Conclusion: A New Economic Model of Community Wealth Building
“An era can be said to end,” wrote playwright Arthur Miller, “when its basic illusions are exhausted.”[64]
Such exhaustion is palpable in Britain today.
Everybody knows that the dominant economic model of the past forty years is failing, with privatised infrastructure crumbling, household debt rising, and public services at breaking point, whilst wages stagnate after two lost decades and yet another looming ahead.
Lamenting the lack of will to tackle underlying problems shown by all political leaders in the 2024 general election campaign, the Fairness Foundation anticipated that “Britain will become more unfair and unequal over the next five years, with growing inequality in health, housing, poverty and the north-south income divide.”[65]
We are already well on the way toward such a dismal outcome. A healthy democratic politics ought to involve some collective soul-searching as to the causes of such profound national malaise. And yet, mainstream politics offers few palliatives for the ubiquitous sense of atrophy and decay.
Even politicians peddling headline promises of “a decade of national renewal” evidently disbelieve their own claims, with a race to the bottom of lowered expectations included in the small print.
The leaders of the present government insist that not much can be done in the short term because – in the constant refrain of Labour’s front bench – “the money isn’t there.” Little wonder that the public’s faith in politics and politicians now stands at an all-time low.
After the financial crisis, austerity, the pandemic, and the recent severe contraction in living standards, Britain is deep in a multi-dimensional crisis – economic, social, ecological, and political. This much is clear from this first edition of the UK Index of Systemic Trends.
It makes for bleak reading for anyone concerned about the social and economic health and prospects of the people living in the United Kingdom for the foreseeable future.
“Change in the long-running trends documented in this Index will only come with significant departures from the core tenets of that economic model – especially privatisation and financialisation...”
A Failed Economic and Political Model
The data presented above suggest that this systemic crisis is traceable back to the UK’s dominant economic model. It is the economic model itself that is failing the vast majority.
Change in the long-running trends documented in this Index will only come with significant departures from the core tenets of that economic model – especially privatisation and financialisation, which are themselves driving many of the outcomes we are seeing in terms of economic extraction, upwards redistribution, and growing and deepening inequality.
Such departures will likely require something approaching a democratic revolution in British politics.
Only such an upheaval would be capable of sweeping away a political class that is itself deeply complicit in the policies that have produced longstanding decline for decade after decade, something only possible through a top-down technocratic politics driven by political and administrative elites – “a political system,” in the judgment of the late Peter Mair, “constructed by national political leaders as a protected sphere in which policy-making can evade the constraints imposed by representative democracy.”[66]
The story of British politics since at least 2014 has been one of a series of recurring revolts against a political-economic model incapable of generating anything but stagnation and decline. The Scottish independence referendum, Corbynism, Brexit – each in its own way represented the boiling over of anger from sections of the public at an unsupportable, unsustainable status quo.
Until there is fundamental change of a magnitude capable of touching the real lives of ordinary people, politics is likely to remain chaotic and uncertain, as the restless underlying popular demand for change continues to seek new ways to break through the surface of everyday politics. Political volatility is the new name of the game.
Added to this febrile atmosphere, and contributing to it, is a rapidly rising far right that is seeking to exploit these political, social, and economic conditions in pursuit of both political power and a societal transformation based on ethno-nationalism and a particularly harsh brand of social conservatism.
Unless we are to succumb to such a dangerous movement, there must be an urgent reinvention in Britain of a broad popular progressive politics of fundamental transformative change. This new politics will have to deliver a new economics.
Turning around Britain’s ailing polity will require a new basis for economic policy beyond the elusive quest for growth – one based on a recognition that, in the sixth richest economy in the world (one of the wealthiest in human history!), the problem is not a shortage of resources but rather that plentiful resources are hoarded at the top.
The problem is the coexistence of concentrated private affluence amidst widespread and growing public squalor. At the heart of this is an overweening financial system predicated on greater and greater extraction from the rest of us, that is further concentrating wealth at the top under the cloak of an increase in gross domestic product that is in reality experienced by the majority as a growing squeeze – a subtraction from, and not a contribution to, wider consumption and living standards.
Any new economics must also be place-based, capable of addressing the growing regional divide.
The wealthiest Britons now live in the equivalent of Switzerland or Luxembourg, whilst the poorest live in regions with per capita GDP equivalent to that of Hungary or Chile. Radical decentralisation and devolution, even independence, must be on the table as solutions to an overly-centralised British state that primarily serves the interests of a narrow stratum of elites concentrated in London and the South East of England.
