Secularities and religions

As a brief way into helping managers and others at my university to think about how the university should handle matters of religion, I have tended to use a distinction I learnt from Phil Lewis who was our diocesan interfaith advisor when we were in Bradford. It  has proved useful in helping people to think about what they mean by "secular" when we talk about the university as a secular institution. What appears to be the default in many people's minds is that secular means to exclude religion. In Phil's binary this would be "hard secularism" and the explemplar national exponents would be France and Turkey who work to remove religious symbols and ideas from the public square. Religion can only be practised in private and can have no influence on public affairs.

The contrast, and the sort of stance we try to encourage people to take, is 'soft secularism'. The national exponent of this would be, in theory, India (though this is under threat) where the state remains impartial about religion but recognises that citizens come to the public square as, among other things, religiously-identified actors.

In this article, Building Ethical Bridges in a Secular Age | Comment Magazine | Cardus,  a three-part distinction in made using the words 'freedom' and 'religion' but varying the adjective between them.

• Freedom of religion—the state does not impose a religion on its citizens: there is no state religion. 
• Freedom for religion—the state does not restrict the free practice of religion by its citizens. 
• Freedom from religion—the state excludes religion and religious voices from the public square, in particular, in relation to law and public policy making.

I think that this is a useful way of thinking about it in a secular organisation. The final point, of course, is pretty much the "hard secular" approach. The first two are both "soft secular" approaches. The first point is about impartiality: not favouring one above the rest. The second point is about allowing all expressions to flourish. These first two points are complementary. However, the human rights approach does restrict the second by making clear that expressions that infringe the rights and freedoms of others are not covered. This reminds us that there is, in fact, a fine line between allowing religious expression and one or more of them becoming an imposition on others.

Beyond this the referenced article makes a case for a post-secular approach.
one of the arguments is this:

... we should point out that everyone has beliefs, so the argument that those with religious beliefs should be excluded from the public square because of those beliefs is discriminatory and anti-democratic. The new option, "none," in answer to the survey question about religious belief, reflects a belief system.

One of the reasons I became convinced of the importance in broad terms of a soft secular approach was noting how the hard secular approach was, covertly, an imposition of a particular viewpoint which has a bearing on religion. As such it functioned in a quasi religious way. In the European human rights framework, religion is paired with philosophical viewpoints. This would include "hard secular" approaches. To be truly pluralist and respectful of the rights of others, the hard secular approach has to be eschewed: it ends up imposing a particular religiously-significant stance on people who conscientiously may believe that their faith is supposed to have a public-square face.

It does require though, an acknowledgement that there are no easy answers. At least with the hard secular approach there is a clarity, even if it can be somewhat oppressive to religious actors. With a soft secular approach, the messiness of understanding, dialogue, compromise and negotiation is implied as no single solution will fit all societies and communities and over time the actors and circumstances and interpretations change, meaning that we will be engaged in constant monitoring, listening, learning and dialogue. But then, isn't that what human society is about anyway? Why should we expect religion and spirituality to be different in that respect?

Why our plutocrats aren't bothered by climate change

Of course! the reason for lack of real motivation and action on the part of our governments is that those in government are pretty much networked into the class of those who are making money by the current financial system.

Now, they might still be interested in stopping the worst and costly effects of the changes that climate change would bring about were it not for the fact that the way things are set up, there is a greater incentive to make money out of selling new stuff to those affected. You see, if you own the means of production, then producing more is more profitable. New homes, new crops, new clothing choices, and all changing rapidly as we work through the succession of effects. All of that means opportunities for selling stuff especially for those with the capital to invest in the new products. It's the same problem at base as with the way we count GDP: it shows up as 'better' for the economy measured by GDP to clean up pollution, for example, than to prevent it; cleaning it up produces measurable economic activity where as stopping it doesn't. And where do the profits from that measurable economic activity go?

In most cases these are people working with organisations, businesses, which do things like scenario planning. The scenarios will certainly include the cases of greater amounts of climate change (above two degrees C). These will then have sophisticated SWOT style planning applied to them. So I conclude that this planning has shown them that there are, from the point of view of profit, greater opportunities than threats in the scenarios which bear down on the poorer members of our global society. As a Friends of the Earth spokesperson said:

“Compensating coastal communities affected by climate change is simply a matter of social justice, ... At the moment, the government is dumping these costs on individual households and vulnerable communities.”Almost 7,000 UK properties to be sacrificed to rising seas | Environment | The Guardian:

This is just the pattern that we are already seeing: the cuts are being made at the expense of the poorer and more vulnerable and letting off the richer (and financially more resilient) from doing their fair share: we are not all in it together. Trickle down economics doesn't work but we are left with the attitude that once was justified by it: that enriching the 'entrepreneurs' is a Good Thing. Of course most of the entrepreneurs turn out to be rentiers not particularly adding any value to the economy as a whole and removing money from the economy by salting it away offshore.

