`Author:` [[George Monbiot]] ## Summary How Did We Get into This Mess? by George Monbiot is a collection of essays examining how neoliberalism, corporate power, media failure, and political timidity have combined to erode democracy, worsen inequality, and accelerate environmental destruction. ## Key Takeaways - Neoliberal ideology has reshaped politics across parties, normalising privatisation, deregulation, and market supremacy. - Corporate capture of democracy weakens public accountability and distorts policy in favour of wealth and power. - Media consolidation and bias limit meaningful public debate and reinforce elite narratives. - Environmental breakdown is not accidental but structurally embedded in current economic systems. - Political imagination has narrowed, making systemic alternatives seem unrealistic when they are urgently required. - Change requires narrative shift — new stories about economy, ownership, and collective action. ## Quotes - ## Notes > [!info] > ## Highlights ### Introduction In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, [[Thomas Piketty]] argues that no government programme could be sustained without an 'apparatus of justification'.' Without the corporate press, without spin doctors and lobbyists and think tanks, the unnecessary programmes of austerity that several governments have imposed would be politically impossible. Ever since Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Thomas Edison financed the publication of Herbert Spencer's works in the late nineteenth century[^1], which argued, among other propositions, that millionaires stand at the top of a scala natura established by natural selection, with which we would be foolish to interfere, and that profound economic inequalities are both natural and necessary, global oligarchs have invested heavily in the infrastructure of persuasion. In reality, the free market is a political construction, that often has to be imposed through violence, such as Suharto's massacres in Indonesia, Pinochet's coup in Chile and the suppression of protests against structural adjustment and austerity all over the world.[^2] Far from being a neutral forum, the market is dominated by powerful agents - [[corporations]] and oligarchs - who use their position to demand special treatment: contracts, handouts, tax breaks, treaties, the crushing of resistance and other political favours. They extend their power beyond their trading relationships through their ownership of the media and their funding and control of political parties. The negative freedom enjoyed by corporations and billionaires (freedom to be or to act without interference from others; as defined by Isaiah Berlin in his essay Two Concepts of Liberty[^3]) intrudes upon the negative freedom the rest of us enjoy. .. the vast infrastructure of law and coercion needed to commodify land, labour and money, none of which fall organically into a market economy.[^4] Without countervailing voices, wells will still be dug and bridges will still be built, but only for the few. Food will still be grown, but it will not reach the mouths of the poor.[^5] ### part 1. There Is Such a Thing as Society #### 1. Falling Apart Like the Stone Age, Iron Age and space age, the digital age says plenty about our artefacts, but little about society. The Anthropocene, in which humans exert a major impact on the biosphere, fails to distinguish this century from the previous twenty. What clear social change marks out our time from those that precede it? To me it's obvious. This is the Age of Loneliness. We are shaped, to a greater extent than almost any other species, by contact with others. In the past few years, we have seen loneliness become an epidemic among young adults.[^6] Now we learn that it is just as great an affliction for older people. A study by Independent Age shows that severe loneliness in England blights the lives of 700,000 men and 1.1 million women over fifty,[^7] and is rising with astonishing speed. Social isolation is as potent a cause of early death as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, while loneliness, research suggests, is twice as deadly as obesity.[^8] Dementia, high blood pressure, alcoholism and accidents - all these, like depression, paranoia, anxiety and suicide, become more prevalent when connections are cut.[^9] We cannot cope alone. We are less likely than other Europeans to have close friends or to know our neighbours. Who can be surprised, when everywhere we are urged to fight like stray dogs over a dustbin? We have changed our language to reflect this shift. Our most cutting insult is 'loser'. One of the tragic outcomes of loneliness is that people turn to their televisions for consolation: two-fifths of older people now report that the one-eyed god is their principal company.[^10] This self-medication enhances the disease. Research by economists at the University of Milan suggests that television helps to drive competitive aspiration.[^11] It strongly reinforces the income happiness paradox: the fact that, as national incomes rise, happiness does not rise with them. Aspiration, which increases with income, ensures that the point of arrival, of sustained satisfaction, retreats before us. The top 1 per cent now own 48 per cent of global wealth.[^12] Hobbes's pre-social condition was a myth. But we are now entering a post-social condition our ancestors would have believed impossible. Our lives are becoming nasty, brutish and long. #### 2 Deviant and Proud I was prompted to write it by a remarkable book, by a Belgian professor of psychoanalysis, Paul Verhaeghe.[^13] [[What about Me?]]: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society is one of those books that, by making connections between apparently distinct phenomena, permits sudden new insights into what is happening to us and why. We are social animals, Verhaeghe argues, and our identity is shaped by the norms and values we absorb from other people. Every society defines and shapes its own normality - and its own abnormality - according to dominant narratives, and seeks either to make people comply or to exclude them if they don't. Where market fundamentalism has been most fiercely applied - in countries like the US and UK - social mobility has greatly declined.[^14] In the name of autonomy and freedom we have ended up controlled by a grinding, faceless bureaucracy. #### 3 Work-Force In June 2015, a note from an analyst at Barclays Global Power and Utilities in New York was leaked.[^15] It addressed students about to begin a summer internship, and offered a glimpse of the toxic culture into which they are inducted. #### 4 Addicted to Comfort How many would have foreseen a national conversation - in public and in private - that revolves around the three Rs: renovation, recipes and resorts? How many would have guessed that people possessed of unimaginable wealth and leisure and liberty would spend their time shopping for onion goggles and wheatgrass juicers? Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chain stores. #### 5 Dead Zone Introduced by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) have criminalised an apparently endless range of activities, subjecting thousands - mostly young and poor - to bespoke laws.[^16] They have been used to enforce a kind of caste prohibition: personalised rules, which prevent the untouchables from intruding into the lives of others. #### 6 Help Addicts, but Lock Up the Casual Users of Cocaine As Nick Davies argued during his investigation of drugs policy for the Guardian, major seizures raise the price of drugs. Demand among addicts is inelastic, so higher prices mean that they must find more money to buy them. The more drugs the police capture and destroy, the more robberies and muggings addicts will commit. Drugs policy in most nations is a matter of religion, not science. (Antonio Maria Costa’s) report does raise one good argument, however. At present the Class A drugs trade is concentrated in the rich nations. If it were legalised, we could cope. The use of drugs is likely to rise, but governments could use the extra taxes to help people tackle addiction. But because the wholesale price would collapse with legalisation, these drugs would for the first time become widely available in poorer nations, which are easier for companies to exploit (as tobacco and alcohol firms have found) and which are less able to regulate, raise taxes or pick up the pieces. The widespread use of cocaine or heroin in the poor world could cause serious social prob-lems: I've seen, for example, how a weaker drug - khat - seems to dominate life in Somali-speaking regions of Africa. "The universal ban on illicit drugs', the UN argues, 'provides a great deal of protection to developing countries.[^17] The drugs charity Transform has addressed this question, but only for the UK, where the results are clear-cut: prohibition is the worse option.[^18] As far as I can discover, no one has attempted a global study. Until that happens, Mr Costa's opinions on this issue are worth as much as mine or anyone else's: nothing at all. ### Part 2 - Lost Youth #### 7 Rewild the Child An overview of research into outdoor education by King's College London found that children who spend time learning in natural environments 'perform better in reading, mathematics, science and social studies.[^19] Exploring the natural world 'makes other school subjects rich and relevant and gets apathetic students excited about learning. Ofsted, the schools inspection service, reports that getting children out of the classroom raises 'standards, motivation, personal development and behaviour.’[^20] #### 8 The Child Inside As Jay Griffiths argues in her magnificent, heartrending book Kith, children fill the 'unoccupied territories', the spaces not controlled by tidy-minded adults, 'the commons of mud, moss, roots and grass.'[^21] Since the 1970s, the area in which children roam without adults has decreased by almost 90 per cent.? '[[Childhood]] is losing its commons.’[^22] Throughout the country, (children) become prisoners of bad design, and so do adults.[^23] What if people were entitled to buy an option for a plot on a new estate, which they would then help to plan? Not just the houses, but the entire estate would be built for and by those who would live there. The council or land corporation would specify the number and type of homes, then the future residents, including people on the social housing waiting list, would design the layout. Their children would help to create the public spaces. Communities would start to form even before people moved in, and the estates would doubtless look nothing like those built today. #### 9 Amputating Life Close to Its Base John Sheil and I sent questions to eight of the universities with the highest average graduate salaries: Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, the LSE, the London Business School, Warwick, Sheffield and Edinburgh. We asked whether they seek to counter these lavish recruitment drives and defend students from the love blitz. With one remarkable exception, their responses ranged from feeble to dismal. Most offered no evidence of any prior interest in these questions. Where we expected deep deliberation to have taken place, we found instead an intellectual vacuum. They cited their duty of impartiality, which, they believe, prevents them from seeking to influence students' choices, and explained that there were plenty of other careers on offer. But they appear to have confused impartiality with passivity. Passivity in the face of unequal forces is anything but impartial. Impartiality demands an active attempt to create balance, to resist power, to tell the dark side of the celestial tale being pummelled into the minds of undergraduates by the richest City cults. We all know how they treat whistleblowers.