At the same time, shifting world conditions require far greater domestic production, self-sufficiency, and resilience in an economy currently resting on trade deficits and over-extended supply chains that has become one of the most globalised and precariously internationally exposed in the advanced industrial world.
Community Wealth Building
There are many dimensions to the kind of political and economic programme that will be required to turn around this Broken Britain. From public investment to industrial strategy, there is an enormous amount of work to be done to create the kind of state capacity and democratic planning capable of responding to these manifold challenges.
For us, one obvious starting point is Community Wealth Building.
Community Wealth Building is an approach to economic development that transforms local economies based on communities having direct ownership and control of their assets. It challenges the failing economic development approaches that have been widely accepted for too long, and addresses wealth inequality at its core. It is a method for making local economies more just, equal, and socially and ecologically sustainable.
“By pursuing a Community Wealth Building approach, we can deliver real, practical solutions to places struggling with the legacy of wealth and resource extraction, disinvestment, displacement, and disempowerment and seeking to build more resilient, equitable, and sustainable economies.”
Community Wealth Building is not simply about correcting or ameliorating some of the worst injustices of our economic system after they occur, or about making modest improvements for a few targeted communities. Nor is it more of the same old attempts at renewal, revitalization, or traditional community economic development under a different name.
The aim of Community Wealth Building is instead to change the nature and operations of the local economy so that it produces better outcomes as a matter of course, working in service of people, place and planet. In this, it is “predistributive” rather than merely “redistributive,” seeking to rebalance the economy so that it from the start genuinely works for us all, producing more sustainable, lasting, and equitable economic outcomes.
Community Wealth Building is an action-oriented approach designed for those not satisfied with tinkering around the edges and those who are ready to directly confront and address systemic economic injustices. With democratic participation and ownership at its heart, Community Wealth Building builds on grassroots community-based activities, and, together, seeks to mobilize the power of local government, the public sector and other rooted “anchor institutions” to shape more equitable economic conditions.
Through greater collaboration and collective action, Community Wealth Building connects grassroots activities to policy action and institutional change and transformation. Rooted in “place-based economics,” Community Wealth Building is inclusive by design, delivering for those who have historically been the most excluded, marginalized, and exploited.
At its core, Community Wealth Building is a bottom-up approach that centres democratic ownership of the economy and community self-determination. Through a defined five-pillar approach, it seeks to direct and retain more wealth in communities by creating new fair work opportunities; helping local businesses and democratic and inclusive enterprise models to expand; anchoring capital and resources locally; and placing control of assets in the hands of local people and communities. Doing so helps ensure that our collective wealth is harnessed and used for the benefit of all.
By pursuing a Community Wealth Building approach, we can deliver real, practical solutions to places struggling with the legacy of wealth and resource extraction, disinvestment, displacement, and disempowerment and seeking to build more resilient, equitable, and sustainable economies.
A Democratic Economy
Community Wealth Building rests on a very different paradigm than the neoliberal paradigm at the heart of Britain’s current failing economic model. It is predicated on creating a democratic economy, not an extractive one.
To begin with, finance in such a democratic economy is put back in the service of people, communities, and the planet. In this economy, labour comes before capital, and good decent work is a core social aim and source of individual development. Ownership is not concentrated but broad-based and widely shared – and stewardship is the basis of ownership, not exploitation.
This is a real and not a financialised economy: all economic activity occurs in real places, and communities are able to take control of their own destinies. It is a collaborative economy, in which human flourishing occurs in healthy communities and a livable planet.
This economy recognizes that we have only one planet, on which all life is interdependent and real ecological boundaries require limits to growth. Human development in such an economy is the real face of freedom, requiring removal of unfreedoms such as poverty and the lack of opportunity.
Government plays a big role in this economy, in a democratic and decentralised fashion, and it is recognized that our collective ability to govern ourselves is the bedrock of the good society.
Join the Movement
If all this sounds utopian and far-fetched, then we have good news for you. Community Wealth Building models and practices can be found far and wide, all across Britain and Ireland, and are growing increasingly sophisticated and effective in their implementation.
Scotland has already enacted into law the world’s first Community Wealth Building Act. Wales and Northern Ireland may not be far behind, with a great deal of pre-existing work upon which to build.
Look up Community Wealth Building and see the growing movement for bottom-up political-economic systemic change all around you.
Come and join us in the vital work of popular democratic economic reconstruction these challenging times demand.