In May, CSM hosted another Tawney Dialogue between John McFall MP and Bishop Stephen Lowe on the topic: “Rewiring the global economy – can the Church provide the spark?” Rachael Maskell gives her perspective on the discussion and on what we can learn from it.
As politicians and economists wrestle to create order out of chaos in our banking systems, Bishop Stephen Lowe and John McFall MP, Chair of the Treasury Select Committee, ignited a debate of a different order at this year’s Tawney Dialogue hosted in Portcullis House, Westminster. The big question asked in the debate was: are our financial systems there to be master or servant? This led to an overarching call for a system underpinned by accountability and responsibility, reconnecting borrower and lender, and steered by tighter regulation of both a national and global order.
In his opening remarks Bishop Stephen asserted that this crisis had been fuelled by “increasingly complex financial systems, instruments and speculation worldwide, extra traditional banking systems, complex investment conglomerates, private equity and hedge funds.” These are words that have entered most of our vocabularies of late, but if we are honest, their interplay is not widely understood.
It would seem that in this complex world – which was healthily growing the economy, contributing to GDP and paving the way to full employment – few asked serious questions about what was really going on. Thankfully Gordon Brown did ask, but in the land of plenty, few were interested in responding to his concerns. Instead the system was allowed to become master. As the Bishop of Hulme went on to say, the inequalities grew with extreme wealth for the few. So it was a self-serving master, feasting off the contributions that the many made in their hope to acquire some equality and close the ever-growing gap between rich and poor. But was this facilitated with the objective that it could, in turn, become servant? Possibly.
He concluded that the market had been built on the sand, so when the rainy day came, ordinary people’s modest aspirations could not be met. Today we learn of the pain for the many as the value of currency falling has meant that the value of international aid has significantly reduced and millions of people across the globe are losing their jobs, their homes, their skills, their worth, their dignity. And despite the creativity of Labour over the past 12 years, it feels that the progress made has only led us back to where we started in so many areas. It could be said that we have simply walked around the desert, worshipped our golden calf and never made it to the promised land, and unless we take a serious turn in our priorities we will be judged on this at the next election.
John McFall brought in a more human dimension to the debate, reflecting on the pain in this crisis that has “led to a serious break in trust between the banks and customers, financial services and the population,” which has led to liquid assets freezing and people’s futures resting on thin ice. In his analysis, it was greed and recklessness that had broken the system, and simply rebuilding what was there before was no solution. A new system built on integrity, customer service, honesty and excellence is needed. Contrary to Adam Smith’s invisible hand, there also had to be the visible hand of church and civil society – a call and a challenge to not sit back and let others determine the destiny of our systems but to speak up and change them.
The co-operative model of banking, of mutual responsibility and relationship – where money is less about figures but more about person and their circumstances – was strongly favoured in the discussion, alongside other models of ensuring that loans stayed with their issuer, and better stewardship was promoted, using more ethical investments.
But as John McFall said in his response, we have to change too. We have to re-learn disciplines like “deferred gratification,” where we save for what we want and not expect that we can have all we desire; we need to be prudent in the way that we manage our own finances, and where necessary call on others to help us in this. We must challenge our own greed in this world of plenty.
Stephen Timms MP, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, reminded us that we do exist in a globalised and digitalised economic system, and there is no real way back. The ensuing discussion moved its ground to question value, self-worth, happiness, well-being, relationships and connectivity, almost to the point of dismissing the importance of our global economic order.
When all is stripped away, people really didn’t want to worship Mammon. Maybe this is our call, a different world order, to worship God.
