Author Archives: The Steady State Manchester team

Become a Friend of Steady State Manchester

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“Steady State Manchester” was established in 2012. We are delighted to see Steady State ideas gaining ground in Manchester. A notable example is that Manchester City Council’s Economic Scrutiny Committee will be discussing Steady State ideas at their meeting on May 22nd. Look on our website for details of how you can get involved in lobbying the council around this important meeting.

We have been encouraged by the number of people keen to work with us and engage with our ideas. We would like to connect with a wider group of like minded people who are keen to understand, influence and support our work. To this end we are setting up a friends group and would love you to join.

Being a Friend can involve one or many things including;

Attend our workshops to become more informed and confident in articulating steady state ideas

Lobby with us to get steady state ideas adopted

Donate money If you can afford to contribute, whether it is 50p, £50 or £5000, you can be assured it will be appreciated and well spent. Suggested contribution £5 a year!

Get involved in project development.

If you would like to become a Friend, please complete this  Friend membership form and e-mail to us at steadystatemanchester@gmail.com

If you’d like to donate you can do it via standing order (download the SO form SSM), which helps us to plan our work, or by one off payment, which can be by cheque payable to Steady State Manchester, or via credit card or paypal.

We will look forward to hearing from you

 

Please consider donating to SSM

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Yes, unfortunately we do need money to fund our activities. We are applying for some small grants but so far SSM has been funded by members of the collective.

So, if you like what we are doing and want to contribute to our efforts to promote Steady State thinking in Manchester and beyond, then please do consider making a donation here by card or by paypal on the link below.  Or you can download this Standing Order Form  and send it to us. Thank you.
And coming very shortly – how to become a Friend of SSM.

Donate with paypal or card

Donate with paypal or card

Pick up a screwdriver and help end our throwaway society!

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This is a guest blog post from James Harries.  He describes his initiative to set up a group to work on repairing consumer ‘durables’  (not so durable are they?)  This is one of the areas  for development that we suggest in In Place of Growth.  We see it as a way of building what we call the ‘replacement economy’, keeping wealth in the community and countering the built in obsolescence of so many products.

Fed up with our throw-away society? Want to help the transition to a more sustainable economy? Enjoy taking things apart and putting things back together again? I am looking for like-minded people in Manchester to set up a group that gets together for evenings of fun, chat and repairs! We will have a go at taking apart and putting back together mobile phones, cameras, printers, irons…anything you can think of. Through this we can learn about how things are designed, come up with ideas on how to improve product recycling and reuse and, who knows, maybe even bring a few old products back to life!
If you are interested, or want more information, email James Harries at jharries17@gmail.com or ‘like’ us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Manchester-Repairs/119454924908472

This is a response to our throw-away society and a reaction to what the Ellen MacArthur Foundation calls our “take-make-dispose” economy, where natural resources are extracted, used to build something that is then used and finally thrown away at the end of its life. Instead, they advocate a more circular economy, where raw materials (both biological and technical) are circulated in a “closed-loop system”. ‘Biological’ materials are non-toxic and are allowed to degrade naturally and ‘technical’ materials are circulated continuously (or at least as much as possible).

This is already happening in some areas. For example Puma has designed a new line of closed-loop clothing, including compostable t-shirts, a backpack that can be dismantled to create new backpacks and a jacket made from recycled plastic bottles that can itself be turned back into the raw material for polyester and reused. But the circular economy is about more than just trying to reuse what you can. It’s about designing items in the first place so they don’t contain toxic materials and can more easily be disassembled and reused.

This is also an important element of Manchester’s climate change strategy (Manchester: A Certain Future). In the 2013 update, it says:
“In 2013–2015, we also need to explore the development of Manchester’s ‘thrift economy’ – growth in local reuse and repair activity and an increase in the service-based economy, with more organisations set up to seize the opportunity to repair and recycle goods that just a few years ago would have been sent to landfill.”

