Wonderfully irrelevant Copenhagen

So the Copenhagen conference ended with the sort of fudged semi-commitment that might have been predicted. I am not worried. I do not set much store by such conferences.

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I am particularly unimpressed by 'legally binding international treaties'. They are legally binding upon whom? Who gets arrested and banged-up if the treaty obligations are not met? If Britain, or the USA, or China, or any other major developed or developing nation fails to meet its treaty obligations will they be faced by a gun-boat from the Maldives or Tuvalu or Bangladesh sailing in to impose those obligations? I don't think so.

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Treaties will not save the planet.
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Only changes in human behaviour will do so, and only then if the behaviour is seen as preferable to that which currently pertains. In other words, a less carbon dependent economy has to be more desirable than the present highly carbon dependent one.
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Let me set out my views on climate change. I accept that there is a strong possibility that the world's climate is changing in a way that will be highly detrimental to human civilisation as it presently exists, with a large proportion of the world's population living a few metres above present sea levels. Should sea levels rise, then those people will not simply allow themselves to drown whilst the rest of us, living at higher levels, happily continue driving our SUVs (through the flood waters?) and jetting off to ever more sunnier climes.
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I am also prepared to accept that human behaviour is a contributing factor in this change, releasing carbon that has been locked up in the Earth's fossil fuels for millions of years, over and above the carbon emissions released into the atmosphere by the rest of the biosphere and by the chemistry of the world itself, and that it behoves humanity to reduce or eradicate such emissions as much as possible in order to prevent ourselves squabbling (with nuclear weapons) over fast diminishing resources, whether farmland or oil, but the truth of this issue is irrelevant.
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For Britain, the dispute over climate change is irrelevant.
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If Britain were a country rich in fossil fuels, it would make economic and security sense to pursue a policy of continued dependence upon such resources, but our reserves of these commodities are fast running out. (Okay, so we still have a lot of coal, but extracting it is difficult, unpleasant and dangerous. I grew up in a mining area. My very first job introduced me to the crippling effects of pneumoconiosis – 'miners' lung'.)

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Instead, Britain, being an island, is perfectly situated to take advantage of renewable energy. We are surrounded by tides, some of the strongest in the world, which flow whatever the weather, and by waves and wind, and if we need to dig holes in the ground, let us do so to create geothermal energy. We need renewable energy for energy security, if for no other reason.
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More particularly, would it not be a grand thing to create an economy where we simply do not need to use such amounts of energy as we presently do and still enjoy a higher quality of life; where the normal trip to work is a ten minute walk, not a half hour drive through traffic jams; where we don't keep having to make new stuff to replace stuff that, at two or three years old, is 'out-of-date' or 'life-expired'; where parents have time for their children so do not keep having to quieten them with this year's latest fad; where grand-parents live in walking distance of their grand-children and not half a world away as a consequence of someone's oh-so important career; where businesses are not so immersed in debt that they have to keep increasing production and their customers' consumption in order to stave off bankruptcy; where governments do not have to keep coming up with new reorganisations of the nation's public services to mask the inevitable unravelling of society as a consequence of the pressured lives that so many people lead?
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The world needs to chill out, but to do so it needs to remove the great driver of our increasingly frenetic and decreasingly productive society and economy – debt.
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We cannot hope for a sustainable economy, whether for environmental, economic, social or security reasons, unless we have a sustainable money supply, one that does not require its own constant expansion, and the expansion of consumption along with it.
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Before we can even think about protecting the environment, we have to reform the money supply.
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The money supply is not some natural phenomenon over which we have no control, like the weather or the amount of oil reserves that are still left to be exploited. The money supply is entirely man-made. It is the one factor in our economy over which we, collectively, have total control, and don't let economists kid you otherwise.
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Money is the driving factor in all our lives or, rather, the lack of it compared to our financial commitments is the biggest factor in most of our lives. The bonds of debt are stronger than the metal chains of slavery.
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Bind someone into high levels of debt, through the lure of all the goodies that our modern technology can provide, and you have an obedient and compliant worker, willing to work long hours for low wages, to travel great distances simply to get to work, to expend enormous amounts of time and effort in securing and maintaining employment (and to condemn their fellow citizens who are less successful in this game of musical chairs), to suffer high taxation and ever increasing prices as more and more of their nation's wealth is creamed off by those who still create the money supply - unbelievably so after the shenanigans of the past two years.
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We must end the absurdity of a money supply created by private interests, based upon the debt-bondage of the working population.
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Removing this pressure from peoples' lives is akin to turning off the water at the mains before fixing the plumbing. It is an essential first step without which no other steps can be undertaken. Furthermore, a money supply created by a public agency would create the means to pay for all the renewable energy projects that we need to give us energy security into the future. We have the technology, and it can be improved as we use it and develop it.
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Britain should not be arguing the case for 'legally binding international treaties'. Instead, we should be quietly leading the way towards an ever more prosperous, debt-free economy and an ever more contented society based upon an ever reducing need for the world's finite resources. The fewer our needs, the more luxuries we can have. For example, the car that is no longer needed as an everyday necessity can become the luxury used merely for social occasions, for days out and visiting friends.

