The government’s disastrous new deregulation programme means that the poor will be fouled by the rich.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom
Twelve bookings and one dismissal: the World Cup final wasn’t pretty. Both sides argued with the referee, but no one was stupid enough to believe that the match would have been a fairer or a better one without him. Yet we have been asked to imagine that the outcome of the power struggle between corporations and the public would be fairer and better if there were no referee.
The referee is government. It is always biased and often bought, but in principle in a democratic society it exists to prevent us from being fouled. More precisely, it is supposed to prevent those who have agency – the rich and powerful – from planting their studs in the chests of those who don’t. When the government walks away from the game the rich can foul the poor with impunity. Deregulation is a transfer of power from the trodden to the treading. It is unsurprising that all conservative parties claim to hate big government.
This one has just lit its long-promised bonfire of regulations. The Conservatives claim that deregulation will save money and relieve business of unnecessary burdens. But the government’s new policies go far beyond simplifying a cumbersome bureaucracy.
Last week the health secretary Andrew Lansley sought to shift responsibility for improving diets and preventing obesity from the state to society. He blamed the problem on low self-esteem and deplored what he called “a witch hunt against saturated fats, salt and sugars”(1). In future poor diets would be countered by “social responsibility, not state regulation.” From now on, he announced, communities will be left to find their own solutions. The companies which make their money from selling junk food and alcohol will be put in charge of ensuring that people consume less of them. I hope you have spotted the problem.
This is care in the community for public health, whose outcomes will be similar to those of the previous Tory government’s care in the community for mental health. Volunteers have neither the power nor the motivation to fight slick, well-financed PR professionals working for big business.
Lansley would do well to read the analysis published by the Government Office for Science. “For an increasing number of people, weight gain is the inevitable – and largely involuntary – consequence of exposure to a modern lifestyle. This is not to dismiss personal responsibility altogether, but to highlight a reality: that the forces that drive obesity are, for many people, overwhelming.”(2) Advances in neurobiology, it argues, show that the hunger drive is far stronger than “satiety cues” (knowing we’ve eaten enough), and easily exploited by advances in taste technologies and presentation.
The same study points out that obesity rates are much higher among the poor than the rich; that they are likely to double between now and 2050(3), and that, by then, the problem will cost the NHS £10bn a year at today’s prices, and the economy £50bn. This was all before the food companies were let off the leash. So much for deregulation saving money.
Lansley’s assault on public health is just one skirmish in the Tories’ new war on regulation. The government has now set up a task force to deregulate the farming industry(4). Farming is the major cause of the loss of biodiversity in the UK. It is one of the two top causes of water pollution. It has the highest rates of death and injury of any industry in this country(5). Now the industry has been asked to police itself.
The chair of the task force is the former director general of the National Farmers’ Union. His deputy is a senior NFU official. The rest of the task force is composed of another farmer, three corporate executives, a county council official and … well this is where it gets interesting. The eighth member, the government tells us, is “a Nuffield Scholar who has been involved with developing an animal welfare scheme”(6). In reality he is yet another farmer, who supplies milk to Sainsbury’s. This selective citation suggests dishonesty on the part of Caroline Spelman’s food and farming department. The last member is the head of public affairs at the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust. This group purports to protect wildlife, but it runs fox snaring courses(7) and gives advice on setting spring traps to catch smaller predators(8). There is no one on the task force representing rural workers, and no one outside the industry seeking to defend the landscape or the wider environment, water quality or animal welfare.
Private Eye reveals this week that the government may scrap property developers’ obligations to provide social housing(9). This won’t save money or streamline the state, but it will allow developers to create enclaves for the rich and ghettos for the poor, ensuring that the UK becomes an even more divided society. The department for transport tells me that it will be discouraging local authorities from erecting speed cameras(10). The department’s own studies show that deaths and injuries are reduced by 42% where cameras are deployed(11). This, among more obvious benefits, saves the NHS and the emergency services a packet. Again the poor will be hurt most: pedestrians in the poorest areas are three times more likely to be killed or injured by cars than pedestrians in the richest areas(12). Drivers will instead be urged to regulate themselves: the department tells me that it wants councils to use “more publicity campaigns” instead.
As the economist Willem Buiter observed, “self-regulation is to regulation as self-importance is to importance.”(13) The financial crisis was caused by government expectations that the banks could police themselves. That provoked the state spending crisis, which the government is now using as an excuse to administer more of the poison which started it.
