Hi everyone, I'm here with George Monbiot
He's an author, columnist and
environmental activist. I'm sure many of
you will be very familiar with his work
and George was a household name in our
family so I'm starstruck to be here.
George's latest book 'Out of the Wreckage'
is incredibly exciting and I want to
talk to George today about how it fits
in with public ownership and your views
on what public ownership can do for
society. So thanks George for joining
us. Thanks Cat. So I'd like to start off
by asking how do you feel about Labour's
latest manifesto and its proposals to
bring rail, Royal Mail, energy and water
into public ownership?
I think it's very
exciting,
and I think it's a great step towards a
sort of world that we want, the sort of
nation that we want, but I think it can
go further and what I want to see is the
idea of public ownership being expanded
from state ownership to Commons
ownership as well. That's not saying I
don't want to see state ownership - I do!
I also feel that for certain resources
particularly natural wealth, public
spaces, land in general, the nature
which occurs on that land we should tend
towards much more of a Commons model
than a state model. And a Commons has
really three elements: its first of all a
community which is the group that
manages a particular resource; and the
resource is a second element; and it is the
rules and negotiations that the
community creates in order to manage it
and the Commons is inalienable: you can't
sell it you can't give it away, and it's
managed in perpetuity on the basis that
any product from it is shared equally
among its members. So what's amazing
about the Commons is that it's
inherently quite sustainable because
you're not trying to extract from it any
more than the natural product which
occurs which doesn't deplete the
actual wealth from which that product
arises.
It's not capitalism, and it's not
communism: it's a different system
altogether and it's one of the great
neglected pillars of our economy.
So where do you see it fitting in so we
talk generally about public services so
we'll talk about rail and buses, water
and energy, NHS, care work, council
services, prisons and probation, and we
talk about these as public services.
Which of those do you think should be
run not by any kind of state, even a very
democratic engaging state, but somehow by the Commons or by the people directly?
I could see water as being a very good
candidate for common ownership. If you
managed water at the catchment level and
we always tend to forget where the water
that we drink and wash in comes from
which it comes from the hills - well it
comes from the sky and then it lands on
the hills, and then it flows down into
the rivers and fills the reservoirs and
fills the aquifers, and we've tended only
to think about water as what you get at
the bottom of the catchment. And when we
think about floods we think about the
management of the floodplain but we
don't think about the whole catchment.
Now that catchment could easily be seen
as a political unit and in ecological
terms it makes sense to manage it as a
political unit. So you know instead of
having County lines which cut across the
catchment or instead of even having
national lines cutting across the
catchment you say here is the ecological
unit we should be managing and we should
be doing so in such a way that what
happens at the top of the catchment fits
in with our objectives at the bottom of
the catchment, and very often that means
if you're gonna have clean water if
you're not going to have flood peaks, you
want to have trees growing at the top of
the catchment, you want your rivers to
meander and braid to hold back the flood
water, to filter the water out, you want a
sense that everyone in that catchment
has a role in deciding how the water is
going to be used for the benefit of the
community, and for the benefit of the
rest of the living world.
And to me that makes water much more of
a live issue. You get much more of a
sense of belonging to the issue and the
issue belonging to you than if it's in
the more remote hands of state ownership.
So we're developing a People's Plan for
Water which is about saying "okay here's
your water company right now, and they
are in in sort of water basins so they
geographically make sense where they are
right now, they're regional structures.
We're saying "what would you do if you
had more ownership over this company and
it was working for you?" We're still
imagining that it would be a
democratically accountable regional
structure.
Do you see public ownership or common
ownership of water not involving any
democratic sort of element but involving
something more direct? How does it work
in terms of governance? Well the commons
is democratic: it's participatory
democracy and another element of the
commons is that everyone has an equal
share, an equal stake, and an equal voice
in the management of the common resource.
And so in a way it's more democratic
than the representative democratic
structures which we often use to manage
state resources or resources in other
forms of public ownership. Now this is
not to say in any way that I'm dissing
state ownership because I think we need
that too, but we need an economy balanced
between the four pillars. The
only ones we talk about are market and
state, and if you're on the left you say
you want less market and more state, and
if you're on the right you say you want
more market and less state, but there's
two other pillars which are the
household: the core economy, sits at the
centre of the economy; and the Commons.
