HOW TO STOP CLIMATE CHANGE BEYOND THE IMPACT OF A 1.5% INCREASE IN TEMPERATURES

1. Recognise the seriousness of the problem. With global human populations well above what we know we can live with sustainably, we are in very uncharted waters. Climate change and biodiversity collapse are existential threats, requiring that we give both issues supreme priority. At the same time all people on earth must have hope and faith in the future, or we can not expect the collaboration and adaptation required.

2. A planned global decarbonisation program needs to be developed based on achieving net zero carbon by 2035. To achieve this there has to be a willingness to use as much of the available space for carbon pollution to create non-carbon based alternative energy systems. 

3. Basic human needs the world over must be prioritised. This means appropriate energy efficient housing. Access to very healthy food produced sustainably. Appropriate clothing produced sustainably. Appropriate education and healthcare.

All of this means a level of international collaboration we have never seen. It means all of us, especially in the richer countries, accepting that we will not have the material wealth we are used to. It means living for years under quite severe restrictions on travel and resource use. It means accepting a command economy at some levels. It means learning to think of ourselves as part of a great global family, living on a living planet that needs us to tread much more lightly and with a love for all life.

It does not mean that we must be unhappy, or have uninteresting and unrewarding lives. We have both technical and cultural challenges to work on.  It can be the best of times, where we learn that competition is always less than collaboration, that trauma asks for love and forgiveness, but above all, that we are part of the beautiful web of life that shrouds our planet, with a special responsibility to be careful and kind to all life.

Few of our politicians are fit to be part of this transition. We need a revolution, not of violence, but of a commitment to the future we want and the hopelessness we reject. The leaders will have to follow. 

    

The Rich Are Too Powerful

The trouble the very rich cause the rest of us is not so much what they have got, so much as that they use their money to shape change in their own interests. This can be direct intervention in democratic process through party donations. It can be through influence at many levels. It can be through their business decisions. It can be through ownership of media. It can be through distorting markets (think of London house prices).

The very rich tend to think that they deserve the wealth they control. Even where the wealth is a direct consequence of a valuable social or economic contribution this is rarely really the case. Rather there is a mix of luck and riding on the backs of other very rich people who have shaped the rule book to suit themselves.

The purpose of money in a modern economy is to enable the vast number of exchanges that contribute to our collective well being. If people don't have full and fair access to money it constrains their ability to contribute and to have access to the resources needed to contribute. In the end, the value of money is not a promise from a central bank, nor is it precious metal; it is the promise to contribute value through our collective efforts, such that future well being is assured.

In a complex economy the point where value is realised is frequently far away from where the value was created. We all know how the money in coffee is in roasting and retailing, not in growing and processing the beans in the mountains of Central America. In a globalized economy, the opportunity for the super rich is to control the points where value is realized and where possible to avoid the wealth captured being taxed for redistribution back to the people whose work created the wealth in the first place.

The consequence for the rest of us of this gross inequality is not only that we may be poorer than we might have been; it is that we have surrendered the power to improve what we do and how we do it. We constantly find our lives as workers and consumers being defined by the interests of a self serving finance system and massive corporations jostling to gain monopoly control.

We can only guess how things might be different if the very wealthy were not so actively advancing their own short term interests, but they deserve at the least the spotlight of concern that they are collectively guilty of massive crimes against humanity.

Forget Corbyn, the one to watch is Tom Watson

There is always a political narrative; the story in our political space that defines politics, ever shifting, ever changing, mesmerizing almost, by its constant movement told in the media of now, that defines the form, the feel and the function of the political space itself.

Through these media driven narratives there emerges a consensus about what should be included or excluded from political thought. This social space is supposed to be where we engage with the civic administration of power. Issues and ideas jostle for attention; to enter the narrative and perhaps become acted upon. The public response to the narrative is carefully monitored; the narrative adjusts to steer opinion, like some blocking move in the game of Go. Meanwhile there is an acceptance that in reality the decisions of government are, for the greater part, driven by narratives emanating directly from the practice of power that are, in telling ways, shrouded in a secrecy and complexity that partially conceals a brutal, self interested cynicism.

The internet's plethora of competing narratives, spanning all imagined explanations for our experience of being, can be used to create new narratives as millions of minds probe towards consensus using the stories they adopt and reject. This has emerged in an age of fear, where fear has been for so long a manipulated facet of the narrative to hold us from rebellion against our alienation from power.

