William Shepherd

My Curriculum Vitae has an entry for ‘Wheelock College, Boston, USA, 1981-1985’ that reads: 1981 Assistant Professor of Education teaching Organisational Development; 1983 Co-Founder and Tutor-in-Residence of Human Scale Institute on Martha’s Vineyard; 1985 Publication of The Ecology of Learning course for teachers and professional educators’. The summer campus for the Human Scale Institute was at Anna Edey’s Solviva Gardens.

Anna Edey was born and raised in Sweden and moved to the USA in 1957 where she raised three daughters and built herself a career on Martha’s Vineyard dyeing and weaving wool from her own sheep and Angora rabbits before the gods took her under their wings and set her to work weaving a web of life. Here is Anna in Growing Edge Magazine.

‘At four o’clock in the morning on the coldest night of 1984, I am awakened by the howling blizzard. To my utter surprise, inside the greenhouse it’s like a balmy night in June. The thermometer reads 13 Celsius. The Angora rabbits are quietly muffling about in their communal dens. Moon and stars shine brilliantly through the four layers of clear glazing. Here among the tall, lush tomato vines loaded with red sweet tomatoes the thermometer reads 7 degrees. I proceed toward the east end, scooping up deep comforting breaths of humid, mild air fragrant with nasturtium, thyme, sage, dill and living earth. At the far end a hundred chickens acknowledge me with sleepy murmurs, cozy at 21 degrees in their spacious quarters’. The insulation comes from the still air between the layers of glazing.

A greenhouse is a hot and sticky place. Light from the sun is absorbed by the dark plants and partially re-radiated as infrared radiation. Not much escapes because glass blocks radiation at the infrared end of the spectrum. This is the Greenhouse Effect and the Earth is a greenhouse…for dark green plants read the planet’s surface and for the glass read the earth’s atmosphere. There are two problems with this analogy. The earth’s atmosphere does not behave like glass and although the Amazon Rain Forest may be dark green the polar ice caps are not, much of the planet’s land surface is desert and semi-savannah and almost three quarters of the earth’s surface is ocean. We are told that 99% of the earth’s atmosphere has no insulating properties, that oxygen and nitrogen have no role and that carbon dioxide alone keeps the earth warm enough for life. Why do we allow ourselves to believe this nonsense?

Nuclear power plants generate steam that turns turbines to produce electricity. So the nuclear debate is not a debate about energy needs but about electricity supply. Electricity accounts for 18 per cent of total energy used in the United Kingdom and nuclear power stations contribute 19 per cent of this…falling to 7 per cent by 2020 as reactors are switched off before they get so old that they break apart from corrosion and spew radioactivity into the atmosphere.

So that’s 3.4% falling to 1.3% of the country’s energy requirements. The Channel Tunnel cables can cope. So what’s all the shouting about? My mind has started to have uncharitable thoughts about the perfidious French and the dastardly Germans. They are up to something and Brits are the fall guys. My headline would be Blair Duped Again.

First the Texans and the Israelis take him for a ride over the Iraq Invasion. Now the European Bank is trying to get its two biggest clients off the hook by flogging Blair a dead nuclear horse. Nuclear power is an archaic technology for goodness sake. It’s more than 50 years old. It has no more place in a modern economy than a horse and cart. Blair must go urgently. He is dangerous to our health. This latest love-in could be the death throes of President Blair.

Renewable forms of energy are almost limitless in their potential. They are flexible and offer good security of supply. Nuclear, by contrast, requires uranium to be mined and transported, produces toxic waste and poses a potential terrorist threat. No one has the foggiest idea of the cost of new nukes, new designs will have to be imported…so much for freedom from foreign control of our energy supplies…and the Ministry of Truth will have to control the whole of Government if real economic appraisals of past and future reactor costs re to be kept as state secrets.

The real opportunity is not renewable technologies but local energy. All the energy we need for a year arrives in half an hour of sunlight…the rest is complications. Cross-channel cables for Surplus French Nuclear Electricity (SFNE) and a gas pipeline from Norway are all the Energy Insurance this country will be needing. All our national utility grids can be dismantled. The English have no need of them. Over the past 14 years Woking Borough Council has reduced energy demand by 50% and made savings of 77% in carbon emissions through green procurement, basic energy conservation, community use of combined heat and power, biomass, photovoltaics and fuel cells. The Woking Strategy is the way forward. Tackle energy locally…town by town, village by village and parish by parish.

Disregard private interests…the personal and the community sectors are more efficient…when working in tandem locally. Get Energy Supply Pricing right…talk to the Danes…and include utilities in your local tax calculations. The job of central government is to stop private interests getting in the way of local investments and to enable local development strategies by shutting down private utilities…tax them ‘til their pips squeak…and phasing out Whitehall and County Council budgets over a single parliament. This is the Labour Party’s back-to-basics way to renewal.

