It's my birthday and I'll buy if I want to

So it's my flat mates birthday and I haven't bought her anything. I have decided not to buy anything in lent, so cannot go shopping. I did not buy anything before lent in readiness. To be honest my shopping was a bit random before lent. I went into Oxfam to buy a wardrobe, I saw one for £19.99 and then saw that for just another £6.01 I could buy a ....er..... sledge.

Which turned out to be rubbish for hanging clothes but quite good for chitting potatoes.

So I make her a card out of an old ladybird book with a funny caption.

Then I wrap up a book which I found being thrown out at work called 650 Favourite Recipes by the Womens Institue. My girlfriend is coming round for the evening before my flatmate's birthday so I declare this 'Kate's pre-birthday event'

We spend the evening reading out the recipes which seem to consist of long forgotten 1970's ingredients such as 'canned chopped pork'. We decide to have another evening where we make a whole meal from the book and the winner is the one who doesn't throw up.

We then watch a Sarah Millican DVD borrowed from a friend. We laugh a lot and Jo is glad she did not watch it with her children.

We then tell each other funny stories and all secretly decide we could be stand up comedians.

Reduce, re-use blah blah ...REDISCOVER!

Having spent a few days now not buying anything ( see yesterdays blog) I start realizing that rediscovering is rather fun. Of course picking something up off your bedroom floor instead of going shopping is completely carbon neutral especially if you rediscover your wind up radio. I start to wind it up and carry on tidying. After a few minutes it starts to go wrong. I reach over and find it needs rewinding! Already! I decide to hum instead and then stop when I realize its the nokia ringtone I am humming.

I find more socks and disappointed add them to the singles pile hoping I will find their mates amongst the debris.

I perk up when I find some knitting patterns. I sit and look through them. Then I find a half made tank top. On closer inspection I discover it is three quarter made. I remember photographing is for a blog post to show you could knit on the train.

Later in the week at my knitting group I proudly show everyone my finished tank top. A few days later I even bring it into a teaching session I am doing on mental health. The audience looks at me in a much less accepting way than when I told them I took anti-depressants.

Having worked up an appetite I go into the kitchen. What can I rediscover in here? I look in the cupboard and find some dried peas. What can be greener than that? (see what i did there?)

I find my glasses to read the tiny instructions. 3 hours later I can smell burning coming down the hallway and discover that pea soup not only takes ages but also requires you to stay in the kitchen with it. I scrape off the top layer and find it is quite palatable.

I remember it is my flatmates birthday and wonder what I can give her. I have already offered to spring clean the flat but decide its a bit like buying a partner sexy underwear in that you benefit yourself as much as the recipient.

Find out tomorrow how I solved this problem.

The Activity Vacuum

For the non religious amongst you this is now what Christians call lent. To the slightly religious it is the time between pancakes and chocolate eggs. To the gardeners it is the time between the Christmas baubles sales ending and the patio furniture coming out at homebase. For self-employed back specialists it is peak trading time as we throw off our winter lethargy and begin to tackle the outdoors.

Traditionally it is a time to hold back and take stock. Last year I didn't buy anything for 40 days and wrote about it in my blog. This year I have done the same but with an added extra. I won't take on any new projects.

So for the next three days I will be writing about what this experience has taught me.
The added extra of not taking on any new projects came about when my dad got ill and I thought it would make sense not to take anything on that I may have to later pull out of. My dad then rallied rather and began to feel better which left me with a kind of activity vacuum. One might think that an activity vacuum is a toy where you can pretend to hoover up. I first found this in my friends flat when I moved in and soon discovered a plastic sucker instead of a proper plug.

I digress. So this activity vacuum began to feel rather good and I found myself more relaxed and organized. So why not encompass it into lent?

This leaves me with a messy room and no shopping to do or projects to plan. Faced with my own chaos and nothing to distract me I begin to organize myself.

First socks. I go through my sock drawer and find 12 socks. All different. Where are the others? I don't remember picking out 12 unmatching socks and throwing them away so they must be in my room. I begin to tidy. 63 minutes later I have 14 matching and 10 unmatching socks.

I declare this a success. The tidying begins to feel good. I start to work on the rest of the room which is also a general storage area for the flat. I find 7 eco lightbulbs, a pair of unworn trousers that fit perfectly, a bra that belonged to a bigger friend that I have now grown into and a nokia phone. It starts to feel like shopping without paying and without being arrested. I decide to write my next blog about adding an extra word to the reduce, re-use, recyle, repair line - REDISCOVER!

Mary Portas Review - High Street Collaboration

On Monday I blogged about how competition is bad for us. Today, I'd like to draw your attention to one report that promotes communication and collaboration as an antidote to such competition: The Portas Review: An independent review into the future of our high streets.

The review, written by retail expert Mary Portas, provides in-depth analysis of the current state-of-play in Britain's high streets, and concludes with 28 recommendations to progress regeneration.