The point we need to grasp is that if you are wealthy enough, you will feel that you can spend enough money to make sure you are shielded from the worst effects: it's easy to move home, easy to buy the stuff you need to deal with the effects, even relatively easy to employ private armies security to keep you safe from the civil strife. They can survive in a new medieval economy by becoming barons.

Pan, Hook and innocent cruelty

In this the panto season in Britain, a post involving a play that is often put on as part of a pantomime season offering may be apposite. I have a number of memories from early childhood  and quite a few from what I think of as mid-childhood (roughly primary school age). One of these was shaken loose by this article about Peter Pan in which early on we are told:

... the Boy Who Won’t Grow Up is—in actuality—a terrifying protagonist .Peter Pan’s “Greatest Pretend” is Heroism | Tor.com

It reminded my of my first reaction to the Peter Pan story when it was read at school in class (you know, that carpet time thing at the end of the day). I recall actually not liking Peter Pan very much. I remember thinking that he reminded me of school bullies: that sense of what I would now label 'entitlement', being full of himself and the carelessness for others. It all just seemed to me that the kind of characteristics I was, in most other parts of my life, being encouraged to emulate were spectacularly absent from this boy's character, not even in embryo were they there nor was this a story of a journey to wisdom on his part. And worse, this lionising of Pan seemed to be empowering to the attitudes of those who swaggered around the playground and the classroom assuming that if they could take it, it was theirs and if anyone objected, we were to be agressed into line.

Now I've got that flashback of my chest ...

The article linked to reminds us how never Neverland is some kind of virtual world (programmed by Tinkerbel who seems to be of a piece with Pan's negligent insouciance) with Pan at the centre.

Peter Pan is lord dictator of Neverland. His word is law. His adventures take precedence. His desires are paramount. Super fun as an avatar for any child, but what about everyone else who occupies space, who breathes Neverland’s air? What happens to the indians, the Lost Boys, the pirates? They are only relevant in terms of how they play into Peter’s story.

So in some way, fair enough: if it's his 'party' then he can be the centre of it. Note, though, there's an interesting Christological counterpoint we could explore on the back of this.

Not only, though, is he dictator; he is a kind of pagan god (I had to say it that way because I was intrigued as a child by his apparent naming for the Greek mythological god of woodlands).

Barrie states—in no uncertain rhetoric—that when the Lost Boys get too numerous, Peter Pan thins out the herd. ... . And we have to assume that he either deliberately leads them into danger, or that he does the deed himself.

Perhaps apt for a character who shares a name with a woodland god: a survival of some version of the fittest -fittest in this case to capture and hold Pan's interest. It really does feel like a version of a pagan sprite or deva has been narrated into this tale.

Again it is hard to avoid thinking of the this god's carelessness in contrast to another Centre of the/a world who self-empties and submits to death rather than condemning others to it and in order to bring life to those others.

So I found this piece somehow affirming of my 7 year-old self's distrust of Peter Pan. interestingly it was because, at that age, I was taking a view from the margins, from the point of view, more in a sense, of the lost boys who outlive their usefulness to Peter Pan and are 'thinned out' of the herd: I knew what it was like to be one of those.

So it is worrying to realise that this is still the world we live in. Emily Asher-Perrin, who wrote the article makes a good point (and I defer to her as she studies Barrie's Peter Pan as a life project, and I don't). I think it is right that what I was as a junior-school child reacting to was the heartlessness of Pan. Dimly aware that something was wrong about it. In this case, we are invited to consider ...

as Barrie states, Pan will always come back to steal our runaways and
lost boys, and will continue to do so as long as children are “Innocent
and heartless.” The genius of Pan’s tale, is that innocence does not automatically denote goodness. Instead, it makes a child’s lack of experience a very frightening thing after all.

it is that important point: innocence does not necessarily mean goodness. Not only children, but animals are innocent. However, the levels of what we would consider cruelty, exploitation and bullying in primate bands, for example, are horrific by our standards. 'Frightening' might be the right sort of term. indeed. But it is the discomfort of the fact that we are considering human children not chimpanzees.