[^24] #### 10 ‘Bug Splats’ Like Bush's government in Iraq, Barack Obama's administration neither documents nor acknowledges the civilian casualties of the CIA's drone strikes in north-west Pakistan. But a report by the law schools at Stanford and New York universities suggests that during the first three years of his time in office, the 259 strikes for which he is ultimately responsible killed between 297 and 569 civilians, of whom 64 were children.[^25] Children wounded in drone attacks told the researchers that they are too traumatised to go back to school and have abandoned hopes of the careers they might have had: their dreams as well as their bodies have been broken.[^26] #### 11 Kin Hell Dozens of socie-ties, across many centuries, have recognised same-sex marriage.[^27] Jesus insisted, 'If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters... he cannot be my disciple.’[^28] In his classic book [[A World of Their Own Making]], Professor John Gillis points out that until the Reformation the state of holiness was not matrimony but lifelong chastity.[^29] What the Reformation sanctified was the proto-industrial labour force, working and sleeping under one roof.[^30] The nuclear family, as idealised today, was an invention of the Victorians, but it bore little relation to the family life we are told to emulate. Its development was driven by economic rather than spiritual needs, as the Industrial Revolution made manufacturing in the household inviable. Much as the Victorians might have extolled their families, 'it was simply assumed that men would have their extramarital affairs and women would also find intimacy, even passion, outside marriage', and often with other women. Children's lives were characteristically wretched: farmed out to wet nurses, sometimes put to work in factories and mines, beaten, neglected, often abandoned as infants. In his book [[A History of Childhood]], Colin Heywood reports that, "The scale of abandonment in certain towns was simply stag-gering', reaching one-third or a half of all the children born in some European cities.[^31] #### 12 The Sacrificial Caste It seems to me that such abuses have three common characteristics. The first is that the countries in which they occur appear to possess a sacrificial caste of children, whose rights can be denied and whose interests can be disregarded with impu-nity. The second is that these countries have a powerful resistance towards confronting and addressing this injustice: discussing it often amounts to a taboo. (These two traits were chillingly dramatised in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel [[Never Let Me Go]].) The third is that systematic abuse becomes widely acknowledged only after determined people spend years trying to force it into the open in the face of official denial. #### 13 A Modest Proposal for Tackling Yourh Youth curfews, introduced by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998,[^32] and dispersal orders, brought into effect by the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003,[^33] go some of the way towards tackling the problem, but they require the active involvement of the police, and apply only where and when they have been implemented. There is as yet no universal provision against those who insist, often in active collaboration with others, on being young people in public view. #### 14 Pro-Death Nations agency UNICEF notes that in the Netherlands, which has the world's lowest abortion rate, a sharp reduction in unwanted teenage pregnancies was caused by the combination of a relatively inclusive society with more open attitudes towards sex and sex education, including contraception.'[^34] In the US and UK, by contrast, which have the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the developed world, 'contraceptive advice and services may be formally available, but in a "closed" atmosphere of embarrassment and secrecy'. A report by the World Health Organisation shows that almost half the world's abortions are unauthorised and unsafe.[^35] The WHO estimates that between 65,000 and 70,000 women die as a result of illegal abortions every year, while 5 million suffer severe complications. These effects, the organisation says, 'are the visible consequences of restrictive legal codes.[^36] ### Part 3 The Wild Life #### 15 Everything Is Connected Large carnivores can transform both the populations and the behaviour of large herbivores. In turn this can change the nature and structure of the plant community, which in turn affects processes such as soil erosion, river movements and carbon storage. The availability of nutrients, the physical geography of the land, even the composition of the atmosphere: all now turn out to be affected by animals. Living systems exert far more powerful impacts on the planet and its processes than we suspected. I'm talking about [[trophic cascades]]: ecological processes that tumble from the top of an ecosystem to the bottom. (Trophic means relating to food and feeding.) It turns out that many living processes work from the top down, rather than the bottom up.[^37] One hypothesis which might help to explain the sudden disappearance from many parts of the world of the mega-fauna, following the first arrival of human beings, is that we triggered trophic cascades of destruction. One paper suggests that the first humans in Australia hunted some of the large animals to extinction, and that this caused the destruction of the rainforests, which in turn wiped out much of the remaining fauna.[^38] (Wales) often feed at depth, but they seldom defecate there, because when they dive the stress this exerts on the body requires the shutdown of some of its functions. So they perform their ablutions when they come up to breathe. What they are doing, in other words, is transporting nutrients from the depths, including waters too dark for photosynthesis to occur, into the photic zone, where plants can live. By producing their faecal plumes - in the surface waters, the whales fertilise the plant plankton on which the krill and fish depend.[^39] There are similar effects on land. Before serious conservation efforts began in the 1960s, wildebeest numbers in the Serengeti fell from about 1.2 million to 300,000. The result was similar to the hypothesised mechanism for the destruction of much of the Australian rainforest. As dry grass and other vegetation that the wildebeest would otherwise have eaten accumulated, wildfires ravaged around 80 per cent of the Serengeti every year.[^40] #### 16 Civilisation Is Boring 'One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds', the pioneering conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote. 'An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.[^41] The world lives within us; we live within the world. By damaging the living planet we have diminished our existence. We have been able to do this partly as a result of our ability to [[compartmentalise]]. This is another remarkable capacity we have developed, which perhaps reflects the demands of survival in the ever more complex human world we have created. By carving up the world in our minds we have learnt to shut ourselves out of it. One of the tasks that parents set themselves is to train their children in [[linearity]]. Very young children don't do linearity. Their inner life is discursive, contingent, impulsive. They don't want to walk in a straight line down the pavement, but to wander off in the direction of whatever attracts their attention. They don't begin a task with a view to its conclusion. They throw themselves into it, engage for as long as it's exciting, then suddenly divert to something else. This is how all animals except adult (civilised) humans behave. Optimal foraging, the term biologists use to describe the way animals lock onto the best food supply, involves pursuing a task only for as long as it remains rewarding. Only with the development of farming did we have to discipline ourselves to think linearly. The language we use to describe them is also rigid and compartmentalised. In the UK we protect 'sites of special scientific interest' , as if the wildlife they contain is of interest only to scientists. The few parts of the seabed which are not ripped up by industrial trawling are described as reference areas, as if their only value is as a baseline with which to compare destruction elsewhere. And is there a more alienating term than 'reserve'? When we talk about reserve in people, we mean that they seem cold and remote. It reminds me of the old Native American joke: 'We used to like the white man, but now we have our reservations' Even 'the environment' is an austere and technical term, which creates no pictures in the mind. #### 17 End of an Era The efforts of governments are concentrated not on defending the living Earth from destruction, but on defending the machine that is destroying it. Whenever consumer capitalism becomes snarled up by its own contradictions, governments scramble to mend the machine, to ensure - though it consumes the conditions that sustain our lives - that it runs faster than ever before. Rewilding - the mass restoration of ecosystems - offers the best hope we have of creating refuges for the natural world, which is why I've decided to spend much of the next few years promoting it here and abroad. #### 18 The Population Myth A paper published in the journal Environment and Urbanization shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for example, sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5 per cent of the world's population growth and just 2.4 per cent of the growth in CO2. North America turned out 4 per cent of the extra people, but 14 per cent of the extra emissions. Sixty-three per cent of the world's population growth happened in places with very low emissions.