Her first and quite possibly most critical recommendation, is to 'put in place a "Town Team": a visionary, strategic and strong operational management team for high streets'. I don't want to suggest by this that the other recommendations are irrelevant or unimportant, but it does seem to me that the biggest reason why small high street retailers fail to compete with large national chains is because of a lack of coordination in providing what customers want. Where a large corporation will coordinate between its various departments to ensure that the whole supply chain is efficient and effective in providing convenience for customers, a group of high street shops may actually hinder the effective provision of services to customers by having too many competitors in a small area, or having no "destination" services which will bring customers into the area.

Such coordination can only occur effectively when there is a team of collaborative stakeholders who are willing to invest in the future of their high street for the benefit of the community and for the profitability of local business.

In my survey of local economic concerns (which is still open for more input), there was considerable concern for the profitability of local business where they have to compete with large corporations (see figure above).  The idea of the Portas "Town Team" is that high streets could claim more power by collaborating with each other, challenging large corporations through innovation and better coordination between stakeholders, so that together, they can provide better services to customers, and ones which are more rooted within community than out-of-town superstores could ever be.

The local government minister, Grant Shapps, and Mary Portas have even launched an invitation to local communities to bid to become a "Portas Pilot", one of the first twelve "Town Teams", which attracts an £100,000 grant and the support of Mary Portas' retail consultancy team. Unfortunately the deadline is getting close (30th March), and it might be difficult to get a bid in on time if none has been started already, but if you know anyone with the resources to do so, it would be a ground-breaking boost to a local economy and a great project (which I would love to be involved in!).

It is clear that really successful local economies require collaboration, not competition, but also that the benefits aren't just economic, but also come in the form of social benefits in having a more cohesive community, and environmental benefits, because of reduced oil-hungry transportation.

Images: vision of a regenerated high street from the Portas review; responses to my Norwich local economics survey.

Public sector cuts: an amplifier for economic problems?

On Thursday, I got quite angry with the BBC Look East presenter who said that everybody agrees that cuts are necessary in the public sector (in this instance the police force), but that the only question was how they were going to go about that. Apart from there being a huge campaign against public sector cuts, which proves the presenter wrong, cuts to police services would actually reduce the amount of public money entering the local economy (through the salaries of police employees) and instead would be funnelled to... oh, yes, the banks, because they've got to pay back that deficit.

I'm not saying that cuts are not necessary altogether. I agree we need to reduce the deficit, but if you're looking at an entire economy, you won't solve the crisis by cutting public spending internally, unless there is somewhere to take up the slack in the private sector. With unemployment at a 17-year high, there is obviously not the capacity there to take up the slack. The crisis is just being made worse, whereas there are some measures that would improve the economy, help to cut government spending indirectly, and improve tax revenues without actually having to increase tax rates.

Essentially, this is done by plugging the leaks in our economy. If you think of an economy (e.g. the Norwich local economy) as a bucket of water (water representing money), and that there are leaks in the economy where money passes out of the local economy to financial centres or abroad, for example, it is clear that the water will diminish, unless either of those leaks are plugged, or more money is injected. With cuts to public sector spending, the input into our economy becomes less, whilst the leaks are unchanged, and the depression in the local economy deepens.

Plugging the leaks in government infrastructure spending

I am always rather upset when the government announces a huge major infrastructure project that is being awarded to a foreign company. I don't care how much more it costs by using a British contractor because, in the end, if that money returns into the British economy, it costs nothing to the British economy, because the total adds up to zero. But when contracts are awarded abroad, that is an instant loss to Britain's economy of the full amount being paid abroad. It seems that this issue, which is totally ignored by the government committees awarding these contracts, is central to keeping a stable economy.

Examples of contracts which have gone to foreign companies which could have quite easily gone to British firms are the contract for the Census last year, which went to American defence corporation Lockheed Martin, and high speed trains which were awarded to a Japanese company, rather than Bombardier, which has factories in the UK.

If these contracts had been awarded to companies who operate in the UK, the government would have benefited from reduced social welfare payments through lost jobs; increased income tax revenues from workers employed in the UK; an improved local economy in the areas where the companies are operating, helping to fund local projects, rather than requiring grants from government; and increased corporation tax revenues (provided that the companies don't avoid tax).

Plugging the leaks in local expenditure

The aspect of plugging the leaks that I think we can get most excited about in Transition are those that really include local communities. Anything where ownership is local and where money circulates amongst those within a community, rather than out to national or international markets, will benefit the economy and therefore the strain on government spending.

If the government tried to make local business more competitive to local markets, rather than subsidising international corporations and supporting the companies with the biggest spending power, there would be a lot more money being spread amongst the actual population, again leading to less money required for social welfare and more money in tax revenues from companies and individuals doing beneficial work.

In our own spending

It isn't just in public spending that this makes a difference, but in any spending that occurs in the local economy, so I urge you, next time you're forking out some money, to consider how much of that money stays in the local area, and how much goes out to national or international interests, never to return. This isn't just about choosing a locally-owned shop over a national chain, but where were the products they sell made? And what about your rent or bills? Does your landlord spend the money that they get from your rent in the local economy, or do they spend most of it on interest payments to national banks?

