23 Jun 2014
Alan Simpson describes himself as a “recovering politician”. He was Labour MP for Nottingham South for 18 years until he stood down because, as he puts it, “I was becoming obsessed with small-picture politics and I thought maybe I just needed to get out and try to influence it from outside”. He is also, to my knowledge, the only member of Parliament who has ever explicitly questioned economic growth while still an MP. What is it like, being driven by the urgency of climate change, not believing in economic growth and being in Parliament? We asked him.
“Very few people grasped it. I was given messages about the unacceptability of this way of seeing things at a fairly early stage. Tony Blair told the press lobby that if I was “the last surviving member of the parliamentary Labour party” he wouldn’t have me in his Cabinet, which I took as something of an accolade.
Nick Cohen in Fools Britannia quotes someone from Downing Street saying that if people listened to me I “could ruin everything”. It was quite clear to me that all of the political parties were strapped to a mindset about growth which was as self-deluding as it was going to be self-defeating, and it was only ever going to end in tears. The difficulty is that it’s locked into the mindset of the Treasury.
I had several unhelpful encounters with the Treasury during the time, trying to argue for a different approach to economics. The funny thing for me is that more often than not when I would go into the Treasury, you’d find yourself besieged by young kids running what I think of as naïve economic theories that we used to laugh at when I was an economics undergraduate.
They were seen as pretty daft ideas at the time, but the passage of time has almost made them market orthodoxies. They bore no relationship to the finite limits of the planet or the notion that at some point an economics of repair would have to overtake an economics of exploitation. It’s only the transformation movements (such as Transition) that really seem to grasp this.
Where do you come from on energy and climate change and the role of top-down, bottom-up action on those issues?
The big achievement for me in the parliamentary sense was that I organised the parliamentary ganging up that pushed the feed-in tariffs into the 2008 Energy Act. That for me was a really profound change that meant that at a community level people could start to get into the renewable energy game and to be drivers for transformation.
Parliament needed to provide the open door and the Transition movement needed to run like the clappers through it. That was what looked to be a real possibility post-2008, up until some time in 2010 when George Osborne turned what had been an open-ended commitment to the financing of that transition on the same lines as what Germany had done, into a fixed budget within government accounts. That seemed to a allow a fundamental change in thinking, in which all the shifts into renewable energy now have been constrained by the levy control framework and dominated by a government obsession not to do anything on any great scale and at any great rush.
We’re at a really critical stage of energy transformation, or not. What I’m hoping is that the transformation movement can save government from locking the UK into a mindset of the past but with huge financial millstones that would sink it in the future.
You wrote recently “obsessed with empowering the individual, parliament has lost sight of the collective.” Is reforming parliament possible, and if so, what would it look like?
What I like to try to remind people of is that if you look at the UK’s energy systems, you have to turn the clock back over 200 years to when they first emerged at a municipal level. From 1817 to the 1880s, you had this fantastic movement of municipal gas, water and electricity companies, all of which were formed by localities. Parliament didn’t catch up with this until the 1850s.
Where we are now, I think there is a similar revolution that is taking place (around renewable energy). Technology is driving this. The possibility of developing energy systems that are lighter, brighter, quicker, more nimble at self-balancing and self-regulating, all of these will deliver a quite different energy system within a decade. Old energy just struggles to grasp this.
Unfortunately they seem to have an absolute arm lock on the mindset of parliament, just bang this drum that “if you don’t throw us more money the lights will go out”. We have a politics of fear, of the Bogeyman. But if you step back from that, all of those who have any grasp of climate science and the turbulence of what’s going on understand that those big centralised energy systems aren’t going to work, and nor will individual energy solutions.
It’s really nice for me to live in a house where I produce more electricity than I consume. But is that going to make any difference to the shape of society in the decades ahead? No. It will only make a difference if that forms part of something larger and more inter-dependent. The era that is emerging that is going to offer any sanctuary is going to be one where we discover real strength and security through our inter-dependencies. In the UK this is difficult for people to grasp because we don’t think we have a starting point. We’ve forgotten the socialisation of our original energy systems.
We have to reach out beyond our own shores and see what’s happening in Denmark, in Germany, in parts of the USA, where people are beginning to see that if they re-socialise today’s grids, they can generate more of their own energy from clean, renewable sources, and they can generate today’s and tomorrow’s jobs in the process of doing that.
They can reduce energy consumption by selling less energy needs rather than more. And they can sell or construct themselves elaborate networks for balancing and storage that deliver that collective security. All this is constructed around an economics that treads more lightly on the present and the future.
You’ve written “tomorrow’s security and sustainability will be built from the strength of our inter-dependency.” What does it look like when politics actually supports that?
We could do far worse than just asking our own kids about the starting point. My guess is that older people may have no difficulty in owning up that at one stage they owned a Commodore 64 and that was where they started with the communications revolution. But if you came up to them now and said “I’ve got this fantastic plan to do a huge investment upgrade in the Commodore 64, we should put go faster stripes on it. We can have Commodore 64s in every school in the country and every house in the land”, it would be our kids who’d turn round and say “sod off, I’ll have an iPad, thank you very much”. The game has changed. What was a legitimate starting point yesterday is not even a credible one today, and it will just be open to ridicule for tomorrow.
When I’ve taken people around Germany, they’ve consistently asked me questions about the UK. I suppose the most consistent one is “why do your political parties all begin from an assumption that you have to work out your future security in partnership with the energy companies? Because in Germany we just see them as people who are intellectually locked into the idea of selling more consumption.”
If you want tomorrow’s partners, they are much more enthusiastically and constructively to be found in the telecommunications sector, where that notion of moving from smart phones to smart homes, and smart homes to smart towns, and smart towns to smart cities, all of which have much more localised senses of how we balance and how we build, how we retain and how we restore. And they join systems up in a way that our system doesn’t currently respond to.
