Mary Portas goes shopping

I have just read Mary Portas' report on high streets. It's truly a lightweight document. It's especially patchy on what it is Portas thinks we want high streets for. Reading it as a transport campaigner, I was shocked by her repeated assertion that one way forward is to have cheaper car parking - ie compete with edge / out of town shopping centres to attract car borne shoppers. Portas brushes aside environmental concerns about increased car use. OK this report is not a transport report, but if Portas thinks that the great car economy will come and save us she is way behind the curve. She should Google peak oil and learn how oil production is falling year on year, as are discoveries.

The report is light on sources, and it would also appear that Portas has not considered the work of Sustrans showing that non car-borne shoppers represent a greater proportion of spend than most people think.

But for an RBE blog I need to dig deeper, and ask what human need do high streets uniquely address. Portas rightly says they should be social spaces, but constantly seems to have one eye on the perceived need for more shopping to be done, both overall and in high streets. The real main message of the report seems to be that if people don't go shopping retail will decline and then people won't be able to go shopping so much. A circular argument.

In the days when people had to go shopping, probably daily, in their local shops, the social function was a corollary. Now it has to be the high street's main offering. The constant references to having a cup of coffee in the discussion of local economies is because we usually link socialising with eating/drinking. People are doing an  increasing proportion of their socialising in cyberspace, where it can readily be blended with entertainment.

Portas doesn't really get at why we would want to save high streets, because she doesn't examine what human need would not be fulfilled if we didn't have them. Where we need to start when examining how we organise society is with how to sustainably meet human need. That is how an RBE approaches societal change and development.

Corruption

It is a weak but unfortunately common argument technique to play down or ignore the advantages of something you are against, play up the disdadvantges of it, and do the opposite of the thing you are in favour of.

This is seen a lot by critics of TZM/TVP especially when they light on money, because of course in an RBE there would be no need for money, and some proponents see actively getting rid of money as a transitional step in bringing in an RBE.

Undeniably money was introduced for practical reasons - a means of exchange, a store of value, a unit of accounting - the classical purposes of money - and it is counter intuitive to claim to be able to do without these functions. [In an RBE we would account for every resource. Difficult, maybe, but look at all the intellect and technology that goes into finance and weaponry. Imagine if that was diverted towards fulfilling human need and measuring sustainability].


To balance the claim of the usefulness and inevitability of momey we can look at corruption as one example of something an RBE would eradicate. I saw a TV programme about black South Africans in shanty towns. Some of them were bribing officials to get what we would call a coucikl house. One family fetaured had applied for and been allocated a council house, only to find that the house was already occupied bu someone (equally desperate) who had 'bought' the house - ie bribed an official.

In an RBE there would be no money to bribe people with, and with resources shared fairly no desire to be bribed. With human needs put first there would be no-one living in a slum. Opponents of an RBE need to put their cards on the table. Do they actually want a world where human needs are met and corruption is designed out? If so, they need to fit it into the monetary system, where scarcity (in this example of decent homes) brings an opportunity to make money.

Free market capitalists often argue that their favoured system will eventually benefit all, but this promise of jam tomorrow doesn't seem likely to be fulfilled based on experience so far. And given that human need is not being well enough fulfilled the while the limited resources of the planet are being squandered as if they were limitless, I say we try something else. Maybe no system has so far been beter than capitalism, bt this doesn't mean no better system is possible.