Hang on a minute – what’s our economy actually for?

I moved to (near) Bristol over three years ago. It’s a splendid place, really it is. You should come and visit.

It’s not like anywhere else I’ve ever lived. It’s got… something different. How would you describe it?

A kind of buzz. A zest. A fiery independence. Soul.

Our office is a literal stone’s throw away from the famous anti-Tesco mural on Stokes Croft – where in 2011 a riot happened, ostensibly about the opening of the Tesco in the first place.

And to get to the office you walk past a huge billboard bearing the Naomi Klein-inspired legend ‘System Change, not Climate Change’.  A nearby underpass is decorated along its entire length with floor-to-ceiling Stop TTIP murals. 600 people turned up on a wet Bristolian Saturday last November to interrogate the city’s MPs on TTIP. Six hundred!

What’s the economy for?

So, if you can’t get people in Bristol asking big questions about what the economy is actually for, you probably can’t do it anywhere. But there’s something else going on too, I think. To take the words of Paul Mason – it’s about to all kick off everywhere.

Our economy’s got the wrong priorities. Right across the country, people – particularly the lowest-paid, or the most vulnerable – are miffed. Wages stink. The profits of big companies keep skyrocketing. The trains cost an arm and a leg.  Footloose, tax-shirking global companies hop around the world finding the cheapest possible places to build their products, then encourage us all to rack up genuinely dangerous levels of personal debt to pay for them all.

Our homes are cold and we’re told there’s no money to pay to help insulate them. The rising, tempestuous seas batter our houses and the Government’s main response seems to be to penny-pinch. Fumes choke our kids’ air.

Our forests shrink, our climate warms, our wasteful, debt-driven consumption harms people, animals and forests.

We have an economy that treats workers and the natural world as disposable, destroyable inputs to a system designed to make cash for the already rich. And where the best vision anyone can really sell us is of one where we might one day be able to pay back the debts we’re racking up to buy things we’re not 100% sure we actually want.

And we’re told: this is how it has to be. How our economy has to work. The price of progress. If we’re lucky, we can get a few measures through the door to redistribute money or tinker with tax rates, and we should count ourselves grateful.  But the system itself, and the fundamentals of what the economy is for? Not up for debate.

So, it’s not whether we have austerity, but how much. It’s not whether we have an unfair, bleeding economy, but what size of sticking plaster we want to stick on it.

The greatest trick those who have power have ever pulled off is getting us all to believe that this is somehow how it has to be, forever.

Well – it isn’t. And I think people know it.

Let’s get our priorities straight

Friends of the Earth thinks our economy should deliver a just world where people and nature thrives and – happily – so do I.  I got into campaigning on economics because I think there’s no iron law that says that making profit has to override closing the gap between rich and poor, or giving us a healthy, thriving environment.   We don’t have to accept lonely, anxious, unhealthy societies as the ‘price’ of constantly turning the handle marked ‘growth’.

But what do others think?

As an experiment I’ve been helping to run a monthly before-work chinwag in Bristol called ‘What’s the economy for?’. It has modest aspirations and I’m not pretending it’ll topple any boardrooms just yet.  It’s designed just to try to plant a seed: to get people talking positively and with passion about what they think the  economy should do, and how and whether Bristol – vibrant Bristol – is the place that could start demanding that we give our economy better priorities.

The next one is, inauspiciously I admit, this Friday, 13 February. If you’re remotely in the area, join us.

With an election on the way, Friends of the Earth are getting ready to ask big questions too. From taking on the assumed right of the shale gas industry to profit richly from underfracking left, right and centre, to asking why, exactly, we have to put up with homes so poorly insulated that they kill people.

We saw in the debate around Scottish independence that the energy and verve of a conversation about identity, values and priorities can be hugely inspiring and visionary.  We think we can play a big part as part of what’s likely to be a galvanised movement for change that reaches right across political parties and taps into that very simmering, barely underground discontent that I feel here in Bristol and beyond.

And I swear I can feel something in the air – here, and in London, and everywhere I go. The hundreds of folk that  turned up to the TTIP event weren’t just there because they worry about the impacts of ‘free’ trade – but because there’s something amiss at the very heart of our economy. Now’s the time for big questions – of power, of the role of business, and about what our economies, and our Governments, are for.

It’s brewing: something is brewing.

This blog was written by David Powell, Senior Campaigner on Economics & Resources. He tweets @powellds.