But there's a further discomfort. In part we can see this played out in the film Hook (which I think is brilliant in many ways). Where we meet what turns out to be a grown-up Peter Pan who has been lured back into the grown up world by love. (In this context, this is an interesting reflection in itself: the way into goodness is through love). This Peter Panning (as he becomes) makes his living by mergers and acquisitions -as 'granny' Wendy says, he has become a pirate. But in this case, it is the grown-up who has become hardened against the simple delights of love and joyfulness who needs to discover the innocence of delight and, actually to rediscover the love of and for his own children. But the interest is in how the man mirrors the carelessness of the Pan though in this case by being lured into 'piracy' -a macho, game-playing, status-seeking heedlessness of human costs. So this discomfort, I'm saying, isn't about the cruel innocence of children but the fact that the selfish cruelty runs through into adulthood.


And there's a question as to how far it is right. I'm not convinced by this innocent lack of goodness. I think, theologically, I'm committed to the insight that goodness is basic and evil is dependent on, parasitic even, on goodness. There can be goodness without evil but no evil without goodness. Evil is always derived from, a twisting or negation of what is good. This is rooted, for me in the Genesis declaration, which the early church understood to rule out gnostic attitudes to the material world, that "It is good". So I'm suspicious of something that appears to see 'good' (and by implication 'evil') as human impositions on a 'neutral' cosmos.

But is that what the phrase 'innocent but cruel' implies? The word 'cruel' seems to be about a lack of kindness or love, well more than lack; in fact, will to harm or hurt. 'Innocent' however, seems to be about not having a will to wrong. So I'm wondering whether 'innocent cruelty' is not an oxymoron. But of course, the words attributed to Barrie are "innocent but heartless". So the question is about whether heartlessness is evil, in truth.  I've translated 'heartless' as careless and cruel, above. Is that fair?  Well, to me 'heartless' seems to mean something like 'lacking empathy' on the basis that 'having a heart' seems to mean being kind, understanding feelings or in some way having empathy. Not having a heart seems to involve being, to some degree, cruel. So I think that these are words sharing a huge amount of semantic overlap. However, I wonder whether cruelty has connotations of deliberate intention of harm whereas heartlessness has the same connotation: could it mean ignorant harmfulness?

All of which, to me, indicates that in Barrie's estimation, children lack empathy or fail to understand others' feeling and are unkind. But could that unkindness stem from simple inability to understand others' feelings and to have empathy. So, is their innocence, in fact, not having yet developed the capability to be empathic? But if so, then I'm not convinced: child development studies indicate children mirroring and matching emotions with those around them, particularly those with whom they share bonds. -Perhaps that is it: the heartlessness comes from not sharing bonds or not having developed them. If that is so, then the difficulty is one of failing to extend the circle of sympathy, perhaps of even refusing to. There may be a degree of willed carelessness arising from an inarticulate understanding that to do so would mean giving up the advantages that their 'lordship' can confer. Such power over others requires the cultivation of heartlessness, learning to suppress or evade sympathy. And perhaps this is what name-calling is about: a distancing mechanism; framing the other in a way that rules out empathy by emphasising distance and making difference a cause for repugnance.

So, it's not so much that children are innocent but cruel as that their (actually 'our') emergence from innocence involves distancing and suppression of empathy. Of course, this is why love of God and of neighbour is a cardinal virtue in many spiritual paths: it is not so much an attempt to restore innocence as to weigh against the creeping distancing and growing repugnance. Peter Pan is not testimony to innocent cruelty but to the loss of empathy and acquisition of the attitudes of objectifying others which allows us to instrumentalise them and even to justify cruelty.

I can't, however, leave it there. One of the other memories shaken loose by this article was that, having got over my dislike of the heartless Pan, I did manage to identify with one aspect of his character: the love of action-adventure. And it is here that I think that Pan's appeal to us really resides. When I watch my nephews playing rough and tumble, when I remember my own children doing the same and when I think about my own childhood, then I realise that it is the exuberance of physical movement and of pitting yourself against something that draws out your abilities particularly when it puts you in a story where you are winning the acclaim of others perhaps by rescuing them or winning a prize for them. (Of course the story may be one that justifies distancing, repugnance and cruelty). So where Pan scores for us as story is identifying with the sheer joy of physical expression and the excitement of deeds of daring-do, especially when these can be framed as the heroism of the smaller or weaker standing up to and defeating the mighty (Pan the child with a knife against the adult Hook wielding a sword). (Again, interesting to note a resonance with a gospel theme here). I guess this further illustrates, in fact, how evil is parasitic on the good.

