The welfare state isn’t working. We are approaching social
breakdown. Young people are running out of control. Our people are living out
their last years totally alone and vulnerable. Orphanages are now known to be
honey pots to paedophiles. Old peoples’ homes, I know from personal experience,
can be just as cruel. The incompetent, the inadequate and the just plain mad
are thrown onto the streets with occasional help from burnt-out carers. We know
you can’t buy love. Well, you can’t buy care either.
It is becoming clear that the State can never provide the
care that it claims. Because of its high taxation, labour costs are high. In a
welfare state caring has to be paid for. The State can never afford to pay for
the care that the extended family used to provide, free.
The breakdown of the extended family and now the nuclear
family means that control of the young has disappeared. Bad behaviour used to
reflect on the whole extended family, so there was considerable pressure on
children to behave. Grandparents would wield the strongest but tolerant
influence, particularly grandmothers. It is the female in rearing the children
who sets the standards of behaviour. And the oldest have the most moral
authority. ‘Matriarch’ is the wrong term, meaning a woman who rules. It is not
power she has but influence.
The extended family is able to ease marital difficulties. If
a man is beating his wife, the wife’s father and brothers will come steaming
down and put heavy pressure on him to stop. Nowadays fathers and brothers are
miles away. If a child is being raised by inadequate parents, it will be gently
moved up the road to aunts, cousins or grandparents, not into ‘care’.
The extended family has vanished because of Mobility of
Labour. Once the crops were sold out of the village, they were no longer able
to provide jobs within the village. Workers with no land had to move to the
cities where the crops had been taken to (because of the higher cost of living
and therefore higher wages, the core can always out-bid the villages for the
crops, as we out-bid the Third World for its crops).
Another cause of the breakdown of the extended family is the
State itself. In attempting to provide welfare it undermines the influence of
the extended family. Family pressure can sometimes be irksome. Knowing that the
State will provide anonymous welfare, pensions etc., the individualist may opt
for State care, but this weakens family pressure to behave.
To rebuild a caring society we have to rebuild the extended
family. But this is not possible in towns and cities. Continual rebuilding
caused by growing population and changing land values, destroys any
geographical concentration of families. A famous study of London’s Bethnal
Green showed how the last groups of extended families were dispersed by
re-housing.
So it is only the villages where we can re-build the
extended families and a caring society. To do this we have to cut the
population, cut taxation, cut the size of the political unit and cut free
trade.
The first thing to do is to provide jobs in villages, to
replace machinery with people on the farms. This means reducing labour costs,
the reason the machines replaced the people. High labour costs are caused by
high taxation. So to provide jobs in the villages we have to cut the taxation
on trade and traders, indirect taxation, which will directly reduce the cost of
living (the taxes on trade are passed directly on to the consumer, an extra
penny on a pint) so wages can be reduced, maintaining buying power, so that
people can be cheaper to hire than expensive machines.
Cutting the cost of living will enable craft-based
industries like pottery and weaving to return to the villages because the
craftsmen will not have to make such a large turnover to make a living.
Ultimately, what provides jobs is the food grown in the
villages. So the less food sold out of the village the more jobs. When the cost
of living has gone down, the smallholder would be able to make a living selling
his produce locally.
On the periphery in the hills of Scotland, Wales and
northern England, where they can be self-sufficient because of their low
population, they can use taxes on imported goods from the core to protect their
local craftsmen, or less formally use community pressure not to buy imported
goods to protect their own family’s craftsmen.
To bring final control back to the village we have to
progressively break up the political unit, first to England, Ulster, Scotland
and Wales, then to the regions with their own coinage and Final Appeal, then
the counties, the towns and finally autonomous, self-sufficient armed villages.
But this can only be achieved when we’ve cut the population.
And when we’ve cut the population sufficiently no one will need jobs. We’ll all
have our own plot of land.
And when we’ve got our own plot of land there’ll be no
television because there will be no one prepared to work in a television
factory taking orders from a foreman, when we can be our own boss on our own
land.
There’ll be no computers or telephones, not because we won’t want them,
but because we won’t be able to get the buggers into factories to make them. If
we want to communicate, it’s back to fire signals.
The loss of technology is the price we pay for a just and
caring society.
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His curriculum vitae is one of principled radicalism. Former
Editor of GREEN ANARCHIST, ALTERNATIVE GREEN and author of TO END POVERTY: THE
STARVATION OF THE PERIPHERY BY THE CORE (a ground-breaking work influencing the
development of National-Anarchism), there is little doubt that RICHARD HUNT was
one of the most stimulating and original thinkers of the last decade.
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