The result in the UK is a change in our politics that is both exciting and alarming. Broadly people are being drawn into two competing groups. There are those who see the country under siege from migrants and pooled sovereignty agreements with other countries, who seek some reclaim of a world that probably never existed. In the opposite corner are those of the planet in crisis narrative.

This is the world of the populist politician; the champion of causes. This is the world of Jeremy Corbyn and Tom Watson. This is the world of Nigel Farage. This is where ambition breaks with convention to grab for power. The Machiavelli among them is Tom Watson.

What Are The Assumptions Behind Green Party Policies

Now That the Green Party is having its "surge" and posing a threat to the Lib Dems and Labour, opponents have started looking through the Green Party policies and rubbing their hands with glee. Policies that are anti nuclear, both for energy and weapons, the abolition of the Monarchy, de-criminalising drug use and for recognising some "terrorist" groups can all be presented as cranky. The overall aim to redirect economic policy away from GDP growth, can be presented as a policy to deliberately cause a recession, with all the meaning that has for people.

In responding to this the Green Party has some explaining and its not easy. Almost all Greens have been on something of a political awareness journey and it can be difficult to explain to someone who has not even started on that journey how the Greens got to where they are. What follows is my understanding and hopefully it will help both Greens and no non-Greens.

I don't think it is useful to think of population as being something that must be 'addressed', for that way lies the strange land of choosing who's life is less valid, but population is undeniably the big underlying issue. There are many people in their 90's who were alive in 1923 when the world population passed 2 billion. Now we are well passed 7 billion and no-one really knows where the upper limit will be,or what will cause it. Generally though, we see populations grow when food increases and disease decreases, but stabalise when people feel secure, have a quality of life and the means to control pregnancy.

We can see that this level of population, even with low environmental impact living, puts humans in extreme competition with many other species, to the extent that the ecosystems that have created a world we can so successfully inhabit, are in danger of not being able to function. We can also see that it causes many species to lose their habitat and become extinct.

The great achievement of humans, that has enabled this population surge, has not been the result of low environmental impact living. Quite the opposite, it has been the product of very high impact living. The whole world has been changed by human activity and the rate of change is growing day by day as more and more people benefit from the science/industrial lifestyle. The impact on local and global ecosystems is now one of the greatest threats to the lives of the billions of people alive now and expected to be born in the future. It is our major security risk.

The most strongly identified threat is from climate change caused by atmospheric C02 from burning fossil fuels as well as other 'greenhouse' gasses, including methane from the vast number of cattle people keep. Other key threats include deforestation, particularly of rain-forests and the pollution of the oceans and the destruction of marine life.

The human consequences of these existential threats are unlikely to be a single major catastrophe, but rather, as we already find, localised events that render places much less able to support existing populations. Most places where people live have populations with different identities and once life becomes dramatically more difficult, these groups are placed in competition with each other, giving rise to conflict. Such tensions are exasperated by poor administration and external pressures, including resource exploitation and geo-political power strategies. The problems we now see in parts of the Middle East and North Africa are likely to arise in other places with ever growing frequency. Rising sea levels will only add to the problem.

There are not just someone else's problem. The way the people in the more developed world lives is the cause. We find an ever growing pressure to accept refugees from both conflict and starvation. We can never be sure that the more stable temperate zones will remain stable, particularly if Arctic circle warming causes the release of tundra methane or the Gulf Stream slows. Furthermore, current agricultural practices and industrial production is dependent on mineral inputs, some of which are expected to become increasingly scarce, including rock phosphate and fossil fuels.

The major political question is how much should we respond to these threats. Many on the right hold that we are best not investing heavily in any response to the threats, but rather should invest in responding to the consequences. The Greens consider this to be criminal negligence of the worst order. Not only are the consequences of ignoring the threats not understood and could be more that we could hope to manage, but the very idea of deliberately letting millions starve and become embroiled in conflict is repulsive. It is like knowingly investing in extermination camps.

This then leads to trying to think out what the alternative political response should be. This is extremely difficult, because those countries that do have the wealth and resources to develop a meaningful response, where they adapt to a life within ecological constraints, are all heavily invested in a system based on capitalist driven economic growth, with minimal constraints. The failure of the Soviet style state capitalist command economies, excludes that model. The only remaining alternative is a mixed economy that includes a large emphasis on community and cooperative ownership, but again there are not good models to draw on.

