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399. Piddington and the Natural Emergence of Localism

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The Government proposes to accommodate as many as 1,256 male asylum seekers at a former military site near Piddington in Oxfordshire. The village itself has a population of only about 350. The proposed centre would therefore be several times larger than the existing community.

Residents say that they have not been adequately consulted. They are concerned about safety, transport, policing, medical services, sewage and the character of their village. Their campaign has included a symbolic referendum on leaving the United Kingdom.

The central issue is not whether every fear expressed by every resident is justified. Nor should people seeking asylum be treated automatically as criminals or enemies. Most are individuals caught within a system which they did not create.

The deeper issue is one of scale, consent and authority.

A national government has decided that a very small locality should absorb the consequences of national asylum policy. Central government determines the policy, selects the site and controls the money. The locality is then expected to cope with many of the practical and social consequences.

Piddington’s response is therefore about more than immigration. It is also a reaction to remote government and the limited influence which local people have over decisions that directly affect their lives.

Immigration as the trigger

Immigration and asylum policy have become the immediate triggers because their consequences are experienced in particular places.

National politicians discuss annual totals, legal obligations, processing capacity and the cost of hotel accommodation. Residents experience the policy differently. They consider its possible effects upon roads, medical services, policing, public transport, water and sewage. They ask whether the scale of the proposal is compatible with the capacity of their locality.

A national total can appear manageable when viewed from Whitehall. The same policy can become overwhelming when a large part of it is concentrated in one small place.

The proposed Piddington centre would not gradually introduce a few families into an established community. It would place a large, predominantly male and temporary population beside a village containing only a fraction of that number.

Whatever one’s opinion of immigration, it is reasonable to ask whether such a concentration is socially and practically sustainable. It is also reasonable to ask whether concentrating so many asylum seekers in one isolated place is in their own interests.

The Government may regard the former military site principally as an available piece of property. Local residents regard it as part of the place in which they live. That difference helps to explain the conflict.

From residents to a locality

Localism often begins when people discover that they share a common interest.

Until an outside decision substantially affects their surroundings, residents may have little reason to organise. They live in the same place, but they do not necessarily act together.

A crisis can change this. Meetings are held. Information is exchanged. Local knowledge is collected. Responsibilities are accepted. People who seldom spoke to one another begin working together.

A collection of individual households starts behaving like a locality.

That appears to be happening at Piddington. Residents are not merely complaining as individuals. They are asserting that their community has an identity, a voice and a legitimate right to influence decisions affecting its future.

The symbolic independence referendum will have no constitutional effect. Its importance lies in the message it conveys. If national government will not listen adequately to the locality, the locality must find democratic ways of making itself heard.

This is one of the ways in which localism emerges. It is seldom introduced according to a government timetable. It develops from below when national institutions appear unable or unwilling to respond to particular local circumstances.

Part of the evolution of the UK economy

Piddington should also be considered within the wider evolution of the UK economy.

The industrial economy encouraged centralisation. Abundant energy, expanding tax revenues and economic growth enabled governments to construct large national systems. Decisions about housing, transport, health, energy and population could be made centrally because the State appeared to possess the resources needed to manage their consequences.

That period is ending.

Energy, materials, public services and government finance are becoming less affordable. The gap between national promises and local capacity is consequently growing.

Central government may announce a policy, but it cannot easily provide another doctor’s surgery, additional police officers, more buses, improved drainage or the social relationships needed to make the policy work. These cannot be created merely by issuing instructions from Whitehall.

A shrinking economy makes scale increasingly important. A policy that might have been absorbed during decades of expanding services becomes much more disruptive when existing services are already stretched.

Immigration is exposing this change, but it did not create the underlying weakness. It reveals the declining ability of the centralised State to match national decisions with local resources.

The same pattern is likely to emerge in other fields. Localities will increasingly organise around food, care, housing, water, energy, transport and employment. They will do so because national systems are becoming too expensive, too complicated and too remote to meet every local need.

This does not require a political revolution. It is an economic and social evolution. Responsibilities will move towards the locality because that is where many essential needs must ultimately be met.

Local consent must carry weight

Localism does not mean that every locality can ignore the interests of the rest of the country. Britain will continue to require national functions, including defence, border administration, taxation, justice, telecommunications and specialist medical services.

It does mean that national policy must recognise the physical and social capacity of individual places.

A genuinely localist asylum policy would ask several questions before selecting a site:

  • What population can the locality reasonably accommodate?
  • What services and infrastructure already exist?
  • Who will pay for the additional demands?
  • Can newcomers be accommodated on a human scale?
  • Have local residents been involved before the decision is made?
  • How will the interests of both residents and asylum seekers be protected?
  • What responsibilities and resources will remain within the locality?

Large concentrations imposed with little local involvement are the opposite of localism. Smaller-scale accommodation, supported by adequate resources and shaped through local consultation, would have a better chance of succeeding for residents and newcomers alike.

No locality can possess an absolute right of refusal over every national responsibility. Equally, central government should not possess an unlimited right to impose radical change upon a small community simply because a convenient site is available.

There must be balance, proportionality and genuine consultation.

A lesson from Piddington

Piddington is not yet an example of a fully developed localist economy. Its campaign is primarily defensive. Nevertheless, defensive action can awaken a sense of local responsibility.

The relationships and practical experience created by the campaign may later help residents work together on transport, medical provision, food supplies, energy or care. They may recognise that the difficulties revealed by asylum policy also affect many other centrally managed services.

The importance of Piddington is therefore not confined to the immigration debate. It demonstrates how a national policy can stimulate the recovery of local identity and collective action.

Localism will not necessarily arrive because Westminster decides to introduce it. It is more likely to emerge because communities find it necessary to safeguard their capacity, resources and social cohesion.

Immigration and asylum policy may be the triggers at Piddington. The underlying cause is the growing tension between centralised decision-making and local circumstances.

As the UK economy contracts and the resources available to government diminish, similar disagreements are likely to arise elsewhere. Communities will increasingly question whether decisions made at national level take sufficient account of local capacity.

Piddington may therefore be a small early sign of a much larger evolution. It points towards the gradual recovery of local initiative as an increasingly overstretched central State finds it more difficult to manage every consequence of its policies.

This is not the rejection of national government. It is the development of a new balance. National government will retain the functions that only it can perform, while localities assume greater responsibility for the practical conditions of everyday life.

That is how localism is most likely to emerge: not through revolution, but through necessity.

398. The Shift Is Not Ideological. It Is Structural.

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The Shift Is Not Ideological. It Is Structural.

Much of the academic discussion about post growth assumes a deliberate transition. The language is about “choosing” degrowth, redesigning capitalism, or voting for ecological limits.

But what if the transition is not optional?

In the UK and other mature industrial economies, several forces are already in motion:

  • Ageing populations
  • Declining discretionary spending power
  • Infrastructure decay
  • Energy constraints
  • Stagnant productivity
  • Rising maintenance costs
  • Fiscal pressure on the state

These are not ideological. They are structural.

The future is not a government programme. It is an evolution already underway.

Government Does Not Lead Structural Contraction

Historically, governments lead during expansion. They stimulate, borrow, build, and promise.

But during contraction:

  • Tax revenues weaken.
  • Welfare demands increase.
  • Borrowing capacity tightens.
  • Political promises become harder to sustain.

In such conditions, governments do not shape growth. They manage decline.

The economy sets the pace. Government follows.

This is closer to historical experience in long stagnations than to the optimistic tone of degrowth theory.

The Cultural Shock

The real issue is not economic technique. It is mindset.

For seventy years, the UK has assumed:

  • Next year will be richer than this year.
  • Property will rise.
  • Consumption will expand.
  • Public services will grow.
  • Pensions will be funded by a larger workforce.
  • Mobility will increase.

If the underlying economy is shrinking in real terms, those assumptions quietly break.

And that break is not temporary.

What Changes in a Shrinking Era

If contraction is structural and prolonged, then values gradually shift:

Instead of expansion:

  • Maintenance becomes central.
  • Repair replaces replacement.
  • Longevity replaces novelty.

Instead of rising revenues:

  • Hard prioritisation emerges.
  • Universal provision becomes targeted.
  • Informal support systems grow.

Instead of mobility and scale:

  • Local provision strengthens.
  • Travel reduces.
  • Small units become viable again.

This is not a manifesto. It is adaptation.

The Foreseeable Future

The critical point is permanence.

If shrinkage is cyclical, governments can wait for recovery.

If shrinkage is structural, they must adapt permanently.

And so must households.

The political danger lies in pretending expansion will return. The practical wisdom lies in recognising that the system is evolving into a lower throughput economy and planning accordingly.

That means:

  • Resetting expectations.
  • Rewriting fiscal assumptions.
  • Accepting that some activities will not return.
  • Valuing stability over growth.

This is not degrowth as policy.

It is contraction as condition.

And it is likely to shape the foreseeable future.

395. The Energy Crisis Will Be a Crisis of Affordability

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This article was prompted by Gail Tverberg’s important essay, “Affordability, Not Scarcity, Is the Real Energy Crisis”, published on Our Finite World. Her original article, including its charts and detailed historical analysis, should be read at the link.

The conventional picture of an energy crisis is one of physical shortage. Oil wells begin to run dry, petrol prices soar and queues form outside filling stations. Governments respond by searching for new supplies or subsidising alternatives.

Tverberg presents a more complicated and much more disturbing possibility. The immediate problem may not be that the world has no oil, gas or coal left. It may be that the economy can no longer afford to extract and use them at the prices producers require.

Energy can therefore become unaffordable in two different ways.

If its price rises sufficiently to cover the increasing cost of extraction, transport and processing, households and businesses cannot afford to buy enough of it. Demand falls and the economy contracts.

If its price falls to what consumers can afford, producers may be unable to justify investment in new mines, wells, pipelines, refineries and power stations. Production then becomes financially unviable.

There may be plenty of energy remaining underground, yet no price at which the whole system works satisfactorily.

Energy and economic growth

The industrial economy did not develop independently of energy. It was created by the growing availability of relatively cheap coal, oil and gas.

Cheap energy allowed mechanised farming, mass manufacturing and long-distance transport. It supported the growth of large cities and international supply chains. It enabled rising wages, expanding consumer markets and the construction of millions of homes. Credit could expand because lenders expected future economic growth to make debts repayable.

Tverberg connects periods of rapidly growing energy consumption with rising living standards. She also identifies troubled periods when energy consumption grew slowly or contracted. These periods were associated with financial crises, political instability, wars and the failure of governments.

This does not mean that energy alone explains every historical event. It does suggest that political and financial systems become much harder to sustain when the energy available to support each person is no longer increasing.

Our present arrangements were built during an age of expansion. They depend upon continuing expansion. Governments, pension systems, banks, property markets and businesses all make promises based upon the assumption that tomorrow’s economy will be larger than today’s.

If the economy is shrinking instead, many of those promises cannot be honoured.

Why low prices are not necessarily good news

We are accustomed to regarding falling oil prices as beneficial. They reduce the cost of transport, heating and production.

In a weakening economy, however, a low oil price may be evidence that households and businesses lack purchasing power. People travel less, buy fewer cars, postpone buying homes and reduce discretionary spending. Factories produce less and freight movements decline.

Falling demand then pushes energy prices below the level needed by producers. Investment is cancelled. Older fields continue to decline and new supplies are not developed quickly enough.

The apparent abundance may therefore be misleading. Oil is available, but only because fewer people can afford to use it. Meanwhile, the productive system required to maintain future supplies is deteriorating.

This explains why scarcity and affordability cannot be separated from the wider economy. A barrel of oil has no economic value unless someone can afford to buy the products made from it. Equally, an oilfield cannot continue operating unless its income covers the cost of machinery, skilled labour, finance and replacement infrastructure.

The debt problem

Debt has allowed governments and households to postpone recognition of the affordability crisis.

Borrowing creates additional spending power in the present. It can support house prices, consumer spending, public services and business investment even when underlying prosperity is weakening. But borrowing is a claim upon future production.

If future production does not grow, the debt becomes harder to service. Governments borrow more to cover existing commitments. Businesses refinance loans that cannot realistically be repaid. Households devote a rising proportion of their income to mortgages, rent, energy and food.

Eventually, borrowing ceases to disguise contraction and begins to intensify it. Banks become cautious. Investment falls. Property prices weaken. Unemployment increases and tax receipts decline.

The financial economy may continue to report growth for a time, particularly when inflation is included. The material economy can nevertheless be shrinking underneath it.

The implications for the future

The future may not be characterised by one dramatic moment when energy suddenly runs out. It is more likely to consist of repeated losses of affordability.

People will give up discretionary purchases first. New cars, holidays, restaurant meals, entertainment and non-essential household improvements will become less frequent. Businesses dependent upon these purchases will contract.

Housebuilding will suffer because the combined cost of land, materials, energy, labour, finance and regulation exceeds what buyers can afford. Existing property prices may also weaken as mortgages become harder to obtain and household incomes come under pressure.

