We (Seatree) are participating in another exhibition!
This is at the wonderful TIG gallery, over in Tighnabruach, overlooking the Kyles of Bute- long reputed to be one of the most beautiful places in Scotland (therefore the world.) What better way could there be to celebrate the arrival of spring? The blurb is below. Come and see!
We would like to invite you to the exhibition launch which is featuring some of our work. We are looking forward to seeing what the other artists have been working on too and hope to see you there! Michaela and Chris
‘Spring on the Secret Coast’ Friday 19 April – Monday 6 May
Mixed exhibition featuring paintings, photography and ceramics by a variety of local artists, all capturing Spring as it bursts onto Argyll’s Secret Coast. Featuring work by Mary Taylor, Peter Walsh, Michaela & Chris Goan, Pauline Beautyman and Kyleside Art Club.
Exhibition Opening Friday 19 April, 2-4pm Join us for a celebratory glass of fizz as we open the exhibition and celebrate the arrival of Spring!
I am starting to get busy outside, and I love it. Every year I long for spring and when it comes, it never disappoints. The smell of the earth. The feeling of energy returning to the whole world around me, from the birds to the flush of shy green on the trees.
The poly tunnels have been cleaned out, and all the beds laced with well rotted compost. I have also created a couple of out door beds, including one for a new experiment, growing tea.
There is a back story to this. A year or so ago, we had a visit from a lovely bloke called Tim, who runs a magnificent gardening project over in Edinburgh. Tim looked at our typical west of Scotland landscape, dotted with rhododendron bushes and said ‘you have ideal conditions for growing tea’. We expressed surprise, but Tim told us that tea is a camellia (Camellia Sinesis to be precise) and loves acid soils and high rainfall. It just so happened that one of our other friends, Ali, was present and she and I started to dream about a local community connection project, involving tea. What better way of symbolising connection is there, after all?
Since then, the organisation that we were both part of through which this idea could develop (South Cowal Development Company) has been busy with other things, but the idea has not gone away. I bought some cheap plants on ebay, and tried to nurture them in the poly tunnel last year, but they are not very happy, so I decided it was time to get them outside;
I am determined to make as much use of our land as possible, and I read something recently about tapping birch trees for their sap;
The next task was to turn the sap into syrup. Cue a LOT of boiling!
The fist lot made a tiny bit of very think syrup because I over boiled it. The next one I boiled less, and the result was sweet, runny syrup, which is like a smoky- tangy version of maple syrup. I am going to make some flapjack with it!
It is easy and fun to collect sap- and there are lots of things you can do with it- check this out.
Today I finally did it. It felt like cutting an umbilical cord – albeit a chord that carried toxicity along with nurture…
…I cancelled my registration as a social worker.
No big deal I suppose- after all, I have not worked in that capacity for over two years now,since leaving my last job as Service Manager for a mental health service.
But then again, it has been a defining factor in my life. I became a social worker straight from university full of a missionary zeal; I was going to be one of the good guys. In a world full of injustice and brokenness, I was going to make a difference, one person at a time because emerging as I was from my own experience of poverty and deprivation as a child of the Welfare State, I could imagine no higher calling.
There were moments of deep beauty. People whose lives touched mine- professional detachment be damned.. There were even successes in the justice-making and people-mending business. But overall, my career also knew enervating disappointment. There was never enough of me. Never enough resources, never enough energy. Despite the manifest failure of the system, I often internalised this as personal failure, like many of us do, leading to a depression and a sense of impotence. Also, the loss of any kind of ethical missionality that began to overtake the whole profession ate at my soul. Perhaps in the face of so much bad publicity, we no longer believed in what we were doing. We became ‘professionals’ but lost our radical edge entirely.
In hindsight, I made other mistakes. I accepted promotions, thinking I could make a difference higher up. I had some very relevant skills to take on management tasks, but lacked other crucial ones entirely. Perhaps above all, my skin was too thin.
