As I write, tens of thousands of anti-capitalist protesters are converging on the City of London to demonstrate against the G20 summit. Marching under the banner ‘Jobs, Justice and Climate’, this loose coalition of anarchists, environmentalists and revolutionary socialists aims to bring the capital’s financial centre to a standstill. ‘We hope to control large parts of London,’ says Ian Bone, the founder of Class War. ‘Whether it kicks off depends on numbers. The poll tax riots were all about 50,000 people who wanted a punch-up. This feels like that.’
Ironically, if the protesters really want to do something about the moribund state of Britain’s economy they should take themselves over to Westfield, the new shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush. After chanting a few anti-capitalist slogans, they could remove their black balaclavas and go in search of some bargains. Not only would this be a nice gesture of support for the 7,000 people Westfield employs, but it would send the right message to the public. The key to getting Britain back on its feet is to persuade people to start spending again. The slogan the G20 protestors should be chanting is: ‘When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.’
Umbrella protest movements are always going to throw together strange bedfellows, but trying to link the causes of full employment and environmentalism is a step too far. Take Britain’s motoring industry. Nothing is closer to the hearts of green campaigners than reducing the number of cars on the road. Yet if everyone followed their advice, the 800,000 people employed in Britain’s automotive sector would lose their jobs. The inconvenient truth is that if you care about full employment you should be encouraging people to buy new cars.
Many of the people protesting against the G20 summit will be advocates of a ‘greener’ lifestyle and that usually involves spending less, whether by growing your own vegetables or making toys for your children out of wood. However, while that might seem like a sensible way of reducing your household’s carbon emissions, it will not do much for the stuttering economy. On the contrary, if people spend less, the economy will not recover.
Our economy is already in the grip of what Keynesians call ‘the paradox of thrift’: during periods of recession people save more, and that, in turn, prolongs the recession. The efforts of environmentalists to influence consumers only exacerbates this problem. According to the latest figures, the cash value of Britons’ savings trebled towards the end of last year, increasing from £4.1 billion in the third quarter to £11.7 billion in the last quarter. This, in spite of a sharp rise in disposal incomes thanks to reduced mortgage interest payments. The areas Britons cut back on were precisely those targeted by green campaigners: holidays abroad, supermarket food and trips to restaurants and hotels.
According to John Cassidy, the New Yorker’s writer on economic matters, this eco-conscious thriftiness is a disaster. ‘A recession is a shortage of overall demand: any behaviour that causes demand to fall further is making the recession worse,’ he says. ‘Of course, from an individual point of view, it makes some sense to cut back and put some cash away, because there’s always a chance you’ll be the next to lose your job… But what the economy as a whole needs right now is some irresponsible shopping — spend, spend, spend. Bring back Viv Nicholson.’
It may be that the hard-left activists and middle-class greens who are united under the anti-capitalist banner actually do want the recession to turn into an unmanageable depression. Revolutionary socialists often talk in millenarian terms about the imminent demise of the global financial system and I suspect that a majority of greens would welcome a return to an agrarian, pre-industrial way of life. It’s the secular equivalent of the evangelical Christian belief in End Times. The fact that the collapse of the world economy would result in mass unemployment, a global health crisis and tens of millions of people dying of starvation is neither here nor there.
With a bit of luck, the G20 protest will turn out to be a damp squib. I cannot help taking some comfort from the fact that one of the leaders of the anti-capitalist movement is Marina Pepper, a former Playboy centrefold who used to work on the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary. Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your clothes.
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