The price of trade

The Trans-Atlantic Trade Agreement currently in negotiation will give more power to corporations, including scope to sue governments over anything that hurts profits. I’ve been thinking about what that means in practice, and which laws interfere with profit making. Not being an expert in business or law, I have no idea how much risk there is over any given issue, but the principle of where people and profit clash is an important one. So, what hurts profit?

Any law that requires a company to pay its workers a certain amount, give them maternity leave or other time off, pay them when they are sick and so forth.

Laws that require social and environmental responsibility, not polluting the air or water, cleaning up your mess, not creating excess noise.

Laws that limit the age at which a person can buy something – alcohol, nicotine and gambling for example, are age restricted, reducing the size of the market.

Laws restricting the advertising of certain products (as above).

Any requirement for advertisement to be fair and honest. Trading standards, safety standards over what’s in a product and how it has been tested. ‘Organic’ means something at the moment.

Laws that attempt to control the price (minimum unit pricing for alcohol to restrict purchasing) salt, sugar and fat content, (all been proposed at various times), that require unhealthy products to be labelled as such (nicotine, sugarfests). Laws restricting opening hours restrict profit.

What happens with products that are illegal (drugs are a very lucrative industry, after all) or with products we discover are dangerous and so would like to legislate to have removed? We’ve got the lead out of makeup and toys, the cocaine out of coca cola... Pornography is a big industry too.

There’s also the issue that state run activities remove scope for competition, which hurts profits. I don’t much fancy a for-profit police force, privately owned army units, or a for-profits benefits system. Of course what we’re moving towards is a privately owned democracy, where politicians are just another commodity to be picked up by the highest bidder. We ought to be really worried about following America’s lead on this.

We have laws to protect the less powerful from the predations of the excessively powerful. We have those laws for some very good reasons. If profit becomes the only measure we care about, the majority of us will get to live and die largely for the benefit of someone else’s bottom line.

www.38degrees.org.uk/ttip if you haven’t signed yet.

Greens, banking and Europe

Molly Scott Cato has been an active MEP for a week, and she’s already hitting the news, having got involved in European banking issues. Green MEPs have been working for some time to make the banking system fairer. Rather than banks being able to assume that tax payers will just bail them out if their gambling goes wrong, European Greens have been working for a system where riskier outfits have to put some money in the pot. As it stands, we the public are bearing all the risk – and the consequence, in the form of crushing austerity measures, but we see none of the benefits. Why should the poorest be made to suffer so as to underwrite the gambling of the affluent?

You can read more about it here. 

However, it looks like the Commission has been persuaded to bow to the demands of the bankers. This would be a failure of democracy, putting the profits of the few ahead of the needs of the many. It’s not over yet. If enough of us protest, perhaps the Commission can be persuaded to stand up for people, not profits. You can read more here http://www.stop-bank-subsidies.eu/ and find out how to get involved.

Know your politicians

Do you know which district you are in? (I confess I did not know, and guessed wrongly before I checked). Wards can be a bit counter-intuitive, being more about the numbers than the geography.  If you visit https://www.writetothem.com/ and enter your postcode, you can see who your representatives are at district, county, country and European levels. It’s also a very handy site if you want to contact any of your representatives to make your opinion known.

The district council has a third of its seats up for election each year. Is your ward being contested this year? You can find out here - http://www.stroud.gov.uk/docs/democ/elections.asp#s=sectioncontent10&p=notices,forthcoming and also see if there are seats available on your Parish council.

On the 22^nd of May, we also have European Elections. If you’d like to know who is standing for those and which parties they represent, there’s some good information here - http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/2015guide/south-west-european-candidates-2014/

Finally, if you’d like to find out more about what your existing representatives get up to, you may find this site helpful - http://www.theyworkforyou.com/

Democracy works a lot better when we can make informed choices about the people who represent us. Politicians should be accountable, and the internet makes it a good deal easier to check up on them! 

Voting and taxation

The latest deranged suggestion from UKIP members, doing the rounds online is that unemployed people should not be allowed to vote. It’s an idea that needs dismantling to show just how dangerous and idiotic it is. We need wiser and more inclusive politics.

Who counts as unemployed? Is it those who collect a benefit, or those who do not have a job? Many students of voting age are not yet employed. Is a woman on maternity leave employed? How about someone caring for a sick relative (they save the NHS a fortune every year)? Do we count retired people as working? What about those whose income involves no work – those who are independently wealthy or who have investments but no day job. Is a low paid self-employed person working, or not working? What about someone who does vital work, unpaid, for a charity? What about the ill and disabled? Do we want a system where someone could work twenty years, lose their job through no fault of their own, and then not be entitled to vote?

Then we can consider who pays tax, because anyone who is economically active pays VAT. Most of us pay National Insurance as well, and many people who are not employed are paying council tax. To say that one form of tax is a valid contribution but the others are not, is very suspect logic. Working immigrants do pay income tax and do not get to vote in all elections (EU citizens can vote in some). If UKIP want to link voting to income tax, what are they going to do with all the non-UK citizens who pay?

I’ve read a bit of history, and there are reasons some of our ancestors fought hard and long to get universal adult suffrage for citizens. If you do not have a vote, politicians generally won’t bother with you. Your needs and issues are irrelevant to them. Basic human rights are not upheld when the right to vote is taken away.