Governments will face the same difficulty. The cost of maintaining roads, hospitals, schools, defence, pensions and public administration will rise while the tax base becomes less dependable. Borrowing may postpone reductions, but it cannot permanently replace the productive economy from which public revenue ultimately comes.

Large projects will become particularly vulnerable. High-speed railways, data centres, complex renewable-energy systems and major urban developments require huge quantities of energy, materials, finance and specialist labour. A government may announce them, but completion and continued maintenance are separate questions.

Global supply chains will also become less reliable. Higher shipping, insurance and financing costs must be absorbed somewhere. Consumers may be unable to pay more, while producers and farmers cannot indefinitely accept less.

The result is likely to be declining variety as well as declining quantity. Goods that depend upon complicated international supply systems may disappear long before the basic materials from which they are made become physically exhausted.

The localist response

Tverberg describes the economy as a self-organising system. When one form of economic organisation becomes unworkable, people do not simply stop living. They find different ways of meeting their needs.

This is where localism becomes important.

Localism is not a government scheme for reproducing the present economy on a smaller scale. It is the natural reorganisation of economic life around what remains necessary, affordable and locally possible.

Food production, repair, care, basic building, water management, woodland work and small-scale energy provision will become relatively more important. Discretionary employment will decline, releasing people who will need to find useful work closer to where they live.

Localities with fertile land, water, practical skills, workshops and strong social relationships may be more prosperous in real terms than places which retain high financial incomes but depend completely upon distant supplies.

Prosperity will have to be understood differently. It may consist less of the number of new products purchased and more of secure food, maintained homes, dependable neighbours and access to essential services.

National government will remain necessary for activities such as defence, telecommunications, specialist medicine, intercity rail and the maintenance of a common legal and monetary framework. But it may no longer possess the resources to organise every aspect of life from the centre.

More responsibility will fall upon localities, families, small businesses and informal networks. This will not necessarily happen because government deliberately chooses localism. It will happen because centralised systems become too expensive and unreliable.

Preparing for a different economy

The importance of Tverberg’s argument is that it moves the discussion beyond the simple question of how much energy remains.

The decisive question is how much useful energy society can afford after meeting the costs of obtaining it. If those costs rise while household purchasing power falls, the industrial economy can contract even though substantial physical resources remain.

Governments will continue to describe each difficulty as temporary. They will promise renewed growth through borrowing, technology or investment. Some innovations will undoubtedly help. But technology cannot remove its own dependence upon energy, materials, infrastructure and paying customers.

The sensible response is not to attempt to predict an exact date for collapse. It is to make households and localities less dependent upon systems whose affordability is deteriorating.

The future may contain less energy, less mobility and fewer material choices. It need not contain less human purpose. As the growth economy loses its ability to provide, people will begin to rebuild economic life around necessity, proximity and sufficiency.

Localism will not prevent the shrinking economy. It is how we may learn to live within it.

394. When Complexity Becomes Fragility

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Two apparently unrelated events tell us something important about the decline of the industrial era.

A technical failure in Britain’s air traffic control system caused delays and cancellations across the country. At the same time, Jaguar Land Rover announced plans to remove about 4,000 jobs over two years as it seeks £1.7 billion in savings. Its difficulties include competition from Chinese manufacturers, tariffs, high costs and the immense expense of developing new electric vehicles.

Neither event means that aviation or motor manufacturing is about to disappear. Both, however, illustrate the vulnerability of an industrial economy that has become extraordinarily complex.

A small failure with national consequences

Britain’s airspace did not run out of aircraft, pilots, fuel, airports or air traffic controllers. The disruption arose because of a failure in the flight-processing system operated by NATS.

That single system sits at the centre of an enormous network. It must receive flight plans, identify aircraft, calculate routes, avoid conflicts and pass reliable information to controllers. It connects airports, airlines, pilots, computers, communications networks and control centres.

When it falters, the consequences spread almost immediately. An aircraft that cannot leave Heathrow may be needed for a later flight from Edinburgh. Its crew may exceed permitted working hours. Passengers miss connections. Baggage is separated from its owners. Hotels fill. airline booking systems become overloaded. Disruption spreads to airports in other countries.

NATS said that the fault on 8 September was in its flight-processing system and that, although a fix had been implemented, recovery would take time. NATS statement

This is the nature of a highly interconnected system. The immediate fault may be small, but its consequences are not.

The efficiency trap

Industrial civilisation has spent two centuries increasing productivity by increasing specialisation.

An airline does not make its own aircraft, engines, computers or aviation fuel. A motor manufacturer does not produce all its own steel, glass, electronics, batteries and software. Each depends upon thousands of specialists, scattered across many countries.

This arrangement can be wonderfully efficient. Components are produced wherever skills, labour and capital can be most profitably combined. Stocks are kept low. Machinery is used intensively. Computer systems coordinate everything.

But efficiency and resilience are not the same thing.

A resilient system contains spare capacity, alternative suppliers, duplicate equipment and stocks that may never be used. These appear inefficient when accountants examine them. The pressure to reduce costs therefore removes much of the redundancy that could protect the system when something goes wrong.

The result is a tightly coupled economy. Almost everything depends upon everything else.

Jaguar Land Rover and the complexity of the modern car

The same problem can be seen at Jaguar Land Rover. The company is reportedly planning about 4,000 voluntary redundancies, nearly a tenth of its worldwide workforce, as it attempts to reduce costs. Reuters report

A modern Land Rover is no longer simply a mechanical vehicle. It is a computer-controlled system incorporating semiconductors, sensors, software, cameras, emissions equipment, communications technology and electronic safety systems. An electric version requires batteries, critical minerals, power electronics, charging equipment and an adequate electricity network.

The factory itself is only the visible centre of a much larger organism. Around it are toolmakers, component manufacturers, software companies, energy suppliers, transport businesses and specialist engineers. If one essential component is unavailable, a production line costing millions of pounds may have to stop.

JLR’s experience of a damaging cyberattack in 2025 demonstrated another aspect of this dependence. Digital systems make production quicker and more controllable, but they also create new ways in which an entire business can be interrupted. The more activities that are joined through one computer system, the more extensive the consequences when it fails.

Its present difficulties are not caused by complexity alone. Chinese competition, American tariffs, changing consumer demand and the costs of electrification all matter. Yet these pressures themselves reveal the scale of modern industrial dependence. A British factory can be placed in difficulty by decisions made in Washington, subsidies paid in Beijing, minerals mined in distant countries and software failures that may originate almost anywhere.

Complexity requires a large surplus

Complexity does not maintain itself for nothing.

Air traffic control requires secure buildings, computers, communications equipment, software, electricity, trained engineers and constant updating. Motor manufacturing requires mines, refineries, chemical works, ports, roads, electricity networks, research laboratories and global finance.

All of this depends upon the economy producing a substantial surplus beyond the immediate requirements of food, shelter, heat and basic care.

During the expanding industrial era, abundant fossil energy made that surplus possible. Coal, oil and gas enabled machines to perform work that would otherwise have required enormous amounts of human and animal labour. Increasing energy use supported longer supply chains, greater specialisation and more layers of administration.

In a shrinking economy, the difficulty is not necessarily that energy or materials cease to exist. It is that their cost consumes a growing share of what the economy produces. Less surplus remains to maintain the complicated systems built during the age of expansion.

Maintenance is then postponed. Old computer systems are patched instead of replaced. Skilled workers are lost. Spare capacity is removed. Manufacturers reduce staff and suppliers operate on narrow margins. Organisations may still appear to function normally, but their resilience gradually declines.

Failures become more frequent and recovery becomes more difficult.

Failure does not remain in one sector

We often discuss aviation, manufacturing, electricity, telecommunications, finance and public services as though they were separate activities. In reality, they form a single interdependent system.

A factory depends upon electricity. The electricity network depends upon digital control and telecommunications. Telecommunications depend upon electricity and imported equipment. Employees depend upon transport. Suppliers depend upon banks and computerised payments. All depend upon people being fed, housed and cared for.

This creates the possibility of cascading failure:

  • A computer fault disrupts flights.
  • Cancelled flights prevent workers and components reaching their destinations.
  • A factory closes temporarily because a component has not arrived.
  • Its suppliers lose income.
  • Employees reduce their spending.
  • Local shops and services lose customers.
  • Government receives less tax while demands for assistance increase.

No single event causes the decline of the industrial economy. Decline emerges from the accumulating interaction of thousands of such difficulties.

Can technology solve the problem?

The conventional answer is to add more technology. Old computers will be replaced by newer ones. Artificial intelligence will monitor networks. Vehicles will become more automated. Factories will use more robots. Supply chains will be digitally mapped.

Some of this will undoubtedly help. But every new technological layer also requires energy, hardware, communications, software, skilled maintenance and protection against cyberattack.

Technology can reduce one form of complexity while creating another. A mechanical control that can be understood and repaired locally may be replaced by software that is more efficient but depends upon distant specialists and systems. The immediate task becomes easier, while the supporting structure becomes larger.

The question is therefore not simply whether a new technology works. We must ask whether the whole system required to support it can remain affordable and dependable in a shrinking economy.

From maximum efficiency to sufficient resilience

The lesson is not that Britain should abandon aviation, advanced engineering or motor manufacturing. Some large and complicated systems will remain essential. But we may have to operate fewer of them and protect them more carefully.

Critical national systems need genuine fallback arrangements. Businesses need alternative suppliers, stocks of vital components and the ability to continue some operations when digital systems fail. This will cost more and may reduce apparent productivity. It will nevertheless make the economy less vulnerable.

At the same time, activities that do not need to be organised nationally or globally should be brought closer to the people who depend upon them.

Food production, repair, care, small-scale manufacturing and many everyday services can be organised within localities. Shorter supply chains will not eliminate failure, but they will make failures easier to understand and contain. A locality that retains practical skills, workshops, food production and human relationships possesses forms of resilience that cannot be downloaded from a distant computer.

The economy of the future may therefore contain two distinct levels.

There will remain a national core responsible for such things as air traffic control, telecommunications, intercity rail, defence and specialist medicine. Around it, a much larger part of everyday life may gradually become more local, simpler and less dependent upon continuous long-distance coordination.

The warning

The grounded aircraft and the difficulties at Jaguar Land Rover are not isolated misfortunes. They are warnings from a system approaching the limits of affordable complexity.

The industrial era taught us to admire scale, speed, specialisation and efficiency. The coming era may place greater value upon durability, repairability, spare capacity and local competence.

Complex systems will not vanish overnight. Nor should they. But as the economic surplus contracts, we will be forced to choose which complexity is essential and which can no longer be afforded.

Localism is not an attempt to recreate the past. It is a practical response to a future in which the enormous supporting structures of industrial civilisation can no longer be taken for granted. The aim will not be to preserve maximum consumption at any cost. It will be to secure a sufficient and worthwhile life with systems that ordinary people and their localities can understand, maintain and trust.

393. National Shrinkage and the Uneven Growth of Localities

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The shrinking economy will not affect every part of the United Kingdom in the same way or at the same speed. National statistics will record falling prosperity, weakening tax revenues, declining discretionary employment and increasing pressure on public services. But these national figures will conceal a much more varied process taking place within individual localities.

Some localities will continue to grow, at least in terms of population, food production, practical employment and social cohesion. Others will shrink rapidly. Some may become extremely poor, while a smaller number retain considerable wealth. Between these extremes will be many places undergoing repeated adjustment as people, skills and resources move in response to changing conditions.

This will not be a planned redistribution directed from the centre. It will be an evolutionary process.

National shrinkage will not be evenly distributed

Economic shrinkage is usually discussed as though it will descend uniformly upon the country. National output falls, real wages decline and public expenditure becomes less affordable. It is then assumed that every household and every place will become proportionately poorer.

That is unlikely.

The national economy is an aggregation of very different local economies. Some depend heavily upon discretionary spending, long supply chains, commuting, tourism, financial services or government expenditure. Others possess productive land, water, woodland, workshops, useful buildings and people with practical knowledge. Some have strong social connections. Others consist largely of isolated households whose relationships are mediated through employers, public agencies and commercial services.

As the formal economy contracts, these differences will become increasingly important.

A locality that loses a large office employer may experience an abrupt fall in money incomes. Shops may close, house prices may fall and tax receipts may decline. Yet if the locality has access to land, practical skills and a willingness to reorganise, it may gradually replace some of the lost formal activity with food production, repair, care and small-scale manufacturing.

Another locality may initially appear prosperous because its residents have accumulated pensions, investments and valuable property. But it may lack food-producing land, water, affordable housing and people capable of maintaining its physical systems. Its monetary wealth may disguise a deeper dependence upon distant supplies and outside labour.

The real strength of a locality will therefore not be measured simply by the amount of money circulating within it. It will be measured increasingly by what it can provide for itself.

Growth within shrinkage

The United Kingdom can shrink while particular localities grow. This is not a contradiction. It depends upon what is meant by growth.

