A letter to the Guardian with signatories from across the country calls for people who have been poor to be consulted in figuring out solutions; [Give poor people a say in policy making]
Holistic political economy wholly endorses this appeal and would go further. The principle of engagement should apply in all areas.
First, I make the general case for people to be involved, then I illustrate it with the example of the food industry - I have chosen food because it is so bound up with poverty. People have very little meaningful power, this is a major issue if you are poor but also effects people in general. Being powerless is a democratic deficit.
Politicians like to say there are responsibilities as well as rights. But they seldom spell out what those responsibilities are beyond paying tax and abiding by the law. The public still get treated as people to whom things are done, not as citizens acting in partnership with their government. When things go wrong we have years of public enquiries looking backwards and pouring over the details; reports pile up , the guilty wriggle free, a hapless scapegoat from low down may be punished and little real change occurs (see, And another thing, Enquiries and Reports and Scapegoats)
Outsourcing removes public administered services from democratic scrutiny for the simple reason that companies are not themselves democracies and shield what they do behind commercial sensitivity (see, And another thing, Secrecy about contracts)
In a holistic political economy citizens would be engaged, as of right, on the boards of all bodies creating, delivering, administering or regulating public services or providing any goods and services with potential societal impacts. What we have now is an out-of-control lobby and an over centralised state. Parliamentary access is used to bend society to business’s wishes in the service of maximising profit. Let me be clear; profit is OK if it delivers a “right livelihood” and is the by-product of doing something well or providing something useful, but too often we simply have price gouging, rent seeking, and asset stripping because profit is the prime objective rather than the secondary effect. Corporate governance must also be reformed to force companies to take their impact on society into account - a 180-degree reversal from the situation we have now (see And another thing, How some comanies behave)
Take food; consider how business fiercely lobbies to protect the right of companies to produce and sell stuff, labelled as food, but what may more accurately be referred to as industrially formulated edible chemical substances, as well as Ultra Processed Foods [Ultra Processed Food] . These contains combinations of sugar, fat and salt that do not occur naturally but which we crave, UPFs are therefore addictive and have many dangers one of which is the massive increase in type 2 diabetis – this isnt just bad for the individual it loading costs onto the NHS.
Martha Gill notes that some known dangers are being ignored “As with cigarettes in the 70s, much of the evidence is in. Junk food is linked to cancer. Two landmark studies last year showed UPFs caused heart disease and strokes. It is also beyond question that these kinds of foods cause obesity, a condition linked to 30,000 deaths a year in England alone. One in five children are obese by the final year of primary school and levels of obesity are spiralling upwards. Unhealthy diets are, worldwide, now killing more people than tobacco.” And she argues that UPFs should come with a Health Warning [Health Warning]
A review of Henry Dimbleby’s book Ravenous notes “It is shocking to read that there are 3.3 million people in the UK “who live in an area where there are no shops selling fresh ingredients within 15 minutes by public transport” [Ravenous]
And Tim Spectre in Spoon Fed points out that “a fat is not just one thing but “a vague umbrella term for anything made up of building blocks of three fatty acids joined together”….so we switch from butter to “cheap highly processed items with multiple additives and new industrial fats that we know little about”. [Spoon Fed]
However you look at it the politics of food is stacked against poor people. Long hours make us time poor and it is often cheaper (money poor) to eat badly. We should not forget that the origins of the cooperative movement go back to campaigns against food adulteration in the nineteenth century.
Poverty exposes people to the worst aspects of society, excludes them from public discourse and reduces freedom of choice - we’d all hate rationing but access to money is fulfilling exactly that role. No money, no decent goods or services. This applies across the board; you are disproportionately subject to indirect taxes if you cannot save, you pay more for small items if you cannot buy in larger quantities, you pay more if you have a pay as you go meter, you are more subject to differential pricing if you cannot buy in advance, a bereaved son gets a notice to quit 3 days after a parent dies because the house is now deemed too big, a council threatens to dispose of a parents few possessions because the only relatives have not got probate, if you go £1 over on carers allowance you lose it all (and get chased for the debt) and so it goes on, and on.