We are where we are. The Treasury is like the land of the undead, which fails to hear messages about the unaffordability or unsustainability of today’s energy sources as the basis of today’s energy thinking. But outside there are people who are unafraid to run with this. Once politicians start to go in pursuit of votes, I think if we decide that we’re running off and not waiting, the parliamentary system will come chasing after us in exactly the same ways that it went chasing after the municipal gas water and electricity companies in the 19th century. I think they’ll catch up in less than the 50 years that it took then. My guess is that they’ll catch up, because they have to catch up, within a decade.
There might be people who are involved in Transition or things like that who are so moved by the scale of climate change and the urgency to do stuff that they might think “maybe I should run for parliament and try and get in there”. What’s your sense of that balance between whether we should be investing our time and energy at the local scale or whether we should be running for parliament? How much impact can you actually have at that scale?
I’m not sure that I see that as an either/or choice. I usually say to people don’t write parliament off, because parliament has an important role and it needs to be rescued by braver people coming in than we have there at the moment. Infiltrate every political party that you can and try to get yourselves selected as candidates. Don’t just think that you can, on a whim, put your name forward as a candidate and the system as is will whisk you up and hail your arrival. It doesn’t work like that.
You have to be realistic about how the current voting system works, and seek to try to engage with that constructively. That’s an invitation for brave people to become candidates for parties that are in with a serious chance of winning seats.
As part of a movement, Transition needs to recognise that it has enormous strength at the moment. All of the parties are living in absolute fear that the public will turn round at some point before the next election and say out loud “there is nothing here to vote for. None of you offer a vision that is worth taking our slippers off, putting our shoes back on and going out to the polling stations”.
That fear of being seen as standing for nothing has suddenly been hyped up by the arrival of UKIP on the right as challenging this notion that on the Conservative side of things, basically we just have to keep with UKIP on immigration to get ourselves in, and Labour on the left saying we can ignore all the votes to the left, we just have to be marginally better than the Conservatives.
The movement has to challenge the mainstream parties to stand for a positive alternative, a visionary alternative to the narrow, introspective divisiveness that is UKIP. To begin by saying, openly, to the mainstream political parties, “there is nothing here, no visionary agenda on sustainability that is worth voting for”. That will send a frisson of fear through the system now.
Why? Because there’s one year before the general election takes place. The Transition movement really has to enhance that feeling of insecurity of parliament. Because that is what drives them, drags them out of their little mouse holes to be bolder than they are.
We have to become much more assertive in running with an agenda of demands that says to all the political parties: “unless you can sign up to standing for a, b, and c, and fighting with us to get these commitments into your manifestos now, do not expect us to vote for you. Do not expect us to campaign for you. Do not expect us to say that you are worth anyone voting for”.
And if there’s a moment in which politicians are more vulnerable to that notion that they might just not be worth voting for, they’ll move heaven and earth to try and convince us that they are.
What’s your sense of what those lines in the sand, those “do these things or you don’t get our support” should be? Two or three of those things that would for you be the absolute?
I’d say absolutely they have to commit to demanding of their party that they reject and actively oppose the proposals from the EU Competition Directorate to make feed-in tariffs illegal and to replace them with auctions. Equally, we should be demanding that the levy control framework is scrapped and that feed-in tariffs are put within either the capacity payments mechanism or they’re dealt with in the way that the Germans do of self-financing parts of the energy sector accounts. But the levy control framework is going to bust apart in the next parliament anyway. At the moment, it’s just being used as a mechanism to constrain the potential of the Transition Towns movement rather than to support it, so make that as a demand.
And the right to be the first users of our own energy is really critical. Part of the reason for that is that at the moment the bulk of the community energy movement is really a movement of investors in community energy. We’ve been very poor at including those who are too poor to buy their way in as beneficiaries. But if you can sell energy or electricity back at something much closer to wholesale price, effectively cutting people’s electricity charges in half, all of a sudden the huge value of that, staying within the local 11Kw distribution network, all of that makes everyone in the locality a direct beneficiary. What Germany found is that as soon as you had a mass movement in the society that are beneficiaries of a radical change, then you have an unstoppable movement.
I think the final part of that is the notion that if you localise our thinking about distribution grids, we can really begin to sell non-consumption, energy saving, energy efficiency, in ways that are 10 times more exciting and coherent than anything you would ever find in Green Deal or anything like it. It turns communities, not just from being consumers to pro-sumers, but it turns people into the drivers of solutions. I think that’s something which is hard for me to quantify, but when I’ve gone round everywhere in Germany, that’s the thing that strikes me. At virtually every level at which there’s discussion about energy, communities see themselves as being in the driving seat and not the passenger seat of sustainable change.
[The above is abridged from our full interview, which you can listen to below]
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16 Jun 2014
I was recently sent a really interesting paper by Philip Barnes of the University of Delaware called The political economy of localization in the Transition movement. I was keen to publish it here, but it’s in moderation to be published, so I couldn’t. Instead, I wrote to Philip and asked if he might be able to summarise its findings for the non-academic reader. In response to our month’s question of ‘Is Transition political?’, he writes “Transition is not only political in theory, it is increasingly political in practice given the heightened level of policy making activity exhibited by some initiatives”. Here is his article:
Is Transition political? That is the question posed this month on Transition Culture. One place to look for an answer is in the undeniably political arena of government. The relationship between Transition initiatives and their local government is an interesting one. On the one hand, initiatives must be mindful not to get co-opted by governments because that would diminish the amount of energy and resources available to get on with the necessary job of localisation and resilience building.
Sometimes it seems that governments and bureaucracies move at a snail’s pace (no disrespect to snails), so perhaps it is best for an initiative to keep moving forward themselves instead of waiting around, hoping that the local government will take action on important issues. On the other hand, initiatives must work within the confines of local laws, plans, regulations, ordinances, and so forth. Initiatives can seek assistance from local government, to be sure, but the role of local government is to “support, not drive” a Transition group. Initiatives therefore strike a balance between retaining the ability to independently engage in do-it-ourselves action, and spending time, effort, and energy to “build a bridge” to local government.