A locality may experience falling financial turnover while increasing its production of food, firewood, clothing, tools and essential services. It may have fewer supermarkets but more market gardens. It may have fewer professional care companies but more people providing care within families and neighbourhoods. It may have fewer new products but much more repair and reuse.

Such a locality would be shrinking according to conventional economic measurements. Yet its ability to support its inhabitants could be increasing.

Local growth in a shrinking national economy will not resemble the growth of the industrial age. It will not necessarily involve rising consumption, expanding credit or increasing house prices. It will mean the growth of useful activity.

There may be growth in:

  • local food production;
  • the number of people engaged in practical work;
  • repair and maintenance;
  • shared equipment;
  • small workshops;
  • household and locality energy production;
  • woodland management;
  • care provided close to home;
  • informal exchange;
  • apprenticeships and the transfer of skills;
  • relationships of trust and mutual obligation.

This activity may not be fully captured by Gross Domestic Product. Some of it may not involve money at all. But it will determine whether a locality is merely becoming poorer or is becoming more self-reliant.

National shrinkage may therefore be surprisingly difficult to see in the more successful localities. People will know that imported goods are less available, that travel is more expensive and that national services are deteriorating. Yet everyday life may remain tolerable, and in some respects improve, because essential needs are being met more directly.

People may have less money but more useful work. They may buy fewer prepared foods but have better access to locally grown produce. They may travel less but know more of the people around them. The economy will have shrunk, but life will not necessarily feel like continuous decline.

De-layering the local economy

This process can be understood as de-layering.

The formal economy has inserted numerous layers between the person who does useful work and the person who benefits from it. Social care provides a good example. The person receiving care pays, directly or through taxation, for much more than the time of the carer. The cost may also include management, regulation, property, transport, finance, debt servicing and profit.

The same is true of food. The price paid by the consumer includes processing, packaging, advertising, distribution, refrigeration, supermarket property, finance, management and profit. Some of these functions are necessary within the present system. But many do not produce food.

As energy and financial resources become less affordable, these layers will contract. The process may be disorderly, but it will encourage a shorter relationship between production and use.

Food grown close to where it is eaten requires fewer layers. A person caring for someone nearby does not require a national company to organise every hour of assistance. A local craftsperson repairing an implement avoids the energy, materials and finance required to manufacture and distribute a replacement.

The successful locality will not preserve every feature of the formal economy. It will retain the useful core while shedding unaffordable complexity.

Migration as a judgement upon localities

Population movement may become one of the clearest signs of how individual localities are coping.

People have always moved towards places offering food, work, shelter and security. During the era of industrial expansion, this generally meant movement towards towns and cities where monetary employment was concentrated. In a shrinking economy, the direction of movement may become less predictable.

Some towns will continue to attract people because they possess housing, workshops, markets, rail connections and established institutions. Some rural localities will attract people because they offer land, water, food production and practical work. Other places will lose population because they cannot provide affordable essentials.

Emigration from a locality will be a visible judgement upon its conditions. Immigration will often indicate that people believe they can establish a tolerable life there.

This judgement will not always be correct. A place may attract newcomers because it appears wealthy, only for its dependence upon external supplies to become apparent later. Another may lose young people during a period of severe difficulty, even though its land and resources give it good long-term prospects.

Movement will also be constrained. Poor people may be unable to move. Wealthier households may retain homes in attractive places while obtaining their essentials from elsewhere. Older people may remain because of family connections or because moving is physically impossible. Population movement will therefore be an important measure, but not a perfect one.

Over time, however, the movement of people will help shape the new local pattern. Skills will move as well as numbers. A locality that attracts growers, builders, carers, mechanics and craftspeople may strengthen itself. A locality that drives such people away through high housing costs or lack of access to land may become weaker, despite retaining substantial financial wealth.

Localities of wealth and poverty

National shrinkage will not abolish inequality. It may initially increase it.

Some localities will contain large concentrations of property, savings and political influence. They may be able to secure scarce supplies for longer than poorer places. They may employ people from outside to maintain their houses, gardens and personal care. For a time, they may seem insulated from the national decline.

But wealthy localities will face a fundamental question. Are they merely places in which wealthy people live, or are they functioning communities capable of providing essential goods and services?

A locality of expensive houses but few workers cannot sustain itself. If carers, growers, cleaners, builders and repairers cannot afford to live there, its financial wealth becomes a claim upon labour imported from elsewhere. As transport and energy costs rise, that arrangement becomes increasingly fragile.

Poorer localities will face different problems. They may contain unemployed people, derelict land and empty buildings, yet lack the finance and organisation needed to bring them together productively. Their poverty may be severe even when useful resources are physically present.

The decisive issue will be access. Who may use the land? Who may occupy empty buildings? Who owns the tools? Can people obtain the small amount of capital needed to begin producing? Are local rules designed to enable useful activity, or do they protect arrangements inherited from the age of growth?

Extreme local poverty will not always result from a complete absence of resources. It may result from the inability of people to gain access to them.

Homelessness during the breakdown of the formal system

Housing may reveal one of the most painful contradictions of the shrinking economy. People may become homeless even while houses and other buildings stand empty.

The formal housing system depends upon wages, mortgages, rents, property values, credit and state support. As discretionary employment contracts, increasing numbers of people may be unable to maintain rent or mortgage payments. They may lose their homes before any alternative local system is ready to receive them.

This could create a period of severe but temporary poverty.

Someone expelled from the formal economy may have no recognised job, little money and nowhere secure to live. Yet that same person may later become essential to a local food system, care network, building group or repair workshop. The difficulty is the interval between the loss of the old livelihood and the creation of the new one.

Grass-roots food systems cannot appear overnight. Land must be made available. Soil must be improved. Tools, seeds and knowledge must be obtained. Growing has to follow the seasons. Storage and distribution must be organised. People accustomed to specialised formal employment need time to learn different skills.

During this interval, destitution could exist alongside the early stages of local renewal.

Homelessness should not therefore be interpreted as evidence that people have become unnecessary. It is evidence that the formal system has discarded them before the emerging system has found a way to use and support them.

This is where a continuing national core and functioning local institutions will be vital. Temporary shelter, basic food, healthcare and access to land can prevent a period of disruption from becoming permanent exclusion. The object should not be to preserve every feature of the failing formal system. It should be to keep people alive, sheltered and capable of taking part in the new one.

The danger of failed localities

Not every locality will evolve successfully.

Some may be trapped by poor land, water scarcity, contaminated sites, unsuitable buildings or isolation from transport. Others may possess adequate physical resources but lack cooperation. Powerful owners may prevent access to land and buildings. Existing groups may exclude newcomers. Crime, intimidation or political conflict may prevent productive activity.

A failed locality may enter a downward spiral. Useful people leave. Essential services deteriorate. Property is abandoned. Those who remain become older, poorer and less able to restore the physical fabric. Food and energy must still be brought in, but the locality has less to offer in exchange.

The national government will not have the resources to rescue every place by recreating former patterns of employment. Nor can it design a uniform local economy from the centre. It can, however, maintain the framework within which local recovery remains possible.

This includes basic law, defence, a workable currency, intercity rail, telecommunications, specialist healthcare and a minimum system of income or essential provision. It may also require measures preventing usable land and buildings from remaining idle while people lack food and shelter.

The purpose of national government in a shrinking economy will increasingly be to preserve the conditions for local evolution.

Local success will have different forms

There will be no single model of a successful locality.

A rural locality may depend upon mixed farming, woodland, village workshops and small food-processing businesses. A market town may serve as a centre for exchange, repair, healthcare and education. A former industrial town may reuse its terraces, railway connections, warehouses and workshops. Parts of cities may reorganise into closely connected urban localities, using allotments, markets, repair centres and shared services.

Each will develop according to its geography, buildings, history, people and natural resources.

This is why localism cannot be delivered as a standard national programme. Government may enable it, but it cannot prescribe its detailed form. The process will involve experiment. Some arrangements will work and be copied. Others will fail and be abandoned.

Successful localities will also exchange with one another. Localism does not mean complete self-sufficiency. Few places can provide everything they need. The aim is to shorten essential supply chains and reduce dependence upon complex systems, not to eliminate trade.

A food-producing locality may exchange with a town possessing workshops and medical facilities. Woodland localities may supply timber and charcoal. Coastal localities may provide fish. Railways and waterways may connect these different economies using less energy than the present road-based distribution system.

The national economy will become less uniform and more like a network of distinct but connected localities.

A new measure of prosperity

The success of this evolution cannot be judged primarily by house prices, retail sales or financial turnover.

A prosperous locality in the shrinking economy will be one in which ordinary people can obtain food, shelter, warmth, care and useful work without depending upon long and fragile chains. It will retain skills, support children and older people, maintain its buildings and land, and produce enough of value to exchange for what it cannot provide itself.

Its inhabitants may own fewer consumer goods. They may travel less and have lower monetary incomes. Yet they may be more secure than people living in apparently wealthier but highly dependent places.

The most important division may no longer be between nationally rich and nationally poor. It may be between localities that can evolve and those that cannot.

Evolution rather than a master plan

National shrinkage is already beginning to weaken the systems built during the age of cheap energy and expanding credit. The consequences will not follow a neat timetable. Neither will they be identical throughout the country.

Localism will emerge unevenly. It will advance where necessity, resources and human cooperation come together. It will falter where access is denied, practical knowledge has been lost or social relationships have broken down.

There will be periods of hardship. People may lose formal employment and housing before new local systems are sufficiently developed. Some localities will become much poorer, while others retain wealth or discover new forms of material security. Migration will increasingly reveal which places offer a viable future.

But national shrinkage does not require every locality to experience unrelieved decline. Within the contraction of the formal economy, there can be growth in food, care, repair, skills, cooperation and genuine usefulness.

This is the central possibility offered by localism. A country may become financially poorer while many of its localities become more capable of meeting human needs. What appears from the centre as national economic decline may be experienced locally as adaptation, simplification and renewal.

The future will not be distributed evenly. It will be made, locality by locality, through the evolutionary response of people to the condition

389. Cutting the State in a Shrinking Economy

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A recent Daily Telegraph editorial argues that cutting public spending must become the central issue in British politics. National debt is estimated to have passed £3 trillion. The cost of long-term borrowing has risen sharply, while debt interest consumes money that can no longer be spent on defence, healthcare or other public services.

The newspaper welcomes Reform UK’s proposal to reduce annual government spending by £80 billion. It also approves of Conservative plans to restrain welfare spending while increasing defence expenditure. Its conclusion is that the British state is consuming ever more resources while delivering increasingly disappointing results.

The financial warning is justified. The Office for Budget Responsibility has acknowledged that debt-interest spending has reached post-war records as a proportion of both government revenue and national output. It has also become exceptionally volatile. Higher interest rates can therefore upset the public finances very quickly. The original Telegraph editorial can be read here.

However, the political debate still avoids the more fundamental question. What if economic growth cannot simply be “unleashed”?

The assumption that growth will return

The conventional argument is that government should cut spending, reduce taxes, remove regulations and allow the private economy to grow. Economic growth would then raise tax revenues and make the remaining public services affordable.

This assumes that the underlying productive economy is merely being restrained by bad government. Remove the restraints and expansion will resume.

But Britain may be facing something much deeper than poor economic management. The industrial economy depends upon abundant and affordable energy, raw materials, transport, infrastructure and credit. As these become more expensive, a growing proportion of economic activity must be devoted simply to maintaining existing systems.

The economy may continue to appear to grow in money terms while producing less real prosperity. Government borrowing can disguise this for a time. So can rising house prices, financial speculation and expanding public expenditure. None of them creates the affordable energy or physical resources upon which productive activity ultimately depends.

If the economy is shrinking structurally, no government will be able to restore the growth rates upon which its promises are based.

Spending cuts will come anyway

In that case, public spending will eventually be reduced. The choice is not necessarily between spending cuts and continued abundance. It may be between planned adaptation and disorderly contraction.

When government borrows to maintain services that current taxation can no longer support, it transfers part of the cost into the future. Interest then becomes another permanent claim upon future taxpayers. Eventually, lenders demand higher returns because they see that the state’s commitments are growing faster than its ability to pay.

The bond market is therefore not merely expressing a political preference for a smaller state. It is exposing an affordability problem.

Nevertheless, announcing a large figure such as £80 billion does not explain what should disappear. Every item of government spending supports somebody’s income. A departmental economy may mean the closure of a local office, the loss of a bus service, fewer carers, less road maintenance or the disappearance of a small rural school.

Badly designed national cuts can weaken precisely those local structures that will be needed as the economy contracts.

What should be cut?

The first distinction should not be between public and private activity. It should be between the essential and the discretionary.

Britain will continue to need defence, basic healthcare, water, food production, essential transport, telecommunications, law, taxation and the maintenance of vital infrastructure. These functions may have to be delivered more simply, but they cannot safely be abandoned.

There is much greater scope for reducing the machinery constructed around them. Layers of administration, overlapping authorities, consultancy contracts, constant reorganisations, excessive reporting systems and grand projects with doubtful practical value all consume resources.