This leads to a shift in thinking to look at the drivers behind wasteful consumerism. Here the differences in wealth and power in modern society look highly implicated. Although our industries are highly productive and use relatively few people, distribution depends on ability to pay. Thus many people are engaged in systems of not very useful work that distribute money. This appears to keep everyone focused on "earning a living", rather than responding to the powerless situation this system of production and distribution puts people in. Power, status and ease of living are all associated with higher incomes, thus keeping most people focused and motivated to work and consume. It is precisely this pattern of work and consumption that is responsible for much of the impacts of our way of life that the environment can't cope with.

Economists, including from the IMF, are increasingly concluding that inequality beyond a certain level harms capitalism, both because it deprives the middle class of capital and because it reduces consumption. This could be regarded as a good thing for the environment, but politically, as we increasingly can observe, it concentrates power in the hands of the very rich. If we accept this model we invite the tyranny of the oligarchs and commit ourselves to a modern feudalism in which we could no doubt expect to have to stand by powerless in the face of mass starvations and genocidal civil wars.

We need therefore to look at something quite different; a very high degree of equality of power and wealth, in which inequality is not driving excess consumption, but allows people not to feel threatened by sacrifices for the common good. This model has been developed in Scandinavia, where, and by no means fully, the environmental impact of people has been significantly reduced.

The United Kingdom is an old imperial power, whose last revolution predated industrialisation. As such it has vast amounts of structural inequality, perhaps most symbolised by its wealthy, powerful and landowning monarchy. The old aristocracy is still there, still owning vast amounts of land in both city and country, albeit alongside the new super rich and lesser oligarchs. The City of London has evolved from providing financial services to the Empire, to be one of the great international financial centres for United States dominated imperial Globalism. It operates a global network of offshore jurisdictions for secrecy and the avoidance of regulation and tax, that are frequently implicated in wealth and power extraction from vulnerable countries (increasingly including the UK). Many Greens, myself included, conclude that these forms of institutionalised inequality need to be removed.

Few would regard substance abuse as a good thing, but like it or not, recreational drugs are currently part of our culture. Their criminalisation results in vast amounts of petty and organised crime, for which a large police force is required for control. Not only is this a costly use of resources, but, together with crime driven by poverty and inequality, justifies the employment of a police force on the scale necessary to control the kind of dissent our current system would otherwise give rise to. It is therefore in the interests of a safer, more liberal and equal society that recreational drugs are decriminalised and carefully regulated, with education and health care used to mitigate the ill effects.

The development of the idea of a shared common good as a guiding social, political and economic principal has many implications. It suggests that the provision of services upon which we all depend, including water, energy, public transport, education and health are all services that belong in common ownership and should never become the private assets of any individual or class of people. The sacrifices that we each make to maintain and support these services are always for the common good and never to increase inequality of wealth or power.

How we understand our economy and society is always changing and will no doubt continue to do so. Over the centuries the nature of money has changed, from a means of settling debts with coins to numbers entered into computer terminals to create debts that can be traded for goods and services. We need to understand better the money system that we need to support a more equal society. It is unlikely to be the system of private banks creating money as debt that we have now. Similarly, we need to ensure that the way we distribute goods and services never deprives or humiliates those having difficulty accessing the money needed for basic living. The Green Party proposes a universal payment to provide everyone with the money needed for basic living. Again this supports the contract of all working for the common good.

One of the detrimental aspects of capitalist nation states is that they are highly resistant to changes that are not in the political or commercial interests of the state. This has repeatedly given rise to extreme state resistance to recognising the demands of minority and regional groups with specific sub-identities. Frequently this has resulted in the formation of "terrorist" groups and protracted separatist conflicts. Within Europe such conflicts account for most terrorist incidents. For any country, having such unresolved conflicts is not conducive to creating the kind of peaceful stability necessary for building a society and economy based on a shared understanding of the common good. It is therefore essential to work towards a politics in which these conflicts can be resolved without conflict and through dialogue and compromise. This may involve the development of a more fluid concept of nation and accepting some inconvenient differences in how people choose to live and be governed.

When we are looking at the kind of society and economy we need for a sustainable future, we should not assume that energy is the only issue and certainly not just be looking at greenhouse gas emissions.  We need to be looking at how we can develop an interesting and engaging way to live that causes the minimum of impact on ecosystems. This means being far more efficient with both energy and resources than we are currently, as well as avoiding creating pollution problems that will impact now or in the future. For this reason, Greens exclude the idea of using nuclear power, although even within the Green movement there are many who think non-uranium nuclear power should be considered while we are in transition away from fossil fuels.

