Old Lady Rampant in Stroud

We're nearly there. On Saturday I will be donning my father's old business suit and the bowler hat from my daughter's dressing-up box. I'll be heading down to Stroud's Threadneedle Street, with its very own Old Lady (Teashop) to launch the Stroud Pound.

Let's call it rivalry rather than competition, but the brief we gave our designers was to make our notes more stylish than the Lewes pounds, which we loved and secretly envied. They have certainly met this requirement and exceeded our wildest dreams. Four denominations will be available from Saturday morning with a mixture of local celebrities (animal and human) and scenes. This post will only be able to be adorned with one once the strict embargo is past.

Laurie Lee is our star character. There has been much interest in the local press, and we are delighted that his widow, Kathy, will be unveiling the note. She and her daughter Jessy were sure Laurie would have approved. His humanity and deep commitment to equality shine through his writing and must have been drawn from the Stroud valleys, which have been described as a red hand in the middle of Tory-blue Gloucestershire. Our local paper went so far as to say that the courage of the Stroud Pound Co-operative was akin to that shown by Laurie Lee when he went to fight for the Republicans in Spain. We blushed at the excessive compliment, but are delighted by the level of support that we have been given.

Starting a local currency is a deep learning experience. Clutching our own notes for the first time last night generated a mixture of hilarity and awe. As the past year has proved, money is right at the centre of our lives. It really does make the capitalist world go around. Just try to imagine what would have happened to your life if the high-street banks had seized up and your credit card had ceased to function last September. No cashpoints, no ability to pay in shops, very soon nothing in the shops. This is the vital role that money plays in a complex modern economy, and the money we are using has inequality designed into it. It is controlled by the very forces that are wreaking havoc on our planet. Making your own money gives you a chance to really change the economic system that is so all-pervasive as to be invisible and unquestioned.

I still have a wistful longing for Tom Paine, but, although he belongs to Lewes, his belief that 'We have it in the power to make the world anew' belongs to us all. Tweet

The Gender of the Gift

This title really has nothing to do with the subject of this post - I just think it is such a great one I thought I would share it. And that is the theme of this post. In passing I might mention a discussion we recently had in an academic seminar that is relevant to this title, which belongs to a book by Marilyn Strathern. The subtitle is 'Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia' - it is social anthropology and if I read it I'm fairly sure I would not be able to understand, although it might give me a warm feeling that I was in good sisterly company.

The debate concerned whether or not gender is a significant designator of personhood compared with, for example, hair colour. During the discussion nobody could make a rational argument about why it was and I found myself in that embarrassing situation of not being able to avoid seeing the funny side when in a small group of people. I was assaulted by the mental image of several brown-haired women struggling to use a urinal. This is the sort of thing that passes the time in the academic day.

Strathern struggles with unquestioned assumptions that Western anthropologists make about Melanesian society - and Western society - in its attitudes to gifts and women. I have my own struggles with gift-giving - a result of my attempt to reduce my impact on the planet and my own personal trait for being exceptionally mean. I can never be sure which predominates when I do - or don't - buy gifts for friends whom I love dearly.

A friend who lives on bread and scrape recently gave me a gift which epitomises the truth of the adage that 'It's the thought that counts'. We'd been together at a workshop at Climate Camp Cymru. I was responsible for the fuzzy-huggy closing bit and had decided to get everybody holding hands and send a bolt of energy around the circle. This didn't work that well and so we switched to the hokey-cokey. Apparently this was the most blogged about asepct of the workshop.

Which is fine - we are modelling a better life - the hokey-cokey is low-carbon fun and will clearly have a central role in any green society. The gift was a t-shirt asking 'What if the hokey-cokey really is what it's all about?' It could just be.

And while we are on the subject of gifts, a couple of co-conspirators have recently produced delightful books that I would like to share with you and that you might like to share with friends and family who have particular reasons to receive gifts, once you've been through all that problematic carbon-related angst, as already described.

First, we have John-Paul Flintoff's Through the Eye of a Needle: The true story of a man who went searching for meaning – and ended up making his Y-fronts. John-Paul is charming and so is his book. As an intellectual might say, it works on lots of different levels. There is a spiritual journey here, but also lots of hi-jinks and good jokes.

