HABITATS (Mini-articles) Index

We are now in the absurd situation of wealthy people commuting from the countryside to opffices in the towns, while, coming the other way are many countryside-born people who commute from the town to the countryside to work.

Behind the tranquil facade of the rustic farmhouses, rolling fields and flower-filled hedgerows of the english countryside important changes are reshaping the pattern of life in rural Britain. The countryside has seen an influx of 300 predominantly "townies" a day for the past 10 years, equivalent to more than 1 million people in all. At the same time, traditional rural jobs have declined.

The well-heeled townies who have moved to the countryside have cast a "cloak of prosperity" over many rural areas which tends to hide the serious problems of many rural people. Jobs in traditional industries are on the decline (65,000 lost in the past 10 years from farming, 60,000 lost from colliery villages) and as many as one in five of rural families live on or below the poverty line. While the overall unemployment rate (6.4%) for rural Britain is lower than the national average (8.4%), there are wide discrepancies between areas. This is partly because, in some areas, a new wave of high-tech "corridors" have started and are among the most vibrant in the economy. But in the more remote areas there has been little job creation and the existing low pay jobs makes it difficult for young people to afford to live in the country_they thus migrate to the cities.

From Job Society newsletter by Sam Samuels, February 1995

By and large, citizens like the idea of the welfare state to be there if they fall on hard times. But, increasingly, governments everywhere are realising that the public purse cannot afford it at present levels.

Right-wingers say that health, education and social security should be cut because it induces a dependency culture and saps individual initiative. But social ills are not merely the product of moral turpitude. Left-wingers say that if unemployment were reduced then governments would have extra taxation income to pay for existing levels of payments. But nobody is simply a helpless victim--everybody has some contribution to make.

A midway position is quite possible, however. Some services now provided by the welfare state should and could be undertaken by people on their own. At the same time, society must continue to share the burdens.

Communitarians propose a principle of subsidiarity in which the primary responsibility belongs to the individuals nearest the problem; if a solution cannot be found, then the responsibility moves to the family; if there is still no solution, then to the community; then and only then, when no solution is possible at all, should the state be involved.

From an article by Amitai Etzioni in the Sunday Times, 9 October 1994

The UK's first genuinely self-sufficient eco-settlement is to be built this year. A group of underground houses will generate their own energy and water , and recycle their waste. Five families will move into the houses at Hockerton in Nottinghamshire over the next 12 months, combining their normal jobs with small-scale food production and fish farming. The project is intended to show that new housing can be designed with minimum impact on the environment. More than 3,000 trees have already been planted to provide shelter and encourage wildlife; and a network of ponds, lakes and reed beds will also be created for fish farms, rainwater harvesting, and sewage treatment. The project is a brain-child of Nick Martin, a member of the British Earth Sheltering Association.

Independent , 8 January 1995

Most inner city renewal schemes have failed, says a report, Made to Last, by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation this month. Mr Geoff Fordham, author of the report, said, "Looking back at a succession of urban programmes spread over nearly 30 years, it is depressing how often previous lessons have been ignored." Mr Fordham said the private sector showed little response to regeneration programmes. Many employers were unwilling to hire staff from a deprived area, but many schemes neglected to try and change employers' attitudes.

Programmes such as the government's City Challenge and single Regeneration Schemes generally lasted too briefly with too few resources to create sustained change. City Challenge initiatives can have five-year life spans, while SRB schemes limit funding to seven years. In February, the government launched Regional Challenge, under which deprived regions can bid for œ160 million of EU funds. Projects can be funded for three years at most.

Newsletter, Job Society, April 1995

We and our direct predecessors lived in small groups and tribes for at least a couple of million years before we became 'civilised' relatively recently. We can't cope with too much information and interacting with too many people.

Nevertheless, for technological reasons, the world of tomorrow may very well consist of both the very large and the very small. On the one hand, the growth of the multinational firm with large, increasingly automated factories is likely to continue; on the other, the highly skilled people who will also be needed, and doing their jobs via the information superhighway, might wish to live in the villages of their own native countryside.

