Personal Security

Next year will see the start of two major legacies of New Labour social policy: NEST and compulsion. Taken together, they are intended to ensure that all employees have some form of pension provision over and above the increasingly paltry provisions of the state pension and associated means-tested benefits. The latter is simply the concept that all employers must enrol all employees in a pension scheme. It is then up to the employees to opt out of that scheme, which they are less likely to do. NEST is the vehicle created to be the scheme for employers who do not already have pension scheme provision: an ultra low cost Defined Contribution (DC) scheme, designed to be simple and cheap.
Both these things are laudable in their intention. In the scramble to condemn the baby-boomers for bankrupting the state and all the good private sector pension schemes, we tend to forget that a good number of them will spend their retirements in poverty, reliant on the means-tested state benefits that are the pensioner equivalent of the dole. If the wealthiest generation in history has these problems, imagine what it will be like for the rest of us. So the idea of pushing us all towards making our own pension provision, and making it cheaper and easier to do so is a good one. Such savings would be inherently ours, whilst still subject to the rules governing all pensions: chiefly that they cannot be drawn until age 55. Beyond that, they would operate in much the same way as any other DC pension or investment. This, of course, is where the problems start.
As the startling hubris of pension scheme actuaries - convinced that market returns of 9% a year would be an everlasting constant - led to the closure of ever more Final Salary pension schemes, the only significant alternative has been the DC pension scheme, which is effectively just an investment vehicle that has restrictions on when and how you can access the invested money. How and why this should have become the preferred form of pension provision is perhaps a discussion for another day, but it is worth noting that whilst invested, most of the money is held by an insurance company, and in order to avoid punitive tax charges, 75% of this money has to be paid to an insurance company at retirement. I guess that's just a coincidence.
Whatever the reasons for its popularity, the DC scheme is now the norm. Chances are, if you have any sort of pension provision, you're in a DC scheme. I wonder how often you check the performance of your chosen investments. I work in the financial services sector and I don't do it more than about once a year. I mean, that's not really a problem: I'm in this for the long run, so the last thing I want to do is start to panic about short term fluctuations in equities, bonds or even the price of gold. In the long term the trend is always upwards. Except of course that it isn't: at several points in the last twenty years index linked investments would have made a loss when adjusted for inflation if drawn at the 'wrong' time. Various schemes have various vehicles to avoid 'the wrong time' being when you happen to need or want retire, such as 'lifestyling' or offering funds run by a fund manager who is supposed to be able to get better than index linked returns on your investments, although such things invariably incur an additional annual charge that eats away at that extra interest. So, even though massive returns on investments are not forthcoming, the models used to predict how much money is needed to fund a comfortable retirement still assume year on year investment growth of 7% against a rate of inflation of 2.5%. Anyone who's paid even  scant attention to inflation over the last few years will know that it has only been at or below 2.5% for 7 of the last 20 years (based on September RPI values). This means that the statutory model for calculating potential retirement provision is about as realistic as the actuarial projections that allowed companies to take 'contribution holidays' from their final salary pension schemes back in the 80s and 90s, ensuring the death of those shemes. However, the government is reluctant to change the assumptions used in the model to more pessimistic (or realistic) ones for fear that it will engender a sense of futility in savers and cause people to give up on pension saving altogether rather than scare them into saving more. Of course in the case of NEST, the impetus to invest more is not there, as it is not going to be possible to do so. Why this should be so is unclear, as it would seem to remove another option to plan seriously for retirement. It seems that the hope is that once in one scheme, people will see the benefits of investing in their future and start another pension scheme with an insurer. No really.

Hmm, not bad...

Hmm, not so good...

Better than stuffing it under your mattress.

Sometimes better than stuffing it under your mattress.