And actually I feel what we need is a
balance between those four pillars which
recognizes the importance of all. So
what's the actual institution that
manages it? You talk about community land
trust's. Would you have a community water
trust, and would there be any election to
that? Well, yes I mean a Community Land
Trust is a classic form of commons
management and depending
on its size, you might have a situation where
everybody comes together in meetings to
decide how that land is used or you
might have a situation where there are
certain occasions on which everyone
comes together but a lot of the time
you're delegating the decision-making to
a committee and I don't see any reason
why the same approach can't be applied
to catchment scale water management I
suppose. So something that we often talk
about is the Parisien model where they
brought water into public ownership in
2011 and they've created a structure
where they've got citizens and workers
as part of the governance structure and
they also have an 'Observertoire'. So they
have lots of different community groups
who are holding the company to account
and making sure that they deliver for
the wider community and making sure that
it really works well. So I suppose I'm
wondering in practice if it does get
delegated, what's the difference between
a really democratic participatory
engaged structure that is nevertheless
official in some sense and has an
official mandate to deliver, versus some
kind of community water trust? I would
say they're both valid models for doing
it and and they could both lead to very
similar outcomes which is
democratization, which is public control,
which is probably much lower prices and
higher quality than we're getting from
the purely market approach at the moment.
But there's something important about
the principle of the commons in its own
right. William Cobbett called them 'the
fortifying commons' and it wasn't just
that you could run around outside on the
common land and get strong! They
fortified your sense of citizenship. They
fortified your sense of belonging. They
fortified the notion that you actually
have a stake rather than just a say,
because a Commons belongs to the
community. If you put it in market
terms (but it's not a market) the
community members would all be
shareholders in it.
But it's a much deeper sense of
belonging than shareholding
and I would argue it's a deeper sense of
belonging than state ownership, however
democratically arranged it is. That's not
to say that I'm dissing the Parisien
model - I think it is perfectly valid, I
think it could be even better. And I
think it's really exciting to read in
your book about that sense of belonging
and the politics of belonging, and it
feels very grounded, and it feels like it
has a huge amount of potential to engage
people. One thing I'm wondering is: what
about the national level? Because you
talked about how, in terms of regulating
the commons, traditionally people have
regulated it themselves on a local level
and that's how it works and it
feels as though it has to be very local.
But we have public services and a
national government partly to make sure
that we have equity and when we have
unequally distributed resources you know
those are fairly distributed and people
get equal outcomes where that's
needed. I mean water obviously is a bit
different but you know say in the case
of energy, you know some some areas will be able to generate lots of
energy, others won't so is it just: well
postcode lottery, raw deal if you
can't? We also have the
national level for you know standards
and a framework and planning and
integrated system, so how does
that come together with the local
commons? To my mind it's not either/or.
It's about seeking a balance, and so for
instance if you were to look at land and
if we had much more progressive land
taxes than we have at the moment you
could say well each community should tax
its own land and keep the taxes and
distribute that money within the
community. But then that means that the
places with the very valuable land where
often people are more prosperous than
the places with the less valuable land
have a lot of money to distribute and
the other places have much less. So we
need distribution between
communities as well as within
communities, and that's where the role of
national government comes in, which
should be distributive and should be
using tax for all its varied purposes to
have at the same time wherever possible
the local link, the sense of local
ownership, the sense of belonging, the
sense of a participatory democracy at
scale where it's meaningful (and
generally the smaller the scale, the more
meaningful democracy is I think) is
valuable in its own right. So wherever
possible we tend to that model: local as
far as possible but when we need to
distribute more widely and when we need
to manage a resource which is more than
local and can't only be governed at the
local level like the NHS for example,
then we move to state ownership. And it
may be tempered by forms of participatory
democracy as well. So it's a
question of having a hybrid politics and
a hybrid economy. It's not just state and
market: it's state, market, household and
commons.
Yeah we're often thinking about
you know national/regional/local: how do
they interrelate? But maybe
we can bring the commons into the
analysis of the local. I think this is I
think this is crucial I mean all too
often local government is like just a
microcosmic version of national
government, but actually you can do
things at the local level that you can't
do at the national level because the
scope for participatory democracy is
so much greater locally. And if all
you're doing is replicating Westminster
politics within your local county hall
then you are losing a huge opportunity
to do something really exciting.
Definitely. George, do you agree with us
that we already own many of these common
resources like water and so we don't
need to be compensating shareholders
when we take them back? It's a really
interesting question because justice
says we've paid for this many times over:
First of all they took it away from us -
there are two forms of enclosure there's
the state taking it from communities but
then there's the private sector taking
it from the state at knockdown prices. We
know that it was effectively stolen and
so justice says we should just take it
back. In practicality. practical terms, it
can be really really difficult to do
that without facing massive lawsuits and
huge political headache which can turn
out to be a lot more expensive than
paying the bastards!
Now I revolt against the idea of paying
the bastards because they don't deserve
to be paid! You know, it's like
compensating the slave owners for the
slaves when emancipation happened. You
know it's just wrong, but it could be the
real-politic thing that we have to do
just to make it happen. You know I've
followed land reform in quite a lot of
countries and basically where people try
to do it without compensation
it almost always falls apart simply
because the kickback is so massive and
the owners invest such huge
resources into fighting it, it brings
governments down. It just creates huge
political conflict and my own feeling,
much as I sympathise with the case is:
just swallow hard, look the other way,
give them the money, and get the job done
and bring it back into public ownership.
