G20 - what else?!

Yesterday, Dave Walker, Church Times Blogger and Cartoonist, asked on his blog what question we would like to put to G20 leaders. Mine was "If stimulating the world economy means people buying things they don't need with money they haven't got, what's the point?" I wrote an article along these lines in a Parish Magazine when everything went wrong with the economy in the early 1990s, but clearly no-one in power read it, so here we are again, only things are even worse this time.

I have enormous sympathy for anyone who has lost their job, or is on short time, or in negative equity as result of the economic downturn, and I can fully understand the feeling that we need to get the banks lending so that things can be produced and sold, and the good times can return. Yet at the same time, we know that all this consumption damages the environment, and does nothing to help the poorest people in the world.

We are regularly given statistics on how much we waste - food we throw away, clothes we don't wear - and then there are all the perfectly serviceable electrical goods that we replace just because we want the latest model. I have heard a number of interviews in the media recently in which people who have been hit by the credit crunch have been talking about the fact that it has made them ask themselves if they really need something - before they buy it.

While I don't want to sound like a sanctimonious (or parsimonious!) dinosaur, I find it hard to imagine ever doing anything else! This does not mean that I live without mod-cons, I just don't replace them until they stop working. I doubt that a brand new washing machine would get my clothes any cleaner than my 12-year old one; arguably a new one could be slightly more energy efficient, but a life-time's use would not compensate for the pollution caused in making it. I wear my clothes until they fall apart - "we've noticed" I hear you cry! - and am still driving the 8-year old car that I've hated since the day I bought it. I do not only do this because I believe it is the way that we should live in a finite world, or because I believe that we should all give a proportion of our income to the church and/or charity. It also, totally selfishly, means that I can afford outings with friends and family, holidays, books, theatre trips, and other things that I enjoy. You can have a lot of nice meals out for the cost of a flat-screen TV!

When Gordon Brown and others talk about stimulating the economy, they mean going back to a time when people bought without first asking the question "do I actually need this?" We have the opportunity to change the world and achieve something that all the recent prosperity in the developed world has failed to do - give people who cannot even buy the things that they do need the chance to do so. And we could reduce the world's carbon emissions, land fill, toxic waste, etc, by not manufacturing and disposing of so much. But this would need a complete re-think of how we do things, otherwise the millions of people world-wide, who have relied on all this excess consumption for a living, will be plunged into unending poverty. I don't doubt that the world leaders meeting in London have the combined intellect to achieve such a re-think, but sadly I do doubt that they have the will.