NEST does not have managed funds because it is designed to cost the minimum for the members. The notion behind this is commendable in that no one should be compelled to pay for the profits of the fund managers, especially when there is no guarantee of a return. However, what it also means is that we all have to effectively become our own fund managers, suddenly realising in our lunchbreaks that the time to sell Pacific equities is now and giving NEST a call to move the lot to European bonds. This sounds very glamorous, but the reality is mundane, and if it is a scheme for people who weren't interested in pension provision in the first place, what is the likelihood that they will suddenly find the interest to get actively involved in making that pension better? I suppose it is possible that some people will, on finding their money is inaccessible take an interest in playing the markets: it's just possible that people will find out that it really doesn't take much to be a Master of the Universe.
Of course what is more likely is that people will be encouraged to invest in 'safer' funds: these traditionally being things like government bonds. Obviously in the case of many governments, such investments have recently become considerably more risky, although that does also mean the long term yields are up. This would be good for the people who have invested in them, but not so good for the tax payers saddled with the extra cost of paying off their country's debts.
So let's think about this a bit more in terms of NEST. This means that the government has set up a pension scheme in which you could invest in the government's debt via an insurance company. Why via an insurance company? Why doesn't NEST buy bonds direct? We have National Savings, why don't we just run NEST in a similar manner? Oh, I forgot,  someone has to make a profit out of your welfare: god forbid you invest in your general wellbeing without paying some superannuated waster for the privilege. Let us not forget, in the business of your future wellbeing just who is lobbying on your behalf. The people whose interest is the status quo that they generated must surely be interested in alternatives that might further benefit you and your government at the expense of their profit, mustn't they? What else could they possibly want?

Perspective

In this country it is not uncommon for people to judge a restaurant run by members of an ethnic minority by the number of people perceived to be from the same ethnic minority who are eating there. "That Chinese restaurant must be good," we say, "it's full of Chinese people."
Of course such a crass distinction has two fundamental problems. The first of these is our ability to accurately define someone's ethnic origin on sight, something that is actually very hard. I once took a friend to a Thai restaurant in Brighton shortly after he had spent a number of years living in Thailand. He greeted the waitress and asked how she was in what I assumed to be pretty good Thai, but the waitress just looked at him baffled for a moment, before explaining that she was Japanese and didn't speak a word of Thai.
The second problem is the idea that all the people of a certain race are expert in all food associated with that race. This is patently nonsense: firstly it assumes a uniformity of cuisine across vast diaspora, and secondly it assumes that all the people of those diaspora to be gourmandes. In fact it assumes all people of another ethnic background to have some sort or innate 'food knowledge', which is dangerously close to the patronising notions of the 'authenticity' of ethnic minorities, itself an ugly hangover from the Enlightenment.
So these prejudices exist, they pervade our attitudes and society without us even knowing it, but do they have negative effect simply because they have negative associations, or am I just making an excessively PC point about something that is simply a result of ethnic diversity and lazy stereotyping? Because any 'other' is ultimately unknowable, are we to be forgiven for assigning group attributes to those less familiar (especially when those attributes themselves are not negative)? I really don't know.
Perhaps it is more about approach: if I don't intend to apply lazy stereotypes based on race, am I to be forgiven when I occasionally do due to tiredness or thoughtlessness? Where do we draw the line? Such cutting of slack very quickly leads to 'casual' racism, usually when people think any potentially injured party cannot hear. Outwardly tolerant people can  suddenly reveal hidden intolerance through racist jokes when in private and 'amongst friends' (i.e. people apparently of the same racial background). The argument in defence of such behaviour is that it's harmless fun and no one is hurt, but it cannot be harmless, no repressed opinion can. The very fact that it only occurs in private makes it potentially even more problematic than overt racism, as the sense is that it is only society that is preventing the covert racist from revealing their true feelings. In such cases, the 'save me from what I want' aspect is about avoiding conflict: I am guilty of letting these comments slip in the past in favour of a 'quiet' life, in order not to upset the 'flow' of a social event. My intention is to challenge such comments in future, whatever the situation or possible outcome.
This brings me back to my original observation though: if someone says we should go into a restaurant because it's full of people from the associated diaspora, do I point out the potential negative associations in such a comment? Maybe I will. Maybe just to revisit this whole argument and see if I get any further.

