Transition Culture

6 Dec 2013

Reimagining Santa’s Grotto: The Restart Project

The mental image we were brought up with of Santa’s workshop was of hoards of elves working away making new stuff, painting wooden trains with paintpots and so on.  But what if we were able to shift that image, and instead tell our children that the elves aren’t making stuff, they’re repairing it?  That Santa’s crack team, with their little screwdrivers and soldering irons, were breathing new life into tired laptops, mobile phones with cracked screens, and TVs with buttons missing?  That new vision already exists, it’s called a Restart Party.  We caught up with Ugo Vallauri of London’s Restart Project to find out more. 

I started by asking Ugo to explain what the Restart Project is.  He told me:

“The Restart Project is a new social enterprise in London creating a network of community repair events in the UK and abroad, helping people to regain skills around the repair and reuse of small electrical and electronic objects and devices, and developing and delivering services to businesses based on the same concept.

We bring repair back to the mainstream by creating engaging opportunities for teens and small organisations through team building and to learn about engaging ways to bring together teams around discussions and repair and reuse of objects.

My colleague and co-founder Janet Gunter we worked, both of us, in international development for many years.  I was living for a few years in Kenya where the repair culture has obviously never died and in fact is thriving. No-one would ever dream of throwing something away. I was working in an area which tries to bridge international development with the use of new communication and new media technologies [here is a good video introduction to Restart].

 

All these projects always involve, in one way or another, bringing technologies to the developing world. Every time I came back to Europe I had a sense that the more technology we were bringing to other people, the more we actually have to question how we use this technology in general back home, and how non-resilient our technology is, in terms of continuously upgrading and moving on, always being excited about the next big thing; the new technology, the new tablet, the new printer and not really having the same approach.  Particularly for people that care about the environment and climate change, not having the same approach we have, for example, around food.

We want to know everything about where our food comes from but the same people might be people that instead keep upgrading their phones or their laptops and not sure about what is involved in the manufacturing and disposal of these objects. That’s where the idea really came from.

If people came to visit, what would they find? Where are you, what happens, what’s your place?

We have an office in central London. We don’t really exist here in the same way we exist through our events. Our events are all pop-up events that happen in all kinds of different places where a network of volunteer repairers, experts, coaches with all kinds of technical skills help all participants at our Restart parties in resuscitating devices that people had lost hope on.  

Giving a second life to things such as toasters, printers, tablets, laptops, mobile phones and the like. We have hosted such events in all kinds of places, from community centres to pubs, art galleries, schools, universities, even in a church in North London.

How fixable are things nowadays? My sense is that most people’s experience is that you can buy a printer for 40 quid and they go wrong so easily. Can you actually fix those things? Most people would just throw it away and get another one.

Most consumer products that we use today still are fixable but obviously manufacturers have made certain compromises and trade-offs in the way they miniaturise products, which has led to consumers accepting certain products non knowing the trade-off that they were accepting. So in many cases we can still fix quite a lot of things.

However, the cost of doing that, if you were to pay someone per hour to do it, would not be comparable to buying a new product, which is also due to all the externalities linked to the disposal of products and the manufacturing of them, and the whole distribution networks are not taken in to consideration, not to mention all the technological costs linked to production, rare materials, disposal and appropriate disposal [here is Janet Gunter of Restart speaking recently at TEDx Brixton].

Even when we accept that things are recycled and disposed of in ecologically approved ways, we really often don’t realise that a lot of the substances go through a massive shredding process where we are led to believe that recycling is the right thing to do.  We really should be questioning this and focusing more on reuse and repair before we even consider recycling.

What does the time you’ve spent taking these devices to bits and trying to reuse them tell you about the mindset of, and the pressures on, the people who design them in the first place?

Certainly designers are aware of the trade-offs.  In my experience it’s quite easy to agree with them that things could be done differently. But the pressure they are put under by whoever does the brief reduces their chances of having a say when in comes to making decisions that could change the upgradeability of products. If you look at today’s modern small laptops, the ultrabooks, the thinner laptops, nothing prevents manufacturers from making choices that would make it still possible for users to upgrade their products, for example by increasing the amount of RAM memory after they are purchased.

Some manufacturers, the majority of them actually, are now soldering the memory to the motherboard of the computer which means you no longer have the freedom to change the memory or increase the amount of memory, let’s say after two or three years use of the product. That is not really due to a need to further reduce the size of the product. In fact there are comparable products that don’t make that kind of trade-off.

How do you find or train people who actually have the skills to be able to repair these things?

This is one of the most interesting aspects. We didn’t know about this when we started. There’s a wonderful community of people out there that were basically waiting for these kinds of events to happen, to be able to be given a chance to contribute and inspire a community of users. The most extraordinary thing is that we’ve actually just promoted this event and a lot of people have come forward and they were ‘one of us’. There are fantastic skills out there. Actually, the massive projects are actually reskilling entire communities, making sure we have more widespread access to tools and to the knowledge that will help us live in a more resilient way.

Our relationship with technology is actually possible because there are people that until now were quite hidden, maybe working on the side and not appreciated for the kind of technical hardware and software skills that they had. They are extraordinarily happy to provide those skills for the rest of their communities. What I always tell people who want to start a Restart party in their community, and Transition Town or other organisations that want to get involved is “don’t worry, repairers will come”.

What’s more crucial is that you organise an event, publicise it properly, and that you have a few initial technicians that you already know. But many more technicians and people eager and happy to help will come up and share their skills. People love to share their skills. It’s really an old myth, the fact that people with technical skills don’t like to share them. We’ve found an incredible community of people who work day and night to increase this movement because they just have a variety of wonderful skills and they’re so much up for sharing them.

Is it not the case that our Western economic model, which depends on economic growth, depends also on us buying things and throwing them away? If everyone started doing Restart Projects everywhere and repairing everything and not throwing anything away, would that not bring our economy to its knees?

Clearly we see this project at the crossroads of the old economy and the new economy that we would like to see. The new economy is one that sees growth in terms of services and providing a new meaning for local economic development: one less centred around products and use and abuse of resources and one more centred around skills and people and making sense of human relationships. Quite contrary to of the criticism around this, we believe firmly in using this project to create more awareness and demand for commercial repair services as well as community oriented ones.

We are looking at models where the use of new resources and the disposal of old ones only happens when people are empowered to make that decision. So they will go out and buy a new computer or a new mobile phone when indeed it is what they need and not what they’re led to believe is the right thing to do.

Obviously this is a model that scares a lot of people because it implies a rethink of how we create value. Currently we create value, funnily enough, out of the disposal of electronic waste. There’s what we call the outer circle of the circular economy which tries to make products more easy to disassemble at the end of life, as opposed to focusing on what’s really crucial for us, which is making products easier to repair so that less waste is generated to begin with.  

