by Robert Phillips on 17 November, 2008
One of the great disappointments of Tony Blair’s Premiership was his failure, in the excitable and fervent aftermath of the ‘97 landslide, to effect some of the profound constitutional changes that would have had a dramatic and positive effect not only on the long-term general wellbeing of British society, but also on the mid-term economic outlook for the country. His suffocation of the Jenkins’ Commission recommendations was perhaps the first indication of his determination that political pragmatism would defy wider political principle. We are paying the price for his inaction today.
As Jonathan Freedland argued in his excellent 1999 book ‘Bring Home The Revolution: The Case for a British Republic‘, the fundamental lack of democracy enshrined within a monarchy that demands subject (or subjugated?) status from its so-called citizens, has had a consistent and negative economic impact on the UK since we parted company with the Thirteen Colonies in 1776. In simplistic terms, America’s sense of enterprise and love of entrepreneurship finds the same root as its commitment to constitutional freedoms (however odd some of their Amendments seem to us bleeding heart liberals). This embedded enterprise culture will most likely mean that the US pulls itself out of Recession faster than we in the UK are able to do; we will all still be watching Dragons Den and Alan Sugar on The Apprentice for our voyeuristic dose of ‘enterprise’ instead. [click to continue...]
by Jules Peck on 14 November, 2008
Harvard Professor John Quelch has warned marketers in his study Too Much Stuff that in the global economic slump “The mass consumption of the 1990s is fast fading in the rearview mirror. Now a growing number of people want to declutter their lives and invest in experiences rather than things”. Quelch has identified a new and rapidly growing segment of developed world society - the Simplifiers who have four characteristics [click to continue...]
by Jules Peck on 3 November, 2008
Watching Simon Schama’s wonderful American Future again this weekend I found it fascinating and chilling to hear about Ford’s early C20th efforts to encourage its immigrant workers to speak, think and act like ‘real Americans’. It made me think about the power of companies and the current fad for CSR in all its many guises. The term which came to mind for me was Corporate Social Engineering (CSE) but I was not sure if this was a real term or if I had just made it up. [click to continue...]
by Robert Phillips on 26 October, 2008
“The sixties were an era that spoke a language of enquiry and curiosity and rebelliousness against the stiflling and repressive political and social culture of the decade that preceded it. The new generation causing all the fuss was not driven by the market: we had something to say, not something to sell”
Suze Rotolo
A Freewheelin’ Time
by Robert Phillips on 17 October, 2008
Yesterday, PR Week published a series of essays on the Future of PR. I have reproduced my copy below. The communications model of the future is one of the key, concluding themes in Citizen Renaissance - where we argue that marketing, having been part of the problem in the Twentieth Century, now can and must become part of the accelerated solution in the Twenty First. I very much hope that this new way of being can start within the PR industry, with my own firm at the vanguard.
THE FALL AND RISE OF THE C WORD
The future of PR belongs to the Citizen. The Consumer Age is coming to an end. Corporate Reputation and Brand Marketing are converging. In tomorrow’s world, constructive dialogue, engagement and a new tripartite contract between Citizens, Businesses and Government will drive the Communications agenda.
There is a free radical somewhere deep within me that believes we are facing the end of consumerism as we know it. The global financial meltdown of recent weeks has served as a timely reminder that the death of Capitalism may be upon us also. There are real lessons to be learned from recent events: consider the inconsistencies and the lack of responsible regulation in the financial sector over the past decade – and think through the implications this may have if Governments and Citizens fail to actively intervene on an environmental level, to properly safeguard our planetary future. [click to continue...]
by Jules Peck on 16 October, 2008
In a recent edition of the National Geographic magazine in a story about the destruction of one of the world’s most crucial resources – soil – the article talks of just how aggressive Mao’s ideology was with the natural world. “Move the hills, fill gullies and create plains! Destroy forests!” were key policies which have led today to the world’s most per-capita resource poor country standing at the edge of its own – and the world’s environmental meltdown. Communism was no better respecter of nature than is free-market neoliberalism. Neither the right nor the left have a natural philosophical grip on the causes and solutions to unsustainability.
If we continue to ignore such crucial but un-sexy resources as soil we are doomed. President Jimmy Carter knew this – he was a farmer and way ahead of his time as a politician (echoing out thoughts in Citizen Renaissance) in realising how consumerism and lack of respect for soil and soul was going to end in tears. Simon Schama has shown Carter speaking of this in his wonderful The American Future . To quote another US President, Franklin Roosevelt said “The history of every nation is eventually written in the way in which it cares for its soil”. My friend Alastair McIntosh speaks to this connection between nature and spirit in his must-read book Soil and Soul.
