and will. A first step may be to elect politicians who will scale back the World Trade Organisation, to allow nations more control over their own economies.

The major political parties in the UK still accept subordination to the WTO, and thus acquiesce in the diminution of democracy that makes us into victims rather than active citizens. The steelworkers in Redcar understand only too well what it feels like to be economic victims, in a system that does not give them a voice.

What MPs’ expenses may reveal about our society

David Marquand’s ‘Decline of the Public: the hollowing out of citizenship’ (Polity Press, 2004) and Michael Power’s ‘The Audit Society: rituals of verification’ (Oxford University Press, 1997) both made a big impression on me. ‘Decline of the Public’ explains how the marketisation of society has turned citizens into consumers, or buyers and sellers, with few opportunities to behave as citizens, to make decisions on social and political priorities, to be involved in governance. Instead, as ‘The Audit Society’ details, there are endless tick lists that purport to prove that everything in the national garden is weed-free and sweet-smelling. Often the lists get in the way of constructive activities, and prove no more than that there is a system for recording x, y, z and everything else under the sun. The BBC Radio 4 readings this last week (June 15 to 19) of Woman Police Constable E E Bloggs’ ‘Diary of an On-Call Girl’ (Monday Books, 2007) were funny yet at the same time depressing because police work appears weighed down with lists and tick boxes. WPC Bloggs (see http://pcbloggs.blogspot.com) is supposed to make eight arrests a month, her ‘target’. She resists, but does no favours to her career prospects. To meet the target, officers have to focus on easy cases, rather than delving into difficult but socially important areas. WPC Bloggs spends hours at her computer, on reports and ticks. The inadvertent missed tick brings questioning emails from the officer/s who spend hours checking through reports and lists.

Audit trails are evidence when aggrieved persons go to law, often with the help of a ‘no win no fee’ solicitor, or when the fees are claimed from the counter-party’s insurance company. Litigation for malpractice is very big business. This means people are terrified of making any mistake, hence the tick, tick, tick, lists to demonstrate that everything was done by the book. Fear of prosecution for simple mistakes makes us risk-averse and unwilling to innovate. It enmeshes us tightly in nets of the proverbial red tape.

When we are not allowed to make mistakes, we cannot learn from them. Learning is essential to development. Learning is essential to any real citizenship. “Well,” you may say, “I’ve learnt a lot about members of Parliament from reading their expenses claims in the ‘Daily Telegraph’.” True. What were the expense claims really about? Easy money, no questions asked? Exploiting legal loopholes, such as calling your second home your main home for a few weeks, so you can sell it and avoid 40% capital gains tax? Keeping up appearances with mansions, moats, and phantom mortgages, so that MPs do not appear the poor country cousins of bank bosses, professional footballers and Russian oligarchs? Do we measure personal worth by the number of black noughts on bank balances? Apparently yes, but this is a consequence of the marketisation of society, to paraphrase Professor Michael Sandel in the first of this year’s Reith Lectures.

Thinking about it, are we just following the negative trend by criticising MPs for taking advantage of citizen taxpayers? Perhaps we should consider the intention behind actions that result in ‘mistakes’. Creating a system that enriches yourself is not particularly moral, but morals are intangible and thus incomprehensible to markets, which have to place exchange values on everything. MPs have been working the market, no more. Our challenge is to relegate the market to a subsidiary role and to elevate social equity and justice above the market place. To achieve such a transformation, we have to be able to make mistakes, to use audits as aids to understanding rather than them controlling us, and to open up politics as collaborative and co-operative arenas, not as party fiefdoms. Maybe the MPs’ expenses scandal is a marker on the uphill climb towards the end of traditional party politics and its replacement with new forms of governance that citizens will try out, refine, adopt and keep refining, in the light of changing contexts and new challenges.

New Economics
Llandeilo is a small town in the Tywi valley, Carmarthenshire, Wales. The ‘Transition Town’ movement aims to prepare communities for a future in which fossil fuel use will be drastically reduced, and as one consequence, far more production will be for local consumption.

Transition Town Llandeilo has a New Economics group, led by Gerry Gold and to which I belong. We have discussions that often centre on the failure of capitalism, but I get the feeling that several of us are not at all sure what should replace it. There are enthusiastic views in favour of Marxism, co-operatives and commonwealths. Maybe we should start with the possibilities contained in our environment and people, and work out from those beginnings, rather than deciding on a structure and adapting to it? Already, keen gardeners have persuaded the National Trust to release land at Dinefwr Park for allotments: perhaps we just need more useful projects like this?