Progress

As I sat there fuming about the fact that I'd missed my train by seconds this morning, I gradually noticed the effect that all the Shard-associated building work is having on London Bridge station. The whole forecourt has been covered in glass and is flooded with natural light. Soon they will surely take out the old dirty corrugated gack roof over the platforms and let the light flood in from all angles there as well, making it a lighter, more airy place to be.
I'm not going to get into the issues around the Shard development as a whole, or even the logic of putting the main timetable right above the barriers (which works sooo well in other London stations), I just wanted to take a moment to bid an oddly fond farewell to dingy, grimy heads-down-and-get-out London Bridge station.

Preconceptions

It truly sucks being young at the moment. The jobs market is buggered and if you've just finished university, you're probably saddled with a debt burden equivalent in size to the GDP of a small island nation. Granted, not all of that money went on books (enjoying yourself whilst you're young, how dare you!) but still it is the price you have paid for a good education. Fortunately, as a graduate you are now eminently employable by a blue chip company who will put you on a fast-track graduate development program and pay you the sort of decent starting wage that'll shift your debt in no time. At least that's how it was before the government and the banks wrecked the economy and your chance of a decent job.
Except of course that it wasn't. I left university a number of years before this recession, and no one I was at university with walked straight into the job of their dreams. Every last one of my friends did any job that just paid the rent for a year or two before they even got anywhere near a sniff of a career. Granted, that may have something to do with my friends, but I don't think it did any of us any harm. I remember panicking a few times thinking that was it, I'd blown my chances of a career straight out of university so I was on the scrapheap for life. This was not the case, after a few years and a short period on the dole, I stumbled upon a career that I had not necessarily been looking for, but which I now enjoy more than most people can imagine.
It is really hard to imagine the future like this when you are fresh out of university and you want everything now. I'm afraid the truth is that you were never going to get it straight away.
It seems that the legacy of the introduction of tuition fees and turning degrees into commodities has worked very well, in that we now see a degree as an investment for which the dividend is some kind of career equivalent of the x factor's instant success. It isn't, and never was, in many cases it is an expensive way to avoid the harsh reality of the world for a few years whilst proving that you have the ability to study a subject (any subject really) in some depth. It is about learning to think at a certain level. That won't get you a job straight away, but it will make a massive difference once you've got one. That doesn't smack of instant success does it? That's because there is no such thing, and there never was.
So if you've recently finished your degree, I'm really sorry there aren't any jobs, but there weren't any decent ones anyway, not for you. I guess you can try and take some positives from the situation: all that extra time you would have been spending on your dream job, you can devote to something else, like radical politics.

