How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Further Impoverishing the Poor

Economic development is a 'naughty plan'

‘Every highly privileged group develops the myth of its natural…superiority. Under conditions of stable distribution of power and, consequently, of status order, that myth is accepted by the negatively privileged strata. Such a situation exists as long as the masses continue in that natural state of theirs in which thought about the order of domination remains but little developed, which means, as long as no urgent needs render the state of affairs “problematical.”’

-Max Weber, Economy and Society

As time goes on, more and more of the green agenda resembles an attempt by the global upper-middle classes to pull the drawbridge up behind them and leave the peasants on the other side of the moat forever. A recently televised children’s pantomime, and some coincidental news stories about the EU Regulation on deforestation-free products, illustrate all of this quite neatly, bringing to the fore the extent to which the environmental movement seeks to keep the poor in what Karl Marx called ‘rural idiocy’. Those of us who care about conservation and the environment have bitter cause to regret this, and the backlash to which it is now giving rise.

Pantomime first. Being a father to young children, I sometimes am forced to have half my attention diverted towards mind-numbingly awful TV programmes, mostly on the BBC children’s channel, CBeebies. I plan to one day write a post about how almost the entirety of CBeebies’ programming seems designed to ensure children grow up with nothing to aspire to except simpering mediocrity, but for the time being, I will focus on this year’s iteretion of the channel’s annual Christmas panto - Robin Hood.¹ Those who have access to the BBC iPlayer can watch it here.

Let’s begin our discussion of CBeebies Robin Hood with a preliminary question. What is the first phrase that typically leaps into your mind, straight away, when the words ‘Robin Hood’ are mentioned? Let me take a guess. Is it something to do with robbing from the rich to give to the poor?

Robin Hood tales have apparently been all about that basic concept since the Middle Ages. Sometimes ‘the rich’ means a rapacious, tax-hungry king. Sometimes it just means ‘the rich’ per se. One can spin the character in other words as Friedrich Hayek or Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. And one can dress him up as an avatar for harmless venting or for biting social critique. But what Robin Hood is known for the world over is always, at root, the same thing: a fundamentally subversive and rebellious refusal to accept the status quo where wealth and property are concerned. What he fights against is, simply put, social class and its economic consequences, and in this he represents the wish fulfilment (and, let’s face it, often entirely understandable outrage) of the poor and put-upon.

But CBeebies Robin Hood is a retelling of the Robin Hood legend for the mid-21st century, and in the mid-21st century, we are supposed to have forgotten about old-fashioned notions like class. The idea that English history (and indeed most of world history) was characterised by divisions over wealth and property, as opposed to sex, race, etc., is nowadays simply banished from the agenda, as is the idea that anybody should want to transcend their background (particularly if they are working- or lower-middle class) and become rich. The most we are nowadays encouraged to aim for is a slightly higher welfare floor; the rest of the time our job is essentially to feel bad about what little prosperity we might have. It is therefore basically impossible to imagine the BBC sanctioning the production of a children’s panto that had any - even tongue-in-cheek - reference to the class-war element of the Robin Hood story.

How the concept of class has been utterly driven out of public life is, however, also a subject for another substack post. Suffice to say that CBeebies Robin Hood displays classic modern-day bourgeois squeamishness about the subject of the legitimacy of social class, wealth, taxation, and so on, and instead makes the central message of the story more-or-less the complete opposite of the traditional dynamic. Here, Robin Hood does not rob from the rich to give to the poor, but instead protects the forest from the rapacious Sherriff of Nottingham, who has a ‘naughty plan’ to build a mansion on it. Robin protects the beloved trees that are his home, and in so doing maintains a subsistence mode of living for him and his fellow forest-dwellers (who seem to live almost entirely on apples). Not for him theft and subversion. Not for him the problematisation of inherited wealth and status. Rather, well-meaning generosity with respect to nature’s provends - a kind of blissful purblindness to politics and worldly matters. The entire motto therefore transmogrifies. Robin has nothing to do with robbing from anyone; rather, the repeated line is: ‘The riches of the tree, he gives away for free.’