The difference in approach between this government and the last is quantitative. New Labour capitulated to the corporations across all the industries I have mentioned here, but it didn’t go as fast or as far. The Tories can carry off this coup partly because the opposition has squandered the moral authority required to fight it. Hearing Andy Burnham criticising Andrew Lansley for deregulating the health sector is a bit like watching the Dutch side going into conniptions about a Spanish foul: they might have been right, but by that stage in the game it wasn’t a credible protest.
So here’s what’s going to happen. The failure of big business to police itself will cause a series of crises: in public health, social provision, quality of life, the environment. The state will have to shell out billions to put them right. Eventually (think of BSE, the railways, tobacco advertising) the government will be forced to re-regulate, but not before large numbers of people have been hurt. In the meantime we’ll be instructed to pull our socks up and take responsibility for issues out of our control. It’s an age-old story from which governments learn the square root of nothing. It happens as predictably as a punch-up when the referee quits the pitch.
References:
- Andrew Lansley, 7th July 2010. A new approach to public health. Speech to the UK Faculty of Public Health Conference. https://www.dh.gov.uk/en/MediaCentre/Speeches/DH_117280
- Government Office for Science, 2007. Tackling Obesities: Future Choices. Project Report, 2nd Edition. https://www.foresight.gov.uk/Obesity/17.pdf
- It suggests that “By 2050, 60% of males and 50% of females could be obese … . The proportion of men having a healthy BMI (18.5–25kg/m2) declines from about 30% at present to less than 10% by 2050. Similarly, the proportion of women in this ‘healthy weight’ category drops from just over 40% to about 15% by 2050.”
- https://ww2.defra.gov.uk/files/2010/07/090709-farmreview-tor.pdf
- https://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/21/green-campaigners-farm-review-nfu
- https://ww2.defra.gov.uk/files/2010/07/090709-farmreview-members.pdf
- https://www.gwct.org.uk/education__advice/frequently_asked_questions/predation/729.asp
- https://www.gwct.org.uk/education__advice/frequently_asked_questions/predation/731.asp
- Private Eye, 9th July 2010, page 3.
- DfT press office, 9th July 2010.
- https://www.dft.gov.uk/think/focusareas/driving/speedurban?page=FAQ&whoareyou_id=
- DfT Road Casualty Statistics 2007. https://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/statistics/datatablespublications/accidents/casualtiesgbar/roadcasualtiesgreatbritain20071
- https://voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3232
Do referees walk out of the stadium, down the road to your house, and physically force you to obey rules you never agreed to and that make no sense? If not, then this government=referee analogy is specious. Two teams agreeing to a set of rules need a contract for a ref, not a government.
How about for every 10 Monbiot pieces of tripe that get posted we post one Lew Rockwell article?
No analogy is perfect JBob. But it still stands, in that your proposed solution is as unworkable me thinks. Two teams agreeing on rules and signing a contract may ‘sound’ good, but, with their vested interests do you think they will not each conveniently see what they want to see and argue to hell and back over who was offside and who caused who to fall, etc.? Of course it will be chaos. If you don’t believe me, go to your local football club and give it a try. Punch-ups are common between sides today, even with a referee. Take him out of the picture, and many games could quickly descend into outright brawls. More, to replace the ref onlookers in the grandstand will flood down to the pitch and scream their version of events.
With all due respect, I’ve yet to see a libertarian/anarchist tell me how we will successfully transition to where we need to go if we just eliminate all government and ‘let the cards fall where they may’. If you don’t like the posts you see, I really, truly encourage you to write up an article or more outlining your proposals for ‘strategies for an alternative global nation’. This site is, within reason, an open forum that you’re welcome to contribute to. I would myself be sincerely interested to hear a clear delineation of your thoughts, as to date I keep seeing ‘get rid of government’, but hear nothing about how to avoid the humanitarian disaster that will come out of the inevitable, ensuing chaos that complete deregulation will bring.
You seem to possess a kind of faith I cannot fathom – a belief in a magical force that will take over once all government and taxation has been lifted off our shoulders. This magical force will suddenly envelop everyone and turn money-/leisure-/resource-hungry corporate captains into community- and philanthropically-minded individuals, and we’ll all stand in a circle of love in moments between hard-working stints of cooperation for the common good.
I just can’t see it myself. Please write something up and tell us all how it works.
I didn’t meant to get rid of the ref, just make him someone mutually agreed upon by both teams. Of course we will need courts and laws to settle disputes, but that doesn’t mean we need one and only one option – the monopoly held by government. I realize it’s not immediately obvious how such a voluntary system would work out, but I will have to graciously decline your offer to write about it. That’s a lot of work that’s already been done far better by others.