Each initiative must find that point where local governments are supporting, not driving their group. Luckily, there are guidelines (or perhaps suggestions?) on how initiatives might walk this fine line, key among them is the recommendation to remain explicitly non-political and to come in “under the radar.” From the very beginning of the movement, a conscious decision was taken to promote this non-political strategy. The common refrain is that if a Transition initiative becomes openly political, it runs the serious risk of entering divisive “us versus them” conflicts and hence alienating potential supporters and collaborators, both in local government and in the wider community.
After all, as the argument goes, we are all in this together because peak oil and climate change will impact everyone so it is best to be inclusive and non-confrontational. One sure-fire way to become embroiled in conflict is to enter contentious political debates so it is simply advisable to avoid them altogether. Join the party, not the protest march, as Richard Heinberg might say.
It sounds fairly straightforward, but theory does not always match reality. What is actually happening on the ground? How are initiatives walking that fine line between independence and institutionalisation? I was curious. For my thesis in the School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Delaware, I am exploring this interesting relationship between Transition initiatives and their local governments.
The investigation began by looking for clues in the previous research on Transition as well as in the Transition-published literature such as the Handbook, the Companion, this blog, and individual initiatives’ websites. I then interviewed Transition members in a number of towns and cities across the United States. And I participated in – and still participate in – the Media, Pennsylvania initiative.
While the initial goal was to discover where and how initiatives balance independence and institutionalisation, I came to an unexpected finding. I found that some groups are beginning to steadily integrate with their local governments and blur that line between independence and institutionalisation. If anything, the balance is tipping toward institutionalisation and it is doing so in a way that transcends the “building bridges” metaphor.
For example, one interviewee is a highly influential member of the local government’s food and agriculture task force. In another town, the initiative mobilized their participants’ votes and successfully propelled a sympathetic ally into a position on the local governing council. And I interviewed a Transitioner who ran for and won a seat in their local council election. Stories like these are not unique to the United States. Rob just posted an interview with Peter MacFayden, Sustainable Frome member and now mayor of Frome. Alexis Rowell’s book Communities, Councils, and Low-Carbon Future contains a “Getting Elected” chapter which offers advice for participants who have such ambitions.
These are role reversal cases where initiatives are beginning to drive local governments. The old approach to build a bridge to local government so they can support, not drive an initiative is being shed in these instances. I am undertaking a comprehensive survey of initiatives in the United States (that stage of the research is currently underway), but my suspicion is that the institutionalisation of Transition groups is much more widespread than we would expect for an explicitly non-political movement.
All of this leads directly to the question of politics. How can an initiative come in under the political radar if it is driving local government? The simple answer is that it can’t, and here’s why. Local governments are policy making bodies. Public policies go through a process whereby they are proposed, developed, written, enacted, implemented, analysed, and revised on the back of human values. A few examples of human values that are frequently brought to bear on policy are justice, freedom, security, resilience, equality, sustainability, and efficiency.
When representatives in local governments go through the policy process, they must make decisions by prioritizing certain values above others. For any given situation and context, it is improbable that a group of people – such as a local governing council and by extension the community they represent – will rank their values in the same way. Given that reality, policy decisions are almost always contested and the stage upon which the contest plays out is that sometimes dirty and scary word, “politics.” Policy decisions are inherently political. Policy decisions are fundamentally political.
The point is that when initiatives drive local governments and start to pull policy levers, as they are now doing to greater effect, they cannot hope to remain under the radar. On the contrary. Initiatives that have direct access to policy power are going to show up as a blinking red dot on the political radar. It is inevitable and there is no way around it. Nor should there be. Policy decisions are essentially political.
To see why this is the case, let’s take a closer look at Dryden, New York which in 2011 revised their city’s zoning ordinance to prohibit the practice of natural gas hydraulic fracking in the community. There is not a Transition initiative in Dryden, but for this example image there is and also imagine that participants of this hypothetical group are on the local governing council. Let’s further assume that the initiative was directly responsible for creating and enacting the policy to prohibit fracking because they prioritized the values of resilience and sustainability.
Now, the ordinance must apply to everyone in the community, including economically depressed land owners who might be anxious to sign a drilling lease so they can raise money and send their children to college. Those landowners prioritize the value of freedom to develop their property; hence they would disagree with the policy decision. By gaining the power and authority to put fracking ban in place, our hypothetical initiative in Dryden just entered political stage left.
It is clear that due to the political nature of policy making, initiatives that drive their local government will struggle mightily to retain the traditional Transition ideals of openness, inclusivity, and the avoidance of conflict. That is the trade-off that some initiatives are making. Institutionalising and getting directly involved in policy decision making means that initiatives can (though not necessarily will) make a much greater impact on the community than would be the case with independent, conflict-free action.
Being involved in local government means having access to the public purse and a larger voice in how those resources are spent on localisation and resilience building. Again, all this comes at the cost of angering some folks whose values do not parallel the initiative’s. Even within an initiative there is bound to be a mismatch of values among participants. But is it really desirable to avoid contentious debates altogether? Perhaps a certain healthy level of political wrangling is a necessary and good thing. Albert Otto Hirschman made a convincing case that being able to successfully navigate through disputes and political conflict represents an indispensable pillar of democratic societies and strong, resilient communities.
This month’s Transition Culture theme is trying to get at the question, “Is Transition political?” Yes, obviously. Transition is absolutely political. But I would extend the answer further by pointing out that Transition is not only political in theory, it is increasingly political in practice given the heightened level of policy making activity exhibited by some initiatives. How this all plays out, and whether or not the wider movement can continue to fly under the political radar remains to be seen. What is certain is that Transition politics, at least for some initiatives, is itself transitioning.
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11 Jun 2014
So, picture the scene. There I was, standing on a Totnes street corner with a film crew from Germany with whom I had been spending the afternoon filming a piece about the new Totnes Pound and local food strategies. We were taking a break from filming when a woman came up and asked them what they were filming. “We’re filming a piece about Transition Town”, they said. “Huh”, she said. “Let me tell you about Transition”. “Uh oh”, I thought, “here we go”.