The message, then, is not subtle, especially if you are familiar with the current obsessions of Britain’s media classes. Basically, we need in some nebulous sense to be more ‘at one’ with nature and live a simpler, more ‘sustainable’ form of life (probably through implementing ‘degrowth’). And we need to oppose attempts to subject nature to human will; presumptively, construction, industrialisation and so on are basically bad, and we need to find better, lower-impact ways to survive.

The corollary of this message, never openly stated but obvious when you think about it for five seconds, is of course that the poor have to stay poor. Since economic development requires industrialisation and the leaving of a ‘footprint’, it is itself a ‘naughty plan’ and cannot be permitted. Indeed, existing economic development itself needs to be scaled back or ‘reimagined’. Those of us who live in rich countries need - metaphorically, or perhaps not so metaphorically - to retreat to the woods, and live a much narrower, darker and dingier life. Those who live in poor countries simply have to remain that way (although often of course they are fobbed off with the cakeism of the ‘just transition’, which holds that we have it in our power to find a way to let them develop that involves literally no trade-offs).

That this is the future that is envisaged for us is made plain by CBeebies Robin Hood’s band of Merry Men, who do not have any ideas above their station or desire to lay claim to wealth, but instead embrace their permanent impoverishment. ‘All we know is the food we grow’, they declare - almost perfectly echoing Marx’s remarks about the ‘idiocy of rural life’ which I alluded to in my introduction. Not for the peasants politics or striving, and certainly not the acquisition of property of their own. For them only grinning, capering simplicity and merry contentment with their lot. Again, the reasons why this narrative has taken hold will have to wait for another day; for the time being it suffices to point out how strange and sad it is that nowadays we are directed by those who would call themselves left-wing to imagine that this hellish prospect, which our ancestors strove with all of their power to rise above, is in fact a necessary and good thing. I am no leftist, but if left-wing politics ever had a value, it is surely that it gestured towards increased material prosperity for the poor. No longer: now it seeks only to reconcile us to drudgery.

Lest I be accused of reading too much into what is after all a kids’ TV programme - and one with some catchy tunes, plenty of infectious enthusiasm, and endearingly bad acting - its screening happens to have coincided with some widely reported comments made by Rebecca Grynspan, Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), on the subject of the rich world’s green agenda.

As Grynspan rightly points out, a great deal of policy concerning what she (with unusual frankness) calls ‘“quote, unquote” the environment’ is actually just good old fashioned industrial policy and protectionism masquerading as ‘sustainability’. And one of the examples Grynspan gives (although she hedges her bets by not challenging its basic premise) is almost too on-the-nose for a CBeebies Robin Hood comparison: the EU’s new and aforementioned Regulation on deforestation.² This piece of legislation, in order to ‘bring down greenhouse emissions and biodiversity loss’, requires any operator or trader putting a list of commodities and products on the market within the EU (this includes cattle, wood, cocoa, soy, palm oil, coffee, rubber, leather, chocolate, tyres, furniture, and so on) to prove that the goods were not produced on ‘recently deforested land’. This will mean handing over geolocation coordinates for relevant plots of land to the EU in order for it to perform checks of varying levels of intensity depending on whether the land is in a ‘high risk’ country.

This requirement comes into effect at the end of 2024, and the global food industry is scrambling. Of course, costs are going to be passed on to the humble consumers of the EU; whether it ends up being the coffee grower in Colombia or Starbucks who bears the initial expense (and has to pay the fines for non-compliance), the price of a decaf skinny latte with hazelnut syrup is almost certainly going to go (yet further) up.

