The triumph of the commons: why Elinor Ostrom matters

The death of Elinor Ostrom, economist, radical and first woman to win the Nobel Economics Prize, seems to have passed largely unnoticed in the Anglo-Saxon world; a look at the #ostrom hashtag on Twitter in the hours following the announcement of her passing showed tributes in many languages, for once English not in the majority.  Yet Ostrom’s work remains an inspiration to those on the Green left and, I’d argue, is supremely important in developing a counter-narrative as the failure of the Anglo-Saxon model of free market economics becomes clearer by the day.

Why does Ostrom matter?  To answer this, you need to go back to one of the most influential texts of free market economics – Garrett Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons, published in 1968.  The heart of Hardin’s argument can be found in these paragraphs:

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component.

1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.

2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of -1.

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another…. But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit–in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

In other words, Hardin argues that collective control of a resource is impossible.  The answer to this tragedy – private ownership (Hardin goes on to compare the use of commons to bank robbery). It is a hugely influential text, one that has been used over and again to argue that common ownership is impossible.  Hardin argues that common ownership will lead to environmental degradation; ultimately he concludes that the answer lies in preventing the populace from breeding.  It’s important to note that, not only is this argument fundamentally anti-democratic, but it is firmly rooted in the social Darwinism that informs so much American socio-political discourse (the irony that this unsupportable bastard offspring of Darwinism holds sway in a society in which millions reject the central, scientifically-supported tenets of evolution is of course vast and obvious).

The failures in the metaphor are obvious.  Most obviously, Hardin offers no evidence at all that the commons are doomed to fail; the actual historical evidence shows that in many societies at many periods, land has been managed as a commons, sustainably and to the benefit of all, according to common rules.   Hardin argues that private ownership will do better; he offers no evidence to support this claim.  Also, the image of the rational being painted by Hardin is clearly one-dimensional; the rational actor is the one who seeks immediate gratification without thought to the collective consequence.  But it’s a straw man; while those attributes look very much like the actor in models of market economics, the simple fact is that not only do people do not necessarily think like that, but in almost all the interactions of life we actually do completely the opposite.  These are ideologically-based assumptions that pay no heed to the empirical world.  I refute Hardin’s psychological assumptions every time I put my scraps on my compost heap. The use of pseudo-mathematics in Hardin’s example is really just a form of obfuscation.

Most importantly, in spite of all these flaws, this unsupported concept of humanity provides a ready rationale for the appropriation and privatisation of common assets – or, more generally, of natural resources.  It’s actually a deep expression of pessimism about the human race – a set of assumptions that Hobbes would have recognised.

The importance of Elinor Ostrom’s work is that it provides a refutation of this world view.  And significantly – at a time when academic economics has retreated increasingly into the refining of mathematical models, leaving the relationship of economic theory to the real world increasingly unexamined, Ostrom was a thinker who worked in the field; her work was informed by a range of projects looking at issues as diverse as water associations in Los Angeles, police departments in Indiana and irrigation in Nepal.  It’s an economics that is grounded in experience. She drew on history and empirical research to show that in reality people are not just selfish actors, but do consider the wider consequences of their actions for those around them and the environment in which those actions are carried out.

At the heart of Ostrom’s contribution is a set of rules for the commons:

1. Clearly defined boundaries (effective exclusion of external un-entitled parties);
2. Rules regarding the appropriation and provision of common resources that are adapted to local conditions;
3. Collective-choice arrangements that allow most resource appropriators to participate in the decision-making process;
4. Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators;
5. A scale of graduated sanctions for resource appropriators who violate community rules;
6. Mechanisms of conflict resolution that are cheap and of easy access;
7. Self-determination of the community recognized by higher-level authorities;
8. In the case of larger common-pool resources,organization in the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small local units at the base level.

These are of course high-level principles – there is no magic wand being waved here; governing the commons, like any democratic exercise, may well in practice be messy and difficult – and involve a lot of activity that those who only measure achievement in terms of cash output will regard as wasteful and bureaucratic – but the fact is that it can be done, and done democratically and sustainably.  In that it contrasts powerfully with  the central conceit of market economics that there is, in Margaret Thatcher’s phrase, no alternative.  Market economics posits a set of pseudo-psychological statements about how individuals behave – of which Hardin’s comment is one; Ostrom’s work on the commons shows that human activity is far richer and more diverse than the market theorists would allow, and is above all democratic – it’s a basis for how equal human beings can resolve key issues about the management of resources without the coercion of ownership, or, crucially, the appropriation of resources

What does Ostrom tell us about the current world financial crisis?