Even though I made a positive choice to STOP and to use my life for something else, I kept paying my registration fee, until today that is. I told myself that I might need to work to earn money (which of course is still true) but the greater truth was that this was it a connection to the old me that I was not quite prepared to let go.
So what now? What am I, now I am no longer a social worker?
There are other labels I can apply. Some of them (writer, poet, artist) feel self-aggrandising and not really me. Others (craft worker, picture framer, carpenter) are too specific and task centred. Anyway, after being a social worker t is not enough merely to ‘do’.
Neither is it enough to just be a ‘former social worker’.
Social work was about reaching for something better, for others as well as ourselves. It was about being part of the resistance. Remember how we used to talk about being both ‘in and against the state’? The fact that the reality was often reduced to mundane administration and form filling never killed this hope in me, and it remains still.
Since I stopped working as a social worker, the lack of urgency has dogged me at times. After all, social work is mostly driven by a series of life-and-death crises and after that finding motivation is not always easy.
But I am not done yet. I am 52 years young, fit and mostly intact with half a life time of experience working on the ragged edges of the welfare state, doing a job that became almost synonymous with tabloid hatred, even though ‘normal’ people had no idea just what it entailed and how much it cost. There are missions left in me.
My life of late has become rather inward looking. I write after all. I spend a lot of time at my desk, or working with my lovely wife, or digging veg . I like it. I am happy, but I am not totally fulfilled. Social work stole that from me, for a while at least.
Now I am no longer a social worker, I have no excuse any more.
This is our local shop. We only have one. It is a post office too; one of those increasingly rare places that increasingly plug the holes left by banks retreating from our high streets and government agencies expecting everyone to go on line. Our village is six miles or so from the nearest supermarket, so the shop is also a life-line for groceries. (They even sell food for our chickens!)
But the shop been for sale for years now with no takers so there has been a real chance that we could lose it. This would be a disaster for all sorts of reasons. Villages like ours used to have a whole range of shops, pubs and churches which as well as meeting physical and spiritual need, also allowed us to mix, interact and build community. Most of these things are long gone, and Innellan is no different, except here, we decided to fight back.
Under the auspices of our local Community Development Company, we started to look at the possibilities of taking the shop into community ownership. There are numerous inspiring examples of other places who have done this- check out the stories on the Plunket Foundation website for example.
Momentum gathered and a community enterprise company was formed to start the huge amount of work required to submit funding bids, raise money and most importantly to engage local interest in making this happen. We are now at an exciting stage of the process- we have been awarded a substantial grant towards the cost of the property by the Scottish Land Fund, but we still need to raise about £60K for stock and other costs. We are hoping to do this through a community shares offer, and we are getting there, but still need some more dosh!
If you support this project, you are participating in a radical act of resistance.
Honestly.
I am excited by the possibility of a community buy out of the shop not because I will still have a small shop to get my pint of milk from, but rather because the shop offers a means by which our small sleepy community starts to renew itself, in the following ways;
It will continue to offer employment opportunities to local people
It will allow local people to have a direct connection and investment in a key local resource
The shop will become a hub for information and engagement
Phase 2 of the development will be to convert the upper flat into a bunkhouse. (There is very little in the way of affordable accommodation in our lovely area.)
We hope to sell fresh local produce, and even to go plastic free wherever possible
The post office. Essential for small businesses like ours!
There are of course dissenting voices. This is a village, and like all villages, allegiance to an idea is shaped by relationship. Misinformation is also easily spread and some feel ‘it will never happen’. But it IS happening. We are almost there.
There has been a lot of talk about the possibilities offered to our fractured societies by Basic Universal Income.
Appealing both to the left (who believe it can cut poverty and inequality) and, more recently, to the right (as a possible way to a leaner, less bureaucratic welfare system), UBI looks all the more attractive amid warnings that automation could threaten up to a third of current jobs in the west within 20 years. Other basic income schemes are now being tested from Ontario to rural Kenya, and Glasgow to Barcelona.