But the much more important point is that the measure almost seems designed to harm smaller producers. The likes of Cargill and Bayer aren’t going to have difficulty complying with the deforestation Regulation, and they may indeed be able to find ways around it (or will discover that with respect to their products the checks are mysteriously light-touch). The people who will have trouble are the small fry in places like Malaysia and Indonesia who find it too difficult or expensive to evidence traceability of non-deforested land use. And, of course, the people who will have even more trouble are those for whom recently cleared land currently provides an income, or who live in grinding poverty and might previously have been able to get a leg up by clearing forest and increasing the size of their land holding. For them, the result of all of this will be lost income and probably lost livelihoods - at the margins, the difference between farming for an income and farming for subsistence, for potentially millions and millions of poor people around the world.

Ursula von der Leyen, always insistent on cakeism (‘agriculture and protection of the natural world can go hand in hand’) won’t care about all of this, of course. In her mind, the problem will be made to go away through consultative ‘multi-stakeholder platforms’ and so on: the technocrat’s vision, of course, being that it is always possible to avoid trade-offs with the right amount of expert management. The Western public, being fed a diet of nonsense about how wonderful rural idiocy is, won’t care either (and don’t imagine that the deforestation Regulation won’t soon be copied in a jurisdiction near you). We’ll just notice the price of our food getting incrementally more expensive as we half-listen to breakfast news reports about ‘something something global supply chains’. And we’ll be yet more quietly lulled into our own form of idiocy, in which the poor, when we think of them at all, are a distant phenomenon who it is beyond the wit of man to help: an undifferentiated mass who will be ‘always with us’, and nothing beyond that.

We should hardly be surprised if the world’s poor are dissatisfied with that role. The truth of the matter is that deforestation is no doubt a problem, and that the instinctive desire to conserve the world’s forests is an entirely understandable one, which I share. The issue is that I, like almost everybody on the European continent, live in a country which found its way to development through largely cutting down its own forests. I live in a country in other words which made a trade-off between protecting nature and prosperity. That those of us who live in such countries should now be using protection of the natural environment (whether deliberately or not) as a stick with which to beat up the developing world is intolerable. This is not how one wins friends and influences people in the long term, of course, but it is also simply immoral.

And environmentalists should also think very carefully about this subject. That the Secretary-General of UNCTAD - hardly a marginal figure - should be so openly critical of sustainability measures is surely indicative that a serious backlash is brewing; wherever they are in the world, people know the smell of a rat when they scent it. Given the importance of what is at stake, what is required is open and frank political discussion about what reducing deforestation might look like - so that we can muddle through the messy and difficult process of dealing with the trade-offs that must necessarily exist, as best we can. Not vague promises about behind-closed-doors ‘multi-stakeholder platforms’, but proper negotiation between public officials and binding agreements. But with the EU deforestation Regulation we are getting the absolute opposite of this, and governments in the developing world will it seems increasingly make clear how little they like it.

Closer to home, it is important to observe that the idiocy - by which Marx really meant ignorance of politics and lack of class consciousness - spreads wider and wider. Our apathy extends beyond the subject of the poor, and indeed to our own lives. Instead of wondering why it is that our standard of living seems to be slowly declining, and instead of wondering why it is that the path to prosperity upon which we were walking appears to have been diverted downhill, we are instead being lulled by our cultural ‘thought leaders’ into believing the absurd notion that this is actually, in the long term, going to be good for us. We probably shouldn’t mind; we were all getting much too uppity and comfortable anyway. We have been engaged in ‘naughty plans’ of our own, and we ought to hang out heads in shame. In particular, we ought not to get any ideas about political struggle (of either the libertarian or Marxist variety³) in order to lead a more prosperous life; we must rather simply be satisfied with our lot - which is of course the same old story the well-off have been telling the striving poor, in some form or other, almost since the days of Robin Hood himself.

1. Foreign readers will likely be unfamiliar with what a ‘panto’ is; trust me - you’re probably better off not knowing. Suffice to say, it’s a stage performance for children with certain longstanding eccentricities.

2. If you’re interested, an EU Regulation is the equivalent of domestic primary legislation. As soon as it is made it comes into effect automatically in the law of EU member states. This is different to a Directive, which has to be enacted in domestic law by a domestic legislature and therefore gives more leeway.

3. I hope it goes without saying that I would much prefer the former.