The Wind is Ours

I was very pleased to be present at the August meeting of Stroud District Council's development control committee where we had an important item to discuss: planning permission for two wind turbines in the southern part of our district. The proposal came from the Resilience Centre, a renewable energy company based in the Forest of Dean. They had previously applied for planning permission for the turbines but permission had been rejected. This time, however, they had the support of the planning officers and were hopeful that permission would be granted.

As ever with such applications there was considerable local resistance from the community living close to the proposed site and the ward councillor for Hardwick also spoke against the application. Representatives from the Resilience Centre and from the community of Kingswood both spoke and the debate was well-informed, respectful and inclusive. Although the final vote will split it was in favour of permission being given and the key deciding factor was the fact that a large dividend will be paid to the community and local people will be offered the opportunity to buy shares in the wind turbines. So everybody in the community affected in Kingswood will benefit and in addition a local investment vehicle will be created.

On Saturday I saw plans for a much larger and more ambitious proposal to build a large array of wind turbines off the south coast of England close to Bournemouth and Poole known as Navitus Bay. In many ways this proposal could not be more different from that which had been agreed at the planning meeting. It has aroused huge local opposition much of which, like the opposition in Stroud, is apparently the result of the potential impact on the landscape. In the case of Bournemouth, this is interpreted as an economic objection rather than a social one, since the argument is that tourists will be put off by the 'towering' turbines.

However it seems to me that the real objection is much work closely connected with ownership than it is with the appearance of the windfarm. The Navitus Bay wind array is being proposed by a consortium between EDF energy's renewable subsidiary and the Dutch-owned Eneco Wind. This appears to be a bizarre reversal of our colonial past where we exploited the energy resources of other countries, originally of course those of Wales to fuel the industrial revolution that made Britain the economic driving force of global capitalism. But now, with a desperately unimaginative government and an economy focused on finance rather than the productive sectors, we seem incapable even of using our own energy resources in the national interest.

This is such a striking contrast with the situation in other EU countries, famously Denmark and Germany, where government is creating a framework for communities to emancipates themselves from energy corporations and have take genuine ownership over there in renewable energy resources.  Because of the focus on community and publicly owned renewables Denmark is the European leader in renewable generation and also consequently turbine manufacture.During the 1980s the Danish government funded 30% of all investments in wind turbines with the result that by 2009, 28% of Denmark’s electricity came from renewable sources.  While the economy has grown by 78% between 1980 and 2009 energy consumption has not increased, indicating significant advances in energy efficiency.

In the period of initial expansion some 80% of turbines were owned by families or co-operatives and 28% of Denmark’s energy coming from renewable energy. This has also led to impressive regeneration with the country now manufacturing half the world’s turbines, with the parallel creation of 20,000 jobs (all data from Andy Cumbers's excellent book Reclaiming Public Ownership. As document by the excellent Energiewende website, the transition away from fossil fuels and nuclear in Germany is even more impressive in its speed and again it is being driven by social ownership. The graphic shows that, in stark contrast to developments in Bournemouth, around half of German generating capacity is now owned by private individuals.

Germany is providing an inspiring example of the speed with which the transition to a renewable energy future is possible. These developments are in the possible because of the genuine engagement of local communities and their ability to take real rather than metaphorical ownership of their energy resources. What a sad contrast to the situation in the UK, with an emphasis on fracking and nuclear new-build to increase our dependence on yesterday's energy sources and to generate privatised profits for the few rather than energy liberation for the many.

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The Gypsy Rover, the Norman Yoke and the Land Value Tax

I have always loved the folk-song The Whistling Gypsy. In fact, I like it so much that I have been known to sing it in those situations of cultural exchange where, far from home and in a foreign language zone, you are called on to share something. But I have always been rather disappointed by the heroine who, although following the gypsy rover, convinces her father to accept her decision by pointing out that he is 'Lord of these lands all over'.

But, like many aspects of folk culture, it occurred to me recently that this is a song of great subtlety. It is not that the gypsy is also a land-owner and therefore deserves the hand of the lady whose heart he has won, rather he considers himself lord of the land that he roves through. He has, in other words, gone through exactly the sort of mental reinterpretation we need to go through as a society. This takes some effort because it requires  us to throw off the shackles of a thousand years of feudalism.

Andy Wightman has done great service in the case of Scotland in challenging the legal effort that has been invested in constructing the reality of land ownership to the extent that the land we should share is littered with 'Trespassers will be prosecuted' signs and the authors of those signs are paid large sums of EU money for the privilege of having sole use of what is our national economy's most valuable resource. His books Who Owns Scotland links the rise of the lawyer's trade and their wealth to the need of warlords to provide written justification for their ill-gotten gains, and in an era when literacy was a rare privilege a legal document could exclude almost everybody from the argument.