[^42] James Lovelock, like Sir David Attenborough and Jonathan Porritt, is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). It is one of dozens of campaigns and charities whose sole purpose is to discourage people from breeding in the name of saving the biosphere. But I haven't been able to find any campaign whose sole purpose is to address the impacts of the very rich. As the habits of the super-rich show, there are no limits to human extravagance. Consumption can be expected to rise with economic growth until the biosphere hits the buffers. Anyone who understands this and still considers that population, not consumption, is the big issue is, in Lovelock's words, 'hiding from the truth'. It is the worst kind of paternalism, blaming the poor for the excesses of the rich. #### 19 The Dawning Whenever I stay in an unfamiliar part of the countryside, I try to wake before dawn and walk until the heat begins to rise. Many of my richest experiences with wildlife have occurred at such times. In this magical hour, I too seem to come to life. ### Part 4 - Feeding Frenzy #### 20 - Sheepwrecked Britain is being shagged by sheep, but hardly anyone dares say so. I blame Theocritus. His development in the third century BC of the pastoral tradition - the literary convention that associates shepherding with virtue and purity - helps to inspire our wilful blindness towards its destructive impacts. His theme was embraced by Virgil and the New Testament, in which Christ is portrayed both as the Good Shepherd and as Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, 'which taketh away the sin of the world'. I've used Wales as my case study. Here, according to figures from 2010, the average subsidy for sheep farms on the hills is £53,000. Average net farm income is £33,000. The contribution the farmer makes to his income by keeping animals, in other words, is minus £20,000. Farmers argue that keeping sheep in the hills makes an essential contribution to Britain's food supply. But does it? Just over three-quarters of the area of Wales is devoted to livestock farming,[^43] largely to produce meat. But according to the UK's National Ecosystem Assessment, Wales imports by value seven times as much meat as it exports. This remarkable fact suggests a shocking failure of productivity. Spend two hours sitting in a bushy suburban garden and you are likely to see more birds and of a greater range of species than in walking five miles across almost any part of the British uplands. The land has been sheepwrecked. #### 21 - Ripping Apart the Fabric of the Nation I always flinch at the name given to soil in the US: dirt. Here there's a similar conflation: something dirty is said to have been soiled. Yet this great gift of nature is being squandered at a horrifying rate. One study suggests that soil in Devon is being lost at the rate of five tonnes per hectare per year. There are several reasons for this, mostly to do with bad practice, but the problem has been exacerbated by an increase in the cultivation of maize. Like the growing of potatoes, maize cultivation with conventional methods in this country is a perfect formula for ripping the soil off the land, as the ground is ploughed deeply, then left almost bare for several months. A study in south-west England suggests that the soil structure has broken down in 75 per cent of the maize fields there.[^44] A study in south-west England suggests that the soil structure has broken down in 75 per cent of the maize fields there.[^45] Maize cultivation has expanded from 1,400 hectares to 160,000 since 1970.2 It is not grown to feed people, but to feed livestock and to supply anaerobic digestion plants producing biogas. If the National Farmers' Union gets its way, maize growing will expand by another 100,000 hectares in the next six years, solely to make biogas. The draft directive asked the member states to take precau tions to minimise soil erosion and compaction, to maintain the organic matter soil contains, to prevent landslides and to prevent soil from being contaminated with toxic substances.[^47] Terrified yet? At the end of last month, unreported by any British newspaper or broadcaster, something unprecedented happened: a European legislative proposal was withdrawn. The Soil Framework Directive has been scrapped. The National Farmers' Union took credit for the decision: #### 22 - Drowning in Money One day a government consultant was walking over their fields during a rainstorm. He noticed something that fascinated him: the water flashing off the land suddenly disappeared when it reached the belts of trees the farmers had planted. This prompted a major research programme, which produced the following astonishing results: water sinks into the soil under the trees at sixty-seven times the rate at which it sinks into the soil under the grass.[^49] .. there is an unbreakable rule laid down by the Common Agricultural Policy. If you want to receive your single farm payment - by far the biggest component of farm subsidies that land has to be free from what it calls unwanted vegetation.'[^50] Land that is allowed to reforest naturally is not eligible. The subsidy rules have enforced the mass clearance of vegetation from the hills. One house was flooded thirty-one times in the winter of 2000-1 by muddy floods caused by ploughing.!? Another, in Suffolk, above which the fields had been churned up by pigs, was hit fifty times.[^51] But a paper on floods of this kind found that, There are no (or only very few) control measures taken yet in the UK.’[^52] Rivers, as I was told by the people who had just rewilded one in the Lake District - greatly reducing the likelihood that it would cause floods downstream - 'need something to chew on’. the drained and burnt moors of the Peak District National Park, comprehensively trashed by grouse shooting estates. A recent report by Animal Aid found that grouse estates in England, though they serve only the super-rich, receive some £37 million of public money every year in the form of subsidies.[^53] #### 23 Small Is Bountiful first made in 1962 by the Nobel economist [[Amartya Sen]], and has since been confirmed by dozens of further studies.[^54] There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield. A recent study of farming in Turkey, for example, found that farms of less than one hectare are twenty times as productive as farms of over ten hectares.[^56] There's a good deal of controversy about why this relationship exists. Some researchers argued that it was the result of a statistical artefact: fertile soils support higher populations than barren lands, so farm size could be a result of productivity, rather than the other way around. But further studies have shown that the inverse relationship holds across an area of fertile land. Moreover, it works even in countries like Brazil, where the biggest farmers have grabbed the best land.[^57] The most plausible explanation is that small farmers use more labour per hectare than big farmers.[^58] Their workforce largely consists of members of their own families, which means that labour costs are lower than on large farms (they don't have to spend money recruiting or supervising work-ers), while the quality of the work is higher. With more labour, farmers can cultivate their land more intensively: they spend more time terracing and building irrigation systems; they sow again immediately after the harvest; they might grow several different crops in the same field. If governments are serious about feeding the world, they should be breaking up large landholdings, redistributing them to the poor and concentrating their research and their funding on supporting small farms. But the prejudice against small farmers is unshakeable. It gives rise to the oddest insult in the English language: when you call someone a peasant, you are accusing them of being self-reliant and productive. Peasants are detested by capitalists and communists alike. If you think that supermarkets are giving farmers in the UK a hard time, you should see what they are doing to growers in the poor world. As developing countries sweep away street markets and hawkers' stalls and replace them with superstores and glossy malls, the most productive farmers lose their customers and are forced to sell up. The rich nations support this process by demanding access for their companies. Their agricultural subsidies still help their own large farmers to compete unfairly with the small producers of the poor world. ### Part 5 - Energy Vampires #### 24 Leave It in the Ground In 2007, British planning authorities considered twelve new applications for opencast coal mines. They approved all but two of them. Later Hazel Blears, the Secretary of State in charge of planning, overruled Northumberland County Council in order to grant permission for an opencast mine at Shotton, on the grounds that the scheme (which will produce 9.3 million tonnes of CO2) is 'environmentally acceptable'.[^58] The British government also has a policy of maximising the UK's existing oil and gas reserves. To promote new production, it has granted companies a 90 per cent discount on the licence fees they pay for prospecting the continental shelf. It hopes the prospecting firms will open a new frontier in the seas to the west of the Shetland Isles? The government also has two schemes for 'forcing unworked blocks back into play'. If oil companies don't use their licences to the full, it revokes them and hands them to someone else. In other words it is prepared to be ruthlessly interventionist when promoting climate change, but not when preventing it: no minister talks of 'forcing' companies to reduce their emissions. Ministers hope the industry will extract up to 28 billion barrels of oil and gas. The International Energy Agency's new outlook report warns that 'urgent action is needed' to cut carbon emissions. The action it recommends is investing $22 trillion in new energy infrastructure, most of which will be spent on extracting, transporting and burning fossil fuels.[^59] In December 2007, BP announced a massive investment in Canadian tar sands. Oil produced from tar sands creates even more carbon emissions than the extraction of petroleum. There's enough tar and kerogen in North America to cook the planet several times over. If that runs out, they switch to coal, of which there is hundreds of years' supply. When you review the plans for fossil fuel extraction, the horrible truth dawns that every carbon-cutting programme on earth is a con. Without supply-side policies, runaway climate change is inevitable, however hard we try to cut demand. #### 25 Applauding Themselves to Death Imagine trying to bring slavery to an end not by stopping the transatlantic trade, but by seeking only to discourage people from buying slaves once they had arrived in the Americas. If you want to discourage a harmful trade, you must address it at both ends: production and consumption. Of the two, production is the most important. Even if efforts to restrict consumption temporarily succeed, they are likely to be self-defeating. A reduction in demand when supply is unconstrained lowers the price, favouring carbon-intensive industry. Creating a silence requires only an instinct for avoiding conflict. It is a conditioned and unconscious reflex, part of the package of social skills that secures our survival. Don't name the Devil for fear that you'll summon him. Breaking such silences requires a conscious and painful effort. You cannot solve a problem without naming it. The absence of official recognition of the role of fossil fuel production in causing climate change - blitheringly obvious as it is - permits governments to pursue directly contradictory policies. In the Infrastructure Act that received royal assent in February 2015, maximising the economic recovery of petroleum from the UK's continental shelf became a statutory duty.