Reclaiming the Economy

 

Davos 2014: Who is Wearing the Trousers?

 

Surely one of the important roles the media plays in our modern society is framing the narrative, determining the parameters within which we understand reality. This week the world's media is doing an important job in normalising a situation where politicians who should be representing us are instead subjugating themselves to the elites who gather annually at Davos.

In my recollection the role of the journalist at this point would be to challenge a situation where the most important decisions about how our economy will evolve over the next few years are being made by a group of self-selected wealthy people inside a ring of steel in a Swiss ski resort. But times have changed and journalists no longer see their role as having anything to do with speaking truth to power or working for the common good. In the reality they are normalising through their breathless broadcasts their role is to rush about the expensive venue seeking out the most important, rich, or famous person that they can find so that we will be gratefully able to hear their views.

This morning, for example, I discovered that Matt Damon found himself surprised by the youth of the Finnish Prime Minister. Thanks for that helpful insight into the leading issues of the day. It's not that I don't like Matt Damon or that I'm not interested in his opinions, it's just that in my version of reality he belongs in Entertainment just as Michael Schumacher belongs in the Sports section of the broadcast, and the weather belongs in, well the weather. When I pay my TV licence I think the news I am paying for should be about important significant events and how those who we have elected to run the country on our behalf are going to tackle them.

Which brings me to David Cameron, who is making a speech at Davos today. You might ask why he is making a speech in Switzerland rather than Scunthorpe or Swansea or somewhere in this country where people have the chance to vote for him and people are expecting him to represent them. The answer is very clear: he does not believe that the economy is any longer subject to any sort of democratic control.  He has gone to Davos to offer the services of the working people of Britain to a corporate boss and what he is offering is cheap labour with poor conditions and cheap energy with wasted environments. If the Davos elites need fracking we'll give them fracking.

Surely even Tory voters are horrified by this lack of self-respect in our country and our citizens. Are we so desperate that we have to send our politicians to Switzerland with a begging bowl to rattle in front of the corrupt and exploitative corporate elites? But our current politicians are working hand in glove with the corporations where they will take up well-paid non-executive positions when they retire, having worked for them undercover during their time in office. This unhealthy relationship has seen our resources privatised, our public services destroyed, and now our creative energies being sold off to the lowest bidder.

It is this process of undermining democracy through the use of economic power that I would like to see dissected by decent journalists working to challenge power rather than rushing about through marbled halls sycophantically seeking it out.
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Deconstructing Austerity I. Money

The narrative of austerity as proposed by Osborne and his cronies is that our huge national debt is the responsibility of feckless Labour politicians and their uncontrolled spending. An examination of the data from the Debt Management Office shows clearly that this is nonsense (this is shown in the graphic and discussed in more detail in my paper 'Who Owes Whom?'). The many billions that were spent as an emergency to prop up failing banks and prevent the financial system from crashing are the real explanation for the huge increase in the public debt. Osborne is a liar by omission because he will not discuss whether he would seriously have refused to invest this money and allow cashpoints to seize up.

 

The reality is that under Osborne far more money has been poured into preventing the cardiac arrest of the economy that results from a lack of circulating money. This is the money created through quantitative easing and the difference between it and what was spent by Darling during the crisis is that the QE money was direct credit creation whereas the money spent by Darling was generated through the sale of bonds and hence features in our national debt.

Since 2009 £375 billion has been created directly by the Bank of England and poured into financial institutions. They have greedily hoovered up this money and paid it to shareholders as well as improving their balance sheet position. They have barely loaned any of it to businesses or invested it in the economy, although the government could have used it for such direct investment, as I argued at the time. This explains why the wealthy and those with interests in finance are flourishing while the rest of us are suffering austerity. The £80 billion created for Funding for Lending has similarly not resulted in an increase in debt and has also been kidnapped by the banks rather than being fed into the real economy.

The Treasury bonds that were bought during the quantitative easing programme are still sitting inside the Bank of England presumably with a big label saying 'do not touch'. If they were to be cancelled, which they could be since they are IOUs issued on our behalf, nearly a third of our national debt would be wiped out in an instant. What a marvellous way of reducing the burden of austerity - or not depending on your political objectives.

These are political choices and hence the narrative of austerity politics that there is no alternative is simply a lie. Darling could have created money directly to save the banks; Osborne could create money directly now for investment in a renewable energy transition. Darling's unwillingness to resort to direct credit creation in the early days is hard to fathom and perhaps resulted from a failure of understanding. Osborne's refusal now to engage in any type of monetary policy that would assist the real economy is a consequence of his desire to use the financial crisis to achieve his long-term policy goal of destroying the public sector.

