Join the Love Feast

I was recently invited to a Diggers Agape in Gloucester, which, as well as (or perhaps because of?) being the place where Harry Potter was filmed, appears to be the world centre of radical vicars. This sounded like such an esoteric event that I had to find out more about the idea. Here is what Simon Topping, who I believe to be a man of green cloth, although I have never seen him in a dog-collar, had to say about how the idea came about:

'There were three main influences behind the idea. Firstly, as you might imagine, I was influenced by the writings of Gerrard Winstanley and his central idea that “the earth was made by Almighty God to be a common treasury of livelihood for whole mankind in all his branches, without respect of persons.” From this starting point Winstanley goes on to reject the practice of “buying and selling” because no-one can buy or sell what is (or should be) held in common. Hence our idea for the Diggers agape that people should only bring things that have not been bought or sold.

'The second influence is the Christian idea of “koinonia” which is often translated as “fellowship” but, in many of its usages within the New Testament, actually implies material, economic sharing. This “koinonia” was put into practice through the early church’s community of goods in Acts 2:43-7 and 4:32-5 and through the collection of funds by Paul for the impoverished church in Judea (2 Corinthians 8:3-4 ff).

'Finally, the tradition of the “agape” or Love Feast (a non Eucharistic shared meal) has its roots in early church practice (Jude 12) but was revived by the Moravians and by John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church to which I belong. Agapes, though now infrequent, do still feature as an element of Methodist church life.

We had the first Diggers Agape in January this year and a second in April with about twelve people attending each one. Amongst the many and varied things which people have brought we have had spring water, nettle soup, elderflower cordial, a road kill pheasant(!), hawthorn and dandelion salad, hazelnuts, parsnip and apple soup, poems, stories, shells, a rendition of the Diggers’ song, a rewriting of Woody Guthries’ “This land is my land” to make it relevant to Gloucestershire.'

This all sounds too good to be true and I shall have to scour my garden, or gutter, for suitable produce for the next eucharistic love feast. Perhaps you could start something similar where you live? Tweet

Suits Meet Scythers

My latest issue of The Land has arrived and is filled as usual with excellent things. Perhaps the most encouraging is the serious attempt to find out who owns our most valuable resource - the land itself.

The threatened privatisation of The Land Registry has spurred the Public and Commercial Services union into action and an interesting relationship between land-rights campaigners and anti-privatisation campaigners seems to be developing. The first evidence is a report presenting An Alternative Vision of the Land Registry.

The report in itself is fairly unoriginal - a rehearsal of arguments about the disaster that is New Public Management - but what is interesting, and rather impressive, is that way that the PCS has identified a way of keeping their members' jobs by massively increasing their workload.

The first step to introducing a Land Value Tax would have to be a cadastral survey - a massive data-gathering exercise to establish who actually owns the rolling acres we all feel to be our national heritage. The fact that this information needs to be discovered is what brings the land campaigners - who want redistribution - and the land registry civil servants - who want jobs - together.

Simon Fairlie, bless him, is leaving nothing to chance and his cynical view of politics is likely to be proved right. In typical DIY mode, Chapter 7 are launching their own 'Map Your Local Landowner' award, with prizes of £400 for 'the best cadastral maps to show how landownership is distributed within any given county, district, town, village or parish.' If they receive enough entries they'll be able to piece the map together themselves in the Flaxdrayton Potato Store. If you feel inspired you can contact them on: chapter7@tlio.org.uk Tweet

The Peasants are Revolting

Simon Fairlie wrote an excellent article in The Land a couple of issues back. His focus was the need for a rehabilitation of manual labour. Heinberg's concept of the 'energy slave' makes it clear how much harder we are all going to have to work as oil supplies dwindle. We can gain a similar sense from thinking about the horsepower of machinery that supports our decadent existence. Fairlie's argument was about the nature of the lives we will be living, which he ascertained from considering production, and particularly food production, before the countryside was overrun with machinery. This was the life of the peasant, a person who is also in need of rehabilitation.

A few concepts from our shared past can help to inform the future we are going to build together. One is the concept of the cottage economy. The label 'cottager' did not relate to the bijoux design of your Cotswold-stone residence but was rather about your rights to use common land and therefore to be able to subsist without selling your labour. Cottage industry, by extension, was work that you engaged in to generate surplus cash, not for your bare subsistence.

J. M. Neeson provides a fascinating account of the liberated existence of Britain's peasantry and how they fought to maintain it as landed interests used their political power to force through the theft of shared land via enclosure acts. She estimates that up to a third of the land of the country was either owned by commoners or was itself common which they had rights to use. The destruction of this ancient social system led to an imbalance between people's work and their needs. It led to explosive population growth, as mouths to feed needed to be outstripped by hands that could be sold to work for others rather than to produce their own food.

It also led to a changed attitude to consumption, a loss of the sense of satiety and sufficiency, and the substitution of greed and excess:

'Perhaps having "enough" was unimaginable to men who wrote about crop yields, rents, improvements, productivity, economic growth, always more, as it has been incomprehensible to twentieth-century historians living in constantly expanding market economies, albeit on a finite planet.' (p. 41)

The commons represented a system for sharing a large proportion of the land of this country, even after the advent of fedualism. Their loss was a financial disaster for commoners and the end of a sustainable socio-economic system. Their revival will be a fundamental foundation for land planning within a bioregional economy. Tweet

A Common Treasurer

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

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


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

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

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

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

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