“Have you heard of the Merchant Venturers in Bristol?”, she asked. Blank looks from my German friends. “Well you need to look into that, in order to see who’s really behind Transition Town”, she continued, getting into her stride. “You need to look into the organisations behind it all. It’s vast. You see that land over there?” she said, pointing down South Street behind her to the extensive rolling green hills beyond. “Transition are going to build all over that. Cover it in concrete. That’s what they’re all about – construction”. Having imparted her revelation, she departed, leaving us all to take in this new, and clearly impeccably researched, conspiracy theory about Transition.
It joins a long queue of similarly groundless and ridiculous conspiracy theories on the subject. Here’s just a few of my favourites that have emerged from the conspiracy blogosphere over the years. Foster Gamble, maker of the dire conspiracy film ‘Thrive’ wrote:
“A key to understanding Transition Towns is recognizing that the organization was founded and operated out of the United Kingdom as a creation of the British Fabian Socialist Society. Transition Initiatives require local communities to conform to “Energy Descent Action Plans”. The same people who are imposing this Plan are the ones suppressing “new energy technologies” — technologies that obsolete the notions that energy is scarce and that using it has to be intrinsically polluting”.
To give him his due, when challenged on this he did apologise on the “British Fabian Socialist Society” point, albeit with the caveat “If in fact I am wrong about your Transition Towns endeavor involving coercive socialism, I will be thrilled and more than happy to apologize for the misrepresentation and correct it here”. Unfortunately in millionaire Gamble’s case, one man’s “coercive socialism”, is another man’s “economy in which people pay taxes”.
A website called ‘Common Purpose Exposed’ states that Julia Middleton, from an organisation called ‘Common Purpose’:
“Addressed the first TT conference on the subject of eugenics although you will find no evidence of this on their current website”.
I was there, and I can tell you there was no workshop on Eugenics (defined by the World English Dictionary as “the study of methods of improving the quality of the human race, esp. by selective breeding”). Can any readers who have been to a Transition Network conference imagine that? “Hmm, Workshop session two, let’s see … Inner Transition, Community energy companies, local food systems, eugenics…” I mean, come on. And note how the fact that there is no reference on our website to something that didn’t happen is presented as evidence that it therefore must have done. Welcome to conspiracy logic world.
A fantastically badly researched article by Susanne Posel set out the “dangers that Transition Towns impose on our sovereignty and individuality” as:
• They refocus town planning and infrastructure on implementation of Agenda 21
• They appear to be grassroots operations
• They promote the Peak Oil mythology as an energy scare-tactic
• They support SmarthGrowth which is code for Agenda 21
• They aspire to control framing (by which I assume she means farming?), disburse ability to farm, and pressure governmental policies on farming that reflect Agenda 21
• Use the hoax of man-made climate change as the purpose for imposing policy control by building cities that are designed to reduce carbon emissions
• Securitize local food stores, businesses, healthcare and fuel
• Ensure SmarthGrowth controls all citizens ability to acquire any needs for human survival
• Create internal advocacies that band together to purvey Transition Town propaganda to elected officials and local governments
By working on the ground level, Transition Towns can over take states and nations quicker than funneling through the bureaucracy of national governments.
She also writes:
“Through manipulative training courses and propaganda films, Transition Towns are beginning to take root as a fake grassroots effort that poses great danger to our individuality and personal sovereignty”.
In the hands of those inclined towards conspiracy theories, the internet is a dangerous tool. Posel’s article has been reposted as gospel in many places, including, perhaps not surprisingly, David Icke’s site. No additional evidence or research is required. It’s what people like Posel and other conspiracy theorists proudly refer to as “research”, but which really seems to consist of Googling other conspiracy theory websites to find things that back up your theory.
A guy called Dean Philpot posted a video on YouTube, now sadly taken down, which argued that Transition is a scam designed to “take our land away”. He also posted this fascinating flow diagram showing how Transition is in fact part of a system that can be traced to the CIA and the Trilateral Commission among others (unfortunately this is the only version I can find online and it’s very low resolution, the original in the video was brilliant).
So what is a conspiracy theory? According to Daniel Pipes, a conspiracy theory is simply a conspiracy that never happened, that it is “the nonexistent version of a conspiracy”. Richard Hofstadter writes that the problem with them “is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a “vast” or “gigantic” conspiracy as the motive force of historical events”.
In other words, if Transition gains any sort of traction or success, it must be because powerful forces have allowed it to, indeed have decided that that must be the case, or indeed have actually most likely designed, created and resourced it in the first place. Conspiracy theorist Ian R Crane used to enjoy, without providing any supporting evidence, referring to “Rob Hopkins and his paymasters”. The very existence of Transition can be seen as confirmation of dark actors behind the scenes, with everyone’s motives open to question.
David Aaronovitch, in Voodoo Histories. The role of the conspiracy theory in shaping modern history, defines conspiracy theories as:
“The attribution of deliberate agency to something that is more likely to be accidental or unintended. And, as a sophistication of this definition, one might add: the attribution of secret action to one party that might far more reasonably be explained as the less covert and less complicated action of another”.
That hits the nail on the head for me. “The attribution of secret action to one party that might far more reasonably be explained as the less covert and less complicated action of another”. Although it is far more likely that Transition is actually what it presents itself as, i.e. a group of well-motivated people in a community trying to change it for the better, the far more covert and complicated argument is presented as being more logical. The conflating of two facts: that the town has a successful Transition initiative, and that the land around the town is under pressure from developers, is again seeking a far more complex explanation where the simpler one would make far more sense.
As Aaronovitch adds:
“Conspiracists are always winners. Their arguments have a determined flexibility whereby any new and inconvenient truth can be accommodated within the theory itself”.
