Declaration of Purpose of the Independent Constitutionalists UK

(1) Independent Non-adversarial Politics While mindful of their ongoing duty and commitment to promoting the values and principles enshrined in their country’s Constitution, the first loyalty of Constitutionalist and other Independent parliamentary candidates would be to their constituencies whose interests they defend.  Their function is essentially a representative one: they are mandated by their constituencies, to whom they remain accountable and by whom they can be recalled.  This in essence is what Constitutionalists mean by participative representative democracy (ideas that are born of citizen participation and carried forward by representation to regional and national assemblies).  It is the anchor of the independent non-party politics that IC-UK is attempting to promote.

The advent of independent candidates in significant numbers, Constitutionalists are aware, would constitute a major departure from what exists. It would be a new way of doing politics that replaces party politics with what might be termed issue-based politics moved by real-world ideas and issues rather than by ideology.  Independent representatives come to the parliamentary table (necessarily hemispherical in shape) with agendas and concerns as defined by their constituency committees and the like.  Essentially thereafter, parliamentary business becomes, first the discovery or identification of common ground and shared purpose, and second the negotiation of consensus and compromise (a process that would include voting as a last resort) regarding what exactly is to be done and how.  Groups and alliances of representatives with their spokespersons (necessary for practical purposes) would inevitably emerge from this process, but, in stark contrast to political parties thus far, such groups and alliances would be functional, flexible and time-limited.

What must unite Independent Candidates of whatever origin is a commitment to genuine democratic practice.   Martin Bell’s 10 Principles, IC-UK’s Guidelines for Collaboration and Flatpack Democracy’s Ways of Working all provide suggestions as to how this genuine practice can be achieved. All these methods basically involve reaching inclusive and consensual decisions by encouraging members of a group to keep objecting to a proposal until, between them, they produce an answer all of them can live with. Locally it’s not hard to see it producing better decisions than the average local authority meeting.  Scaling it up to regional and national assembly levels presents a formidable challenge, but one that Constitutionalists believe is well worth taking up.

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(2) The Will of the People is the term frequently employed to describe the shared values and collective purposes of a community.  The all-important question is however: how is the will of the people to be determined? 

The Will of the people is clearly not what, for example in Germany, the Soviet Union and Communist China, a series of dictatorial and totalitarian ideologues imposed upon their respective populaces during World War Two and subsequently.  Nor was it what Mrs Thatcher, over the heads of many of her ministers and Parliament, said she was convinced she heard through her special ear, and even less what Tony Blair was reflecting when he took his country to war in Iraq.   Indeed, the will of the people, that collective aggregate of individual reason, is not even what audimats, box-ticking opinion polls and market surveys – those trackers of individual preference  –  claim to inform us about. 

For Constitutionalists, the Will of the people, not being a discoverable given, cannot by definition exist prior to the painstaking democratic process of collective enquiry, debate, discourse, deliberation and consensus-building that brings that Will into existence.   In other words, the Will of the people is an act of purposive collective co-creation. Unless and until that ongoing articulative act begins to be accomplished, and the processes by which it is achieved enshrined in a codified and living constitution and perpetuated by constant democratic practice, we risk being left with a political void.  History has repeatedly shown how this void can all too easily be filled by the lies and manipulation of unscrupulous individuals and groups who, driven by self-interest, seek to divide, control and exploit, especially when the communities concerned are cowed by scarcity, deprivation and fear. 

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(3) People Sovereignty and Constitutional Supremacy  People (or Popular) Sovereignty is the theory embracing the notion that all political power resides in the people but that the people delegate a defined measure of that power to a government to avoid the practical impossibility of making and enforcing laws themselves.  This theory goes hand in hand with that of Constitutional Supremacy whereby the Constitution becomes the supreme law of the land and cannot, at least in its fundamental features, be altered save by wide popular consent.  Constitutional Supremacy embodies the notions of (1) a constitution, codified and accessible, that in principle invalidates any laws that are inconsistent with it, and (2) of entrenchment whereby the latter’s provisions cannot, for example, be repealed by Parliament as at present under the principle of Parliamentary Sovereignty.  Neither should the provisions of a constitution be altered by plebiscitary consent through majority vote without controls in the form of constitutional checks and balances.  Such checks and balances, in turn, should be so designed that minority interests are protected and the enduring moral and ethical dimension of the settlement that the constitution sets forth be secure.  For Constitutionalists, this includes “the shared values of the people of the United Kingdom and the principles of democratic self-government, so that the Constitution should serve as a compass to guide people in their moral aspiration and direction of political travel” (see Provision 12 (d) of this Declaration of Purpose).  Finally, any such Constitution would need to recognize an enhanced role for public participation, for, as we have already suggested, under a reformed system, rather than government simply imposing its authority on the people, power will be delegated by the people to government with a remit, however broad or narrow, which reflects their will.  