The logic behind a basic income is outrageous to a culture stupified by the logic of Thatcherite and Blairite neo-liberalism to the point where it seems almost offensive. Giving people money for nothing? It seems like an insult to money itself. A new kind of blasphemy. Check out the opposition from all sorts of angles;
Until you start to look at the gathering evidence. It seems that if you lift people away from the pressure to scratch out survival, and modify the broken contract between the haves and the have-nots, all sorts of both intended and unintended benefts can unfold.
I find it impossible not to feel a historical twinge as I think about these issues. The post war social contract known as the ‘Welfare State’ in the UK emerged in the post-war surge of working class empowerment, and from the Beveridge Report, which along with many other factors, was concerned with the previous corrosion of punitive and damaging means tested unemployment benefits, designed to shame people back into work. Those that could not work might have benefited from parish welfare funds but largely they were condemned and finished. The injustice of these arrangements was to be banished forever, or so we thought.
Beveridge’s report was based on eight principles. I am going to replicate them in full here, not because they are historical oddities, but because they seem just as relevant now as they did back then, and may remind us just how far we have slipped from this high tide of ethics and morality.
Beveridge might have been outraged by the idea of a universal basic income- for him, the saving grace was WORK. But universality, and a resistance to means testing whenever possible dominated the political agenda.
I would love to know what his response to the new economic realities would have been…
The contributory principle: Beveridge neatly asserted that ‘benefit in return for contributions, rather than free allowances from the State, is what the people of Britain desire’ and it’s hard to argue that the sentiment has changed much seventy years later. Today politicians use ugly terms like ‘something for something’ to capture the same spirit. For the left the contributory principle matters because it binds people into supporting decent welfare provision by presenting entitlements as earned rights. But it also contains a risk – that the contribution bar will be set too high and many who need help will not receive it. For example, the recent reforms to the State Pension system aimed to update contribution rules so they no longer exclude many women from full pensions. Universalism: Beveridge and many since have sometimes elided universal non-means-tested provision with contribution, but they need not be the same. For example Beveridge argued for contributory payments for retirement pensions and out-of-work insurance but he also proposed non-contributory Family Allowances for everyone with children. The argument for such in-work payments remain unchanged from the time Beveridge wrote: ‘if children’s allowances are given only when earnings are interrupted and are not given during earning also, two evils are unavoidable. First, a substantial measure of acute want will remain among the lower paid workers as the accompaniment of large families. Second, in all such cases, income will be greater during unemployment or other interruptions of work than during work.’ Today Child Benefit remains but we also have tax credits and soon universal credit to overcome poverty and earnings ‘traps’ with payments continuing well up the earnings distribution – progressive universalism, as Gordon Brown called it. Today many on the left worry that removing Child Benefit even from very high paid families could undermine solidarity for child-focused welfare. Adequacy: Beveridge found that welfare provision where ‘benefits amount to less than subsistence’ was one cause of the giant of ‘want’. His insurance scheme was therefore designed to ‘guarantee the income needs for subsistence in all normal cases’. This principle is being rediscovered in the design of the state pension. The 2012 Queen’s Speech included a bill to introduce a higher flat-rate state pension for all future retirees, paid at a level in line with contemporary measures of ‘adequate’ income (this Liberal Democrat policy accelerates a plan introduced by Labour in government). Gordon Brown’s tax credit system aimed to do the same for families with children, albeit on a means-tested basis. But this principle has been totally abandoned when it comes to people before retirement without children. After decades where we have indexed the main out-of-work benefits to inflation rather than earnings they are totally inadequate to lead a normal, healthy lifestyle. Hypothecation, of a sort: Beveridge built on previous insurance schemes by presenting contributions as hypothecated for the provision of welfare provision (though not necessarily to specific contributory allowances). But he did not support a ring-fenced system where