Transition Culture

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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28 Nov 2013

Frances Northrop on how Transition Town Totnes are responding to austerity

For our last piece in our month’s theme of austerity and how Transition responds to it, we head to Totnes, one of the first Transition initiatives.  What does austerity look like there, and how is Transition Town Totnes responding to it?  We asked Frances Northrop, TTT Project Manager.

While from the outside Totnes may be thought of as a relatively affluent and unaffected by public spending cuts, that’s not entirely the case.  The reality is more complex.  With Transition Town Totnes increasingly seeing its work in this context, it felt like an appropriate way to wrap up our austerity month.  As usual, you can either listen to/download this podcast, or read the transcript below.  And please, let us know what you think.  Comments welcome below.  

 

What does austerity look like in Totnes?

That’s such an interesting question. It’s a question we should ask ourselves more, wherever we live.  I think a lot of it’s hidden. I think austerity has been happening for a lot of people for a very long time, and there’s really entrenched poverty across the UK in different places. I think that because we don’t see it, it’s a bit like the classic walking past somebody who’s homeless in the street and you don’t engage with it – it’s easy enough to engage with it.

If your work doesn’t bring you into that arena then it just coexists happily, or unhappily, with other people’s everyday lives.  I think what it looks like, particularly in Totnes, is that people are really reliant on part-time work, on zero-hours contracts and seasonal work, because a lot of the work is in agriculture or in the tourist sector. In-work benefits are probably quite a large scale of people’s income.

Also, the housing stock isn’t great. When we did the Local Economic Blueprint, we did some research for that about what the standard of housing was, using the Thermal Homes comfort statistics. It showed that it was staggeringly low-quality housing, that there wasn’t very much insulation, people were living in very cold houses. A lot are off gas, people living in the villages and outer areas of Totnes, so they’re spending more money on energy than other people. Also, payment meters are a classic way for people who haven’t got very much money, that they pay a lot more for their energy full stop, even if they’re on mains electricity.

The perception from outside is that Totnes is doing alright for itself really. To what extent is that image of Totnes misleading and possibly even dangerous in terms of masking that?

It is misleading, and it becomes dangerous when people think that everything’s ok.  Partly because it’s like something that somebody talked to me a long time ago about rural communities, affluent rural communities, when I was working in the home counties. It’s double deprivation. If you haven’t got very much money and you live in the big city where lots of other people don’t have very much money, you’ve got access to cheap stuff, whether or not that’s the stuff that you want people to have in an ideal world.  Cheap supermarkets and cheap goods.

Also, there are more people to trade with, so if you’re trading your skills or bartering, there’s more people to do that with. Whereas in a town like Totnes, there’s less people like that, so you haven’t got the economies of scale to make it worthwhile for a low-cost supermarket to come or cheaper shops, so you end up with very high-end shops where you can’t afford the things or you perceive that you can’t afford them because – particularly around local food – of perceptions about seasonality and it being a middle-class thing.

So people end up being doubly deprived. Also, psychologically, living alongside such affluence, when you’ve got people here who’ve sold houses and been able to buy places and do them up, that slight gentrification of areas and the perennial thing that Totnes has always had of second-home owners and affluent older people retiring here. Psychologically, that’s really quite damaging.

How has the work of TTT sought to address that, what are some of the ways in which that’s happening?

I think it’s happening in lots of really subtle ways. It’s building on the trust and goodwill of work that’s gone before, and the networks that we’re building. Our food work, principally, started as the strongest group of Transition Town Totnes. It principally started because people wanted to grow more of their own food, so the Garden Share project and the allotments association. But since then, it’s formed a real network of people. We recently held an event called Food for the Future and part of that discussion was about crop gaps and what crops we could grow more locally that might have grown here before and don’t any more.

But there was a full representation of everybody from the whole cycle of food, from people who grow the food right through to what we do with that surplus food and what we do with the compost to go back into the soil to create the circle again. There was a real willingness there, there were people there who work at the drop-in centre for the homeless, who give out hot meals to people who are homeless. There’s Food in Community which is a really fantastic, relatively new enterprise who work with Riverford, taking their surplus vegetables and distributing them to community projects, people who work with people with mental health problems and the local children’s centre and schools.

So the interest that was there, Riverford was there as well, and some of the restaurants and the cafes.  The conversations there weren’t just about how can we grow the local food economy, they were about how can we enable that local food economy to also help people who haven’t got enough to eat.