Ostrom’s theory of the commons can be seen as providing a powerful alternative to the conceits and fallacies at the heart of the current world economic crisis.  The current crisis looks in many ways very much like Marx’s crisis of capital accumulation – corporate interests hoarding vast cash piles, while demand slumps, in the face of the capital’s need to accumulate to survive.  It’s a scenario that moved Keynes – whose mission was always to save capitalism from the idiocies of its practitioners – to formulate the need to stimulate demand, to kick-start the normal process that kept capitalism working (and, one might add with the hindsight of today,  to escape the cycle of crises that increasingly appears to characterise raw unregulated capitalism).

Commons thinking addresses two key elements of the way in which capital has continued to accumulate.  The first is through accumulation and price inflation of assets like land – the latest crisis, like every financial crisis since 1973, was precipitated by the collapse of a property bubble.  The second is through the monetisation and effective privatisation of assets held in common but which have sat outside the traditional purview of exchange.  This includes such things as the appropriation and exploitation of land belonging to indigenous people (or colonialism, as we used to call it) and the turning of subsistence economies into cash-based suppliers for the wealthier parts of the world; it also includes the monetisation of natural resources like air and water or even  life itself (for example in the case of the appraisal mechanisms for new roads, where the safety benefits of new roads are calculated on the basis of a “value of life” number generated through stated preference techniques);  exchanges that have traditionally been free acquire a cash value that can be factored into GDP numbers that feed capital’s voracious need for compound growth.  It means that economic activity – and increasingly what we would traditionally think of as non-economic activity – is carried on according to structures of value dictated by capital’s need for voracious expansion.  And many would argue that it is that expansion, based on paper values of intangible assets rather than the needs and aspirations of the majority, that is at the root of the current crisis.  Moreover, the inexorable pressure of capital accumulation – especially in times of crisis – is towards short-term gain; an economy which is based on the short-term realisation of paper gain in relation to monetised assets is the very opposite of sustainable.

Commons thinking offers us a way to counteract this. It challenges the belief that the only measure of wealth is the generation of asset numbers on paper; it reminds us that real wealth often has little or nothing to do with economic activity, and it places democratic decision-making at the heart of the generation of real value (it actually means that we decide democratically what has value, rather than leaving that decision to owners of capital and their tame accountants, or to politicians in a representative democracy in which those who do not share the prevailing ideology have little or no voice).  It’s a challenge to the fatalism of market economics – notably to the belief that millions of people are not permitted to have a view on what matters.  It emphatically does not offer easy solutions – in that sense it is way more honest than the neoliberal view that suggests we just have to make markets work more efficiently to ensure prosperity for all.  It recognises the messiness of life, the fact that the world is full of conflicting interests that have to be resolved, far more effectively than a system based on the single imperative of maximising paper asset value in the long-term.

In summary: the commons, and Ostrom’s work, offer a starting-point for an economic and political discourse that is more humane, nuanced, grounded and sustainable than the dominant neoliberal ideology.  At a time when neoliberalism is failing and the reaction to that appears increasingly to be an abandonment of democratic principles, the work of Elinor Ostrom is desperately important.

Bradford by-election – time for respect?

You do not need to be an admirer of George Galloway, or to get mired in the politics of ethnicity, to realise that the Bradford West by-election result sent out important messages about the state of democracy in Britain.

Galloway was a high-profile candidate whose anti-war, pro-Palestine policies would inevitably strike chords in a constituency of Bradford West’s demographic.  But Respect only scored a modest vote there in 2010 – even allowing for the allure of a celebrity by-election candidate something deeper must have been going on here.

I see the Bradford vote as something much deeper – a profound vote of no-confidence in the Westminster political system.  The striking thing about the constituency’s demographic is perhaps not the ethnic mix but its economic and social deprivation – its high unemployment, its poor housing.