In this way we create more value and more jobs around the repair of things at a community level, where it’s cheaper, there’s no shipping back and forth, and we can rebuild more meaningful relationships considering specifically that our high streets, as we all know, are dying. So many shops have closed and so many spaces are empty and this we see as an opportunity to really reinvent how this service is delivered and redefine creative values to our goods here and now.

What’s the relationship been with Transition? There’s some connection between yourselves and Transition Brixton, am I right?

There’s been connections with Transition both in Belsize where I’m from and Transition Brixton and we’re now talking to other groups. We’ve done an event together with Transition Dartmouth Park, one with Primrose Hill, one we’re discussing with Kensal to Kilburn and we’ve been in touch with other Transition initiatives across the country who want to get involved and replicate the model. We see this as a great opportunity, because the Restart party, and you’ll find more information about this on our website therestartproject.org.  

Restart is a format that every organisation can incorporate and reuse locally as long as it’s kept as a free event supported by donations but open to everyone and very inclusive, as well as being centred around joint learning between people who repair and people who want to learn how to repair the things that they have broken at home.

We see a fantastic opportunity to help Transition Towns use a format that will bring them a new way of getting in touch with their local community, both in terms of new types of volunteers who might not have had a chance to share their skills and not seen themselves as valuable resources for their communities. It’s also a way to create events that speak to a wider portion of society.

What we noticed during these community repair events is that there is an easy way to talk to people of all kinds, from people who really care about the environment and see it as a matter of principle not to throw things away, to people who might not be able to afford a commercial repair and have been harder to reach out to for whatever reason.

The nature of popping up in all kinds of different venues really helps create a dialogue with a much wider set of groups in the communities around us. We’d love to collaborate further with the Transition movement in establishing many more Restart parties across the world.

You talked about how you see and how you’ve planned and designed Restart as being a social enterprise. Could you tell us a bit more about that – how do you see this becoming something that’s able to be financially self-supporting and create livelihoods for people and so on? What’s that model?

We’ve just launched a series of services called Restart Your Workplace, and we see this as a quintessential part of our plan. We noticed that the kind of services we provide to communities obviously make a lot of sense especially in their complete, independent nature. But some of the key values of those events make sense in all kinds of other environments. So we designed a few services that we’re promoting to businesses.

One is around what we call Restart Pop-Up, which is like a clinic that we can take to any organisations for any number of hours, where community repairers will help fix and repair things that belong to employees or things that belong to the company creating a service that people can use during one hour, their lunch break, during a corporate event and creating a buzz and sharing some of our best resources and the best learnings and our wonderful repair culture.

Then we’ve created a more professional service called Restart for Teams which is based on creating a more learning-oriented half-day team building event where a team works in small groups with our best coaches learning the key skills that could transform you from a passive consumer to a much more engaged repairer, getting to know your products; learning how to take a smartphone apart and change the battery and double its future life and learning how to use the basic tools. Using this as a collaborative effort that brings things together, enhances problem solving and is also a lot of fun.

The third one is aimed at small organisations. Not-for-profits are particularly stressed about their IT costs and we help them figure out a way through our trainings to be more resilient and use what they already have in terms of technologies in their business at its best and reducing unnecessary costs in terms of hefty fees paid to an external consultant.

We see this as exactly the same philosophy as what led to the launching of the Restart project but taking some of these key elements to new audiences and reinforcing our message. We’re talking exactly how the same resilience and the same skill sharing are taken into new environments where people see value for them and helping us further develop the community services that we want to develop and provide for free to everyone.

How’s that going? Are you pleased with how it’s been developing and the interest it’s been generating?

In terms of interest it’s going great. We’ve run some wonderful pilots with a number of organisations and we are now relaunching it and marketing it more aggressively. It looks like a lot of people really enjoy this fresh approach and we are lining up quite a few events for the beginning of next year.

You were one of the businesses that appeared in the New Economy in 20 Enterprises report that REconomy did. Do you feel part of a wider new economy movement, and if so, what does that mean or look like for you?

We obviously feel part of a much wider movement. Even just in terms of repair, we’re clearly not alone. There’s an ecosystem of new services and products that are creating value in this area, from companies producing tools that help make it easier for repairers to do their work, to other projects similar to ours but perhaps without the drive to reach social enterprise status and focusing more on community values around repair.

But of course we feel very much part of this new wave, trying to create economic value around new ways of approaching environmental challenges and local engagement, local community development.

It’s very hard at the moment because it’s much easier to come up with a great idea and to push it these days with the internet to reach global visibility around that than to really create a business case for it of course. But we find it a particular time, both in terms of the environmental awareness that seems to be happening in this community and the push for a rethink of our relationship with waste, very much in line with all the social enterprises that are working around food and trying to create a more meaningful relationship between our skills and how we can create value that makes sense for our communities around it.

If you’re successful and the idea that you have really takes off and we see Restart happening everywhere, in an ideal world, what does our relationship with ‘stuff’ look like? It seems at the moment our relationship with stuff is an unhealthy one which generates disappointment and debt and waste and so on and so on. What does a healthy relationship with stuff look like?

It’s a great question, because we have just come up with a new tag line for the Restart project, which says ‘let’s fix our relationship with technology’. We are not just looking at fixing products per se, but really using this as a way to reflect on how we relate to specific objects that are so commonplace in our daily life at this point.

We believe that getting to know a product, including getting to know how you take it part, and having much more open information about where its components come from will help us appreciate in a much more detailed way and fall in love in sense with the things we have as opposed to basically having a very transient relationship with them.

The more we see groups wanting to replicate our work from New Zealand to the US, from Italy to South Africa, we have started to realise that a focus on bringing people together and solving problems at a community level helps people realise that it’s much more important to focus on what we can learn together through these objects than to be always bombarded with marketing messages trying to push to us innovations that are often just perceived innovations, not bringing any more value or better relationships with the people surrounding us.

We believe that ideally, we should come to terms with how much stuff, technologically speaking, we are surrounded by, and learning to make sense of what we have, using it at its best and learning how to repair and reuse. Not everything, obviously, we can’t expect everyone to learn how to repair everything, but to be aware that repair should always be the first option and the fact that something stops working is not an excuse to really move on and go and buy the next flash thing. We should always be mindful of the kind of relationship we have with things.

In a way, people have developed a relationship with objects, we know a lot of people who wouldn’t ever throw away an old mobile phone because it still contains memories, whether in terms of an old SMS from someone special or the memory of a time when that phone was operational. We want to help increase this relationship, just reduces the chance of having to give up on things just because of the way consumer society has been pushing us to move on without us really wanting to necessarily [lastly, here is an interview with Ugo from Smart Monkey TV]. 

                                                                                                                                                     

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5 Dec 2013

The day I closed my Amazon account

I’ve done it.  I’ve closed my Amazon account.  I now stand before you as an ex-Amazon account-holder.  I feel curiously shaky, but at the same time empowered, excited even.  While opening a new Amazon account is easy as pie, closing one is another matter altogether.  I’d like to share with you how, and why, I did it. 

