The Future of Politics. Charles Kennedy
Wal-Mart, a local currency was created, based on the mutual exchange of goods and services between local people within the scheme. It has been so successful that the organizers calculate $1.5 million dollars have been created in local trade in five years, and around 300 businesses in the town are within the scheme – helping many local businesses, such as struggling organic farmers, find a market. The federal government has decided to let it carry on without interference.
In areas of high unemployment and poverty, people’s skills are quite literally going to waste alongside their communities. Local exchange schemes help people keep their skills fresh, as well as develop new ones. The isolation that often goes hand-in-hand with joblessness is tackled into the bargain.
There are currently 400 Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETS) systems operating in Britain, involving around 35,000 people. Groats, reeks, bobbins, bricks and concrete cows may not be quoted on the stock market, but these unofficial currencies are doing much to improve individual quality of life and revive communities across Britain. Over 100 local authorities are now funding the development of these systems as a means of tackling social problems. Hampshire and Surrey use them as a means of getting people with mental health problems back into the world of work, while Bristol and Gloucester are linking them to local allotments, so that fresh fruit and vegetables can be given to people in exchange for their services.
In this country you tend to hear about schemes like local currencies and credit unions on the sort of day when there hasn’t been much news and the Independent is short of something to fill its column space, but anyone registering as unemployed in New Zealand is automatically advised to join their local green dollar scheme, and governments in Australia, Ireland and Holland have ruled that participation in local exchange schemes does not affect people’s entitlement to benefit. Their relative obscurity in the UK is undeserved.
The culture of British government has always made it reluctant to think laterally about social problems. For too long, people have thought in terms of two models: tax-and-spend or tax-concessions-and-huge-dole-queues. But there are alternatives. Voluntary organizations and local exchange schemes – whether they are exchanging time or local currencies – can and do have a real impact on society, by fostering and developing the skills and habits of public involvement.
Schemes like these are of particular importance in harnessing the enormous potential of our ageing population. It is a paradox that while we live in an increasingly ageing society – one where people survive to increasingly greater ages – we seem to attach less and less respect to the aged, and more and more to the young. The term New Labour is itself very telling – it suggests that, behind the nomenclature, there is a value system at work. Old equals bad, new equals good. We also see it when William Hague has a fashionable haircut and sports a baseball cap – as well as saying to the young, ‘I want your vote,’ he is effectively saying to the old, ‘I’m not so bothered about yours.’ Of course we must endeavour to engage the young, because they are the future – the disillusionment of young people with politics is an issue of particular concern to me – but we must not advance the values of youth at the expense of the elders.
I am keenly aware of this for two reasons. My parents are now both in their seventies, and far from being on the scrap-heap, they lead lives which are in some ways more full and active than when they were at work. But they have numerous advantages: they live in a small and close community, they have made adequate provision for the future, and they have a network of friends and relatives close by. I am fully aware that the same is not true for many people of the same age.
The importance of the silver vote was also made clear when I visited Miami for the Democrat primaries. There, every morning, the candidates hosted huge breakfast meetings in order to rally support. These were sell-out events and, understandably in a retirement state like Florida, dominated by people of retirement age. They formed a vocal, powerful and formidable body and the US politicians knew only too well that their success depended on securing their support. Politics has to take greater cognizance of the specific needs and concerns of the elderly. I think it telling that Tony Blair has given us a drugs Czar and a Heart Czar. Drugs and heart ops are emotive subjects, a gift for the press. The needs of the elderly are no less urgent, but they are, clearly, less fashionable. That’s why we probably won’t, under the present government, be seeing a Pensioners’ Czar.
The elderly and the young alike find themselves excluded when it comes to the new credit economy. Between six and nine per cent of the UK population have no bank account, and therefore no access to small loans, other than by turning to loan sharks who charge exorbitant interest – sometimes even up to the equivalent of 6,000 per cent APR. The disappearance of so many bank branches means it’s hard enough for many people, especially in rural areas, even to get hold of cash.
Credit unions allow people to help and be helped at the local level: people band together to save small amounts, and they can also borrow from the fund when they need to. They have their roots in the old friendly societies, which by the nineteenth century were an unofficial welfare state for over half the British workforce. Currently, we have around 400 in the UK, and under half a million people are involved, half of those in Northern Ireland.
Measures like these are more important than ever. New forms of money, such as credit and debit cards, smart cards, telephone and Internet banking are creating an electronic economy where money is invisible. All of this is exciting for society, and for those of us with secure incomes and bank accounts, but those on low and insecure incomes are being more or less excluded from this new economy, and need help if they are to become engaged.
Credit unions not only extend credit to disadvantaged people, but they also provide a range of financial advice and services. They need a new infrastructure to back them, to enable them to provide access to anything from small loans for the micro-businesses that provide much of Britain’s employment, to mortgages on hard-to-let properties. This new generation of self-help financial services should also go hand-in-hand with measures to make sure the big banks lend their far larger resources in a fairer way. We should, perhaps, shame banks into ending their refusal to operate in some neighbourhoods with a Bill along the lines of the highly successful US Community Reinvestment Act, which forces banks to reveal their lending patterns, and has levered over $1 billion in investment into poor neighbourhoods during the past twenty years.
An area where community input is particularly valuable is in the fight against crime. Crime, and the fear of it, touches every person and community in Britain – although certain groups are disproportionately likely to be victims. Those who serve their communities are at particular risk. This was brought home early in 2000 when Liberal Democrats in Cheltenham lost an invaluable friend and dedicated party worker, Councillor Andrew Pennington. Andrew had gone to the aid of Cheltenham MP Nigel Jones, as a man wielding a sword attacked him in his constituency office.
Such high-profile cases are outnumbered by the thousands of other violent crimes committed every year. Total recorded crime doubled in the eighties and early nineties. While some property crime declined in the late nineties, violent crime continued to rise. And now the overall crime rate has risen again. In the year to September 1999, recorded crime in this country rose by 2.2 per cent – the first in five years. This general figure masked especially large rises in certain sectors. Most worryingly there was a 6.3 per cent rise in violent crime, and robberies were up by 19 per cent.
There is undeniable evidence that the bulk of crimes are committed by those with the least opportunities: men and women from the most disadvantaged sections of society. It follows that a major weapon in the fight against crime is the pursuit of equality, but we must also not forget the victims. The justice system should always serve the victims’ rights: rights to medical help, counselling, financial compensation, and welfare and legal services. Victims have already suffered at the hands of a criminal. At present, too many go on to suffer at the hands of the system.
When a mugger is sent to prison, he may, arguably, be repaying his debt to society, but he is not, in any sense, making amends to the person he mugged. Even worse for victims is the fact that many offenders are not given any kind of sentence at all. Around three in five young offenders are given a police warning or a caution.
That is why I strongly believe in restorative