So for example, when I challenged, in a comment thread, the assertion that Transition Network hosted workshops on eugenics, the fact that I had bothered to try and correct it was seen as evidence that we must have “something to hide”.
For me, conspiracy theories often represent what happens when people feel so disempowered, disinterested or bewildered by politics that it becomes easier to make up their own. It’s a world where things don’t just happen, they are all part of a carefully planned and meticulously rolled-out masterplan. Yet any time spent with anyone actually involved in politics will tell you that much of it is chaos, generally responsive rather than proactive.
Do bad things happen because neoliberal capitalism is doomed to eat itself to death and corrupt most of what it touches, and is fighting for the dwindling resources on a finite planet, or, perhaps, because the Moon is an artificial space station built by an ancient alien race which controls our thought patterns and keeps us enslaved (David Icke’s latest theory)? Tough call.
Our friend in Totnes (whose community contains a fair few people who share such views) has managed to turn her sense of bewilderment as to how the world works, how decisions that affect her are made, into a theory for which no evidence whatsoever is required, yet which feels entirely watertight and compelling. Any attempts to challenge it would, most likely, be taken as confirmation that her understanding is the correct one.
Yet holding such a world view is awesomely disempowering. No point doing anything. No point trying to make change happen. No point trying to get involved in local politics, or working for local charities. No need to do anything. And that, in itself, combined with a worldview with its own internal logic, provides a comfort blanket in confusing times. It just happens to be a rather dangerous and toxic one.
I’ll leave the last word to Aaronovitch, who puts it beautifully:
“Conspiracy theories are theories that, among other things, offend my understanding of how things happen by positing as a norm how they do not happen”.
Indeed.
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8 Jun 2014
Something remarkable is happening in Frome, a story that offers many useful insights for increasing the impact of Transition and reimagining how it relates to local politics. Peter MacFadyen is author of Flatpack Democracy and very recently became the Mayor of Frome. Previously he worked for Comic Relief as a development consultant, and is also the director of an undertaking firm. In 2011 he was one of a group of ‘Independents for Frome’ who ran for, and were elected onto, the local Town Council. I asked him to tell me the ‘Frome story’.
“The Frome story starts four years ago really. In January before a local election, I was the Sustainable Frome representative who was meant to have a relationship with the town council. Sustainable Frome is the Transition Town equivalent and a member of the Transition Network. When I went to the town council, their sustainability policy consisted of “we’ve got a park, what more do you want?” Essentially I found that rather unsatisfactory, and I met a number of other people who were also finding all sorts of other bits of the town council’s work unsatisfactory really, because they were missing opportunities rather than that they were particularly evil in any way. It was just that they didn’t do anything.
That then led, as so often happens through probably too much beer, to “ok, let’s try and whip this up a bit, make it more interesting, raise some issues and see if more people will vote”. Like many places, we have a lot of wards that have not been contested for years. That led to an election in May 2011 where a group of people stood as ‘the Independents of Frome’ and won 10 out of 17 seats. [Here’s a piece from local TV just after their election]
We have an outright majority and have continued over the last three years with a very ambitious programme which has at its core a lot of green things because a lot of the people who got involved were green in everything but politics, because we’re independent.
So why Independents?
It’s partly anti-party politics because part of the history of Frome was party politicians bickering around party issues and spending their time doing party things. For instance, a number of the party politicians last night couldn’t come to the meeting because they were all off campaigning for the Euro elections. Things like that, we just felt, at this level, they should have Frome at the core of their interest and they shouldn’t be driven by ideologies that are actually irrelevant and often corrosive at a local level.
The thing that’s slightly different about us is that we work as a group of independents, which is not the same as a party. But we do have a way of working, we set out some rules of behaviour really which are essentially common sense: accept that if you lose a vote, you move on from it, things like that. Ours and many other councils and councillors get terribly involved in stabbing each other in the back, revenge for previous votes and that kind of thing. That’s probably one of the best examples of where we’ve said we’ll work as individual people with individual ideas but we’ll work with a common purpose which is around the betterment of Frome.
As part of this month’s theme I interviewed Natalie Bennett from the Green Party and I asked her what her thought was about the role or otherwise of party politics at the very local level, and she said it’s really useful because it means you have all the support of a party, advice and policy and all of that immediate profile. Do you see anything to be said for that or really do you feel that party politics just has no place at the local level, it does more harm than good?
I think it does more harm than good. I think you can pick and choose. I’ve had some really interesting discussions in the last few weeks with the prospective parliamentary candidate for the Tories, the guy who’s going to stand for the Tories in the next election. If I was a Labour politician I probably wouldn’t feel I could do that or he wouldn’t want to see me. I think it’s really important to be able to pick and choose and the vast majority of what Natalie was talking about just wouldn’t be relevant at a parish town level.
What are the things that you’ve been able to do? One of the things that’s really interesting in the book I think is how you set out that there are powers that town councils have that they may not know about, which you’ve taken full advantage of.
We have. Some of that comes from localism. We were very happy at the beginning of Independents of Frome to have some of the really key people who were involved in the new localism Act as it was created, and to be able to tip us off on what might be useful. There are powers through which local communities can try and buy land, can try and do things in a way which they didn’t used to be able to.
Essentially, what you had to do before was what’s on a list, and the list was dog shit, bus shelters, and at our level very limited. What we’ve now done is to break out from that and we can now do anything that isn’t illegal other than, apparently, “form an army”. Other than create an army, anything that’s legal, we can do it. This means we’ve been able to, for instance, borrow significant sums of money in order to do up buildings or create opportunities which we wouldn’t have been able to do and wouldn’t have had the ambition to do…
I have to say I’m very relieved to hear that you aren’t able to form an army in Frome, that’s a great relief. You’ve done some work around allotments and you’ve been looking at bringing assets into community ownership I think? Tell us more about some of the things?