Almost without challenge Osborne portrays himself as the saviour of the economy while Cameron claims deceitfully to have reduced the debt. The national debt is of course still increasing (see the Spectator graphic) and while the deficit is slightly decreasing we're way off Osborne's original projections. However, this is all smoke and mirrors since the Conservatives have no intention and no desire of reducing the national debt: it's far too useful to them politically.

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How Rising House Prices Serve George's Friends in the City

There is a lot of controversy about the potential of the Help to Buy scheme to restart the housing bubble. I must say that I share this concern and am disturbed by the thought that Osborne may be deliberately reflating the value of the housing market to enable himself to portray the government as having tackled the problem of the deficit. To portray this policy as one of compassion for the homeless, and to encourage homeowners to celebrate rising house prices, as Cameron did on the Andrew Marr show yesterday, is disingenuous.

The PM  may sanguinely say people can afford these high-proportion mortgages but how much do interest rates need to rise until this is no longer the case? Cameron used the example of two people earning £20,000 or £25,000 per year and an average house price of £200,000. Leaving aside the 5% deposit to make the maths simple, the BBC mortgage calculator indicates that if interest rates rise to only 3% this couple will now be paying nearly £1000 a month to fund their mortgage.

Clearly the Tories think that offering young people homes financed through large amounts of debt will be politically popular, but the historic pattern in Britain of high and rising house prices and high rates of home ownership financed through a mortgage actually serves the financial sector much more than it serves British citizens. The explanation is simple: if your house costs twice as much you pay the bank twice as much in interest.

Useful data from the land registry indicates that the house price index has risen to more than 250 compared with January 1995 (the graphic indicates the ratio of prices to earnings during this period). At its peak before the crash the index reached nearly 300, which means that prices had undergone a threefold increase net of price inflation. As I teach my students, because of the compounding nature of interest, you are likely to pay back something like double the principal when you take out a loan over 25 years. This means that when house prices double, twice as much is paid back to financial corporations in interest. No wonder that those with friends in the City encourage us to celebrate house price rises.

House price inflation serves financiers and those who welcome the increasing value of their home as though it were an asset are missing the point. Those who still have mortgages are simply celebrating an increase in their housing costs; if their house is a home then they have no greater value from it even if its financial value has doubled. As it turns out in Britain the house is not a machine for living in, as Le Corbusier once suggested, but rather a machine for increasing bank profits.

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The Art of the Hypothetical

The news, to my rather simplistic way of thinking, is about stuff wot happened. Today's headlines make clear just how wrong I am about this. Today's news is dominated not by events but by a speech that didn't happen twice. First David Cameron moved his speech to avoid the tactlessness of metaphorically bombing the EU on the day of the Franco-German love-in; then he postponed it because there was disastrous news from Algeria. Today what has been billed as a 'long awaited speech', although other than journalists it is hard to find anybody waiting with much excitement, will finally be given. It was so unwelcome in Europe that Cameron ended up delivering it in the last place he wanted: London.

I fear that the outcome of the speech will be to show the Conservatives' approach to Europe as weak and misguided. For some of their less informed supporters, the ones who are considering voting for UKIP, it might seem appropriate to adopt a position of superiority, lecturing the 26 other countries of the EU about what is best for them. This is a posture learned on the playing-fields of Eton where the empire is a fond memory for which such schools and their games masters continue to take credit. In the world where the rest of us  live, Europe is a social club where we feel rather comfortable and where most members operate social, cultural and infrastructural systems we find generally superior to our own.

In such a club you cannot make the rules on your own: you make them by agreement or you are forced to leave. This seems genuinely incomprehensible to the Tories who think we can operate our selfish individualist model of neoliberal capitalism, dump on all the systems our 'European partners' have put in place to protect their peoples and our planet, and still be invited to the party. The Tories' attitude to Europe is the ultimate example of the free-riding of the rational economic man.

The question of a referendum that is at the heart of today's speech is an entirely hypothetical one. What will we be voting to leave or stay in? The crisis in the Eurozone and the fiscal pact that the majority of EU members are now signed up to is in itself not in fînalalised. Cameron vetoed our membership but that leaves open so many questions that a wholesale renegotiation is inevitable. The smart move would be to get ahead in those negotiations, which the better players of the EU game are no doubt doing right now, while Cameron is losing friends in Europe in a desperate attempt to keep friends in his own party.

