The Glasgow Effect E-Book

Ellie Harrison

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 714

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

I will not travel beyond Glasgow's city limits, or use any vehicles except my bike, for a whole calendar year. – Ellie Harrison, January This simple proposition – to attempt to live a 'low-carbon lifestyle of the future' – put forward by an English artist living in post-industrial Glasgow cut to the heart of the unequal world we have created. A world in which some live transient and disconnected existences within a global 'knowledge economy' racking up huge carbon footprints as they chase work around the world, whilst others, trapped in a cycle of poverty caused by deindustrialisation and the lack of local opportunities, cannot even afford the bus fare into town. We're all equally miserable. Isn't it time we rethought the way we live our lives? In this, her first book, Ellie Harrison traces her own life's trajectory to examine the relationship between literal and social mobility; between class and carbon footprint. From the personal to the political, she uses experiences and knowledge gained in Glasgow in 2016 and beyond, together with the ideas of Patrick Geddes – who coined the phrase 'Think Global, Act Local' in 1915, economist EF Schumacher who made the case for localism in Small is Beautiful in 1973, and the Fearless Cities movement of today, to put forward her own vision for 'the sustainable city of the future', in which we can all live happy, healthy and creative lives.

Leseprobe

I will not travel beyond Glasgow’s city limits, or use any vehicles except my bike, for a whole calendar year.

—Ellie Harrison, January 2016

This simple proposition – to attempt to live a ‘low-carbon lifestyle of the future’ – put forward by an English artist living in post-industrial Glasgow cut to the heart of the unequal world we have created. A world in which some live transient and disconnected existences within a global ‘knowledge economy’ racking up huge carbon footprints as they chase work around the world, whilst others, trapped in a cycle of poverty caused by deindustrialisation and the lack of local opportunities, cannot even afford the bus fare into town. We’re all equally miserable. Isn’t it time we rethought the way we live our lives?

In this, her first book, Ellie Harrison traces her own life’s trajectory to examine the relationship between literal and social mobility; between class and carbon footprint. From the personal to the political, she uses experiences and knowledge gained in Glasgow in 2016 and beyond, together with the ideas of Patrick Geddes – who coined the phrase ‘Think Global, Act Local’ in 1915, economist EF Schumacher who made the case for localism in Small is Beautiful in 1973, and the Fearless Cities movement of today, to put forward her own vision for ‘the sustainable city of the future’, in which we can all live happy, healthy and creative lives.

ELLIE HARRISON was born in the London borough of Ealing in 1979. She moved north to study Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University in 1998. In 2008 she continued northwards to do a Masters at Glasgow School of Art and has been living in Glasgow ever since. She has described herself as an artist and activist, and as ‘a political refugee escaped from the Tory strongholds of Southern England’. In 2009 she founded Bring Back British Rail, the national campaign for the public ownership of our railways. As a result of thinking globally and acting locally during The Glasgow Effect in 2016, she is now involved in several local projects and campaigns aimed at making Glasgow a more equal, sustainable and connected city, including the Get Glasgow Moving public transport campaign, Car-free Glasgow and the Glasgow Community Energy co-operative.

Praise for The Glasgow Effect

‘This is a most excellent book for anyone interested in public transport, local democracy, and seriously addressing the climate emergency and socio-economic inequality in the world… Ellie analyses her own personal experiences to better understand the world and its injustices. As a self-confessed privileged person, she bravely steps out of her comfort zone, acknowledges her naiveties and limitations, navigates complex social situations, reads shitloads and critically dissects and reconnects all of it. She breathes new life into slogans such as ‘Think Global, Act Local’ and ‘Small is Beautiful’, at the same time as asking such obvious questions as, why do cities spend millions on branding exercises while ignoring obvious solutions to social problems?’

—Helen Varley, Goodreads, October 2019

‘The Glasgow Effect by @ellieharrison is the most relevant book I’ve read this year. A creative(’s) insight into bringing about climate and social justice (from a Glasgow perspective) that would put the majority of our politicians to shame. Positive, honest and inspiring.’

—Caroline Smyth, Twitter, December 2019

‘What a journey. Epic yet intimate, meticulously researched and brilliantly synthesised. Great to see Cathy McCormack, Ada Colau and Carol Craig rubbing shoulders with Geddes, Schumacher and the like. I found it illuminating and challenging in equal measure. It is a timely wake-up call to all who care about our Dear Green Place to awake from our slumber, emerge from our silos and work together for a municipal takeover. Count me in!’

—Babs Nicgriogair, December 2019

‘Just finished reading [The Glasgow Effect] by @ellieharrison. I was sceptical when the project was running but inspired now I’ve read this. So much to think about.’

—Dr Beth Williamson, Twitter, January 2020

‘This book is a timely questioning of our priorities – inspiring debate about the practicalities of what can be done to foster a healthy relationship between our self and our environment.’

—Dr Anna McLauchlan, Social & Cultural Geography, February 2020

‘I absolutely loved reading this and couldn’t put it down. I can’t remember ever reading such a deep and engaging documentation of an artist’s practice, going right through from their art school days. How she ties together a history of post-war Glasgow planning, discussion of her own practice and life as an artist in the 21st century, a family story, a critique of the international art scene – it’s brilliant. The interconnected-ness of everything is so fully realised.’