I wonder, though, if it’s possible for one project to lead to another, and another, until the local economy is ‘sustainable’ in terms of resource use, without an infrastructure for the transfer of permissions, funds, and expertise. Transition Town Llandeilo doesn’t have a deep pocket, and is not an agency of government. The lack of funds and power is a barrier to getting things done. Yet is ‘getting things done’ the way forward? Perhaps we should be an enabling group, with visions of many ways forward. Can there be one infrastructure capable of allowing ‘many ways forward’, or are we talking about multiple-choice infrastructures?

The thought of multiple infrastructures worries me, as they could create as much trouble as a whole school of octopuses suffocating an unlucky diver with dozens of their tentacles. Without a system for bridging the wide gap between conventional and New Economics, though, the new ways are likely to remain marginalised.

New Economics are about a lot more than just money and production. They are about creating economic systems that the Earth can sustain far into the future, systems that are flexible enough to cope with climate change and democratic enough to prevent corporations from determining the fate of societies. A counsel of unattainable perfection, perhaps, but we need to try because the alternative is to devour everything and then to fester in our own waste. Current economic policies encourage growth as the way to prosperity, but Earth is a finite system, in which perpetual growth is impossible. This common sense was reinforced in 1972 by Donella H Meadows, Dennis L Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William W Behrens III, the authors of the classic The Limits to Growth.

I’m sure we need a New Economics infrastructure, one that can plug in to national and local government to source permissions. The quantities of permissions and prohibitions that tower over our lives restrict innovation to an alarming extent. If you want to start a small farm and woodland, perhaps on a permaculture model, acquiring the land is just step one on a long, long journey. Planning law is suburban in outlook, liking to keep homes and work as far apart as possible. Development agencies would rather talk to one multinational than to lots of individuals. Planners often regard the countryside as a mega-park, not as the source of our continued survival. One obvious way forward is for proponents of New Economics to stand for election to councils and to Parliament… worthwhile but, on its own, too slow.

John Christopher’s 1956 novel The Death of Grass has just been reissued, by Penguin. In the book, the Chung-Li virus has destroyed grasses – including cereal crops – around the world. Government, and the infrastructure that government manages, break down. Starving people take the law into their own gun-toting hands, and being quick on the draw is the difference between dying, and existing a little bit longer. Christopher makes a plausible case for the end of infrastructure marking the end of civilisation. Maybe what we need is a New Economics infrastructure which can link into government as we know it, but which can also function independently as networks of local cells. Perhaps I should say ‘groups’, in case ‘cells’ comes over as subversive. (All the surveillance that goes on these days is really hampering debate, as to avoid trouble there is a big temptation to speak in platitudes.)

So far there’s no sign of Chung-Li in Llandeilo, but I don’t think we should wait much longer before building a New Economics infrastructure. Several areas in the UK are a long way further down the road. Stroud in Gloucestershire, for one, and Totnes in Devon, where Transition Town pioneer Rob Hopkins is a leading light. There are over 150 Transition Towns around the world, the majority in the UK but also in ten other countries including the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Germany. The transition concept gives communities a way of alerting themselves to the coming challenges of peak oil and to climate change. And come they will.

More Fraternité, urges Jacques

Jacques Monin, London correspondent for Radio France, has just published a book called Le naufrage britannique (The British Shipwreck). I’ve read the first two chapters, ‘L’argent roi’ (‘King Money’) and ‘La fin du rêve’ (‘The End of the Dream’) and am impressed by M. Monin’s analysis of the UK’s civic weaknesses. He covers similar ground to David Marquand in Decline of the Public, a book which castigates the retreat of civic values and of opportunities for debate and engagement, in the face of aggressive private enterprise and commercial values.

M. Monin has been startled by the extent of political apathy in the UK, and makes the point that the rare instances of labour unrest in recent years have had money at their heart – individuals fearing insufficient income or excessive costs. Ideas, or concepts of right and wrong, have largely ceased to concern the populace. He concedes that there was a wave of public opposition to the Iraq War back in 2003, but uses this as an example of the rarity of mass dissent on a political issue. The ascent of money as all that really matters has, he suggests, impoverished public debate because Britons have come to accept the hegemony of economics as natural, as common sense, impossible to question because they do not realise that it can be questioned.

Acceptance of a single dogma is, in a constantly changing natural and social world, a recipe for disastrous rigidity. Furthermore, a dogma that privileges the economy above every other consideration relegates all that makes us human to the periphery of existence.

The cold dawn of 2009, heralding financial hardship and a fall in our collective standard of living, reveals the nation state as very much the junior partner in global business, existing to provide business with workers to be paid as little as possible, and with consumers to buy goods and services for as much as possible. There is a fundamental contradiction here, of course, but one masked by government as income redistributor, through taxation and the use of measures such as tax credits to supplement individuals’ incomes.