But recognising the value of nature to us spiritually and also in practical terms is leading some to try and put a financial value on all of nature. It seems a strange thing to do when its clear that ‘knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing’ is what got us into the mess we are in now. Indeed many NGOs seem to have sold their souls to the popular ‘ecosystem services valuation’ zeitgeist.
Now an important new report Commodifying Nature’s Last Straw? warns of a corporate grab on all biodiversity in the post peak-oil and climate change realisation and a rush into the ‘sugar economy’. Just as a ‘green-growth’ economy cannot be the answer to our problems, neither can any ‘new economy’ which merely picks up the pieces of the now broken model of growth-fetish corporate-consumer-capitalism and fumbles in the dark to piece it into something new.
Before we rush head long into any new economy we should be asking ourselves far more fundamental questions than ‘how do we keep our cars on the road’. We should be asking what is it to be human, what is our relationship to each other and to the natural world, what do we really want from life, what does it mean to live a ‘good life’. Only then can we start to glimpse the shape of a Wellbeing Economy which respects and does not feed off nature and which can be truly sustainable. The building blocks of the new model have to be understanding of the true meaning of needs (not created wants) and of the means (sustainable resource use) left to us now our post industrial age hangover shows us the mess we have made of the planet. We are trying to ask some of these questions and imagine what this new Wellbeing Economy might look like in Citizen Renaissance and would love your thoughts.
by Jules Peck on 14 October, 2008
These two ads are from Denmark and were picked up by a friend of mine, Dennis. They make one wonder what the world would have been like if Gandhi and Madela had just ‘gone surfin’ instead of fought for their beliefs.
This made me think about what we say about the developing world in Citizen Renaissance in Chapter 7 the section ‘Sharing Growth Globally’. Often people hold up the hoards of Chinese and Indians who threaten out lifestyles in the west by attempting (how dare they) to emulate them. Is it inevitable that they will want to? Dennis has spent time in China and suggests in some of his work that Maoism may not have killed off completely Confucian and Buddhist values which might hold China back from a wholehearted carbon-copying of our mistakes. OK so the signs are not great. Chinese capitalism seems set to make our version look positively restrained. [click to continue...]
by Robert Phillips on 13 October, 2008
The much-trumpeted Tory Green Agenda is under threat in these Recessionary Times.
One of the more irritating questions posed in recent weeks is whether the ‘whole Green thing’ will fall victim to the encroaching economic crisis and inevitable recession. There have been too many smug comments disguised as questions from those who have only ever seen the environmental agenda as a boom-time plaything, rather than a societal imperative. Their naivety astounds.
A version of this same question is, of course, being put with increasing frequency to David Cameron. His beacon of new light in the reformation of what was once, allegedly, the ‘nasty party’ is under threat of extinction in graver times - now that other, apparently more important agendas have come in to play. [click to continue...]
by Jules Peck on 12 October, 2008
Peter Oborne tells us today in his Day That Britain Changed Forever piece in The Daily Mail that the Government’s COBRA emergency committee has as its doctrine that ‘the UK is only five meals away from chaos’. Having studied just how centralised and lacking in sudden-shock resilience our energy and food supply system is these days I am sure they are right. It reminds me of the brilliant The Road by Cormack McCarthy which describes just how bad things could get and how ‘every man for himself’ could grip the ‘civilised’ world almost overnight.
No doubt some people are already panic buying and hoarding – maybe they are right. Maybe I will go and buy that deepfreeze – Oh but then again it would all defrost within a few days… I guess the point is though this economic meltdown is showing just how lacking our current system was not only in common sense but in resilience. We explore the risks of energy famine in Chapter One of Citizen Renaissance and I have written elsewhere about how Transition Towns and some canny companies are now undertaking energy famine resilience studies. [click to continue...]
by Robert Phillips on 9 October, 2008
I have to admit a somewhat irrational distaste for Andrew Gilligan - the sort of irrational aversion I have long held for Freddie Ljundberg. It dates back to pre-Hutton days (the Gilligan moment, that is) and was exacerbated by his attacks on the people’s Ken last year.
But here he is chipping in on the Planetary/Wellbeing debate in tonight’s Evening Standard:
‘The wider slowdown will do more to reduce consumption, reduce carbon and help the planet than any amount of ministerial eco-blather’
Yes, it probably will. That’s what we say in the book. But we must also all, as citizens, keep up the pressure to turn ministerial eco-blather into ministerial eco-action. The Recession is not an excuse. [click to continue...]