—RBH, Amazon, February 2020

‘Ultimately, The Glasgow Effect was successful in fostering debate. Harrison’s commitment to reflecting on and sharing her experiences is impressive. It is clear that the artist needed to write this book to move beyond the distress she experienced.’

—Elinor Morgan, Art Monthly, April 2020

‘To those who could not afford to leave Glasgow in any scenario, Harrison’s Creative Scotland-funded ‘lockdown’ seemed in poor taste. But it touched on an interesting question: is the ability to move about and switch locations integral to advancement? Is staying in one place the same thing as being stuck in another sense?’

—Natalie Whittle, Financial Times, July 2020

‘In 2016 when Ellie Harrison announced she received funding from Creative Scotland to stay within the boundaries of Glasgow and not travel any faster than 20 miles an hour, it caused a social media outcry, but her work is an important and illuminating read. Many Glaswegians will spot some of the infuriating issues that face many of the city’s working class residents, such as the strange quirk of only being able to renew your SPT ZoneCard on a Sunday. Harrison attempts to explain the reasons why Glasgow suffers with excess mortality in an accessible way.’

—Lauren Gilmour, Glasgow Times, March 2021

Top 10 best Glasgow books for World Book Day

—Glasgow Times, March 2021

Top 5 books about urban design and sustainable transport

—Sunday National, October 2023

First published (red spine) 2019

ISBN: 978-1-80425-352-6

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Typeset in 10.5pt Sabon by

Main Point Books, Edinburgh

Front cover illustration by Neil Scott, Glasgow

Photograph on back cover taken by Ellie Harrison on 28 October 2015, featuring chips bought and eaten by the artist (at her own personal expense) from the Philadelphia chippy, Great Western Road.

Cover design by Neil Scott, Ellie Harrison and Maia Gentle

A full bibliography and index of the artworks referenced in this book can be found at www.ellieharrison.com/book

© Ellie Harrison 2019, 2021

For my beautiful mum

Extract from ‘Neoliberalism’ by Loki

Since the youngest age I was always threatening to run away,

but social mobility isnae what they say.

Stuck at a red light on my tricycle thinking ‘fuck them!’

While a bunch of Westenders whizz past me in the bus lane.

How come it’s bright in this posh part, but in Pollok it’s dark?

Probably cos the sun isnae shining out of everyone’s arse.

Vegan liberals lecture me to ‘buy local’,

while they’re sneering at the Glesga dialect and my vocals.

…

Apart fae that, nothing’s going on here locally,

Except an off sales masquerading as a grocery.

The local shops are shutting since the new Tesco’s getting built.

Thought I’d check it out. Went in sceptical,

had to walk 20 miles just to get some bread and milk.

Then got diverted at the checkout by a clothing section.

Ended up flipping out, bought some pens, Pepsi, Lilt,

a Craftmatic adjustable bed, a lamp, a feather quilt,

a pair of stilettos, salt and pepper, a kilt, a pair of stilts.

First person to mention my free will is getting killed.

Luckily there’s a pretty woman on the end of the till,

offering me instant loans to help me with my credit bills.

…

While I look across the river at you sipping your Pimms,

wishing I could get hooked on yoga, swimming and gyms,

as I can to chicken dippers, Lidl’s crisps and 70 million minute SIMs.1

Reproduced with permission of Darren McGarvey (aka Loki the Scottish Rapper)

Contents

Foreword to the Second Edition

Summary of Key Ideas

Preface

Introduction

PART 1A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEOLIBERALISM

Chapter 1 Thatcher’s Children

Straight outta Compton

What the fuck is neoliberalism?

Privatisation

Deregulation

Trade liberalisation

Social mobility isnae what they say

Waste not, want not

Major setback

Chapter 2 Creative Decade

Things can only get better

The knowledge economy

A golden age

Technologies of the self

Community vs career

Chapter 3 Welcome to Scotland

Dark clouds

Creative education

Bring Back British Rail

Hedonism vs asceticism

Austerity politics

Long-distance love

Reality check

Chapter 4 Socialist Dystopia

Turning point

You are what you eat

System change, not climate change

Asceticism and the spirit of capitalism

Compromise and complicity are the new original sins

Progress trap

The leaky bucket

Worst inequalities in Western Europe

Settlers and colonists

First as tragedy, then as farce

Carbon Graph (2021)

PART 2THE GLASGOW EFFECT

Chapter 5 When the Chips Hit the Fan

Calm before the storm

I like Glasgow and Glasgow likes me

Facebook wormhole

The Divide

Small is Beautiful

Could there be a worse insult?

Chapter 6 Creative Destruction

But is it art?

Money can’t buy you love

Every human being is an artist

I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!

Career suicide

Where art and politics become one

Public property

Chapter 7 Lived Reality

Low-carbon lifestyle of the future

Citizen’s Basic Income

Biographic solutions to systemic contradictions

History, politics and vulnerability

Overcrowding

Rip it up and start again

Brain drain

Hypocrisy kills

Other causes of ‘the Glasgow effect’

Diseases of despair

The elephant in the room

Remunicipalisation!

Reflection and action

We need to stop ‘researching’ and start fighting!

