Spring Flowers at Cogden By Philip Strange

CHARDSTOCK

More support for village shop

After successfully raising over £240,000 towards the preservation of its village shop and post office, Chardstock Community Shop Limited (CCSL) has enjoyed further success with the award of two grants. Blackdown Hills AONB Sustainable Development Fund and The Norman Family Charitable Trust have both approved grants to CCSL in order to help with equipment and fitting out of the shop once it begins operating as a community run shop in two to three months time. A spokesman for CCSL said, ‘We are extremely grateful to both these organisations who recognised raising money to preserve the village shop was just the first stage of our journey.’

UPLYME

Bell ringing for Ukraine

In continuing local efforts to support those affected by the crisis in Ukraine, on Saturday 30th April eight bell-ringing teams from across the region came to Uplyme Church to ring for Ukraine. Over £900 was raised. On Sunday an extra £350 was raised through a cream tea held at The Rectory. The money will be sent to the Red Cross. Rev Nicky Davies said: ‘Huge thanks must go to Andy Jarvis our bell-ringing co-ordinator for organising this day. We all continue to be horrified by the situation and glad to do something positive to help.’

DORCHESTER

PJ Harvey donation to museum

PJ Harvey visited Dorset Museum recently and gifted proofs of her Dorset dialect narrative poem Orlam along with an exclusive photograph. The singer-songwriter, musician and poet also gifted a published copy of Orlam, which she signed and wrote into the frontispiece ‘I’m so proud to be a local!’ Born in 1969 in Bridport, Polly Jean Harvey grew up in the Dorset village of Corscombe and released her first album Dry in 1992. She is the only musician to have been awarded the Mercury Music Prize twice, in 2001 and 2011.

COLYTON & COLYFORD

Support and sympathy at cafe

Having gained their Quality Assurance mark, the Memory Café is looking forward to a summer season of special events. The Memory Café welcomes anyone who is looking for company, a change of scene and interesting activity to keep body and brain active. Most of the volunteers are Dementia Friends, able to listen sympathetically and talk through the challenges of living with dementia, and to offer contact details of agencies able to provide expert advice and support. Visitors are assured of a friendly welcome and an afternoon of fun and laughter. For information, ring Sue on 07517054166 or email colymemcaf@gmail.com

WEST DORSET

Show your Greener home

Could you open your home to visitors to show off your ideas for greener living? Dorset Climate Action Network is organising a Greener Homes Event on the first two weekends in October to showcase examples of sustainable living. The focus this year is on low cost solutions to cut energy use, reduce waste and save money, as well as looking after nature in your garden. Alongside that will be an opportunity to view low carbon technologies like solar panels, heat pumps and electric cars. The event has been running in West Dorset for nine years. The organisers provide insurance cover, a website and a booking system. Anyone interested can email: dorsetgreenerhomes@gmail.com for more.

Social Capitalism—an economy to benefit the people

Former teacher, Andrew Blackwood, has long been resolved to shed a clearer light on what he sees as the narrow focus of much political and economic analysis. He has recently published a book detailing his research and gives us a summary of his findings.

It sometimes seems as if we are living in a parallel universe—a kind of Alice-inWonderland world where alternative rules apply and dimensions are distorted. There is the high profile realm of government policy, national statistics and political rhetoric on the one hand, and then there are the instincts of ordinary, rational people, trying to cope with day to day challenges in the wake of Brexit,

Covid and economic austerity. For example, we are continually told we must put all our efforts into raising GDP, for economic growth is the only way we can finance the NHS and social care. Yet—hold on! Annual

GDP growth in the UK averaged a steady 2-3% from 1980 until the financial crash, and average income per head of population is now more than twelve times that in 1970. But for all this economic ‘progress’ our social landscape is still littered with food banks and rough sleepers—in one of the world’s richest nations. We might well think, as Alice did,

Curiouser and curiouser!

This is just one of the many anomalies which bedevil our capitalist economy in modern Britain. Another is the question of the optimum conditions for an economy to thrive. Our Tory leaders tell us that ideally we need

less government involvement in economic life—limited regulation and lower taxation for a successful national performance. And yet the UK had a thriving economy and higher GDP growth in the 1950s and ‘60s, despite a highly regulated economy and high taxation. Contrary to popular myth supported by official rhetoric, ‘big’ government does not by itself reduce entrepreneurship or inhibit economic performance. And neither does reducing taxes on the rich contribute to raising livings standards for the poor; the suspect notion of trickle-down has been undermined by a wealth of evidence, and as President Joe Biden concluded last year, My fellow Americans, ‘trickle-down’ economics has never worked.

I could go on—and did so, at length, in the recently published Social Capitalism: The End of Neo-Liberalism and Where We Go Next. (Published by Austin Macauley on 31/3) The fact of the matter is that under current neoliberal capitalism we exist in an environment of blurred assumptions and plausible half-truths about how the free market works and how it might benefit us. They give sufficiently convincing coherence to notions about social and economic development, which then become popular dogmas, not easily challenged. But they are myths, nonetheless. And where is government in all this, especially at a time of rising inflation and increasing poverty?—it simply repeats the mantra of growth, low taxes, privatisation, leave it to the market and the dynamism of our innovative entrepreneurs. It hasn’t always been like this. Before the arrival of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, before what thriller writer Lee Child has called… a dramatic hinge in history, we had a different kind of capitalism, one which did more to serve the interests of ordinary people. But to return to this we need to remove the veil through which our economy is viewed, and overturn some of the myths that have bewitched us: economic growth by itself does not reduce poverty or inequality; lowering taxes on the rich does not raise the living standards of the poor; neither promoting a flexible labour market nor indulging corporate highfliers will produce a dynamic economy, (there is hardly any correlation between executive salaries and their firms’ performance, in terms of shareholder return or company profits); and neither reviving our lost social mobility, nor increasing equality of opportunity for the young, can ever be achieved until the vast inequalities of wealth and income in Britain are firstly reduced.

We are a nation of enormous talent and potential, but much of it squandered through inappropriate government policy and misguided leadership. Free market capitalism is important, but needs to be reined in to limit its more malign consequences and guide it to serve the interests of all in society. For example, public, social spheres, such as school playing fields or municipal property must be protected from the imperialism of market forces; not everything in life should be seen as a commodity. And by classifying essential, everyday goods as universal basic services (UBS), beyond the reach of normal market forces, important steps could be taken to creating a fairer, more equal society; this itself could increase economic dynamism by raising living standards and opportunities, as well as improving the morale of what is a growing underclass. Social life is not merely a matter of economics.

...as President Joe Biden concluded last year, My fellow Americans, ‘trickle-down’ economics has never worked.

Andrew Blackwood

Social Capitalism: The End of Neo-Liberalism and Where We Go Next is published by Austin Macauley at £14.99, and is available from bookshops in Sidmouth and Axminster.