No need for magical forces, just a system that generally rewards self-interest to the extent that one provides value for others, i.e. goods or services others want.
I just find it interesting that permaculture can be so attractive to libertarians specifically because it promotes the decentralization of political power and personal empowerment, yet so many permaculturalists don’t seem to understand that free market capitalism and secure individual property rights are a prerequisite to such goals.
Hi Craig,
I personally appreciate your articles – even if I do not agree with them. They make me question my world view and look at the possibility that I might be wrong. That’s always a good thing.
But you too seem to possess a kind of faith – that government will let us successfully transition to a post oil world.
While I would love to share your view of representative democracy and socialism I just don’t think it is realistic.
In my humble opinion this is a realistic view of how the following decades will play out and why I think a libertarian approach will prove superior:
1. Peak oil/Limits to Growth will create a series of economic shocks that will make large globalised industry untenable. This will result in bankruptcies/recession/mass unemployment.
2. Governments will try to maintain the status quo (and preserve the oligarchs) and will “stimulate” the economy to preserve jobs that should no longer exist e.g. car factories/construction workers/bankers/big-ag farmers etc.
3. For a while it will seem that the governments have succeeded in putting us “back on the growth track” using a combination of
increased debt, increased taxes, money printing and resource wars.
4. Eventually we’ll have a shock so large that government will lose control completely (maybe hyperinflation?). Then we’ll see a real plunge of living standards and people will be completely unprepared.
‘Letting the cards fall where they may’ is not such a bad strategy. Maybe most people have to feel a little pain before they make a transition to a more sustainable life?
I just came across this web site, here are many good books that deal with these questions: https://www.permacultureactivist.net/booksvid/community.htm
Thanks Øyvind. Those books seem interesting. I’ve read all of Holmgren’s books and I’m a huge fan. I agree with everything he says – except he included a small paragraph in “Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability” in defense of Keynesian economics. I don’t think Holmgren really thought through the consequences of Keynesian stimulus (money printing) in light of peak oil – it’ll likely lead to hyperinflation.
The book that seems the most interesting to me is “Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender”. I’m a huge fan of community money – it keeps the money within the local community and stops taxes going to the government. Although I think if it proves popular the government will probably outlaw it and throw people in prison if they continue using it :)
What a luck Cyrus! I came across this site when ordering the book “Creating a Life Together” this morning. Unfortunately they clamed a very high fee sending the book outside US, so I had to buy it from Amazone.
Yes, I agree we must by time get rid of huge bureocratical structures, because these rigid structures outlaw living structures. Because living structures are organic by nature, while bureocratical structures are mechanical, and henche the exactly opposite. We probably need a state or gouvernment of some kind, this is not the big problem. The problem is every structure that doesn’t allow or eliminate living structures, and the state bureocracy is here the worst.
JBob, you can just find the quotas most important from these “others” you menchened, and add some small notes on why you choosed these quotas from your authors. Craig did the same thing here with Wendell Berry: https://www.permaculturenews.org/2008/08/19/developed/
As we are entering the end of the fossil age, we now have to create new systems adapted to this new time. Just like the people of Paris developed new systems/ideologies at the beginning of the fossil age or industrial revolution, discussing at the cafes.
This site is a kind of cafe where we can share ideas to develop new design systems for a post-fossil and post-industrial time age. And here you have an opportunity to give your contribution. Only this way we can evolve!
I find this book interesting too: “The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times”
This book is useful as we are now leaving the fossil time-age, and the changes in community will be even more dramatical than when we entered the fossil time-age, also known as the industrial revolution.
The only revolution adaptable to this new post-fossil time-age, is in my view a Permaculture Revolution.
Unfortunately most people are still blind for what have to come.
I’m not saying we don’t need government, but the governments we have ARE the problem. There is no difference between the corporations and the state. The state created the corporations and the corporations control the state lock stock and barrel. So great is their control that during this economic mess they’ve simply stopped pretending it is anything but that.
That government will save us is an illusion. They are mostly the problem.
Diet and obesity is a great example. It was government subsidies and dietary recommendations that created this problem. By and large the people escaping obesity are those who wake up and take charge of their own health. The single greatest thing government could do to help public health and obesity is to completely withdrawl from the issue of food and food subsidies. They created this problem and they are actively opposing its resolution.