Public Argument

Only new Labour could have come up with a system whereby everybody is obliged to pay for the profits of certain companies, or at least only after Thatcher had given them the idea. Certainly the current bunch of feckless toffs don't appear to have the gumption to dream up anything so radical. Maybe I am being hoodwinked, or maybe the Lib Dems deserve more credit as a moderating influence than I give them. Who knows. This doesn't change the fact that one of the legacies of the last Labour government will be the PPP.
I'd like to say that I don't have an issue with the private sector providing public services and in principle I don't. However, I do have an objection to being compelled to pay for the profits of private individuals. Are these two things entirely incompatible? Not entirely in a fully functioning modern democracy.
I understand the need to make the service sector a useful income generator in an economy that cannot rely on manufacturing. I also understand that private sector structures and practices have added efficiencies to a sector that was once riddled with institutionalised inefficiency. However, that does not mean that the private sector is a panacea for all the ills of public services. In many cases the cartels of unions that once ran these services have simply been replaced by cartels of companies with an eye on the best opportunities for profit. Many of these services are run by the same small number of large companies, who have no interest in efficiency beyond those that will save them money in the short term, which are usually those around saving staff costs. Little of this happens though investment in new technology. In the case of some sectors - most notably rail, the companies involved complain that the length of the contracts do not allow them a guarantee that they will make a return on their investments. HELLO? THIS IS CAPITALISM: IF YOU DON'T DELIVER THE GOODS YOU DON'T MAKE THE PROFIT. THAT'S THE GAMBLE. I find myself saying this a lot, but did I miss the point? The private sector can't push for open markets only to complain that open markets don't guarantee a profit. It doesn't work like that, except that largely, it appears it does. The last bunch of cowboys 'running' the country - and therefore by extension the current shower - are only too happy to make contracts with private companies almost entirely on the company's terms. This is not competition: it is simply jobs for a different set of boys than the ones available when the unions had a stranglehold on the public sector.
I had the dubious pleasure of being involved in a re-tendering exercise for quite a large public sector contract as an independent consultant a few years ago. Whilst we weren't reviewing every aspect of the service delivery of the incumbent provider, we were reviewing the quality of the data they held, which was fundamental to the service they were providing. Along with the staff and buildings, the data was one of the largest assets they had inherited with the contract, and easily the one in need of the most modernisation. From what I saw (and I spent months looking at this data) they had done little over the seven years of their contract but carry on the arcane practices of the department when it had been public sector, except with the data was stored on a different system. Personally I struggled to see how the incumbent contractor added any value at all, whilst they must have made a reasonable profit (the operation was on too big a scale to be a loss-leader). What truly astonished me was the fact that there appeared to be no differentiation between the data they had inherited from the public sector and that which they had generated themselves: they treated it all as equally unreliable. This is surely an indicator that they were adding little additional value.
Some months after my involvement ended, I heard that the incumbent had retained the contract dispite three other companies bidding for it. Now as I was not involved in the decision-making proces, I cannot say what led to this outcome, but if it was based entirely on what was offered, what does that say about other bidders? In their defence, even whilst I was still involved, the incumbent provider had wheeled out the big guns and started to make all sorts of lavish promises, and maybe their public sector paymasters have put all sorts of delivery conditions into the new contract. I don't know. At the time, for understandable reasons of commercial confidentiality, the whole process was entirely confidential. However, now I would expect it should be a matter of public record, as the public are paying for it. I suspect though that what actually swung it was scaremongering by the incumbent about what others might to with data in such a poor state, that now they were familiar with it, they would be best placed to deal with it (and presumably do all the tidying of it that they hadn't bothered to do so far). If this is the case (and I admit I am simply speculating now) then the contract was awarded due to fear that any new contractor would do an even worse job than the incumbent or the data was in too poor a state to go through another migration. The least worst option is not necessarily what you would associate with raising standards, but it's got to be better than the whole thing being run by the state. Well, only if by the same logic the service provided by the civil service would be worse than the least worst option.
This leads me to the next thing I don't understand about these contracts: why are there no bids from the public sector? Again I can hear the chorus of protest from the private sector that this would be unfair competition because the public sector doesn't need to make a profit. Well, I'd be willing to change that: let's make it so that if they want to get involved in these contracts, the public sector does have to make a profit. The contract I reviewed was all based in one city and was a big employer in that city. What stopped the local authority putting in a bid to run the contract? They could have used it to generate a bit more money to subsidise a cut in council tax, or more likely to pay for other cash-strapped services, or even (just imagine!) to invest in service improvements on that contract. What stopped them as far as I can tell is the idea that it is somehow immoral for the state to make money out of the business of running the state, but absolutely fine for private companies to make as much money as they like. Furthermore this appears to be a moral that we apply only to our own country: the sovereign wealth that other countries have amassed through making money in commercial circumstances appears totally acceptable, indeed it is currently our preferred source of debt relief now the markets are running away from bonds.
If we are to become a proper service economy, why don't we do it properly: if the civil service really is continuing its tradition of recruiting the brightest and best, why aren't we outsourcing their bureaucratic talents to Brussels? We could have a civil service version of BBC Worldwide, which makes a profit for its shareholders, or taxpayers as they're more commonly known.
I'm not saying private companies shouldn't be allowed to bid for public sector contracts, I'm just saying maybe public departments should as well. As a taxpayer paying for the profits of these companies, I feel the company I am a shareholder in should have an equal chance to make some of that profit: I am talking about UK plc.