Treating people as consumers (or nuisances, or stupid, or inconvenient) rather than citizens helps perpetuate these social dysfunctions. This amounts to a massive con trick, we are told we live in a democracy but it can amount to a sleight of hand. Everything is turned into a personal responsibility whilst in reality we have, and the poor especially, little meaningful agency. We can choose between 10 types of crap but only the rich can buy the 1 quality item. Though we are targeted as consumers we are all excluded from the inception, design, and delivery of goods and services made for us to use. What we do do is reap the consequences; the first order consequences of obesity, and if not simple malnutrition, certainly poor health and reduced life expectancy and the second order consequences we are expected to pick up as taxpayers - to pay the costs to society that come along later (smoking, lead in petrol, air pollution etc. etc.). These costs can be considerable, business need to avoid them, they are what economists euphemistically call externalities, for if they had to factor them in it might eliminate profit, and we couldn’t have that could we.
The answer to these problems is not tecnhocratic management to create growth, it is likely to exacerbate problems of accountability and externalities, let alone its impact (symbolic and real) on activity that exacerbates global heating (see And another thing, Growth when global Heating should be changing everything)
A holistic political economy would seek to empower its citizens and make the right way the easy way. In our society we make life easy for those with money and difficult for those without. I am not saying this change of outlook and increased accountability would solve all problems overnight, nor am I saying that all businesses are bad, but the reasonable voices are mute, they tolerated Osborne, Johnson, Truss and Trump, they steal the lefts’ approach (that an attack on one is an attack on all), and brand even modest changes as an attack on business; well no it isn’t (See And another thing, Good Process).
There is nothing easy about being poor, why should we tolerate having poor fellow citizens and why won’t we ask them what would actually help?
As the letter closes by saying; nothing about us, without us, is for us.
These supporting arguments do not sit in the main line of argument, some are subjects in their own right. The whole subject of democratic renewal is complex and many topics are interconnected
Enquiries and Reports
In no particular order; Hillsborough, Steven Lawrence, The Post Office Horizon System, countless child deaths involving social services, the Black Report, Undercover policing, Dawn Sturgess, Lampard, Bloody Sunday, Omagh Bombing, Thirlwall and more…
The point is we look backwards but lack mechanisms ensuring changes follow. My contention is that by including citizens, and users on the boards of all bodies delivering services we would have better scrutiny at the time, less likelihood of organisations closing ranks and being defensive and more chance of making sure improvemnt are implemented.
Scapegoats
After the crash of 2008 the people administering Libor were the only ones to be tried, no one senior has ever been brought to account. It was the cost to us of propping up the banks in 2008-9 that was the immediate cause of Austerity (Osborne's 2010 budget) which is still runining public services bedevilling the public debate.
Years after Bloody Sunday the state decided to go after a squaddie who was young at the time and being used in a policing role for which he wasn’t trained.
The Post Office went after postmasters (who demonstrably had no mysteriously acquired assets) instead of dealing with the systems and contracts, and when there was clearly no case to answer where were the legal professions ethics?
The point is this; we need to meaningful accountability - that means the people at the top need to know that if they mess and hide it they will be held to account but paradoxically we need a leaning and no-blame cultures in organisations - the only conceivable way this can be done would be to bring people into the process.
Secrecy about contracts
I am thinking specifically about Sheffield’s trees, but this goes right to the top, think of G4S – still getting government work, Carillion, or the contract clauses embedded into PFI which mean schools cannot cut back on grass cutting to bolster capitation when the budget is tight.
We get a form of ping pong between the part of government that owns the service and the companies that deliver it - one referse you to the other and back and forth it goes, accountabilty is diffuse and unclear.
Regulators interpret their duties narrowly and to the letter e.g. in the water industry the regulator was looking at the financials and not analysing investment, repairs, investment, future demand and sustainability. Even when focused on the financials it totaly missed the inherent risk finiancial engineering - of loading up debt free orgaisations with debt - let alone the ethics of using it to pay dividends.
