The post offices and the guilds

When the new economics marks up a small victory, it seems to me we should claim it – even though others have been involved.  And there is no doubt that the decision by consumer affairs minister Ed Davey to end the programme of post office closures is a victory.

For years now, nef has been arguing that local post offices play a critical role in the local economy.  Our research in Manchester suggested that they seem to mean the difference in up to £300,000 in extra money flows per urban ward.

The fact that the Government now accepts this argument is a major step in the right direction – all the more so now that there is to be an announcement about a programme of investment in local post offices.

Now we have to make sure that this investment includes the launch of a national post bank, like those in New Zealand and Italy.

What is far less expected, and really hardly predictable, is the apparent conversion of Ed Davey’s Conservative colleague John Hayes, another minister in the Department for Business Innovation and Skills – which we all used to call the DTI – to the radical philosophy of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

This is what he said:

Within living memory, the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker were all someone in the local community, alongside the bank manager, the lawyer and the schoolteacher.

But these days, in most of this country, the hard-won skill of the individual has been subsumed into the anonymous, impersonal supermarket or out-of-town megastore.

But history shows us that there is an alternative.  When industrialisation was reaching its zenith in this country, it provoked a reaction which eventually became known as the Arts and Crafts movement.

This movement, too, recognised the unbreakable link between satisfaction in work and quality of life. Its proponents considered the dehumanising effects of mass production in their own time and sought to recreate what they saw as a happier period for working people. A period when their skills were recognised, valued and freed to produce great art.

He went on to quote William Morris, who – along with John Ruskin – might be considered the grandfather of the new economics.

But there is more.  The purpose of the speech, at the RSA, was to set out the government’s intention to launch a new guild movement, as the basis for the new crafts apprenticeships that they are so keen on.

The Guild Socialism movement is long gone.  So is the Distributist movement that took up the same baton in the 1920s, though it shows some signs of a revival.  But only a few months ago, nef was organising a meeting about what we can learn now from medieval economics and the guilds were high on the list.

It is now a century or so since the Guild Socialists set out their platform in the New Age, in opposition to the Fabians who populated the New Statesman.  It seems extraordinary, after so long, that their language might have found its way into a speech by a Conservative trade minister.

I look forward with interest to his proposals for tackling the “anonymous, impersonal supermarket or out-of-town megastore”.