In the US people are waking up to the fact that the standard ‘healthy diet’ advice and the drugs are killing them. And they are rejecting all that in search of healthy, life giving whole foods, prime among them raw milk. But it is government, on behalf of the corporations, who are actively fighting them. Right now the FDA is in court arguing that people don’t have a right to make their own food choices and they have no right to health. Why? Because they are attempting to outlaw foods which make people well when drugs can’t. The author of this article seems to think the government knows better than people what we ought to eat. But in our country it is the government who is proscribing and defending the very things making us sick.
But this article misses all this in its attempt to defend the nanny state.
Top down solutions almost never work, especially when you are trying to defeat the status quo. True change must happen one person at a time on the ground. When the people change the government will follow. But until that time the government cannot make the people change for good and the government is quite likely to fight any change for good the people attempt.
I think this document, DENGLUSAUism, as can be download as an PDF, could be relevant to this discussion:
https://www.permakultur-danmark.dk/?Artikler:Nordic_Pamphlets:DENGLUSAUism
DENGLUSAUism
THE MOST DESTRUCTIVE POWER EVER ON THE GLOBE
I just saxed this from the DENGLUSAUism document:
The strategy is based on 3 key objectives: INDIVIDUALISM, SECTORIALISM and PARLIAMENTARIANISM – all for securing an open market economy on all levels, national and global.
I – INDIVIDUALISM
The basic element is to get people out of committing social elationships – out of the tribe, of the village, of the family and out of the marriage – only in such a situation is the system able to manipulate you in any direction. And that’s what it’s all is about.
II – SECTORIALISM
The sectorial system of administration is able to achieve extreme results within limited sectors – it can follow its own agenda, strive for maximum benefits without any consideration for other sectors,and without interference from anybody else from outside the aim that is set up for the limited sector. Transcend all geographical boundaries and give room for companies to fit into any local government administration and community for exploiting resources.
III – PARLIAMENTARIANISM
As developed in France, in Prussia and in England during the 17th and 18th century, into the system of majority dictatorship that is the ctual state of the system, where huge political parties, through management and public relations, are able to manipulate globally, using the structure of the political parties for international cooperation and control.
These functions of these basic characteristics are secured by a class of administrators, manipulators and intellectuals who are the basic requirement for the functions, the legitimisation and the dynamics of this monstrous complex of a new Empire. A class of people in our societies who constitute the stability and convenience of the existing order – the middleclass – the group of well educated individuals who are paid by the capital owners to secure and manage their interests and therefore are well-paid and allowed extreme comfort and consumption.
To change such a system is impossible without radically changing the 3 basic characteristics – and that’s what we have to do if want to change the actual tendencies to bigger and bigger disasters… To show good will, common sense or spiritual responsibility are all the middle class way of explaining away the bad conscience of our self indulgence – and would only give time for even worsen catastrophes.
JBob, a mutually agreed upon Ref would be great. That gets into the participatory democracy aspect of what I try to share. Industry and government are both manipulating us into passive submission – we’re not politically active as we used to be.
https://www.permaculturenews.org/2010/05/20/the-century-of-self/
You and Cyrus may appreciate Marcin’s work in this regard, if you haven’t already seen it:
https://www.permaculturenews.org/2008/11/04/the-flaw-of-western-economies/
https://www.permaculturenews.org/2009/02/06/building-the-sustainable-economy/
https://www.permaculturenews.org/2009/02/19/rediscovering-democracy/
https://www.permaculturenews.org/2010/03/23/towards-local-democracy/
Just removing government and leaving industry unbridled in its ‘self interest’, as you put it, doesn’t leave me feeling comfortable at all. Self interest will only lead us back to where we are now – monopolisation and centralisation (I’ll sound like a broken record, as I’ve said this to you repeatedly). Basing society on selfishness is never going to work. As I understand it, selfishness combined with privatising everything on the planet is your recipe for success. I wish you could think this through, and consider what a free-for-all this would become. These articles might interest:
https://gadfly.igc.org/politics/right/private.htm
https://gadfly.igc.org/eds/econ/theory.htm
You have me wrong here Cyrus. I don’t at all think government will successfully transition us to a post oil world. Government is clearly controlled by industry, and they’re increasingly becoming fascist as things become unglued. It’s my belief that we need to become government, by widespread, grass roots participation in it.
Cyrus – you wrote, above, your views on what will happen in the future if we persevere with the status quo. My request, however, was:
What I’m asking for is for a clear picture/prediction on what would happen if your views were applied. Please advise your prognosis on the steps that will occur if we remove government. Please advise, specifically, what you would like to see happen, how it should be staged, and what results you expect to come from it.
I think this article could be relevant too: https://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20141