One of the things that seems like TTT is doing at the moment is what some people call “the Power to Convene”. Actually TTT, thanks to its networks and connections, has the ability to get people in a room. You did that recently with the Caring Town conference. Could you tell us a bit more about that?

That was I think a real tribute to the trust and goodwill that TTT has built up over the last 6-7 years since we started. Basically, one of the strands of the blueprint was looking at health and care and how important that is for the resilience of a place. People need to stay well, they need to stay personally resilient and healthy. We need to acknowledge how much we need to care for each other and get back to a situation where people are looking out for each other more.

It was also about how existing resources that go into health and care from the public sector, over the years have very much been one-size-fits-all. You’re old so you have a day centre, you’re a learning disabled adult, you can have the same day centre. Those ideas that that’s enough for people, that you’re providing some care.

What we wanted to do was get people together in a room and ask “if you looked at a place and said what would it look like if it was at its most caring?”  We put an invitation out and invited voluntary groups from the town who are involved in broader wellbeing and health and care work, and we invited people from the public sector who are also involved in that kind of work, so people who work in mental health, but also the fire service, the police, drug and alcohol workers, homelessness support, general social care.

Lots of people responded to that question, “what would a caring town look like?”, they obviously wanted to have that conversation. What happened when we gave them permission, convened them in the first place which was lovely to be able to do that, their being given permission to just imagine what it would be like if their service, as a public sector professional, could be delivered in a different way that was place-based and crossed over other people’s services, so people weren’t delivering in silos and the public sector was working with the voluntary sector, and then the community beneath that were looking out for each other.

It was just joyous. There was a real, palpable sense that it was a way that people wanted to work in the future, and at the end of it, I think there were about 50 people there and 95% of them signed up to be part of the next steps to look at how that might manifest.

One of the tensions austerity throws up is that it’s about cutting back on public spending, and the private sector will pick up on any of the profitable bits, and communities are somehow supposed to come together and pick up all the leftover bits in any spare time they have beyond doing anything else. That seems to be the model. From what you get a taste of from here or what you think is going into the future, is that the best way to do it? What’s the tension between picking up things the public sector is dropping but which the private sector doesn’t want? Does it mean that we end up just colluding with the wider agenda?

That’s such a big question.  It’s the biggest thing that troubles me, that you’re enabling, that you’re complicit.  Complicit’s a good word. I’ve morally struggled with it. I think where I am at the moment with it personally is that yes, it is enabling to an extent, but if you can do it in a way that’s quite clever then you might be able to change the ideas of the public sector about how they commission, or whether they do always commission from the private sector.

The other thing that drives me to do it is that there are some people out there who are desperately vulnerable and we have to help. If we’re the people who can assist with that then we have a responsibility. It is a massive tension.

Before I started working at TTT, my work was working with the public sector, looking at how social and community enterprise could scale up and then voluntary activity on the ground could be the right solution to delivering public services, to meet the needs of people. So, not having this one-size-fits-all, but having a real needs-based approach – actually what do people need in a place.

Unfortunately, that work was happening too early. That work was happening really well, the Social Enterprise Coalition and Locality are doing loads of really great work around how that could be enabled. But austerity kicked in too soon for local authorities to be won over to that, so they still commission large contracts to big companies based on a silo-based way of working.  Care homes for old people, children’s services, under fives. They don’t look at it in a holistic kind of way.

In some ways, this is exciting with some of the people in the room at Caring Town conference because they’ve probably been thinking the same thing. What would it look like if it actually was meeting people’s needs and was holistic and place-based?  In that way it’s really exciting. That’s enough to make me think there’s a chance there to try and win some minds over from that big scale contracting out and stuff.

One of the things that’s unique about TTT is that it has the role that you occupy, that role of Project Manager sitting in the centre, avoiding that doughnut effect that we see in other places where all the energy rushes outside to the projects and you don’t have anybody at the centre linking it all together. What’s your sense, from having done that role for nearly three years now, about the value that it brings?

I was going to say it’s invaluable but I would say that, wouldn’t I!  Actually, it is invaluable because people need to feel held.  There are some people doing some incredible work in Totnes, within Transition and the broader community. What a lot of them need is to know that the centre is being held, that there is somebody or some people who hold the narrative, and all the time they’re spinning this work into the narrative so that when we’re talking about the work of Transition we’re celebrating what people are doing.  That what they’re doing isn’t just for the goodness of what they’re doing – which is enough, actually – but to say it’s part of this greater whole, and this is how it fits together and this is why the work we’re doing is so important.