These, then, are the principles (which, incidentally, have been adopted by almost all other democratic states) underlying the constitutional settlement that our movement believes should now be established in the United Kingdom.    

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(4) An Ethical Code

Martin Bell’s 10 Principles

We will:

• abide wholeheartedly by the spirit and letter of the Seven Principles of Public Life set out by Lord Nolan in 1995: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership;
• be guided by considered evidence, our real world experience and expertise, our constituencies and our consciences;
• be non-discriminatory, ethical and committed to pluralism;
• be free from the control of any political party, pressure group or whip;
• make decisions transparently and openly at every stage and level of the political process, enabling people to see how decisions are made and the evidence on which they are based;
• listen, consulting our communities constantly and innovatively;
• treat political opponents with courtesy and respect, challenging them when we believe they are wrong, and agreeing with them when we believe they are right;
• resist abuses of power and patronage and promote democracy at every level;
• work with other elected independents as a Group with a chosen spokesperson;
• claim expenses, salaries and compensation openly so the public can judge the value for money of our activities.

These principles apply to personal integrity.  Our strap-line reads: We aim to use the system, to change the system, to recover Trust.  Its reference to Trust extends these principles into the broader and more complex contexts of societal and global relations.  Hence our insistence on articulation by companies of a Declaration of Public Benefit Purpose and on Charters for all public institutions (Provisions III. 13 (g) and (J) respectively of this Declaration).

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(5) Referendums  Constitutionalists believe that referendums have a place in participative representative democracy but their role is to complement it, not replace it. Their link to democratic legitimacy is tenuous and heavily conditioned.  Far more than primary legislation (law created through delegation by the legislative branch of government), the outcome of a yes/no referendum leaves the content of the decision underdetermined, particularly when the question put to the people, as in the case of the EU referendum, affects an array of interconnected issues of law and policy. In most liberal democracies the use of referendums is strictly regulated by a codified constitution that restricts the types of question that can be asked and the conditions under which they have a binding legal effect. The UK’s uncodified constitution lacks this robust constitutional architecture. The experience of the EU referendum is another blow to the argument that the UK has no need for a codified constitution.

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(6) Settled Residency The criteria for entitlement to voting in general elections and referendums  –  minimum age, minimum length of residence and so forth  –   need to be, and normally are, constitutionally established.  However, the transition from elective to participative representative democracy that Constitutionalists are advocating raises a series of rather different and in many respects new challenges and questions:

• the achievement of local devolved self-governance in our globalised, increasingly nonlocal world, where a principle of freedom of movement reigns supreme  
• the necessary incorporation into our current exclusively elective leader-based democratic mindset (whereby we elect at distant intervals others to “do” politics for us) of new participative tools and practices  – open and fair deliberation where reason-giving and genuine communication (discovering why others hold the opinions they do hold) give rise over time to consensus-building and compromise, in other words, a new democratic norm to replace the tired winner-loser adversarial negotiating and trade-offs from fixed positions to which we have become accustomed 
• voting as a last resort rather than the acme and be-all of democratic achievement 
• the widespread use of properly trained facilitators to mediate deliberation
• recourse to strictly advisory expertise whenever necessary
• constitutionally entrenched protection of these democratic practices and of the institutions and facilities that sustain them at all levels.

The list of such participative tools and practices is long and examples of their successful use in Commons Communities and Citizens Assemblies the world over are there for the taking.  See in this connection Flatpack Democracy’s Ways of Working and IC-UK’s Guidelines for Collaboration.

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(7) Fair Political-funding Constitutionalists believe that if one person’s vote is not to count more than any other, then no one’s money should either, and dethroning the billionaires and corporate and union funders would help to restore political power to where it properly belongs:  with the people.  This is the principle underlying a fair political-funding system.  One example of such a system might be: every party would be allowed to charge the same membership fee (say £20).  The state would then match it with a fixed multiple.  All other funding would be illegal.  If a party or movement wanted more money, it would need to attract more members.  With Referendums, the state would provide an equal amount for campaigns on either side.