These are the people that the British political system has left behind – the people who are invisible in the Westminster village, and who are at the sharp end of austerity economics.  Faced with three main political parties offering no more than variations on the neoliberal narrative, and media that at worst demonise them and at best ignore them, people voted in their thousands for a candidate who, regardless of any alleged personal failings, at least offered an alternative.  Respect?  Whether Galloway offers the reality of that misused and maligned word remains to be seen, but at least, unlike the three neoliberal parties, he’s offering the appearance of respect to people who have long been denied it by the political mainstream.

In many ways the Bradford result epitomises the crisis of democratic legitimacy that seems to characterise the politics of Westminster, which pursues austerity and privatisation that nobody voted for, on economic grounds that are largely bogus – and which in recent days has been preoccupied with a fuel crisis that doesn’t exist and game-playing about tax on pasties. Already, a huge process of explaining-away, determined to avoid these issues and to reinforce the denial of political process implicit in the neoliberal agenda,  is under way.

Will Galloway’s victory change much? Probably not – Galloway’s track record suggests little inclination to move beyond the politics of narcissistic gesture (and to that extent he’s part of the problem rather than the solution). But it remains a powerful rejection of mainstream politics by people who have long been denied respect.

Privatising the roads

The news that the Department of Transport is to study the feasability of privatising the running of the trunk roads network is hardly surprising.  It’s been a gleam in the eye of the neoliberal Right for a long time – and it’s not difficult to see its superficial attraction for those of a neoliberal view.  The promise of a modernised network, with fast clear roads offering a pleasant motoring experience and reliable journey times, ticks all sorts of Tory boxes.  But it is – as with so many Tory/Orange Book projects – fraught with contradictions.

Some of these can be seen by travelling along the M6 Toll.  It’s a clear, free-moving and often empty road, allowing motorists to eat up the miles.  One thing you probably won’t see is a truck – the tolls are priced to keep trucks off the road, which is not surprising since nearly all the wear and tear on roads is caused by goods vehicles (essentially, what wears roads out is the weight on vehicle axles, and road wear increases to the power of four as that weight increases.  It’s why lorries do the real damage to trunk roads and why the cult of the suburban 4×4 is in the process of smashing local roads – obviously built to a much lower standards than motorways at a time when there was far less traffic – to smithereens).  You’re paying a toll, of course – for the most part stopping at toll plazas to do so, although regular users can get a tag.  And then you rejoin the heavy traffic on the main M6, with its rows of trucks.  You have enjoyed a luxurious alternative – one provided by the private sector and one over which the Secretary of State, i.e. our elected representative, has almost no control.  As with any other private infrastructure project, it’s almost certain there’s a change of law clause in the concession agreement – if the law changes in a way that changes the terms on which M6 Toll conducts its business, the taxpayer pays.  I obviously don’t know what’s in the M6 Toll concession agreement, but that’s how big private sector projects work; the taxpayer always carries the risk.

So what does this mean for a part-privatised national network?

The model that appears to be in the Government’s mind is Nicholas Ridley’s privatisation of the water network in the late 1980s which, it is argued, brought vast quantities of much-needed investment into the water industry.  But there has to be a question of whether that investment needed the private sector.  Governments can make investment; there’s a pretty powerful case for saying water needed more than the private sector has provided.  What of course is obvious is that the private sector may take spending off the Government balance sheet but there’s a price – the handing over of strategic (some would say democratic) control.  Part-privatisation represents in theory an acceptance that Government no longer has any strategic or policy interest in directing roads policy, or, as is more likely to be the case, that strategic decisions taken in the public interest must be paid for in hard cash.  The one-off income from the letting of concessions is quite likely to be offset by later expenditure to, in effect, buy the right to make policy decisions.  Add to that the costs of running a regulatory system and the fact that the network will be fragmented among private sector providers and you have all the makings of a hugely expensive, politically-atrophied mess.

