Credit: Adam Berry / Getty
Some messages are just too big to take in. They bounce off the surface of our collective consciousness like a flat stone being skimmed across a pond.
Nature is dying. Human existence is under threat like never before. Our air is polluted. Our rivers run dry. Our oceans have become dustbins of disposable plastic. From coral reefs to the earth’s forests, from bees to elephants, the planet faces existential threat. A million species are now threatened with extinction.
In ages past, natural catastrophes were designated acts of God – in other words, not a human responsibility. In the Anthropocene era, however, we humans are in the dock and our economic activity is being judged.
Our obsession with growth, with GDP as the measure of human success, has given more of us more wealth along with extraordinary technological toys. It is, apparently, one of the great success stories of the modern era. But it has come at too high a cost. Public intellectuals such as Steven Pinker may flatter the present generation with talk of our enormous progress – but the latest UN Report on the state of the planet shows that progress is being purchased at the price of our future existence.
Anyone who believes in infinite growth on a finite planet, according to David Attenborough, “is either a madman or an economist”. Or a philosopher. Pinker is simply a thinking man’s Bernie Madoff, selling us a flashy Ponzi scheme that points the way to disaster.
“Things can only get better” sang Labour activists in 1997, on the way to Tony Blair’s first election victory, as even the Left parroted the virtues of economic growth. These days it is almost impossible to find a mainstream politician who doesn’t believe in the virtues of having more, the very engine of our coming environmental catastrophe.
There was a time when we thought a few lifestyle tweaks were the answer – a bit of re-cycling here, cutting down on meat and long-haul flights there. But we’re well beyond that now, far past what George Monbiot calls “micro-consumerist bollocks”. He goes on: “Instead of pissing around on the margins of the problem … We have to go straight to the heart of capitalism and overthrow it.”
For Monbiot, the destruction of capitalism is not some Left-wing fantasy of universal equality, it is not about class warfare or Marxist politics, it is about survival plain and simple. Either we kill it or it kills us.
In this new world, two things will be necessary: we will have to learn to have less, learn to be poorer. And we will have to learn to be smaller. Scale down, don’t scale up. “Small is beautiful” as the people-centred economist E F Schumacher put it back in the 70’s.
The trouble is, not even the Green Party seems to believe in small any more. With Brexit, it too has caught the bigger is better bug. One honourable exception, though, would be Green Party member of the House of Lords, Jenny Jones. Writing in the Guardian in 2016, she observed:
“The most profound weakness of the EU, from the Green point of view, is that it is a super-sized, top-down dogmatic project of endless industrial development and growth. It fosters the pointless carting of goods enormous distances, and it smashes local resilience and self-reliance.”
Yes, yes, and yes again. And there is a small but worthy Green Leaves movement (great name, btw) that agrees with her.
But, unfortunately, the wider Green movement has come to be hijacked by this whole corporatist top-down approach, prioritising free movement – including the free movement of film stars to take international flights to protest climate change – and free markets, insisting that the only way to tackle the big issue of climate change is through the very globalised structures that create it.
The Greens, too, been suckered by the idea that being progressive is the path to climate restoration. Yet, in truth, those who believe in progress have little to offer the environment. Because it was under the gas-guzzling banner of progress that the current scourge on our planet was justified.
Indeed, it is probably conservatives who now offer the greatest hope for the future. By definition, they seek to conserve the best of what is threatened. You get a strong sense of this connection between conservatism and conservation in the writings of the novelist, poet and farmer, Wendell Berry, a man so anti-progressive he won’t even use a tractor:
“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us”
Most conservatives have yet to recognise is that capitalism is not their friend. I noted in my Confessions interview with Roger Scruton that Capitalism is the greatest change agent the world has ever seen. And he acknowledged that this has become the great question for natural conservatives to wrestle with.
The problem, in the USA especially, is that conservatism has come to mean conserving free-market capitalism. But increasingly, this view is being challenged. In Peter Kolozi’s 2017 book, for example, Conservatives against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization, an older tradition of conservatism is appealed to. One that pre-dated the neo-liberal revolution. And, earlier this year, the deeply conservative Fox anchor and Trump supporter Tucker Carlson opened up the subject by providing a compelling critique of the cult of the free market, in a way that no ‘progressive’ Democrat would ever dare.
The Green Party, though, has been mugged by progressivism, which has left its environmental credentials surprisingly poor. When I was younger, the Green Party’s European position was all about contesting the terrible Common Agricultural Policy. Now that the butter mountains have gone, too many Greens assume that the issue has been resolved. But it hasn’t. Monbiot calls the CAP “among the most powerful drivers of environmental destruction in the northern hemisphere.”
And here he makes common cause with the unlikely figure of Michael Gove:
“Each year, around £3.2 billion comes to U.K. farmers under the CAP. Of this, a full £2.6 billion is not paid according to how farmers manage their land but according to the size of their holdings. This perverse arrangement means public money flows to those who are already wealthy.”
All of which is just a little more evidence that our political goalposts are rapidly shifting. Left and Right are changing their meaning. My own diagnosis of this change follows the brilliant analysis of this by Nancy Fraser, that Bill Clinton and then Tony Blair made their peace with free-market capitalism at just about the same time as some on the Right were beginning to wonder whether capitalism was really their ally.
The shock of this re-alignment has yet to fully work itself out. But for those of us who have long been suspicious of unrestrained free markets and their effect on human flourishing, the thought has started to dawn that the old-fashioned Right – with its emphasis on family, religious belief and small-scale wellbeing – might be a better place from which to challenge the evils of capitalism, than from within the assumptions of the progressive Left. And nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to the environment.