Today I typed “Debt Solutions” + UK into Google and got back 57 600 hits. All these solutions suggest there are plenty of problems. In the 1990s three quarters of bankruptcies were traders...the rest were consumers. This has now reversed. The idea of bankruptcy gets the thumbs down from the wage slaving classes who see it as a trick of the feckless to get out of paying their debts...a fiendish plot open to others but never to them. They have a point.

Fairness matters in a society. But the fact that limited liability companies have been doing bankruptcy for years destroying thousands of honest small traders in the process seems to have been kept beneath the middle class radar. One answer in the UK is to give greater prominence to Individual Voluntary Arrangements ( IVAs )...legal alternatives to bankruptcy which leave you without too much of a stain on your fiscal character. Twenty thousand IVAs got the Stamp of Approval of the English Courts in 2005 and the annual rate for this year is thirty thousand.

Price Waterhouse Cooper have just finished a survey into the motivations of 6500 people who entered IVAs between July and November 2005 and found that 83 percent cited excess expenditure over income as the reason for failure. 56 percent of these legally binding agreements between debtors and creditors were drawn up for people in the 20-40s age-groups. Average debts were £62 000 and were mostly held on credit cards, personal loans and bank overdrafts.

As the law stands...following Gordon Brown’s rewriting of the rules in 2004...the difference between an IVA and a Petition for Personal Bankruptcy ( PPB ) is that the ( PPB ) wipes out your debts immediately and releases you back into fiscal society after 12 months...it also costs three hundred quid to file which is adding insult to injury. This is not quite what the middle classes fear. Try it more than once in your lifetime and you will probably find that the Bankruptcy Courts goes for the job-holder’s feckless view of your character and places you under a fifteen year arrangement.

IVAs on the other hand keep you on a tight rein for five years...and then cancels any remaining debts. I did some work on the history and feasibility of Clean Slate Campaigns last year and was surprised when a colleague assured me that UK law wipes the slate clean after five years with these IVAs. I hadn’t picked up on this...which means the fact must be well hidden. With both the PPB and the IVA you are expected to work hard and do everything you reasonably can to pay off your debts throughout the time you remain under the watchful eye of the bankruptcy authorities.

Choosing between a ( PPB ) and an ( IVA ) might look like a no-brainer if you take the view that with an IVA you live in poverty for five years while with PPB you come out from under in just one year. But I rather like our English version of the US Chapter 11 regulations because it not only addresses the problem of business cycles and temporary entrepreneurial set-backs but also makes it much harder for assets to be legally stolen at knock-down prices.

Manoeuvring hard-working businessmen into offers they can’t refuse is one of the causes of microbusiness failure. It may be legal...and the perpetrators are often admired as shrewd businessmen...but preying on honest traders is wrong and a Sane Humane Ecological (SHE) society would run these Spivs and Hustlers out of town...or in extremis get a rope and hang the bastards. The Good Old Law and the Guild Lore had the measure of the ways of businessmen.

For the country as a whole debt including mortgages...viewed not as debts but investments by the lower middle classes a generation ago...are well over the thousand million pound mark. Contrary to middle class prejudices...and Daily Express and Daily Mail ranting...only £50 million of this is credit card debt and defaults on this chunk of debt have slashed profit margins for the companies issuing the cards from 11 percent to 6 percent over the past five years.

Every society has to figure out how to get money into the hands of people who need it and people who use it for the common good rather than for private profit, squalor or extravagance. The history of Clean Slate policies from Babylonian Times to the modern day is a pretty clear indicator that the problem is probably irresolvable in principle. So every few generations it has to be grappled with.

For the past 75 years...the 1930s was awash with monetary theorising...too little attention has been paid to the who-whom issue of money. Excellent work gets done on the money problem every generation or so. The emerging cycle is Unfairness & Inequality, Remembering, War...a surrogate for slate cleaning...Forgetting, Inequality & Unfairness. Repeat ad nauseum while mopping up millions of surplus population...for King & Country. There is a better way.

Inflating the currency masks and mitigates the money problem by reducing the purchasing power of the borrower’s debts. In Human Ecology...published in 1947 and the definitive summary and conclusion from the work of monetary theorists in the 1930s...Thomas Robertson coined the phrase Minor Usury and Major Usury. Addressing the Debt Problem arising from issuing money as debt at interest moves the chairs of Minor Usury on the deck while leaving the Titanic of Major Usury untroubled. This is no reason to ignore the deck chairs. Ignorance is Power to Them. Raising public consciousness of the fundamental flaws in our monetary arrangements yields its own rewards.