Staff meeting & Small is beautiful

There was a very productive staff meeting yesterday in the West Midlands.

Some new and key appointments were made which will help the Party run smoothly as it goes through what many political pundits believe will be our most important year to date.

These new appointments will be covered on the website, but I would just like to say how delighted I am that Michaela Mackenzie has been taken on for the key role of Party coordinator. Michaela has been on the BNP's management committee since its inception but now moves on to this most important of roles within the BNP.

She has immense experience within business management and her expertise and drive is just what is needed to help the Party run efficiently.

January's Freedom is out this weekend and the Freedom website will be updated later today with a 'taster' of what is in the issue.

In the Daily Telegraph this morning columnist Simon Heffer bemoans the loss of small 'government'. He wrote:

"Anyone familiar with the way government used to operate a century ago cannot but be struck by the disparity with the way in which it operates now. Then, governments were small entities of a dozen or so cabinet ministers, matched by similar numbers of under-secretaries and ministers of state outside the cabinet. An empire on which the sun never set was ruled by roughly the same number of civil servants as are now to be found in the average department of state. "

His article prompted me to think of E.F. Schumacher who argued for the decentralisation and devolution of economic activity. He was one of those people whose political thinking inspired British National Party ideology and in Freedom Steve Johnson analysed why Schumacher's contribution was so important.

"IN HIS 1973 classic critique Small is Beautiful, subtitled ‘Economics as if People Mattered’, E.F. Schumacher (1911-1977) offered a mass modern audience that third choice, neither Capitalist nor Communist, which is at the heart of modern British Nationalist economic thought.
Born in Bonn, Germany, in 1911, Schumacher first came to England in 1930 to study economics at New College, Oxford. He then taught at New York’s Columbia University. In 1937, he moved to England for good.
At Oxford during the War he devised a plan for postwar economic reconstruction and after the War, Schumacher played a senior role in the British Control Commission which laid the foundation of the German economic recovery. From 1950 to 1970 he was Chief Economic Adviser to the National Coal Board. He argued that coal, and not oil, should be used to supply the energy needs of the world’s population.
He warned that oil would run out before coal and pointed out that whilst Britain, the United States and other Western countries have vast coal reserves under their feet, in the case of oil “the richest and cheapest reserves are located in some of the world’s most unstable countries”. He prophesied the rise of the Islamic-dominated oil cartel OPEC and the wars over oil that are taking place today in Iraq.
In 1973 Schumacher, despite his impeccable credentials as an Establishment economist, launched his devastating critique of establishment economics. He attacked the worship, shared by governments in West and East for a hundred years, of economic growth and efficiency as the highest good, regardless of all costs to the welfare of people and our planet. The worship of “economism” that is destroying the identity of nations and the environment of the Earth alike, responsible for woes from global warming to mass immigration. Economism Schumacher saw as “standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity”.
Inspired by earlier Distributist ideas, Schumacher advocated, and provided economically-literate, practical guidelines for a workable alternative. The decentralisation and devolution of economic, and indeed political, activity to small human-scale communities, rooted in the land and preserving their local identities.
He favoured the use of sustainable “Intermediate Technology” rather than the vast polluting machinery of global greed, pointing out that the current system uses technology to produce as much output per unit of labour input as possible. Thereby making many workers redundant and entire industries dependent on equipment so expensive that only the global corporate giants can afford to use it. He felt, as we do, that technology should be aimed at enabling the self-employed, small businesses and producer co-operatives to dominate production.
Central to Schumacher’s thought was the concept of “decentralization”, of what he called “smallness within bigness”. He felt that for a large organisation to work it must behave like a related group of small, human scale organisations.
This is the foundation of the BNP’s concept not only of economics but of our nation and its society and democracy. It should be built from the bottom up, based on families in local communities, joined into local, regional and component British peoples’ communities of communities with as much power as possible devolved as far down as possible.
Schumacher’s vision of established communities living in harmony with the land in a society that puts the good of the community before the greed of the individual, inspires our own vision. It’s a vision of the New Britain we invite you to help us build together."