There is something in this that resonates with the Biblical theme of growing in wisdom, perhaps.But that is an exploration for another post, perhaps.

The Green report: grammar schools for CofE clergy

 I have just in the last couple of days identified why it is that what  I think I know about the Green Report is bugging me. I should say, at the outset, that temperamentally I'm a reformer: I tend to think that things we have inherited are likely to have come to serve vested interests and to have succombed to Lord Acton's dictum about the corrupting potential of power else they become outflanked by human corruption. Therefore most human institutions are likely to need reform on a regular basis. The churches are not exceptions. The training and selection of church leaders is not exempted. That said, not all reform is good reform: sometimes reform further exacerbates problems or is itself illustrative of Lord Acton's Dictum.

So, I do not doubt that the Church of England's selection and training of so-called senior leaders needs to be looked at. Heck, I've even written about things that imply just that suggestion.

What I find myself concerned about is that what is proposed is a kind of grammar school system. The grammar school system selected a small number of children at age 11 to be sent for a more academic (potentially university facing) education, while the rest were assumed to be fit only for trades and educated accordingly. Now the problems with this system were many. One was that the number of places at a grammar school did not necessarily reflect the number of kids who might genuinely be university-capable leading to a situation where the talent pool might be bigger than the places offered -or potentially (but I suspect rarely) vice versa. So capable people were left behind. Sometimes these were people who, in the fulness of time, actually could have greater 'promise' than those selected at the relatively arbitrary age of 11.

Which brings on a second problem: differential development. That is to say that a number of children /young people don't develop intellectually in step with chronological age. A third and related issue is that many do not do well with the way that the test attempts to measure potential or may not be all rounders or may not be temperamentally suited to the kind of environment that the schools are. However, they may be people who are very well suited to all kinds of demanding roles requiring insight and intelligence.

And it looks to me like the Green report is inventing, in a sense, grammar schools for clergy with just these sorts of difficulties translated into an ecclesiastical key. The assumption of the kind of role wanted creates a narrower than necessary 'test' for entry. The restriction doesn't allow for the development of the whole population (of church leaders) in fair ways that recognise differences in development or even contextual wisdom.

To put it more practically: the system could end up selecting people who turn out not to be suitable but whose selection would then deprive others of the opportunities. It could end up missing people who should be serving by that kind of wider leadership but who don't appear to fit the criteria but in fact are the right sort of people for what God is trying to do with the church next. It might ignore people who mature into potential for the role later (but who won't be spotted because when they were 'taking their 11plus' they didn't look promising).

Worst of all, the selection process seems to be likely to produce a self-replicating 'elite'. It puts the cart before the horse: the process should be driven by a process of discerning the vocations of the whole people of God in order to get a sense of God's call to us as a whole church. We are then in a position to recognise and support the development of appropriate leadership (and evolution of structures, btw) which may well not be just like what has gone before or even what we think using a overly secular mindset (1). I think that the CofE already has a bias problem in discernment (towards certain kinds of educational and class backgrounds (and I don't actually expect women bishops to change this dimension of bias), this seems set to further institutionalise the bias to the prominent, the well-connected and the fortunately-circumstanced. I fear that all too often the apparent impression of a safe pair of hands in upper class social occasions is the main determiner of prima facie suitability.

We need the equivalent of a comprehensive school: where there is a much more fluid approach to setting, context, development and, yes, vocation. As we start to look to develop training more contextually, so that should apply to so-called senior appointments: we should expect that they would have a ministry development process which equips them as they go. Perhaps the most important quality would be a humility to learn and to work in teams. Everything else should be open to all church leaders according to inclination and need. And who knows, some God-borne surprises my result.

An open letter to advocates of the Green Report | Theore0
I think that some of the comments in the Church Times letters page support my concerns, though none of them use the image of grammar schools to tie together the concerns.

(1) I actually think that God sometimes speaks through the secular, but that there are some things where secular approaches can mislead us. I fear this may be one.