The United Kingdom has been proud of its military history. It has indeed been "glorious" at times if you ignore the horror of drowning at sea, burning to death, bleeding in agony and the endless horrors and nightmares of those who have experienced war. Now, however, there is no such thing as containable conflict, if there ever was. As we consider ourselves as part of an interdependent planet, war becomes increasingly an anachronistic folly. The idea that the UK, or any other nation, thinks it needs to arm itself with the means to annihilate any major threatening nation is obscene. If such a war starts, we have all lost. If we are to live with nuclear weapons, the UK must do as most countries do: know they exist, know they always can exist and to oppose them and work constantly for the spirit of mutual trust where they will never be used. While no country should put itself in a position of total vulnerability to mighty tyranny, there is a need to ensure that no other country feels threatened by such defense.  NATO may have had a defensive purpose when it was established, but today it is an instrument of aggressive US policy in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. It is time for the UK to reconsider its defensive alliances in the interests of peace. We need the courage to be vulnerable.

While many might consider this vision for the United Kingdom a great loss. A loss of our national grandeur. A loss of our national myths. A loss of our story as the plucky buccaneer state that rules the seas, they need to consider the future this vision aspires to. It aspires to creating a space for "grown-ups". People who see clearly the situation they are in and who want to work intelligently to make the best of the situation. People who are willing to put aside childish illusions of all being millionaires, or swash buckling soldiers or great imperious bosses and who are willing and able to get on with the daily business of working respectfully and generously with each other.  This would not be a world where dreams of being "famous" or winning the lottery are the best compensation for being poor and powerless. Rather this would be a world where life is possible, broadly agreeable and as interesting as people's own creativity allows. For me, this is a far more attractive prospect than the hopelessness of staring at the daily dribble of news from around the world, telling stories of the horrors in people's lives and knowing that my country and how I live are part of the cause. We may not avert the cycles of disaster, but to not even seriously try because we would rather cling to what we have is pathetic. We can be better than that, for the common good.



 

The Tyranny of Cognitive Dissonance

What happens when our beliefs and values are not what we do? Could the answer be responsible for an awful lot of problems in the world?

Parents, teachers and others involved in raising children, almost all want to do their best for the children. A large part of that work is helping children to know how to be a part of their community: to understand the shared values and beliefs and to make those ideals part of who they are. Frighteningly often though, those values and beliefs are not the values and beliefs that shape what people actually do. This sets up a conflict between the self we are and the self  we beieve we should be. How we reconcile such conflicts can have significant costs to ourselves and those around us.

In Medieval Christianity, the idea of salvation of the soul through Jesus Christ was a very powerful cultural concept that enabled people to work together despite living in difficult and precarious conditions. Perhaps inevitably though, this personal aspiration exposed people to manipulation by the Church, to enrich and empower itself. At a time of great political factionalism and weak civil institutions, this was not an unmitigated curse, for the Church contributed to learning and political and cultural stability. However, the Church's control over people was much rooted in setting people up to fail. The standards and sacrifices required to enter the Kingdom of Heaven were set such that most people knew they were failing. While this gave the Church the power over people it wanted, it did so at the cost of oppressing people's sense of self worth. This in turn could result in people giving up and becoming shamed and degraded, or struggling on, but in ways that their creativity, empathy and vitality were suppressed.

The truth of this was evidenced when liberation came. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in southern France in particular, the Cathar religion took hold. The core belief of the Cathars was that the material world was sinful and that the heavenly soul was locked into a sinful body, destined to be reincarnated until life was lived perfectly. While not sounding like a promising belief system for a healthy state of being, it was in effect liberating. Men and women were nearly as sinful as each other, so mysogyny was much reduced. People could accept both the inevitability of being sinful and aspire to express their better selves. The result was a well ordered, creative and dynamic society.

Certainly in terms of creativity, learning and personal development, the reformation of the sixteenth century was another similar psychological release, out of which came the age of science and the industrial era. However the release of the spirit is best seen as a release from the tyranny of contradiction between belief and how life is lived. Today it is unexceptional for women to excel in all aspects of work, life and culture, but even now many western women constrain their ability to express themselves in their lives in avoidance of the residual conflict between themselves and cultural beliefs about women.