Polish

On my way home last night I was graced with a prime example of one of my pet hates. Not only do these shoes have enough spare shoe in the pointless pointy bit to make a spare pair of silly pointy shoes for a baby, but they are also entirely unpolished. They are so unpolished that the pointless points look grey; not a good grey either, it is the grey of soggy cardboard.
The young man covering his feet with these sorry looking joke shoes is not alone either, the City of London is awash with men in Sharp suits and shitty looking shoes. Do they gather round the water cooler and compare scuffs?
CityBoy1: "Check it out, my shoes are so unpolished that even a light fog soaks through to my socks!"
CityBoy2: "Yeah, well the pointy bits of my shoes are so waterlogged they drag along the ground when I walk, which has the added bonus of scuffing them even more."
CityBoy3: "Wow, your feet look like Dopey's from Snow White!"
CityBoy2: "I know, it's awesome: way cooler than Dick Whittington!"
...and so on.

Protection

I noticed in the Economist's coverage of the latest European agreement over the sovereign debt crisis that the countries agreeing the terms would prefer the 50% write down of Greek debt by the private sector to be voluntary, as any actual default might trigger payments from Credit Default Swaps, and these are 'untested'. Just so we're all clear here, Credit Default Swaps are insurance against a company or country not paying back the money it has borrowed in the form of a bond. Let's just check that again: this is insurance against a country defaulting and the politicians don't want countries to default because it might mean the insurers would have to pay out on the policies. Am I the only person who struggles with this concept? Isn't this a bit like someone telling me I can't have a crash in my car in case my insurance company has to pay for it? Surely the the clue is in the word 'insurance', perhaps that is why that word is not included in 'Credit Default Swap'.
But seriously, do we need to go back to basics? Capitalism 101: a company will exchange goods and services with a customer in return for payment. Capitalism 101b: if those goods or services are shit the customer will stop paying for them. For many years now the insurance industry has been charging healthy sums of money to insure against the possibility of countries defaulting, indeed the rising price of this insurance was one of the causes of the sovereign debt crisis in the first place. However, now there is the threat that they might have to pay back some of the money that they have been accumulating rather than keep all of it as profit, they seem a little unsure of the whole process. Let's be clear, I'm not saying 'the evil insurers should pay their debt to society', I am simply saying maybe its time they honoured some of the contracts they've made with their customers.
So whilst we're all busy bashing banks, maybe we should be asking ourselves who is really profiting from this crisis and why our leaders are happy to let them quietly get on with it.

Pied Piper

It turns out that it is harder to photograph other people's feet than I thought. However I will persist because this is a point* that requires illustration. Think yourself into the mind of the wearer of these shoes for a moment. Presumably you are looking down at your feet and thinking 'damn, my feet look so good dressed up as the Pied Piper of Hamelin; these shoes really add a much needed medieval touch to my otherwise entirely 21st century outfit.' Why would you be thinking anything else? This presumably is the thought of countless men up and down the country who, apparently voluntarily, choose to wear pantomime footware.
Consider this the start of the backlash.

*geddit?