I hate the principle of it but I think
that might be the practical politics of
it. Although Parliament can decide how
much, so it's always going to be a
question of (yes) how much. Yes that's
right so I think what you can do
is to say: Ok yeah let's look at the fact
that basically they got this for next
to nothing, we're not going to pay them
what they think they can get as a
market rate, but we're going to pay them
enough to make them go away without a
humongous battle. I think that's the
principle I would probably apply, and
will when I rule the world. Fantastic, so
we want to make sure that public
ownership, when it happens, if it happens
when it happens, is much more successful
than anything we've seen before, and as
well as democracy we also want to see it
being more innovative and greener and
more caring and just just better on all
fronts so that we have something really
resilient that can survive not just you
know the next Labour government but
beyond if we end up with the Tory
government beyond that. What are your
other thoughts on how we how we make
public ownership really amazing? My over-riding
objective is what I call 'private
sufficiency, public luxury'. If we try to
all enjoy private luxury and all have
our own swimming pool and tennis court
and play barn and art collection and the
rest of it - very quickly we literally
fill the whole world up, and you suddenly
discover that actually only a few people
can have that, because there's simply not
enough physical space or ecological
space for everyone to do it. If you all
try to live like the ultra-rich today, we
burn the planet up and we use all its
resources, and we turn it into a dystopia.
But there is enough space for everyone
to enjoy
public luxury. Fantastic quality
public amenities where everybody gets to
play tennis if they want to play tennis,
and everybody gets to swim if they want
to swim, and there are amazing
playgrounds and wonderful parks and
beautiful nature reserves and and
everything that you would look for in
your own life to enhance your luxury is
found in the public or the common sphere.
That way you genuinely make this
a land of luxury for all rather than
luxury for some. The other thing about
public luxury is it's far more efficient
than private luxury. So for example you
can say: 'oh I'm sick of being stuck in
traffic in my old banger. I'm gonna get a
really fancy car. I'm gonna spend twenty
thousand quid on a fancy car'. You're
still stuck in traffic and you're twenty
thousand quid down! Now
imagine if one thousand pounds of your
taxes and everybody's taxes were
invested in a really great mass transit
electrified system, which was super
efficient. You're gonna get there at ten
times the speed, and it's cost you one
twentieth of what that fancy car costs
you to get stuck in traffic. So you
can you can actually use resources far
more efficiently when you're seeking
public luxury than when you're seeking
private luxury. I love that, I love that
concept of public luxury it's just
brilliant. What are your favourite
three public services by the way? Well
having had my life saved
recently by it, the NHS has to come in at
number one. I'm loving my children's
engagement with state education which
gets a very bad press but both of them
are having a great experience with it at
the moment so I think I would put that
in a number two. It's a bit boring:
hospitals and schools, but then who
doesn't love them, or who shouldn't love
them? And then I think number three would
be parks. Yeah great parks are absolutely
essential I think for a sense of local
community, a sense of place, a sense of
belonging. I think place is very
important in our lives and is often
greatly underestimated. And a park which
is really nicely looked after, which has
some wild areas ideally, as well as the
manicured areas, has great playgrounds
for the kids,a place where people can come
together.
Ideally there might be a cafe where you
can have tea as well. I think that is a
really important part of the public
sphere. And final question: When we have
public ownership do you see all of our
interests aligning? So the public, workers
the environment, the earth that we live
in. Are there going to be conflicts? It's
very important to recognise that the
public is not just workers  and I
think it was a mistake going all the way
back to guild socialism to basically
vest political power in workers and to
see the workers as being the only really
valid political force, because
straightaway that means that anyone who
doesn't have work, or anyone who's
retired or children for that matter, they
don't have a legitimate political voice.
But it's become even more problematic in
an age where hardly anyone has a proper
job anymore. Where it's very hard to know
are you actually a worker in this?
Because you're having to come in and out
of it a zero hour contracts and the gig
economy. And I think we need to
broaden out the scope of where
political validity lies. It lies with
everyone of course,
but the hub of it I feel is community.
This is why I think the politics of
belonging is where the big change
will come. Building it up from the bottom
up, in community and of course work is a
very important element of that, but they
don't have to be attached permanently to
one industry to be an important element
to that. Their voice must be heard, but
alongside the many other community
voices that have to be heard. So the rail
users as well as the rail workers and
the people whose backyard the new
railway might go through. Fantastic
George, thank you so much, I'm so excited
to be talking to you today. Everyone
should read this book! Thanks George.
Thanks very much Cat. Brilliant. Lovely.