Class and cast systems are yet another belief system that facilitates structural social oppression. Working class white settlers in southern Africa needed racism as a belief system to enable them to take on the same powers  aristocrats had used to oppress their ancestors. Only by believing in some inherent difference can the oppressor justify to himself his brutish and exploitative behaviour to another human.

Conversely, the oppressed is then caught in a bind. To accept the oppressors belief of his inferiority is to become complicit, not just in his own enslavement, but also in the suppression of the creative and empowered self. To resist though is to live in a state of conflict. To inwardly resist and outwardly comply is to live in the oppressive state of contradiction.

That such states of contradiction are normal in all societies is explained by Cognitive Dissonance Theory, which holds that we will adjust our beliefs to avoid the distress of doing one thing and believing another. While this explains how people become complicit, it needs to be recognised that there is a high personal and societal cost in putting large proportions of the population into a state of psychological oppression as a means of gaining social compliance. Conversely, a society becomes much more creative and dynamic when this oppression is not strongly in action and it is therefore a key function of the modern state to understand and work to remove dysfunctional contradictions in society.

This tends to be a slow process, requiring the courage and conciousness of the oppressed. Here organised labour, feminism, gay rights, BME rights and disability rights have common cause in the face of resistance from the oppressor classes. With the emergence of the transnational super rich as the new oligarchy, with their highly rewarded servants in finance, advanced technologies and the new monopolies, whole new populations are being brought into an oppressed state in which expression is stifled. Awareness of the need to prioritise action towards a sustainable prosperity for all is in daily conflict with being powerless to be other than a disempowered worker, a debtor and a consumer. Resistance to this infantilism tends to be distorted to the blaming of some group of 'others' to avoid the consequences of true resistance, which include social ostracism, poverty and vulnerability.

The current drift towards fascism in Israel can be explained within the same paradigm. After years of being the oppressors of the Palestinians, the escape route for Israelis from the cognitive dissonance of holding the belief of themselves as progressive, democratic rationalists that live under the rule of law, has been to adopt the belief that the Palestinians are lesser beings. That non-Israelis do not also believe this is an indication of their inferiority and their opinions can be invalidated. While to some extent Israeli Arabs have had the opportunity to be complicit with their own oppression and to adopt the reconciling beliefs, Palestinians in the occupied territories have to a great extent been forced to live as excluded resisters. The organisation of such a society is extremely difficult as the main roles for compliance with the oppressor is as agents of oppression. The alternative is organised resistance, however futile. The difficulty and futility of more normal economic and social organisation constitutes the most insidious aspect of the oppression as it leaves Palestinians with no safe way to resolve the cognitive dissonance of their situation. In deliberately failing to understand the effects of this oppression, the Israelis, like the whites in southern Africa, create and enforce a difference between themselves and their victims that is then used to justify their sense of superiority and therefore their oppressive actions. What the Israelis fail to see is the irony, as this same process was in play when the Nazis were engaged in the Holocaust.

The importance of understanding the role of belief and the practice of power in social psychology needs to be much better appreciated in our political discourse if we are to have a political economy structured to enable people to fulfil themselves and to contribute to our sustainability. The threats to the survival of modern humanity are substantial and it is only if we can move past this culture of systemic oppression that we can expect to be able address the much more serious issues.

Taking on 'Mafia Capitalism'

Are the Mafia Capitalists a symptom or a cause of crisis?

As much as the left loves to split to a thousand passionate opinions to confuse and confound the unwary, opposition to what David Graeber calls 'Mafia Capitalism' is proving a unifying force. As the gangstas in suits commit one act of blatant robbery after another and pass the bill to the poor, we watch in disbelief and horror as the world of 'respectable' politics and media rallies to their defence. Opposition is ridiculed and marginalised, while every law is passed needed to enable police and security services to 'manage' dissent. Such is the power deployed to constrict momentum towards reform, both mainstream media and academia are largely self-policing.

Academics though may prove to be the 'Mafia Capitalists' greatest threat, although the path of radical social scientists is far from easy in the current climate. Over the last few years, the Australian economist, Steve Keen has had a rough ride following the success of his book 'Debunking Economics'. Professor Keen modelled the idea developed in the 1950's by Hyman Minsky, that lenders become less risk averse the more stable the economy behaves, resulting in risky lending that causes the next crash. The led him to look at the historical relationships between non-government debt relative to the size of the economy. In 2005, three years before the crash, he was able to successfully support the court claim of a family in Australia that had defaulted on their mortgage, that the lenders were taking an unreasonable risk that they, but not the borrowers should have been aware of.


