Change Everything No 2: Rather than general election prattle, let's talk about 'development'

New thinking in politics, science, history and books from Natalie Bennett

Jan 07, 2024

Welcome to the second edition of the Change Everything Substack email newsletter. This week I’ve rearranged, with recommendations at the top (so they are easy to find) then the “long read” about development at the bottom.

Let’s NOT talk about the general election

We could be waiting for the next UK general election for a year. The final date it could be held is January 23, 2025. And I have long thought there’s a risk we could stagger along until then. If you are the Prime Minister, or anyone in government, why give it up before you have to? Something might always come up … and maybe you don’t really want there to be an election campaign. (I hate to imagine knocking on doors on Boxing Day.)

But general wisdom is that October/November is most likely. I don’t know. Rishi Sunak does not know.

What I am certain about is that acres of print, endless hours of broadcast, will be consumed by speculation about the date. And even more meaningless debates about the outcome. In the Age of Shocks, one certainty is there will be plenty more of those before the election; a poll now only tests what people think today, not in many months’ time. Any prediction is just hot air.

Looking at the media in other European nations, you don’t see anything like so much speculation about unknowable futures. There is a lot more debate about issues, what we should be talk about in the UK, how to repair of our austerity-scarred, depleted communities, services and public health. We should be talking about our food system (as was brilliantly done last week at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, in which I participated virtually), our education system, our economic system, our benefits system.

So a challenge to journalists: rather than write another election speculation story, how about writing something substantive, that explores the issues affecting people’s lives and proposals for changes? And yes, as a former newspaper editor - of the Guardian Weekly - I do know how hard it is to go against the flow. But why not give it a go?

Picks of the week

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Reading

A Christmas present, and brilliant (thanks Cathryn!), An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us is a must-read. We’re as a species at about the early primary level of understanding the world around us. We’ve come to realise that animals have multiple senses that we don’t; that they communicate voluminously in ways beyond our aural and visual range. (Not “secret” or “hidden”; it is our senses that are inadequate.) This is a wonderfully readable account of some of these discoveries. The details of cetacean life are amazing, but perhaps one of my favourites revelations is that rodents are as vocal and interactive as birds. Rats when tickled make chirps that seem like laughter. Male and female mice duet. “Rodents are among the most common and intensively studied mammls in the world and have been fixtures of laboratories since the 17th century. All that time, they’ve been spiritedly talking to each other without any human realizing.”

Listening

Whenever a new Byzantium & Friends podcast lands, it goes right to the top of my “to listen” pile. I’m into the history of the Eastern Roman Empire (a more accurate term), but that is not a prerequisite to be a fan. Professor Anthony Kaldellis is rethinking history much more broadly than just in his own field, He often asks what was life really like for people outside the all-too-obvious topics of emperors and generals, priests and rich merchants, and what different methods we can use to ask new questions about history. Such as if you were the Eastern Roman Emperor, how do you actually run the Empire and ensure you aren’t deposed and murdered with all of your family?

Some of my favourites: scavenging around post-Roman Britain, what was late antiquity doing with hieroglyphs it could not read?, and a history of olive, oak and other trees in the Med. Latest is a reminder there is nothing new about culture wars: see the vicious rhetorical conflicts between the Greek and Latin churches.

Thinking

When you have a shower or wash the dishes, you might give a thought to the water that had been carefully collected and cleaned that you are now sending into the drains. But have you thought about the heat? If it isn’t making the life of sewer rats and cockroaches more comfortable, it is just dissipating into the soil. I hadn’t really, until I read that Vancouver is harnessing the heat and putting it back into homes. That really is a circular economy.

Researching

Finally, research has started into traditional African understandings of fossils. British hubris suggests they started to be “discovered” here in the 17th-century. But of course humans have been finding and seeking to understand them for millennia. Unsurprisingly, discoveries in Africa produced in local folklore tales of dragon-like monsters, just as it did in ancient Greeks and Romans (as is brilliant told in Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters - read if you want to know about the logical origin of the Cyclops). Although even Mayor’s isn’t an accurate title; a Pliocene gastropod from either the Isle of Wight or Ireland was transported to Lascaux Cave in France some 17,000 years ago; we’ll probably never know exactly why, but people understood it was special.