Practising what we preach, preaching what we practise

Thrift radiates happiness

Hostile environments

The outsiders

Chapter 8 Aftershock

The end is the beginning

Impact agenda

The report

Homecoming

Worst nightmare

PART 3THE SUSTAINABLE CITY OF THE FUTURE

Chapter 9 Think Global

Climate emergency

Downward mobility

Back to the future

Prosperity without growth

Deconsumerisation

Chapter 10 Act Local

City as a site for social change

Regional power

Community control

Fearless Cities

Non-material pathways out of poverty

World-class public transport

Sharing is more sustainable

Motivational structures and meaningful work

Variety is the spice of life

Chapter 11 Universal Luxurious Services

Those things we all need to live happily and well

Information

Transport

Food

Healthcare

Housing

Co-production

Foundational economy

Public luxury

Localism and protectionism

Positive alternatives

Car-free future

Chapter 12 Travelling Without Moving

Equalising mobility

Minimising migration

Paradox of repopulation

Education for life, not for work

Rekindling our radical past

Love-hate relationship with the city

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

Foreword to the Second Edition

JUST TWO YEARS have passed since the first edition of this book was published in November 2019, yet the whole world has changed. Not as a result of the book I might add, but because of a then unknown virus, which escaped into the human population and quickly spread across our globalised world. Within five months of the book’s launch, governments across the world had imposed ‘lockdown’ restrictions not entirely dissimilar to those I imposed on myself during The Glasgow Effect project in 2016. We were all ordered to ‘stay local’ and ‘make essential journeys only’. Population Health – the topic I had chosen to study during my intensive year in Glasgow – was thrust centre stage, as epidemiologists became household names.

Amongst the carnage caused by Covid-19 and the excessive death toll resulting from poor government decision-making are some positive stories which resonate with many of the themes of this book. The intense refocusing on our localities created a flourishing of local community activism, with ‘mutual aid’ groups popping up all over the country to offer practical help to those most in need. Many, including myself, moved back in with elderly relatives to care and ‘shield’ together, strengthening family bonds. But most striking of all was the drop in global greenhouse gas emissions resulting from less travel. 2020 saw the largest reduction on record: 7 per cent less emissions than 2019 levels1 (my Carbon Graph on pages 138–9 has been updated to illustrate this drop on a personal level). This shows what’s possible when we all change our behaviour. But it also highlights the scale of the challenge we now face. We need decreases like those seen in 2020, year-on-year-on-year until we reach net zero, instead of the economic impulse to ‘bounce back’ that is now well underway.

This new edition is being published to coincide with COP26 – the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP) held in Glasgow this November (the history of the COPS is woven into the other personal/political histories in Part 1 of the book, see pages 29 and 62). As Glasgow City Council Leader Susan Aitken has said ‘this year, Glasgow is the world’s most talked about city’.2 It is a chance for Glasgow to become known by yet another short catchphrase. Not ‘the Glasgow miracle’, used to promote its cultural credentials within the artworld. Not ‘the Glasgow effect’ coined in 2008 to highlight our comparatively poor public health. But soon, perhaps, ‘the Glasgow agreement’ – a legally binding global treaty committing all nations of the world to tackle climate change before it’s too late.

Given the urgent call to action in the most recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, published on 9 August 2021, stating that ‘human-induced climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe’3 – it is vital that ‘the Glasgow agreement’ is reached. And that it commits all governments to do what is ‘scientifically necessary’ to keep within 1.5ºC warming and not just what is deemed ‘politically possible’. However, one of the clear messages of this book is that targets and slogans are meaningless unless matched with tangible action on the ground. As one of the book’s heroes, economist EF Schumacher says, ‘an ounce of practice is generally worth more than a ton of theory’.4 We cannot allow COP26 to become just another PR exercise for Glasgow. It should be a wake-up call and an opportunity to get our own house in order as the eyes of the world look on.

When delegates from around the globe descend on Glasgow this autumn, they will be shocked at the expensive and dysfunctional public transport network, which we have been left with as a result of the deregulation and privatisation of our buses and trains in the ’80s and ’90s – that the Scottish Government has done so little to address in more than two decades of devolution.5 They will be shocked at the car-centric design of the city and the massive six-lane motorway cutting right through its centre, which Transport Scotland is currently spending £100 million repairing without any consultation about alternatives (a situation I explicitly warned against on page 340).6 And they may be surprised to learn that 62 community venues in some of the most deprived parts of the city are now under threat of privatisation or permanent closure in the speciously named ‘People Make Glasgow Communities’ scheme.7 None of this shows signs of the forward-looking ‘sustainable city of the future’, which we must urgently become.

As we recover from the pandemic, it is vital that we continue to localise our lifestyles and our economies – to ‘travel local’ and to ‘buy local’ – as central to the ‘rapid and unprecedented societal transformation’ that the IPCC demands.8 This book contains many ideas to help us achieve this. Using Glasgow as a model, this new edition aims to act as a handbook of ideas for activists and policy-makers working to transform towns and cities across the UK and beyond. It includes a ‘Summary of Key Ideas’ on pages 5–9 as well as a new online bibliography with links to hundreds of resources available at: www.ellieharrison.com/book.