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(8) Parliamentary Sovereignty   Our current system of government is one where Parliament enjoys an absolute and unfettered right to make and unmake laws.  It is based on an uncodified and largely informal constitutional settlement in which, following power struggles between a monarchy claiming absolute power and Parliament, all the spoils of victory went to Parliament.  The people were left with little or no part to play.  That situation has prevailed to this day, in spite of the advent of universal suffrage and the post-war establishment of the welfare state when the interests of the people began to be represented and taken seriously into account.  In recent decades, however, citizen participation in governance has become increasingly confined to voting in local and general elections at distant intervals.  The simple truth is that Parliamentary Sovereignty is of undemocratic origin in that the people of Britain have never been invited to vote on whether we should be ruled by a parliament which claims absolute sovereignty, let alone by a parliament which has become an arena where two major parties are engaged not in representative politics but in an adversarial power struggle, leaving the minority parties squeezed out and deprived of any representative influence.  Electoral reform, which enjoys the overwhelming support of the people of the UK and which might be a step towards addressing this state of affairs, is one of its more obvious casualties. The choice at general elections has long ceased to be between the pluralism of two or more different sets of policy options.  It has now become a choice between electing a party that wants to retain power and a party that wants to gain it.  But power, since all other considerations appear to be irrelevant, to what end?  The people, the only estate with a legitimate and democratic right to answer that question, has seen its voice and vote progressively confined to participating in what, not without reason, has been dubbed an elective dictatorship.  The Brexit referendum and its muddled aftermath illustrate the depth of our current constitutional crisis and just how confused people are about the sovereignty issue. Constitutionalists believe that a paradigm shift is now necessary and clarification long overdue:  the unfinished business of wresting sovereignty from an absolute Monarch and transferring it to what has become an increasingly unrepresentative and backward-looking Parliament of undemocratic origin must now be completed.  A forward-looking principle of People Sovereignty must now be constitutionally established and Parliament restored to its proper representative function. 

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(9) A Political-Economy for People and Planet 

Political-economy because moral and social purpose must precede the economic means of their achievement. People are ends in themselves, not means to an end.  They and the Planet they share with all other living species must be put before profit and mindless growth. Principled pragmatism must become the watchword of economic management.

People because people will begin to hope and recover trust in society and in the political system only when they feel included in the latter, when it belongs to them, and when they have a meaningful part to play. For example, widespread participation in the framing and writing of a comprehensive Constitution will help people to recover commitment and understand how important are the themes of Trust, Solidarity, Devolution and possibly even Confederation. The antagonisms, mounting personal insecurities and abrogation of personal responsibility generated by the current system, must give way to mutual trust and cooperation. This change of attitude across society will be possible only if meaningful livelihoods are available to all, and if all are enabled to participate in changing the system.

Planet because, even though Homo sapiens has become a major agent in shaping the circumstances of its own existence, the future of our species depends on the survival of other living species and on our sustainable use and replenishment of finite planetary resources. Recognising this truth, Constitutionalists believe that a viable political-economy for the future must be symbiotic with Planet Earth enabling us as its custodians and stewards to hold it in trust for future generations.

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(10) The Circular Economy

Decoupling human well-being from resource consumption (i.e. more resource consumption does NOT mean more human welfare) is at the heart of theCircular Economy.  It takes essentially two forms: the fostering of reuse and extending service life through repair, remanufacture, upgrades and retrofits; and turning old goods into as-new resources by recycling atoms and molecules.  People – of all ages and skills – are central to the model.  Ownership gives way to stewardship and caring; consumers become users and creators. The remanufacturing and repair of old goods, buildings and infrastructure create skilled jobs in local workshops, and, with outmoded technologies (for example, electro-mechanical) disappearing from vocational training courses, value is restored to the skills and experience of workers from the past.

Yet lack of familiarity and fear of the unknown mean that the circular-economy idea has been slow to gain traction. As a holistic concept, it collides with the silo structures of academia, companies and administrations. For economists used to working with GDP, wealth creation by making things last is the opposite of what they learned in school. GDP measures a financial flow over a period of time; while the circular economy, by measuring quality as well as quantity, preserves physical stocks. Increasingly, however, concern over resource security, ethics and safety as well as green-house gas reductions are shifting our approach to seeing materials as assets to be preserved, rather than continually consumed and disposed of.  