This article is inspired by, and uses references to the nef campaign Plugging the Leaks. If you want to become more active in promoting leak-plugging in Norwich, I'd love to hear from you! Contact me at simeon@simeonjackson.co.uk, or fill in my survey and mention this article in your comments.

Images: "Austerity Isn't Working" from UK Uncut campaign website; Plugging the Leaks bucket from the publication by nef.

Risk, or Why competition is bad for us

On Wednesday of last week I had my good friend James over for the last time before he moves away from Norwich. Having noticed it in the loft a few days before, I proposed we played Risk, the classic "World Strategy" board game, where you have to conquer the world by battling and out-witting your opponent. It was a tense game... well, it was for the first two or three rounds, but after a few lucky dice rolls from James, it became quite obvious that I would never be able to claw back enough territories to get back into the game.

And this got me asking myself "is Risk unrealistic in giving such an unfair advantage to the person who is already winning?" and when I thought about it, the answer is no. It happens all around us. Wherever there is competition - that is to say, a truly competitive environment - anyone who is already ahead has advantage over people who are lagging behind. A trailing runner always has to run not just as fast as but faster than their competition even just to tie with them.

So it is with races, so it is with Risk, and so it is with business. The latter is the one that most concerns me, because favouring business that is already ahead favours the large, long-established businesses of yesterday, rather than new, socially and environmentally responsible businesses of today. To be financially viable and provide a competitive return to its investors, a new business would have to be a lot more economically efficient than its competitors.

Labour Efficiency

Since the existing company already (probably) has the advantage of the economy of scale and materials, the new company will probably need to make itself efficient through labour efficiency - i.e. fewer or lower-paid workers for the same economic output. If they're a social enterprise, perhaps they might even use volunteer labour where the large business has to pay its staff, in order to be able to compete. My point is that by being new, and being required to be that much more efficient than its competitors to be able to compete in the marketplace, jobs will be lost, margins will be squeezed and the company will have to choose between its ethics or its bottom-line. If it is successful, then its competitors will have to become more competitive too, and job losses will take place there instead (or as well!).

You may be asking "what's wrong with that? Efficiency is good, isn't it?". Well, material efficiency is good (although there is a problem associated with material efficiency which I'll get onto in a minute). However, labour efficiency is not good, because it is essentially what puts people out of work. OK, it's good for the particular company that is racing ahead and making profits, and that company's investors, but on average over society as a whole, labour efficiency means putting people out of work, paying them benefits out of taxes, which in turn puts more pressure on small businesses to maximise their labour efficiency because the small businesses are inevitably less able to avoid taxes through the use of tax havens and other tax-dodging schemes.

Material Efficiency

As I mentioned above, material efficiency is a good thing. Doing the same thing with fewer physical resources is always good news for the environment: less energy wasted in the extraction of materials, less energy wasted in processing and less energy wasted in transportation. However, going back to the competition model, if a socially responsible company uses less material to make a product, the competitive industrialist sees this as an opportunity to take up the resources saved and put them to another profit-making venture. Thus, material efficiency only serves to free up physical resources for those who are competitive, rather than serve any societal or environmental good.

This dynamic mechanism both relies on and feeds consumerism to take up the slack caused by more efficient production, and is the reason why competitive businesses feel such need to advertise to ensure we keep on spending and consuming, to make up for any decreases in economic throughput caused by material efficiency.

When does this all stop?

Imagine if, like in Risk, the entire point of the game of political life was to conquer the world. A scary thought, I know, but I think the result would turn out much like is does in Risk. There would be one nation, that by directing all its resources to the conquering of other nations would end up taking over the world. Thankfully, this hasn't happened, with the recognition at the end of the cold war that nations do much better for both themselves and others if they cooperate with other nations rather than consider them their enemies.

I'm not saying that there is no place for competitive systems in society - there are times when a free market is the only way of reaching an equilibrium of resource distribution within a particular closed system, but at the same time, shouldn't society recognise the flaw in competitive systems as a means of distributing resources fairly, and instead look at ways in which benefit is felt by all, whether or not they have a competitive advantage?

Image: Risk, the boardgame, photo by the author

The Tale of a Radical Greenhouse

Last week Transition initiative, GrowHeathrow celebrated their second birthday in the village of Sipson. Here is a video about how they converted a derelict site into a community garden and meeting place, by Dean Puckett, director of this year's key documentary, The Crisis of Civilisation (wait ten seconds for video to appear!)

Grow Heathrow - "Everything's Changing" from thecrisisofcivilization on Vimeo.

On March 1st 2010 I had the pleasure of filming Transition Heathrow members swoop on an abandoned market garden site in Sipson; one of the villages to be completely tarmacced to make way for a third runway at Heathrow.

2 years later I returned to the site which has been transformed from a derelict mess into a beacon of community strength and a great example of how to live sustainably on this planet.

Keep Grow Heathrow Alive!!

Grow Heathrow is under threat of eviction and will be appearing at Central London County Court on 18th & 19th June 2012 transitionheathrow.com

Dean Puckett deaddeanfilms.org