This is my reason for supporting a Land Value Tax and this is what I will be arguing when I come up against Vince Cable on Tuesday evening at an RSA Screens event. He and John Christensen will find other reasons to support the taxation of land, some pragmatic and some rather dangerous--based in arguments about the 'inefficient' use of land. Property development is perhaps the most egregious current example of private profit at social cost and returning a large proportion of the gain from planning uplift to the community is an immediately appealing consequence of introducing LVT.

But for me our alienation from the land—our economy’s most valuable natural resource—is at the root of our alienation from nature itself and from our own freedom. This does not mean that we all need to be peasants but it does suggest that the way of the whistling gypsy may be a surer route to happiness than the way of the suited business executive or the zero-hours-contract worker for whom he creates a job.

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Dial M for Murdoch

I have had this book for several months but have been reluctant to open the cover, not because it was likely to be turgid or boring but because I feared that the content would both sadden and sicken me in terms of the conclusions I would be forced to draw about the decline of standards in public life. Although none of the content is now news, to read it collected together is an emotional rather than intellectual feat. It truly does describe, as its subtitle claims, how News International has been permitted through cowardice and greed to corrupt Britain.

I often think of involvement in politics as being a continuum that runs from truth to power. Anybody involved in making political decisions is forced to compromise and then tells their story about why that happened. So even Gandhi would have been hard pushed to claim he was entirely at the truth end of the spectrum. But British politics today is entirely focused on power, and money used as a tool to obtain greater power. In this world the perverse statement by James Murdoch to the Edinburgh Television Festival (August 2009, p. 90) creates no sense of dissonance: 'There is an inescapable conclusion that we must reach if we are to have a better society. The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.'

The Murdoch press used phone hacking not primarily to garner stories that would sell newspapers. It was a strategy to gather dirt on the rich and powerful and to blackmail them into submission. The aim was to gain even greater control of the market for information by bullying Cameron and Hunt to allow News International to control 40 per cent of national newspapers and the UK's largest broadcaster (p. 89). The Murdoch family needed to get  control of the remaining 61% of the company’s shares and they needed to prevent politicians from blocking this. It was only the timely breaking of the scandal by The Guardian that put the wholly undemocratic and anti-competitive buyout on hold.

It helped me to have read Jon Ronson's book on psychopaths during the same month as Dial M, because it is apparent that many of those involved in this story are incapable of experiencing remorse or shame and spotting how these people abound in public life makes their behaviour seem more like a disability than evidence of moral decay more generally. But as a society we must find a way to protect ourselves against such people. In response to suggestions of press regulation, those who thrive in the murky and corrupt world of British public life raise objections around liberal values and human rights but, like James Murdoch's suggestion that what Sky is seeking to achieve is media competition in the public interest, this is deceitful guff.

Tom Watson makes clear that the way he and Nick Davies ferreted out the truth about the underbelly of the British media establishment was by using the mantra ‘follow the money’. Hence the inevitable conclusion of the Murdoch saga is that we urgently need to get money out of politics and competition into the media. The Office of Fair Trading exists to prevent exactly the sort of monopolistic domination that Sky has achieved in recent years, while the failure of successive governments to limit donations to political parties feeds into the same incestuous and corrupt relationships between politicians and media executives.

In spite of the work of lawyers and the courage of witnesses a year on from the publication of his report, Lord Leveson’s Inquiry has come to nothing. Politicians claim that they are forced to consider the press’s plan for self-regulation equally alongside Leveson’s independent proposals. Sky still dominates our media and the BBC, that should be our defence, has made a cowardly retreat in the face of political threats. Alan Rusbridger is still fighting the establishment but his paper is lonely and isolated, as it was throughout the years of Murdoch dominance. This autumn will be a watershed in our democratic history with the trials of Brooks, Coulson et al. We should be watching carefully to see whether, in the end, truth or power holds sway.

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The Entropy Law and the Economic Process

I am reading Georgescu-Roegen 's mighty work and not at the first time of trying. It is a huge, dense and rich tome, rich in the manner of chocolate mousse but similarly hard to take in large quantities. But this is August and the month when even the over-worked drones of the modern academy can find some time for reading and so I am treating myself to a surfeit of chocolate mousse and will be sharing some select spoonfuls via this blog.

For those who do not know this book or its author it is worth beginning by saying that  Georgescu-Roegen (henceforth GR) was born in Constanta on the Black Sea coast of Romania in 1906. He studied first mathematics and then statistics and economics, on a scholarship to Paris and in London with Karl Pearson. After communism came to Romania he went to the US where he taught economics at Vanderbilt University from 1950 to 1976. We probably know about GR because of the work of his student Herman Daly, who began with a fairly conventional career but seems to have been so influenced by the thought of his heretic teacher that he started taking the biophysical limits seriously and developed, with others, the school of Ecological Economics that is now one of the major critical approaches to the neoclassical hegemony.