The CEO of an electronics multinational, after spending the morning video-conferencing with her senior colleagues all round the world, helps in the village school in the afternoon; her son, after finishing a long spell of computer-assisted learning on nuclear physics is playing football with some young villagers; her daughter, who's been riding returns home to resume the production of her popular fashion designs in her small robotic factory 10,000 miles away; her husband, who's a world-renowned music historian, but pays for his keep as the village odd-job man, has been unable to speak with his distant students today because the village has a problem with the drains and he will be rodding-out all day."

From News From Everywhere by Keith Hudson 1994

For those teleworkers who feel that they might be isolated at home, telecottages have been proposed to offer an attractive alternative. In these, individuals can work at their own businesses but also take advantage of skilled advice and access to the latest technology. SW2000. a specialist teleworking forecast unit set up in 1988 by business consultant Noel Hodson distinguishes between telecottages, generally serving rural areas and dependent on external funding, and telecentres, run as businesses to provide a variety of facilities for urban teleworkers.

In addition, some large organisations are setting up their own telecentres for mobile staff to drop in and 'hot desk' shared space and equipment. To cope with the growing level of interest in teleworking and the need to reintroduce work into rural areas, the Telecottage Association was set up in 1993 with government funding plus equipment and support from such firms as BT and Apple. The association represents some 140 telecottages and has 2,000 members, including architects, accountants and management consultants. For Hodson, teleworking is evidence of a fundamental shift in the UK's socio-economic structure. But he see only a limited role for telecottages or telecentres, arguing that most are 'uncomfortable, unprofitable, unsightly and unnecessary' compared to home-based teleworking. He calculated that it can cost both employer and employee 30 per cent more to use a telecentre than to work from home. Telecentres also threaten to create 'cross-commuting' patterns with suburban workers struggling across normal commuting routes to get to their telecentres.

Sunday Times, 22 January 1995

Professional and managerial people are working harder than ever before, to the detriment of their health, humour and families. The corporation demands absolute commitment, and the ruthless competition for recognition feeds a vicious circle. High salaries are often needed to 'buy' the tolerance of the executive's family with a luxury home, a fleet of vehicles, private schooling, ponies, exotic (though short) holidays and so on. From the family perspective, less income and more togetherness is often preferred.

There is a better way which increasing numbers of executives and professionals are discovering and forward-thinking employers are encouraging. 'Corporate telecommuting' combines work in an office environment with work from home, and it works. Some people do a 'normal' day's work in the office, get home well before the children go to bed then put in a couple of hours in the late evening, with the company-sponsored home computer and telephone fully connected to the office systems. Others are going further and perhaps visiting the office only two or three days a week. As this trend develops, office environments are changing, with less private work space, and more areas for meetings, both formal and informal. The benefits of a new approach to work are numerous--organisations become more flexible and responsive, work and family life become more compatible, wasteful commuting is reduced and communities are rejuvinated. Governments can support change through taxation and incentives and can also be an example as an employer. The European Commission is already taking a lead through its Telematics Programme, in response to the Bangemann report on 'Europe and the Global Information Society'. With its flexible labour market and liberal telecommunications environment, UK employers are well placed to reconcile corporate and family life.

Financial Times, 24 January 1995

The market towns of England have had a long history. Some of them have been vibrant places for over 700 years but now, in the course of a mere fifteen years or so, they have been dying.

Their origin was accidental. In 1285 Edward I expelled markets from churchyards and they set up around market crosses. Towns grew up around them and, until now, they have retained the same raison d'être, as the places local people came to buy food. But people are now going to out-of-town supermarkets now.

Out of almost 300 towns and cities in England, only half-a-dozen can now be described as healthy, with plenty of shoppers in their High Streets, according to a recent government survey. More than 200 are in steep economic decline with the remainder just about holding their own. Market towns in particular are doing worse than other settlements. But it's too late now to do anything about it because the supermarkets are either already in place on the outskirts or they may just be building--because there are a further 200 planning applications that have already been granted and could be taken up in the next two years before lapsing.

Firstly, stagnation, then a slow spiral of decay, then, sometimes swiftly, vandalism and danger on the streets. What were once lovely places in which to live and to visit, that were charming and sometimes architecturally beautiful and idiosyncratic, are now returning to the graveyards from whence they came.

Samuel Hargreaves in Newsletter of the Job Society, March 1995

Vast energy resources are needed for the refining and manipulation of all other resources into the products we make, the fertilisers for growing food and for all our electricity production and transport needs. It is the very basis of the modern industrial economy--and, of course, all jobs.