Although there was widespread scepticism of my thinking and action in 2016, I’m pleased to see many of these ideas now filtering into the mainstream – with ‘local supply chain development’, ‘20 minute neighbourhoods’ and ‘Community Wealth Building’, all featuring in the Scottish Government’s 2021–2 Programme for Government.9 We now need some serious intervention – and funding – to match these encouraging plans.10 For it’s impossible to build a ‘20 minute neighbourhood’ if all your local facilities are shut down, and not much ‘community wealth’ is generated if your rip-off local bus service is run by a company (FirstGroup) whose biggest shareholder is a private equity firm based in the Rockefeller Tower in New York! Local supply chains also become laughable when you’re busy striking trade deals with Australia, as Tory Brexiteers are hell-bent on doing.

Using The Glasgow Effect artwork as its central framing device, this book tells the story of my personal and political journey to this city; of my growing awareness of the urgent need to address both climate change and inequality; and my subsequent transformation from artist to activist. Written in one intensive year following a series of traumatic events – including the social media shitstorm the project provoked – it aims to inspire action. It is a tale of the effect a place can have on you, and, in turn, the effect that you can have on it.

Ellie Harrison

September 2021

Summary of Key Ideas

Economic policies matter for population health.

—Glasgow Centre for Population Health, May 2016

IDEAS ARE INTRODUCED and developed throughout the book and then brought together in Part 3, which sketches out a manifesto for ‘the sustainable city of the future’. The summary below has been added to the Second Edition as a useful resource for activists and policy-makers. If you’re more interested in following the story, you may wish to skip to the Preface on page 11, and then refer back to this at the end.

Challenge neoliberal policies

The three key neoliberal policies implemented in ’80s and ’90s are identified as: privatisation, deregulation and trade liberalisation (see pages 24–31). It is these processes that have accelerated globalisation and led to the triple crises of increasing social inequalities, catastrophic environmental destruction and frequent financial instability and uncertainty – all contributing to falling levels of well-being. It is therefore these neoliberal policies we must challenge:

• Privatisation must become democratically accountable public ownership of all our essential goods, services and infrastructure, managed at local/regional or (occasionally) national level.

• Deregulation must become reregulation of all aspects of the economy that are causing unnecessary social and environmental harms.

• And in order to reduce carbon emissions and create local jobs, trade liberalisation must become localism and protectionism. But instead of just saying ‘No’, we need positive alternatives and incentives to encourage everyone to ‘travel local’ and ‘buy local’ (see pages 284–5).

Move away from growth by ‘deconsumerising’ our economy

The obsession with GDP growth is also contributing to catastrophic environmental destruction (see pages 187–8 and 198–9) and creating ‘perverse incentives’ (ie to destroy world-class public transport networks and replace them with roads) in order to ‘create a market’ for the things that are actually killing us: oil, cars, sugary foods and so much more. We need to create new measures of ‘success’ that are qualitative not quantitative so that people don’t feel pressurised to keep on shopping, and can spend their time in more productive and worthwhile ways, such as lifelong learning and local community activism (see pages 293–7).

Transform our broken political systems

Scotland is the least democratic country in the European Union with a ratio of councillors to citizens of one to 4,270, compared to one to 125 in France. The political structures defined in the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1994 are dysfunctional as resources and opportunity are not effectively redistributed across the Strathclyde region, leading to stark inequalities in wealth and health. Devolution to Holyrood has stripped yet more power away from Glasgow. We need a new Greater Glasgow Authority (GGA) to manage strategic regional services and infrastructure (such as our public transport network) and to decentralise and redistribute wealth to the areas that need it the most (see pages 299–305).

Glasgow City Council in its current form is an unwieldy size – far too big to have a meaningful relationship with its citizens and far too small to be able to coordinate strategic regional infrastructure and services (such as public transport). Once the GGA is set up, Glasgow City Council should be abolished. Instead Community Councils should be re-empowered to manage all local amenities (libraries, leisure facilities etc.) in each local area, which must be held in trust to the area’s people so that they can never be shut down or demolished without agreement from local people first (also see page 322).

We may have to ‘win back the city’ (as Barcelona en Comú did in 2015) in order to change the system from within. We must ensure that it’s the people who actually live in a local area who own and control its local assets and that they are the ones that deliberate and decide on the policies that will affect them. As the famous disability campaigners’ slogan goes, it must be: ‘Nothing About Us Without Us!’ (see pages 305–8).

Universal Luxurious Services

Instead of Universal Basic Income (UBI), we should provide Universal Luxurious Services (including: information, food, shelter (housing/ energy), transport, education, democracy/legal and healthcare/ leisure) so that everyone can live a good quality of life without needing any money. These services should be ‘co-produced’ so that we are all both service users and providers, by contributing in some way to the running of the system (see pages 319–32).

Never mind a referendum on independence, let’s use the new Referendums (Scotland) Act 2020 to hold a local referendum on bringing all our region’s services and infrastructure back into democratic public ownership once and for all. This is what Hamburg and other cities have done (to reclaim their energy grids) and Greater Glasgow should follow suit (see pages 307–8).