We’re just about to bring a significant asset into community ownership. We agreed last night to pursue the purchase of what will become a major community hub. This is an ex-Somerset County Council building that we’re going to buy with yet another loan. These loans, incidentally will add up to about 10% of our budget. So it is significant, but it’s not a problem, just not something that was done before.
The allotments was an interesting combination of the council combining with a local donor who wanted to support Frome, so we used his money to buy some land and then added council money to that, to get rid of a 10 year waiting list overnight.
A lot of what we’ve done actually is to up the buzz of Frome though. There’s now a very large market in the town which closes the whole middle of town, brings thousands of people in once a month in very much a European-style market. Again, that’s happened because the town council’s combined with local entrepreneurs, with the district council to do all the road closing and so on.
We’ve done that partly by the nature of the people who we’ve attracted to the council. In many ways, it’s not very tangible, but one of the main things we’ve done is to massively the structure. There were five layers of council management, there are now three. There were a plethora of meeting, there are now two main ones and two committees. With that cleanness, we seem to have been able to attract staff who would definitely not have worked for local councils before.
We’ve got some really, really good people who come with a different outlook. I don’t mean that negatively about the people who were there before really, but they’ve brought in ideas to up the whole game, in that kind of way.
You mentioned localism, and the Localism Bill gives communities some very interesting powers it didn’t have before. What do you see as being the opportunities that localism presents and also perhaps some of the down sides of it?
I think the ethos is really exciting. The idea that communities really can do things, essentially a Community Right to Build, the Right to Challenge, the Right to Bid. They basically say that if the community comes together and has a referendum around something like a building which was going to be sold – which might be a pub or something, it doesn’t have to be a public building – then that community can really have a say in what’s going to happen.
There was also meant to be money that came down to support a lot of that. The challenge is that certainly for us, the interpretation of what local is, and much of that has been ‘district’ so it has stopped at the level above us. We have a very highly politicised district who are very short of money. They all are, we do understand their problem, but they’ve creamed off the money and basically held the decisions at that level.
We’ve done the consultation, said what the people want or found what the people want, we’ve set everything up and then it doesn’t happen. At the moment it’s got stuck, and not surprisingly in many ways, the government’s moved on to things like the recession and fracking and whatnot and have kind of lost interest, I think. So it doesn’t have the weight from the top down to make this happen.
One of the things in UKIP’s EU elections mainfesto which is interesting is how it takes the idea of localism a stage too far, I think, saying that local communities should have the power of referendum on everything, basically. On wind farms, solar farms, any housing development, any development at all. If you can get 5% of people to say they want to have a referendum, then there should be a referendum. Which makes me think actually that the piece that’s missing is if you give people loads and loads of rights but you don’t give them the responsibilities that go with them in terms of national targets for cutting carbon, then it just doesn’t make any sense at all. So actually if you were to say, yes you can have a referendum on planning but in total over 5 years those have to add up to a 10% cut in carbon emissions over a period of time, then you’ve got something quite different. I wondered what your thoughts were on the extent to which giving people power over local decisions is wise or not?
That’s a very interesting point. Obviously I must go out and read the document before I rush out and vote, which I haven’t done yet. This whole thing of giving people power is also without information. So people will vote with their instincts. There’s a real dilemma there. I went to a meeting about fly tipping the other night as there’s a particularly big issue on fly tipping in one area of Frome, and for some people the answer was to close the road. But that’ll just mean they’ll move somewhere else, the answer being that we don’t care. So we’ve got things like that to deal with, NIMBYism at its most astute, which I suppose is what you get with wind farms and solar farms and so on.
But also a lot of these issues are complicated aren’t they? They are difficult things to get our heads around. Quite a lot of people elect people like me as a councillor and then say – look, I trust you, I’ve elected you in order to make all the decisions for me, so I don’t have to read all these papers and get involved. And it’s really difficult to find that point where you engage people enough so they actually understand the issues and can make the decisions and could take part in a referendum sensibly. At the other extreme you have a dysfunctional democracy like we have at the moment. So I don’t see an easy answer, but giving that level of power to what would inevitably, at least initially, be a very few people who turn up, would be deeply dangerous I would say.
At the moment I imagine Frome has a town council, a district council and a county council. Do we need all those tiers, and if not, which ones should go?
We don’t and the district should go. In my view, it’s now irrelevant. Not least because it has so few resources. Much of what it does they have sold off anyway, so it’s been privatised. All the street cleaning, for instance, is on a 10 year contract. A lot of the other services which they used to provide they’ve sold off, so they’re not really doing anything. Probably technically they’re managing them, but they’re effectively gone. It seems to me they just cost money and are completely unhelpful now. Certainly for us they’re just another layer which serves no useful function at all as far as I can see.
We talked about how the powers of localism have helped what you’ve done in Frome, and given you new powers that you can do a lot with. And how you see the work that you’re doing there as an extension of the Transition work that was happening before. What would more government help and better legislation, what would need to change in order to help you deepen that work and help you move further forward? How much further could government go to enable that?
There’s a lot of training that people need, a lot of confidence that they need to get that actually if they were to have the skills and if they were to participate and engage, that participation and engagement would lead to change. Then they would do it. I think what’s happened at the moment is everything’s got sucked to the top. I’m not at all surprised that Russell Brand can say what he said and 11 million people can watch him and most of them will agree, that actually “voting only encourages them”.
Actually, our system is collapsing from the top down, and what government could do is to give real powers to local people and the resources, partly to have an army if you like, of facilitators and well-trained people to help people to help the community to make those decisions and to engage. We’ve lost those skills, I think, and we need to regain those skills. The government could really help in training people, working with people to get them back again. Then, crucially, make sure that decisions that are made at a local level actually lead to real change. That people will get pissed off really quickly if that doesn’t happen.
What would your advice be to people who are thinking “I wonder if we should do that and get a few people together like they’ve done in Frome?” What would your advice be to them?
My cocky advice would be read my book, Flatpack Democracy, but there is a real moment actually. What the book set out to do is to try and help people to see actually how easy it could be to take power at a local level and then really put in place some change very quickly. We are at a unique moment.