[^60] Future governments are now legally bound to squeeze every possible drop out of the ground. Barack Obama has the same problem. During a television interview, he confessed that, 'We're not going to be able to burn it all.' So why, he was asked, has his government been encouraging ever more exploration and extraction of fossil fuels? His administration has opened up marine oil exploration from Florida to Delaware - in waters that were formally off-limits.[^61] It has increased the number of leases sold for drilling on federal lands and, most incongruously, rushed through the process to enable Shell to prospect in the highly vulnerable Arctic waters of the Chukchi Sea.[^62] contradictions beset most governments with environmental pretentions. Norway, for example, intends to be 'carbon-neutral' by 2030. Perhaps it hopes to export its entire oil and gas output, while relying on wind farms at home.[^63] I believe there are ways of resolving this problem, ways that might recruit other powerful interests against these corporations. For example, a global auction in pollution permits would mean that governments had to regulate just a few thousand oil refineries, coal washeries, gas pipelines and cement and fertiliser factories, rather than the activities of 7 billion people.[^64] #### 26 The Grime behind the Crime It seemed, at first, preposterous. The hypothesis was so exotic that I laughed. The rise and fall of violent crime during the second half of the twentieth century and first years of the twenty-first were caused, it proposed, not by changes in policing or imprisonment, single-parenthood, recession, crack cocaine or the legalisation of abortion, but mainly by... lead. I don't mean bullets. The crime waves that afflicted many parts of the world and then, against all predictions, collapsed, were ascribed, in an article published by Mother Jones in January 2013, to the rise and fall in the use of lead-based paint and leaded petrol.[^65] Lead poisoning in infancy, even at very low levels, impairs the development of those parts of the brain (the anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortex) that regulate behaviour and mood. The effect is stronger in boys than in girls. Lead poisoning is associated with attention deficit disorder, impulsiveness, aggression and, according to one paper, psychopathy.' Lead is so toxic that it is unsafe at any level. There is only one remaining manufacturer of tetraethyl lead on earth. It's based in Ellesmere Port in Britain, and it's called Innospec. The product has long been banned from general sale in the UK, but the company admits on its website that it's still selling this poison to other countries. Innospec refuses to talk to me, but other reports claim that tetraethyl lead is being exported to Afghanistan, Algeria, Burma, Iraq, North Korea, Sierra Leone and Yemen, countries afflicted either by chaos or by governments who don't give a damn about their people. #### 27 Going Critical If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn't work. Like others, I have called for renewable power to be used both to replace the electricity produced by fossil fuel and to expand the total supply, displacing the oil used for transport and the gas used for heating fuel. Are we also to demand that it replace current nuclear capacity? The more work we expect renewables to do, the greater the impacts on the landscape will be, and the tougher the task of public persuasion. At high latitudes like ours, most small-scale ambient power production is a dead loss. Generating solar power in the UK involves a spectacular waste of scarce resources.[^66] It's hopelessly inefficient and poorly matched to the pattern of demand. Wind power in populated areas is largely worth-less. This is partly because we have built our settlements in sheltered places. And how do we drive our textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces and electric railways - not to mention advanced industrial processes? Rooftop solar panels? The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment at which you fall out of love with local energy production. A national (or, better still, international) grid is the essential prerequisite for a largely renewable energy supply. Some Greens go even further: why waste renewable resources by turning them into electricity? Why not use them to provide energy directly? To answer this question, look at what happened in Britain before the Industrial Revolution. The damming and weiring of British rivers for watermills was small-scale, renewable, picturesque and devastating. By blocking the rivers and silting up the spawning beds, they helped bring to an end the gigantic runs of migratory fish that were once among our great natural spectacles and which fed much of Britain: wiping out sturgeon, lampreys and shad as well as most sea trout and salmon.[^67] As E. A. Wrigley points out in his new book [[Energy and the English Industrial Revolution]], the 11 million tonnes of coal mined in England in 1800 produced as much energy as 11 million acres of woodland (one-third of the land surface) would have generated.[^68] Deep green energy production - decentralised, based on the products of the land - is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown. #### 28 Power Crazed Since the tsunami in 2011, the Internet has been awash with ever more lurid claims about Fukushima. Millions have read reports which state that children on the western seaboard of the US are dying as a result of radiation released by the damaged plant. It doesn't seem to matter how often and effectively these claims are debunked: they keep on coming? But children in the US really are dying as a result of pollution from coal plants, and we hear almost nothing about it. among the most polluting power stations in Europe, Longannet in Scotland is ranked eleventh. Drax, in England, is ranked seventh.! The House of Lords has just failed to pass an amendment which would have forced a gradual shutdown of our coal-burning power plants: they remain exempted from the emissions standards other power stations have to meet.[^69] The International Energy Agency estimates that the global use of coal will increase by 65 per cent by 2035.[^70] Even before you consider climate change, this is a disaster. You don't have to be an enthusiast for atomic energy to see that it scarcely features as a health risk beside its rival. I wonder whether the nuclear panic might be a way of not seeing. Displacement is something we all do: fixing on something small to avoid engaging with something big. Coal, on which industrialism was built, which over the past 200 years has come to seem central to our identity, is an industry much bigger and nastier and more embedded than the one we have chosen to fear. I don't believe our choice is accidental. ### Part 6 Riches and Ruins Let us imagine that in 3030 BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5 per cent a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium in 30 BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker Jeremy Grantham. Go on, take a guess. It's 2.5 billion billion solar systems.[^71] It does not take you long, pondering this outcome, to reach the paradoxical position that salvation lies in collapse. To succeed is to destroy ourselves. To fail is to destroy ourselves. That is the bind we have created. Economic growth is an artefact of the use of fossil fuels. Economic growth is an artefact of the use of fossil fuels. Before large amounts of coal were extracted, every upswing in industrial production would be met with a downswing in agricultural production, as the charcoal or horsepower required by industry reduced the land available for growing food. Every prior industrial revolution collapsed, as growth could not be sustained.[^72] But coal broke this cycle and enabled - for a few hundred years - the phenomenon we now call sustained growth. It was neither capitalism nor communism that made possible the progress and the pathologies of the modern age. It was coal, followed by oil and gas. A few days after scientists announced that the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is now inevitable,[^73] the Ecuadorean government decided that oil drilling would go ahead in the heart of the Yasuni national park.[^74] The trajectory of compound growth shows that the scouring of the planet has only just begun. As the volume of the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world's diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble. Perhaps it's unsurprising that fantasies about the colonisation of space - which tell us we can export our problems instead of solving them - have resurfaced.[^75] As the philosopher Michael Rowan points out, the inevitabilities of compound growth mean that if last year's predicted global growth rate for 2014(3.1 percent) is sustained, even if we were miraculously to reduce the consumption of raw materials by 90 per cent we delay the inevitable by just seventy-five years.[^76] Efficiency solves nothing while growth continues. #### 30 Curb Your Malthusiasm in 1786, as economic crises threw rising numbers onto the mercy of their parishes, the clergyman Joseph Townsend sought to recast poverty as a moral or even biological condi-tion. "The poor know little of the motives which stimulate the higher ranks to action - pride, honour, and ambition', he argued in his Dissertation on the Poor Laws. ‘In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them onto labour; yet our laws have said, they shall never hunger.’ Thomas Malthus expands on this theme in his Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798.[^77] Poor relief, he maintained, causes poverty. It destroys the work ethic, reducing productivity. It also creates an incentive to repro-duce, as payments rise with every family member. The higher the population, the hungrier the poor become: kindness results in cruelty. Macroeconomic policy mistakes were blamed on the victims. Does that sound familiar? This helps to explain the persistence of the fallacy. Those who promoted laissez-faire economics required an explanation when the magic of the markets failed to deliver their promised utopia. Malthus gave them the answer they needed. #### 31 Kleptoremuneration There is an inverse relationship between utility and reward. The most lucrative, prestigious jobs tend to cause the greatest harm. The most useful workers tend to be paid the least and treated the worst. At university, I watched in horror as the grand plans of my ambitious friends dissolved. It took them about a minute, on walking into the corporate recruitment fair, to see that the careers they had pictured - working for Oxfam, becoming a photographer, defending the living world - paid about one-fiftieth of what they might earn in the City. As the pay gap widens - chief executives in the UK took sixty times as much as the average worker in the 1990s and take 180 times as much today - the uselessness ratio is going through the roof.