By taking things apart, learning about how they are designed in the first place and trying to repair them, we can improve our own skills and get a better understanding of what companies need to do move towards a circular economy. We will be able to support those companies doing the right thing and name-and-shame those that aren’t. In particular, we’d like to highlight those companies that are practicing “built-in or planned obsolescence”, where companies design items specifically so they stop working after a period of time or a certain number of uses, thus forcing the consumer to buy new prooducts. As the Restart Project in London says “Don’t despair, repair”!

Action call! Consultation Paper on Non-economic Regulators: Duty to Have Regard to Growth

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Action call! Consultation Paper on Non-economic Regulators: Duty to Have Regard to Growth

The unholy alliance of neoliberalism and the pursuit of economic growth.

The current Tory led coalition government has been strangling the country with its austerity measures. But, like all mainstream political and economic opinion it clings to the hope that economic growth (strictly speaking GDP growth) can be restored. One way in which it wants to promote this is to reduce the impact of regulation. Regulation is what helps reduce the likelihood that businesses and other organisations do things that are unsafe, for the public, their workers, and the ecosystem.

Good regulation has reduced pollution, reduced accidents at work, and reduced the likelihood that our food poisons us. It helps prevent the abuse of vulnerable people and it imposes basic ethical rules on commercial activity.

But now the government wants to make what they call ‘non-economic regulators’ obey a “Duty to Have Regard to Growth” in the advice and direction they provide.

In our view there are two serious problems with this.

1) It will inevitably, despite their claims that protection comes first, compromise the regulatory function, making the job of these bodies, already under attack via the usual right wing bluster about “red tape”.

2) If it were successful in promoting indiscriminate economic growth, we know that too will be a disaster for the ecological systems that support us. We’ll say it again – nobody has yet shown that the overall growth of an economy can be reconciled with with reductions in resource depletion and polluting emissions1. And insofar as this proposal also relates to bodies with an environmental responsibility (like the Drinking Water Inspectorate, Environment Agency, the Food Standards Agency, the Highways Agency, Natural England, ), it would directly affect the environment and ecosystem that provides the basis for real prosperity and survival.

What you can do.

1) Look at the consultation document at http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/brdo/docs/publications-2013/13-684-growth-consultation.pdf

2) Respond at http://www.bis.gov.uk/brdo/publications/current-consultations

The most important thing is to answer NO to the first question (actually Q5: Should primary legislation be used to introduce a duty for regulators to have regard to growth and the economic impact of their actions? ) Most of the other questions are of the usual government, convergent, non-consultation type, that assumes you agree with the proposal in the first place). Deadline is 3 May – but please respond now in case you forget – it will only take a few minutes.  It would be good if you’d let us know you’ve responded.

2) Spread the word about this nonsense.

1 See In Place of Growth p. 18-20 for the evidence.

“We must never be afraid to stand outside the consensus.”

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Who said that?
Ed Balls in his classically Keynesian speech to Bloomberg in 2010.  He was talking about the consensus that stopping economic activity (austerity) will make us prosperous.  But we also stand outside the consensus he is part of, that unlimited, undifferentiated economic growth, GDP growth, is desirable.
See our In Place of Growth.  

The financial enclosure of the commons | Red Pepper

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The financial enclosure of the commons | Red Pepper.

Really useful and succinct summary of the problem.  Carbon trading creates financial derivatives and actually makes the situation worse.

For more detail also see:-

Lohmann, L. (2009). When markets are poison: learning about climate policy from the financial crisis. (Briefing No. 40) (p. 68). London: The Corner House. Retrieved from http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/when-markets-are-poison
Tricarico, A, & Gerebizza, E. (2012). Why the lock-in of financialisation could further delay a low carbon and just transition beyond the growth paradigm. Presented at the International Conference on Degrowth, Venice: Research and Degrowth. Retrieved from http://www.venezia2012.it/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/WS_22_FP_GEREBIZZA.pdf

There they go again – growth, airport. GM budget. SSM’s initial response. (now with an update – 20 March, 2013)

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The first Greater Manchester budget has just appeared.  We need some time to digest it, but having seen the MEN reports (here) and (here) this is yet more orthodox thinking – a mixture of wishful thinking and denial.