Government must also reconsider whether it can continue trying to manage every locality through elaborate national systems. Central administration is expensive because it attempts to impose uniform procedures upon places with very different circumstances.

Cutting local capacity while preserving central bureaucracy would be the worst possible outcome. It would leave people with fewer services but no greater ability to provide for themselves.

Spending must move closer to necessity

A shrinking economy requires a smaller national state, but not an absent one. The national government will still be responsible for functions that cannot sensibly be undertaken locally. These include defence, monetary affairs, national taxation, major railways, telecommunications and highly specialised medicine.

Many other activities should move closer to the locality. Food production and processing, basic care, housing maintenance, smaller schools, minor roads, local transport, repair workshops and some forms of energy supply can be organised nearer to the people who depend upon them.

This would not merely transfer existing bureaucracy from one tier to another. Localities would have to recover the freedom to decide what they genuinely need and what they can afford. Solutions would differ from place to place.

One locality might give priority to food production and a small bus network. Another might concentrate upon fisheries, forestry, water management or the repair of existing buildings. A town might convert empty shops into workshops, health rooms and food markets.

Success would no longer be judged solely by the amount of money spent. It would be judged by whether essential needs were met.

Welfare and the loss of employment

Reducing welfare spending is particularly difficult in a shrinking economy. Discretionary employment is likely to disappear before essential employment. Retailing, hospitality, advertising, entertainment, financial services and parts of the digital economy may contract as households have less money left after paying for food, energy and housing.

Simply withdrawing benefits will not create conventional jobs that the wider economy can no longer support.

The answer must include enabling people to undertake useful local work. This could mean food growing, care, maintenance, woodland management, repair, reuse and small-scale manufacturing. Some of this work may produce relatively little taxable money while making an important contribution to local survival.

A government that recognises only formal employment and monetary output will misinterpret this development as economic failure. In reality, it may represent the beginning of a more resilient economy.

A different political debate

The Telegraph is right that Britain cannot continue borrowing and spending as though growth will always rescue the public finances. But the argument cannot end with a competition over which party promises the largest cut.

The real debate concerns what the national state must continue to do, what it must stop doing and what it should allow localities to do for themselves.

Public spending will have to fall because the resources supporting it are becoming less affordable. Yet indiscriminate austerity would accelerate decline without creating anything to replace the services being lost.

The purpose of spending reductions should therefore be to preserve the essential national core while releasing local initiative. Government must become smaller at the centre while localities become more capable, practical and self-reliant.

Britain cannot cut its way back to the former growth economy. It must reduce its financial commitments while helping a different economy to emerge: one founded upon local resources, essential production, sufficiency and the quality of everyday life.

388. When House Building Ceases to Pay: What the Viability Crisis Means for Localism

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The conventional housing model depends upon continual economic growth. A developer buys land, obtains planning permission, installs infrastructure, builds houses and sells them at prices sufficiently high to cover every cost while leaving an acceptable profit.

The Home Builders Federation’s report, The Viability Crunch, suggests that this model is beginning to fail across substantial parts of England and Wales.

The Federation calculates that additional taxes, regulations and rising material and labour costs have added as much as £76,000 to the cost of building a typical house since 2020. It cites research suggesting that conventional house building is financially unviable across 48 per cent of the country and faces viability difficulties in a further 16 per cent. Typical housing schemes are therefore viable in little more than one-third of English local authority areas.

The Home Builders Federation represents the building industry, so its recommendations naturally reflect the interests of developers. Nevertheless, its figures point towards something more fundamental than a dispute over planning regulations.

The national housing machine is faltering

Government housing policy assumes that granting more planning permissions will produce more houses. But planning permission does not make an unprofitable development profitable.

Developers build only when completed houses can be sold for enough to cover land, materials, labour, finance, taxation, environmental obligations and infrastructure contributions. If household purchasing power is weakening while these costs continue to rise, the calculation no longer works.

This is particularly serious in parts of the Midlands and northern England, where house prices may be too low to support present construction costs. The strange result is that houses may be desperately needed but cannot be supplied through the commercial market.

A national housing shortage can therefore coexist with land that has planning permission, builders who need work and families who need homes. The missing element is not physical capacity. It is financial viability.

This is one more indication of the shrinking economy. The monetary value of a completed house can no longer be assumed to rise fast enough to absorb every additional cost imposed upon its construction.

Development will become increasingly uneven

Where building remains profitable, investment will be concentrated. This is likely to be in localities with high incomes, wealthy purchasers, strong employment markets or an influx of people able to bring money from elsewhere.

Other localities may receive very little new housing, even where their existing population needs it. Young people may be forced to leave because homes are unavailable or unaffordable. Older people may remain in houses larger than they require because suitable smaller homes have not been built.

This could divide the country into pockets where conventional development remains profitable and much larger areas where it does not.

Central government may respond by increasing subsidies, reducing requirements or pressuring planning authorities to approve more land. But none of these measures resolves the underlying problem if construction costs remain above what local people can afford.

A threat to local communities

The immediate consequences could be damaging.

Fewer homes will mean fewer opportunities for local families. Small builders may disappear because they are less able than national companies to absorb delays and rising costs. Building trades may lose employment. Contributions towards roads, schools, drainage and affordable housing may also decline.

Large developers may concentrate on standardised estates in the most profitable locations. Such development is designed primarily around the national housing market, mortgage finance and car travel. It does not necessarily meet the needs of the locality.

There is also a danger that government, desperate to meet national targets, will overrule neighbourhood plans and local objections without ensuring that the resulting schemes are financially deliverable. Localities could lose control over land while still receiving few of the homes they actually need.

The opportunity for localism

The failure of the national development model could eventually encourage a different approach.

A locality does not merely need a numerical allocation of houses. It needs particular kinds of homes for particular people: modest houses for young families, smaller homes for older residents, accommodation for carers, homes connected with farms and small businesses, and housing that can be maintained with locally available skills and materials.

Instead of asking how many houses a national developer can profitably sell, the starting question could become:

What homes does this locality need in order to remain a functioning community?

That change of question has far-reaching consequences.

Land might be released at a value related to local housing need rather than its speculative development value. Community land trusts, housing co-operatives, local authorities and small builders could play a larger part. Some homes might be self-built or completed gradually. Existing buildings could be subdivided, extended or converted. Groups of cottages might share heating, water, workshops, gardens and other facilities.

Local builders could use designs suited to the climate, landscape and available materials. Houses might be smaller, simpler and easier to repair. Construction could provide apprenticeships and maintain practical skills within the locality.

This would not remove the cost of building. Safety, accessibility, water conservation and protection of nature remain important. But decisions could be made together, at locality level, rather than arriving as an accumulation of separate national demands, each considered worthwhile but with little regard for their combined effect.

Housing as local infrastructure

In a shrinking economy, housing can no longer be treated principally as a financial asset. It must increasingly be regarded as part of the essential infrastructure of a locality.

A community cannot maintain farming, food processing, care, education or small manufacturing if the people doing those jobs cannot afford to live nearby. Housing policy must therefore be connected with the future economic purpose of the locality.

Some localities may need homes tied to essential work. Others may need to renovate empty properties rather than build large estates. Towns may convert redundant offices and shops. Rural areas may need small groups of cottages close to farms, workshops and local services.

The appropriate solution will differ from one locality to another. That is precisely why a rigid national model is becoming less useful.

From developer viability to community viability

The Home Builders Federation asks whether a development leaves an adequate return for the builder and an incentive for the landowner. Those are legitimate questions within the existing system.

Localism asks a broader one: will the locality itself remain viable if the homes it needs are not built?

The answer cannot be found simply by relaxing planning control or subsidising the established development industry. It requires new relationships between landowners, builders, residents and local government. It also requires society to accept that rising land and house prices cannot remain the foundation of housing provision indefinitely.

The house-building viability crisis is therefore both a warning and an early sign of change. The growth economy produced housing as a national investment product. A shrinking economy will increasingly require homes to be created as durable, affordable and useful parts of a locality.

The future may involve fewer large estates and more small, locally determined developments. They will not be judged merely by the profit they produce, but by whether they provide sufficient homes, sustain essential work and allow the locality to endure.

387. Small Nuclear Reactors, Localism and the Shrinking Economy

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The decision to manufacture steam turbines for Rolls-Royce’s small modular reactors in Newcastle is important. It will return a major engineering capability to Britain after an absence of more than 20 years.

Siemens Energy plans to make the turbines at the historic Parsons Works. The investment is expected to create 550 skilled jobs. The factory will also service the turbines throughout their working lives, providing employment that could continue for decades.

The turbines will be used in three Rolls-Royce small modular reactors planned for Anglesey. Further reactors may be built in the Czech Republic and Sweden. Each reactor will be capable of generating 470 megawatts.

This is encouraging news for British manufacturing. It also raises an important question. How does such a large, centralised project fit into a future shaped by localism and a shrinking economy?

Localisation is not necessarily localism

Rolls-Royce describes the decision as part of its commitment to localisation. Manufacturing the turbines in Britain will certainly reduce dependence upon overseas production. It will create British jobs and help to rebuild a domestic supply chain.

That is localisation, but it is not quite the same as localism.

Localism is the movement of economic and social activity towards the places where people live. It involves local food production, care, maintenance, education, workshops and small businesses. It reduces dependence upon distant suppliers and energy-intensive transport.

A 470-megawatt nuclear reactor is not a local power station in this sense. It requires national finance, international supply chains, specialist regulation and connection to the national electricity grid.

The reactors will be situated in Anglesey, but their electricity will not belong principally to the surrounding communities. It will enter the national system and be distributed according to national demand and commercial arrangements.

The description “small modular reactor” can therefore be misleading. It is small in comparison with a conventional nuclear power station, but it remains an enormous and technically complex installation. It cannot be designed, financed, operated or decommissioned by a locality.

Rebuilding productive capability

Nevertheless, the return of turbine manufacturing to Newcastle has considerable relevance to localism.

Britain has allowed many of its productive capabilities to disappear. Machinery, electrical equipment and components for essential infrastructure are routinely imported. Once factories, workshops and skilled workforces have been lost, they are difficult and expensive to recreate.

The Parsons Works has an exceptional industrial history. It was established in 1889 by Sir Charles Parsons, whose steam turbine transformed marine propulsion and electricity generation. The turbine for Calder Hall, the world’s first commercial nuclear power station, was built there.

Returning large turbine production to Newcastle reconnects a modern project with that industrial inheritance. It means that Britain will recover some of the practical knowledge needed to construct and maintain essential equipment.

The effects could extend beyond the 550 direct jobs. The factory may support apprenticeships, engineering colleges, specialist contractors, metalworking businesses and maintenance services throughout the surrounding locality.

An economy cannot live indefinitely by consuming imported goods, providing services and increasing debt. It must retain the ability to make and repair essential things.

A national core supporting local economies

Localism does not mean that everything must be organised at village or town level. Some systems are too large or specialised to be provided locally.

A localist future is likely to have two levels.

The first would be a limited national core. It might include defence, telecommunications, the main railway network, specialist hospitals and major electricity generation.

The second would consist of numerous local economies providing food, care, education, housing, maintenance and everyday necessities.

Nuclear power belongs mainly to the national core. Its purpose would be to provide dependable electricity for activities that cannot function without it.

That electricity could then support local food processing, refrigeration, water supplies, sawmills, workshops, health facilities and small manufacturers. Nationally generated electricity would help localities meet their own essential needs.

The reactors would not themselves constitute localism. They could provide part of the framework within which localism develops.

The shrinking economy

The shrinking economy makes the proposed reactors both more valuable and more difficult to build.

They could provide secure electricity as fossil fuels become less affordable. At the same time, their construction depends upon the large and complex industrial economy that is beginning to contract.

Nuclear power requires enormous expenditure many years before any electricity is produced. The Anglesey project is intended to demonstrate commercial viability by the mid-2030s.

During that period, the Government may face declining tax revenues, rising borrowing costs and growing demands upon health and social care. It will also have to maintain roads, railways, water systems, public buildings and the electricity grid.

The Government will increasingly have to choose between maintaining existing essential services and financing new infrastructure. A project that appears affordable in a growing economy may become much less affordable when the economy is contracting.

Rising material and construction costs

A nuclear reactor requires large quantities of steel, concrete, copper and specialised components. Producing and transporting these materials requires energy.

As energy becomes more expensive, the cost of mining, steelmaking, manufacturing, transport and construction will rise. The costs of security, waste management and eventual decommissioning must also be met.

SMRs are supposed to reduce costs through standardisation and factory production. This advantage will only be realised if sufficient numbers of identical reactors are ordered.

Three British reactors may not be enough to provide the expected economies of scale. Orders from the Czech Republic, Sweden and other countries are therefore important to the commercial case.

If weakening economies cause orders to be postponed or cancelled, the anticipated cost reductions may never appear.

Continuing international dependence

The Newcastle decision reduces one important dependency, but the reactors will not be wholly British.