I was drawn to the book because, unlike so many economist who began as mathematicians, GR did not remain in the abstract world of numbers and figures, trying to make the systems of life fit into the place statistics had designed for it. Rather his objective was to address the relationship between the biological world and the theorising of economists directly and honestly. Since this task lies at the heart of the interest of a green economist a careful reading of the book is inevitable. However, to challenge the discipline he was so much a part of GR needed to conduct a deep and systematic analysis of how economics worked in the middle of the last century, and it is the outcome of this that the The Entropy Law and the Economic Process presents.

GR begins with a survey of the philosophy of science, as a background to discussing whether economics can ever be a science. Here he draws in many of the philosophical greats, reminding us, for example that it was Kant's view (explained in his wonderfully titled Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that will be Able to Present itself as a Science) that, rather than observing the world and then theorising from our findings, we create our theories and then force our observations to fit them: 'the understanding does not draw its laws (a priori) from nature, but prescribes them to nature' (p. 35).

GR's target, of course, is the early theorists of economics, who sought to transform economics into 'a physico-mathematical science', for example Leon Walras who, when faced with the impossibility of extending the concept of 'utility' this far apparently exclaimed 'Eh bien! This difficulty is not insurmountable. Let us suppose that this measure exists, and we shall be able to give an exact and mathematical account' of the influence of utility on prices and on other economic variables (p. 40). Perhaps it was Walras who was the original inspiration for the joke that asks how many economists it takes to change a light-bulb. The answer is none at all, because they assume that the light-bulb has already been changed.

Jevons was similarly optimistic about the potential of the new sciences and the load-bearing capacity of its concepts. Having declared his intention to rebuild economics as 'the mechanics of utility and self-interest' he waved his hand optimistically at the large quantity of data in account-books and the like as an indication of the nature of economics as a quantitative study, but 'failed to go on to explain how ordinary statistical data could be substituted for the variables of his mechanical equations' (p. 40) GR likens this to 'planning a fish hatchery in a moist flower bed'.

His conclusion on the work of these pioneers of the economic science is damning, his target its misplaced enthusiasm for mechanistic epistemology and for using logic in an inappropriate context: 'For I believe that what social sciences, nay, all sciences need is not so much a new Galileo or a new Newton as a new Aristotle who would prescribe new rules for handling those notions that Logic cannot deal with'.

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Solidarity to Counter Corporate Exploitation

As though in response to my previous post (!) Chris Bryant will today make a speech addressing the political economy of immigration. According to extracts published in yesterday's Telegraph, he will accuse Tesco and Next of deliberately hiring workers from other EU countries because they are prepared to put up with working conditions and terms of employment that unions outlawed for British workers several decades ago. This, at last, is Labour fighting back on behalf of labour but it comes nearly a decade too late.

Most of the public prognostications about immigration are performance rather than policy, because since the major Enlargement of the European Union in 2004, right in the middle of the last Labour government, there has been a labour-market of 500 million people but without legislation to protect working conditions. What the EU proudly calls the 'largest enlargement so far' took place in 2004 and saw ten new countries join the EU including the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Solvenia, Hungary and the Baltic States. This creation of a huge pool of surplus and low-paid Labour was inevitably going to create downward pressure on wages and cause migration from lower- to higher-paid economies across Europe.

I opposed the Enlargement because I saw that it would increase the size of the low-skilled labour-market and therefore as part of a corporate agenda to undermine the power of working people. I lived in Wales at the time and it was obvious from that vantage-point that the life-chances of those who relied on employment in the factories of multinational companies would suffer seriously if workers earning far less were to become available within the same single market. I assume that Chris Bryant, MP for the Rhondda, has a similar vantage-point but his protestations come to late and with no concrete policies attached. If trade unions, and the Labour parties that were supposed to represent labour and were in power in many of the EU countries at the time, had insisted on equal terms and conditions and a single European minimum wage then the Enlargement could indeed have spread poverty eastwards, but without this agreement it actually brought poverty and employment insecurity westwards.

The conditions of employment, democratic rights and legal protections we enjoy in the UK--the very reason that living and working here is so attractive to those overseas--were won as a consequence of long and bitter struggles. Globalisation, through the expansion of out-sourcing and off-shoring as well as the freer movement of labour, has weakened these rights. This is an issue that stems from the relative power of capital and labour rather than an argument about who us, or is not, a racist. The whole immigration debate is a classic example of divide-and-rule, distracting from the obvious truth that all workers need to be protected with basic employment rights and minimum wage rates.

In the 19th-century the attempt by those who control capital to exploit workers by moving them beyond their sphere of natural rights was recognised and the proposal was one if international solidarity: that workers of the world should unite. If Chris Bryant is to move beyond rhetoric, and to convince working people that there is some purpose in voting Labour, then he needs to get his union friends across Europe to organise that solidarity and call for uniform working conditions and a Europe-wide minimum wage.
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