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As you may have noticed, there is a Government consultation out on the selling off of forests currently controlled by the Forestry Commission. I’ve been following the forests debate (and signed the massive petition at 38 Degrees despite slight annoyance at their oversimplification of the issues (I’m not sure anyone is proposing that forests be ‘turned into golf courses and holiday villages’), but not yet been moved to post on here about it as it’s such a clear-cut issue. I’m in favour of local ownership of local assets, but forests aren’t like the local community hall, cooperative shop or waste-to-energy plant: they provide larger-than-local benefits and so should be owned at a larger-than-local level. Sure, it isn’t best practice to have the same body owning assets and also regulating that ownership, but this could be gotten around by creating another QUANGO – if anyone honestly thought it was that big a problem. Even before you discover that the move would result in a net loss to the Exchequer, the argument’s pretty much won.
But when I read my dad’s letter to his local MP on the subject, I wanted to post it here as I think he’s encapsulated the way in which this issue has angered – and mystified – a broader range of people than usual.
To: Stephen Williams MP, Bristol West
Mr Williams,
I am a resident of Bristol West and below are my views on the sale of Forestry Land proposed by your government.
As background, I would like you to know that although I have strong (mainly liberal) opinions on many subjects, I tend to view political policy decisions in a holistic manner. I could have written to you about many Government policies that I disagreed with, for example the government policy on tuition fees which in my opinion is short-sighted, but I give the Government the benefit of the doubt on economic grounds. The point I am trying to make is that I am not a serial activist.
Having heard and read about the proposal to sell and/or lease English Forests I cannot see any economic or environmental justification for the proposed sale. I therefore question the motive behind this proposal. My belief is that the motive is Tory ideology at best or subtle corruption at worst. In terms of public enjoyment of our heritage and the Environment it is likely to be a disaster in the long term. I have spent 30 years building and running a successful business and this experience leads me to believe that greed will undermine other considerations, probably long after you and I have gone. The simple well tested solution is to leave all Forests in public ownership. Let our Tory friends find other ways to satisfy their greed.
Your website is silent on this subject and therefore I wish you to take my view into consideration when representing Bristol West in Government and in Parliament.
As my MP, I urge you to represent my views as best you can. I will continue to oppose this proposal in every way I can.
Regards
Mehboob Neky
Please do leave a comment if this interests you. You can also email me at majeed@cantab.net, find me on Twitter @majeedneky or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/majeedneky.
This second in the putative ‘Localism is not…’ series (for the first, see here) was inspired by the lovely people at Spiked-online.com, whose proprietors ludicrously describe themselves as ‘libertarian Marxists’ and which, a bit like chocolate-coated pretzels, is just so wrong that it ends up being quite compelling. Every time I cull the huge number of email newsletters from various organisations that I receive, theirs somehow survives, on a vague principle that I should probably not confine my reading habits to things that I agree with. So I came to see a recent piece which particularly interested me for what I saw as a wilful misinterpretation of the idea that communities could gain benefits from becoming more locally resilient.
The author, Colin McInnes, condemns the idea of local resilience – promoted by the Transition Town movement and many others – from an engineering perspective. One excellent point that he does make, which I feel is very much worth considering, is that “Individuals who purchase a domestic wind turbine can certainly congratulate themselves on their apparent self-sufficiency. However, they are entirely dependent on the international semi-conductor industry for embedded power electronics in the turbine, materials manufacturers for thermo-plastic turbine blades, Chinese miners for neodymium permanent magnets, and the oil industry which fuels the container ship that imports the constituent parts.”
McInnes is, of course, right – and his argument is a compelling reason to safeguard and foster green industry in the UK. His choice of example itself, however, is quite revealing. In an article with ‘localism’ in the title, the only examples of so-called ‘localist’ action that are given are individual actions: growing food in one’s garden, putting a wind turbine on one’s house. McInnes ridicules such actions for what he sees as their impracticality and inefficiency, compared to the ‘hydrocarbon-fuelled machines’ that produce food and energy at giant, economically efficient scales for distribution to individuals via the market mechanism.