World-class public transport

We must plan and rebuild a world-class regional public transport network, which means that everyone can get where they need to go – to fully-participate in the social, cultural, economic and political life of the city – without needing or aspiring to own a car. We must start by reregulating the private bus companies, so that routes and timetables are planned and coordinated to integrate seamlessly with the trains and Subway, as Greater Manchester is now doing. As one of the seven key Universal Luxurious Services, this regional network should be free to all at the point of use. This will disproportionately benefit those who rarely leave the region anyway and encourage everyone to ‘travel local’ for work and leisure. To physically decentralise and redistribute wealth, let’s build an ‘outer circle’ Subway or train line linking up Pollok, Drumchapel, Easter-house and Castlemilk (see pages 310–2 and 321–2).

Localism – community currency, local ownership of business

We should create a new regional currency, which only has value within the GGA region to encourage everyone to ‘buy local’ (perhaps people could also receive some sort of UBI in it). This would again disproportionately benefit those who rarely leave the region. We should also set up a regional trading network like Switzerland’s WIR bank and implement local procurement policies like the Preston model (see pages 334–6 and 343–6).

We need to follow EF Schumacher’s ideas about co-operative ownership of business. For any private companies with more than 350 employees based in the region, corporation tax can be abolished. Instead the company must give over 50 per cent of its shares to be held in the ‘public hand’ so local people benefit from profits and can advise at a strategic level on the social/ethical objectives of the company (see pages 332–4).

We must, however, remain mindful as a core theme of the whole book is identified as being the very fine line between localism and protectionism, and bigotry and xenophobia, which was exposed in The Glasgow Effect debate. The key question remains: how do we balance the need to cut carbon emissions from imports and exports and from excessive global travel whilst remaining outward-looking and welcoming to ‘outsiders’? (see pages 200, 346 and 356).

Car-free future – remove the hideous big motorway

We need to build people-friendly cities that are just so pleasant to be in that people don’t actually want to leave. We can only do this if we start to get rid of roads and cars. Once we have our world-class regional public transport network, which means everyone can get where they need to go without needing to own a car, we can remove the M8 and restore the Monkland canal which once ran below. We must take inspiration from Seoul and Utrecht and many other forward-looking cities, which have already taken similar action to remove this outdated carbon-intensive infrastructure tearing their cities apart (see pages 336–40).

All schools should be art schools – especially on the periphery

Everyone needs the opportunity to access a creative education, and not just the privileged few. This is what fosters the eclectic mix of essential life skills – critical thinking, practical skills, confidence and self-motivation – which enables and empowers people to use their time in productive and worthwhile ways, such as lifelong learning and local community activism, and to ‘Be realistic, demand the impossible!’ (see page 187). In a ‘deconsumerised’ economy community participation will replace monetary wealth (see page 297). So why not rebuild Glasgow School of Art in Easterhouse? (see pages 352–4).

Preface

I STARTED TO write this book – for therapy, for clarity, for closure – in summer 2018, having been thinking about it for nearly a year. There seemed a beautiful symmetry in it being exactly 30 years since I first visited Glasgow, exactly 20 since I left my family home in Ealing and exactly ten since I moved to Glasgow to live; a good point to stop and reflect. My aim was to have it finished before I turned 40 in March 2019, a task in which I almost succeeded (it went to print on 29 July 2019).

The one thing nobody seemed to consider at the time The Glasgow Effect ‘chips hit the fan’ in January 2016, was that this was a project that could only have been dreamt up by a single woman in her late 30s, a ‘mid-life crisis’ you could say. I had chosen a title addressing mortality because it was, and still is, a major preoccupation. I loved my family and wanted to be nearer to them and I was angry at an economic system which had torn us apart; arbitrarily scattering us in different parts of the British Isles.

When nearly all my heterosexual friends and family were ‘settling down’ with a house, a car, a big telly, the latest smartphone, frequent holidays and some kids, I had a niggling feeling these lifestyles were neither ethical nor sustainable. I found myself resisting conforming to this social norm. Instead, I decided to devote my life to work, to undertake the most epic and the most public artwork of my career; one that did not only last a year, but which has shaped my thinking, action and life course ever since.

Reading Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari in March and April 2018 inspired me to start writing. His book, in turn, had been partly inspired by The Glasgow Effect project. As I sat alone, late at night, turning page after page, I came to realise the intimate connection a book enables between author and reader, away from the inherent agitation of the computer screen. A book demands patience to allow a person’s stories and ideas to unfold slowly over time, offering a more complete picture of how their personal history and lived experience have shaped their politics; their thinking and action in the world. From very different backgrounds, Darren McGarvey and I have arrived at similar critiques of the city, the society and the economic system within which we live.

I can’t say that this book has been an easy undertaking, but it was a necessary one. I have emerged stronger and with more conviction than ever that in order to address the ‘climate emergency’ we must urgently reduce the amount we travel and the amount of energy we consume. Not least because a happy, healthy and sustainable life can and should result from committing and contributing to the community where you live.

Ellie Harrison

July 2019

photograph of sticker at Bike for Good in Finnieston.