Some other considerations.  New roads (and improvements) may be funded through tolls.  The Government seems to be hinting that road providers will be entitled to a cut of Vehicle Excise Duty, but that is a red herring as it will not provide a revenue stream of any significance.  VED raises about £4bn per year and only represents a very small part of total tax take from road users; it hasn’t paid for the road network since 1937; it cannot begin to provide the sort of revenue stream that would interest a private sector entity to run roads. It is the revenue stream that currently goes to the Highways Agency, and above all income from new infrastructure, that will attract the private sector.  So in effect the pass on roads policy will have been sold; all the incentives will be for the building of new roads, while maintaining the existing, less profitable stock, at the lowest possible cost – and with a strong disincentive to provide for freight traffic, which wears out the roads.  It’s the return of predict and provide with a vengeance, except that the “predict” part will be about corporate profit rather than any concept (however flawed that might be) of public need.  Moreover, if tolling is permitted for upgraded as well as new infrastructure, there is a risk that tolling will be far more widespread than the Government is willing to admit.  It is difficult to see the Treasury (who, rather than the DfT, will be driving the work on this issue, regardless of which Department’s name appears on the report) conceding the principle that motoring taxes should be offset as a result; from a Government which has generated much cheap rhetoric about Labour’s “war on the motorist” it’s a curious policy development.

Crucially, even limited tolling on the network could have huge implications for motorists everywhere.  One obvious issue is diversion – people avoiding tolls by going on to local roads.  It’s difficult to assess how great the impact could be – but of course a pricing structure delivered by the private sector is unlikely to have any need to take account of this externality.  More interesting is the question of free-flow tolling; if you are to avoid long queues at toll plazas you must have free-flow electronic tolling – the most likely method being the issuing of electronic DSRC tags to be placed in the vehicle windscreen, which register with a roadside beacon and allow toll-road usage to be charged to an account.  Vast numbers of people use the motorways on an occasional basis – unless you are to have huge queues at toll plazas you will need to have an infrastructure to manage accounts and enforcement.  None of this technology is new – but it is potentially seriously expensive and will involve what many private motorists regard as real inconvenience.  And they need to be interoperable – a system in which motorists need either to use a number of tags or pay at a number of toll plazas is just not going to be acceptable (people may cite the French motorway network, but the density of traffic is far greater in the UK).

Moreover, EU law requires that such systems are interoperable across Europe, and that it is possible to access all significant toll systems with a single tag and account – which means, for example, that lorries who are signed up to the German system must be able to use their account and on-board unit to pay for their use of a British tolled road.  It’s called the European Electronic Tolling Service, or EETS for short, and it’s an obscure piece of legislation that we may be about to hear a lot more of. The logistical issues – and inevitable costs – of this system will provide some of the Department for Transport’s bigger headaches in preparing its feasibility study.  Does a Tory-led coalition really want to be responsible for requiring millions of motorists who want to use the motorway network to carry a piece of electronic equipment in their car which, however erroneously, will be portrayed by the taboid media as a spy in the car?

And here is one of the major flaws in the scheme.  The coalition wants to portray itself as the motorist’s friend.  Moreover, it used to be standing joke in transport circles that, while the Anglican church used to be the Tory Party at prayer, the road haulage industry – represented by its powerful trade bodies the Road Haulage Association and the Freight Transport Association – was the Tory Party at work.  The AA Foundation has already shown its opposition to the proposals.  The FTA and RHA will not countenance a proposal that imposes costs on their members (and ultimately, since almost every item we buy will have spent some time in the back of a lorry, on all of us).

How far is this Government prepared to go to alienate its electoral base in order to generate more wealth for its friends in big finance? NHS policy suggests that the hold of big finance on the coalition is so great that even Liberal Democrats facing electoral oblivion will cheerfully vote for the NHS Bill.  I suppose the decisive question may be who matters more to the Tory Party – the hospital patient or the motorist.

Innovation and change in delivering monarchy services

The following was left in a photocopier in Whitehall sometime next week:

Secretary of State

Ruling Smarter – monarchy that works in challenging times

1. The institution of monarchy has served Britain well for many years. However, in these straitened times, in which the Government’s overwhelming priority must remain the reduction of the unprecedented and damaging deficit bequeathed by New Labour, it is axiomatic that no part of the public sector should be immune from scrutiny.

2. Following your commission the purpose of this paper is to consider options for ensuring that the monarchy should deliver value-for-money for the taxpayer while maintaining and where possible enhancing levels of service. The proposals have been developed by a working group representing a number of Government departments, as monarchy services impact on a wide range of Departmental briefs.

Business structure

3. A full analysis of the business structure and profile of the monarchy is attached at Annex A. In summary, it is characterised by substantial public subsidy and a business model which is resistant to change. Business practices have not in essence changed since 1952, and are characterised by opaque management structures, a narrow recruitment base and a systematic failure to innovate.