Priorities

There is a lady on my tube who has an iPad and is using it to read the Metro. It's a free paper, there's one behind her on the seat. Am I missing something? Is this like when people wait for a rush-hour tube at Bank, squeeze themselves on it and then get off at Liverpool Street? It's five minutes walk away, you could have actually saved yourself time as well as the unpleasant sensation of being crammed into a train at rush-hour!
To me this typifies our relationship with technology: we will use it at every opportunity, regardless of whether it is to our benefit.
The recent demise of Steve Jobs led to a plethora of articles detailing how he changed the way we use technology, and I would tend to agree, although I am not sure he was by any means alone in this; he was merely one of the more visible and successful practitioners. I am talking of course of technology for which a need is invented rather than technology that is invented to fulfill a pre-existing need. The personal computer was perhaps not the first such technology, but the tablet computer is definitely the latest. Many will argue that the tablet computer will come to fill many roles just as the personal computer has done in the last ten years, and that is undoubtedly true. This can be said about much Jobs-related technology: I wouldn't have time to write this blog if I didn't do it on my smartphone. However, if we look at the services the computer began to provide, they were mainly those that were already provided by other technologies: to become useful, the personal computer had to borrow uses from elsewhere. Is that necessarily a bad thing? If the computer replaces several other devices, surely that is a rationalisation of technology, which is an efficiency and therefore good. However, if to reach the point at which the computer is actually useful in this way, millions, possibly billions of useless computers had to be made and thrown away, how efficient actually is the final product? I understand the need for continual improvement, but is there a difference between developing a product and doggedly plugging away at it until it becomes useful?
The printing press did not do anything new, it just did it in a different way, but the use for it was discovered at the same time as the thing itself, not 20 years later.
Even the car had a clear purpose from its inception, it was just that it took 20 years of improvement to stop it being woefully inefficient and lethal (obviously neither issue has ever been fully resolved). It is the bloody-mindedness of the pioneers of motoring that has become almost a blueprint for the inventors and developers of all subsequent technologies, indeed it is seen as an essential quality of such people. This is fine when it applies to one or two lone practitioners, but when it becomes the attitude of a whole industry the fallout in terms of waste products can be huge. Indeed the legacy of these bloody-minded pioneers is a bloated, blinkered and uni-directional industry that has shunned radical innovation in favour of idiosyncratic aesthetics and masculine fashion. Granted, much of the 'development' in the car industry in the last 30 years has clearly been driven by the single interest of the oil companies, but even without this powerful lobby it is likely that the internal combustion engine would still be at the heart of most cars.
All industry is subject to outside interest and the desire of shareholders to make money - that is the nature of capitalism - but we have arrived at age where the commercial interests of a company are sold to consumers as desirable regardless of the usefulness of the products that are inherent in this transaction. As consumers, we buy into the idea of a product or its lifestyle associations, or even the lifestyle associated with the company that produced it, and it appears that we are increasingly willing to buy the image wholesale. How else can we explain Apple retaining its counter-cultural identity even after becoming the highest valued company listed on Wall Street? So are we as consumers responsible for the products that we end up with, or are we being tricked by a future lifestyle myth? Can the Man exploit the fact that our desires and hopes and dreams are still hopelessly Modern? Is this possibly a failing attributable to the linear nature of our lives? Are we naturally predisposed towards a concept of development as a process of relentless accumulation arrested only by death?
Maybe we are unable to resist the pull of desirable future filled with objects we don't yet have a use for. Maybe we are destined to spend our time finding out whether our iPads are better at opening tins than tin openers.
Of course, my argument can be seen as a little facetious, in that the use of tablet devices to read newspapers and books will reduce the environmental impact of the publication of these tomes in hard copy. But this can only be the case if enough books or newspapers are read to offset the environmental impact of producing the device in the first place before a newer, faster, more desirable version is sold to us and we chuck it on the fadget* graveyard.
It is clear that there is no simple answer to the wastefulness of our production and consumption of technology. Obviously it will help if obsolescence is not built into our technology as standard - and that will require many manufacturers to rethink their business models. However only we as consumers have the power to make them think about these things much more seriously, and that requires us to see beyond the rather childish notion that fagets somehow make us cool. Seriously, I'm over 25, nothing is ever going to make me cool. Indeed, why should it?