(Ellie Harrison)

Ellie Harrison (right, aged nine), with her sister (left, aged ten), at Glasgow Garden Festival in 1988. (Family photograph)

Introduction

I FIRST CAME to Glasgow 30 years ago, in summer 1988 when I was nine years old. Margaret Thatcher had had a plan. Her government thought that by imposing ‘Garden Festivals’ and the associated twee middle-class values onto five of Britain’s most deprived post-industrial cities, she could miraculously raise the standard of living for everyone. It was symbolic of how her vision of ‘trickle-down economics’ was meant to work. You only need look at vast swathes of vacant and derelict land still left in Glasgow (9 per cent of the city),2 including much still around the ‘Festival Park’, and at Glasgow’s persistent and worsening inequalities of wealth and health, to judge this policy’s effectiveness. What it did succeed in, however, was luring more middle-class cultural tourists on ‘city breaks’ to see the sights and spend their money. And this was indeed why my family came.

My memories of the trip are hazy. I remember having a ‘Coke float’ in Deep Pan Pizza Co. somewhere in the city centre (which I now assume was Sauchiehall Street, though Deep Pan Pizza Co. has long-since gone bust).3 I remember this weird reconstructed house thing (which must have been the Mackintosh House at the Hunterian, completed in 1981). I remember the thrill of riding to and from the West End on the newly refurbished Glasgow Subway (public transport got me excited back then too). And, I remember I wasn’t allowed on the Festival’s Coca-Cola branded rollercoaster because I was too short. That was it. The holiday was over. Armed with our Garden Festival merchandise (my sister had the t-shirt and I had the keyring, which we both still have – how’s that for ‘legacy’?), we returned to suburban London to tell teacher about our trip. I had no cause to return to Glasgow for another 20 years. And once again, it was ‘culture’ that led me back.

Glasgow’s Garden Festival could be seen as the beginning of the city’s post-industrial renaissance as a global capital of culture. It was promptly followed by Glasgow being awarded the mantle of European City of Culture in 1990, and a slew of investment in the arts sector: Tramway opened in 1990, the Gallery of Modern Art in 1996, The Lighthouse in 1999 when Glasgow was named UK City of Architecture, and the newly refurbished CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts in 2001.

The city had many high-profile artists nominated for Britain’s Turner Prize, which led the international star curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist to ‘parachute in’ one day in 1996 and proclaim all this ‘the Glasgow miracle’.4 What I only came to realise after five years of living in the city myself, in 2013, was that this ‘miracle’ was much more about how the city appeared to people living elsewhere – to potential tourists, students or other transient residents – than it was about the quality of life for the majority of Glasgow’s citizens.

‘Glasgow is kind. Glasgow is cruel’, wrote Scottish novelist William McIlvanney in 1987.5 And so this book is about my love-hate relationship with this city, where I have now lived for well over a decade. It is my story. It is about how I ended up here, by following the absurd and lonely career trajectory of the ‘conceptual artist’. It aims to do what much of my art work has done before – that is to use my own personal history and lived experience to illustrate the impact that social, economic and political systems at local, national and global scales have on our individual day-to-day lives. Specifically it’s about the forces of globalisation, unleashed by Thatcher and her fellow free-market ideologues in the ’80s, which decimated industrial cities across Britain and sent millions of ‘economic migrants’ like me on the move. It could be about any post-industrial city attempting to fill the vast voids and regenerate its economy with ‘culture’, but it’s not. It’s about Glasgow and Glasgow, as we know, is special.

The phrase ‘the Glasgow effect’ began to emerge in the field of public health around the time I moved to the city in 2008. It was used to describe a then unsolved mystery. Why did people die younger in Glasgow than in similar post-industrial cities in England, such as Liverpool and Manchester? Why did Glasgow and West Central Scotland have the lowest life expectancy in Western Europe? In 2011, Glasgow Centre for Population Health (GCPH) published a report exploring 17 different hypotheses for why this could be, including: diet, other ‘health behaviours’ (such as alcohol and smoking) and ‘individual values’, ‘boundlessness and alienation’, lower ‘social capital’, a ‘culture of limited social mobility’, inequalities, deindustrialisation, ‘political attack’ and, of course, our terrible weather.6

GCPH concluded their 2011 report by saying that ‘further research is required to fully understand why mortality is higher’ in Glasgow.7 It wasn’t until May 2016, when they published their epic follow-up History, Politics & Vulnerability: Explaining Excess Mortality in Scotland & Glasgow,8 which synthesises research into 40 potential causes, that they finally claimed to have solved the mystery of ‘the Glasgow effect’ (their findings are discussed in detail in Chapter 7). By then, I was five months into my year-long ‘durational performance’ named after this phenomenon, which had become one of the most controversial publicly-funded artworks that Scotland had ever seen.

Part psychological experiment, part protest, part strike, for the whole of that year, I had vowed not to travel beyond Glasgow’s city limits, or use any vehicles except my bike. As stated in the application I submitted to Creative Scotland in summer 2015 to fund the project, my aim was ‘to actively address the contradictions and compromises’ which had been building in my own lifestyle ‘as my career as an artist/academic has progressed’ and to slash my own carbon footprint for transport to zero (the results can be seen in my Carbon Graph on pages 138–9).9

I had chosen the title The Glasgow Effect to dismantle the myth of ‘the Glasgow miracle’,10 and to throw the spotlight back on the real story of this city – glossed over in recent years with a pervasive ‘People Make Glasgow’ PR exercise – where a third of children live in relative poverty,11 and 20 per cent of our households use food banks.12 Sacrificing myself to the social media trolls as a symbol of the detached ‘liberal elite’ I too had come to despise, I aimed to encourage people to make the connections between the social, environmental and economic injustices in our world, and to realise the need to fight for holistic solutions – at an individual and policy level – which address all three at once.