The bulk of available energy resources consist of oil and natural gas. The problem is that the annual discoveries of these--of the order of 10 billion barrels of oil equivalent a year--have been declining steadily for the past two decades, despite better geological knowledge of the earth's crust. These annual discoveries are now less than world annual consumption of about 22 billion barrels of oil equivalent. If we assume that the newly-industrialising countries of South-East Asia will continue to grow as they have been doing in recent years, then there is substantially less than 30 years to go at present rates.

There are still huge deposits of other fossil fuels such as coal, and tar sands and shales, but all these are very expensive to exploit. There are also alternative technologies which derive powqer from solar radiation and the wind and waves, but all these are very capital intensive. None of these will come on tap quickly enough when the downturn affects us.

The result will be that the transnational corporations will compete even more intensively, and become even more efficient, throwing even more people out of jobs. It's a terrifying future, unless we create a whole new swathe of jobs within new local communities.

From The Looming Shortage of Jobs, the Job Society, December 1994

All the evidence points to the fact that Western governments will not be able to sustain even the present sorts of welfare benefits to the unemployed, old people and many others in the years to come. If structural unemployment continues to grow, particularly among young school-leavers--with so much energy and wanting to belong to adult society--what are people going to do?

I believe that here and there, scattered about, people will realise that they can create additional jobs within their local areas. A great deal of work can be done in simply exchanging services with one another in fair transactions. It's almost like adding new money to the neighbourhood in addition to the official money coming to them in benefits.

These experiments won't be numerous and they'll probably require especially innovative individuals to get them started. But, economically, they make great sense and, sooner or later, they'll learn the best methods of organising themselves. They will surely do better than other neighbourhoods which simply depend on welfare benefits alone.

These communities will not be an alternative to the normal "official" economy because only the latter can supply many of the tangible goods that people will still need. However, there is no reason why the new communities shouldn't co-exist.

From a report to the Job Society, June 1995

Village council houses, as much a part of rural Britain as the country pub and the medieval church, are being sold off to urban emigres by their owners who prospered from "right-to-buy" policies in the 80s. It means the villages of Middle England are being transformed into dormitories for affluent city commuters and fewer of the edge-of-village council houses are available for local families to rent.

The change has been identified in the first detailed study of the long-term consequences for the countryside of Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy. Paul Chaney, a geographer at Nene Colege in Northampton, has followed the pattern of ownership of houses in a rural district of Northamptonshire and has found the beginnings of a social upheaval in sales on the open market of council homes by their former tenants.

"The new buyers are evidently more mobile and more affluent, and there seems to be more commuters. This is likely to have a major effect on the villages." he said. In south Northmaptonshire, the area where Mr Chaney conducted his study, one third of the 1980 stock of 4,400 council homes has been sold to tenants, as compared with a national average closer to one quarter. And of those sold, one-third has already been re-sold on to the private housing market--a very high turnover for country properties."The character of the English village is changing fast", he concludes.

From an article by Sam Samuels in the Independent on Sunday, April 1995

In both Britain and America violent crime by children and teenagers is rising to alarming levels. In the UK, violent crime among children as young as 10 has soared in recent years. Among 10 and 13 year olds, rapes, shootings, knifings and assaults have risen by more than 50 per cent; and among 14 to 16 year olds, violent crime has risen by more than 29 per cent.

Much the same has been happening in America, and the leading criminologist, James Fox, has a bleak prognosis for the year 2005. While the adult population is committing fewer crimes, an unusually small population of teenagers in the early 1990s has been filling the gap by committing far more--a rise of 160 per cent in murders alone since 1985.

By the turn of the next century, when the population of 16 to 24 year olds will have risen by 23 per cent. The racial mix will have changed, too, with 28 per cent more young blacks and 47 per cent more hsipanic teenagers, offspring of the baby boomer generation. Already, with too many with no jobs and having no hope for the future, too many live for today, die for today and even kill for today, says Fox. An epidemic of crime is due.

What is particularly alarming is the absence of any sense of morality among the younger generations which allows children as young as 10 to commit murder without feeling any sense of wrong. A social catastrophe is in the making in many of our cities.

From an article by Geordie Greig in the Sunday Times, 22 January 1995