4. In particular, the review team has noted:

Substantial issues in relation to succession planning, in which strict hierarchies fail to adapt to meet changing business needs;

A lack of clarity over its role, in which the business is apt to become inward-looking and resistant to change at times of crisis

A failure to understand, and adapt to, modern business practices, and to focus on delivering high-quality outputs while minimising costs.

Significant issues in stakeholder management, in which public esteem for the CEO no longer offsets public concerns over the performance and cost-effectiveness of her fellow board-members

Operation based around a limited number of geographical locations, including two principal sites in the South East (London and Windsor) which conflicts with the Government’s agenda for localism and raises questions of cost-effectiveness

Case study – the royal wedding

5. You requiested that we examine the management of this major event. The full case study is attached at Annex B.

6. The business case for this event focusses on a number of outcomes. These include the perpetuation of the business through the recruitment of new personnel; benefits in relation to succession planning and securing the future of the business; an opportunity to develop and enhance the undertaking’s public and commercial profile; and to promote wider Government objectives like the Big Society agenda and restoring faith in the institution of marriage.

7. However, we discovered there was a lack of a clear business plan and a systematic failure to employ full PRINCE 2 methodology. As a result costs, invitations and stakeholder communication on issues like dress code were poorly managed and failed to draw on best practise from the private sector. We believe that this strengthens the case for innovative solutions involving partnership between public and private service providers

Recommendation

8. In our view, there is considerable scope for bringing private sector disciplines to the delivery of monarchy. At a time when all public providers are under pressure to deliver more with less, we think there is much scope for an initiative which we have provisionally entitled “Rule Smarter”. Within that umbrella we have developed a number of recommendations to consider how innovative approaches to change could be brought to the delivery of monarchy services. Some proposals are attached at Annex C

9. Our preferred approach centres around a programme of market testing. While we recognise that there would be considerable presentational difficulties in introducing such a programme to the Queen’s core activities, we believe there is a strong case for introducing limited trialled outsourcing to the role of minor Royals, as well as investigating whether there are some non-critical administrative functions across the royal domain e.g. corgi management that could be put to market.

10. In particular, we note that functions such as the opening of day-centres and schools, equestrian functions and some domestic visits would be suitable for offering to competitive tender. Such tenders would not of course exclude existing royals but would ensure that they were obliged to heed market principles, driving down costs and thus bringing efficiency gains for the taxpayer.

11. We note in particular the significant strategic fit between the formal opening of hospitals and the Government’s modernisation of the NHS; while we believe that the level of activity will fall in the medium-term we believe that there is considerable scope for GP commissioning units to manage the procurement of ribbon-cutting, plaque-unveiling etc, perhaps sourcing such activity locally within the context of the Big Society agenda.

12. Foreign visits are of course a matter for the FCO. The sensitivity around such visits suggests they are not appropriate for tendering and should not be included in this trial.

You read it here first ….

It’s not about fees, it’s about democracy

Now that things are settling down after this week’s massive student demonstration in London – and the events at the Conservative HQ building that followed it, it’s worth reflecting a little on what was really happened, and what it tells us about the temper of Con Dem Britain.

The media reactions have been predictable. It’s either a case of privileged youth after a free ride, or a riot by the usual suspects who disgraced the 50,000 students who had marched earlier. Of course, it’s neither – one of the most interesting things about what happened on 10 November is the complete inability of most of the mainstream media to “get” it, to ask whether there might be something going on here that’s a bit more profound or interesting.

Small riot, not many hurt

The riot angle is of course what the tabloids led on. Actually, stand back from it, and it’s not much – a few minor injuries (more to protesters than to police), a few arrests, a bit of criminal damage. Always excepting the moron who threw the fire extinguisher, not much more than a Bullingdon Club night out, really. Nothing quite gets a lazy journalist going more than a picture of a youth putting an object through a plate glass window. And it allows them to retreat behind all the usual tropes about political motivation, hard-core anarchists, Class War and all the rest of it.