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(11) Monetary Reform

For Constitutionalists what is at stake here is the nature of money itself as a vital social good.  Money facilitates commercial exchange, it provides the basis for social investment, and it has the power to stabilise or destabilise society.  They firmly believe that handing the power of money creation over to commercial interests is a recipe for financial instability, social inequality and political impotence.  Constitutionalists are convinced that reclaiming that right in the national interest from the wealth elite of the City of London would prove a powerful tool in the struggle for lasting and inclusive prosperity,

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(12) Sovereign Money

Some 24 national campaigns argue that taking the power to create money out of the hands of banks would end the instability and boom-and-bust cycles that are caused when banks create too much money in a short period of time.  In this way, banks could be allowed to fail without bailouts from taxpayers.  It would also ensure that, rather than being lent into existence as currently happens and frequently for speculative rather than productive purposes, newly created money is spent into the real economy.

Only one campaign has official endorsement — Iceland — on which one reviewhas commented:  “Under the proposed sovereign money system, the Central Bank of Iceland would increase the money supply in proportion to growth and consistent with the mandated inflation target.  Direct control of the money supply would remove the need for traditional policy instruments designed to manipulate commercial banks’ incentive to create money, such as policy interest rates and regulatory lending limits.  The government would then put the money into circulation via sovereign bond purchases, and/or fiscal measures. To avoid conflicts of interest leading to the oversupply of money, decisions over allocation would be made by a committee independent of the government.”  For Constitutionalists, however, whatever system of money management is opted for, by government or independent thereof, it is crucial that the overall process remain at all times subject to public oversight thereby ensuring that money is deployed as a social good in the interest of the many rather than, as at present, of the few.

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(13) Democratization of the Renewable Economy

The provision of the country’s energy supply is currently controlled by corporations and consortia.  Under democratization, individual citizens and small and medium enterprises could be enabled through subsidies, tax reductions or other incentives to feed electricity from solar energy or other renewable resources into the national grid and, as voters in local council elections or as local councillors, to participate in establishing priority zones when national incentives were allocated geographically.

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(14)  Fiscal Reform 

Constitutionalists remember that land is not a manufactured good but a birthright and our shared natural inheritance.  They are fully aware of the paramount impact of land and property ownership regimes on the entire economy and are mindful that housing policy needs to acknowledge that land-banking (the hoarding of land out of use) and the ownership of property for speculative rather than residential or home-making purposes are the underlying cause of inequality and the direct cause of the high cost of homes.  They are confident that an annual location value or amenities user fee would help to end land and property speculation and provide government with the funds to build more homes.

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(15) A Citizens’ Dividend

The concept of a Universal Basic Income (UBI)  –  a regular and unconditional cash transfer from the state received by all individual citizens in acknowledgement of the part they play in generating the wealth currently enjoyed by only a few  –   needs no introduction. It is an idea that, in varying shapes, political parties across the world are now adopting as official policy.

Constitutionalists are well aware of the many issues, positive and negative, raised by this idea: its alleged effect on work incentives, its affordability and funding, its transparency, its administrative efficiency, its potential for contributing to sustainable consumption, its relevance to mounting automation and to freeing people from a life reduced to shopping between shifts at work; its role, finally, as a first and tentative step in creating a new economic and social order.  

Constitutionalists believe that the list of issues raised by the idea of a UBI should now be the focus of democratic deliberation.  However, unlike redistributive benefits that are funded from taxes that penalize productive effort, the UBI is neither benefit nor redistributive, and could be seen rather as a dividend paid to all citizens out of the rents (i.e. the net national income) from the location value they all help to create.  Its payment becomes possible once the fiscal system has been restructured to include a Location and Amenities User Fee that honours the principles of both fairness and economic efficiency. 

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(16)The Commons

That it is necessary to explain the Commons, perhaps the oldest-known model of social organisation, testifies to their neglect. In these times, when conceptions of the world tend to be prescribed by notions of individualism and private property, it’s no surprise that the Commons are often misunderstood.  A Commons is neither state nor market nor any thing. It is a material, institutional or cultural resource  –  such as land, water, minerals, scientific research, hardware and software or a facility for democratic deliberation  –  plus the community of people who have shared and equal rights to this resource and who organize themselves to manage it, plus the rules, protocols, systems and negotiations they develop to sustain it and allocate its benefits.  The activity of such communities to achieve such ends is known as commoning.