* fadget - a faddish gadget - see most modern technology.

Privileges

It is a common complaint that 'being green' is a privilege that only the wealthy can afford, but I want to understand the basis of this claim. It is entirely possible that the environmental movement has historically been driven by people from a relatively privileged background, but then the same can be said about many movements, largely due to the amount of free time that relative financial security affords such people to start thinking about such things. It is perhaps no surprise that progress of the labour movement accelerated as workers gained access to more free time. But in the 21st century we all have access to a reasonable amount of free time, so cannot claim time poverty. Even most of those who do claim time poverty have opted to do the additional work that deprives them of their free time. I don't doubt for a second that there are people in this country who can only keep their heads above water by working every waking hour, but these people are at the extreme end of the spectrum and are precisely the people the welfare state should be helping. The rest of us have free time, so it cannot be that which is the privilege required to care about the long term future of our planet.
In terms of monetary poverty, again I fail to see the argument. With the notable exception of those in extreme poverty, who I have already mentioned, we are all capable of affording to take the options that would result in lesser environmental damage. The fact that these options may in many cases deprive us of some luxuries is, I suspect, the greater reason for the reluctance. Indeed, why should we give up the luxuries for which we have worked so hard? Surely we are entitled to our foreign holidays, our abundant cheap clothes and food, and the freedom to travel wherever we want by car. Certainly the language used when discussing these things is the language of entitlement, but entitlement on what basis? Are we entitled to something just because someone else has it and it exists? Surely there is no other basis for our sense of entitlement than natural human greed.
I am beginning to sound like a member of the hair shirt brigade. I'm not. I believe life should be enjoyed, I just think that maybe we need to consider what actually gives us enjoyment and what its real cost is. That said, I've no idea how we quantify that cost. This to me seems to one of the biggest problems of the 'green' movement: the fact that it is a nebulous catch all for so many things means that the creation any kind quantifiable moral scale with reference to it is impossible. In the resulting maelstrom of righteousness, all sorts of ideas, concepts and lifestyles are given credence; some of them totally crackpot, some of questionable environmental benefit and some of them probably essential to the future of our planet. Unfortunately they get lumped together in random batches by people whose egos allow them to know what's best for you. So we end up with people telling us all our food should be organic and biodynamic, when one is a laudable aim and the other is a quirky approach to farming with no proven benefits of any sort. However, there are many who would argue that organically farmed food cannot be a solution, as it cannot provide sufficient quantities of food for the world's population. How this fact is worked out I don't know - half of my brain thinks it's a simple calculation, the other half thinks the data required for such a calculation must be considerable and ultimately unknowable - but assuming its veracity, does that mean we should give up on organic food production as an ideal? Politics used to be about taking ideals and making them pragmatic, but since the political class did away with ideals in favour of focus groups, all ideas must apparently be pragmatic before they can be considered at all. This disallowal of pure ideology is in many senses a diminishing of the horizons of ambition.
The question in terms of organic farming has to be whether its practice by those who can is detrimental to those who can't. Certainly, many would say that a less 'efficient' method of farming wastes the land available as it could have yielded greater amounts of food through more intensive farming methods. However, this is an extremely short-termist viewpoint if the intensive farming methods are unsustainable.
The question of privilege comes into the debate here because organic food is more expensive than 'conventionally' grown food. This is because it is more labour intensive, not because it's part of some middle class conspiracy. Food should at least be as expensive as the cost of its production, and it is only the artificial price manipulation of the supermarkets that has given us the idea that we are entitled to exceptionally cheap food. Buying food at its actual (i.e. more expensive) price would require us to be more frugal and therefore more thoughtful about how we use our food. But there is no impetus for this: as long as cheap food is available, people will continue to waste it. The real problem is that even if cheap food isn't available, those who can afford to will still waste it. Being wasteful is the way people have always demonstrated their wealth, even when they have none; overcoming the impulse for waste would be one of the hardest undertakings for anyone, especially as it can easily turn you into a bore. However, if we even have a vaguely altruistic inclination we need to consider it.
So what am I saying about privilege and the environment? I think all I can say is that wealth allows people to appear more environmentally friendly without actually being so, and it is this conspicuous greensumption that gives the impression that being green is a luxury of the wealthy. This becomes the perfect excuse for those who do not wish to change any aspect of their lifestyles: that they cannot afford it. In short, the lazy plead poverty.
However, possibly more reprehensible are those who create this impression: the privileged. Not only do they generate the impression that the environmental movement is a club exclusive to them, but they are simply hiding their wastefulness behind a plethora of 'green' fashions.
Finally I guess I have to ask 'who am I to judge?' Really I am in no position, like many people I often plead poverty when expense would preclude the 'green' option (such as taking the train to Europe) and convince myself that I am not part of the problem the rest of the time using my few 'green' actions as self-justification. Must try harder.

