There are five big banks on England’s High Streets…HSBC, Lloyds-TSB, Royal Bank of Scotland-NatWest, Barclays and Halifax-Bank of Scotland…and there are rumours that one or two of the big American banks are eyeing up Barclays for their branch network rather than their Barclaycard Credit Card operation. The reported 2006 profits of these five commercial banks were £31 billion…and they are forecast to rise by 15% next year.

Ordinary people assume…incorrectly as it happens…that the Main Business of these five commercial banks is to borrow money from savers and lend it out securely to home-owners with their homes as collateral. But ordinary people are starting to notice that hundreds of millions is being spent on Media Advertising to smother complaints with spin and propaganda. They have also noticed that interest rates for savings are not the same as those for mortgages…less a small few percent for administration and profits…but actually bear little relationship to them.

Conceiving a Local Economy without the High Street Banks is not hard. Tom Paine had a good stab at it in Agrarian Justice two hundred years ago and I adopted his method in 2001 when I wrote a paper on The Wealth of Counties for the Radical Consultation. My 2001 paper begins with Economic Ideologies and the roots of Environmentalism in the Botany & Economics of Carl Linnaeus in the 18th Century. Having set the scene the paper then looks at The County of Kent in chapters entitled Counting by Bailiwick, Food by the Hundred and Shelter by the Score. Rounding off the 7500-word paper are chapters entitled Profits for Everyone; Income for The Poor; Public County Services; Money, Justice & Credit; Tickets & Tokens; and Early Retirement. Here is an extract from the Counting by Bailiwick chapter.

Kent has a population of 1 500 000. It has fine arable soil and excellent pasture. Kent can also boast of some 500 parishes from the 16th century, overlaid on a medieval structure of 7 lathes, 13 bailiwicks, 65 hundreds and two market towns...Canterbury and Sandwich. Currently about 225 000 (15%) of the population live in the Medway Towns of Maidstone, Rochester and Chatham. 375 000 (25%) live in rural hamlets, villages and small towns of 500 or less. The other 900 000 (60%) live in 450 small Parish Regions of around 2 000 souls. The County of Kent is currently served by 100 county councillors and 50 000 county council employees. There are 14 boroughs, 16 parliamentary constituencies and two euro constituencies…East and West Kent.

In this model each Parish Region is collectively responsible for its self-sufficiency in food. Half the people of each Parish Region are assumed to live in urban settings of a few hundred households, 10% or 200 people in each Parish Region live in single homesteads and the remaining several hundred households are neither Homesteaders nor Urban Dwellers but something in between. The calculus assumes only one communal association of citizens and places this at the county level with a tax base of one and a half million for its Communal Services.

To develop the dimensional aspects of the calculus a Utopian Society has been assumed, living harmoniously within the 1440 square miles of countryside of the county...three quarters of which is covered with rich food growing soil...in nested Parish Regions…i.e. within bailiwicks within lathes within the county. Food self sufficiency or 80%-90% is at the Parish Region level with progressive nested self-sufficiencies up to the level of the County at which 95%-100% Self Reliance is assumed. In other words our model is of a Walled Garden with one gate…and drawbridge…in the outer county wall but with plenty of gates for local movements in the urban centre of each parish.

From an economist's point of view we are designing for virtually Full Protectionism at the county level. Once we have that working we can start sending out some mariners to roam the world for spices and mobile phones or anything else not made or grown in Kent. The calculus assumes Kent will choose to have its own Currencies and its own Mints and will issue money directly to each of its half a million urban and rural Households in quantities based solely on the needs of its million and a half citizens. We must begin and end with people.

We now need to get a handle on the Idleness of our local race so let's look at some statistics. The current employed workforce of the county is estimated at 500 000 with 10% unemployed. One waged person is therefore supporting two unwaged people. And so the money wage per job needs to be sufficient to support not one but three people. Another way to do the calculation is to recognise that a normal working life is 40 years from 25 to 65 and planned retirement is 20 years from 65 to 85. On this basis one pound in every three pounds of wages needs to be put aside as savings for retirement.

Adding these together means that each worked wage packet must support the needs of six people. Eliminating double counting of retired people by treating these 250 000 as self-supporting, 500 000 worked wages need to support 750 000 non-workers. This brings the multiplier down from six to five.

This calculation assumes all 1 500 000 of Kent's citizens are supported monetarily by money paid out as wages to the current working population of 500 000. So we have an Idle Young, an Idle Old and an Idle Rich…much as we find things at the moment. But in my next chapter Food by the Hundred we put the Idle Young to work at Harvest Time.