Steve Keen then went on to show that the neo-classical economic models not only could not predict crashes correctly, but were not suited to a predictive understanding of macro-economics as they did not take into account the effects of money, debt and banking. Abandoning the mainstream approach, Steve Keen has gone on to develop a model that draws on basic accounting techniques to look at the effects of debt on the economy. A stunning conclusion has been that if the rate at which total debt increases does not itself steadily increase, then economies go into recession. In other words, the basis for capitalist economics is the exponential increase in debt. This is another way of saying what we all know: capitalism is addicted to growth, despite our being on a finite planet. Steve Keen's observation is though, extremely important in that it offers detail to our understanding.

As we look at the criminal and near criminal activity of the finance industry and some of the largest corporations, together with the complicity of politicians and regulators, we need to consider the context in which they are operating. Is it essentially a highly corrupting environment. That doesn't justify their behaviour, but it probably explains it. That environment is about money and money, where it comes from and what it is used for is something that needs to be understood if there is ever going to be real reform that can enable us to have a better and more sustainable society.

The invention of double entry bookkeeping in fourteenth century Italy enabled one of the most significant evolutions of money: fractional reserve banking. Without fractional reserve banking (in which banks lend against the same reserves multiple times in accordance with their sense of risk, or the regulators sense of risk) there would be no modern industrial capitalism. Fractional reserve banking effectively creates money as debt. If a borrower has an idea that he or she thinks will make more money than the amount needed to repay with interest, fractional reserve banking allows the money for the investment to come into existence for as long as it is needed before repayment is due. When it is repaid, that money ceases to exist. Today in the UK, 97% of all money is created in this way. This means that if all debts were repaid, 97% of all the money in the economy would cease to exist. All that would be left would be the notes and coins in circulation plus the money used to enable banks to settle affairs between themselves.


While fractional reserve banking has, for better or for worse, enabled the development of the modern economy that has brought to the developed world a standard of living beyond the dreams of the richest medieval lords, it may now be the cause of our current 'Mafia Capitalism'. There are quite a few big problems with this sort of capitalism and the more global the economy becomes and the closer we get to resource depletion the bigger these problems become. Until the twentieth century economic growth as measured as GDP struggled to be greater than 1% a year, even in the most developed economies. This reflected the very slow rate in the exponential growth of money available for the purchase of goods and services, a key constraint on growth. However, as mechanisation brought down the labour cost of goods and governments began to use fiscal policy to increase the money available for consumption, GDP growth over 10% became possible.


Fiscal policy is essentially a form of government banking. Governments borrow money, spend it into the economy in ways they think helpful and then recover the money through taxation to pay it back. If it all works out, the benefits of a healthy and well educated population, together with the increased demand created by having more money in the system, will result in a bigger economy.


In the years following the second World War, fiscal policy was used to rebuild the economy. This left private bankers to do very boring lending. Exchange controls and banking regulations restricted their opportunities to take risks or explore new areas of lending. Although the United States had similar controls, the US dollar was being increasingly used all around the world for international trade. This created a high demand for dollars that enabled the US government to sell US Treasury bonds at high prices. This in turn enabled the US government to turn into the mighty military machine we see today. Dollars had to be kept in dollar bank accounts that were subject to US banking regulations that controlled how many times reserves could be leant out. However, in 1955, the Bank of England gave the green light to London banks offering unregulated dollar accounts. This resulted in a vast increase in the amount of US dollars over which the US government had no control. This was to result in the steady erosion of banking regulation and ultimately led to the US abandoning the Dollar's link to gold, the deregulation of consumer credit and by the 1980's, the end of exchange controls and the dominance of private banking in money creation. By the 2000's the regulation and control systems had become as lax as in the 1920's, with some important differences.


The collapse of the British Empire and the end of protected markets for British manufacturing left the UK economy in a precarious position. Competitors in manufacturing had distinct advantages in attracting new investment, not least because the UK government's key role in maintaining money supply prior to Margaret Thatcher made it highly susceptible to political pressure, both from industry and trades unions. This produced the high inflation of the 1970's. Other countries had similar pressures, but were not so burdened with complacent management, ageing infrastructure and an appalling history of industrial relations built on a history of abuse, arrogance and greed. What Thatcher and Reagan did was to transfer most of the responsibility for creating money away from the state, by deregulating finance. This allowed debt to explode and with it the corruption processes in finance to accelerate.