Belatedly, it is becoming apparent that globalisation is a merciless master. Surely the nation state can seize back the intellectual initiative, to start to create a society in which citizens control economies, not the other way round. Have we become too apathetic to politics to start to devise new ways forward?

If you can understand French, do read the book. Le naufrage britannique, ISBN 978-2-7103-3104-9, is published by La Table Ronde in Paris and costs €20.

Guatemala and the USA, part 2

Written by Emily Hall’s aunt, June Spears, in 2007. It is 2020 and Emily is about to travel to Guatemala herself.

The leader of the Partido Patriota (PP), one of the strongest political parties in Guatemala, is the former head of the Army Intelligence Directorate, General Otto Pérez Molina. The retired general was one of the two candidates in the run-off election for president on November 4th 2007, but he lost out to Álvaro Colom Caballeros, leader of the Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE). The violence that marked the election campaign continued afterwards. On December 21st Marco Antonio Xicay, a newly elected member of Congress representing the Partido Patriota, was shot dead. Nothing unusual: the annual murder total in Guatemala is around 6,000, or about one person in every 2,000. The odds are lot shorter if you are a politician, a trades unionist, a human rights activist, or an investigative journalist.

Criminals operate within Guatemala’s political parties, reinforcing the webs of extortion, money laundering and drug trafficking that kill latent democracy in the country. For the ordinary Guatemalteco, it does not matter much who is the nominal president, because the threat of violence hangs over every attempt to improve social justice and reduce poverty. In the 21st century, Guatemala is source of cheap labour for foreign companies that locate factories – called maquiladoras – there, and a market for toxic pesticides, veterinary pharmaceuticals and other products that are no longer permitted in ‘advanced’ economies.

People die young in Guatemala. So many children die that cemeteries have special zones for them. The only people who receive any sort of pension are ex-government employees and a few fortunate private-sector employees for whom a pension was part of their benefits package. If you are old and don’t have a pension or an affluent and caring family, you are on your own. If you are ill you cannot expect free medical treatment, for there is no health service, so again you are on your own.

Guns are everywhere, in the hands of criminals and of the armies of security guards, who often look no more than 15 or 16 years old. There are armed guards in chemists’ shops, in supermarkets, on Coca-Cola delivery trucks, and inside and outside banks. It is unnerving at first, but you get used to it alarmingly quickly. Local buses are often attacked, to rob the passengers, and the attacks frequently turn violent. The British Embassy does not allow its staff to travel on local buses. I went on the bus to school every day, and felt quite safe, but the journey was just a few kilometres, from Antigua to the next town, Jocotenango.

Guatemala produces more food than it consumes. The food is exported, while almost half the children suffer from malnutrition. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations calculated that in 2004 Guatemala produced 0.32% of the world’s food and consumed only 0.16%.  The export revenues – US$1.417bn in 2004 — do not benefit the population, only the international shareholders of the multinational corporations – including Chiquita, the modern incarnation of United Fruit Company — that control the country’s best land. Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: Markets, power and the hidden battle for the world’s food system, uses the term “bottleneck corporations” to show the power that they wield over the whole food supply chain.

Government in Guatemala is all about creating attractive conditions for corporations.  This was the main theme of the 2007 presidential campaign. Improved social justice got a mention in the campaign of the winner, Álvaro Colom Caballeros, but way down his agenda. The losing candidate in the run-off between the top two in the first round, the retired general Otto Peréz Molina, had promised more security and more opportunities for business. His vice-presidential running-mate, Ricardo Castillo Sinibaldi, is a member of one of Guatemala’s elite business families. The Castillos have 82 companies in their holding organisation, Corporación Castillo Hermanos, including Consorcio Cervecero Centroamericano, a huge beer and drinks business. Colom won because of support from the indigenous Mayan peoples. They supported him not because he had a vision for a new Guatemala, but because he was the least bad option.

Business as usual. This is how the USA likes Guatemala to remain: a de facto colony south of Mexico.

To be continued

Background information

Meet the Halls, my mythical family:  Rob Hall, born on January 2nd 1970; his wife Janie (February 25th 1972); their children Emily (March 5th 2002) and Joshua (May 4th 1999). Rob’s parents are Tim (November 12th 1937) and Beryl (April 20th 1940). Janie’s parents are Shirley (April 22nd 1946) and Bill Priest (October 17th 1944).

The names and characters in this and other posts in the ‘Tales for the 21st Century‘ series are entirely fictional, but June Spears’ diary is factual, written during and just after my own stay in Guatemala in 2007.