Here is our initial  response to the first of those MEN articles.  Why not add your comment on their site (unfortunately you have to sign in with FaceBook – why?).

Well I suppose that’s what you expect from a “body that represents the city’s lawyers, accountants, bankers”.  There are some things to support of course, more public spending, investment in housing.  But overall these people are climate change denialists and economic fantasists: more roads, more flights, an economy increasing by 12% in 2 years (see the other MEN article on this budget).  Won’t happen and shouldn’t happen.
Let’s look at aviation in particular:  it is already highly subsidised (almost no taxation on fuel) and they want to add another subsidy – making society pay even more for its diseconomies.  Already  in Greater Manchester some 12% of our total carbon footprint is caused by personal aviation (not to mention the impact of air freight.  Yet the aviation sector only accounts for 1.3% of the economy. In other words it costs us dearly, it costs people in the Global South dearly (hurricanes, droughts, coastal flooding), and it will cost us even more as we get older, not to mention our children and grandchildren.

Postscript 20 March
Since this quick reaction we’ve had a chance to look at Prof Ashcroft’s Budget for Greater Manchester (you can find it on the Manchester Business School website). The MEN oversimplified the proposal – he is suggesting (following the Chamber of Commerce, whose recommendations he reproduces as chapter in his report) that there is an exemption made just for business travel. How ever would you do that? Looks like the slippery slope to me.
The report (rather sloppily written and presented we’re afraid) really is a mix of sensible proposals (keep a low VAT rate for green technologies, invest in local transport infrastructure) with the seriously wrong grey Keynesian thinking that helped get us into this mess (along wth the even more malign neoliberal thinking – and not just thinking…) – more roads, more flights…. But the report mostly focuses on what central government and its co-managers should do to stimulate the GM economy. Right issue, wrong formulation, and wrong recipe. “Ask not what the world should do for Greater Manchester but what Greater Manchester should do for the world” as JFK once said (but was we think misquoted).

The Limits to Social Democracy

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Last summer #Compass, the centre-left pressure group, held a competition for essays that identified the “elephants left in the room”.  “We all know there are issues the left find it hard to talk about – immigration, crime and punishment, why people seem to be more sceptical of the state than the market, limits to economic growth, patriotism, faith and population have all fell into this category at one time or another.”  SSM sent in an entry on, … you guessed it, economic growth. Now the winning essays have been published – see the whole collection of essays here.
So the SSM piece wasn’t included (OK, OK, we were over the word limit) – here it is for the record:  Elephant – Economic growth and progress to a Steady State Economy. Our more assiduous readers will recognise some of the material that we used in In Place of Growth.  What was selected by Compass?   This piece by “Compass member” Nicholas Robin.  Now it is a well written piece that starts well by identifying the environmental limits to growth.

“In the clamour to fix the economy and get people back into work we are now in danger of ignoring an even bigger problem – economic growth itself. …  if ‘growth’ is all we focus on, we run the risk of resurrecting an economic system that literally has no future. The crisis has presented us with an opportunity to remodel our economy along more sustainable lines. … Meanwhile, climate change and the destruction of forests and other vital eco-systems threaten the very life-support systems that we and all the other creatures on the planet rely on. … If we continue to outpace nature’s ability to renew our resources and process our wastes we will end up exhausting the Earth’s ability to sustain life or at least its ability to sustain human populations as large as they are now. That is the biggest elephant in the room for both left and right.”

But then Nicholas seems to lose his nerve, or maybe his consistency, because he goes on:

“Economic growth can only continue in the long term if it is decoupled from the use of natural resources and the emission of greenhouse gases, and we move to what has been described as ‘steady state’ economy.”