This is the way the world changes, gently, through Woman's Hour and in second-hand clothes shops, not the Today programme and no. 10. At least, I very much hope this is the case. How delightful it would be if Gordon Brown were revealed as wearing underpants made from nettles - that might explain why he always looks so uncomfortable.

The second book is more hard-hitting. In this world of ubiquitous cognitive dissonance how can we be anything other than Speechless? Polyp's fame has increased steadily since his origins as house cartoonist for New Internationalist. Like a really good comedian he can sum up everything that has been causing you frustration and rage in one drawing - and make you laugh about it.

Sometimes the laughter here is fairly dark and hollow, and the cartoons are so complex you could easily spend the whole duration of a bath perusing only one. On that basis the book could keep you going for a whole year - assuming you have cut down your bath-rate to reduce your carbon emissions. It would make a good present for friends (an increasingly large number of younger ones) who don't read. Tweet

Labour or Ownership

I had an interesting time yesterday, revealing myself at the conference of the UK Society for Co-operative Studies (of which I am an Executive member) as not being a member of the Labour Party. I was invited to address a political panel as the Green Party economics speaker. The other parties declined the invitation, which left me hitting it out with Co-operative Party researcher Robbie Erbmann.

The curious thing was how Robbie felt bound to defend The Labour Party, in fact New Labour, which should be even more troubling for a co-operator. The arcane relationship between The Co-operative Party and The Labour Party has been the best kept secret on the British Left since Mandelson was revealed as gay on Newsnight.

The Co-operative Party was set up by co-operators, whose aim was to take direct control of the productive forces of the economy and thus undermine the power of the capitalists to extract their labour as surplus value. The party, set up in 1917, was their political wing, to lobby for a supportive environment to build co-operatives. But in 1927 it made the fateful mistake of signing an agreement not to stand against Labour candidates. Although there are 29 MPs today who are officially Co-operative/Labour, nobody would tell the difference. They are probably more likely to raise questions about the killing of innocent civilians as a result of resource wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they are still there at Westminster keeping the government who made the decision to launch those wars in power.

Why is it assumed that if you support co-operatives you must support Labour? Way back in the mists of the dawn of the last century the genuinely political working people of this country who were busy organising their own alternative economy (which made up some 30% of the economy during the 1930s) were utterly shafted by the Webbs and their ilk, who sold them out to a political party which took their power in return for a vote once every five years. But there is no reason why today's co-operators should support New Labour.

At a time when it is clear that the interests of working people in reclaiming control of the value of their labour, rather than merely their pay and terms and conditions, are coinciding with those of the planet, which cannot take the pressure from the extraction of surplus value, I find it bizarre that co-operators are still unquestioning about their commitment to Labour. Co-operatives are clearly a part of the future sustainable economy; the Labour Party is not. My proposal for the stranglehold that Labour has on the Co-operative Party was not favourably received, but may perhaps resurface during the bloodbath that will follow the next election. Tweet

Ecological One-Upmanship

If only we could convert all those faceless automata who make up the corporate persona to approach the environment as if, rather than seeing it as something outside the window, they felt that we were truly a part of it. We would not then need to introduce policies to prevent companies from polluting because their employees would intrinsically resist poisoning their own air. If we were truly embedded in our environment then protecting it would become a personal commitment rather than something governments needed to devise policy to force us to do. This is the approach of environmental philosophers who develop the concept of ‘ecological citizenship’.

Ecological citizenship suggests that strict policy-making might militate against our best environmental behaviour. Two Swiss academics analysed a mass of international research into the effect of compensating people financially for acts and services they performed freely had on their willingness to continue in their virtuous behaviour. They distinguished between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, i.e. those things that people do because they are ethically motivated or just feel good about them, rather than those things they do because there is some material incentive or disincentive. In the case of volunteering, they found that paying volunteers actually reduced the amount of volunteering. In similar vein, an Israeli childcare centre that began charging parents who picked up their children late found that more were doing so. The explanation is that, once it became a financial matter, they felt they had an implicit contract; whereas when they felt guilty about their lateness they tried much harder to be there on time.