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It may be that only Britain can take the lead in money reform, and so provide an example for the rest of the world to follow. We still have our own currency, making money reform easier within Britain than in Europe. We do not have the USA's perverse antagonism towards government involvement in the economy. We still have strong links with a diverse range of countries around the world - the Commonwealth - amongst whom we could create a genuine Commonwealth of Nations, sharing resources and technology in a mutually beneficial and co-operative manner, rather than engaging in the divisive and destructive 'beggar thy neighbour' approach of the World Trade Organisation.
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Despite our modest size as a nation, we have led the world before. We can do so again.

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Anne Belsey

(Leader of the Money Reform Party)

The Pre Budget Reform - Do I laugh or do I cry?

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The Chancellor of the Exchequer has set out the state of the nation's finances in his Pre-Budget Report. He has set out his tax increases and his rather more vague spending cuts, and he has talked of his expectation of significant future growth in the economy in the medium term from which will be drawn the revenues to pay off the still considerable differences between these economies and the high level of Government debt (the National Debt).

It is enough to make one weep.
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Nor have we received any sense from the opposition parties. The ignorance of the Shadow Chancellor beggars belief. Slightly more sense comes from the Liberal Democrat's Treasury spokesman, but that is not saying much.
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Let us start at the very beginning; that's a very good place to start. When you read, you begin with A B C; when you count, you begin with 1 2 3...
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A functioning economy needs to have a money supply, a means by which goods, services and employment can be paid for. It is not rocket science.
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So what does Britain's money supply consist of?
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There is £54 billion in notes and coins in circulation (Bank of England Monetary & Financial Statistics October 2009 – the Bankstats). This is clearly not a very large sum when set against the hundreds of billions of pounds mentioned whenever Government borrowing or bank bailouts are discussed. Indeed, the Bankstats give us a total UK money supply of just over £2 trillion (£2,000 billion).
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This £2 trillion does not consist of bank notes or coins. Despite what has been said about quantitative easing over the past year in the popular media, neither the Bank of England, nor the Royal Mint, nor the Treasury nor any other Government agency has been printing up hundreds of billions of bank notes.
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Money in the UK and around the world consists of debt. When you have money 'in' a bank, that bank is in debt to you. Its debt to you, is your money. Similarly, a bank's money consists of its customers' debts to it. A bank can be said to have money 'in' those customers to whom it has lent.
In this whole process, no real money actually exists. It is just numbers in computers.
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However, the net result is that for there to be deposits in some people's bank accounts – giving us a national money supply (£2 trillion at the present time) - other people or businesses or the government have to be in debt to the banks. Without their debt, the money supply would not exist (except the £54 billion of notes and coins).
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“Everyone agrees that government spending has to be cut.”say all the major media outlets. “Oh no they don't!” say I.
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The popular media, proving itself to be no more knowledgeable than our politicians, keeps on spouting the mantra of austerity, that government spending has to be cut, and that taxes have to rise. The reason for such austerity is to reduce the level of government debt (the National Debt), currently some £800 billion and approaching 70% of GDP.
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This is the sort of thinking that we might expect to read in a schoolchild's essay, not opined by our leading politicians, economists and commentators. No wonder we are in a mess.
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THAT DEBT IS A MAJOR PART OF OUR MONEY SUPPLY, YOU CLOWNS! Reduce it and you will reduce the overall level of money within the UK economy, and it is due to a shortage of money already that we are in recession.
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The only way we can get out of recession is to increase the amount of money within the economy, and given that 97% of our money is based on debt, to increase the money supply, we have to increase the total level of debt!
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Who is going to have to carry all this debt if not the government? The people of Britain will, whether as private householders or private businesses. Although, of course, it is questionable whether we can afford to borrow significantly more. Most people, having woken up to their own high degree of indebtedness, are trying to reduce their own debts. This is good for them, their families and their businesses, but it is disastrous for the economy.
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So why is it that we need to keep expanding the money supply?
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More debt is needed to create enough new money repay the high levels of debt currently in existence.
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You might need to read that last sentence more than once to grasp the full absurdity of the situation in which we find ourselves.
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Yes, it is true. We can only repay past debts, both principal and interest, by borrowing even more money into existence. Without that, an ever increasing proportion of the money supply would need to go on repaying the principal and interest of existing debts, effectively shrinking the money supply and plunging us further into recession.
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If we have to borrow to provide the money supply, then government borrowing is best as it is cheapest. Governments, even the supposedly dubiously credit-worthy British Government, can still borrow at cheaper rates than most citizens or businesses.
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But why have a money supply based on debt at all? Even with 'cheap' government debt, the debt-based money system is mathematically unsustainable. With a bit of jiggery- pokery, we might be able to eke out another decade or so, especially if the Chinese people can be persuaded to follow the UK and USA into high levels of personal debt. But as with all pyramid schemes, eventually one runs out of people – of credit-worthy borrowers, in this case.
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This is the question that none of our senior politicians are addressing.
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It would be farcical if it were not so tragic.
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Anne Belsey
(Leader of the Money Reform Party)