Photo by Wes Warren on Unsplas

Time for post-development

The sentence, “you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet” is one that often crosses my lips; I was at three “post-growth” conferences last year. But it was only over the holiday season, as I was thinking and writing about “development” that I really started to engage with a related term, “post-development”, catching up on some of what’s happened in the “development studies” field since I spent a decade focused on it in the 1990s, first studying, then working in Thailand with the National Commission on Women’s Affairs and various UN bodies.

In a development theory course at the University of New England (UNE - Australia) back in the early 1990s, I had a lucky escape. The set texts were – still -- standard modernisation theory. The claim was that Global South nations could only improve their peoples’ lot by slavishly copying, and following along the historical route of the West, going from “traditional” to “modern”: the stadial theory of history shared by right and left. (I was reminded this week that such thinking still has great hold in listening to a New Books Network podcast on “migration, food security and development” in rural India. It had interesting insights on how migration has always been part of rural life, but underlying it was an assumption that urban, “modern” living is a good, traditional, rural life a bad.)

Back at UNE three decades ago, the tenured lecturer was on sabbatical, so instead we got a rather piratical-looking youngish post-doc, who had done his PhD on and with the Moro rebels in the Philippines, a people who had kept up their resistance since the American annexation of 1898. He introduced the concept of “underdevelopment” – that many of what we now call Global South nations were wealthy, and healthy, and stable, and had been robbed of all of those characteristics by military force and repression in the colonial era, and continued extractivism and exploitation since. Still to go to that stats, "every year more than US$486 billion in profit repatriation by multinational companies and $575 billion in debt service flow from the South to the North." Yet on both the history and the modern-day, there’s still precious little understanding of that, as I saw in the House of Lords when I made a speech on these issues last year.

Still, we are stuck in the idea of “modernisation” and development that, more or less implicitly, assumes that the aim is for the rest of the world to become like the Global North. That is not only impossible when you consider the physical limits of this fragile planet, but when you look at the state of the Global North - public health, insecurity, political and social instability - not in any way desirable. Wolfgang Sachs in The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power sums it up:

“A decolonization of the imagination has not occurred. Quite the reverse: across the world hopes for the future are fixed on the rich man’s pattern of production and consumption… the competitive struggle of the global middle classes for a greater share of income and power is often carried out at the expense of the fundamental rights of the poor and powerless.”

Reading Sachs and others has led me to reflect on the sustainable development goals, the SDGs, which I often speak about approvingly (while offering a footnote of concern about the focus still on growth). And of course there’s a huge amount in them that needs to be maintained - and delivered as it is not being now. Maternal and child health, education for all, sanitation and clean water, food security. But often what is eagerly sought as “development” is negative for delivering those essential rights for all.

As Sachs points out

As government and businesses, urban citizens and rural elites mobilize to forge ahead with development, more often than not the land, the living spaces and the cultural traditions of indigenous peoples, small farmers or the urban poor are put under pressure. Freeways cut through neighbourhoods, high-rise buildings displace traditional housing, dams drive tribal groups from their homelands, trawlers marginalize local fisherfolk, supermarkets undercut small shopkeepers. Economic growth is of a cannibalistic nature; it feeds on both nature and communities, and shifts unpaid costs back onto them as well.

Photo by Doina Gavrilov on Unsplas

That is a conversation often focused on the Global South. Yet when you look at the UK, the degraded state of our infrastructure and communities, the impacts of austerity, privatisation and financialisation, there’s an awful lot of underdevelopment to be undone. (Even more so in the United States, where deliberate underfunding of education, removal of reproductive rights for women, and failure to provide or repair basic infrastructure deny many basic survival rights.)

In a story in the Guardian this week there was a positive account of how this might be approached in a “post-development” way in the UK. It was about community buyouts: by the end of 2022 there were 754 facilities in community ownership in Scotland, up from 85 in 2000. Those include community shops, arts and play centres, as well as a few large purchases of islands and estates. That is a “bottom-up”, locally focused approach, that uses and re-uses local resources to meet human needs - this is the kind of “post-development” story that should be at the heart of our media, rather than endless general election debate.

You’ll hear a lot in this newsletter from me on universal basic income - which is one crucial route to delivering human rights for all (and at the centre of my forthcoming book, Change Everything, available for pre-order now). That puts resources into communities as well as individuals; but we also need to do far more structural reallocation of resources from central control to peripheries. In the UK. And in the world.

Almost the end

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