A true Commons is managed not for the accumulation of capital or profit, but for the steady creation of prosperity and wellbeing. It belongs to a particular group, who might live in or beside it, or who created and sustain it. It is inalienable, which means that it cannot be sold or given away. Where it is based on a living resource, such as a forest or a coral reef, the commoners have an interest in its long-term protection, rather than the short-term gain that could be made from its exploitation.

Over the centuries, the Commons have been attacked by the forces of rent-seeking capitalism, frequently abetted by the state  –  a process that has accelerated since the early 1980s.  Thus, resources that no one invented or created, or the value that a large number of people through commoning have co-created, are stolen by those who sniff another opportunity for generating unearned income.  This theft of value by people or companies who did not create it is called enclosure. Originally, it meant the seizure – supported by violence – of common land. This practice of land-grab started in England, spread to Scotland, then to Ireland and the other colonies, and from there to the rest of the world. It continues to this day as a global phenomenon.  Behind all forms of enclosure lies the continuing and enabling unequal prior distribution of wealth that characterises capital-controlled economies the world over.

Now enclosure, which can be seen as the polar opposite of resource use and maintenance through commoning, is in fact the commodification or privatization of shared wealth. It means that things that were previously freely available, or collectively managed, pass into the hands of individuals or, in collusion with governments, are privatized and made available for market exchange. This process is cast as ‘progress’ by Neo-liberal market economics and put forward as the way that human development happens  –  i.e. the way that wealth is generated. But in fact, it is often just a radical way of dispossessing people of resources that are rightfully theirs and whose value they help to co-create and maintain. Moreover, and perhaps most important of all, it creates a damaging and dangerous disconnect (*): it removes things from their organic context, be that a community or an ecosystem, so that they can be sold.  In so doing, it disrupts the relationship between a community and its resources, destroys the shared rules and protocols that govern their use, and reduces said “resource community” to a collection of isolated individuals vying unequally to maximize an individual share of what was commonly theirs in the first place.  Indeed, the Commons Enclosure story helps us talk about and understand what continues to be the great unacknowledged scandal of our times:  the removal into minority ownership and rent-seeking exploitation of the wealth that belongs to all of us.

(*) A disconnect that in our day has achieved astonishing proportions: where all previous social organising principles saw markets, land and money as embedded within social relationships, today’s rent-seeking mismanagement of the economy has destroyed such relationships.  It has removed from the operation of market any social, religious or moral constraints, and disconnected finance from the productive economy altogether, whittling shareholder commitment and concern down to a single narrow goal: the short-term maximization of return on investment.

For Constitutionalists, more than a system for managing individual resources, the commons presents a model for a new (old) way of organising society, a new politics, neither capitalist nor socialist, and a radical path towards the co-creation of a truly ecological political-economy. Constitutionalists are fully aware that restoring Commons thinking to the public mindset and its widespread practice constitutes a colossal challenge.  They are calling for a national debate about an alternative to the current system that permits a rent-seeking minority to capture increasing quantities of public wealth and in so doing to destroy, with virtual impunity, widening areas of public value.  The Commons, Constitutionalists are convinced, will be a crucial part of that alternative. Some of the issues that debate will need to address might be:

