Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain
George Monbiot Macmillan, 415pp, £12.99
ISBN 0333901649
At another moment in time, George Monbiot might well have been considered mad. Among many choice examples of ecobabble in the Guardian, he has asserted that "flying across the Atlantic is as unacceptable . . . as child abuse" (should we sign the Environmental Offenders Register at check-in?); that the North-South divide would be closed by moving the capital city to Newcastle (can you imagine the Blairs swapping Chequers for Whitley Bay caravan park?); and that, because the environmental crisis makes having children amount to stealing from the poor, "being gay is arguably more moral than being straight" (presumably, high priests of the earth goddess such as Monbiot should be celibate).
At its worst, Monbiot's miserabilism can make him sound like the ancient loon with the huge sandwich board who used to harangue partying West End drinkers about the dangers of protein and lust. He wails that "the world is dying and people are killing themselves with laughter", and considers it a terrible thing that we buy our children more toys these days.
Yet, instead of being left to write unpublished letters to the press in green ink, Monbiot has been turned into Britain's foremost green newspaper columnist, feted and flattered. The Evening Standard's claim that he is one of the 25 most influential people in Britain is topped only by the Independent on Sunday's suggestion that he is one of the 40 international prophets of the 21st century. So perhaps it's me who is mad, after all. Or perhaps it's just that, in our uncertain age, when an "Oh, no-zone" layer of anxiety hangs over society, Monbiot's one-eyed prophecies of imminent doom about climate change or GM products can feed public fears.
No doubt Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain will be well received, despite its apparently subversive thrust and the author's admirable admission that he has written a boring book. As one who used to edit Living Marxism magazine, there is something attractive to me, too, about a book revealing the workings of contemporary capitalist society. But this is not it.
Monbiot's thesis is that big corporations have staged a coup d'etat in Britain and seized control of government ministries, hospitals, schools, universities and the food chain. He accuses the pro-business government of "appeasement", and supermarkets that help to close down corner shops of "economic cleansing", and he demands that corporate directors be charged with human rights crimes at international tribunals. Next stop: Nato air strikes on convoys of City commuters.
But what is so new about corporations having power or connections with the state? Monbiot himself quotes Abraham Lincoln's fears, from 1864, that "corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow". It is indeed possible to argue that what really is new is the rising influence of environmental, consumer and other lobby groups, all of them as unaccountable as big business. The government has just appointed Jonathan Porritt to head something dreadful called the Sustainability Development Commission, while the big corporations are so defensive about ethics that even BP - one of Monbiot's arch-villains - now sends top executives to learn about Foucault, human rights and the morality of anti-capitalism.
This change of mood might be for the best - although another development is that many of today's influential critics of corporate capitalism seem to want society to go backwards, rather than forwards. Monbiot ends up calling for the reintroduction of a 1720 Act, under which no corporation could do anything without a licence from the Crown, for the closure of "damaging" out-of-town superstores and for a return to small-scale farming and retailing. Conceding that there is no immediate prospect of this becoming reality, Monbiot has a simple solution: "the peaceful mobilisation of millions of people in nations all over the world". He does not mean reactionary protests against progressive petrol taxes, nor violent upheavals such as the French revolution, in which the peasants showed their appreciation of the small-scale producer's lot by deposing the Beaumont family from their ducal lands and forcing them to flee to England, where they changed their name to . . . well, Monbiot.
Stripped of their fantasies about turning the clock back, the self-flattering message from most eco-crusaders today is that they are more moral people than you and me because they don't drive a car (Monbiot modestly calls this "my decision not to destroy the planet", for which we are all naturally grateful), and because they don't take their kids to McDonald's, shop in supermarkets, fly in aeroplanes or support GM trial crops. So, as our author bicycles off to reap organic goodness on the moral high ground, one is left with the feeling that the GM he really wants us to know all about is not genetic modification, but George Monbiot.
Mick Hume is a former editor of LM magazine
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