A much more interesting account of the events at Millbank – from an eye-witness – is here. It makes a convincing case that what we saw here was not the “usual suspects” at all, but a group of angry people in a confused and confusing situation:

The majority were just plain old students, but angry. The kind of students who go to their lectures, go to parties, play sport at the weekends and sometimes get a bit drunk and lairy. And there were a lot of very young students there. Maybe they were first years, but many of them looked like school students. They weren’t all middle class, they weren’t all white, they hadn’t all come in on the student union buses. They were never looking at the Russell group education that private and grammar school educated kids could, until now, take for granted. These are the people who made up the majority of the people at Millbank – ordinary young people, working class and middle class, from school age up to university age, who hadn’t been on many demos before, whose only encounter with the police, or with agitated crowds, had been Saturday night lairiness or sports matches.

And that set the mood. It felt like a rowdy night in a busy town. People were angry and frustrated, and they hadn’t had the training or the experience to deal with the situation. If it was true that a militant anarchist faction had led the violence at Millbank then here’s what it would have looked like:

Everybody facing the police line would have had a mask on. Nobody wouldplan to feature prominently in national newspapers with their face clearly exposed, throwing a stick at a police officer or smashing a window. But what did we actually see? A few make-shift bandannas slipping down people’s faces and a huge number of students who hadn’t even tried to hide their identity.

The police line would have been stormed. There was a large plate glass window missing, right in front of the crowd. There were hundreds of protestors, there were a laughably small number of police. Very little organisation would have been required for everybody to link up and just walk through the police line, with little damage done to either side. Instead there a mass of people hanging back, and a handful of angry people launching themselves one by one at the police with fists or sticks to be beaten back with batons.

When the snatch squad was sent in their targets would have been surrounded and protected by fellow protestors. Instead the crowd allowed the police to get to their targets and then to carry them back out, right through the bulk of the protestors. The reaction was angry, and violent, but completely ineffective. It was clear that people didn’t understand what was happening until it was over.

There would have been a sense of purpose. I did quite a bit of chatting and eavesdropping. People didn’t know what was going on. Not just the people milling around near the back. Students in university hoodies who were right up near the front, the ones who were launching sticks as if they were javelins, were confused. They asked each other if anyone was in charge, they wondered if they were going to miss their bus back, they talked about ‘kettling’ as something that they’d heard of but never experienced. They had a slightly dazed look, part exhilaration, part anger, but partly just the look of someone trying to cope with a situation that they’ve never been in before. There was no one in charge, so they made it up. And a number of them got it wrong.

Degree to go with fries, please

The other misunderstanding is that this protest was about privileged kids looking after number one. But this was actually about far more than that. It was about tuition fees, yes, but also about massive cuts in funding especially to arts courses, with the increase in fees being part of a strategy that looks horribly like the privatisation of higher education.

Behind that assumption is an insidious and dangerous interpretation of what higher education is about. The mainstream trope runs, you get a degree, you earn more, you pay. Education is a commodity like a Big Mac or an iPhone, something that students consume.

But it isn’t, and as soon as the Left falls into that trap it’s lost the argument. The pioneers of education in Britain, who were largely on the left, didn’t do it so that their kids could get a well-paid job in a multi-national. They did it because education is at the root of what a decent society should be, and because of a belief that it should be freely available to all who wanted it. It wasn’t a commodity, it was the mark of a decent society. It was a collective good, something we all benefitted from, not a badge to be bought by the affluent, to, as Ivan Illich caustically put it, to rationalise the head start as achievement.

So when did we vote for this?

I think to understand the anger, we have to think about democracy. Anybody who was there at the march would have been in no doubt that the most virulent anger was reserved for Clegg and the Liberal Democrats. Tories are Tories; people expect nothing better of Cameron and Osborne.

But these were people to whom Clegg made a pledge that he would fight against tuition fees. Many of those students would have voted Liberal Democrat in May on that basis – voting, of course, for the first time. Some of them would have worked for Lib Dem candidates. And they’ve been shafted.

It is difficult to think of more pathetic examples of dishonesty turned to excuse-making than some of the attempts by Liberal Democrats to rationalise their sell-out. This extraordinary piece by John Hemming MP is fairly typical, its desperation of tone more illuminating than any of its content. (I should mention as an aside that I first met Hemming thirty years ago when he and I were at Oxford, and he was organising a rent strike at Magdalen College – something that makes me wonder just what sort of self-loathing and moral delinquency it takes for people who once believed in something to sit in Parliament meekly cheering as Osborne and Duncan Smith go to work on the most vulnerable in society).