Post

At the Postmodernism exhibition at the V&A, Jenny Holzer's 1985 piece in which the words 'protect me from what I want' were displayed on advertising hoardings is seen as an attempt to make us question how we feel about the voice of authority in advertising. This work illustrates what is for me one of the enduring strengths of Postmodernism, as it is only through a postmodern critical framework that we begin to question the linear inevitability of capitalism that is the backbone Modern thought and confidence. Of course much has already changed since Holzer's piece was created: most notably we are much more aware of the consequences of our consumption. This knowledge doesn't stop us from consuming at an accelerated rate even though reason would dictate that it should. We are irrational consumers and we are encouraged to be.
I recently heard a Labour politician complaining that the high cost of fuel was endangering business and therefore jobs in his constituency. This seems like a perfectly reasonable point until one asks what he wanted to achieve by it. I think the simple answer is he wanted some sort of government assistance in the lowering of the fuel price. But the price of oil is never going to go down, not in real terms, so any subsidy (in whatever form) the government applied would only be a short term solution. Moreover, it would simply be saving the problem for later when it would be worse. The answer to the problem is that the businesses in question should have built the increase in the oil price into their business plans, otherwise they are badly run businesses and they will ultimately fail. Leaving these companies to the ravages of the market would be a harsh solution, but if they failed because of their inability to adapt to economic realities the resulting reduction in greenhouse gases would be good for the environment. This is a solution to both the economic and environmental problems; it is actually the purely capitalist solution, but of course in our society it is viewed as an unacceptable solution because a vocal minority lose out. I am not by any means advocating pure capitalism as the solution to our planet's problems, I am simply illustrating the lengths to which people go to stop it appearing as nasty as it is, even when they're supposed to be socialists. This is because they have no concept of an alternative. Not that I'm saying I do; I don't.
All of the 19th and 20th century 'alternatives' to capitalism retained one essential component of that system: the requirement for continual growth. It is this requirement that we cannot ween ourselves off: even as our population growth stagnates, growth is driven by our accelerating consumption. In the Modern world (and still to an extent in the 'developing' world) this growth was driven by production, but in the postmodern world that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century people had to find new ways of generating the growth that was required. Ultimately what we are left with is a bizarre fantsay ecomics that swirls around funny ideas and obsessions, and would be amusing if it didn't have such a dreadful impact on people's lives. This is not just the fault of the bankers, we are all complicit in denying the realities of our economic situations. Why? Because we are addicted to consumption. We can't help ourselves. Like severe drug addicts we are willing to deny the consequences of our actions because we are consumed by the actions themselves.
So what is the solution? I don't know, I'm as caught up in the whole thing as you. But I think it's time to start asking some questions, the sorts of questions that that politician should have been asking. Questions that will have answers many people don't like.
Hopefully they won't all be serious questions. Hopefully not everything I write will be this pretentious. I'm promising nothing.