Mechanisims of trust building

It's eye-cathing to be told that The 21st C organisation will be small, decentralised and flat. The very opposite of the 20th C organisations that still cling on to power.  The article points to the software technology behind Bitcoin as having much greater potential applications. The individualising guarantee of uniqueness in the digital realm on which Bitcoin is built is something, it is argued, that can, in a sense, 'automate' trust by enabling people to have reasonable grounds to believe that other parties to agreements will play the part they agree to. This leads to the following scenario:

So the traditional corporate structure where investors, a board and a senior management team make the big decisions for a company might be challenged by an arrangement where groups of self-employed individuals with complementary skills and experience contract with each other to pursue a certain commercial project. The co-ordination, decision-making and operational matters usually handled by the corporate hierarchy would be managed by a combination of computer code and a diversity of individuals and organisations in return for material incentives such as an automatic share of profits. The trust required to ensure that all the contracted parties had the necessary skills and resources to fulfil their functions would be built into the very code and processes that facilitate the contracts just as conducting a transaction in bitcoin inherently provides the necessary guarantee of trustworthy payment.

What this helps us to see is that there is a good deal of many lager ceroporisations that is actually about enabling 'trust' and processing background information which is not core to the aims of the enterprise. It's probably the thing that triggers the common cry against bureaucracy: the sense that it is not very directly contributing to the core endeavours, merely supporting and even sometimes seeming to get in the way of 'actually doing'. It seems that this software solution could be the death knell for at least some administrators and middle management.

Precisely the same principles could, in fact, be applied to any area of common endeavour removing the need, for example, for hobby clubs to have an organising committee, political campaigns to have a central leadership, public services to have government appointed managers or even for social networks and search engines to have an office full of co-ordinators.

When we consider that one of the aims of a bureoucracy is to deal with processes fairly and even handedly, in fact without respect for persons, then this kind of solution is the ultimate in depersonalising administrative processes.

Of course the question is whether the programming can be up to it. I would guess that quite o lot of trial and error may need to be endured at first until blocks of programming which generally work for common kinds of joint enterprise are devised and can be called up and finessed relatively easily.

What will this do to the character of corporisations? Will it mean more smaller, leaner and shorter-lived enterprises? Will the ties so created be enough to form corporisations or will they be less than such?

At the moment I can't work out the answers, but I'll be watching out for developments.

See also article at RSA.

GenZ: what will it be like?

Well, I've certainly seen toddlers doing this. However, I have to say that I also find myself hovering, finger ready to tap when I read books. A family member confesses to having tried the reverse squeeze gesture (opening out finger from thumb) in order to see a magazine picture better (and obviously failing):

... some toddlers attempting to treat magazines like iPads and TVs like touch screens. So Gen Z will be tech-fluent in many ways, and certainly more connected than any generation before it. One consequence will be a multicultural a nd globally oriented mindset —even more so than the Millennials that preceded them. Kids are already Skyping with friends and family on the other side of the globe. A quarter of Gen Z participants in this study said all or most of their social-network friends live a plane journey away. Expect even more linguistic and cultural borrowings and consistencies across nations and regions. F_INTERNAL_Gen_Z_0418122.pdf

  So, while these things are undoubtedly true. We must be careful not to let them hide the continuities with our own experience. We must also be wary of thinking that it makes others somehow completely different to us. The truth is that many things remain the same. We still hunger and thirst, we tend to be attracted sexually to others, we normally desire physical closeness with others and we seek to establish emotional bonds with others for mutual support. Culture never takes those things away; it merely refracts them through varying mental contexts, artefactual opportunities and habitudes.

So yes, we need to understand the differences, but we need to do so in a way that does not alienate them from us. And by recalling that they are still trying to achieve common human things, the same sorts of things that we try to achieve, then it starts to help us to understand them. Only then should we try to get a sense of how the technology changes things, and in particular the way that they most automatically focus on the world and expect things to work.

Money creation: a reply to my MP

A month or so back I wrote to my MP on the back of the discovery that 75% of our MPs didn't actually understand the role of banks in creating money and the lack of control the government has over the money supply. My MP seems to have passed the test somewhat, though her reply gave me some pause for further questioning. Here's what I wrote to her having considered things a bit.

Thank for your response of 5 November to my email about money supply and banking.

It was heartening to see that you had clearly given consideration to the issue and could articulate a position which reaches beyond some of the popular (mis)understandings. I hope you'll be okay to consider and perhaps comment further on a handful of further points that, it seems to me, arise from what you wrote back to me.

I was intrigued by your use of the phrase 'banks are technically able to create money'. I wasn't sure just what the hedging adverb was meant to convey. To be clear: 97% + of the British money supply is created by bank loans. These loans while not notes or coins can be converted to notes and coins (though only a tiny fraction ever are, hence the figure just quoted), and the money so generated is spent (mainly electronically) into the British economy. If by 'technically' you mean to make a distinction to 'traditional' money consisting of notes and coins then, fair enough. However, if you mean something else, some further explanation might be needed.