The very sad thing is that the Euro-sceptics inside the Conservative party have totally outflanked the Cameroons. They know that his strategy of hypothesis-testing is bound to fail. They know that they have already succeeded in making a decision to leave Europe a possible outcome for the first time in three decades. Their understanding of Europe is better, and so it their understanding of politics.
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TINA Makes an Unwelcome Return

The voice of authority telling you that you cannot possibly think a certain way or that their view of the world is simple common sense is hard to resist, especially when it is intoned with the upper-class accent that we have learned to defer to. So it is that Cameron and Osborne tell us that we are a trading nation and that the Europe we want is the Europe of markets and competition. So it was when they told us that there was no alternative to the politics of austerity and the destruction of our welfare state. They are deeply wrong on both counts.

Such powerful manipulation of our thinking must be challenged. We must actively resist the 'England Good; Europe Bad' mantras that are issuing forth from both the Tories and UKIP and being fanned into a bushfire of anti-European sentiment by an irresponsible and ill-informed media. So let's start now by recalling some of the policies from Europe that have made our lives better in this country than they would have been had the free market of Beecroft and Paterson.

Let's start with the End-of-Life Vehicle Directive. This is a practical policy devised by European Greens to challenge the throwaway culture of contemporary capitalism. The Directive passes responsibility for the disposal of cars back to the manufacturer, thus putting a cost incentive behind attempts to improve recyclability of components and reuse of materials used in the manufacture of cars. The WEEE Directive achieves similar objectives in the case of electronic equipment.

The REACH regulation is a system for the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemical Substances. It is an attempt to acknowledge that fact that new chemicals are proliferating in our environment. It is clear that the interests of corporate industry have had too much influence over this regulation, as a critical account by Anne Chapman describes, but it is at least an attempt to gain social and political control over this potentially most destructive of industries. Where would we be without the EU regulating the chemical industry?

The European regulation that is a key target of the marketeers and that working people would miss most is the Working Time Directive. This has been subject to vilification akin to the fictional attempts to straighten out bananas, but in reality it is a system of reasonable boundaries to protect workers against exploitation. Who except the likes of Beecroft could object to requirements such as 'a minimum daily rest period, of 11 consecutive hours in every 24' or 'paid annual leave of at least four weeks per year'?

The very aspects of the European project that the Tories and their business friends would seek to support are the same ones that I deplore: the pro-corporate market that is not obliged to consider the needs of people or the environment. It is only our 'European partners', and amongst them the powerful Green Group in the European parliament, who are protecting us from such a fate, as the three parties who dominate Westminster politics and the strange purple party that dominates the debate on Europe sacrifice everything of true value for the sake of economic growth.
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Flying Down to Rio

World leaders are gearing up for their trips to the global environmental conference in Rio later this month. With so much bad news around who could resist a little climate grand-standing? The suited heros will stride the world stage comparing the size of their green stimulus packages. Civil servants will spend hours preparing documents demonstrating reductions in CO2 emissions, despite the fact that a report soon to be launched by Green House thinktank includes clear evidence that, if you include aviation and freight emissions that are left out of the Kyoto totals, and especially if you include the emissions embodied in our imports, then we are polluting more and not less.

And what of the carbon impact of the conference itself? The admittedly rather primitive calculator provided by the website Flying Off to a Warmer Climate suggests that a business flight to Rio generates around 3,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide with a warming equivalent of around 10,000 tonnes. (The warming impact from aviation is higher because the emissions are produced high in the atmosphere.) This is more than two years' worth of an individual's total carbon emissions. And that is just Ed Davey. What about his civil service retinue? I can imagine a situation where, if these high-level negotiations were serious, this production of CO2 could be justified, but the kind of hot air that will be produced in Rio just does not deserve this level of planetary warming

It is a times like this that I wonder whether there is a God, but the constant stream of cosmic jokes and coincidences restores my faith. Not only does God exist, but she has a great sense of humour and wonderful timing. In 1933, some four years after capitalism's last world-wide catastrophe, and during a similar burst of cultural escapism, RKO made the film Flying Down to Rio. The film, which starred Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, included a range of crazy scenes with tiller girls high-kicking on the wings of planes that seemed so novel and glamrous in the thirties. This has provided the inspiration for the wonderful cartoon by Imogen Shaw that you are invited to share far and wide.
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Unified Continent not Single Currency

The first time that I was in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with Conservatives was some ten years ago when, on behalf of the Green Party, I joined the national campaign against Britain joining the Euro. The pro-finance and little Englander Tories felt the need for a bit of breadth and so invited Euro-sceptic former foreign minister David Owen, a couple of anti-European Labour MPs and a representative from the Green Party to join them.

