Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/15/we-can-rebuild-economy-foundations-up
What’s the point of growth if it creates so much misery?
By Lynsey Hanley
Forget the ‘high-skill, hi-tech’ obsession: we should invest in everyday
services to create a society run for collective good
The Guardian, Monday 15 Oct 2018
The late Prof Mick Moran, who taught politics and government at
Manchester University for most of his professional life, had, according
to his colleagues, once had “a certain residual respect for our
governing elites”. That all changed during the 2008 financial crisis,
after which he experienced an epiphany “because it convinced him that
the officer class in business and in politics did not know what it was
doing”.
After his epiphany, Moran formed a collective of academics dedicated to
exposing the complacency of finance-worship and to replacing it with an
idea of running modern economies focused on maximising social good. They
called themselves the Foundational Economy Collective, based on the idea
that it’s in the everyday economy where there is most potential for true
social regeneration: not top-down cash-splashing, but renewal and
replenishment from the ground upwards.
It hurts nobody to bring local services back into local authority
control and to divest from outsourcing firms
Foundational activities are the materials and services without which we
cannot live a civilised life: clean, unrationed water; affordable
electricity and gas without cuts to supply; collective transport on
smooth roads and rails; quality health and social care provided free at
the point of use; and reliable, sustainable food supply. Then there’s
the “overlooked economy” – everyday services such as hairdressing,
veterinary care, catering and hospitality and small-scale manufacturing
– which employ far more people, across a wider geographical range, than
the “high-skill, hi-tech” economy with which recent governments have
been obsessed.
For the Foundational Economy authors, focusing on the fundamental value
of invisible and unglamorous jobs “restores the importance of
unappreciated and unacknowledged tacit skills of many citizens”. It’s a
way of looking at economics from the point of view of people rather than
figures, and doing something revolutionary (yet so blindingly obvious)
in the process. What is the point of “growth” if the basic elements of a
decent life are denied to a large and growing number?
Because everybody has these everyday needs, their provision is not – or
ought not to be – specific to one or a few regions, and is comparatively
resistant to automation. If applied by government as a central plank of
industrial strategy, prioritising the foundational economy could
fundamentally transform people’s quality of life outside London and the
south-east – which would be the direct opposite of the dire “northern
powerhouse” template that has only created even more cynicism.
Visions of an economy run for social good, rather than individual gain,
are being developed by Labour through a series of regional workshops on
the “new economics”. As the examples of Preston, Enfield and Oldham
councils have shown, it hurts nobody to bring services back into local
authority control and to divest from the outsourcing firms whose own
definition of “growth”’ is extracting profit from social misery.
Any future government will have to take this vision seriously. Take
Jeremy Corbyn’s promise of “a million climate jobs” at last month’s
Labour conference, which could be a conservative estimate for the task
at hand. In 2012, Oxfam reported that 4.7m jobs could be supported and
£280bn added to the economy if the government invested in retro-fitting
the entire existing housing stock for lower energy consumption. (It
could also save a total £8.7bn a year from our domestic fuel bills.) Our
homes are the most expensive to heat in Europe, and the oldest, with
more than 60% built before 1960.
A change in thinking is urgently required to bring about a permanent and
ongoing renewal of the foundations of a good society.
This brings to mind a long-buried yet prescient quote by Raymond
Williams. In his 1960 novel Border Country, he describes a character
witnessing “a slow and shocking cancellation of the future” in the wake
of the 1926 general strike. This quote has been leapt upon in recent
years by a reinvigorated and youthful left.
It’s as though, nearly 60 years later, we’ve woken up to the idea that a
better future can be reinstated, but that we have to get it back
ourselves. Restoring decent basic services for everyone, then keeping
the bar high for everyone, is a task akin to painting and repainting the
Forth Bridge, and this alone is enough to keep millions of people in
stable, valuable work.
For a future better than the one we’re dreading, we need to start
rebuilding the foundations now.
• Lynsey Hanley is a freelance writer and the author of Estates: an
Intimate History and Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide
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