| Subject: | [socialcredit] Frances Hutchinson | | Date: | Saturday, October 6, 2007 21:00:57 (-0700) | | From: | william_b_ryan <william_b_ryan @.....com>
|
In this recent article from Frances Hutchinson, she
mentions that the Secretariat had a "tidy sum" in
legacies when she became involved in 2001. Does
anyone have an idea what that "tidy sum" was, and what
has become of it?
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F_A_I_R__U_S_E__C_L_A_I_M_E_D
http://www.sustecweb.co.uk/current/sustec15-3/why_i_am_not_a_social_crediter.htm
Why I Am Not a Social Crediter
Frances Hutchinson April 2007
In making this personal statement I seek to support
Brian Leslie in his campaign against the fabrication
of untruthfulness which has descended upon the Green
Party of England and Wales. The truth may at times be
uncomfortable, even inconvenient, but it is never
harmful. Suppression of debate, on the other hand, can
serve no useful purpose: in politics, debate should
always be open and above board. There is no reason why
this rule should fail to apply in Green Party today.
As Voltaire so rightly said, "I abhor what you say,
but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
Following the recent events, in which the discussion
of ‘social credit’ ideas has featured, it becomes
necessary to explain my position.
After decades of campaigning for peace, co-operation,
green politics, women’s rights, third world issues,
education, local political autonomy, international
understanding environmental issues and justice
generally, at the age of fifty I became a
post-graduate student in the Department of Economics
at Bradford University. I reasoned that although each
issue was rich in its own literature, no substantial
changes in policy were forthcoming because one factor
overarched policy-making in each subject area – the
economy. I was advised by Mary Mellor, whom I had met
at a ‘red-green’ gathering in Manchester, to put my
general reading onto a more formal footing.
Having located a tutor – Brian Burkitt, Senior
Lecturer in Economics at Bradford – and paid the
registration fees, I was left with a problem. What
should I research? The whole of economics was too tall
an order. At the time, I was standing in local
elections as a Green Party candidate. When I discussed
Green Party policies with my elderly neighbour, Tommy
Tinkler, he said that concerns about protection of the
environment, notions of sufficiency as opposed to
unfettered economic growth, and basic income were
nothing new. It had all been said before in the 1930s
by "Major Douglas and social credit". Through
University Extra-Mural classes and a local social
credit study group which met weekly, he had studied
alternative economics, including social credit in such
detail that he was able, fifty years later, to provide
me with an outline of the basic ideas from memory. He
gave me The Monopoly of Credit by C. H. Douglas, some
copies of the national weekly The New Age, and of a
bi-monthly newsletter of the ‘Northern Greenshirts’,
printed in Keighley. Social credit was to become the
subject of my research for the next fifteen years.
Over a lifetime of study of the social sciences,
politics and economics, I had never heard mention of
social credit. Hence from the very outset of my
research there were unanswered questions. Tommy
Tinkler was astounded that I knew nothing of the
subject. Yet when I mentioned it to my father, retired
senior lecturer in economics, and to my tutor, both
knew what I was talking about immediately, though both
declared that "all that crank nonsense was over years
ago." Which it was. Douglas had been dead forty years.
Repeatedly, over the years, I was advised, in a kindly
sort of way, not to pursue the subject. I took no
heed.
In those pre-internet days obtaining information on
obscure topics was tricky. Through the library system
I located three books on social credit published
between 1953 and 1972. All three authors focused on
political events in Alberta, Canada, in the late
1930s, giving virtually no indication of what social
credit economics was about. Since no list of his books
appeared, it was clearly assumed that the reader
already knew what ‘social credit’ was about. I
collected copies of all Douglas’ books and articles
written between 1918 and 1924. Having analysed these
works I set out the economics and philosophy of social
credit. It all made very good sense. Here was an
alternative to business-as-usual, ‘I’m alright, Jack!’
growth-based, environmentally destructive capitalism
and socialism ‘as-we-know-it'. I went on to study the
world-wide debate between Douglas and leading
policy-formers in the early 1930s. And finally I
looked at the events in Alberta in 1935 when the
election of a Social Credit government brought social
credit onto the political arena.
Throughout my research I was sustained by the guiding
hand of Brian Burkitt, who is an authority on radical
economics in the inter-war years (see Brian Burkitt,
Radical Political Economy Harvester 1984). Nothing
would have come of my rambling researches without his
firm discipline, fund of knowledge, constant support
and sparkling sense of humour. Ten years ago, our
findings were published in The Political Economy of
Social Credit and Guild Socialism (Routledge 1997), a
refereed publication.
Once published, the book would, I thought, be snapped
up by green campaigners everywhere. And indeed, the
review published in Resurgence (No. 190,
September/October 1998, pp64-65) indicates, I was
justified in my opinion that we had presented a
readable and relevant account of the story of social
credit. However, the book was so highly priced that it
disappeared onto the shelves of university libraries,
and nothing more was heard of it in the popular
alternative press.
I continued my researches, writing two more books and
working with different co-authors. In the ten years
following from 1993 I gave papers at sixteen
conferences in ten different countries, and had eleven
papers published in refereed journals. Although I
worked with academics and alternative thinkers in the
voluntary sector, nobody was prepared to step outside
the mould of conventional economics. By the time the
‘post-autistic economics’ students started their
enthusiastic attack on the logical inconsistencies of
neo-classical economic theory (c2000/1), I was
beginning to lose heart.