Around the same time I published a chapter in a book called Implications of the Euro: A Critical Perspective from the Left. In my chapter I discussed the ways that a single currency would force the pace of political change in a way that the institutions could not follow and would alienate the peoples of the countries involved. This, and the growing tensions between nations that would be created, could threaten the future of the European project as a whole. The self-interest of finance could overwhelm the common interest of peace.

This morning I believe we have seen these predictions come to pass. This is why I believe that David Cameron was right not to join the treaty although, just like the Tories on the anti-Euro committee a decade ago, we could not be further apart in terms of the economic route Britain should follow. Cameron's interest is almost entirely to protect the City and to avoid its spivs and speculators from being forced to consider the social consequences of their actions. However, some in his party are articulating concerns about democracy that I still believe have merit.

It is tempting to believe that the European institutions might impose acceptable standards on the City, just as they have forced us to improve our environmental standards and reduced exploitation at work. But the problem every time has been that we have not had the power to make these decisions democratically. We do not elect people with sufficient power to make decisions at the European level and so these decisions have no more political authority than the current unelected prime ministers of Italy and Greece.

The democratic deficit is more threatening to the aims of the EU than the collapse of the euro. For many years the single market and then the single currency were ambitions driven by business to serve its interests. They have utterly distorted the institutions of Europe and have alienated many of the people of Europe from this organisation that was designed to protect their peace and prosperity. How else can we interpret the huge votes in many of Europe's most loyal members for parties of the nationalist right?

Although the details of the new treaty are as yet unclear we do know that it will involve allowing unelected European officials to set levels of spending and rates of taxation in countries over which they have no democratic mandate. The Euro always constrained monetary policy and therefore reduced the room for manoeuvre in terms of fiscal policy. But as the fiscal straitjacket is imposed, and austerity follows, it is Europe and the other nations that make up the continent that will be blamed by the citizens of the countries who suffer.
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Who's Fooling Who[m]?

This posts begins with a conversation I had with my daughter about whether Banksy would be elected as Mayor of Bristol if he chose to stand. Everybody wants to know Banksy, to be like him. The pride we feel in somebody who manages to make political argument witty and accessible is unexpected in an era when we are told that people are not interested in politics.

Banksy's variety of street politics is more appealing because it is more open, and also more directly challenging without having any apparent victims. His anonymity adds to the allure as well as to the appeal. He has become an Everyman character: like Charlie Chaplin's tramp, standing up to authority and using ridicule to emerge victorious. We would all like to feel that we could legitimately claim 'I am Banksy (and so is my wife)'.

The trickster character plays an important role in mythologies across the world. In West Africa he is Anansi, who plays tricks on the Gods and takes the form of a spider. In Japanese mythology he is Kitsune, the fox. Tricksters are cunning and witty, but often end up with joke on them. In native American cultures Coyote often plays this role, while in historic mythological systems the Norse cultures had Loki and the Greeks Hermes.

The role of the trickster, like the fool in Medieval courts, is to prick the pomposity of those in authority. He is the antidote to hubris. Perhaps it is because our society, with all its scientific knowledge, has lost the wisdom of being able to laugh at itself that Banksy is proving so popular. He also tempts us to revel in, rather than eliminate, doubt and uncertainty. His first foray into film-making, the Oscar-nominted Exit through the Gift Shop, could itself be one extraordinary hoax. But whether the joke is on the duped majority, the art establishment, Mr Brainwash, or even Banksy himself, is hard to tell.
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Which side are you on?

Has anybody learned anything from the riots? The responses across the political spectrum suggest that people are reading into the events what they need to see to reinforce their prejudices. This is happening to me to: I am warming to Ed Miliband with his soothing words about diverse families and immoral bankers, and snorting involuntarily as Nadine Dorreys tells us about the Good and Bad uses of Twitter, as though she had barely left kindergarten.

In times of stress it is predictable that we will cling more strongly to what we know, rather than being opening to new ideas. The research into brain function initiated by Colin Firth as a playful attempt to discover what was biologically wrong with people who didn't agree with him in fact generated interesting results about the security levels of those who identify with Labour or Conservative world-views.

