TRUE GREEN

According to The Observer, Mr David Cameron is courting the "muesli vote" or something. Well, here's something which may surprise him: green voters can see through this kind of cynicism.

Here is another quotation from E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, which remains startlingly relevant more than thirty years since its publication around the time of the 1970s oil crisis. His critique of Keynesian economics is based on our treating irreplaceable natural capital as mere income; he argues that countries’ pursuit of growth has necessarily institutionalised greed and envy as a basic mechanisms, resulting in instability and conflict worldwide. All other values have been subordinated to the economic one. Drawing on ideas from Gandhi, he comments here on the dehumanisation of work.

“It is only necessary to assert that something would reduce the ‘standard of living’, and every debate is instantly closed. That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of ‘bread and circuses’ can compensate for the damage done – these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence – because to deny them would condemn the central preoccupation of society as a crime against humanity.”

Schumacher was a true visionary. It’s incredible to think that, had his ideas been taken seriously at the time, all the foolishness of “Thatcherism” – in whose shadow we still live – might have been avoided. That her successsor is attempting to mask hardline industrial capitalism with a few "green" gimmicks is shameful. It's time that the "muesli voters" took to the streets.