[^78] I propose a name for this phenomenon: kleptoremuneration. #### 32 The Self-Attribution Fallacy If wealth were the inevitable result of hard work and enter-prise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illu-sion. For example, he studied the results achieved by twenty-five wealth advisers, across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. ‘The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.’ Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky. When Kahneman tried to point this out they blanked him. ‘The illusion of skill... is deeply ingrained in their culture.’[^79] In a study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon tested thirty-nine senior managers and chief executives from leading British businesses.[^80] They compared the results to the same tests on patients at Broadmoor special hospital, where people who have been convicted of serious crimes are incarcerated. On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses' scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients. In fact on these criteria they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders. In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded.[^81] Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family you're likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family you're likely to go to business school. Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119 per cent, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122 per cent. But between 1979 and 2009, productivity rose by 80 per cent, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4 per cent. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1 per cent rose by 270 per cent. #### 33 The Lairds of Learning Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the Western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Wal-Mart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch look like a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but - wait for it - to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities. Independent researchers who try to inform themselves about important scientific issues have to fork out thousands.[^82] This is a tax on education, a stifling of the public mind. It appears to contravene the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says that, ‘Everyone has the right freely to... share in scientific advancement and its benefits.' In the short term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly funded research are placed in a free public database. #### 34 The Man Who Wants to Northern Rock the Planet Brass neck doesn't begin to describe it. Matt Ridley used to make his living partly by writing state-bashing columns in the Daily Telegraph. The government, he complained, is a self-seeking flea on the backs of the more productive people of this world... governments do not run countries, they parasitise them'.[^83] Taxes, bail-outs, regulations, subsidies, intervention of any kind, he argued, are an unwarranted restraint on market freedom. Ridley provides what he claims is a scientific justification for unregulated business. He maintains that rising consumption will keep enriching us for 'centuries and millennia' to come, but only if governments don't impede innovation.' He dismisses or denies the environmental consequences, laments our risk-aversion, and claims that the market system makes self-interest ‘thoroughly virtuous.’[^84] Northern Rock grew rapidly by externalising its costs, pursuing money-making schemes that would eventually be paid for by other people. Ridley encourages us to treat the planet in the same way. He either ignores or glosses over the costs of ever-expanding trade and perpetual growth. His timing, as BP fails to contain the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, is unfortunate. Like the collapse of Northern Rock, the Deepwater Horizon disaster was made possible by weak regulation. Ridley would weaken it even further, leaving public protection to the invisible hand of the market. #### 35 The Gift of Death Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1 per cent remain in use six months after sale.[^85] People in eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smartphone upgrades of ever-diminishing marginal utility.[^86] Forests are felled to make personalised heart-shaped wooden cheese board sets'. Rivers are poisoned to manufacture talking fish. This is pathological consumption: a world-consum-ing epidemic of collective madness, rendered so normal by advertising and the media that we scarcely notice what has happened to us. So effectively have governments, the media and advertisers associated consumption with prosperity and happiness that to say these things is to expose yourself to opprobrium and ridicule. Witness one of the BBC's Moral Maze programmes from December 2012, in which most of the panel lined up to decry the idea of consuming less, and to associate it, somehow, with authoritarianism.[^87] When the world goes mad, those who resist are denounced as lunatics. ### Part 7 Dance with the One Who Brung You #### 36 How the Billionaires Broke the System There are two ways of cutting a deficit: raising taxes or reducing spending. Raising taxes means taking money from the rich. Cutting spending means taking money from the poor. Not in all cases of course: some taxation is regressive; some state spending takes money from ordinary citizens and gives it to banks, arms companies, oil barons and farmers. But in most cases the state transfers wealth from rich to poor, while tax cuts shift it from poor to rich. As the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, in the past ten years the income of the top 1 per cent has risen by 18 per cent, while that of blue-collar male workers has fallen by 12 per cent.[^88] The groups and politicians funded by the Kochs also lobby to destroy collective bargaining, to stop laws reducing carbon emissions, to stymie health care reform and to hobble attempts to control the banks. During the 2010 election cycle, Americans for Prosperity spent $45 million supporting its favoured candidates.[^89] But the Kochs' greatest political triumph is the creation of the Tea Party movement. Taki Oldham's film Astro Turf Wars shows Tea Party organisers from all over the Union reporting back to David Koch at their 2009 Defending the Dream Summit… Are they stupid? No. They have been systematically misled by another instrument of corporate power: the media. The Tea Party movement has been relentlessly promoted by Fox News, which belongs to a more familiar billionaire. Like the Kochs, Rupert Murdoch aims to misrepresent the democratic choices we face, in order to persuade us to vote against our own interests and in favour of his. #### Plutocracy’s Boot Boys In Think Tank: The Story of the Adam Smith Institute, the institute's founder, Madsen Pirie, provides an unintentional but invaluable guide to how power in this country really works.[^90] Soon after it was founded in 1977, the institute approached 'all the top companies'. About twenty of them responded by sending cheques. Its most enthusiastic supporter was the coup-plotter Sir James Goldsmith, one of the most unscrupulous asset strippers of that time. Before making one of his donations, Pirie writes, 'He listened carefully as we outlined the project, his eyes twinkling at the audacity and scale of it. Then he had his secretary hand us a cheque for £12,000 as we left. Pirie also wrote the manifesto of the neoliberal wing of Mrs Thatcher's government, No Turning Back.[^91] Officially, the authors of this document - which was published by the party were MPs such as Michael Forsyth, Peter Lilley and Michael Portillo. 'Nowhere was there any mention of, or connection to, myself or the Adam Smith Institute. They paid me my £1,000 and we were all happy. Pirie's report became the central charter of the doctrine we now call Thatcherism, whose praetorian guard called itself the No Turning Back group. I see these people as rightwing vanguardists, mobilising first to break and then to capture a political system that is meant to belong to all of us. Like Marxist insurrectionaries, they often talk about smashing things, about creative destruction', about the breaking of chains and the slipping of leashes.[^92] But in this case they appear to be trying to free the rich from the constraints of democracy. And at the moment they are winning. #### 38 How Did We Get Into This Mess? For the first time, the United Kingdom's consumer debt now exceeds our gross national product: a new report shows that we owe f1.35 trillion.[^93] When the Mont Pelerin Society first met, in 1947, its political project did not have a name. But it knew where it was going. The society's founder, Friedrich von Hayek, remarked that the battle for ideas would take at least a generation to win, but he knew that his intellectual army would attract powerful backers. Its philosophy, which later came to be known as neoliberalism, accorded with the interests of the ultra-rich, so the ultra-rich would promote it. as David Harvey proposes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, wherever the neoliberal programme has been imple-mented, it has caused a massive shift of wealth not just to the top one per cent, but to the top tenth of the top one per cent.[^94] In the United States, for example, the upper 0.1 per cent has already regained the position it held at the beginning of the 1920s.[^95] So the question is this. Given that the crises I have listed are predictable effects of the dismantling of public services and the deregulation of business and financial markets, given that it damages the interests of nearly everyone, how has neoliberalism come to dominate public life? Richard Nixon was once forced to concede that 'we are all Keynesians now': even the Republicans supported the interventionist doctrines of John Maynard Keynes. But we are all neoliberals now. Mrs Thatcher kept telling us that 'there is no alternative' , and by implementing her programmes, Clinton, Blair, Brown and the other leaders of what were once progressive parties appear to prove her right. In the United Kingdom, stagflation, strikes and budgetary breakdown allowed Margaret Thatcher, whose ideas were framed by her neoliberal adviser Keith Joseph, to come to the rescue. Her programme worked, but created a new set of crises. But the most powerful promoter of this programme was the media. Most media outlets are owned by multi-millionaires who use it to project the ideas that support their interests. Those which threaten their plans are either ignored or ridi-culed. It is through the newspapers and television channels that the socially destructive ideas of a small group of extremists have come to look like common sense. The corporations' tame thinkers sell the project by reframing our political language.