Clearly, I am not a neuro-expert, but it appears that the amygdala, the primitive part of the brain that was found to be enlarged amongst Tory voters, is associated with the foundation of emotional memories, and how we relate these to our responses. if the neuro-scientists will forgive me, I would like to suggest that this relates to our decisions about what should make us afraid and how we should act as a consequence.

The performance by a range of Conservative spokespersons in the past fortnight can be read as a live demonstration of their insecurity and need for strict boundaries. When we hear Iain Duncan Smith being so firm about the difference between Right and Wrong we should remember that, as a Catholic, he believes that these are clear categories determined by the Pope. For his emotional security he needs to believe that, just as he needed to join the army to gain some sense of structure.

Similarly, the talk of absent fathers is interesting coming from politicians whose busy work schedule makes it questionable how much they can really be there for their own children, and whose fathers were also presumably rarely present. For those who were sent early to boarding schools, family life must be something they yearned for, a yearning they are now happy to project onto others.

Might it be going too far to suggest that joining a political party is itself like joining a gang. Each party has its own code, its own set of firm beliefs, a togetherness gained from adversity - except for the Green Party they even have a whipping system to prevent failures of group loyalty. Nothing can repair the damage caused by a dysfunctional childhood, but clinging to a dogmatic belief system can certainly help you feel less insecure.
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Man or Superman?

In the wake of last week's riots there have been no shortage of supermen rushing forward to suggest how the rest of us might live. I have found many of the prescriptions, frankly, sickening. The focus on the failure of families is especially troubling, because it slides so easily into blaming women for their failure to be adequate parents.

I also find the use of the phrase 'underclass' troubling. Like the idea of the 'undeserving poor' that preceded it, it suggests a natural hierarchy in society that actually arises as a result of a capitalist economy. The easy way with which Duncan Smith and Cameron talk about Right and Wrong, as though these were generally agreed categories, identifies them clearly as members of the dominant class and its hegemonic ideology.

The Wrong values are, apparently, about selfishness and greed; whereas the Right values are about hard work and supporting your community. I can't be the only person who questions whether the wealthy are more likely to find themselves in the first value set or the second.

As Cameron styles himself as some sort of Nietzschean Übermensch, the 'creator of new values' striding forth to save us mere mortal from chaos, I am reminded of the balancing word Untermensch, and the danger of defining human beings into more or less worthy categories. How much more wholesome is the Yiddish word Mensch, that comes without qualification or hiearchy and means, according to the Webster-Merriam online dictionary: a 'good person, human being, person'.

That is where most of us are at: struggling to do our best in a hostile economic system and without the advantages of wealth or elite status. We haven't broken society and, through our daily acts of mutual kindness, we make and mend it anew. Tweet

The Voice of Reason

The following exchange from Hansard neatly illustrates the benefits and the limitations of having a Green MP:

Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green): Violence is always to be condemned, but as the Prime Minister said, seeking to understand violence is a world away from seeking to justify it. Indeed, we ought to try to understand it to stop it happening in future. Given the growing evidence, from Scarman onwards, that increasing inequality has a role to play in drawing at least some people into violent behaviour, can the Prime Minister reassure the House that comprehensive impact assessments will be undertaken before his Government introduce any more policies that increase inequality?

The Prime Minister: Everyone wants to see a fairer and more equal country, but I have to say to the hon. Lady that young people smashing down windows and stealing televisions is not about inequality.
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Shock till you Drop

How many of your friends have told you recently that they feel lucky to still be in work? This is the sign of somebody who has already given up the fight for decent standards of employment and a fair rate of pay. People who make comments like this should be politely but firmly put right. Their supine acceptance of the public-spending lies must not be allowed to take hold of the national psyche.

This sort of feeble-minded compliance is, of course, particularly prevalent in the public sector, which is the primary target of Slasher Osborne. The news that the Treasury is requiring plans for 40% cuts from the majority of departments makes clear that this is all about ideology and nothing to do with economics. One would expect the instinctive reaction of a Tory government to be to favour the private sector and punish the public sector. But in the case of Cameron and Osborne it is difficult to understand whether they really are stupid enough to sacrifice the whole national economy just to pick on public-sector workers, or whether it is a more subtle attempt to undermine the self-confidence of working people.

