Letters - 15 July 2011
From legal aid to Fairmined gold
Legal aid
Thanks to Alan Bean for his lucid and powerful article on changes to the legal aid system (8 July). Friends are rightly concerned about the effects of many of the proposed government spending cuts; but Alan helps me to see that this one has a unique character, being an attack on the fundamental principle of everyone’s equality before the law.
John Lampen
A fool’s paradise
As someone who cut his credit card up several years ago I have some sympathy with Alan W Smith’s suggestion of a ‘No Debt’ campaign (8 July). I urge Friends to be cautious about accepting his analysis.
• He says that interest payments are ‘lost to society’. This of course depends on the definitions of ‘society’ but to ignore the existence of lenders is unhelpful.
• He says that ‘the government has to manage its affairs in a business-like manner’. The suggestion is that governments have been irresponsible to increase their level of debt. Economists from Keynes to recent Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman would reject this. If governments had not increased their borrowing in 2008-2010, the recession would have been significantly worse.
• He refers to the private sector as ‘the real economy’. I am all in favour of a healthy and thriving private sector but reject the idea that the public sector is in any way ‘unreal’ and believe that there is an interdependence between the two sectors.
• He describes the recent strikes as ‘irresponsible’. I must declare my interest here as a striking teacher who believes that unions have a responsibility to defend their members’ terms and conditions.
Herbert Hoover – thirty-first US president between 1929 and 1933 and a Quaker – was in many ways a great man. However, the ‘Hoovervilles’ – the shanty towns of the unemployed of the American great depression – illustrate the problems of imposed austerity rather than the joys of voluntary simplicity.
I agree that we need to rethink our attitudes to individual and collective debt. I am very worried about the current coalition’s programme of deficit reduction and its possible consequences for the most vulnerable in society.
Mark Dewey
Money was invented as a substitute for bartering. If you are a peasant, growing wheat or farming sheep, it is easier to exchange your own produce with the products of a weaver or a carpenter by means of tokens made of gold, particularly if your own wares are seasonal.
The problem is that money has now become a product in its own right. When I worked for ICI, the new employee was sometimes asked: ‘What is the business of ICI?’ ‘Manufacturing chemicals?’ No. The right answer is ‘To make money’. (These comments are further to the articles by Sue Holden 27 May and Alan Smith 8 July.)
To continue: The next part of our problem is that only a small percentage of us are actually producing goods, for example, food and clothes and houses and motor cars and so on. Wealth is created by work. The wealth of oil or coal or fish comes from our work to obtain these raw materials.
Office workers may think that they are doing a good day’s work – and most of them are – but in my view they are not actually creating wealth. What makes the system so unfair is that many of the people who are producing the goods, such as farmers and clothing sewers, are the least well-paid.
Most of us appear to be locked into the system. People want to be able to retire at sixty-five and live off their savings. Ideally these savings are investments in manufacturing industry (wealth creators). The reality is that these savings (pensions) are manipulated by people who handle money as a product in itself.
Sue Holden and Alan Smith state the problem in terms of the national debt and Alan Smith writes that the British national debt is far more than our gross domestic product (GDP). It is not clear to me how GDP relates to the wealth creation I have mentioned above, though it appears that the British government has very little notion how to get us out of this ‘debt-based financial system’. Some countries (such as Greece) are even worse off than we are.
The situation is full of paradoxes; because of our longevity, old people will be required to work longer before they receive their pensions; there is continuing unemployment among the young.
The subjects of wealth and debt need to be explored further.
Bernard R Bligh
I agree with much of what Alan writes and wonder how we Quakers are facing up to the effects of the current financial situation regarding our spending as an organisation.
To what extent have Britain Yearly Meeting and Area Meetings looked at their budgets in light of what will be a belt-tightening future for all of us when gas, electricity, water, food, petrol and diesel prices escalate in the next four years?
Alan makes no mention of what I consider a major reason for the UKs national debt; reckless speculation as practised by all the banks as well as incorporating hedge funds based on a exponential gambling principle. It has been and remains the norm that it’s OK for these institutions to speculate and for them to go bust with the taxpayer paying the bill to bail them out and with those responsible to walk away with their pockets full. I have yet to see evidence that any real regulation has been passed to stop these practices, so in the future financial collapse will result yet again.
Allan J Herring
We all know that the government is in financial difficulty. However, I feel that some of Alan Smith’s comments were unjust.
Is Alan Smith not aware that public sector workers do, of course, pay taxes just like the businesses in his ‘real economy’ and some, for example the teachers, have their own, healthy, pension scheme? Public servants are paid fairly moderately throughout their forty-plus years of work, with the promise that part of their salary will be deferred until retirement. To reduce this pension is dishonest.
Does Alan Smith believe that the only valuable work is the making of hard cash? How will our borders be protected, the sick, needy and old be cared for and our children safeguarded and taught the skills to become the next generation of businessmen/women without the dedication of Britain’s public sector workers?
The current financial difficulties were not caused by ordinary working people. They are the result of the government’s mishandling of the economy, aided and abetted by the dishonesty of the banks and compounded by money wasted on wars. These issues are the priority, not pensions.
Lyn Joyner Stebbings
Gold
From a historical perspective and right until this present moment it seems to me that there have been two groups of people, those who recognise that we humans are part of nature and therefore, in whatever this group does, they endeavour to take care of nature, and the other group who see everything outside of themselves as a cornucopia of wealth just waiting to be exploited by themselves. Organisations like Fairtrade and Fairmined Gold are an excellent development because they attempt to distinguish the goods produced by the first group from those produced by the second so that consumers can make a moral choice when buying these goods. This kind of distinction is essential if humankind is to have any kind of future because it is the second group who, by their activities, are rendering the world totally uninhabitable and, unfortunately, because, up until now, money has been accorded no moral colour whatsoever, the money earned through the activities of both groups looks exactly the same to everybody and the unwitting consumers of the second group’s products are helping them to destroy the world.
Rory Short
Theism or nontheism
Further to the recent correspondence regarding theism/atheism, I came across an explanation of God a few weeks ago that I found helpful and I wonder if others might, too. Brother Ramon, a Franciscan monk, described God as ‘the name we have for the dynamic, life-giving Spirit which flows throughout creation, importing meaning, beauty, love and compassion wherever there are those who are open to those creative impulses and powers’.
Lesley Atkinson
David Parlett (8 July) claims to be a ‘nontheist’ who believes in the presence of God. There are surely many ways of being a theist, and having a sense of God’s presence in the world and in our lives probably accounts for several of them. It is evidently not the label that matters, but the life.
Derek Bond
School in membership?
Am I alone in objecting to Sidcot School’s claim to be ‘in membership of the Society of Friends’ (see recent advertisements to recruit a new head 10 and 17 June)? I can find no reference to corporate membership of this kind in Quaker faith & practice.
Kurt Strauss