Reactor pressure vessels may be imported from South Korea or the Czech Republic. Other specialised components will also depend upon international suppliers. Even the Newcastle turbines will be manufactured by Siemens Energy, a German-owned company.

A shrinking world economy may make these supply chains less dependable. Manufacturers may close. Governments may protect strategic industries. Transport costs may rise. Countries may give priority to their own energy projects.

Bringing production home wherever possible is therefore sensible. It reduces exposure to international disruption and preserves skills that might otherwise disappear.

The Government’s objective of manufacturing 70 per cent of the components in Britain should be regarded as a measure of resilience, not merely a way of creating jobs.

The cost of the grid

Generating electricity is only part of the undertaking. The national grid must carry it to consumers.

Britain must maintain transmission lines, substations, transformers, control equipment and local distribution systems. Much of this infrastructure will require renewal or expansion.

In a shrinking economy, the grid may become increasingly difficult to finance. A declining industrial base could reduce total electricity consumption while leaving the country with high fixed costs. Fewer economically active consumers would have to support an expensive national system.

Electricity could therefore remain costly even if the reactors operate successfully.

Energy security does not automatically mean energy affordability.

Competition for skilled workers

Nuclear construction requires engineers, welders, electricians, inspectors and project managers. These skills are also needed to maintain railways, water systems, power stations and other essential infrastructure.

A shrinking economy will not necessarily release the right workers in the right places. It may instead create intense competition for a limited supply of specialist labour.

The Newcastle factory could help by providing apprenticeships and continuous employment. But 550 jobs will not recreate the enormous industrial ecosystem Britain possessed when Calder Hall and Sizewell B were built.

Skills take years to develop. They must be supported by colleges, workshops, suppliers and a dependable stream of orders.

Nuclear power will not restore growth

The greatest danger is the belief that new nuclear power will restore the growth economy.

Electricity is not a complete replacement for fossil fuels. Nuclear reactors do not directly provide diesel for tractors, excavators, heavy lorries, ships and construction machinery.

Some of these activities may be electrified. Doing so would require another enormous programme of manufacturing and investment. The reactors themselves will be built using an economy still heavily dependent upon oil, gas and internationally traded materials.

Nuclear power cannot reproduce the conditions of cheap and abundant fossil energy upon which the modern industrial economy was built.

It may help to preserve essential services within a smaller economy. That is a more limited purpose, but it is still an important one.

Reindustrialisation on different terms

The Newcastle announcement has been presented as evidence of the Government’s intention to reindustrialise Britain.

That should not be taken to mean that Britain can recreate the expanding industrial economy of the twentieth century. The energy and financial conditions that sustained that economy are disappearing.

Reindustrialisation in a shrinking economy will have to be selective. Britain must decide which productive capabilities are essential and ensure that they are retained. Turbine manufacturing may be one of them. Much discretionary production will not be.

The purpose of industry will increasingly be to maintain essential systems rather than to support ever-rising consumption.

This means producing equipment that can be maintained, repaired and used for many years. The servicing operation at Newcastle may ultimately be as important as the original manufacture of the turbines.

Build while the capability remains

There is an argument for proceeding while Britain still possesses the capital, skills, international purchasing power and industrial organisation needed to build the reactors.

These capabilities cannot be assumed to exist indefinitely. Delay could allow costs to rise until the projects are no longer possible.

This creates a difficult choice. Building the reactors will consume capital, energy and materials that could be used elsewhere. Failing to build them could leave Britain without enough dependable electricity to maintain essential services later.

The decision should therefore be based upon realistic expectations of a smaller economy. The reactors should be designed as part of an essential national core, not as instruments for restoring perpetual growth.

The shrinking economy strengthens the need for secure electricity while weakening our ability to finance it.

The return of turbine manufacturing to Newcastle is encouraging because it restores a valuable productive capability. But the ultimate importance of the reactors will not be measured by whether they revive the former growth economy.

It will be measured by whether they can provide affordable and dependable electricity for the essential national systems and resilient local economies upon which life in a smaller economy will depend.

386. The Future of Political Parties in an Age of Localism

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UK political parties developed to compete for control of central government. They offer national programmes, seek national majorities and promise to apply broadly similar policies throughout the country. This made sense during an expanding industrial economy. A growing state could collect more revenue, build national systems and distribute resources from the centre.

A shrinking economy will change this. As energy, materials and financial resources become less affordable, central government will find it increasingly difficult to fulfil national promises. Political parties may continue to argue about how the economy should be managed, but none will be able to restore the conditions on which their traditional programmes were based.

The important political question may therefore cease to be: “Which party should govern the country?” It may become: “How should each locality organise itself with the resources available to it?”

From national ideologies to local choices

National political parties divide society into large ideological camps. Socialists, conservatives, liberals, nationalists and greens each offer a different theory of how the whole country should be governed.

Localism does not require every locality to follow the same theory.

A locality may base its modus operandi on whatever its inhabitants consider suitable. One locality might favour co–operative ownership of land, workshops and essential services. Another might depend mainly upon family businesses, privately owned farms and voluntary associations. A third might organise much of its economy through extended family ownership, most would probably develop a mixture of all three.

This variety would not be a defect. It would be one of localism’s greatest strengths.

Localities differ in their geography, history, culture, skills and natural resources. A fertile agricultural locality should not be organised in the same way as a former industrial town, a fishing community or a densely populated city district. National uniformity can disregard these differences. Localism begins with them.

Politics would become practical

National politics is largely concerned with abstract questions. Should taxation rise or fall? Should an industry be privately or publicly owned? Should economic growth be encouraged by borrowing, investment or deregulation?

Local politics would be more immediate.

How much land is available for food production? Who owns it? How will elderly people be cared for? Can houses be repaired with local materials? Is there enough water? Which roads and buildings can still be maintained? Can waste become a useful resource? What skills must be taught to the young?

These questions do not always divide naturally along party lines. A Conservative gardener, a socialist engineer, a liberal shopkeeper and a green smallholder might agree completely about the need for a local bakery, a repair workshop or a reliable water supply.

Political allegiance would become less important than knowledge, competence and trust.

The possible decline of political parties

Political parties might not disappear, but their influence could diminish. They might remain important at the national level, where decisions would still be required about defence, currency, taxation, national transport, telecommunications and specialist medicine.

Within localities, however, national party labels might become increasingly unhelpful. Candidates could instead stand as individuals or as members of temporary local groups formed around particular needs.

There might be a food and land group, a water association, a housing co-operative, a traders’ council and a care organisation. These would not necessarily try to control the whole locality. They would contribute knowledge and undertake particular responsibilities.

Representation might grow out of useful activity. The person who successfully organises a community orchard, maintains a workshop or establishes a care network would possess practical authority. This would be different from the career politician whose main abilities are winning elections, following party discipline and appearing in the media.

UK-wide political parties might gradually become looser associations. Their role could be to express broad principles rather than impose detailed national programmes. Local members would be free to adapt those principles to local circumstances.

Different localities, different arrangements

A locality should be able to choose its own form of organisation within a simple national framework of law and fundamental rights.

Some localities might elect conventional councils. Others could make greater use of public meetings, citizens’ assemblies or occupational representation. Farmers, carers, craftspeople, teachers, traders and young people might each contribute to decisions affecting the locality.

One locality might provide communal allotments and shared machinery. Another might lease smallholdings to individual families. One might operate a local currency or system of credits. Another might rely upon sterling, barter and informal exchange. One might own its energy and water systems collectively. Another might contract these services to local enterprises.

Even neighbouring localities might adopt very different methods.

This would allow ideas to be tested on a manageable scale. If an arrangement worked well, other places could copy it. If it failed, the failure would be contained. National government would no longer have to impose a single experiment upon millions of people.

Freedom needs limits

Local autonomy could also have dangers. A powerful family, landowner, employer or faction might dominate a small community. Local majorities might treat minorities unfairly. Personal disputes could become political disputes.

Localism must therefore be accompanied by safeguards. National law could still protect fundamental rights, ensure access to justice and prevent exploitation. Higher authorities might intervene where a locality became corrupt, oppressive or incapable of meeting basic obligations.

There would always be tension between local freedom and national protection. It could never be removed entirely. The object would be to keep decisions at the lowest level capable of making them, while retaining enough national authority to protect people from abuse.

Localism is not the abolition of the state. It is a change in the division of responsibility.

Politics without a single destination

Modern political parties present history as a journey towards their preferred destination. For some, the destination is greater equality. For others, it is a freer market, faster growth, national strength or environmental sustainability.

Localism need not offer one final destination. It accepts that society will develop differently in different places. It is evolutionary rather than doctrinal.

People will adopt arrangements because circumstances make them useful. A co-operative may emerge because no private business can afford the necessary equipment. A privately owned workshop may prosper because one person has the skill and determination to run it. Shared grazing may return because individual holdings are too small. Informal care networks may grow because national services can no longer provide everything.

The resulting economy will not be purely socialist, capitalist or conservative. It will be shaped by necessity, custom and experience.

A different kind of political debate

National political debate asks which ideology is correct. Localist debate would ask what works here.

That small word, “here”, changes politics profoundly.

It replaces general promises with visible consequences. Decision-makers live among the people affected by their decisions. Resources cannot be treated as figures in a national account. They are particular fields, woods, buildings, streams, workshops and human abilities.

Failures become harder to conceal. Success becomes easier to recognise. People may still disagree strongly, but their arguments will concern circumstances they understand and results they can observe.

The future of politics may therefore lie less in the triumph of one political party than in the gradual weakening of party thinking itself. National parties will survive where national decisions remain necessary. Below that level, political life may become more varied, practical and personal.

A locality will not have to wait for the correct national ideology. It will be free to develop its own modus operandi, drawing upon whatever combination of private enterprise, common ownership, voluntary effort, custom and public authority best meets its needs.

In a shrinking economy, this freedom to differ may be essential. The future will not be planned successfully from one centre. It will be discovered, locality by locality.

385. Just Stop Oil and the Shrinking Economy

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Just Stop Oil may be seen as an early sign of the changes that will accompany the shrinking economy.

However, the reduction in oil use is unlikely to happen simply because governments prohibit it. It will happen increasingly because oil, diesel fuel and the activities that depend upon them become less affordable.

The modern industrial economy was built upon abundant, inexpensive fossil energy. Diesel fuel made possible large tractors, combine harvesters, construction machinery, road haulage and the daily delivery of food to supermarkets. It allowed factories to draw materials from across the world and distribute finished goods through national and international markets.

As energy becomes more expensive, the economy cannot continue operating on the same scale. A rising proportion of its resources must be devoted simply to obtaining energy, maintaining infrastructure and servicing debt. Less remains for discretionary consumption. The result is not an ordinary recession followed by renewed growth. It is a long-term shrinking of the industrial economy.

Just Stop Oil recognises that dependence upon oil must end. But its emphasis is mainly upon stopping new oil and gas development to limit climate change. Localism approaches the same problem from the direction of economic necessity. It asks what happens when society can no longer afford to use diesel fuel in the quantities to which it has become accustomed.

The answer cannot be the abrupt removal of diesel from every activity. Modern food production and distribution are critically dependent upon it. If diesel supplies were suddenly withdrawn, farmers would struggle to cultivate and harvest crops. Food processors would lose deliveries, and supermarkets could quickly run short. Emergency services, care workers and essential trades would also be affected.

In the shrinking economy, diesel use is more likely to be reduced progressively. The least essential uses will disappear first because people and businesses can no longer afford them. Recreational driving, frequent flights, long-distance commuting and the transport of low-value goods over great distances will become increasingly difficult to sustain.

Diesel will then have to be concentrated upon essential purposes. Agriculture, emergency services, necessary construction and the maintenance of water, electricity and telecommunications may receive priority. The question will no longer be whether oil should be used, but where its declining availability produces the greatest social benefit.

The contraction of road transport

Road haulage is one of the foundations of the industrial economy. Thousands of lorries constantly move food, building materials, components and consumer goods around the country. This system assumes that diesel fuel, vehicles, tyres, spare parts and maintained roads will remain affordable.

A shrinking economy will weaken every part of that system. Haulage charges will rise. Roads will deteriorate as maintenance becomes more expensive. Marginal deliveries will cease to be worthwhile. Businesses dependent upon distant customers or suppliers will become vulnerable.

Rail could carry a greater proportion of essential long-distance freight. Goods could be moved between towns by rail and then distributed locally by smaller vehicles. Over time, electric vans, bicycles, handcarts and perhaps animal-drawn vehicles could undertake some short journeys. None would replace the present haulage system completely. Their importance would lie in creating an economy that required less movement.

Farming with less diesel

Agriculture presents the greatest difficulty. British farming has become dependent upon powerful machinery, imported fertilisers, pesticides and long supply chains. It produces large quantities of food with relatively little human labour, but it does so by consuming considerable amounts of energy.

Reducing diesel use would require more than replacing tractors with electric versions. Batteries capable of powering large machinery are costly, heavy and dependent upon complex international industries. A shrinking economy may not be able to manufacture and replace them on the scale required.