This is not a new strategy. Back in 1981 Thatcher's absurd policy of monetary tightening pushed the economy over the edge and resulted in the worst recession in a generation. The weakened situation of employees allowed the Tory government to force through a range of anti-union legislation that will make resistance much tougher this time around. I wonder how many people then were wandering round telling colleagues how lucky they were to still be in work. I was lucky enough to be too young to be in the labour-market.

Between them Mark Serwotka and Naomi Klein seem to have the right explanation: political shock and awe to make us vulnerable to whatever radical changes they seek to impose on our society. Together we can resist, but the shock tactics are designed to divide and conquer: pitting public sector against private sector, employed against unemployed. These are times for keeping your head, whether all about are losing theirs or not. Tweet

A Brief Word, Mr Cameron

The class war has been launched, and not by the Labour Party. Cameron's speech today sets the scene for a principled stand in favour of the interests of his owners rather than earners. This should be greeted with no surprise - why else was he elected in the bungled events of last month? Certainly not on the basis of his charisma or incisive intelligence. This speech will be followed up by attacks in the media on the plans for strike actionsby working people defending their living standards before these have even be discussed much less voted through.

The political implication is that the public sector has enjoyed massive investment during the Labour years and that it will now pay the price while the private sector and the interests of capital see their just returns. The problem is that this is an outrageous untruth. My argument rests on the two pictures that are included with this post. Between them they demonstrate how the need for the shocking levels of public borrowing arose and where that money was spent.


The first graph demonstrates perfectly how we got into this mess by tracing public-sector borrowing from February 2007 to December 2008. It shows the steep rise that followed the banking crisis when our money was extracted in various ways to prevent the collapse of global finance. We didn't cause this, we didn't benefit from it, and yet the graph shows clearly that we paid for it.

The second graph shows the same variable - public sector net borrowing - between February 2009 and April 2010. If you compare the graphs you can see that we are on a totally different axis here. Annual borrowing of £35bn. in Feburary 2007 had, by April 2010, been massively increased to £160bn. This is not the result of pointless spending on government bureaucracy, or the overpayment of nurses and teachers, its precise location in time makes clear its origin in the bank bailout.



Perhaps as some sort of weak demonstration of honesty to justify his claim to have introduced a new type of politics Cameron does, in a subtle way, identify where the money went:

'The global financial markets are no longer focussing simply on the financial position of the banks. They want to know that the governments that have supported the banks over the last eighteen months are taking the actions to bring their own finances under control.'

This implicit admission of the massive transfer of value from public to private, from us to them, and the corresponding transfer of their debts to our public balance-sheet is the real political issue here. It is vital that working people defend their interests, and most importantly do not follow the divide-and-rule strategy that the attacks on public-sector pay suggest will accompany the inevitable summer of discontent. Tweet

True Blue Never Fails

At last the Tories have come out of their policy closet and given some detail on what they actually plan to do after the next election. And we see that they are the same old party. Their response to a recession is to cut public spending and pick on the vulnerable. Cuts in the health budget and tax breaks for business: business as usual for the true blues.

The slogan for the first day of 'business' was peculiarly misplaced: getting Britain working. It is hard to see how forcing the sick and disabled from one form of social security benefit to another is going to create the millions of jobs that our economy is short of, according to the conventional economic paradigm, based as it is on wage slavery. Any attempt to resort to the traditional pasttime of threatening the marginal with starvation is more likely to get Britain robbing.

Why is it that those on the right are so desperate to force others into unpleasant, poorly paid jobs, that generate little of value and a great deal of carbon dioxide emissions? Could it be that they detest their own jobs and feel others should suffer alike? Light greens are much more likely to offer to share some of their work through reducing work hours, or their income through a citizens' income scheme. Darker greens would argue for freeing access to resources - especially land - so that people can provide for their own needs outside the market system.

And what of the Tories' promise to be the 'new green'? This fake and shallow veneer has rapidly peeled away. 'The environment' will barely feature at this week's conference as the planet's fair-weather friends revert to type and blow on the dog-whistle of oppressive Victorian policies that works so well within their electoral niche.

As Colin Hines argued back in the spring, within the conventional paradigm the obvious answer to the two-sided crisis of environment and economy is to send the quantitative easing money in the direction of real green jobs, with real green consequences: retrofitting Britains' tragically leaky housing stock would be a good place to start.

It's hard to know whether the reason this will not happen is that Boy George can't work out the economics - or whether he just can't resist his in-built propensity to beat up on the working people of this country. Or perhaps I should say the people who would be working if the money that might have enabled this had not all been spent on those who live from rents rather than wages. Tweet