[^96] Nowadays I hear even my progressive friends using terms like wealth creators, tax relief, big government, consumer democracy, red tape, compensation culture, job seekers and benefit cheats. These terms, all deliberately invented or promoted by neoliberals, have become so commonplace that they now seem almost neutral. Neoliberalism, if unchecked, will catalyse crisis after crisis, all of which can be solved only by the means it forbids: greater intervention on the part of the state. In confronting it, we must recognise that we will never be able to mobilise the resources its exponents have been given. But as the disasters they have caused develop, the public will need ever less persuading that it has been misled. 28 August 2007 #### 39 Going Naked ### Going Naked Like many British people, I feel embarrassed talking about money, and publishing the amounts I receive from the Guardian and other employers makes me feel naked. I fear I will be attacked by some people for earning so much and mocked by others for earning so little. ### Part 8 Out of Sight, Out of Mind #### 40 The Holocaust We Will Not See Avatar, James Cameron's blockbusting 3-D film, is both profoundly silly and profound. It's profound because, like most films about aliens, it is a metaphor for contact between different human cultures. But in this case the metaphor is conscious and precise: this is the story of European engagement with the native peoples of the Americas. It's profoundly silly because engineering a happy ending demands a plot so stupid and predictable that it rips the heart out of the film. The fate of the Native Americans is much closer to the story told in another new film, The Road, in which a remnant population flees in terror as it is hunted to extinction. In his book [[American Holocaust]], the American scholar David Stannard documents the greatest acts of genocide the world has ever experienced.' In 1492, some 100 million native peoples lived in the Americas. By the end of the nineteenth century almost all of them had been exterminated. Many died as a result of disease. But the mass extinction was also engineered. When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they described a world which could scarcely have been more different from their own. Europe was ravaged by war, oppression, slavery, fanaticism, disease and starvation. The populations they encountered were healthy, well nourished and mostly (with exceptions like the Aztecs and Incas) peaceable, democratic and egalitarian. Throughout the Americas the earliest explorers, including Columbus, remarked on the natives extraordinary hospitality. The conquistadores marvelled at the amazing roads, canals, buildings and art they found, which in some cases outstripped anything they had seen at home. None of this stopped them from destroying everything and everyone they encountered. L'Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, condemned the film as "just ... an anti-imperialistic, anti-militaristic parable'S But at least the right knows what it is attacking. In the New York Times the liberal critic Adam Cohen praises Avatar for championing the need to see clearly. It reveals, he says, 'a well-known principle of totalitarianism and genocide - that it is easiest to oppress those we cannot see'. But in a marvel-lous unconscious irony, he bypasses the crashingly obvious metaphor and talks instead about the light it casts on Nazi and Soviet atrocities. We have all become skilled in the art of not seeing. #### 41 The Empire Strikes Back Over the gates of Auschwitz were the words Work Makes You Free'. Over the gates of the Solovetsky camp in Lenin's gulag: 'Through Labour - Freedom!' Over the gates of the Ngenya detention camp, run by the British in Kenya: Labour and Freedom'[^97] Dehumanisation appears to follow an almost inexorable course. In his book '[[Exterminate All the Brutes]], Sven Lindqvist shows how the ideology that led to Hitler's war and the Holocaust was developed by the colonial powers.!° Imperialism required an exculpatory myth. It was supplied, primarily, by British theorists. I believe that the brutalisation of empire also made the pointless slaughter of the First World War possible. A ruling class which had shut down its feelings to the extent that it could engineer a famine in India in the 1870s in which between 12 and 29 million people died was capable of almost anything. Empire had tested not only the long-range weaponry that would later be deployed in northern France, but also the ideas. #### 42 Unremitting Pain No one suffers more from al-Shabaab than the Somalis. Preventing these crucial transfers of funds epitomises that combination of menace and absurdity satirised in Chris Morris's film Four Lions. In the areas these few thousand men control, they have tried to ban samosas, on the grounds that their triangular shape invokes the Holy Trinity! They whip women for wearing bras, have pledged to prohibit the Internet, have imposed fundamentalist Wahhabi doctrines on a largely Sufi population, have tried to stop food aid and have waged war on vaccination programmes, causing outbreaks of polio and measles. They have just murdered another MP. So you take a country suffering from terrorism, massive youth unemployment and the threat of famine and you seek to shut off half its foreign earnings. You force money transfers underground, where they are more likely to be captured by terrorists. You destroy hope, making young men more susceptible to recruitment by an organisation promising loot and status. Through an iniquitous mass punishment, you mobilise the anger and grievance on which terrorist organi-sations thrive. You help al-Shabaab to destroy Somalia's economic life. Compare this pointless destruction to the US government's continued licensing of HSBC. In 2012 the bank was condemned by a Senate committee for circumventing safeguards 'designed to block transactions involving terror-ists, drug lords, and rogue regimes'. ' It processed billions of dollars for Mexican drug barons and provided services to Saudi and Bangladeshi banks linked to the financing of terrorists.! But there was no criminal prosecution because, the Attorney General's office argued, too many jobs were at stake. The further outrageous practices that have since been revealed will doubtless be treated with the same leniency! So the US government fails to prosecute the illegal transfer of billions of dollars, in order to protect American jobs, while sentencing people in the Horn of Africa to death because of the illegal transfer of a few thousand. There is a word for these double standards: racism. #### 43 Bomb Everyone In the name of peace and the preservation of life, our governments wage perpetual war. There are no good solutions that military intervention by the UK or the US can engineer. There are political solutions in which our governments could play a minor role: supporting the development of effective states that don't rely on murder and militias, building civic institutions that don't depend on terror, helping to create safe passage and aid for people at risk. Oh, and ceasing to protect and sponsor and arm selected networks of death. Whenever our armed forces have bombed or invaded Muslim nations, they have made life worse for those who live there. The regions in which our governments have intervened most are those which suffer most from terrorism and war. That is neither coincidental nor surprising. ### Part 9 Holding Us Down #### A Global Ban on Leftwing Politics The purpose of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is to remove the regulatory differences between the Unites States and European nations. I mentioned it in an opinion piece on the Guardian website in October 2013.2 But I left out the most important issue: the remarkable ability it would grant big business to sue the living daylights out of governments which try to defend their citizens. It would allow a secretive panel of corporate lawyers to overrule the will of Parliament and destroy our legal protections. Yet the defenders of our sovereignty say nothing. During its financial crisis, and in response to public anger over rocketing charges, Argentina imposed a freeze on people's energy and water bills. It was sued by the international utility companies whose vast bills had prompted the government to act. For this and other such crimes, it has been forced to pay out over a billion dollars in compensation.[^98] ### 45 Innocent until Proved Dead Obama admitted for the first time that four US citizens had been killed by US drone strikes in other countries. In the next sentence he said, 'I do not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any US citizen - with a drone, or a shotgun - without due process.[^99] Global powers have an anti-social habit of bringing their work back home. The British government, for example, imported some of the methods it used against its colonial subjects to suppress domestic protests and strikes. Once an administrative class becomes accustomed to treating foreigners as if they have no rights, and once the domestic population broadly accepts their justifications, it is almost inevitable that the habit migrates from one arena into another. If hundreds of people living abroad can be executed by US agents on no more than suspicion, should we be surprised if residents of the United States began to be treated the same way? #### 46 The Paranoia Squad Just as the misleading claims of the security services were used to launch an illegal and unnecessary war against Iraq, NETCU's exaggerations will be used to justify the heavy-handed treatment of peaceful protesters. In both cases police and spies are distracted from dealing with genuine threats of terrorism and violence. For how much longer will the government permit the police forces to drum up business like this? And at what point do we decide that this country is beginning to look like a police state? 23 November 2008 #### 47 Union with the Devil It is true that some important victories have been won since 1997. We have a minimum wage, better pension protec-tion, improvements in parental leave, better conditions for part-time workers. The list of defeats is much longer. There is the private finance initiative, doggedly promoted by Gordon Brown, which now dominates the provision of most public services. There is the creeping marketisation of health and education. Knowing that it can take the support of the affiliated unions for granted, the government can concentrate on appeasing the bosses. The unions' involvement with the Labour Party is rather like the government's special relationship with George Bush: their response to being used as a doormat is to become just a little more bristly. ### Part 10 Finding Our Place #### 48 Someone Else’s Story System justification is defined as the 'process by which existing social arrangements are legitimised, even at the expense of personal and group interest'.