inputs and outputs should match. Originally the taxpayer was expected to pay a large share as well as individuals and employers. Perhaps more importantly, his proposals embodied what can be called ‘soft’ hypothecation: the introduction of improved provision came hand-in-hand with the announcement of revenue-raising measures. Even this form of hypothecation has traditionally been resisted by the Treasury, but was famously employed by Gordon Brown in 2002 to raise National Insurance to improve the NHS (following the work of the Fabian Commission on Taxation and Citizenship). Today, the principle of matching new spending programmes to revenue streams needs to be revived, simply because there is no prospect of new welfare provision from general taxation. The best example is the funding of social care, where the parties are in deadlock over the best funding source for spending reforms almost everyone supports. Conditionality: An ugly word for an old idea, that social security entitlement should be dependent on your current actions not just past contributions. Beveridge said unemployment benefit ‘will normally be subject to a condition of attendance at a work or training centre after a certain period’ while disability benefit would be paid ‘subject to acceptance of suitable medical treatment or vocational training’. In our collective memory the left has forgotten that the idea of conditions for support does not just trace its lineage to the Work House but also to the mutual insurance fund. Over the last decade the reintroduction of conditionality with respect to disability benefits was initially greeted with opposition in principle, but this has been slowly displaced by concern with fair implementation based on people’s personal circumstances. Longevity: Population ageing and the rapid growth in the pensioner population are often presented as novel policy challenges. But the Report anticipated our contemporary debates, recognising that ‘persons past the age that is now regarded as the end of working life will be a much larger proportion of the whole community than at any time in the past [making] it necessary to seek ways of postponing the age of retirement from work rather than of hastening it’. Beveridge understood that state pension provision ‘represents the largest and most rapidly growing element in any social insurance scheme’ so the fact that we today spend two-fifths of all welfare on state pensions should not be seen as shocking or novel. Beveridge proposed that the pension age be a minimum age of retirement but wanted to see pension rates ‘increased above the basic rate if retirement is postponed’ – an idea reintroduced by Labour’s pension reforms, but seldom taken-up in practice. The raising of the pension age may be regrettable for all sorts of reasons, but we can hardly suggest it is a betrayal of the Beveridge settlement, given that male life expectancy at 65 has roughly doubled since 1943. Private provision: A key dimension of Beneridge that many on the left have forgotten is the report’s keen endorsement of personal saving and insurance as an addition to good public welfare. In outlining its key principles the report argued that ‘the State in organising security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility ; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family.’ This principle was a key consideration in the design of Labour reforms such as the Child Trust Fund and the Savings Gateway (both scrapped by the coalition), the new state pension and the recent proposals for social care advanced by Andrew Dilnot. Housing costs: A final salutary thought. Beveridge was unable to resolve ‘the problem of rent’ and come up with a fair way of supporting people with housing costs under a contributory, universal system. The costs of housing were and are so variable that any flat-rate subsidy would either cause real hardship or give some money they had no need for. Beveridge wrote ‘in this as in other respects, the framing of a satisfactory scheme of social security depends on the solution of other problems of economic and social organisation’; problems familiar today like high unemployment, falling earnings, inadequate housing supply and huge regional dispaprities. Housing benefit remains the ultimate economic ‘stabiliser’ patching-up the failings of our unequal society. Its rapidly rising cost is a reflection of our economic failure not the failings of the people who need to rely on it.
The CEO sort of made the point that people like Bregman should stop banging on about tax and inequality because, after all, world poverty is rapidly decreasing. The implication then is that global capitalism is working to advance the cause of the global poor. Give people a factory to work at, or a hotel room to clean, and they will no longer starve.
The evidence is strong. Take this report from Politifact for example. They were fact checking this claim by U.S. Agency for International Development administrator Gayle Smith.