Was it the recent Panorama programme about working conditions in those vast Amazon ‘fulfilment centres’ that tipped me across into doing something?  Was it the stories about the appallingly low levels of tax Amazon pay in the UK?  Was it the recent video showing Amazon’s plans to be delivering across the UK within 30 minutes through the use of drones? Was it hearing the level of taxpayers’ money that goes in sweeteners to attracting Amazon to open up in different communities, while the profits generated pour out of those same places?  What actually tipped me across was a conversation I had with a book seller in my town. It was that that led me, finally, to build the steely resolve needed to close down my Amazon account.  

Yes, I confess, I had an Amazon account.  I buy music from my local record shop, I support my local book shops, but there are times when I need a book quickly, or feel I do, and it’s just easier and more convenient.  And, if I’m honest, I love getting exciting parcels in the post. And isn’t it cheap?  But as Carole Cadwalladr, who went undercover in Amazon’s Swansea ‘fulfilment centre’ for The Guardian puts it:

Our lust for cheap, discounted goods delivered to our doors promptly and efficiently has a price. We just haven’t worked out what it is yet.

I’ve always had that nagging conscience that it’s not OK really, but I have just had it ticking away in the background and carried on using it on occasion.  The conversation that tipped it for me, with my local bookseller, was around “what would it take for you to stop supporting Amazon?”  His example was Primark, recently implicated in child labour in the manufacturing of some its clothes.  We know that’s the case, but we still shop there.  If we knew that 8 year olds work there, would we stop shopping there?  Or 5 year olds?  If we knew that every day they arrive for work they get hit with a stick, would we still pop in there for a cheap new shirt?  And if they got hit 3 times, and then again in the middle of the day?  Where do we draw the line?  

Our tendency is to draw a line, but then for that line to slip.  What swung it for me was thinking that actually, what I already know should be enough to make me withdraw my support.  Also, it was thinking about where the world will be in 5 years time if we continue to give Amazon our support.  More and more low paid jobs, with little Union protection, in conditions described in the BBC documentary as “… all the bad stuff at once. The characteristics of this type of job, the evidence shows increased risk of mental illness and physical illness.”  

We’ll see Amazon ‘fulfilment centres’ that look like a wasp’s nest, with drones flying in and out.  High streets swept clean of bookshops, indeed of most shops, as Amazon spread into selling virtually everything that local economies sell, but far cheaper.  It made me think about what kind of a world I’m creating for my sons as they enter the work place.  What kind of opportunities will Amazon offer them, as they gut local economies and focus economic activity into vast warehouses along the side of motorways? 

I give so much of my time every day to trying to create a different, more just, more resilient world, yet my shopping decisions undermine that.  There is also an extraordinary arrogance to thinking that it is OK for you to fill peoples’ airspace, the sky above their heads, with your drones, delivering your products to people for your profit.  What happens for a company to get so huge that that is considered acceptable?  It is about getting too big.  Amazon is too big.  Far too big.  But it clearly sees that it has only just started.  That’s not good. 

So, decision made, and with a commitment to source those things in other ways, I went to the website to close my account. Closing an account with Amazon is like breaking up with a girlfriend whose level of obsessive denial is such that the possibility you might want to split up with her doesn’t even enter her consciousness.  It’s a fascinating process.  Opening an account with Amazon is so easy.  Closing an account is, as my 15 year-old son might put it, a right mission.  

Click on ‘Your account’ and there is no option anywhere of “Close my account”.  Nothing.  Like it’s not even a possibility that it might entertain.  I had to Google (and don’t get me started on them) “closing your Amazon account”.  If you search the Amazon site for “close my account” it yields no results.  See below:

 

The Google link took me to their Help section, on pages that bear the slogan “we’re the people with the smile on the box”, prompting the thought that the inside of their box-like warehouses are probably somewhat bereft of smiles.  If offers you a drop-down menu under the helpful title “what can we help you with?”.  Surely that’s where I’ll find “Close my Account”?  No. You get a range of choices, “An order I placed”, “Kindle”, “Digital services” and, er, “Something else”.  Guess I’m “something else” then.  So I click that.  

I’m then given another 4 options, none of which are “Close my account”.  I’m asked to “tell us more about your issue”, and given another list where my option is “other non-order question”.  Given that still, the idea that I might have got this far could mean I want to close my account is clearly unimaginable, I am then given an option to email, to phone, or to “chat”.  So I click on “chat”, and am told “a customer service associate will be here in a moment”.  

A charming man then begins to chat with me.  Here’s how our conversation went:

Me: I want to close my account please. How do I do that?

Tom (not his real name): Thank you for contacting Amazon.co.uk. My name is Tom. May I know your name, please?

Me: Rob

Tom: Thank you.  I’m sorry to hear that you want to close the account.  May I know the reason for closing the account please?

Me: Certainly. I am appalled by the way Amazon operate as highlighted in the recent BBC Panorama programme. I am appalled at the recent story on Amazon considering deliveries in future by drone. I am appalled by the low level of tax Amazon pay in the UK. I have been a customer for years, but I feel Amazon has become too big, and eats everything in its path. It is no longer something I wish to support.

Tom: I’m sorry for the situation. For confidentiality reasons, I’m not able to close your account for you in chat, so I’m going to send you an e-mail with the information to close the account. When you receive it, please respond to that e-mail so that we will close your account.

Me: Thank you Tom. I would really like my reasons for leaving to be registered somehow, as I think a lot more people will be closing their accounts for similar reasons, and it would be good for that to be noted by those in charge. Will that be possible?

Tom: Unfortunately we will not be able to comment on this issue. However, I will send you an email regarding the closing of the account. Is there any thing else I can help you with?

Me: I am not asking you to comment on the issue. I am asking you to make sure that the reasons for my closing my account are passed on to management. If I ran a business I would want to know why my customers were closing their accounts. Is that not the case at Amazon?

Tom: Sure, all the information’s will be recorded and forwarded to the appropriate department.

Me: Thank you Tom. I appreciate your help.

Tom: Thanks for your understanding.  We hope to see you again soon! Have a Nice Day!

I later received an email from Customer Support to say:

“We appreciate your feedback and have forwarded it to the appropriate team internally. We are proud to provide a safe and positive working environment for all of our associates. Information about working at our fulfilment centres can be found at the following link: www.amazon.co.uk/fcpractices“

Amazon may be cheap, but cheap comes at a cost for someone else.  And, after all, much of what is bought on there is throwaway rubbish.  As Carole Cadwalladr puts it:

The warehouse is 800,000 square feet, or, in what is Amazon’s standard unit of measurement, the size of 11 football pitches (its Dunfermline warehouse, the UK’s largest, is 14 football pitches). It is a quarter of a mile from end to end. There is space, it turns out, for an awful lot of crap.

