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

A Road Runs Through It

Recently I spent a delightful late summer day on a car-borne pilgrimage to Avebury. Yes, ok, I did drive there, but I was astonished for find that two roads cut right through the sacred circle that was created about 6,000 years ago. It forces you to question what sort of people we have become that we could so blatantly desescrate what our ancestors clearly regarded as a sacred site.

The monuments date from the Stone Age and the relationship of their creators with stone is moving and impressive. We are clearly living in the Money Age, since that is the only thing that touches us so deeply today. Our creations are vast shacks of corrugated tin that have been set up to provide a venue to buy something cheap and sell it expensive. Our greatest monuments are at Canary Wharf - the cathedrals of profit. In Woman on the Edge of Time Marge Piercy projects us into a distant future where they look back at our times and call it The Age of Waste and Greed.

I returned home to hear the news that Athens was burning - the result of fires set deliberately on behalf of property developers seeking to extend the city. The parthenon was lit up by the sacrilegious flames. Only a culture so utterly divorced from its connection with the land could destroy the trees that allow Athens to breathe. Perhaps the tin shacks will be constructed and peopled with privateers who count their piles of money as they suffocate. Tweet

An Economy with Soul

I can't remember who it was who told me that we need to overturn the God of the market: GOD = Grow Or Die. This is obviously a necessary condition for moving our economic life in a sustainable direction, but we need something deeper and more soulful to go along with this: a shift in consciousness.

For a while I've been thinking about a paper to respond to R. H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism in which he argued that the personal ethics engendered by the Protestant religion were crucial in underpinning the development of the new economic system as it developed in the 16th and 17th centuries. I see a parallel with the growing interest in mystical and anti-materialist religions amongst many of those who are building the new economic and social paradigm.

I spent the nicest three days of my holiday at Druid Camp, handily close in the Forest of Dean and - naturally - blessed with beautifully sunny weather (although we were all quite capable for worshipping mother nature in all her different moods). In contrast to the academic conferences I go to, the workshop conveners all spoke from their hearts and so were constantly enthralling.

From a shaman I learned how the world appears if you believe that every aspect of the material reality has a deeper spiritual reality or consciousness. How could this type of understanding contribute to a new consumption ethic, one which includes reverence for the natural world? Many of us do this to some extent when we give thanks for our food, or recall the spirit of the animal that died if we are meat eaters.

The traditional role of the shaman in animistic societies is to move between the seen and unseen worlds. S/he is also responsible for identifying what parts of the physical world can be taken into our bodies, hence their role in experimenting with mind-altering (because toxic) plants. The deeper relationship with the enviroment we are seeking as we build a sustainable economy can be usefully informed by this sort of wisdom. Tweet

When it Comes to Work, Less is More

How embarrassing that yesterday's data from the European Statistics Office show that France and Germany are surviving the recession better than the UK and the US. The two-pronged approach of disciplining labour and liberating capital that was pursued with such conviction for the past 20 years in the Anglo-Saxon world suddenly doesn't look so clever.

I am depressed beyond measure by the thought that this is a result of France and Germany having got in first with their car scrappage schemes. First, I hate to believe that the automotive sector can provide such a significant contribution to any national economy. But more importantly, the thought that continuing to engage in the perverse alchemy of turning fossil fuels into money can possibly be a solution to the mess we are in is simply untenable.

One real difference between the Anglo-Saxons and the continental Europeans is in the extent to which their 'captains of industry' have abandoned the noble task of production for the fool's gold of money itself. If your most significant exports are all invisible they have a tendency, like the emperor's clothes, to disappear. The almost wilful destruction of our manufacturing industries during the 1980s and the refusal, until recently, to take seriously the need for food security, have left the UK in a precarious state.

Interestingly, the French have achieved a stronger economic position with considerably less effort. Far from continuing to haunt their offices throughout the summer for fear of the email tsunami that will be lurking there if they dare to stray, French workers disappear en masse for a whole month in the summer to toast themselves in the sun or eat cheese or whatever else they enjoy doing.

Please join me in my campaign for a real summer holiday. No work for the whole month of August sounds good to me. Anybody else up for that? Together we can defeat the relentless capitalist treadmill and save those Californian internet servers some work. Tweet

The Courage of Conviction

Central to the myth of progress, what Vandana Shiva has called capitalism’s creation myth, is the idea that you can always have more. The lesson of wisdom, of most of the world’s religions, is that there must always be balance. The joy of new love is always balanced by the pain of opening up to another person; the precious love for children is bought at the cost of the fear of their loss; the thrill of being alive is balanced by the fear of death. Balance is the central lesson of life.

It is because of the refusal to accept the pain that accompanies the joy that we are left with a culture devoid of depth and relationships devoid of meaning. We value the instant karma of the reality TV show or the next gadget, while laughing at those who invest their lives in seeking a deeper, more valuable wisdom. When the entrepreneur tells you there is no such thing as a free lunch, he is thinking that everything must be paid for in terms of money, which we are prepared to work for and offer up. But how many of us still understand the price of a meaningful human life, and are prepared to pay for that?

The managerialist politicians who predominate today would probably argue that in order to change something you need to be able to measure it. A cynical wag recently undercut the purported objectivity of this process with his comment that the Blair government has moved from evidence-based policy-making to policy-based evidence generation. The balancing of costs and benefits in the public policy debate demonstrates clearly the predominance of utilitarianism. The downside of this sort of calculation is that it yields outcomes which are repugnant to many citizens.

This is especially apparent in debates over nuclear power, where politicians have decided on our behalf that the number of lives lost as a result of nuclear irradiation are a fair trade-off for the generation of electricity to power homes and factories. Similar arguments are made when decisions are taken to situate landfill sites or incinerators. The welfare of the average citizen predominates over that of the affected individual, making the cost-benefit analysis an inherently immoral calculus. Utilitarianism is also guilty of species chauvinism since the impact of economic decisions on the non-human inhabitants of the planet are never considered, let alone measured.

It is easy to laugh at the economist or politician who attempts to put a price on human life, or the cost of climate change, or the total annihilation of the planet, or who finds that it is best to encourage Czech citizens to smoke because their early deaths save the government money. It is harder – and therefore more vital – to have the courage of our convictions, and of our intuitions and judgements – when we are in situations where important decisions must be made. Tweet