Although unemployment may be falling, there are vast numbers of young people who are either unemployed or under-employed. If they continue to be totally disenfranchised as they effectively are now, (well not totally, but really have a deep cynicism from the system), we’ve set up something which is potentially really explosive. There’s a real need but there’s also a real opportunity particularly to bring young people into the system and to running things like councils.
The mayor who I replaced was 21 when he took over, and he’s done a fantastic job. There’s no reason why young people shouldn’t be much more engaged than they are. There is a moment, particularly with social media where cheaply, quickly and easily, new bunches of people can come in at the bottom level and make things change.
It strikes me that what you’ve done in Frome is really imaginative and bold and creative, and town councils aren’t renowned for being bold and passionate and creative. Is there a way that they can have an injection of that? How can we get these ideas into councils?
Hopefully Frome and other places, because we’re not alone, can be examples and things do spread quite quickly. I think it’s a social media thing. Something like Incredible Edible which I know wasn’t a council idea, spread quickly. Transition Towns, blimey, world domination in only a few years! Good models can spread quickly. The effect of somewhere that is functioning being put out there is that it puts pressure on those that aren’t functioning. Other councils and other groups of people hopefully will think, why not us?
That’s definitely happening in the conversations that I have. I have a significant number of conversations now with people asking for advice or support and will you come and talk to us and so on, who want to do similar things. We’ll come to things talking a bit more later about the Transition Town movement because I think that’s the same thing really. A lot of what the Transition movement are doing is parallel democracy really. That puts a huge pressure on town councils to up their game.
The advantage of a town council is you have access to money, which a Transition group doesn’t have in the regular way that a parish or town council does. There’s real potential in there for the two working together to lead to a really significant evolution or revolution.
[Here is the podcast of our interview in full]
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7 Jun 2014
Criticising Transition for being explicitly apolitical, and for not engaging in the political system in the conventional way feels, to me, like criticising a spoon for not being very good at cutting bread. Transition is a tool designed for a specific purpose. But with the rise of UKIP, the National Front, the Golden Dawn, and others in Europe and elsewhere, is the Transition approach still tenable? Should we all actually be standing for election? This feels like a good time to explore how Transition relates to politics, and whether its approach is still appropriate. Welcome to our month on Transition and politics.
Over this month we’ll be exploring 4 key questions:
- Is Transition political?
- What does it look like if you and some similarly-minded friends get together and run for your local council?
- How do those within the political system who question its fundamental assumptions find a voice?
- What do the main political parties make of Transition?
We’d love to hear your thoughts and contributions too. We’ll start today with this piece as the response to the first question, “Is Transition political?”, and our interview with Peter Macfadyen for the second. First thing to say is that what follows are my thoughts, not any kind of official Transition Network position on politics. For me, I imagine Transition as being like an app. It is designed to do a particular thing, to bring people together to support and enable them to build resilience at the community level, but always in the context that, if done in a sufficient number of places, it will start to change politics on the larger scale and help to bring about a more healthy human culture.
But it’s one of a number of apps you might have for different purposes. It is different from the campaigning and protesting apps, it’s different from the political lobbying apps, and you’ll use different ones at different times. As Jeremy Caradonna puts it in his forthcoming book Sustainability: a history, “the challenge is to have a politically active movement without coming politicised“.
But the question that arises is if Transition is but one part of the wider process of driving the shift towards a more resilient, just, low carbon and abundant society, what should its relationship be to the other pieces of the puzzle? How should it relate to the other ‘apps’ (i.e. other movements/campaigns/ideas for change), and to local and national government?
Esther Aloun and Samuel Alexander of the Simplicity Institute recently published a refreshingly well-researched and thoughtful paper called The Transition movement: questions of diversity, power and affluence. In it, they ask “can a social movement, such as the Transition movement, achieve fundamental change without engaging in ‘top down’ political action?”
I would respond that that is the only way that Transition will work, by creating a space for innovation and experimentation at the local scale in such a way as to inspire change in other communities as well as higher up. We are starting to see evidence of this working. Aloun and Alexander’s suggestion that Transition would be more effective by being better connected with more radical change movements feels to me to entirely miss the point. It is effective precisely because isn’t connected to radical change movements, in my opinion. Let me unpack that a bit more.
If I decided to run for election as a Transition Town candidate, alongside my great Transition-related policies, I would need to have policies on abortion, healthcare, education, defence, international trade, etc etc. Every time I state a policy on one of those issues, I increasingly place myself somewhere on the left/right, pro/anti-growth, pro/anti-capitalism spectrum. As soon as I do that, I lose all the people who don’t also inhabit that place. What works at the national political level becomes profoundly unskilful at the local level.
Working through a Transition initiative, that lack of an explicit political positioning is one of our key strengths. It enables you to build the kind of diverse, cross-political groups that building more resilient communities requires. It enables the creation of projects on a meaningful scale, but unfettered by party politics and wider issues. It’s the ‘power to convene’ that Transition is so good at, which is virtually impossible to do in a truly inclusive way if you are seen as being politically aligned.
I was intrigued recently to get a copy of a novel called The Second Life of Sally Mottram, just published by David Nobbs, author of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, among other things. It tells the story, in the kind of novel many people will be taking to the beach this summer, of Sally who, according to the back cover “embarks on her ambition to bring her town back to life” by trying to start a Transition initiative. It’s “a hilarious, heartwarming tale about what keeps our community spirits alive”. How does he sum up Transition? Here Sally is on the train reading, for the first time, about Transition:
“The books are full of small details of little things that have been done to change and improve many places, mostly quite small places, but their underlying subject matter is not small. It is, simply, the saving of our planet. Implicit in it and the actions is that big things come out of little things, that out of a thousand tiny acts, if they can be joined up, one mighty act may emerge.