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SubscribeI have to tell you that you have missed the major obstacle, most of the rental properties are owned by ministers, counsellors and the elite, they do not want anyone to be able to afford to buy because they are raking it in. Taxes pay those who cannot afford rents, in the form of benefits, and those that can afford it need to keep paying, preventing any means of saving. In addition they are reluctant to keep rental housing in a liveable condition, rendering most private rented housing damp and expensive to heat
“publicly-owned ‘community land banks’ taking control “
But that’s Communism! How could such an idea get past the Daily Mail?
Good article, you’ve identified the real problem of high prices of LAND. There are other non-communistic ways of solving this problem. Site Value Rating anyone? But how are you going to sell falling house prices to today’s owner-occupier?
This seems a hugely complicated solution to the problem, and also fraught with all the usual inefficiency and moral hazard that occurs when governments take over chunks of industry. Surely, the simplest answer is a land tax? Builders wouldn’t hang on to land banks if they had to pay significant tax on them and it would regulate house prices, especially in sought after areas.
So what rate per acre given no other taxes?
Yes. The simple solutions are often the best. So why hasn’t it happened, and why is there no realistic option of it happening (in the UK, in the foreseeable future)? Because the vested interests of capital would never allow their employees – the ‘opinion formers’ and the mainstream media – to present the idea as a realistic and sensible option.
The only sustainable way to solve the housing crisis is to stabilise the population at current levels. This means close to zero net immigration and adjusting the benefits system to discourage large families.
Sustainable is the key word. The size of the country isn’t increasing, so a continually growing population means competing for a reducing stock of land. Prices must always increase. This is aside from the continuing decrease in available farmland, and the increase in energy use and waste produced. We need to bring an abrupt halt to population growth and invest in the training and education of the people already here.
A problem you don’t mention is the increase in single person households. Couples used to buy a house together when they got married, now everyone wants their own place.
Single people often lived in digs, there would be houses with several lodgers and the landlady all living together, or bigger houses divided up into bedsits. Now everyone wants their own place!
Virtually all house building at the moment is in the hands of the big 4 and they don’t build what people need, they build what is most profitable for themselves. Building more houses that are too big and that people can’t afford to buy is not going to solve the housing shortage.
Finally, as long as property sells it will be built and a fair bit of property is being built and sold as an investment, and is never lived in!
The free market will not deliver the homes people need and the government needs to intervene to ensure that all housing needs are being met and that brownfield land is used first.
There is a huge amount of people renting out one or more house they own due to high salaries or inheritance fortune. Their are also a lot of elderly blocking up family homes with longer life expectancy and not wishing to move whilst the property deteriorates. This reduces the available stock a lot.
With future generations earning less and possibly with less work available I would suggest a big building programme of affordable council housing as either flats or small family homes. I whole-heartedly agree people need a secure home to have a stake in their community and society. It should be government priority for either party, definitley a vote winner from the young I would imagine.
So get rid of stamp duty, a tax on moving.
The solution sounds very much like a rehash of Henry George’s proposal in “Progress and Poverty.” He argued that changes in the value of unimproved land were not the result of anything the owner did, and so the proceeds of any such changes should be appropriated for the common good. He proposed a very heavy tax on land, so that the price you paid for a plot was only the value of the improvements on it (the water/sewage/power pipes/wires, and then the building). Only drawback – the tax was an annual event, so, if the land became more valuable (because of a school or shopping centre being built nearby) then the occupier would have to pay more tax.
Problem is very simple. When Over 20% of your income is redistributed to pay the socialist pension debts, you accrue no wealth. You just get further and further into debt. Those debts are taken out in your name and the debt is hidden off the books.
When you bring in millions of low paid workers, those starting out don’t get the low paid jobs to get experience, They are forced on to the dole or on to low wages. Even the better off are impoverished because they are forced to subsidise the low paid migrants.
There is no easy solution, just pain
What the author is suggesting is effectively expropriation of land. How else would one ban the owner of farmland from selling at a price that includes the value that comes from the ability to build on that land? In an arm’s length transaction, the buyer and the seller would both see that value and would be willing to share it. I cannot see how “abolishing hope value” is supposed to be achieved. The author does not explain it.
According to Halligan ‘Home Truths’ (a must read) the original TCPA envisaged compulsory purchase at agricultural use-value. A 1961 overturned that and ‘hope-value’ was re-instated.
One project which slipped through was Milton Keynes, where land was cheaply bought and vested in the Development Corp
Expropriation worked in Singapore!
There’s lots of empty land in Scotland. It’s bog, plagued by midges, but build thousands of homes there.
How to rescue generation rent:-
1. Build more homes.
2. Control immigration.
A partial solution.
Abolish the tax on moving, stamp duty.
Abolish inheritance tax.
Allow them to invest their NI for their old age and for a deposit on a house.
Thanks, yes, those are important too.
This is all summed up in Liam Halligan’s book Home Truths, which I found tedious and repetitive, but does give all the information that one needs to understand the problem
All the many articles such as this fail to mention the huge amounts of property wealth that will pass down to the Millennials and Gen Z etc.
But at what point in the lives of these generations will that wealth transfer? It will hardly be a life defining experience for people to become home owners in their late 50s and 60s.
Having control over your own home and the sense of security and accomplishment that brings is good for the individual, for their families and for society as a whole.
But people are living longer than they used to… My parents are due to retire in the next few years, but I still have grandparents on both sides. How old will I, as a mid-millennial, be when I eventually inherit?
You could always do what your parents did.