As Darren McGarvey acknowledges at the end of Poverty Safari, during The Glasgow Effect I was not just researching and criticising, I was actually doing; through my action that year and the way I had chosen to live, I was articulating

what might come next… beginning to reimagine the society that had left so many in [his] community feeling excluded, apathetic and chronically ill.13

By undertaking The Glasgow Effect, I aimed to find out what happens if you make a stand against the forces of globalisation by localising your existence; what happens if you attempt to live a ‘low-carbon lifestyle of the future’ in a city, in a society and in an economic system with infrastructure and values still stuck in a carbon-intensive past (this is described in Chapter 7). Two years on from that intense and stressful experience and 30 since my first visit to Glasgow in 1988, this book aims to bring together everything I have learnt in order to provide the complete context for my thinking and action, which was lost in the whirlwind of the social media storm (a whirlwind described in Chapter 5).

The book is structured in three parts, each part containing four chapters. Part 1 – A Brief History of Neoliberalism – provides the backstory: a personal and political history examining the ways our lives are shaped by wider social and economic forces often beyond our knowledge or control, and by the privileges or disadvantages that result from a person’s accident of birth.14Part 2 offers a behind-the-scenes insight into the making of The Glasgow Effect – exploring the many issues the project raised, including the relationship between art, activism and well-being. Part 3 sketches out a manifesto for The Sustainable City of the Future, articulating the action necessary to transform Glasgow and our other cities into places where we can all live happy, healthy and creative lives.

Part 1

A Brief History of Neoliberalism

CHAPTER 1

Thatcher’s Children

Straight outta Compton

NONE OF US choose where or when we are born. It just so happens that my life began in the now-bulldozed Perivale Maternity Hospital in the London borough of Ealing in March 1979.1 It was the spring following the so-called ‘Winter of Discontent’, which saw the coldest weather for nearly two decades coupled with the largest strike action in Britain since the General Strike of 1926.2 In the absence of refuse collections, London’s Leicester Square was used as a makeshift landfill site. It was just a few days after the first contested referendum on the devolution of power from Westminster to Scotland and Wales (although it wasn’t until I moved to Scotland myself that I discovered that history). But, perhaps most symbolically for this story, it was less than two months before Margaret Thatcher came to power on 3 May 1979.

My mum and dad had been married for just two years, and I was brought home along with my big sister to a semi-detached house in West Ealing with its ‘own back and front door’,3 which they had bought for £18,750 in 1977. My parents had met at work in the early ’70s, where they both taught new-fangled subjects to teenagers – my mum taught ‘Communication Studies’ (as well as English and French) and my dad taught ‘Business’ at Uxbridge Technical College, opened in 1965. It was quite a handful having two children just 18 months apart, so for the first few years of my life, my mum stayed at home to look after us and get more involved in our local community.

I have happy memories of those very early days; sitting on the living room floor eating tasty snacks and watching telly. In between Chock-A-Block, Pigeon Street and Button Moon, I remember seeing glimpses of this powerful looking woman on the news. She had quaffed blond hair and was wearing a bright blue suit. I didn’t really know what she was up to at that time, but what I did know was the more I appeared to be in awe of her, the angrier my mum would get.

My mum was born in Bickley in south-east London in March 1944, where she had to be sheltered from the air raids during the last year of the Second World War. Her parents were both Welsh. She had one Scottish grandmother (who was actually half-Irish) and despite having a booming posh southerner’s accent, it remained her pet hate to be mistaken as ‘English’ (could there be a worse insult?). She had always voted Labour. She was active in the teachers’ union,4 and when we were young she got involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Ealing Peace Register. I have one very early memory of being taken on a coach trip. Together with a big group of families and children wearing a hotchpotch of ’70s styles, we were driven out of the city to a very crowded and very muddy field. While we all scampered about amongst the trees eating homemade sandwiches from foil wrappers, the adults just stood around. It was as though they were in a very long queue which didn’t seem to be going anywhere. It turns out that was Greenham Common, the peace camp set up and run by women in protest against the Cruise missiles being held at the Royal Air Force base in Berkshire during the Cold War.

In the early ’80s, my mum also joined the local branch of the Campaign for the Advancement of State Education (CASE), which sought to abolish selective schools and to ensure the same well-resourced comprehensive education was available to all children no matter where in the country they grew up. The campaign is still going – battling against the ‘academisation’ process in England, which under the mantra of ‘choice’ is ensuring the exact opposite. CASE also ‘rejects the hierarchical division of skills into academic and vocational subjects and affirms that well-educated children need both mental and practical skills’.5 Needless to say, my mum was always very supportive of all our skills and abilities – arts, sports and/or academic – and we were bundled off to the local state schools to make friends with local kids. It would not be a lie to say I was ‘straight outta Compton’ – attending Compton First School (1983–7) and Gurnell Middle School (1987–91), which both shut down in 1993.