Clearly, and perhaps this was what you were alluding to in mentioning market forces, the making of loans is a supply-to-demand issue. So in that sense I would agree that there is a demand-limited element to the creation of bank-money. However, there is more to be said about this.

One thing is that the elasticity of the demand is not simply related to actual economic activity but to perceptions of future activity. And of course the sub-prime lending issue indicates that latent demand is huge but some of it needs to be resisted. It is this latter issue that has prompted the concern of Postive Money and a growing network of economists (who recognise that the failure of many economists to predict the recession does place a question mark against some of the discipline's modi operandi and assumptions). Currently this perception is left to banks to manage and respond to and therein lies a difficulty: their aim is not to manage the economy overall well but to make profit and so the slip into ever riskier money creation strategies becomes nigh-on inevitable. This should have been a lesson drawn from history looking back to the global financial system before the Bretton Woods accords. From that perspective it is no surprise that the crash took place. It was only a surprise from the point of view of the current orthodoxy.

In addition, commenting on your remark about management of bank-created money supply via the BoE base rate. I think that it is worth remembering that this only really factors into the thinking of banks when they have to go to the BoE for a loan to maintain liquidity and this is actually something of a marginal activity and generally very short-term. So this particular lever is not a very powerful one most of the time. So the idea that this is regarded as an efficient and effective way to run a modern financial system is both increasingly and rightly contested and also contradicted by the evidence.

Therefore the issue of monetary instability can indeed, as you say, be seen as largely due to irresponsible loans and debts. But the issue is not just to make sure they are repaid, but to limit the risk-taking behaviour and mindset that encouraged those loans in the first place. Currently, the way that the banking and finance system operates, there are real incentives not to address that until we go over the event horizon of a further crash cycle.

That means that (given that economies are complex dynamical systems) while it is true to some extant, as you say, that the lack of housing creates property price inflation, we should not lose sight of the fact that supply is always relative to demand and so demand-side factors can and do affect price. So while I agree with your implicit recommendation to increase supply of housing, I fear that it could be rendered relatively ineffective unless we address the issue that property is seen as an investment attractive to the increasingly rich financial sector. This increases demand and contributes, I would argue, significantly to housing inflation (personally I think that a land value tax, such as used to be Labour Party policy, ought to be considered to help address this and other issues related to rentier behaviour, but that's another conversation).

So, I think I agree with you about regulation of the banks and the restriction of lending. However, I am not sure that you are proposing to  significantly-enough pull back the ability of banks to, bluntly, create money. One thing that gives me pause for concern about your reply is the phrase “how much that money is leveraged”. To me 'leverage' means using a financial asset to create a further financial product or package. I wondered whether this was an allusion to fractional reserve lending? If so, I would have to say that it would be misplaced as, in effect, it is not the way that loan creation works any longer. I know that our economics textbooks often give it as an example, but it's out of date. There is no fractional reserve system. If you are talking about the run-away growth in derivatives, I tend to agree that action is needed there too.

Putting that aside to one side, I think that the real issue is of accountability (if you'll pardon the pun). Money supply should be seen as a public good and managed for the benefit of society as a whole and either not in the gift of private, for-profit, enterprises to arrange according to their own business plans and estimations of risk which are clearly blindsided at regular intervals and only tangentially and sporadically serve the common good. So, I think that we need to substantially return money creation to a democratically accountable system analogous to the legal tender approach to notes and coins but extended into the electronic realm.

Now it may be that what you have in mind in terms of regulation and controls might amount to that.  I'd be interested to hear your comments. In the run up to the election, I intend to ask all of the candidates for this constituency about this issue.

So that is what I wrote. On reflection, I didn't express well the issue about supply and demand in relation to bank loans. it would have been simpler to say, simply, that the banks' tendency toward profit pushes towards more finance tied up in riskier loans because demand is potentially infinite and only limited by price, in effect.

A further consideration I had thought about including but didn't in the end was to point out the disadvantage of money created by loans to be repaid at interest. Margrit Kennedy (free book outlining some of the issues here). In here book Occupy Money, she points out that by creating money as debt, we introduce automatically interest into the pricing of virtually the whole economic system. In effect, the banks are taxing us through practically every financial transaction. Her estimates are that in some cases this is compounded into quite significant price inflation. (Remember this next time banks propose to charge you to hold a current account). So restricting banks' ability to create money through loans could mean that we collectively subsidise the financial system's fat cats rather less.