I think this betrayal is part of a wider crisis in democracy. We now have three parties wedded to neo-liberal economics, whos political aim is not to serve the electorate but to get their aims past them. I think the electorate is beginning to wake up to it. The use of deficit scaremongering to override democratic accountability seems to me to be at the heart of the Con Dem agenda, and people realise this and are getting angrier. The spectacle of a handful of the extremely wealthy telling the rest of society to make sacrifices for the common good, while their chums in the banks continue to get their bonuses, is wearing thin. Is it any surprise that people are getting impatient with Westminster?

And in any case, given everything that’s happened, the broken pledges, the privatisation that the electorate never had their say on – given all that, who the hell are Clegg – not to mention people like Cameron and the ludicrous Boris Johnson, who as members of the Bulllingdon Club took a rather less rigid view of criminal damage in their student days – to lecture the students at Millbank about democracy? Who are they to tell students that they should channel their anger in establishment-approved ways?

A (nine) grand day out – part two

Some more pictures:

These are from the early part of the day, of course, before the Millbank occupation. It was loud but good natured, and the sheer size was impressive.

It’s worth reflecting on the issues for a moment. The Con Dems’ proposal that Universities should be allowed to charge up to £9000 per year in tuition fees will make Britain’s universities the most expensive on the planet. But the measures announced by the coalition will also amount to the effective privatisation of Britain’s universities – when did we vote for that?

 

Privatisation and death rates

Here’s an interesting piece from The Times that reports on some fascinating research about the impact of mass privatisation in Russia following the collapse of Communism.

A recent piece in the Lancet by David Stuckler, Lawrence King and Martin McKee suggests that the rapid privatisation in a number of former Soviet and Eastern European states coincides with a spike in the death-rate of 18%. They suggest that the link between the two is unemployment, whose link to both stress and ill-health in a general sense and self-destructive behaviours like binge drinking is well-chronicled.

The report has caused a real storm, it appears.  In particular, it has brought forth a robust response from Jeffrey Sachs, the principal proponent of “shock therapy” to bring about irreversible capitalism in countries moving away from command economies.  But as the Times article says, the science looks pretty sound and the conclusion that key support networks risk being swept away in the name of economics is logical.

But most chilling is the fact that privatisation is only one type of economic shock. The toll of the extreme failure of market economics we are facing now could, on that basis, be a lot more than financial.

Bottlemania

Now here’s a marketing coup.

Imagine a commodity that is supplied cheaply, safely and to a high standard to every house in our society, through a sustainable infrastructure network. Now imagine an attempt to market this commodity in much smaller, portable packages. Imagine that this new version will have a price tag several thousand times that of the supply to your home; that its standard will be unregulated; and that it will be packaged in a way that potentially damages the environment, and has to be transported to shops, and from the shops to home.

Disaster? Not a bit of it. For this is the story of bottled water, one of the more obviously absurd consumerist fads of our time.

This phenomenon is examined by Elizabeth Royte in her new book Bottlemania: How water went on sale and why we bought it. An extract published by Alternet can be found here.

Royte’s thesis is that the reasons for the success of bottled water are, in essence, laziness and impatience. This has, as in so many areas of life, led to the effective privatisation of water consumption (as distinct from the actual privatisation of the supply of water, which of course happened in the UK some years ago). And it’s about narcissism, an increasing obsession with hygeine and sterility, and the use of the water bottle as security blanket.

And it is of course about the power of the market to provide us with – and to persuade us to part with our hard-earned cash for – something that is superfluous, a lifestyle accessory; in this case a necessity of life, once provided as a public service, provided more expensively and wastefully by the free market.

Privatising schools

Today’s Guardian carries a report that the Government has commissioned a review from London University professor David Buckingham on the impact of commercialisation of schools. As well as looking at the perennial issue of academies, Buckingham is particularly concerned about the commercial sponsorship of school activities, and concedes that the Government may not like his conclusions.

I’m particularly pleased to see that he is going to examine so-called “edutainment” products – the marketing of alleged intellect-enhancing strategies and even toys for children. In particular, one hopes for a bit of consideration of Brain Gym, for which state schools are paying large amounts of money in spite of a scientific basis which, to put it mildly, has not stood up well to serious scrutiny.

Definitely one to watch. I wonder how far he’ll be allowed to go …