Farms may instead become smaller, more diverse and more labour-intensive. Machinery would continue to be used, but it would be shared, maintained for longer and reserved for work where it offered the greatest advantage. More people might work in food growing, processing and distribution. Horses could return for certain tasks, particularly on smaller farms, in woodland and on difficult ground.

Food production would also move closer to consumers. Local mills, dairies, slaughterhouses, bakeries and preserving businesses would reduce the need to carry food repeatedly across the country. A locality with good land and food-processing skills might become prosperous in practical terms, even while contributing relatively little to the measured growth economy.

Localism will reduce the need for oil

The most effective way to reduce oil consumption is not merely to substitute another fuel. It is to reduce the amount of energy that everyday life requires.

A locality that grows more of its own food needs fewer lorries. A town with local workshops needs fewer distant deliveries. People who live near their work need less transport. Repairing goods reduces manufacturing and shipping. Local markets shorten the distance between producer and customer.

This is where localism differs from many national energy plans. Those plans commonly assume that the industrial economy can continue largely unchanged if petrol and diesel vehicles are replaced by electric ones and fossil-fuelled machinery is supplied with alternative energy.

But electrifying everything would require immense quantities of electricity, copper, batteries, generating equipment and grid infrastructure. These would have to be financed, manufactured and maintained while the wider economy was already shrinking. Some electrification will certainly be useful, but it cannot preserve every part of the present system.

Localism begins with the recognition that less energy will be available and affordable. It therefore reorganises economic life around shorter distances, fewer material demands and locally available resources.

Evolution rather than prohibition

Just Stop Oil looks principally towards government action. Localism is more likely to emerge naturally from economic conditions.

As discretionary spending contracts, businesses serving non-essential markets will close. Workers will seek employment in food production, repair, care, maintenance and other essential activities. Some people will move from places with few viable livelihoods to localities where useful work remains available.

This has happened before. When employment declined in the slate-quarrying areas around Corris, some workers moved to the coalfields of South Wales. Future migration may follow different routes, but the underlying process will be similar. People will move towards places capable of supporting them.

Government cannot prevent the shrinking economy by borrowing more money or announcing another growth strategy. Nor can it design localism in every locality. It can, however, help the natural evolution by protecting essential diesel supplies, supporting rail freight, permitting small-scale food processing and removing regulations that unnecessarily favour large centralised businesses.

An early indication, not the complete answer

Just Stop Oil is therefore coincident with one early movement towards localism. It challenges the belief that increasing quantities of oil will always be available to support economic growth. It helps to make society conscious of a dependence that was previously taken for granted.

But the shrinking economy will reduce oil consumption regardless of protest. People will drive less because driving becomes unaffordable. Businesses will transport fewer goods because their customers have less discretionary income. Farmers will use diesel more carefully because its cost absorbs a growing share of their income.

The essential task is not simply to stop oil. It is to prepare for an economy in which oil, diesel fuel and many other resources are less available and less affordable.

Just Stop Oil asks society to reduce fossil-fuel use because of climate change. The shrinking economy will compel society to reduce it through declining affordability. Localism is the practical way in which people may adapt to both.

382. Ursa Ag: A Low-Technology Tractor for Localism

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Modern tractors have become extraordinarily sophisticated. They may incorporate computers, electronic sensors, satellite navigation, automated steering and proprietary software. Some can diagnose their own faults, but the farmer may not be permitted or equipped to repair those faults. A relatively minor electronic failure can immobilise a very expensive machine until an authorised technician arrives.

Ursa Ag, a small Canadian tractor manufacturer based in Alberta, is taking a different course. Its tractors are deliberately built without computer controls. The company removes complex electronics and returns to proven mechanical systems that can be understood, maintained and repaired by farmers and independent workshops.

This does not mean returning to the horse-drawn plough. Ursa Ag tractors are powerful machines. The present range includes models of about 150, 180 and 260 horsepower. They use mechanically injected Cummins diesel engines and conventional mechanical controls. The electrical wiring is kept to what is necessary. There are no proprietary electronic control units governing every movement of the machine.

The result is a tractor that an experienced mechanic can examine with ordinary tools. A fault does not necessarily require a laptop, a software licence or permission from the manufacturer. Parts can be repaired or replaced without the entire machine becoming dependent upon a distant dealer.

Low technology does not mean primitive technology

Ursa Ag illustrates an important distinction. Low technology is not the rejection of machinery. It is the selection of machinery that is sufficiently simple, durable and repairable for the work it must perform.

The best technology for a shrinking economy may not be the most advanced technology available. It may be the technology that delivers a necessary service while making the least demand upon money, energy, specialised knowledge and distant supply chains.

A purely mechanical tractor may perform fewer functions than a computer-controlled machine. It may not offer automatic steering or precisely vary the application of fertiliser across a field. Yet it can continue working when digital communications fail, when software support is withdrawn or when the nearest authorised dealer is many miles away.

Its useful life may also be extended by repeated repair. This matters because the energy and materials already embodied in a machine should not be discarded merely because an electronic component has become obsolete.

The right to repair

Localism depends upon local competence. A locality cannot be resilient if every essential machine must be returned to a national manufacturer or connected to a remote computer before it can be repaired.

Mechanical equipment supports a local network of engineers, welders, machinists, parts suppliers and agricultural workshops. Knowledge remains within the locality and can be passed from one generation to another. Money paid for maintenance circulates locally instead of being extracted through software subscriptions and manufacturer-controlled servicing.

This principle extends well beyond tractors. Pumps, sawmills, heating systems, food-processing machinery and small generating equipment should all be designed so that their operation can be understood. Standard components should be replaceable. Manuals should be available. Repair should be expected rather than discouraged.

Ursa Ag’s approach is therefore closely connected to the right-to-repair movement. It restores a measure of ownership to the purchaser. A farmer who has paid for a tractor should be able to maintain it without continuing dependence upon the company that supplied it.

A machine suited to economic shrinkage

The highly automated tractor belongs to an economy that assumes abundant capital, reliable global supply chains and permanently available technical support. These assumptions become less secure as energy costs rise and the discretionary economy contracts.

Farmers will have less money available for machinery. At the same time, food production will become more important. Agricultural equipment will therefore have to remain in service for longer. It must be capable of being repaired repeatedly, sometimes by adapting locally available components.

Ursa Ag claims that its simpler tractors are significantly less expensive than comparable machines from the large manufacturers. Independent reporting says the company uses proven mechanically injected engines and avoids the proprietary diagnostic systems associated with many modern tractors. The trade-off is that its machines are not intended for the most advanced forms of digital precision farming. They are working tractors rather than mobile computer platforms. OmniTrattore provides a useful description of the design and its limitations.

Limits to the example

An Ursa Ag tractor is not a complete model for future local agriculture. It remains a large diesel-powered machine. It depends upon imported fuel, industrial tyres, replacement parts and a substantial manufacturing system. Nor does the company currently appear to have an established British sales and support network.

In the longer term, smaller farms and more labour-intensive cultivation may require lighter tractors, walk-behind machines, electric equipment, horses and greater use of human effort. Heavy machinery compacts soil and can encourage farming on a scale that is poorly suited to local food production.

Nevertheless, Ursa Ag demonstrates an important intermediate step. A society cannot move immediately from highly industrialised agriculture to an entirely local system. Existing mechanical power will remain necessary, particularly for ploughing, harvesting, lifting and transport.

The immediate task is to make that machinery simpler, cheaper, longer-lived and more locally repairable.

Technology under Localism

Localism will not divide technology neatly into the modern and the obsolete. It will distinguish between technology that strengthens a locality and technology that creates dependency.

A useful machine should be understandable by those who operate it. It should be repairable near where it is used. It should perform an essential task without unnecessary complication. Above all, it should remain useful when the affluent, globally connected economy in which it was produced can no longer be taken for granted.

Ursa Ag is important not because it has created a revolutionary tractor, but because it has rediscovered an old principle: the purpose of a machine is to do useful work, not to make its owner permanently dependent upon its manufacturer.

That principle will lie at the heart of technology in the coming age of Localism.

375. Global Migration in a Shrinking Economy

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For most of the industrial age, migration has been driven by a simple expectation. Life somewhere else would be better. There would be more jobs, higher wages, better services and greater opportunities for children. The movement of millions of people around the world has been made possible by expanding economies, abundant fossil fuels and increasingly affordable transport.

That world is changing.

As the global economy shrinks in real terms, migration will not stop. Indeed, in the short term it may increase. But over time it will become more difficult, more selective and increasingly local. The great age of mass international migration is likely to give way to an era of constrained mobility.

Migration Depends on Surplus

Migration is expensive. It requires transport, housing, employment opportunities and functioning public services. Every migrant depends, directly or indirectly, upon the surplus generated by the receiving economy.

When economies are growing, this surplus can absorb newcomers. New houses are built, businesses expand and governments collect rising tax revenues. Even where tensions arise, growth helps soften the impact.

In a shrinking economy the opposite occurs.

Jobs disappear. Housing becomes scarcer. Infrastructure deteriorates. Governments struggle to maintain existing services. Instead of expanding capacity, society begins managing decline.

Migration therefore becomes a competition for shrinking resources.

Why people will continue to move

Economic decline does not remove the pressures that encourage migration. In many parts of the world they become even stronger.

Climate instability reduces agricultural yields.

Water shortages make farming impossible in some areas.

Political instability increases as governments lose the resources needed to maintain order.

Young people continue to seek better opportunities abroad.

Some coastal settlements become increasingly vulnerable to flooding.

Initially these pressures will increase international migration.

But the countries that once absorbed large numbers of migrants are themselves entering economic contraction. The opportunities which attracted migration begin to disappear.

Britain becomes less attractive

For decades Britain attracted migrants because wages were relatively high, public services were dependable and employment was plentiful.

These advantages are steadily weakening.

Real wages struggle to keep pace with living costs.

Housing becomes increasingly unaffordable.

Public services face growing financial pressures.

Infrastructure ages faster than it can be replaced.

The United Kingdom will remain attractive compared with many poorer countries, but the gap narrows. Migrants may still arrive, yet many will find that the prosperity they expected no longer exists.

Increasing numbers may also choose not to come.

A changing pattern of movement

Migration itself may become more regional.

Instead of crossing continents, people may move shorter distances.

Migration within Europe may replace migration from much further afield.

People may move from large cities to smaller towns where housing remains affordable.

Families may regroup in familiar localities rather than disperse across the globe.

The enormous energy costs associated with long-distance migration become harder to justify as fuel prices remain structurally high and disposable incomes decline.

What happens to population?

Global population is unlikely to continue growing indefinitely.

Industrial civilisation allowed population to rise by providing abundant food, modern medicine, sanitation and mechanised agriculture. All of these depend upon high levels of affordable energy.

As surplus energy declines, population growth slows and eventually reverses.

Many developed countries already have birth rates well below replacement level.

Developing countries are also seeing fertility decline, although often from much higher starting points.

Population may continue to rise for a time because people are living longer and because of demographic momentum. Eventually, however, deaths begin to exceed births.

Migration cannot reverse this globally.

It merely redistributes people.

The world as a whole must ultimately live within the carrying capacity supported by available energy, soils, water and climate.

Britain will age

The United Kingdom already has an ageing population.

Governments have often viewed migration as a way of maintaining the workforce and supporting tax revenues.

This works while the economy continues expanding.

In a shrinking economy it becomes increasingly difficult.

More workers do not automatically create more prosperity if the economy itself cannot grow. Instead, additional demand for housing, healthcare, transport and energy may simply place greater strain on declining systems.

The challenge becomes one of adaptation rather than expansion.

Why localism becomes more important

As international systems weaken, communities become more important.

People increasingly depend upon nearby suppliers rather than distant ones.

Food production becomes more local.

Repair replaces replacement.

Neighbours become more valuable than distant institutions.

Migration does not disappear. People will still move between localities. Some areas may gain population while others lose it. Rural districts with productive land, reliable water and strong communities may become increasingly attractive.

Local resilience becomes more important than national averages.

The return of locality

History suggests that periods of contraction reduce mobility.

Before cheap fossil fuels, most people spent their entire lives within a relatively small area. Long-distance movement existed but involved only a minority.

Industrialisation reversed that pattern.

The coming decades may gradually reverse it again.

People are unlikely to become completely immobile. Digital communications will continue to connect communities. Some international migration will remain essential for specialised skills, family reunification and humanitarian protection.

But everyday life is likely to become increasingly rooted in place.

A different future

The political debate often assumes migration is simply a matter of border control or immigration policy.

In reality it is closely linked to economics and energy.

As surplus energy declines and economic contraction becomes permanent, migration patterns will change whether governments wish them to or not.

Some countries will become less able to receive large numbers of newcomers.

Others will become less able to retain their own populations.

Over time, mobility itself becomes another resource constrained by energy and affordability.

For localism, this presents both challenges and opportunities.

Communities will need to welcome those who genuinely become part of local life while strengthening their own capacity to provide food, water, energy, housing and mutual support. Success will depend less upon the size of the national economy than upon the resilience of individual localities.