The example of research most relevant to the theme of this book concerns the willingness of communities to accept the siting of a noxious facility in their backyard, in this case a nuclear waste repository in Switzerland. Conventional economists would suggest that the solution is to provide financial compensation. Initially, 50.8% of residents agree to have the repository in their community, with 44.9% in opposition. The next stage was to offer variable rates of compensation to local residents, who were then surveyed again:

The respondents were asked the same questions, whether they were willing to accept the construction of a nuclear waste repository, but it was added that the Swiss parliament had decided on a substantial compensation for all residents of the host community. While 50.8% of the respondents agreed to accept the nuclear waste repository without compensation, the level of acceptance dropped to 24.6% when compensation was offered. The amount of compensation has no significant effect on the level of acceptance. About one quarter of the respondents even seem to reject the facility simply because financial compensation is attached to it.

The findings have important implications for policy in this area, since we may conclude that taxation or charging may be expensive in itself but may also be inefficient if it discourages people from undertaking environmentally friendly behaviour they might have undertaken anyway, without the incentive. And in other areas they might now look for incentives before changing their behaviour. Policy-makers should beware of crowding out people’s natural motivations to do good, to respect each other and their environment. The danger with applying tools such as cost-benefit analysis is that they assume a selfish motivation which may not exist. However, assuming such selfishness can become a self-fulfilling prophecy and can then train citizens to be self-serving and less virtuous.

So if policy-makers might do more harm than good by their restrictive policies, how might they encourage the sorts of shifts in behaviour and moral (spiritual, even?) outlook that would enable a protective ethic towards the planet? Dobson suggests the rewarding and celebration of pro-environment behaviour—perhaps the designation of environmental ‘champions’ or the rewarding of particularly well-embedded citizens through the award of medals. Rather than struggling to live within our carbon quota perhaps we might find ourselves receiving the Order of the Lapwing or being designated Green Man of the Year? Tweet

Anti-Bank Holiday to Remember

Climate camp was a delight. The whole event has been planned and executed with what I hardly dare call military precision, perhaps most of the all the 'swoosh' to the chosen site on Blackheath common, which was completely unexpected by local residents. Apart from the absence of uniforms, hierarchy, and meals-ready-to-eat, of course. Instead we had communally cooked organic veggie fare, available on time and for a nominal (and voluntary) charge. The level of organisation was immensely impressive.

Campers are encouraged to join 'neighbourhoods' which, with the exception of the Thames Valley (an in-joke at the expense of our friends in navy blue) are based around regions of the country. So we had our dinner in Wales and our lunch the following day in the Thames Valley. When our massive saucepan was empty, news reached us that there was still food in Yorkshire. It did begin to feel rather Medieval. Each neighbourhood meets at 10am to plan the day, share out work and raise any concerns about the camp as a whole. It then sends a representative to the spokes meeting so that the whole camp can share planning and decision-making.

I always find camps and festivals the most vibrant source of creative and informed discussion about the world's problems and solutions. The site was well chosen, with an excellent view of the skyscrapers of the city which could be seen beyond the perimeter fence draped with slogans such as 'the planet doesn't do bail-outs', 'soul not coal', and 'capitalism is crisis'.

My own contribution was the Friday night plenary on capitalism and climate change. It began with a camper explaining to a marquee packed with about 500 people, and in pictoral form, Marx's analysis of the crisis of capitalist production. The theory had been brought up do date by the inclusion of 'loadsamoney' and 'shitloads of cash' but otherwise would have been easily recognisable to the man with the beard. Aside from the proliferation of four-letter words, which I probably wouldn't get away with, I might follow this tack in my university teaching next year. As occupation of universities was the theme of one of the workshops over the weekend, I may not need to.

My journey home was chaotic and discordant in contrast to the smooth harmony of the camp. The Blackheath site passed its health-and-safety inspection. My First Great Western train would not have done since there was no water to wash your hands after using the toilet. Given a choice between 'business' and the campaigners I know who I would have running the country, and not just because of the standard of the WCs. Tweet

Tobin or Not Tobin

At first blush we may be surprised to hear Adair Turner, the closest thing to crumpet the City ever produced, supporting a tax which has long been proposed by those who oppose financial speculation, the casino economy, global capitalism and everything the City stands for. But if we dig a little deeper we begin to see that this may be a very cheap way out of a very deep hole for our sharp-suited adversaries.

James Tobin was far from being one of us, and in fact was rather offended that it was the anti-capitalists who picked up on and propagated his idea for a tax on currency speculation. Until he died in 2002, his had been a fairly typical career for an orthodox economist: teaching the bogus ‘science’ at Harvard and Yale, advising the government on same, a seat on the board of the Fed., and a ‘Nobel Prize’ for developing an econometric modelling technique. How disturbed he would be to find his idea working against everything he stood for from beyond the grave.

It should be made clear that the Tobin Tax, which would be levied on all international currency transactions, is proposed at a tiny rate. Tobin originally suggested 1% and even lower rates are now being bandied about. The fact that it is worth introducing a tax at this rate indicates the vast sums of money that move across the international currency exchanges every day. Taxing may extract some of that value to be invested in worthy projects, but relating the tax inversely to the length of time the investor holds their investment would do so more effectively. This principle could then be applied to investments in general, discouraging the short-termism and rapid movement of investment cash that so destabilises the real economy.

The Tobin Tax is Green Party policy and is a good step towards gaining some return from currency speculation for the public benefit. The fact that the financiers are so opposed inclines one to support. The idea for the tax grew out of the last financial crisis – when Nixon unilaterally dismantled the international financial architecture that had been agreed by a group of nations at Bretton Woods, following the Second World War. It may be part of the solution to the current crisis, but only in the context of a new international negotiation, and one in which all countries engage on equal terms. Tweet

Not Earning but Owning

There are two important questions that keep recurring in current debates about the resilience of our economy: 'Can Britain Feed Itself?' and 'Who Owns Britain?'. The first is the title of an excellent study by Simon Fairlie in The Land, which reported his back-of-an-envelope calculations about how we might survive if our post-colonial trading links with the rest of the world were suddenly cut.

As I consider these two questions I am developing a particular fondness for the word 'requisition'. Like the landless peasants of Brazil, we should use the concept of usufruct to prevent the rentier landlords from depriving us of land for homes, growing plots, and useful wastes. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Landshare idea is all well and good, but, as an old Etonian, he is unlikely to challenge the ruling class and - as ever - access to land is not the point. It is ownership that really matters.

Here we come to Kevin Cahill, whose weighty but fascinating book Who Owns Britain?, first published in 2001, is the product of another man's healthy obsession. It is the best account we have of how the land that should be our common treasury is actually parcelled out between us - well between very few of us as it turns out. It is a fairly patchy account, since 1066 and 1872 are the last two dates when a proper cadastral survey of the country was undertaken.

My own county of Gloucestershire is dominated by large estates. I've been somewhat distracted by Cahill's excellent book and have checked out that of Lord Sudeley (Merlin Charles Sainthill Hanbury-Tracy), who I once shared a platform with at the House of Lords. His wikipedia entry fills me with a combination of hilarity and rage. His pedigree truly is Eton, Oxford and the Guards. I can't be sure whether I am pleased or not that he has now had to sell the family seat to Damien Hirst.

Sudeley's peerage arose from the political activities of plain John Hanbury (he adopted the 'Tracy' suffix as his career developed), whose father made his money in the Pontypool Ironworks. My great-grandfather was just down the road in Merthyr, but on the other end of the class system. Hanbury became MP for Tewkesbury and was later given a hereditary seat in the Lords. This is how power, wealth and most importantly land are allocated in our far from meritocratic society.

We don't know what we could grow on our land and we don't know who owns it. These two issues are obviously closely connected. Before the enclosures or 'lowland clearances' as we should really call them took place in the 17th and 18th centuries (these are profiled in depth in the latest issue of The Land), whether or not we could feed ourselves was a question we had it in our power to answer, both as individuals and as communities who shared common land. This made us free in a sense that most of us today cannot even imagine; and that explains why the question about who owns our land today is so difficult to answer. Tweet