Me, I resolve to buy less, but better.  Less, but longer-lasting.  Less, but local.  The thought of where we will end up in 5 years time, 10 years time, 20 years time, if companies like Amazon continue as they are, really frightens me. It’s not good, it’s not right.  It’s not about our needs, it’s about the needs of huge investors.  I want a different world for my boys.  

I can’t, on my own, do that much about it.  I can’t insist that the UK government legislate so that, as in Holland, the Recommended Retail Price (RRP) is the legal minimum at which any book can be sold, although I think that is grounds for a really timely campaign.  Because of that, Amazon don’t really operate in Holland.  Bring back the RRP for books here, and let’s have a level playing field.  As I say, I can’t do much, but I can withdraw my support. I just have withdrawn my support.  It feels surprisingly unsettling, as one does after ending a relationship, but it was the right thing to do.  It may be a drop in the ocean, but if enough people do it….

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3 Dec 2013

Celebrating the marvel that is Transition Free Press

The fourth edition of Transition Free Press has just come out, and it is a Thing of Great Beauty.  Transition has long created spaces in which people can engage their creativity, and TFP is one of the shining examples of that.  It models a different approach to telling stories, to building networks, and to building a movement.  We love it.  With its fourth issue published this week, it’s time to pause and celebrate the wonder that it has become.  And, of course, we’d love to hear what you think. 

The Winter edition of TFP is currently being dispersed around the UK and further afield via its distribution network of Transition initiatives (of which more later).  As the paper’s editor, Charlotte Du Cann, writes in the editorial:

“Without communications we remain small, disconnected dots.  With our own media we join up and become a new network, a movement, a new story.  The future of the people has to be together.  You just have to see it.  You just have to turn the page”.  

I caught up with Charlotte, who describes herself as an editor, writer and community activist, to find out the latest with TFP, and its plans for the future.  

Asked what Transition Free Press is (just to bring anyone up to speed who is coming to this article having never heard of it), she describes it as a 24 page newspaper, which follows the conventional look, shape and feel of a tabloid, with a news section at the front and with different features on the arts, books, people etc, even with a sports section! The aim has always been for TFP to be as creative and good-looking as possible, and to have colour splashed throughout.  It really is a gorgeous thing. 

Over the last year, 4 issues have been produced as the pilot phase of the life of TFP (Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter).  As Charlotte told me:

“We wanted to cover stories happening in Transition and in related groups or organisations, all working towards creating a very different and positive world, a world where we can come together and share our our resources and be aware of the challenges of that in our particular time.  To look at difficult things but respond creatively and collaboratively. We felt that there was a gap for a paper or medium to cover many of the community-based stories.  Our sense was that there were a huge number of great tales out there not being told”. 

But surely, I wondered, those stories are being told in blogs, Facebook posts, newsletters and so on?  What does a printed paper do that those things can’t?  Especially in the context of this month’s theme of “stuff”, do we really need a tangible newspaper as well?

“Our strong sense is that we have created a paper that can be used, particularly by Transition initiatives, as a communications tool.  People can grab a paper literally physically in their hand and say “hey look, this is what Transition is about” in a format that is readily recognisable. All those stories scattered across cyberspace are now all in one place so you can hold them in your hand”. 

A printed paper has several advantages over electronic media, according to Charlotte:

• You can actually hold it in your hands: it’s a different relationship than with electronic media.
• It goes horizontally rather than vertically: so you read it in a different way. In a blog you can’t get a wide range of stories at once in your hand.  With TFP you can hold it and at once get about 30 different voices just by flicking. It gives you a sense of a composite culture.
• It reaches a different audience: as Charlotte puts it, “the kinds of people who pick up a newspaper are not necessarily the kinds of people who will go on line to find a story.  A lot of our distributors will put them in doctors’ surgeries, local libraries, in cafes, they’ll sell them at events.  You reach a readership you would never reach in reading a blog, which tends to be dedicated readers”.
• It has a longer life.  Blogs are gone after a couple of days, TFP can hang around for a lot longer. 

I was interested to know what the challenges are of creating such a paper.  One of the challenges Charlotte identified is that genuinely reflects the voices of those doing Transition on the ground.  As Charlotte told me, the aim has always been to get:

“the stories from those inside, what they felt is going on, but this means you are more subjective than objective which doesn’t always suit a newspaper.  Our aim has always been to get a good piece of journalism that is fairly objective but not just a marketing “I’m doing a great project” piece. I think we’ve been successful with this on the whole but not totally”. 

So what can you expect from the latest edition? (You’ll find a great A-Z of what’s in it here). Each edition of the paper has a different flavour, and the theme of the Winter edition is “turning protests into solutions”.  It embraces Russell Brand’s recent call for a revolution and explores it in very wide-ranging ways.  There’s also a story about quinoa being grown in the UK, about the recent floods in Colorado and where to put your money after recent developments at the Co-operative Bank. And there’s Charlotte’s great editorial … let’s have another taste of that:

“Transition Free Press has been about telling that new story.  Our aim was to report on the movement, to spread some wild and heirloom seeds in a dominant monoculture, to challenge the orthodoxy that the powerful are in charge of our lives and the ecosystems of the planet.  Most of all it was to join the dots and show the emergent culture that is Transition and many other initiatives besides”.   

Thanks to the marvels of embeddable files, here is the paper in its entirety!

The last thing I wanted to know was how people involved in Transition on the ground can help ensure that TFP continues to thrive beyond its pilot phase.  Charlotte set out two key ways in which, with the support of the Transition community, TFP can thrive into the future.  Firstly is for people to contribute their stories and their editorial to the paper, as well as sending in some great photos.  The second is to become a distributor.  As the map below shows, TFP is distributed through a network of Transition groups, and that network needs to grow some more.  

If you become a distributor, you undertake to buy a bundle of 125 copies for £50, which you can then sell and make some money for your initiative.  You could also become a subscriber.  You could stick TFP buttons on your website.  Anyway, yes, that map… impressive stuff …

 

Lastly I asked Charlotte what would be her dream for the future of TFP.  She told me it would be for it to thrive into 2014, and to become a well established paper, reflecting the wider movement of positive change, both in Transition and beyond. There are also plans for a digital edition next year.  Over time, building on the strong backbone of Transition initiative distributors, the hope would be to produce a larger paper for a much higher readership.  Transition initiatives have shown that they can do impressive and visionary things.  Getting behind TFP to help it realise this vision of its future is surely something that shouldn’t be too much of a leap?  

What difference has Transition Free Press made to your experience of Transition?  Do you have any questions for Charlotte or anyone at TFP?  Any feedback you want to share?  Please use the comments box below.

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2 Dec 2013

On delivery by drone, vinyl and our month of "stuff"

For this month’s theme we’ll be exploring, in the run up to Christmas, our relationship with “stuff” from different angles.  We start with today’s post which, among other things, takes you for a drive along the M5 motorway, delivers your Christmas gifts by drone, and argues that “the amount of stuff we have, how we look after it and how long it is designed to last, matters”. 