In the shrinking economy, the future belongs not to places that rely upon endless growth, but to places that learn how to thrive within limits. Localism is not a retreat from the wider world. It is an adaptation to a world in which distance becomes increasingly expensive, resources increasingly constrained, and community increasingly valuable.

376. Food Inflation and the End of the Global Supermarket

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The latest warnings from the Bank of England and Britain’s supermarket leaders should not be seen as an isolated inflation story. They are another indication that the global food system, built during decades of economic expansion and abundant cheap energy, is becoming progressively less reliable.

The immediate causes are familiar enough. Heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, disrupted harvests, war in the Middle East, higher fertiliser prices and more expensive transport are all pushing food prices upwards. Yet these are not separate events. They are interacting pressures acting on a system that has become increasingly fragile.

For many years Britain has relied on the assumption that food could always be obtained from somewhere else. If Spain suffered drought, another country would supply the fruit. If one shipping route became difficult, another could be found. If energy became more expensive, the additional costs could simply be absorbed by a growing economy.

Those assumptions are beginning to fail.

The shrinking economy described by Tim Morgan means that societies are no longer becoming steadily wealthier. Instead, there is less surplus energy available to support increasingly complex global supply chains. At the very moment when climate instability is increasing, the economic capacity needed to absorb repeated shocks is declining.

Food inflation is therefore becoming structural rather than temporary.

Every disruption now exposes another weakness. A wildfire destroys olive groves. Drought reduces cereal yields. Conflict interrupts fertiliser supplies. Fuel prices rise. Transport costs increase. Supermarkets compete for scarcer produce. Consumers pay more.

Governments naturally respond by promising to reduce the cost of living. But governments cannot legislate for plentiful harvests, cheap diesel or abundant fertiliser. They cannot command rain to fall or shipping lanes to remain open.

The danger is that politics continues to promise outcomes that the physical economy can no longer deliver.

Britain has become heavily dependent upon imported food. Many products travel thousands of miles before reaching supermarket shelves. Such systems work well during periods of stability. They become progressively less dependable when confronted by repeated environmental, geopolitical and economic shocks.

Localism offers a different direction.

Instead of asking how global supply chains can be restored to their previous efficiency, localism asks how communities can become less dependent upon them.

This does not imply complete self-sufficiency. Few localities could produce everything they require. It does mean increasing resilience by shortening supply chains wherever practical.

The opportunities are numerous.

  • More locally grown fruit and vegetables.
  • Greater support for nearby livestock producers.
  • Local food processing.
  • Farmers’ markets and community food hubs.
  • Community orchards.
  • Allotments and productive gardens.
  • Better food storage and preservation.
  • Reduced dependence on imported seasonal produce.

Each step may appear modest, but together they reduce vulnerability to distant disruptions over which local communities have no control.

The coming years are likely to bring more frequent weather extremes across many food-producing regions. They are also likely to bring continuing geopolitical instability, rising insurance costs, higher transport costs and increasing pressure on agricultural inputs. None of these developments sits comfortably alongside a highly centralised food distribution system.

The lesson is becoming increasingly clear.

Food security can no longer be measured simply by the amount of food available somewhere in the world. It depends upon whether that food can still be produced, transported, financed and delivered at prices ordinary households can afford.

In a shrinking economy these conditions become steadily more difficult to satisfy.

Local food production will never replace international trade entirely. Nor should it. But every tonne of food produced close to where it is consumed reduces exposure to the growing uncertainties of the global system.

The cost-of-living debate therefore risks concentrating on symptoms rather than causes.

The deeper issue is that Britain has built its food system around assumptions that belong to the age of expansion. Those assumptions are being overtaken by physical limits, declining economic surplus and increasing environmental volatility.

As global supply chains become less dependable, local food resilience ceases to be an environmental ideal or a lifestyle choice. It becomes an economic necessary.

364, Devolution Is Not Localism 

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The current debate about devolution assumes that transferring power from Whitehall to larger regional authorities will create stronger economic growth. It is certainly an improvement if decisions are taken closer to the people affected by them. Local knowledge is almost always better than decisions made hundreds of miles away.

However, devolution should not be confused with localism. They are not the same thing.

Devolution merely moves power from one level of government to another. Whitehall gives powers to combined authorities, regional mayors or county authorities. The structure remains essentially the same. Decisions are still made from above. Taxation, regulation and administration remain the principal tools of government.

Localism is fundamentally different.

The localist model begins with the locality itself. Instead of asking how government can manage economic growth, it asks how people can meet more of their own needs where they live. The emphasis shifts from administration to production, from bureaucracy to practical activity.

The Daily Telegraph rightly warns that devolution could simply become another layer of taxation, regulation and administration. That danger is real. New political institutions have a tendency to justify their existence by creating more officials, more plans and more spending. Unless there is genuine economic change beneath the political structure, little will have been achieved.

The deeper question is whether the industrial economy that made large-scale central government possible is now beginning to contract.

For two centuries Britain became steadily more centralised because abundant, cheap fossil-fuel energy allowed production, transport, communication and government to operate on an ever larger scale. Economic growth supported increasingly complex institutions. Centralisation was not simply a political choice. It was made possible by abundant surplus energy.

As surplus energy declines, that process begins to reverse.

Economic activity naturally becomes more local because long supply chains, distant administration and highly specialised systems become increasingly expensive to maintain. This is not an ideological programme. It is the natural evolution of a post-growth economy.

In that world, local government itself will have to change. Success will depend less on attracting outside investment and more on increasing local resilience.

A successful locality will produce more of its own food. It will conserve water. It will generate part of its own energy. It will maintain local skills, workshops and small businesses. It will make greater use of local materials and local labour. Money will circulate within the locality instead of constantly leaking away to national and international corporations.

The role of government also changes. Instead of attempting to stimulate endless economic growth, it becomes an enabler of local production. It removes unnecessary barriers, supports local enterprise and helps communities organise the essential services upon which daily life depends.

Competition between regions, as suggested in the debate on devolution, has some value. But cooperation within localities is even more important. The future is unlikely to be won by competing to attract the next multinational employer. It is more likely to depend on rebuilding the local economy from the ground up.

This is why localism goes beyond devolution.

Devolution changes who exercises power.

Localism changes where economic life takes place.

One is primarily constitutional.

The other is structural.

As Britain moves beyond the age of continuous economic growth, transferring powers from Westminster to regional authorities may prove useful. But unless that process also encourages the rebuilding of genuinely local economies, it risks becoming little more than a different way of administering decline.

The real challenge is not to create bigger local government.

It is to create stronger local economies.

362. The Missing Debate: Has the Industrial Economy Reached Its Limits?

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Comparing economist Robert Peston’s view of the economy with the localist view

Robert Peston is not an economic pessimist in the sense of predicting imminent collapse, but he has been consistently concerned that the UK has deep-seated structural economic weaknesses that politicians have failed to address.

His views can be summarised like this:

  • Low economic growth
    • He argues that Britain’s biggest problem is persistently weak productivity.
    • Without higher productivity, wages, tax revenues and living standards cannot rise significantly.
    • He frequently says governments of all parties have promised growth without tackling its underlying causes.
  • High government debt
    • Peston believes the UK’s public finances are under severe long-term pressure.
    • He points to:
      • an ageing population,
      • rising NHS and social care costs,
      • defence spending,
      • climate transition costs.
    • He argues that future governments will probably face difficult choices involving higher taxes, lower spending, or more borrowing.
  • Living standards
    • One of his recurring themes is that many people feel poorer even when GDP is growing.
    • He has highlighted that real wages have grown very slowly since the 2008 financial crisis.
    • In his view, this explains much of the political frustration seen across the UK.
  • Investment
    • He believes Britain invests too little in:
      • infrastructure,
      • research,
      • skills,
      • training,
      • technology.
    • He argues these are essential if productivity is to improve.
  • Brexit
    • Peston has repeatedly argued that Brexit has reduced trade with Europe and made the economy less productive.
    • While he does not blame every economic problem on Brexit, he regards it as an additional drag on growth.
  • The Bank of England
    • He generally supports the Bank’s independence.
    • However, he has criticised occasions when monetary policy or communication has been unclear, especially during periods of high inflation.

Peston does not usually claim that:

  • the UK economy is about to collapse;
  • capitalism is ending;
  • Britain is running out of physical resources or energy.

Instead, his analysis is that Britain faces long-term stagnation unless productivity and investment improve.

Peston’s view Compared with the localist view

Localism is more radical.

Robert Pestonlocalism
Weak productivityEnd of economic growth
More investment can restore growthGrowth itself is ending
Structural reforms are neededSociety must adapt to a post-growth economy
Concerned about debtConcerned about declining surplus energy and shrinking economies
Expects national institutions to continueExpects increasing importance of local communities

The key difference is diagnosis:

  • Peston: Britain’s problems are mainly economic and political, and could be improved through better policy.
  • Localism view: The problems are rooted in natural limits to growth—particularly energy, resources and economic contraction—so localism is an adaptation of what is occurring naturally and not a matter for government policy choice.

So, Peston identifies many of the same symptoms that concern localism (weak growth, stagnant incomes, strained public finances), but he attributes them to policy and productivity, whereas localism analysis sees them as natural consequences of how the economy works.

Neither Peston nor other classical economists say that the industrial economy has ended thia seems to be the bigger difference beween them and localism

I think we have identified a fundamental difference in the starting assumptions rather than just a disagreement about policy.

Most mainstream economists, including Robert Peston, generally assume that the industrial economy is still the dominant system and will continue, although it may need reform. Their questions are usually:

  • How can productivity be increased?
  • How can investment be encouraged?
  • How can innovation, technology and skills raise output?
  • How can governments manage debt and taxation?

The possibility that the industrial economy is entering a terminal phase is usually outside their framework.

The localist perspective starts from a different premise:

The industrial economy was built naturally on abundant, cheap energy, expanding material consumption and increasingly complex global supply chains. If those foundations weaken, the issue is not how to restore growth but how society reorganises itself after growth.

From this viewpoint, many of the problems identified by economists – stagnant wages, falling productivity growth, unaffordable housing, public debt, pressure on services – are not isolated policy failures but symptoms of a system reaching its limits.

The difference can be expressed like this:

Mainstream economicsLocalism / post-growth analysis
Growth is the solutionGrowth will no longer be possible
Productivity can keep rising through technologyTechnology itself depends on industrial supply chains and energy
More investment creates expansionInvestment may increasingly maintain existing systems rather than expand them
Globalisation increases efficiencyGlobalisation creates vulnerability
National governments remain the main actorsLocal communities naturally become more important
Economic decline is a temporary problemDecline is a long-term evolution from fossil fuel based industrial and consumerist growth to food based local economies.

The concept that bridges these views is surplus energy. Economists traditionally focus on money, capital, labour and productivity.

Analysts such as Tim Morgan argue that the economy is fundamentally a system for converting energy into useful work, and that declining energy returns constrain economic possibilities.

Where localism differs is that it treats this not merely as an economic adjustment but as a social transformation. The question becomes:

If the industrial economy cannot continue expanding, what replaces it?

The localist answer which evolves naturally will be:

  • shorter supply chains,
  • greater local food production,
  • community ownership,
  • repair and reuse rather than replacement,
  • local energy systems,
  • mutual support networks,
  • reduced dependence on distant complex systems.

This is not simply a forecast of industrial based economic decline, it is a different model of adaptation. Mainstream economics asks: “How do we restart growth?” Localism replies: “We are creating a new kind of society in which economic growth is no longer the organising principle?”

That distinction is probably the central argument you have been building in Chatting about Localism: that localism is not an ideological preference, but a practical response to the end of the industrial growth era.

359. The Future of the Bicycle in a Local Economy

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The bicycle has one of the longest and most successful histories of any form of transport. During the nineteenth century it evolved from simple wooden machines into the familiar pedal cycle. By the late Victorian period Britain had become one of the world’s leading bicycle manufacturers. Thousands of local workshops produced frames, wheels, chains, saddles and components. Many engineering skills that later supported the motor industry were first developed in bicycle factories.

The bicycle was a truly local product. Every town had cycle shops that not only sold bicycles but repaired and modified them. Parts were interchangeable, skilled craftsmen could braze broken frames, and a bicycle might remain in service for decades.

The twentieth century brought enormous changes. Steel tubing became highly specialised, aluminium alloys became common, and later carbon fibre transformed racing bicycles. Manufacturing became concentrated in large factories, mostly overseas. The local cycle maker largely disappeared, replaced by retailers selling imported machines.

This model depends upon abundant energy, long international supply chains and continuous supplies of high quality metals. As the industrial economy contracts, each of these assumptions becomes less certain. Steel production requires huge amounts of energy and complex infrastructure. Aluminium is even more energy intensive. Carbon fibre depends upon sophisticated chemical industries. If these systems begin to fail, complete bicycles will become increasingly difficult to obtain.

That does not mean that cycling itself disappears. Quite the opposite. As fuel becomes expensive and motor transport contracts, bicycles become more valuable than ever. The question is not whether bicycles survive, but how they are made.