McInnes’ evident economic philosophy no doubt leads him to realise two things: people respond to incentives, and negative externalities need to be stopped or paid for. Accepting this can lead to some interesting conclusions. Taking food retail, for example, the incentives framework at the moment favours large supermarkets. Much has been written about the middle-class solipsism of some campaigners who argue against supermarkets, and I would argue that people who care about these issues should avoid painting themselves into a corner by glibly recommending, say, organic local produce without tackling the fact that this is seen as, and often is, more expensive. However, one can also argue that there are negative externalities associated with supermarkets – or, more accurately, with the dominance of supermarkets – which are not currently being paid for, and that if these were to be factored in to prices, the incentives framework could well realign towards a localist approach.
This is all very much up for debate, with the methodology of identifying and quantifying externalities being a matter of considerable controversy for a lot of people far cleverer than I am, and McInnes’ argument can certainly be acknowledged as making sense within its own closed logic. As suggested above, though, what leapt out at me given the title of the Spiked piece was its lack of any concept of a community or a locality – which, for something that purports to be an argument against localism, presents a slight problem. Not many people are seriously suggesting, as McInnes claims they are, that most or many individuals will produce a significant proportion of the food and energy they need within the bounds of their own property through their gardens and roofs. There are three points to consider which I feel lead to a more accurate and positive vision of localism as collective action, rather than simply green lifestyle activism.
The first is the practical idea of economies of scale, which McInnes wrongly seems to assume cannot be achieved outside huge corporate-based activities such as nuclear power stations and factory farms. Considering food, community gardens have the potential to produce far more than individual gardens for a far lower input – the number of people wanting to be involved means that individuals need expend only a few hours a week to see a return, there is far more scope for sharing tools and physical resources, and the positive externalities from skill sharing and the development of social capital, though not necessarily quantifiable, are potentially impressive.
With energy, this argument comes into sharp relief because of the existence of technologies that only make sense at a community level, not an individual or a nationwide level, such as the use of energy generated from waste plants to provide power in the immediate area, or of the excess heat generated by a factory to heat homes. Community ownership of such technology through mutualist schemes can create income-generating community assets – potentially providing just that little bit more money that doesn’t need to come from taxation. So far, so Spiked, surely?
Secondly, it is worth acknowledging that though this sort of activity could substantially reduce the need for a community to import resources, it would hardly be likely to eliminate it. Reducing the need to trade, furthermore, is not the same as reducing the ability to trade. McInnes’ suggestion that communities aiming for self-sufficiency cut themselves off from international trade and leave themselves open to bad weather or crop failures is disingenuous nonsense: given that we do exist in this much-vaunted globalised economy, it escapes me how the opportunity to own part of a community asset with environmental, social and financial benefits would somehow restrict an individual’s ability to buy things.
Thirdly, and closest to my heart, it is a small leap – particularly in the context of the current political discourse – from collective asset ownership to some degree of collective, local civic governance: communities working together, raising and spending local budgets and generally rolling back formal government to an enabling role.
This probably isn’t what the Tea Party mean by smaller government. It certainly isn’t what Spiked seems to mean in its frequent diatribes against the nanny state. Taken to their logical conclusion, such rants always seem to end up handing more power to the equally unrepresentative elites of big business, precisely because – as with Jesse Norman’s critique of the Hobbesian philosophy which as he he sees it has come to dominate politics – their analysis consistently lacks a concept of community. And this need for community is why I am so uneasy about things like individual-level ‘choice’ over schools and hospitals being painted as localism by this and the previous government.
So in reality, maybe community action should be what these people mean when they talk about smaller government. Maybe they could start by campaigning, from a libertarian perspective, for the ideal of a shorter working week to give people back more of their own time to spend however they choose – including in taking an active part in running their communities.
Please do leave a comment if this interests you. You can also email me at majeed@cantab.net, find me on Twitter @majeedneky or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/majeedneky.
Localism Club: pioneering people power 