[^100] It consists of a desire to defend the status quo, regardless of its impacts. It has been demonstrated in a large body of experimental work, which has produced the following surprising results. System justification becomes stronger when social and economic inequality are more extreme. This is because people try to rationalise their disadvantage by seeking legitimate reasons for their position.[^101] In some cases disadvantaged people are more likely than the privileged to support the status quo. One study found that US citizens on low incomes were more likely than those on high incomes to believe that economic inequality is legitimate and necessary.[^102] Most of the world's prosperous nations are small: there are no inherent disadvantages to downsizing.[^103] (neoliberal economics) treats the natural world, civic life, equality, public health and effective public services as dispensable luxuries, and the freedom of the rich to exploit the poor as non-negotiable. The concerns of swing voters in marginal constituencies outweigh those of the majority; the concerns of corporations with no lasting stake in the country outweigh everything. Broken, corrupt, dysfunctional, reten-tive: you want to be part of this? #### 49 Highland Spring The Westminster government claims to champion an entrepreneurial society, of wealth creators and hard-work-ing families, but the real rewards and incentives are for rent. The power and majesty of the state protects the patrimonial class. A looped and windowed democratic cloak barely covers the corrupt old body of the nation. This is an essentially feudal nation. #### 50 A Telling Silence In just two and half years, the government has cut corporation tax three times. It will fall from 28 per cent in 2010 to 2 per cent in 2014. Labour's near silence on this issue is easily explained. Under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who were often as keen as the Conservatives to appease corporate power, the rate was reduced from 33 per cent to 28 per cent. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, a tax rate of just 0.01 per cent would raise f25 billion a year, rendering many of the chamber's earnest debates about the devastating cuts void. For the simplest, fairest and least avoidable levy is one which the major parties simply will not contemplate. It's called land value tax. The term is a misnomer. It's not really a tax. It's a return to the public of the benefits we have donated to the landlords. When land rises in value, the government and the people deliver a great unearned gift to those who happen to own it. In 1909 a dangerous subversive explained the issue thus: *Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains - and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived ... the unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.'[^104]* Adam Smith and many others have pointed out,[^105] those who own the land skim wealth from everyone else, without exertion or enterprise. Land value tax recoups this toll. It is altogether remarkable, in these straitened and inequitable times, that land value tax is not at the heart of the current political debate. This is where the debate about workers and shirkers, strivers and skivers should have led. The skivers and shirkers sucking the money out of your pockets are not the recipients of social security demonised by the Daily Mail and the Conservative Party, the overwhelming majority of whom are honest claimants. We are being parasitised from above, not below, and the tax system should reflect this. #### 51 The Values of Everything The acceptance of policies which counteract our interests is the pervasive mystery of the twenty-first century. In the United States, blue-collar workers angrily demand that they be left without health care, and insist that millionaires should pay less tax. In the UK we appear ready to abandon the social progress for which our ancestors risked their lives with barely a mutter of protest. What has happened to us? The answer, I think, is provided by the most interesting report I have read this year. 'Common Cause', written by Tom Crompton of the environmental conservation group the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF), examines a series of fascinating recent advances in the field of psychology.[^106] Progressives, he shows, have been suckers for a myth of human cognition he labels the Enlightenment model. This holds that people make rational decisions by assessing facts. All that has to be done to persuade people is to lay out the data: they will then use it to decide which options best support their interests and desires. A host of psychological experiments demonstrates that it doesn't work like this. Instead of performing a rational cost-benefit analysis, we accept information which confirms our identity and values, and we reject information that conflicts with them. We mould our thinking around our social iden-tity, protecting it from serious challenge. Confronting people with inconvenient facts is likely only to harden their resistance to change. We are not born with our values. They are shaped by the social environment around us. By changing our perception of what is normal and acceptable, politics alters our minds as much as our circumstances. Free, universal health provision, for example, tends to reinforce intrinsic values. Shutting the poor out of health care normalises inequality, reinforcing extrinsic values. The sharp rightward shift which began with Margaret Thatcher and persisted under Blair and Brown, all of whose governments emphasised the virtues of competition, the market and financial success, has changed our values. The British Social Attitudes survey, for example, shows a sharp fall over this period in public support for policies which redistribute wealth and opportunity.[^107] Advertisers, who employ large numbers of psychologists, are well aware of this. Crompton quotes Guy Murphy, global planning director for the marketing company JWT. Marketers, Murphy says, 'should see themselves as trying to manipulate culture; being social engineers, not brand managers; manipulating cultural forces, not brand impressions.'[^108] The more they foster extrinsic values, the easier it is to sell their products. Instead of confronting the shift in values, we have sought to adapt to it... Green consumerism has been a catastrophic mistake. 'Common Cause' proposes a simple remedy: that we stop seeking to bury our values and instead explain and champion them. Ed Miliband appears to understand this need. He told the Labour conference that he wants to change our society so that it values community and family, not just ‘work', and 'wants to change our foreign policy so that it's always based on values, not just alliances... We must shed old thinking and stand up for those who believe there is more to life than the bottom line." But there's a paradox here, which means that we cannot rely on politicians to drive these changes. Those who succeed in politics are, by definition, people who prioritise extrinsic values. Their ambition must supplant peace of mind, family life, friendship - even brotherly love. So we must lead this shift ourselves. People with strong intrinsic values must cease to be embarrassed by them. We should argue for the policies we want not on the grounds of expediency but on the grounds that they are empathetic and kind; and against others on the grounds that they are selfish and cruel. In asserting our values we become the change we want to see. `Concepts:` `Knowledge Base:` ##### footnotes [^1]: Susan Jacoby, 2008, The Age of American Unreason: Dumbing Down and the Future of Democracy, Old Street Publishing, London. [^2]: David Harvey, 2005, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford; Naomi Klein, 2007, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Penguin Books, London. [^3]: Isaiah Berlin, 1958, Two Concepts of Liberty, published in Isaiah Berlin, 1969, Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford University Press, Oxford. [^4]: Fred Block and Margaret Somers, 2014, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. [^5]: Amartya Sen, 1981, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entilement and Deprivation, Oxford University Press, Oxford. [^6]: Natalie Gil, 20 July 2014, 'Loneliness: A Silent Plague That Is Hurting Young People Most', theguardian.com. [^7]: International Longevity Centre and Independent Age, 2013, Isolation: A Growing Issue Among Older Men, independentage.org. [^8]: Ibid; Gil, 'Loneliness'. [^9]: Ian Sample, 16 February 2014, Loneliness Twice as Unhealthy as Obesity for Older People, Study Finds', theguardian.com; Gill, 'Loneliness'. [^10]: The Campaign to End Loneliness, 'Loneliness Research', campaign-toendloneliness.org. [^11]: Luca Stanca and Luigino Bruni, June 2005, 'Income Aspirations, Television and Happiness: Evidence from the World Values Surveys', boa.unimib.it. [^12]: Jill Treanor, 14 October 2014, 'Richest 1% of People Own Nearly Half of Global Wealth, Says Report, theguardian.com. [^13]: Paul Verhaeghe, 2014, [[What about Me?]] The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society, Scribe: Melbourne and London. [^14]: Simon Rogers, 22 May 2012, 'Social Mobility: The Charts That Shame Britain', theguardian.com. [^15]: Daniel Huang, 3 June 2015, ‘[[The Ten Commandments for Wall Street Interns]]’, wsj.com. [^16]: Alex Gask, 2004, Anti-Social Behaviour Orders and Human Rights, Liberty, liberty-human-rights.org.uk. [^17]: Costa, World Drug Report 2009. [^18]: Transform Drug Policy Foundation, April 2009, 'A Comparison of the Cost-Effectiveness of the Prohibition and Regulation of Drugs', tdpf.org. uk. [^19]: Kings College London, April 2011, Understanding the Diverse Benefits of Learning in Natural Environments, webarchive,nationalarchives.gov.uk. [^20]: Offsted, November 2012, Learning Outside the Classroom: How Far Should You Go?, Ofsted, Manchester, nationalarchives.gov.uk. [^21]: Jay Griffiths, 2013, Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape, Penguin Books, London. [^22]: Stephen Moss, 2012, Natural Childhood, nationaltrust.org.uk. [^23]: Please see the 1997 report Child's Play: Facilitating Play on Housing Estates by the Chartered Institute of Housing and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for an excellent summary of what child-centred design might involve, at jrf.org.uk. [^24]: Dina Medland, 5 June 2013, 'Whistleblowing Almost Killed Me', ft.com. [^25]: International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic, Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic, NYU School of Law, September 2012, Living under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan, livingunderdrones.org. [^26]: International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law, '[[Living under Drones]]' [^27]: William N. Eskridge, 1993, 'A History of Same-Sex Marriage', Virginia Law Review, vol. 79, no. 7; Jim Duffy, I1 August 1998, 'When Marriage between Gays Was a Rite, libchrist.com; 'Same-Sex Unions throughout Time: A History of Gay Marriage', randomhistory.com. [^28]: Luke 14:26. [^29]: John R. Gillis, 1996, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual and the Quest for Family Values, Basic Books, New York. [^30]: Gillis, A World of Their Own Making. [^31]: Colin Heywood, 2001, A History of Childhood, Polity, Cambridge. [^32]: Crime and Disorder Act 1998, Section 14, legislation.gov.uk [^33]: Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003, Section 30, legislation.gov.uk. [^34]: UNICEF, July 2001, A League Table of Teenage Births in Rich Nations', UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence. unicef-irc.org. [^35]: World Health Organisation, 2007, Unsafe Abortion: Global and Regional Estimates of the Incidence of Unsafe Abortion and Associated Mortality in 2003, fifth edition, who.int. [^36]: WHO, Unsafe Abortion. [^37]: Does this mean trickle down [[Economics#Trophic cascade and trickle down economics|economics]] is correct!?.. No.. [^38]: S. Rule et al., 23 March 2012, "The Aftermath of Megafaunal Extinction: Ecosystem Transformation in Pleistocene Australia', ncbi.nlm.hih.gov. [^39]: Joe Roman et al., September 2014, 'Whales as Marine Rcosystem Engineers', Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, vol. 12, no. 7. [^40]: Oswarlk J. Schmitz, 19 September 2013, "Animating the Carbon Cycle', Ecosystems, vol. 17, no. 2. [^41]: Aldo Leopold, 1949, A Sand County Almanac, Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 197. [^42]: David Satterthwaite, September 2009, 'The Implications of Population Growth and Urbanization for Climate Change, Environment and Urbanization, vol. 21, no. 2, eausagepub.com. [^43]: The National Ecosystem Assessment states that 'agricultural land occupied some 1.64 million ha or 79 per cent of Wales in 2008' and that 'crops now account for only 3 per cent of the agricultural land area'. UK National Ecosystem Assessment, Chapter 20, uknea.unep-wcmc.org. [^44]: R. C. Palmer and R. P. Smith, December 2013, 'Soil Structural Degradation in SW England and Its Impact on Surface-Water Runoff Generation', Soil Use and Management, vol. 29, no. 4. [^45]: R. C. Palmer and R. P. Smith, December 2013, 'Soil Structural Degradation in SW England and Its Impact on Surface-Water Runoff Generation', Soil Use and Management, vol. 29, no. 4. [^46]: Commission of the European Communities, 22 September 2006, Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council Establishing a Framework for the Protection of Soil, eur-lex.europa.eu. [^49]: B. Reynolds et al., February 2014, The Impact of Rural Land Management Changes on Soil Hydraulic Properties and Runoff Processes: Results from Experimental Plots in Upland UK', Hydrological Processes 28, no. 4, doi: 10.1002/hyp.9826. [^50]: Official Journal of the European Union, 31 January 2009. Council Regulation (EC), no. 73/2009 of 19 January 2009, establishing common rules for direct support schemes for farmers under the Common Agricultural Policy and establishing certain support schemes for farmers, amending Regulations (EC) no. 1290/2005, (EC) no. 247/2006, (EC) no 378/2007 and repealing Regulation (EC) no. 1782/2003, Annex III, eur-lex.europa. eu. This rule remains unchanged in the current round. [^51]: R. Evans, April 2010, 'Runoff and Soil Erosion in Arable Britain: Changes in Perception and Policy since 1945', Environmental Science and Policy, vol. 13, no. 2, sciencedirect.com. [^52]: Boardman and Vandale, 'Soil Erosion'. [^53]: Animal Aid, 2013, 'Calling the Shots: The Power and Privilege of the Grouse-Shooting Elite', animalaid.org.uk. [^54]: Amartya Sen, February 1962, 'An Aspect of Indian Agriculture', Economic Weekly, vol. 14, epw.in. [^55]: Fatma Gül Ünal, October 2006, 'Small Is Beautiful: Evidence of Inverse Size Yield Relationship in Rural Turkey', Policy Innovations, policyinnova-tions.org• [^56]: Giovanni Cornia, 1985, 'Farm Size, Land Yields and the Agricultural Production function: An Analysis for Fifteen Developing Countries, World Development, vol. 13, researchgate.net. [^57]: For example, Peter B. R. Hazell, January 2005, 'Is There a Future for Small Farms?", Agricultural Economics, vol. 32. [^58]: Banks Developments, 29 November 2007, 'Banks Group's Shotton Surface Mine Proposals Approved', banksdevelopments.com. [^59]: International Energy Agency, 2007, World Energy Outlook, 2007, table 1.9, p. 25. worldenergyoutlook.org. [^60]: The Stationery Office, 2015, 'Maximising Economic Recovery of UK Petroleum', Infrastructure Act 2015, legislation.gov.uk. [^61]: Thomas L. Friedman, 7 June 2014, 'Obama on Obama on Climate’, nytimes.com. [^62]: Subhanker Banerjee, 3 March 2015, "Tomgram: Subhankar Banerjee, Arctic Nightmares, tomdispatch.com. [^63]: Michael Le Page, 30 September 2013, IPC Digested: Just Leave the Fossil Fuels Underground", newscientist.com. [^64]: See kyoto2.org. [^65]: Kevin Drum, January/ February 2013, 'America's Real Criminal Element: Lead', motherjones.com. [^66]: George Monbiot, 1 March 2010, 'Are We Really Going to Let Ourselves Be Duped into This Solar Panel Rip-off?", theguardian.com; George Monbiot, 11 March 2010, 'Solar PV Has Failed in Germany and It Will Fail in the UK', theguardian.com. [^67]: Callum Roberts, 2007, The Unnatural History of the Sea: The Past and Future of Humanity and Fishing (Gaia Thinking), Gaia Books, London. [^68]: E. A. Wrigley, 2010, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 37 and 39. [^69]: Vicky Ellis, 12 December 2013, 'Lords Vote against Tougher Coal Plants Rule in UK', energylivenews.com; Carbon Brief, 11 November 2013, 'Could Old Coal Threaten the UK's Carbon Budgets?", carbonbrief.org. [^70]: 1. International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2011: Executive Summary, woldenergyoutlook.org. [^71]: Jeremy Grantham expressed this volume as 1,057 cubic metres. In his paper 'We Need to Talk about Growth (And We Need to Do the Sums as Well)', Michael Rowan translated this as 2.5 billion billion solar systems (persu-ademe.com.au). This source gives the volume of the solar system (if it is treated as a sphere) at 39,629,013,196,241.7 cubic kilometres, which is roughly 40 × 1,021 cubic metres. Multiplied by 2.5 billion billion, this gives 1,041. [^72]: E. A. Wrigley, 2010, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. [^73]: Suzanne Goldenberg, 12 May 2014, Western Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse Has Already Begun, Scientists Warn, theguardian.com. [^74]: Adam Vaughan, 23 May 2014, Ecuador Signs Permits for Oil Drilling in Amazon's Yasuni National Park', ,theguardian.com. [^75]: Paul Kingsnorth, 'The Space Race Is Over', globalonenessproject.org. [^76]: Rowan, 2014, 'We Need to Talk about Growth (and We Need to Do the Sums As Well)'. [^77]: Thomas Malthus, 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population. [^78]: BBC, 14 July 2014, 'Executive Pay "180 Times Average", Report Finds', bbc.com. [^79]: Daniel Kahneman, 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, p. 216. [^80]: Belinda Jane Board and Katarina Fritzon, March 2005, 'Disordered Personalities at Work’, Psychology, Crime and Law, vol. 11, no. 1, tandfonline.com. [^81]: Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, 2007, Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, HarperBusiness, London. [^82]: John P. Conley and Myrna Wooders, March 2009, 'But What Have You Done for Me Lately? Commercial Publishing, Scholarly Communication, and Open-Access', Economic Analysis and Policy, vol. 39, no. 1, eap-jour-nal.com. [^83]: Matt Ridley, 22 July 1996, 'Power to the People: We Can't Do Any Worse Than Government', Daily Telegraph. [^84]: Matt Ridley, 2010, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Fourth Estate, London. [^85]: The Story of Stuff, storyofstuff.org. [^86]: See the film Blood in the Mobile, bloodinthemobile.org. [^87]: BBC Radio 4, 8 December 2012, 'Ethical Consumerism', Moral Maze, bbc.co.uk. [^88]: Joseph Stiglitz, May 2011, 'Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%', vanityfair.com. [^89]: Carrk, The Koch Brothers. [^90]: Madsen Pirie, 2012, [[Think Tank: The Story of the Adam Smith Institute]], Biteback, London. [^91]: Pirie, Think Tank, p. 106-16. [^92]: Allister Heath, 25 July 2012, Britain Unleashed: David Cameron Needs a Change of Heart - and Some Fire in His Belly', telegraph.co.uk. [^93]: Larry Elliott, 23 August 2007, 'Consumers' Debt Overtakes Gross Domestic Product', theguardian.com. [^94]: David Harvey, 2005, 4 Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford [^95]: Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 17 (see graph). [^96]: For an account of how this happens, see George Lakoff, 2004, Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont. [^97]: Caroline Elkins, 2005, Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, Random House, London, p. 189. [^98]: Corporate Europe Observatory, 3 June 2013, 'A Transatlantic Corporate Bill of Rights', corporateeurope.org. [^99]: Obama, 'President Barack Obama's Speech at National Defense University: Full Text'. [^100]: John T. Jost and Mazarin R. Banaji, March 1994, "The Role of Stereotyping in System-Justification and the Production of False Consciousness', British Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 33, no. 1, onlinelibrary.wiley.com. [^101]: John T. Jost, Mahzarin R. Banaji and Brian A. Nosek, December 2004, 'A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo’, political Psychology, vol. 25, no. 6, onlinelibrary.wiley.com [^102]: John T. Jost et al., January-February 2003, 'Social Inequality and the Reduction of Ideological Dissonance on Behalf of the System: Evidence of Enhanced System Justification among the Disadvantaged', European Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 33, no. 1. [^103]: Adam Price et al., The Flotilla Effect: Europe's Small Economies through the Eye of the Storm, Plaid Cymru, party.of. wales/flotilla/? force=1. [^104]: Speech delivered by Winston Churchill in King's Theater, Edinburgh, on 17 July 1909, see Current Affairs, '[[Winston Churchill]] Said It All Better Than We Can', landvaluetax.org. [^105]: 'Ground-rents are a still more proper subject of taxation than the rent of houses. A tax upon ground-rents would not raise the rents of houses. It would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent, who acts always as a monopolist, and exacts the greatest rent which can be got for the use of his ground', from [[Adam Smith]], 1776, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter 2. [^106]: Tom Crompton, September 2010, '[[Common Cause - The Case for Working with Our Cultural Values]], WWF, Oxfam, Friends of the Earth, CPRE, Climate Outreach Information Network, wwf.org.uk. [^107]: J. Curtice, 2010, "Thermostat or Weathervane? Public Reactions to Spending and Redistribution under New Labour', in Alison Park et al. (eds), British Social Attitudes 2009-2010: The 26th Report, Sage, London, srmo.sagepub.com. Cited in Crompton, 'Common Cause' [^108]: Guy Murphy, 2005, Influencing the Size of Your Market', Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, cited in Crompton, 'Common Cause'.