“I think everyone in the room knows that this is a moment of extraordinary progress. Over the last 30 years, extreme poverty has been cut in half. Boys and girls are enrolling in primary school at nearly equal rates, and there are half as many children out of school today as there were 15 years ago,” Smith said in a speech on Capitol Hill.
They concluded that
Smith said, “Over the last 30 years, extreme poverty has been cut in half.” By World Bank figures, Smith actually understated the reduction. We’ve cut extreme poverty by 58 percent using the 2008 definition of extreme poverty, and 74.1 percent by the 2015 definition. While we don’t quibble with Smith using that metric, our research shows that there are other ways of determining poverty, and those different ways show different declines. Moreover, defining poverty is not an exact science, experts say. Because of those caveats, we rate Smith’s claim Mostly True.
The message emerging from the world’s major economic foundations ( the World Bank, the IMF etc) appears to be this;
Things are getting better. Climate change will be a challenge (See below), and there are a few areas where poverty stubbornly remains and is difficult to deal with (mainly in Africa) but on the whole, global capitalism has reduced poverty to a level unknown in human history.
It’s all good news then? Bill Gates certainly thinks so- he tweeted this graphic at Davos;
Just in case you were starting to feel warm and comforted, I am afraid it takes but a second of examination of these stats for a whole raft of questions to emerge.
The first problem is the tool used to measure extreme, or absolute, poverty, which was set back in 1990 by the World Bank at a figure of $1 a day (now rising to $1.90 a day, adjusted for inflation.) There are all sorts of problems with this figure. What does it mean, when the costs of living vary so much from place to place? National poverty lines vary even within countries after all, let alone globally.
Secondly, this analysis ignores inequality and the brutalising, alienating nature of relative poverty- being measured by society as ‘wanting’ and ‘worth-less’. It has been strongly argued that inequality creates vast sickness in both those who have and those who have not. (Check out The Spirit Level book for a full analysis.)
Thirdly, even if you use the $1.90 figure, what about those just above the line?
Fourthly, the improvements described are rarely broken down into where in the world the improvements have been made. If you take China out of the figures, then measure again over the last four decades there seems to have been very little change- 60% of people remain in poverty.
The next problem is that the World Bank analysis is based on one solution to world poverty- economic growth. This solution gives it a major problem- how to keep the economy growing without killing the planet;
There is another question about how this all works for the global economic system…
Who benefits most from lifting people above $1.90? Could it be Global capitalism? Think about the debate in the UK right now about low paid, insecure jobs. Working people are undeniably poorer than they were, but levels of employment have gone UP.
This is starkly highlighted in the infographic that Bill Gates tweeted- it suggests that in 1820, global absolute poverty was at 94%. Think about that. What on earth does that mean? Jason Hickel, writing in the Guardian, said this in response;
What Roser’s numbers actually reveal is that the world went from a situation where most of humanity had no need of money at all to one where today most of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money. The graph casts this as a decline in poverty, but in reality what was going on was a process of dispossession that bulldozed people into the capitalist labour system, during the enclosure movements in Europe and the colonisation of the global south.
Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor. This way of life was violently destroyed by colonisers who forced people off the land and into European-owned mines, factories and plantations, where they were paid paltry wages for work they never wanted to do in the first place.
In other words, Roser’s graph illustrates a story of coerced proletarianisation. It is not at all clear that this represents an improvement in people’s lives, as in most cases we know that the new income people earned from wages didn’t come anywhere close to compensating for their loss of land and resources, which were of course gobbled up by colonisers. Gates’s favourite infographic takes the violence of colonisation and repackages it as a happy story of progress.
Finally, I think again of my own situation. I am poor by any measure of income within the UK- not at the dollar-a-day level, but in terms of relative poverty. If we use a financial measure, that is. The fact is, I have a house, I have land. I have skills and assets. I can grow food, keep chickens. I am largely unmolested by government or oppressive regimes. I have time to think and create and write.