The idea that bottom up citizen-led approaches actually represent just the kind of political action that we need to see, is gaining momentum, galvanised in particular by the recent successes of the Right in the European elections. The left wing think tank Compass recently wrote, in their reflections on the European election results:
A new economy is waiting to be fashioned via companies serious about climate change, through peer to peer lending schemes to really challenge the big banks, through crowd sourced investment like Kick-starter and sharing platforms in which we borrow and lend big ticket items we don’t often use. A myriad collaborative projects made possible by new technology, democratic initiatives like Abundance and big ideas like B Corps that change the very social nature of companies.
The same trends towards collaboration, self-organisation and social networks will infuse our politics. From 38 Degrees to Frome’s Flatpack democracy, from the great success of Hope Not Hate in defeating the BNP to Transition Towns, we need a citizen led politics of everyday democracy not just a vote once every five years.
When we started Transition, people said “you’ll never be able to influence policy-makers through community projects. It’s not going to happen”. Yet we can now start to get a sense of what that progression might look like. Let’s take Transition Town Brixton in London as an example:
- A group of people come together and raise awareness locally, Open Space events, engage as many people as they can, and formally kick themselves off as a Transition initiative
- This creates a supported space in which people have permission to start projects, enterprises, initiatives, but within a wider context of other people doing the same
One of those, Brixton Energy, emerges from the Energy Group, and soon becomes a successful community energy company, running three share offers- Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Davey, chooses it as the place to launch his call for ‘a community renewables revolution’ (see right).
- When the government drafts its ‘Community Energy Strategy‘, Brixton Energy are part of the drafting team (along with people from other Transition energy initiatives) and are mentioned as a case study.
That feels to me to be as radical as any of the groups Aloun and Alexander feel Transition should be teaming up with, but couldn’t have happened if they had. The question that arises of course is whether engaging with something like the Community Energy Strategy was a good use of time, whether it looks likely to bring about the kind of truly transformational change we really need.
The answer, thus far at least, is that it’s not enough, but it’s probably the best one could have hoped for under the current government. And it has enabled the funding to enable things like the Community Energy Peer Mentoring Fund which has enabled the peer-to-peer work OVESCO is now doing, supporting 10 neighbouring communities to set up their own community energy companies, as well as other financial support.
There is always, of course, the danger of co-option, a danger raised by Aloun and Alexander:
“As with most reformist, non-confrontational approaches, by the time the movement creates enough change to become noticeable, the existing system may already have had time to adapt and simply adjust to that change”.
That’s a risk. One could argue that, in the UK context, the Big Society was an attempt to try to bottle some of what Transition does so well. As indeed were some elements of the Localism Bill. But although getting support from local authorities and other bodies could be seen as co-option, it can actually be one of the best ways to protect against it. For example, the degree of institutional support for the Bristol Pound from Bristol City Council is such that if the government or the Bank of England wants to close the scheme down for any reason, it’s not just the Bristol Pound they need to pursue.
Ultimately, you can get more done at the local level, you can make more change happen. Seeing that change happen rebuilds your belief that change is possible and that it’s worth making an effort, something far harder to sustain when trying to bring about change at the national level. I tend to go along with John Boik who recently wrote in the Guardian:
“The national level is not the place to introduce bold change. Doing so would be too risky, too abrupt and too chaotic for a nation. Besides, it would be politically infeasible; the push-back from vested interests would be intense.
A far more practical strategy is to introduce new monetary, financial and corporate systems at the local level, on a volunteer basis and as a complement to current systems. Such an approach is already legal in the US and many other countries; no new laws would need to be passed. This strategy offers the greatest chance of success with the least amount of friction.
At the local scale you can create a new story, show it in practice, living and breathing, functioning pieces of the larger forthcoming resilient economy in practice. And that matters. As John Ehrenfeld put it in Sustainability by Design:
“Sustainability can emerge only when modern humans adopt a new story that will change their behaviour such that flourishing rather than unsustainability shows up in action”.
What fascinates me is how this idea of being more effective by not being explicitly political is gaining momentum. It’s written through the story of Independents for Frome that we’ll hear about next week. It’s in the invitation I had to speak in Salisbury a couple of weeks back from a mixture of councillors from across the spectrum and some local people wanting to get Transition started but realising that the Council couldn’t do it. It’s in the Totnes Economic Blueprint, created with a coalition of local stakeholders.
So, to answer the question that kicks us off this month, “is Transition political?” The answer is yes. Deeply. It has the power to transform communities, economies, shift power back to the local level, encourage communities to own their own assets and be more in control of their economic destiny. To create new food systems, economic systems, education models, and so on and so on. You know this stuff. It’s deeply, profoundly political. But it isn’t explicitly so. It comes in under the radar, and that really matters.
But the question then arises as to whether, when the Queen’s Speech gives, among other things, fracking companies the powers to frack under your home without your permission, your best option is to get your neighbours together to reduce your energy use and start a community energy company (as recently happened in Balcome), or to lobby and protest? And which, ultimately, is more ‘political’? Enjoy the month.
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Parliament needed to provide the open door and the Transition movement needed to run like the clappers through it. That was what looked to be a real possibility post-2008, up until some time in 2010 when George Osborne turned what had been an open-ended commitment to the financing of that transition on the same lines as what Germany had done, into a fixed budget within government accounts. That seemed to a allow a fundamental change in thinking, in which all the shifts into renewable energy now have been constrained by the levy control framework and dominated by a government obsession not to do anything on any great scale and at any great rush.
We could do far worse than just asking our own kids about the starting point. My guess is that older people may have no difficulty in owning up that at one stage they owned a Commodore 64 and that was where they started with the communications revolution. But if you came up to them now and said “I’ve got this fantastic plan to do a huge investment upgrade in the Commodore 64, we should put go faster stripes on it. We can have Commodore 64s in every school in the country and every house in the land”, it would be our kids who’d turn round and say “sod off, I’ll have an iPad, thank you very much”. The game has changed. What was a legitimate starting point yesterday is not even a credible one today, and it will just be open to ridicule for tomorrow.