1. Commons relations: Recognition of the trust-based existential nature of relations within a co-created Commons economy.  This contrasts with the competitive, strictly contractual nature of relations within a commodifying market-economy.  The members of a Commons develop deeper connections with each other and their assets (see the stewardship and caring mentioned in connection with the Circular Economy in Note 10) than we do as passive consumers of corporate products.  This must mean reshaping governance to meet the needs of communities and not just corporations, and reviving the Commons to act as a counterweight to the fragmenting, alienating forces now generating a thousand forms of toxic populist reaction;
2. Amenities User Fees & Location Value:  This is the idea that land and its resources belong to us all (but only by reason of our shared stewardship and management of them), together with the notion that the value of land is a function of its location, i.e. its proximity to community-created amenities.  Since land and its resources are inalienable, it is suggested that they can only be temporarily removed from the public domain for private use in return for a user fee or Amenities User Fee.  The value of any existing property on land, or of its subsequent development at the user’s expense, would accrue to the user and be subject to market exchange when its use is passed on or the land returned to the public domain.  The proceeds from land-use rents could constitute a community reserve, part of which could be used to fund a social-rent dividend (or Universal Basic Income)to citizens as a return on the location value they help to create.  The payment of such dividend or income would constitute the single most effective protection of the Commons against free-riding land-bankers and rent-seekers.  It could be part of a root-and-branch reform of the current fiscal system whose taxing of earned income places a punitive and unfair burden on productive effort;
3. The notion of local user expertise as an essential pillar of sound Commons design and management.  Outside expertise should be on tap but not on top.  This will require a massive ramping-up of local participative democracy whereby Commons Communities belong to their members by reason of the membership’s involvement in their design and ongoing management;
4. Restoration and promotion over time of a Commons mindset leading to the co-creation of a systemically reformed and curative Political-Economy for People and Planet which integrates Commons, Markets, Households and the State (genuinely reformed and representative Regional and Central Governance), thus providing a viable alternative to the prevailing mismanagement which continues to produce so much inequality, social injustice and ecological degradation.
5. Constitutionally entrenched acknowledgement of Commons Regimes and their accompanying Rules and Protocols, and protection against external commodifying encroachment.  Should not a major new chapter of any future constitutional settlement, alongside the existing separation of the three functions of government, be entrenchment of protection of the Commons and of the participative/deliberative processes (fair, facilitated, respectful and informed) that make both the Commons and Democracy possible? One of the basic principles of Commons governance is subsidiarity – the idea that decisions should be made at the lowest level practical. While there will always be some benefits to centralisation to reduce duplication and to deal with large-scale or global issues such as climate change (hence the reference above to Regional and Central Governance), many decisions can and should be made by local communities for themselves within democratically determined limits.  The Constitution will need to identify such limits and to show how Commons Communities can be fitted into an overall, readable structure of political organisation and governance that citizens can understand and value (see Section IV of the Declaration of Purpose).
6. Minimum individual entitlements: Finally and more generally, in parallel with the widespread promotion of Commons regimes, everyone, as well as a minimum livelihood, should be guaranteed a safe, private space in which to found a home.

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Examples of largely unacknowledged but functioning commons: 

Subsistence economies the world over  • community-owned forests in Nepal and Romania  •  lobster fisheries in Maine  •  pastures in East Africa and Switzerland  •  FOSS: free open-source software that has underpinned the creation of Wikipedia, Internet, Linux, digital libraries and a whole range of other Commons : intellectual, literature, music, arts, design, film, video, radio and heritage preservation (**)  •  journals published by the Public library of Science  • time-banks  • local currencies and open-source microscopy  •  lollipop ladies  •  households   •  the British NHS (at least until recently)  • pubs, meeting places and other ACVs (assets of community value)   •  and probably the greatest of them all: democratic deliberation!  Or as the song might put it:  “ those best things in life that are free!”  Free, of course, at the point of delivery, but created by painstaking commoning.

(**) The main principle in Knowledge Commons is the issue of copyright-free licenses which grant licensees all necessary rights such as the right to study, use, change and redistribute on condition that all future works building on the license are kept in the Commons.

Examples (again largely unacknowledged) of fragmenting Enclosure: the recent PPI fire-sale of franchises over sections of the health, social welfare, security and transport services and other public utilities to rent-seeking private firms and companies  • the conversion of fines for anti-social behaviour into fees for dispensations  • the use of the social good or Commons that is Money as a speculative asset  •  the temporary renting-out of public park-space as Event Venues to offset shortfalls in funding from public revenue  •  attempts by the recent US administration to destroy internet neutrality and to prohibit community broadband  •  the extension of commodification of intellectual property through trade agreements  •  academic publishers’ capture and commodification of the research freely provided by scientific communities  •  the increasing use of business bottom-line models for the management of social services  •  and a double-whammy this one: the weakening through commodification of our already ailing system of elective democracy by those who use our wealth to purchase and leverage their political influence.  Alas, the list is virtually endless!

Editors Note IC-UK gratefully records its indebtedness to the ideas and in some instances the language used in articles and books by the following authors: David Bollier, Fred Harrison, Tim Hollo (and The Griffith Review 59: Commonwealth Now), George Monbiot, Richard Murphy, Kate Raworth and Guy Standing.

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