We’ll be talking to Oliver James, author of Affluenza and The Selfish Capitalist about how the “stuff-driven” economy impacts us and how we relate to each other.  We’ll hear from Ugo Vallauri about the Restart Project in London, working with people to give them the skills needed to repair and breathe new life into electronic devices that we otherwise tend to discard with the seasons.  Steph Bradley, who in 2010 spent 6 months walking around England gathering stories of Transition, will be telling us about the book she just published about the trip, carrying just the stuff her small green rucksack could fit.  

We’ll be talking to Annie Leonard, producer of The Story of Stuff series of films for her reflections on stuff and our relationship with it.  I’ll be dropping into Totnes’ now-legendary Drift Record Shop to hear what the revival of vinyl tells us about stuff and the power of treasuring exquisite beautifully-made artifacts.  We’ll hear from Ruth Potts of Bread, Print and Roses about the New Materialism.  Plus, I’m sure, a couple of other things thrown in for good measure.  

To start us off on our exploration of stuff, I want to take you on a short drive along the M5 motorway near Bridgewater in Somerset, albeit without you actually having to go anywhere.  I’m taking you past Morrisons’ recently-built 34,000 square metre regional produce pack house and distribution warehouse.  I think it is a strong contender for one of the world’s most repellent buildings, indeed in a poll run by the local paper, the Bridgewater Mercury, 75% of readers stated that they thought it was an eyesore.  I passed it on Friday, and took the following photos so as to be able to share how it unfolds as you pass.  I’m not sure they quite capture the sheer sprawling obnoxious banality of it, but here we go:

It’s vast.  As one person commenting on Facebook wrote, “It looks like an airport terminal that they were halfway through building when they lost heart”. I have despised this building since I first saw it, and for me it has come to typify what’s wrong with our relationship to “stuff”.  It is the result of a partnership between Morrisons and Barratt Homes (an unholy union that would have most people reaching for the planning objection forms if ever there was one) which has seen 110 hectares of land around Bridgewater developed to include, alongside the Morrison’s distribution centre (according to Construction Enquirer):

a commercial services centre providing local retail opportunities, up to 2,000 new homes, a primary school, improvements in recreation facilities and substantial enhancements to the local transport and green infrastructure.

It is, according to investbridgewater.org, an “exemplar of low carbon, sustainable design”. It has 1 MW of solar panels on the roof, harvests its rainwater, and uses very energy efficient lighting.  And the revolting cladding design with the different shades of green?  Well, you see, that’s done with nature in mind too: 

The intention is to create a family of buildings, with The Willow Man, “the Angel of the South” located to the south of the site and adjacent to the M5 motorway. This has been the inspiration for the design concept of a “willow weave” of cladding panels employing a natural palette of willow colours. 

This captures the distinction between ‘sustainable’ and ‘resilient’ for me.  Such a facility may be efficient and pay some attention to its impacts, but it also makes more efficient the undermining of local economic resilience and deepens our dependency on large supermarket chains and cheap oil. It is simply a more efficient system for extracting money from local economies to put it in the pockets of distant shareholders. To use the language of Occupy, it enriches the 1% rather than the 99%.  While such facilities may create jobs, they create less and less of them.  In 2011, supermarkets expanded their floor space by 2,750,000 square feet, while at the same time the number of people employed fell by 400.

But what has this got to do with “stuff” and our reflections on how we might best approach the forthcoming festive season? In their recent pamphlet The New Materialism, Andrew Simms and Ruth Potts write:

“In a green economy characterized by less passive consumerism and more active production, making, adapting, mending, sharing and all the The New Materialism ‘re-s’ such as: re-use, recycle, re-love, re-purpose… etc, there is far more potential for novelty and pleasure”.

If this festive period is about one thing, it should surely be pleasure. And family and community. As George Monbiot put it recently:

Christmas permits the global bullshit industry to recruit the values with which so many of us would like the festival to be invested – love, warmth, a community of spirit – to the sole end of selling things that no one needs or even wants.

But what I want to write about here isn’t why this Christmas should be about recycling, repairing, reusing. While that is hugely important of course, there’s loads of stuff about that online, and we’ll be touching on it in other posts this month. For example, Transition Newcastle in Australia recently held a World Cafe about how people might enjoy a more sustainable Christmas, which generated lots of useful ideas along those lines.  

Do I think that Christmas is a time when we should all just not give each other anything as some sort of protest against the proliferation of commercialism and “stuff”?  That we should extend ‘Buy Nothing Day’ to cover the entire notion of Christmas?  No.  I think there is something very special about exchanging gifts with those we love.  Plus I don’t want to see my high street full of empty shops.  But we have a choice as to which kind of economy we want to support.  

What I want to talk about picks up on something Eric Fromm once wrote:

“Everything one owned was [once] cherished, taken care of, and used to the very limits of its utility. Buying was ‘keep-it’ buying”.  

What does ‘keep-it’ buying look like today, and how might it inform our buying decisions over the next few weeks?  It would be silly to accuse a huge food retailer like Morrisons of not promoting “keep-it” buying.  If you were to keep pretty much anything they sold beyond its sell-by date it would rapidly go rather smelly.  But it is that model, the economy that requires vast regional distribution centres, solar-powered or otherwise, that I am objecting to.  Personally, I am still recovering from watching the BBC Panorama documentary on Amazon, ‘The Truth Behind the Click’.  

Not that it was that much of a surprise.  What seems to enticingly easy, and somehow magic, that you click a button, and the next day something arrives in the post, was revealed as a deeply sinister, malign, abusive, vast enterprise.  It became clear why it’s so cheap, due to driving its workers in ways which was described by a leading expert on stress at work as:

“… all the bad stuff at once. The characteristics of this type of job, the evidence shows increased risk of mental illness and physical illness.”  

Then today I read that it is likely that in 5 years time our skies will be full of little Amazon drones delivering peoples’ goods within 30 minutes of ordering …

That’s where the economy is headed unless we do something about it pretty sharpish.  The cheaper things get, the quicker they can be delivered to us, the more of them we buy. Yet most of them we either only use them once or we throw away again within months, either because we’re bored of them, or because they are broken. All we’re left with is the memories of the thing, the sense that we need to buy something else to fill the hole or to “keep up”, and the debt we generated to buy it.  

Likewise, the food model that requires regional distribution centres like that in Bridgewater requires 40% of crops grown in the field to be discarded because they don’t meet the supermarkets’ ludicrously high specifications.  Households then throw away around 20% of what they buy (7.2 million tonnes of food), and 40% of apples are chucked out.  