In the meantime, with Brian Burkitt’s help, I put
together a module entitled "An Institutional Analysis
of Money" for second and third year economics
undergraduates. Based on the work of Clifford Hugh
Douglas and Thorstein Veblen, it proved very popular
with the students. The course contrasted the orthodox
approach to economics teaching, which is ‘institution
free’, with the realities of economic life where
economic agents operate within a network of man-made
laws and institutions. When it was suggested that the
course could form the basis of a book, Mary Mellor and
Wendy Olsen offered to help with the writing. In due
course The Politics of Money: Towards Sustainability
and Economic Democracy was published by Pluto Press in
2002. Although it received very few reviews, it is now
sold out.
In writing about social credit I had inadvertently,
become caught up in another agenda. In June 2002, as
we were on the point of sending the final draft of The
Politics of Money to the publishers, a draft paper was
circulated to the three of us and to all with whom we
were in professional contact. The paper, by Derek
Wall, currently Principal Speaker of the Green Party,
entitled "Social Credit: The Ecosocialism of Fools,"
was a collection of untruths juxtaposed with emotive
non-sequiturs. The gist of the paper was that Douglas
and all social crediters were anti-Semitic. Therefore
greens and all respectable academics should drop the
subject if they did not want to blight their careers
by being labelled ‘anti-Semitic’. With great
difficulty I persuaded Mary Mellor to continue with
the book, promising that I would research the
allegations fully. The quality of the Wall paper was
such that I felt certain it would never appear in a
respectable journal. I was wrong. For whatever
reasons, the editorial board of Capitalism, Nature,
Socialism published the paper, under the same title,
in September 2003 (Vol. 14, No. 3, pages 99-122).
In 2001, I had been landed with the editorship of The
Social Crediter, a periodical founded by Douglas in
the 1930s, and the Chairmanship of the Social Credit
Secretariat, set up as an educational body to promote
study of Douglas social credit. (Douglas was firmly
opposed to propaganda: social credit spread through
weekly study groups and guided coursework. See The
Political Economy of Social Credit and Guild
Socialism.) When I took over, the Secretariat had a
tidy sum of money left in legacies, but my
predecessor, Alan Armstrong, found himself unable to
enlist support for his work from politicians – because
of circulars making unfounded allegations of
anti-Semitism.
By now, I was thoroughly curious myself. A body of
economic theory presenting a sane alternative to
rampaging consumerism, disseminated through study
groups across the world, was to be studiously avoided
because it was - anti-Semitic? It just did not begin
to add up. Were the editors of academic journals,
their referees and the organisers of international
conferences on economics playing with fire when they
accepted my/our work for publication and discussion?
One journal, the Political Quarterly, is read by any
social scientist and politician worth their salt. Were
its editors failing in their duty to protect the
public from unsavoury material when they published
"The Contemporary Relevance of Clifford Hugh Douglas"
by myself and Brian Burkitt, in the October-December
1999 issue (Vol. 70, No.4, pages 443-451)? Would the
study of social credit really lead impressionable
people into setting up Nazi-style death camps? I was,
and remain, puzzled.
In the early years of the 21st century, people
continue to air their views and/or campaign on a whole
range of single issues: anti-war, anti-nuclear
weapons, animal rights, organic/local agriculture,
fair trade, slow/safe food, debt, poverty, racism,
feminism, conservation, ecology, alternative
medicines, education, diseases and disabilities which
have struck their own families – the list is endless.
Some pick up on Basic Income, Credit Unions, LETs
schemes, Grameen Banks and the like as ways out of
specific pockets of economic disorder. However, unless
and until there is a radical re-think about the
operations of the institutions of banking and finance
which now regulate all human co-operative activity,
the over-arching problems will continue to grow at a
far faster rate than individual solutions will be able
to solve. Social credit offers a starting-point – it
was never more than that – for a healthy debate about
ways forward into the future.
Although I advocate the study of Douglas’s writings on
social credit, and the study of the story of the
Social Credit movement, I do not claim to be a ‘social
crediter’, as this would imply the bigoted advocacy of
an unscholarly collection of dogma. On the same basis,
I do not claim to be a feminist, pacifist, ecologist,
economist or Marxist. What I do advocate most urgently
is the study of the works of leading writers on
feminism, pacifism, ecology, economics, including
especially Douglas, Thorstein Veblen, Karl Marx and
many others (see my published works for introductory
comment on the work of leading thinkers).
Until the early 1990s the Green Party was at the
forefront of debate on coherent alternatives to
business-as-usual capitalism and labourism. Only
through open discussion between people within and
outside the Green Party who have indeed studied the
works of leading thinkers across a range of writings
in economics will a sound, sensible and sustainable
economics policy platform emerge once again in the
Green Party. I have long admired Brian Leslie’s
dedication to the cause of engendering open-minded
debate. He has, as ever, my full support. I urge all
who share these concerns to back Brian Leslie in his
campaign to have Sustainable Economics re-instated as
the Newsletter of the Green Party Working Group of the
Green Party of England and Wales.
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In addition to having published numerous articles and
reviews in academic and other journals, Frances
Hutchinson is the author (with Brian Burkitt) of The
Political Economy of Social Credit and Guild Socialism
(Routledge, 1997) (Reprinted by Jon Carpenter, 2005),
(with Andrew Hutchinson) of Environmental Business
Management (McGraw-Hill, 1997), of What Everybody
Really Wants to Know About Money (Jon Carpenter,
1998), and (with Mary Mellor and Wendy Olsen) of The
Politics of Money: Towards Sustainability and Economic
Democracy (Pluto Press, 2002). She edits The Social
Crediter.
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|
Frances Hutchinson
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