Taking votes away from people is about punishing those people someone with power does not like, and it is totally at odds with democracy. Once upon a time you had to have a certain amount of land in order to have a vote. Most people had no say and few rights. Go back to feudalism and you get the ’it’s your Count that votes’ system, and no rights for peasants.  Radical, working class ancestors fought long and hard to get a voice, and rights. One of the most important rights we have won is the right to have a value that is not based solely on economics. A person whose worth is purely economic, is little more than a slave, no matter how much you can sell them for.

Democracy has its flaws, and we certainly haven’t perfected it yet. That said, the spread of democracy is one of the great achievements of the last century. Democracy is our best defence against tyranny. Democracy is our best route to getting and keeping rights and basic dignity. Either we all have that, or none of us do. Any of us could lose our jobs tomorrow. A system that strips us of rights if we aren’t getting paid, threatens everyone in it. We all deserve better than that. We must have the security of knowing we are entitled to speak, no matter what. We must have the security of knowing that all politicians must consider all of our needs if they want a shot at being elected. Above all, we need politicians who genuinely care about democracy and who care about the common good.

RON is my favourite candidate

Who's afraid of RON?
Image by Russ

I love RON. He’s on every Green ballot paper, although I’ve yet to see him win anything. I’d like him to stand at every election, for every seat at every level both in politics and in every democratic organisation out there. RON really is that awesome, and we all need him.

RON stands simply for “Re-Open Nominations”. This is a really important addition to our political and voting choices. If you’re looking at two candidates on the ballot sheet, and you don’t fancy either of them, you currently have the options of voting for the one you find least objectionable (and so voting for them), not voting (and thus being assumed to be apathetic by those in power) or spoiling your paper (which will not be taken seriously as a protest). You might, in a desperate act of protest vote for some awful, no-hope party you don’t even like just to send a message to the establishment. (Am I allowed to cough and wonder about UKIP in this context?)

I expect Russell Brand would show up at a polling station if he could vote for RON and express his disgust with the system in a way that would be hard to ignore. If RON wins, you have to do what he says – re-open nominations, and find some better candidates and some better ideas. RON could really upset the status quo, and give a voice to people who are not currently feeling represented.

In democratic organisations, it is often the case that the person who comes forward gets the job. If there’s only one candidate, you have, by default, voted them in. This means that people who lack the skills, or who have very dodgy attitudes can work their way into positions of influence because they’ve been elected in by default, not by choice. Having RON on the paper means it is possible to say no, and it is understood that you can say no, and should say no if the person isn’t up to scratch, and that stepping up is not the only necessary qualification. RON demands that we think a bit more about things and take more responsibility.

If you have no choice but to vote in what’s there by default, you don’t get democracy. You get the same narrow array of people and opinions, and you get to pick from what you are told you can pick from, and often that’s the choice between one posh idiot in a suit, and another posh idiot in a suit. I’ve included one by way of illustration, because for me, this is what an absence of RON in our lives looks like. RON clearly doesn’t look like David Cameron. He looks heroic, but also benevolent. More of a Nelson Mandela or a Ghandi, he’s there if you need him, but he isn’t hungry for power. He’s there to give you a voice, not to take something from you.

We should have RON on every ballot sheet.

Who is spending your money?

If anyone had asked me a couple of weeks ago how public money is spent locally, I would have assumed anything not handled by central government, would go to big, well known institutions like the Police and the NHS, and the rest would be sorted out by local government. That, after all, is a big part of what we vote for. We elect people to make financial decisions on behalf of our community.

Turns out I was wrong.

Rather a lot of money, including money from Europe, goes to Local Enterprise Partnerships. I’d never heard of them before, and I’m not oblivious to politics. Who gets to be in one of those, then? Who do they answer to? How are they accountable?  We have The Gloucestershire Local Enterprise Partnership; that was news to me. How would a local business or enterprise go about tapping into that? I have no idea.

Here’s a bit from a recent Stroud District Green Party press release…

Martin Whiteside, the Green Party councillor on Stroud District Council’s (SDC) Environment and Planning Committee, said: 'The Local Enterprise Partnership and similar bodies springing up around the country, spending billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, appear to be an immaculate re-conception of the quango system. What is most sinister about them is the lack of democratic accountability and the dominant role of unelected and unaccountable business people spending our money.'

Molly Scott Cato, Leader of the Green Group on SDC, added: 'My particular concern is the Local Enterprise Partnership, which appears to have emerged from a transfiguration of the old G1st. The process by which this body has come into existence is unclear and its governance arrangements are murky. This is not acceptable for a body that will make decisions about the investment of all the national infrastructure money in our county, as well as significant European funds. In addition, money that was previously in the budget of SDC, arising from the New Homes Bonus, will now be top-sliced by this quango to the tune of 40%'

Greens will seek to improve representation and accountability of all bodies responsible for spending public money.

Pausing to pick over Molly’s words… Stroud District Council was going to get money from the New Homes Bonus, and now 40% of that pot gets creamed off by unelected people in an unaccountable organization where no one who was elected locally has any say whatsoever over how that money gets spent. The government did not even tell us in any way we might have noticed or understood, that this kind of thing would be happening. I am deeply uneasy about this and I do not think it bodes well for the future.

If you want to get a more in-depth look at the issues, hope over to Molly Scott Cato’s blog http://www.gaianeconomics.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/how-public-is-public-money_28.html