It’s a form of development driven by assumptions.  For example, Germany assumes that it will cut electricity demand by 25% by 2050 while the UK assumes that it will double.  Germany assumes its population will fall 10% by 2050, while the UK assumes a rise of 25%.  The UK Department for Transport also assumes that UK air travel demand will rise from 211 million passengers per year in 2010 to 520 million passengers per year by 2050. These assumptions underpin the infrastructure we create.  Similarly, the Bridgewater monstrosity is based on a series of deeply flawed assumptions about the future, that we will continue to be so wasteful into the future, that local economies will continue to die, that cheap oil will remain into the future etc etc etc.  

Economist Herman Daly once wrote the economy of the future needs to be:

“a subtle and complex economics of maintenance, qualitative improvements, sharing, frugality, and adaptation to natural limits. It is an economics of better, not bigger.”  

So what does a Christmas of “better” look like?  A flash of illuminating came to me while reading Andrew Simms and Ruth Potts’ Short manifesto (less in more) for The New Materialism and what it might mean for Christmas.   

1. Liking ‘stuff’ is okay, healthy even – we can learn to love and find pleasure in the material world
2. Wherever practical and possible develop lasting relationships with things by having and making nothing that is designed to last less than 10 years
3. Get to know things – before you acquire something, find out at least three things about it
4. Love stuff – mend, maintain and re-use things until it is no longer possible, then recycle them
5. Get active – only acquire something new if you are also learning a new, useful skills
6. Share – look at all your things, think about what your friends might need or could benefit from, and share at least one thing a week

How might it be if, when choosing gifts for loved ones this month, we set ourselves the objective of only buying things designed to last more than 10 years?  Out go the iPads, poorly made kitchen devices, this month’s fashion shoes and handbags.  In come things of permanence, things of beauty, things designed for resilience, not disposability.  I am currently in the process of emptying my late father’s house to get it ready to sell, and distributing or getting rid of his possessions.  

One of the things that has been fascinating is how the things I am wanting to keep rather than get rid of are just those things, the things created to last for more than 10 years.  His few bits of well-made furniture, a clock made at a time when people made them to last, his German stereo he bought in the 80s which is still a fine stereo.  

Which brings me on to vinyl.  The revival of vinyl is, in part, about creating objects that people will treasure for decades, objects that will last for decades.  One of the things that has been a delight to me recently has been my 15-year old son inheriting my passion for vinyl.  He has my old turntable set up in his room and has dug out all my old hiphop records and is having a ball.  He now pines for trips to second hand record shops in Plymouth.  Clearly records (unlike CDs) are “designed to last more than 10 years”, as some of them I bought over 20 years ago and they stil play fine.  

Here is a video which beautifully captures the love and attention a new generation of labels and artists are pouring into vinyl:

So for me, my mission this Christmas is to buy less for people in terms of quantity, but to buy things that will still be here in 10 years, still giving pleasure, which are beautiful, and which hopefully might be treasured and then handed on to the next generation.  It is a shopping approach underpinned by Richard Jefferies’ statement that:

“The hours when the mind is absorbed in beauty are the only hours when we really live”.  

Do those things generally come from vast sprawling warehouses alongside motorways in which poorly paid, stressed people scurry about driven to exhaustion by bleeping order-picking machines?  Do those things come delivered by a drone to your front door?  Do those things tend to put money into the pockets of distant shareholders?  Do those things support or undermine the economy of the place I live, the traders there who are my friends and who form the glue of the local community?  That’s the mindfulness I intend to take with me when choosing gifts for my loved ones this year.  I’m calling it my 10 year rule.  There will be no drones arriving on my front door step for the foreseeable future.  I hope you enjoy this month’s articles and discussion, and have a relaxing festive season.  

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1 Dec 2013

Our Austerity Basics all in one placel!

List of episodes

1. What is austerity?
2. Where did the idea come from?
3. Is the UK’s debt really historically unprecedented?
4. What are the dangers of trying to pay our national debt off too fast?
5. Can austerity ever be said to have worked anywhere?
6. Why is the flight of jobs to the private sector a problem?
7. What will ‘permanent austerity’ look like in practice?
8. Who benefits from austerity?
9. Is there an alternative, and if so, what is it?

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Austerity Basic 1: What is austerity?

“What austerity means at the minute is a plan by goverment, by any government really, but by this one in particular, to reduce the amount of weight it has in the economy, to reduce its presumed burden on the rest of the economy.  Generally this means cutting government spending, so the government just spends less, it reduces expenditure on libraries, on hospitals.  Ideally on all sorts of inefficiencies and waste, but more likely it starts to chew into real expenditures of some sort.  

Potentially it also means whacking up taxes, increasing taxes, whatever that might be: Income Taxes, VAT, Excise Duty, could be anything.  That, in very broad outline, is what the plan amounts to.  The aim of this usually is to try and reduce the government deficit.  The government deficit is the gap between what the government gets in taxation and what it spends on public services and everything else.  Your aim overall, usually, is to try and shrink that deficit by cutting spending and maybe pushing up taxes as well.  At the moment for this country the balance is very largely in favour of cutting spending, with not very many tax increases, either now or scheduled”.    

Austerity Basic 2: Where did the idea come from?  

“This particular usage of austerity as a description for a programme like this I think only really enters in this form in the 1970s.  Obviously, it is a word with longer standing than that, but it changes its meaning slightly.  It enters as an idea to do with a perceived notion that governments were spending too much money at the time, so if they cut their spending, if they were quite strict about their spending, if they were “austere”, then you could reduce government deficits, reduce government expenditure, and the economy would, in theory, run much better.  That was the theoretical outline of it.  

You’ve got that sort of approach being taken now.  The Coalition here, and similar for governments across Europe, are saying that government has been spending too much money, that’s why things are a mess, therefore we have to cut government spending.  That’s the kind of claim they make about it.  

It’s quite similar, in this country certainly, to something that used to be known as ‘The Treasury View’ in the 1920s and 1930s.  This was the orthodox view at the time of governments’ role in the economy as being one of balancing the books.  The government gets money in, and it spends a certain amount of money over there, so it levies taxes, it has spending over here, and the ideal aim for government, as the Treasury believed at the time, as was the economic orthodoxy, the ideal aim for government was to have a complete balance between taxes and spending.  That was the Treasury view. 

The implication is that potentially you end up imposing very very sharp austerity, that maybe you don’t have much coming in in taxes, so you have to cut spending a long way.  That’s what happens in the Great Depression here”. 

 

Austerity Basics 3: Is the UK’s debt really historically unprecedented? 

 

There’s two parts to that. Firstly, we’re nowhere near record levels of government debt. Just to be clear about this, we’ve been talking about the national debt or the UK’s debt. Really they’re talking about the debt of the government, they’re not talking about the debt of everybody else. This government, when it talks about the national debt, is not talking about everybody else’s debt, it’s just talking about its own public sector debt. But we’re not even close to record levels of public sector debt. 