Well just a minute, a Steady State Economy is one where there isn’t net, or aggregate economic growth.  Economic growth can’t continue in either the short or the long term.  Nicholas goes on to suggest that

“The left will have to frame the debate very carefully. We must rebrand the ‘steady state economy’ and sell a compelling vision of a genuinely ‘green growth’ that does not rely on high consumption levels and fossil energy.”

It would indeed be good if we could find a better slogan than ‘steady state economy’ – as the discussion at the Ragged University the other week noted, it doesn’t sound that inspiring.  But that doesn’t mean we can fudge the matter and pretend that this means growth after all.   Green growth still means an increase in the size of the economy, and the evidence, as reviewed in In Place of Growth is that nobody yet can show that this can be decoupled from increasing resource throughput (and hence emissions).  As we’ve said before, you can’t have your cake and eat it.

In our submission we made the following point:

“Socialists should not be afraid of a steady state society and steady state economy. What we have to be afraid of is the impending global ecological collapse. We have almost certainly missed the 2 degree target, above which runaway effects are likely. …. A society in which we care for one another, for future generations and for the planet that makes our life possible is socialism … Socialism has to be about a different kind of society, not just managing capitalism better, and that means prioritising equality, via pre- and re- distribution, valuing sharing as an alternative to the often mindless consumption of trinkets and passive entertainment for the radical reduction of consumption, and the politics of place, of community of neighbourhood. It is compatible with the principles of diversity and stewardship but it is not compatible with a system whose sole purpose is the facilitation of endless capital accumulation, a.k.a economic growth.”

Compass has made a valuable contribution to helping the centre left reject the neo-liberal, market is god, approach.  It has done this through a series of thoughtful and well researched publications and polemics as well as through effective networking.  But it seems torn between the idea of a better yesterday – back to neo-Keynesian management of an otherwise malign system, or the difficult task of constructing something for the future, a better, green and caring socialism resting on a one planet economy and a radical re-evaluation of what prosperity really means.

Mark Burton

Events this week in Manchester

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We are keen to learn from experiences in the ‘majority world’ to give us clues as to what an ecologically and socially just society would be like.   That’s why SSM is celebrating the contribution of Wangari Maathai this week.  More details below.  See her obituary from the Guardian, September, 2011.

Wangari Maathai – photo is at http://www.plt.org/words-to-live-by—a-tribute-to-wangari-maathai where there is an intersting article about her.

Wednesday 6th March, 7.30pm. Alexandra Practice is hosting ‘Taking Root’ in conjunction with Steady State Manchester http://www.steadystatemanchester.net/”>http://www.steadystatemanchester.net . Taking Root is a beautiful film which tells the dramatic story of Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement. The film will be followed by a discussion to consider what we can learn from this inspiring woman and the Green Belt Movement to develop a healthy, sustainable future within Manchester. Steady State Manchester advocates and acts for a steady state economy where human well-being in harmony with the environment. Come and find out more. Alexandra Practice, 365 Wilbraham Rd, Manchester M16 8NG. Free event

Wed 6th March, 7.30pm Filmshow ‘Taking Root’ Alexandra Practice, Whalley Range http://www.steadystatemanchester.net/”>http://www.steadystatemanchester.net

7/3/13 6.30pm, – Beacons: stories for our not so distant future, International Anthony Burgess Foundation, http://www.steadystatemanchester.net/”>http://www.steadystatemanchester.net

A6 to Manchester Airport Relief Road: no economic case and a dodgy consultation.

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Manchester Friends of the Earth.
Good analysis of this retro road building project.  The usual story of flawed economic modeling (or possibly modeling conducted to support a favoured project).

Above all we have to ask why in this time of imposed austerity our councils are planning to spend £300M of our money on a white elephant whose construction will be complete when the airport begins its long decline following an inevitable rise in fuel prices.