What did the Local Economic Blueprint highlight or reveal that is so important in actually designing meaningful responses to austerity, do you think?

I think the Blueprint and the associated work that we’ve done around Reconomy has shown, I think it’s a term you used actually, that it’s about internal investment rather than inward investment. I really liked that. Our whole society is geared towards big-scale solutions to everything instead of those interactions that you have every day that actually build something more beautiful.

The Blueprint, for me, to be able to show in it that actually these big employers that came before, that have gone, they were never actually the big employers. It was this network of small businesses that were something like 70% family owned, 80% small businesses with 10 or under employees. It was showing that it was those businesses that interact every day and build community and circulate money locally, and provide the infrastructure that communities really need, rather than somebody coming and building a factory, employing some people, and then probably pulling out a few years later and ripping out some of the fabric.

David Cameron’s now talked about us being in a state of “permanent austerity” and it looks like an incoming Labour government would uphold most of the cuts that are already in place.  From the 7 years of Transition here and your sense of it and the learnings from what’s happened here, what more general lessons do you think Totnes can offer to communities up and down the country who are faced by austerity?

 There’s something about Totnes being quite particular that is true, but then I look at other places like Bradford, where I’m from. I was at a conference in Leeds, which is nearby, about the food work that we’ve been doing here, and somebody said, well it’s alright, you can do it in Totnes, but what about places like Bradford and Leeds?

Actually, access to land is easier in places like that. There’s more land, more unused land that could be appropriated. There’s more of a history of self-organising in those places, that if you could revive that again, which is happening, that’s happening with other organisations within Transition, that the things that we can model here because it’s uniquely geographically like it is and because it’s surrounded by a lot of growing land and traditionally agricultural, and all the different reasons why Totnes is like it is, if we can model it here and then parts of bits of that are done elsewhere then I’d be happy with that.

What I wouldn’t be happy with is if we’re doing everything that we do here and it didn’t inspire people elsewhere to be self-organising, and all that happened was the government saying ”they can do it in Totnes so why can’t you do it everywhere else?”  I think we really have to guard against that and think about how we can pull together. I think that’s about working, not just with our colleagues in Transition, but ones who are in the Co-operative movement and the Community Land Trusts and in Development Trusts, social enterprise movements, so those other models, if we can pull together, we’ve got a really strong voice.

In the beginning, TTT was really framed as being a response to peak oil and climate change. Would you say that it’s now equally a response to austerity as well? Where does it sit there in terms of being a driver for TTT these days?

I almost think the thing about peak oil and climate change was a consequence of the world we’ve managed to construct because we had cheap fossil fuels, and we’ve been able to construct this economy gone completely insane, the free market economy.  So it’s part of the broader picture. It’s a response to living well, really. To being resilient. But we want everybody to be resilient, not just, “this is our place and we’re going to forget about you”.

It’s about the things that are important to people. What do we need and what’s important. Increasingly that’s what everybody is talking about. I think Transition was there first, and everybody now is talking about energy and climate change and the impacts of climate change, because it’s happening now. It was happening before, but now people are acknowledging it more. You don’t need to talk about that, but you can talk about how we’ve gone too far with this excess of everything that was fuelled by that fuel, and so it’s a symptom. 

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27 Nov 2013

The Big Debate: how should Transition initiatives respond to austerity?

This month’s immersion in austerity has taken us in numerous directions.  We’ve heard from all sorts of people, and now we’d like to hear from you.

We’ve had James Meadway’s ‘Austerity Basics’, which have given us a grounding in the thinking behind the whole approach. We’ve heard from a Conservative MP on her take as to why austerity is necessary and could be the spark for all manner of community enterprise.  We’ve heard from food journalist Felicity Lawrence about the impact the austerity cuts are having on the safety and regulation of our food.  We spoke to Jeremy Leggett about the importance of challenging the stranglehold the Big Six energy companies have over our energy supply.  Pam Warhurst of Incredible Edible Todmorden told us how they are seeing urban food production in the context of a response to austerity.  Prof Tim Lang told us about how food policy needs to reevaluated in the light of austerity.  Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall shared her thoughts on what we can learn from the austerity of 1939-1945 that might apply today.  We have yet to hear from Frances Northrop at Transition Town Totnes about how TTT are seeing their work in the context of austerity.  Our Social Reporters also reflected on the subject (for example here).  We heard how Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition are responding to austerity, and Jason Roberts told us about lessons from the Better Block project.  

So now it’s over to you.  How do you think Transition initiatives should be responding?  What are you doing in your initiative?    

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