In its search for winners for the UK economy, a few sectors were backed. The Empire's military industrial complex was adapted to meet the global demand for weapons that was fostered during the Cold War. The UK chemicals industry that had also built up to meet the needs of the military, was adapted to meet the demand for pharmaceuticals. The Empire's oil and mineral extraction companies were also backed. However it was the Empire's finance and trading networks that were given special concessions. In the 1980's the City was given the go ahead to develop as a centre for financial piracy. A combination of deregulation and quiet collaboration with the development of the offshore secrecy and tax evasion jurisdictions in the remnants of the Empire, were used to challenge the ability of governments to operate fiscal policies or control on money created as debt. The UK was once again a world player.


As a world player, UK based corporations and banks were encouraged to see themselves more as part of a US lead global economy. In collaboration with the US, international treaties on trade, resource exploitation and intellectual property were forced on other countries. This created a reduced risk environment for banks, as well as massive lending opportunities. Some of the best opportunities were in financing the transfer of manufacturing from the developed countries to the emerging economies in the Far East.


This created a corresponding need to be able to lend to maintain demand in the developed economies. This was achieved by inflating asset values in developing countries and lending against the inflated values. Houses that forty years ago required one full time income to repay a mortgage now required two full times incomes. The effect was to inject vast amounts of money into the economy, a large proportion of which went on purchases of energy and manufactured goods from the Far East. Much of this money in turn was used to purchase assets, including shares, bonds, land and property, creating a prolonged bull market.


This of course was a one off bonanza. The UK now has the highest level of debt relative to income of any country in the world. This is not mostly government debt. The government debt problems are largely due to the UK having done so much to undermine taxation both here and abroad. The unrepayable debts associated with the UK are household and finance sector debts.


The government's response to this problem has been short sighted and unjust. To pump money into the economy has been its biggest concern, so as to keep the system from imploding as it has in Greece. To achieve this it has done everything it can to encourage increased non-government debt. Hence we have had stimulus to the housing market, student loans, and money pumped into the banking sector. The government has also tried to expand the process of privatising tax revenues, through creating private sector contracts to deliver government services and infrastructure, all of which create assets that can be used as security for borrowing. The extent to which government borrowing increases is a measure of the failure of this policy.


The government's other strategy has been to suppress wages. This has been achieved by withdrawing support for people not in employment. Suppressing wages compensates for the lower productivity resulting from decreased investment in efficiency. It also cuts the governments own wages bill. Behind all this is a desperate hope for a miracle. Without the UK suddenly finding some new industries it can become a world leader in, it is in very serious difficulty.


Trying to reform this mess is going to be extremely difficult. As part of a global economy and with the country tied into countless treaty obligations, the freedom for any government to act, while at the same time maintaining the stream of imports upon which we rely looks more than daunting. Among all the world's larger economies, none is more dependent on maintaining growth driven by capitalism and none is worse than the UK at delivering real value.


On the positive side, if it can be seen that way, this means the UK is where reform is most needed. It is not difficult to envisage the progression of the current policy leading towards our becoming dominated by an oppressive, but anonymous, international oligarchy to whom we are perpetually indebted. Indeed many of our politicians appear resigned to this. This though is not the inevitable outcome of our current situation.


Clearly the reason we are in this situation reflects some fundamental systemic problems. The narrative above is intended to promote the concern that it is money itself that is struggling to be fit for purpose. Over the millennia, money and the mathematics with which it is described and expressed has been progressively evolving. Fractional reserve banking in conjunction with fiscal policy by governments constitutes the state of the art in money and has a demonstrated history in stimulating both supply and demand. However in a world where supply and demand is generally out of balance between national economies, are these money tools appropriate?


As production efficiency rises, do we need a different way to pay for things other than using money created as debt, whether that debt is repayable to the bank or as tax to the government? How should we distribute entitlement to the products of industry? To make the challenge even more complicated, how can we make so that what we demand when spending money is closer to what we actually need when living in a finite world with a growing population and a climate at the tipping point of change? How can money be changed so that it values the present and the future more equally, when our tendency is to favour consumption in the present?


