corporate responsibility

"At a conference organised by the Building Research Establishment, I witnessed an extraordinary thing: companies demanding tougher regulations, and the government refusing to grant them. Environmental managers from BT and John Lewis (which owns Waitrose) complained that without tighter standards that everyone has to conform to, their companies put themselves at a disadvantage if they try to go green. “All that counts”, the man from John Lewis said, “is cost, cost and cost.” If he’s buying eco-friendly lighting and his competitors aren’t, he loses. As a result, he said, “I welcome the EU’s Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, as it will force retailers to take these issues seriously.”(6) Yes, I heard the cry of the unicorn: a corporate executive, welcoming a European directive."



And what's more there are examples of inventiveness that are just waiting for the right [regulatory] environment to be turned into resource-saving reality [including 'a virtually silent wind turbine, which hangs, like a clothes hoist, from a vertical axis. It can be installed in the middle of a city without upsetting anyone']. As one of the protagonists says, “none of this is going to happen if the market is left to itself.”. In fact we should recall markets are rarely 'left to themselves' there is always a regulatory structure; weights and measures, trades descriptions, contract, legal redress, and that's before we get onto the various subsidies and tax regimes virtual or actual that try to ensure just and humane working of the system. The old names for deregulation were banditry, piracy, theft, fraud, slavery etc.



The issue is not to regulate, it is how to regulate. The point of the historic regulatory frameworks which we so take for granted that we forget they are there and necessary, is to make trade work fairly and to protect the lives, health and wellbeing of consumers, workers, bystanders and producers. It seems to me that this kind of regulation is about all of that.

This is not an issue that we want new Labour machismo about.

George Monbiot � A World Turned Upside Down: