Rural romanticism

The bibliography to Zac Goldsmith’s The Constant Economy includes The Trap by his father, Jimmy Goldsmith.

The bibliography to Zac Goldsmith’s The Constant Economy includes The Trap by his father, Jimmy Goldsmith. When it was published in 1993, The Trap caused a bit of a stir because it challenged the consensus that free trade and globalisation were good for mankind. But it also contained a deeper theme, that the world had become falsely enamoured of the commercialisation of science and technology. Goldsmith père protested not just that economic orthodoxy was wrong, but that society had become too materialistic and complex, too far from nature.

Since the early 1990s these anxieties have been given a new focus. Claims have been made that economic growth has led to ever-increasing consumption of fossil fuels, that this has increased the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere and that the extra CO2 represents a powerful ‘anthropogenic forcing’ (or man-made cause) in global warming. Taken to its logical conclusion, this kind of environmentalism is apocalyptic. The doomsters say that, if governments do not intervene in the process, continued economic growth will throw up even more carbon emissions, accelerate global warming and make the earth uninhabitable. The richer we are, the closer we are to ruining ourselves. Technology reaches its zenith and the end of the world is nigh.

In his new book Goldsmith fils repositions his father’s argument to fit the altered context. The aim of the anti-materialism is now to recognise nature’s limits and to protect the environment. The Constant Economy does praise certain kinds of technology, notably the technologies that reduce the energy intensity of consumption (or the energy per unit of output). But it also wants people to restrict consumption so that, even with energy per unit of output unchanged, the world’s carbon emissions would decline.

People, goods and money move between countries to a greater extent today than ever before. The modern age is, above all, an age of mobility made possible by the burning of immense quantities of fossil fuel. So, just as Goldsmith père was opposed to trade and globalisation, Goldsmith fils is a strong proponent of self-sufficiency and localism. Further, The Constant Economy tries to be much more than a statement of the facts. It is intended also as a programme of action, with the case presented not in ten chapters, but in ten ‘steps’.

Step four on ‘food quality, food security’ advocates local self-sufficiency in farming and food consumption. It gives some appealing and superficially plausible examples of how a more local approach can save resources. The discussion is then generalised into a critique of any transporting of food away from its area of production. The Royal Cornwall Hospital Trusts, which ‘already source 83 per cent of their food from local Cornish farmers’, are held up as a model, because so-called ‘food miles’ have been cut by 67 per cent.

But where does the Goldsmith agenda end? What is ‘local’ and what outside the locality? As a logical possibility, London’s hospital trusts could no doubt source 83 per cent of their food from local London farmers. This might involve demolishing many rows of houses in the East End in order to clear space for dairy farms and cabbage patches, but — logically, theoretically — it could be done. Practically the notion is of course daft. However, this doesn’t stop Goldsmith suggesting that diverting 20 per cent of the food expenditure of London’s 69 hospital trusts ‘would provide a boost for local farming’.

One blinks, until the explanation comes that the boost would be to ‘local farming and food businesses in the south-east [reviewer’s italics] of over £3 million a year’. Well, the south-east is not London. If London is entitled to import food from the south-east, one must ask where the south-east begins and ends. The south-east could include Peterborough. If so, why shouldn’t hospitals in the south-east corner of Cornwall import food from the south-western part of Devon, since the distance between them is a fraction of that between London and Peterborough? And on what basis is the south-east to be preferred as a NHS food supplier over East Anglia?

Does Goldsmith really sincerely believe that calculating the number of ‘food miles’ provides all the answers when bureaucrats have to decide how to spend this part of the NHS budget? Does it in fact provide any meaningful answers at all? Shouldn’t the decisions instead be taken according to supply (relative cost) and demand (patients’ preferences), even if supply and demand — those much maligned market forces — are difficult to evaluate in the public sector? Market forces have many faults, but allowing the multiple and isolated responses of numerous individuals to these forces is the best way of organising an economy that has so far been devised.

Both Goldsmith père and Goldsmith fils are rural romantics. Theirs is a form of conservatism that has been both sinister (in its contribution to German fascism) and quaint (in Joseph Chamberlain’s ‘radical programme’ of the 1880s). Despite its fallacies and confusions, this sort of nostalgia for a greener, simpler, easier past has been such a durable tradition on the European Right that it cannot be dismissed as mere crankiness. Rural romanticism has been given a new pertinence by the global warming debate. Zac Goldsmith’s The Constant Economy is a readable and interesting statement of a deeply flawed, if currently very fashionable set of beliefs.