On the Bank of England figures, it’s predictable really, in the Second World War, the First World War, and the Napoleonic Wars. If you fight a war, it involves an awful lot of expenditure. It costs a lot of money to employ soldiers, supply them with bullets and food and all the rest of it. It’s incredibly expensive. The Second World War and the First World War were financed by a very large amount of government borrowing.  The Napoleonic Wars, the wars with France over the course of the 18^th century were also incredibly expensive. At that time, you were looking at a national debt, the debt of the government is the debt of the public sector, pushing up to 200, 300%, massively higher than it is now. 

The idea that we have a particularly high level of debt to the size of the economy is nonsense, historically speaking. It’s certainly not very high internationally. It’s a little bit higher than Germany which is about 82-83% debt to GDP ratio. It’s about the same, maybe a bit higher than the US as a debt to GDP ratio. It is very, very substantially lower than Japan which is about 200% of debt to GDP.

 

Austerity Basics 4: What are the dangers of trying to pay our national debt off too fast? 

The danger here is one of pursuing the analogy too far. If you or I have a large amount of debt, and what happened with the crash of 2008 is that government debt leapt up from about 60% of GDP to about 80& of GDP. It’s carried on rising since 2010, it’s risen quite a bit since then. That’s the jump that you get with a very deep financial crisis, a very deep recession. That pushes up debt: the bailouts, the recession itself. All these sorts of things add to the amount of debt the government has. The problem with rushing to try and repay that debt is something that, although it makes sense for you or I, if we have an increase in our debts, to repay it. If, for whatever reason, my debt suddenly explodes tomorrow, this is a real burden for me and it makes sense for me to try and repay it to get it out the way.

The problem that you’ve got is when, if everybody does this in the whole economy, if everybody says let’s repay our debt; if you take the whole economy, every time I spend money, or you spend money or any of us spends money, somebody else is earning that money. This has to be the case: if somebody else isn’t spending the money, you’re not earning the money. If I go to the shops and buy a packet of crisps, if I spend 50p, the shopkeeper earns 50p. So every time I spend money, someone else earns. So if I cut my spending, somebody else must be earning less. So if everybody cuts their spending, which is kind of what happened in the crash of 2008-2009, the economy goes into recession. If everybody cuts spending, the economy starts to shrink. That’s what’s happened, and that’s what’s been happening for the last few years. 

If the government also turns up and says we have to cut our spending; the government spends a huge amount of money, so if it cuts spending a huge number of people earn less, so you make the recession worse and worse. In other words, by saying we’re going to rush to pay back our debt, we want to impose austerity because we want to shrink the government deficit, repay our debts, that’s the only way out of this mess, you’re actually potentially making the situation worse and worse because you’re not shrinking the debt, you’re shrinking the economy. Potentially, you’re shrinking the economy faster than you’re shrinking the debt.

The most extreme example of this is Greece, where at the end of 2009, the start of the debt crisis, they had a debt to GDP ratio of 130%. They then impose exceptionally severe austerity, much, much worse than here. Two years later the debt to GDP ratio is 160%. So debt to GDP has ballooned because the economy is shrinking. The economy is shrinking because you impose austerity, and you impose austerity to try and repay your debt. It’s completely a vicious circle. You’re not even running on the spot, potentially you’re running and going backwards with this one, and that’s happened to some extent in this country over the last few years.

 

Austerity Basics 5: Can austerity ever be said to have worked anywhere? 

You can sort of make cases – it’s very hard because the economic logic of this, this is really John Maynard Keynes’s insight back in the 1930s when he’s sitting in the middle of the great depression wondering what’s happened, and he basically comes up with an explanation which is exactly that story I’ve just told, which is that if I cut my spending someone else earns less. If the government cuts its spending, loads of people earn less so you get a recession, or you make a recession worse. That’s John Maynard Keynes’s story and it is very widely accepted, any economics textbook will tell you something along these lines.

You will sometimes find claims that austerity has had a beneficial effect overall, you might try and construct an argument that by imposing austerity now the immediate cost is severe but it makes your economy more efficient, it clears out lots of inefficient firms who should go out of business; it forces people out of work so they have to get new work of some sort and they will become more productive as a result; you can kind of try and make an explanation like that. It’s usually not very convincing. The ones that get talked about at the moment are the Baltic States, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania which had very dramatic, very sharp recessions in 2008-2009, you’re talking 20% or more of their economy wiped out in the space of a year or so. Very, very sharp recessions to which the governments responded by imposing austerity, really quite harsh austerity as well.

The argument from a lot of people, people like Paul Krugman for example, was that that was making the recession much worse. In Latvia, the economy has actually started to recover a bit over the past year. A lot of people say this is a good success story for austerity. The problem with saying what’s good for Latvia is good for everywhere else is that there are very exceptional conditions in the Baltic States. The first one is that about up to 20% of the Latvian population have emigrated over the last 5 years or so – just a huge number of people have upped and left because they can’t find work there, so they go somewhere else. That’s not really a particularly successful functioning economy. But it does mean that you’re unemployment rate is kept down somewhat, it only goes up to 15% rather than 18, 19, 30%. So mass emigration is one part of it.

The EU supplies a very large amount of Latvia’s government budget, and the other Baltic States, just in the form of direct assistance. That’s not quite a free gift, but it’s nice if someone’s just going to give you the cash, that always helps.

The final bit is that these are very small, open economies. They’re very dependent on their export trade, which means they’re very dependent on what the economies next to them are doing, which means in this case Sweden and Finland have both recovered from the recession. They didn’t have a very sharp recession. The Baltic States have been able to sell more to the rest of Scandinavia and they’ve recovered on the back of that. So it’s got very little to do with austerity. Austerity has quite dramatic effects, that’s why you lose – 1 in 5 Latvians decide to leave the country. That’s a dramatic impact. But what gets you out of the mess is a recovery that’s starting elsewhere, and I don’t think you can really say that Sweden wanting to buy more of your products is a direct result of you imposing austerity.

 

Austerity Basics 6: Why is the flight of jobs to the private sector a problem? 

“The problem we’ve got is that the evidence for the private sector actually being more efficient than the public sector, particularly in the delivery of things that the public sector always historically provides, fairly complex services like healthcare or education, things where the outcomes are not actually very well defined, there isn’t a monetary value immediately attached to this.  It’s very hard to say, for instance, what the value of a good education is, you just have to go out there and make use of it and maybe you’ll find out.

It’s quite hard, unless you directly privatise a thing and charge every parent. Of course, there are schools that do this. It’s quite hard to stick a value on it. It’s similar with healthcare. It’s very hard for me to know how valuable it is to have a healthcare system. I reckon on not wanting to be sick, I reckon on wanting to be able to go to the hospital if something goes wrong, so does everyone else. But it’s very hard for me to make a judgement on how much that is worth to me at any point in time. Usually, or course, if any of us are healthy we tend to have an optimism bias. We tend to understate the value of healthcare in the future, and then we panic about in and overspend on insurance.  