Assuming there were answers to the questions about money, what sort of political framework would be required to sustain a reformed economy? Would we need to use political power in a much more detailed way and if so what would be the compromises to personal freedom? Despite our cultural difficulties with working closely with others, would we need to empower some sort of communalism as the best way of balancing individual expression with a more constrained relationship with consumption?


At present our politicians are mostly avoiding everything discussed here. This is not because they are all ignorant, but because in times of danger it is safer to be as close to the centre of the herd, even if it is charging towards a cliff. This is not very comforting, but reflects the reality that our current system will carry on longer if no one acknowledges that it is bankrupt. If we await the systems collapse, the takeover by the international oligarchs and the emergence of fascist politics will be the most likely outcome. The alternative is to try to find some creative answers to some of the questions raised here and to at least have a political faction ready to step forward during the moment of uncertainty in crisis, with some alternative to tyranny and a courageous commitment to the future. That demands that people in reformist politics engage creatively with academics and other thinkers to develop policy. The slogans have their place, but real reform is a deadly serious business with critical outcomes for us all.

Global Governance: Today's Historical Struggle

The idea that our understanding of the world and its history is full of lies, errors and uncertainty is not something we are disposed to consider. We take most of our reality on trust. In practice this rarely lets us down at any single moment. Most of the doubtful reality is not part of our daily lives, but rather is enmeshed in the shared world that frames our lives. Much of it never touches most of us, so if it is untrue we find out after the event and can usually not be that concerned. The world we know of through shared media is frequently a manipulated version of a partial truth. Ownership of the reality frames we share, is what advertising and propaganda are about. Just as this control enables brewer's waste to be sold as Marmite, so it enables corporate capitalism to shape our futures. It enables the leaders of nation states to squander on the military and form alliances to advance their favoured systems to control the world.

So used to are we to thinking of ourselves in terms of our nations that we are blind to the limits of meaning of nation. In the 500 years since navigators sailed around the world we have come to understand the earth as a finite space with millions of interconnected systems describing all the flows and processes that are the living planet. This big world is watched by countless satellites, while other satellites bounce information, instantly linking distant friends and the spokes of global corporations.

As the impact of humans upon the earth, its life and its stability grows greater, so too does the need to understand our shared predicament, not as nations, but as citizens of the world. For this to have meaning though, the world needs some system of government that is appropriate and legitimate. To some extent there is a system of global governance, but much of it is neither apropriate nor legitimate. It consists of a hotch potch of treaties, institutions and trade agreements that are the product of military, financial and industrial coercion as much as of genuine mutual interest. This global government is of course dominated by the United States who are reluctant to compromise with the competing powers emerging in China, India and Russia. Each of these powers is ultimately willing to use the threat of armed force to express their independence and perceived national interest. It is though, the smaller nations that are constantly made vassal to the greater powers and collectively they constitute an ill served interest, frequently vulnerable to poverty and war.

The Irish economist Richard Douthwaite suggested that climate change and the global inequality of nations could be addressed by creating a global trading currency based on carbon emission rights allocated to nations on a per head of population basis. This would effectively be a one off subsidy to the poor, but would have the sustainable benefit of replacing reserve currencies with a fit for purpose trading currency. This is probably the first step towards a more legitimate world government system. Equally there is a need to see how laws and treaties need to change such that each country can best adapt to become more equitable and sustainable, while retaining as much power over their cultural and linguistic diversity as is compatible with our shared interests.

Meanwhile, however, the nations of the earth continue to struggle. The US and its allies in Europe, Japan and elsewhere, aggressively push a US centric model of globalisation that is frequently backed by military might. Around the world, the western cultural, financial, media and academic models define people into situational stereotypes that limit expression and frequently mock culture and religion. The opposition to this arrogant dominance becomes an opposition to global government and global systems.

This leads us to our current position. Amid the struggle to create a global system of governance, we live out our daily lives. Our news of this struggle is not presented for what it is, but as a confusion of dispersed events, each packaged for our understanding. Collectively these packaged stories of our time describe the frame in which we understand our lives and the lives of others. As the struggle deepens and becomes more intense, the stories we are told through which to understand the world and its events become more and more enmeshed in lies and half truths. Rather than this creating a call for better global governance, the effect on most of us is a desire to retreat to the safety of nationalism or religion: shared institutions we believe once worked for us.