The point is that contracts for he deliver of public servives should at the very least be in the public domain
How some businesses behave
Louise Haig was criticised for describing PO as a rogue operator (for its use of fire and rehire), because the parent company UAE owned DP World being courted for its investment.
In the Independent’s report “Labour MP Liam Byrne, chairman of the House of Commons’ business and trade committee, sought to play down the row, saying Ms Haigh was “absolutely right” to criticise P&O’s past behaviour, but that new legislation would regulate how the firm can treat its staff.”
This is curious, what is not being made very evident in the reporting is that the proposed investment is for a Freeport and one of the attractions of Freeports to multinational business is not just that they always provide tax breaks but in some instances they have exemptions on workers’ rights; that is why they appeal to libertarian, small state, neo-cons.
The previous government was progressing the London Freeport already, its briefing to Lord Dominic Johnson was that DP World are “major investors in the UK through the London Gateway and are a key partner in the delivery of the Thames Freeport” the briefing suggested Johnson tell the Dubai company that he was “confident” that “DP World will be economic beneficiaries of the Freeport’s project.”
Trade Unions are banned in the UAE.
We already know that the previous government was going to give exemptions on worker rights “But free ports in the UK won't be bound by this rule, so anyone working in them is likely to have less protection at work – not only with the EU but with the rest of the UK as well.”
We will have to wait and see if this Freeport gets an exemptions from Labours Employments Rights Bill which was introduced into parliament on October 24th.
The point is even badly behaved business gets a seat at the table and many politicians collude in giving them access. Citizens, workkers, supplierd and customers need to be included, corporate governance need to be reformed. Comapnies that willl not play ball need to be excluded -if they walk away we can buy out the assest and create a worker/user led ferry company along the lines of John Lewis or more radical a full blown worker owned coop.
Growth when global Heating should be changing everything
The Labour government is insistent on bringing business into government and still committed to growth. It has been hosting an investment summit of multinational businesses (see also comments in note 3). There seems to be no recognition that the world has changed. The latest report by the IPCC says; “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all…The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”
As I say in my previous essay “Global heating and parochial politics” we cannot make a substantial difference in terms of the carbon emissions themselves (we are too small) but we can get our own house in order and lead; the summits we should be leading in are those addressing the key issues of our times – how to have prosperity without growth.
Going for growth is yesterday's answer, collectively the world is facing its disastrous consequences. In comparison to what is needed from our politicians, going for growth is a crass error of gigantic proportions. In the context if this blog post it will make more people poorer in the meantime (we will lose security of supply on food and fuel).
Good Process
Although I have some views which may appear radical I am not trying to win control of a party, finess an election and acquire dictatorial power though a majority of seats built on minority opinion. My contention is that a good process will deliver better outcomes - if pople are truly engaged and can determine both politcy and oversee its deliver I will be able to put in my contribution and be happy to live with thw results. What we have now is a travesty that PR alone will not fix as I blogged after the election
There are signs that some on the other side of politics (to me) get it. Poor processes do not guarantee poor result but they do make tham more likely and mopping up more difficut. Overcentralisation means the centre is overworked and so become shoddy or ineffective, when the centre is also cut back it makes it even even worse. Local government capability has been destroyed (e.g. we didn't use local public health in the pandemic, its nearly impossible to get a stement of educational need, there are hardly any educational psycholigists)), ideas become policy with to few checks and balances and there is no follow up. See Rory Stuart in Politics on the Edge (ISBN 978-1529922868) and Sam Freedman (who was a senior policy adviser to Michael Gove between 2010 and 2013) Failed State; Why Nothing works and how we fix it, (ISBN 978-1035026593)
In holistic political economy a good process goes futher than these criticisms and requires the input of citizens, they should be selected by sortition for the reasons articulated by Aritotle - to protect us against plutocracy.
To recast Bill Clintons slogan, it not the economy, "its the process, stupid"