This is what happens in America. This is why America spends an absolute fortune, a huge great chunk, 10%, 12% of its economy, on healthcare.  Yet you still end up with huge numbers of uninsured, the enormous political wrangling that takes place over Obamacare, this attempt to expand healthcare provision there, deep inequalities in the provision of health but huge huge amounts of money being spent by people who can afford it to get in there.

Relative to that, the NHS is very efficient. Britain spends a proportionally small amount of its GDP, of its total economy on healthcare, and actually gets a very good universal service out the other side.  The public sector is really quite efficient at doing this. But the difficulty when you start to creep in private sector providers is instead of what might be, if you’re lucky, a relatively clear public service requirement of any given service: “run this hospital”, “keep this school open”, it suddenly starts to be: “run this hospital and make a profit”. “Keep this school open and make a profit”.

That’s why, as a private provider, you get involved. Some parts of the whole provision, perhaps private providers might or might not be better at offering a particular element of a service in the public sector.  You can maybe construct a case-by-case argument here.  But if you take the public sector as a whole, once you start to impose these additional requirements on what public services are doing, “provide this service AND make a profit”, you can see that immediately that’s an additional pressure on everything.  

It’s a pressure on costs, it’s a pressure on the service provision, and it’s not one that immediately translates into a public benefit.  In theory, competition should improve efficiency and all the rest of it.  In practice, as we’ve seen with major privatisations like the energy companies, or the railways, this doesn’t necessarily follow.  The economic theory sometimes says that it ought to follow, but it doesn’t necessarily appear in practice”.

 

Austerity Basics 7: What will ‘permanent austerity’ look like in practice? 

It means a very dramatic reshaping of the kind of country we live in. This is over and above an immediate claim about economics or the management of the economy. It’s not about making the economy work better in some senses, it’s about making it work rather differently. It will change if they go through with it, it will change how we perceive ourselves as citizens and the kind of relationships we have with each other and with the state, and the sort of expectations we have about our society to limit the economy like that.

But bearing in mind we’re not actually very far into the original austerity programme that the Coalition government wanted to get us all to stick to. We’re only about 15, 16% of the way through it. So if you then say we’re going to have permanent austerity, we’re going to lock all this in place, and we’ve already seen the dramatic impact of things like the bedroom tax, the incredible increase in the use of food banks, the series of slow-burn disasters in welfare cuts and the rest of it, this is really reshaping how all of us think about what it means to be a citizen in an economy that looks like this. So this is over and above just an economic management claim about the world. I don’t think there was ever really any credible basis, just in pure management terms, for imposing austerity in the way that the Coalition has done. That was never just about how to make things work better for people. It’s really been about how to make things work differently. It’s a reshaping of the economy.

Underlying this is probably somewhere along the line, an attempt to try and reduce costs, that would be the easiest way to look at it. If you have to provide for a large welfare state, a substantial NHS, lots of publicly funded education, it’s going to appear as a cost on doing business; somebody has to pay taxes for this. You as a business might have to pay taxes for this. If you are concerned to reduce costs, and try and make bits of your economy more competitive internationally, and you thought cost pressures from around the rest of the world were going to grow and grow. If you thought China and India were going to be chewing away at Britain’s market share, then that might be a reason to try and think like this. 

Austerity Basics 8: Who benefits from austerity?  

On the whole, most people don’t. I think what we’ve seen over the last few years, at least partly as a result of austerity is a substantial decline in real living standards for most people. Average real earnings have fallen by 9% to 9.5% since 2008, so it’s a very long decline in real earnings. You have to go back several generations, you have to go back to the 1870s or thereabouts before you find comparable period of decline in real earnings, it’s just several generations, my great-grandparents or great-great grandparents wouldn’t have had experience of anything like this. To the extent austerity just undermines economic activity, that long, drawn-out period of decline in living standards is definitely part of it.

But on the other hand, if you take the political economy into consideration, so not so much how the machinery of the economy fits together but who benefits from it, who benefits from the machinery working this way, I think the clearest thing you can say about austerity is it definitely privileges those who hold financial assets above those who hold real assets. It privileges people who hold debt and govern debt in particular above those who, for instance, have to sell their labour to make a living. There’s a hierarchy in the economy, it’s what it creates.

What you do in austerity is say, we know this is going to damage real economic activity, be a drag on growth, on employment, on people’s real standards of living, but nonetheless we’re going to do it, and we’re going to do it to make sure that those who hold debt are definitely going to get repaid, and those who hold government debt are definitely going to get their money back. We’re going to use the tax system, use spending cuts to make sure they get repaid. So that’s really the drive behind austerity.

If you hold financial assets, or you’re somebody who’s interested in making use of Britain’s financial system or you want to invest in maybe property here – property in London is very popular for large overseas investors – then having a government that thinks about the world like this can look very attractive, and I think that’s one of the political economy considerations that’s working away in the drive to austerity.

 

Austerity Basics 9: Is there an alternative, and if so, what is it?? 

“There’s actually any number of different proposals that have been made over the last few years. There’s almost too many in a way. The most obvious one is that if this is damaging the economy, in particular hurting some of the weakest, most vulnerable people in society, the thing to do is not to do it. Just stop. If you wanted to promote a recovery with jobs and wages and all the rest of it, the quickest and easiest way to do that would be to just not do austerity. But you can only really treat that as a short-term solution.

A long-term solution to any of the tangle of issues that austerity is the most immediate part of, but really there’s some very deep long-term issues in the British economy. We don’t invest, it doesn’t create secure jobs, the private sector doesn’t create secure well-paid jobs. We are increasingly dependent on our energy supplies from the rest of the world, and that means in particular a dependency on non-renewable energy.

The education system, public services, you can carry on down the list of different things. If you wanted to start to address that, probably the biggest one to get into is how do we get investment. British companies just aren’t investing, they aren’t spending any money at all. In fact, the amount of investment taking place is declining at present in Britain. Without investment you don’t create jobs, you don’t create work into the future, you end up with just a stagnant economy forevermore.

So how do we promote investment, and how do we get investment in things that are going to be future-proofed? How do we invest in the green economy, how do we invest in renewables? How do we invest in improving how the economy works rather than just going back to what we’ve always done? I think that means that we have to talk about the economy rather differently. It’s not just about saying whatever the private sector does, it will do better than everybody else.

It’s about having a much more involved conversation about what we can collectively do. How do we organise the economy so it produces the outcomes we want. That will mean intruding on the private sector in lots of different ways. It might mean, for instance, government directly investing in public transport. It would be sensible for a government to borrow and spend the money on new buses, bus routes, new train services, because the government can borrow very cheaply at the moment. That would create jobs and all the rest of it.

It would make sense for the government to borrow again, because it can do so very cheaply at the moment, to go out and build new houses. Not just jamming them into the South-East but thinking about where we can put new jobs across the rest of the country. These are all things that could be done fairly rapidly, but involve turning on its head a lot of what austerity means and a lot of what the Coalition government is talking about. 

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