The answer may lie in rediscovering local manufacture using materials that can be obtained within the locality or recovered from the existing economy.

The first source of material will be recycling. Millions of bicycles already exist. Their frames, wheels, chains and gears represent an enormous stock of engineering materials. Even badly damaged bicycles contain useful components. Local workshops can recover, repair and rebuild machines almost indefinitely.

Eventually, however, even recycled steel may become scarce. Local communities will then need to explore other materials.

Timber offers one possibility. Modern wooden bicycles already exist, using laminated hardwoods such as ash, oak and beech. Properly designed wooden frames are surprisingly strong, absorb road vibration well, and can last for many years. Unlike metals, timber can be grown within the locality and replenished continuously through careful woodland management.

Bamboo provides another example where climate permits. It has exceptional strength for its weight and has been used successfully for bicycle frames in several countries. Although not suitable everywhere in Britain, it illustrates how natural materials can replace industrial ones.

Other parts can also return to natural materials. Wooden mudguards, leather saddles, wooden rims for certain applications, natural fibre baskets, hemp ropes and locally produced accessories all reduce dependence upon imported industrial products.

Local blacksmiths and engineering workshops could manufacture the few metal fittings still required from recycled steel. Bearings, axles and chains may remain the most difficult items to replace, making their careful maintenance increasingly important.

The bicycle itself may also change. Modern multi-speed machines are highly efficient but mechanically complex. Simpler designs, single-speed bicycles and direct chain drives require fewer specialised components and are easier to maintain locally.

This represents a return to an older philosophy. Throughout most of cycling’s history, people expected to repair rather than replace. A broken frame was brazed. Worn bearings were adjusted. Wheels were rebuilt repeatedly. Ownership meant stewardship rather than consumption.

Localism naturally supports this approach. Every locality could sustain a bicycle workshop employing skilled mechanics, woodworkers and metalworkers. Apprentices would learn practical engineering rather than simply replacing factory-built parts. The bicycle would once again become part of the productive economy instead of the consumer economy.

Ironically, the decline of industrial abundance may restore the bicycle to its original role. Not a fashionable recreational item, but an essential machine that local people understand, build, maintain and value.

The future bicycle may look rather different from today’s lightweight racing machines. It may contain more timber than steel, more craftsmanship than automation, and more local knowledge than imported technology. Yet it will still perform the same remarkable task that has made the bicycle one of humanity’s greatest inventions – transporting people efficiently using nothing more than human energy.

In a shrinking economy, that may prove to be one of its greatest strengths. The bicycle does not belong to the age of limitless industrial growth. Properly adapted, it belongs just as naturally to the age of localism.

348. The Pension Crisis Points Towards Localism

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A recent Daily Telegraph article examined Britain’s growing state pension problem by comparing it with Slovakia, which has introduced reforms to make its pension system more affordable. The conclusion is clear. Britain faces rising pension costs, fewer working-age people to support retirees, and difficult political choices over taxation, borrowing and retirement age.

But the article raises a more fundamental question.

Why has the pension system become unsustainable in the first place?

The answer lies in the ending of the growth economy.

For most of the last century governments assumed that each generation would enjoy higher productivity, higher incomes and a larger workforce. Economic growth would generate enough tax revenue to support an expanding retired population. The system depended upon continuous expansion.

That expansion is now faltering. Energy is becoming more expensive to obtain, natural resources are under increasing pressure, debt has grown to extraordinary levels, and birth rates have fallen across much of Europe. Governments are trying to maintain promises that were made under conditions that no longer exist.

The result is predictable. Pension ages rise. Benefits come under pressure. Taxes increase. Governments borrow more. None of these measures addresses the underlying cause. They merely delay the adjustment.

Localism starts from a completely different understanding.

Instead of asking how central government can continue financing an ever more expensive welfare state, localism asks how people can recover the ability to provide more of life’s essentials within their own locality.

This is where the emerging wood economy becomes important.

As fossil fuels become more costly and less available, wood once again becomes a valuable local resource. Managed woodlands can provide building materials, fuel, furniture, tools, charcoal, compost, craft products and many other necessities. They also create meaningful work that cannot easily be moved elsewhere.

Older people have a particularly important place in such an economy. Many possess practical knowledge, traditional skills and life experience that can be passed on to younger generations. Their contribution is measured not only by paid employment but by teaching, mentoring, repairing, organising and strengthening the social fabric of the locality.

At the same time, local communities naturally provide much of the practical support that older people need – friendship, transport, meals, small repairs, shopping and companionship. These are things that no amount of central government spending can organise as effectively as neighbours who know one another.

The pension itself remains important. People who have contributed throughout their lives deserve financial security. But money alone cannot provide resilience. A pension paid

At the same time, local communities naturally provide much of the practical support that older people need – friendship, transport, meals, small repairs, shopping and companionship. These are things that no amount of central government spending can organise as effectively as neighbours who know one another.

The pension itself remains important. People who have contributed throughout their lives deserve financial security. But money alone cannot provide resilience. A pension paid into an isolated community with few local skills and little local production buys progressively less security as national systems come under strain.

A locality that produces more of its own essentials, values the contribution of every generation and shares responsibility for one another is far more resilient.

The pension debate is therefore about much more than retirement ages or Treasury budgets. It is about the future shape of society.

The growth economy assumed that security would come from expanding national wealth.

The local economy recognises that lasting security comes from productive localities, healthy woodlands, practical skills and strong human relationships.

The pension crisis is not simply a financial problem. It is another sign that Britain is moving from one economic age into another. Localism is not an escape from that transition. It is one of the few practical ways of living successfully within it.

347, The Daily Telegraph reports that Britain is approaching a point where the present economic system is becoming impossible to sustain.

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The Office for Budget Responsibility warns that ever higher taxes will discourage work, while advances in artificial intelligence could remove millions of jobs over the coming decades.

The discussion is framed as a crisis. How will governments pay for everything if fewer people are in paid employment?

From a localist perspective, this may be asking the wrong question.

The industrial economy has taught us to believe that people only become economically useful when they are employed by someone else and paid through the national money system. Anyone outside that system is seen as a cost, supported by taxes collected from those who remain in work.

Yet throughout history this has been the exception rather than the rule.

For thousands of years people created wealth directly within their own localities. They grew food, repaired buildings, made tools, cared for one another, passed on skills and maintained the landscape. Much of this work never appeared in government statistics, yet it sustained society.

Today millions of unemployed, retired and underemployed people possess experience, practical ability and local knowledge. The present economic system largely ignores this resource because it values only paid employment.

Localism sees something entirely different.

These people are not an economic problem. They are the seed from which a new local economy can grow.

Given access to land, workshops, woodland, community buildings and local markets, they could help produce food, repair household goods, restore neglected buildings, manage local woodlands, teach traditional skills, care for neighbours and create countless small enterprises that reduce dependence on distant supply chains.

Many already have the time. Many have the willingness. What they lack is not ability but opportunity.

As national systems become increasingly strained by debt, taxation and declining growth, local production becomes more valuable. Every item produced locally is one that does not need to be transported long distances or purchased from outside the locality. Every practical skill shared strengthens local resilience.

Artificial intelligence may replace many office jobs, but it cannot coppice a woodland, repair a dry stone wall, maintain a village hall, grow vegetables, restore biodiversity or care personally for an elderly neighbour. These activities are rooted in place.

The unemployed therefore represent a reserve of human energy waiting to be released. Instead of paying people simply to remain outside economic life, society could create the conditions in which they become active participants in rebuilding their own localities.

This is not a return to the past. It is a recognition that the future may depend less on creating ever more jobs within a shrinking industrial economy and more on enabling people to create genuine wealth where they live.

The question is not how many people leave the national labour market.

The real question is how many of them can become the pioneers of a thriving local economy.

Source

The Daily Telegraph article, “Two million could quit work: Burnham warned on tax rises”, 8 July 2026, discusses the long term fiscal outlook published by the Office for Budget Responsibility and the growing pressures on taxation, employment and public debt.

346, Could There Be Some Beauty in Collapse?

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Professor Jem Bendell has published a thought-provoking essay entitled “Could There Be Some Beauty in Collapse?” It can be read here:

Could there be some beauty in collapse?

The title itself challenges one of our deepest assumptions. Collapse is normally seen only as something to fear. Bendell does not ignore the hardship that accompanies the breakdown of complex societies, but he asks whether such a process might also create the conditions for a better way of living.

This question goes to the heart of localism.

Our industrial economic system depended upon continual growth, abundant energy, expanding global trade and increasing complexity. Yet these same forces have steadily weakened local communities. Production has moved further away. Decision-making has become centralised. People have become consumers rather than participants in the places where they live.

The growing evidence is that this system is reaching its limits. Economic growth has ended as energy is becoming more difficult and expensive to obtain, public finances are under increasing pressure and many institutions struggle to perform the functions expected of them. These are not isolated problems. They are symptoms of a civilisation that has grown beyond what can be sustained.

If this is true, then the future will not simply be about managing decline. It will be about discovering how society can function at a smaller and more human scale.

That is where localism offers hope.

As large systems become less reliable, localities become more important. Food can increasingly be produced close to home. Small businesses can meet more everyday needs. Skills that have almost disappeared can return. Repair can replace disposal. Local woodland can provide timber, fuel and employment. Housing can be built using local materials. Young people can find worthwhile work without leaving the places where they were born.

A shrinking economy does not have to mean a shrinking quality of life. If wealth is measured only by money, the future may appear bleak. If wealth includes security, friendship, purpose, practical ability and belonging, then a very different picture emerges.

Throughout history, people have shown extraordinary resilience during periods of change. Communities that work together often become stronger, not weaker. They discover that many of the things that bring satisfaction cannot be bought in a supermarket or delivered through a national bureaucracy.

The beauty in collapse, if there is any, lies not in the suffering that accompanies it but in the opportunity to rediscover ways of living that industrial society has pushed aside. Simplicity can replace excess. Cooperation can replace dependency. Responsibility can replace bureaucracy. The locality can once again become the place where people shape much of their own future.

Localism is therefore not a reaction to collapse. It is preparation for it. It provides a practical framework through which people can rebuild economic life, restore community and recover a sense of belonging. In doing so, it transforms what many see only as decline into the beginning of renewal.

Whether or not one agrees with every aspect of Bendell’s argument, his essay deserves careful reading. It encourages us to look beyond the immediate difficulties and ask what sort of society might emerge afterwards. That is a question localism has been asking for many years.

Perhaps the greatest beauty in collapse is that it reminds us of something we should never have forgotten – that the strongest society is not built from the top down, but grows from the locality upwards.

344. Delays are a Symptom of Centralisation, Not Simply of Road Building

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The latest delay to approval of the first phase of the Hereford bypass is being presented as an administrative matter. Approval of the Full Business Case has slipped from July until September, while work on the Holme Lacy Road improvement scheme has also fallen behind schedule because of design changes and technical issues. The council says it will not enter a construction contract until the business case has been approved.

For many people this is simply another frustrating postponement. Yet the real lesson goes much deeper than delays to one road.

Britain has developed a system in which almost every important local decision depends upon lengthy approval procedures, detailed business cases, central government funding and layers of professional assessment. The result is that even projects which enjoy broad local support can spend years moving from one stage of bureaucracy to the next.

This is not simply a Herefordshire problem. It is a national problem created by centralisation.

Localism asks a different question. Why should local communities have so little authority over their own future?

A genuinely local system would allow localities to decide many of their own infrastructure priorities, raise a larger proportion of the money locally, and commission work directly. Decisions would still need to be made carefully and transparently, but they would be made much closer to the people who live with the consequences.

The endless cycle of studies, revisions, approvals and delays consumes both time and public money before a single vehicle uses the road. Every delay increases costs and undermines public confidence.

The bypass itself should not be viewed simply as another transport project. It raises a more fundamental question about how places organise themselves.

In a localist society, transport would be planned as part of a much wider pattern of local economic life. If more employment, shopping, food production, education and services were located within each locality, many journeys would disappear altogether. Roads would still be needed, but their purpose would change. They would connect self-reliant localities rather than compensate for an economy that requires people and goods to travel ever greater distances.

That does not mean bypasses have no place. Existing patterns of development have left Hereford with unacceptable congestion, and practical solutions are needed. But localism reminds us that the long-term answer is not simply to build more roads. It is to reduce unnecessary travel by rebuilding local economies that meet more of people’s daily needs close to home.

The repeated delays to the Hereford bypass therefore illustrate two different futures.

One future continues with increasing central control, where local projects wait for approval from distant institutions and progress depends upon complex administrative processes.

The other future trusts local people with greater responsibility for shaping their own places, reducing dependence on central bureaucracy and creating communities that need fewer large infrastructure projects because more of life takes place locally.

The debate about the bypass is therefore not just about transport. It is about where power should reside. As long as decision making remains concentrated at the centre, delays such as these are likely to remain a normal feature of public life rather than an exception.