It’s impossible to understand the nuances of the British class system when you’re not yet into double digits but I was aware there were kids at school from very different backgrounds. Ealing was one of the most ethnically diverse of all London’s boroughs and these schools served the big council estate, Copley Close, which was right next door – literally the other side of the railway tracks at Castlebar Park. I remember being taken to birthday parties in my friend’s flats on the estate. Holding my mum’s hand, we’d navigate the dark stairwells and balconies. I was surprised at how cramped their living rooms were. That’s weird, I thought, how come the kids from Copley Close always have the most expensive trainers? There was racism and homophobia in the playground and I’ll never forget the bollocking I got when I repeated one of the words I’d picked up to my mum one evening when I got home from school.

In 1987, the AIDS advert featuring that monolithic grey tombstone hit the telly. It said ‘there is now a danger that has become a threat to us all: it is a deadly disease and there is no known cure’. We were all terrified of catching it. Kids calmed their nerves by chasing others around playing ‘it’, as though they were passing this mysterious disease onto one another. Another popular insult in those days was ‘NHS’. If you had ‘NHS specs’, then it meant that they were free or cheap, whatever: they were the worst. So much of this must have been filtering down via parents from a right-wing media hell-bent on discrediting our public services and propagating hate to enable our Conservative leaders to ‘divide and rule’.

Compton and Gurnell were both secular schools. In fact, we were barred from singing anything religious. Our teachers had to be imaginative in assembly. Instead we ended up reciting pop hits from the ’60s: ‘Downtown’ and ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ (the drug references were lost on us of course), as well as ‘Guantanamera’ based on the poem by Cuban revolutionary philosopher, José Martí. Most of it went over our heads. We sang songs reflecting our diversity like ‘Linstead Market’, which we learnt in Jamaican Patois. I still know nearly all the words. We had a brilliant teacher called Mr Strong, who wrote our school anthem ‘Gurnell Middle’s Happy Song’, and helped us put on plays which he wrote and directed. I was cast in the lead role as Wally Bottle, a small boy on a mission to clean up the planet. He lived in a landfill site and his best friend was a crisp packet. It was quite ahead of its time. The following year, I was cast as Scrooge! I don’t remember being any good at acting. All I remember is the feeling of being on a stage with everyone looking at me expectantly and not being able to perform quite in the way I wanted.

One day Gurnell had a visitor. It was the Conservative MP for Ealing North, Harry Greenway, who was also one of our school governors. He was later caught up in allegations of Tory ‘sleaze’ in the early ’90s.6 I had a feeling he was a nasty piece of work. He stood at the front of assembly and lectured us, then the head teacher asked: ‘Right, does anyone have any questions?’ Sitting cross-legged on the floor in the front row, I felt my pulse start to quicken. I had to say something, so I tentatively put my hand up. Harry Greenway spotted me: ‘Yes, that little boy at the front’. I was so humiliated. I forgot my question, but I did answer back: ‘I’m not a boy, I’m a girl!’ I was traumatised by that and many similar incidents around the time. In the year before I went to high school, I started to grow my short hair into a drab ponytail which allowed me to just blend in. Little did I know that Harry Greenway’s Tory government were effectively eradicating difference and enforcing conformity anyway – their Local Government Act 1988 included the infamous ‘Section 28’ (known as ‘Clause 2A’ in Scotland) banning discussion of homosexuality in any state school. The Act remained in force until 2000 in Scotland and 2003 in England and Wales. By then I was 24 and had left education altogether. I’d finally cut my hair short again.

My favourite book in the ’80s was Gertie & Gus.7 My mum used to read it to me in bed, and in later years we entertained ourselves by subjecting it to a Marxist analysis together. It tells the story of two happily married bears named Gertie and Gus. They live in a very modest little hut by the sea. Gus is a fisherman. Every day he heads out on his little boat bobbing around with a single rod to catch a fish for them both to have for tea. One day Gertie has an idea: why doesn’t Gus catch a few more fish and then we could sell them and make a bit of money? So Gus works harder. He brings home bucket-loads of fish and they begin accumulating funds. Gertie buys him a bigger boat and hires some other bears to help him. They catch so much fish that they move out of the hut and into a posh villa and start buying fancier and fancier clothes – Gus wears a Captain’s uniform with gold epaulettes. But something isn’t right. It’s just not the same as ‘the good old days’ – when they caught and cooked their own dinner and actually had time to spend with each other and enjoy the beautiful scenery where they lived. They were so much happier then. So they gave it all up and went home.

What the fuck is neoliberalism?8

It took me nearly 30 years to work out what that woman on the telly was really up to and then the next ten to start fighting back. The aim of this book is to share all the things I’ve learnt during that time in the hope of inspiring young people to join the fight against an unjust system which has already robbed them of so much. I chose to include Darren McGarvey’s (aka Loki the Scottish Rapper) piece ‘Neoliberalism’ at the start as it touches on many of the book’s themes. The word ‘neoliberalism’ is often bandied around to explain why we live in such a precarious, exploitative and unequal world, yet it is rarely defined. I’m sure that’s what Loki is hinting at by using it as a title; another little jab at the pretension of what he calls the ‘progressive left’.

To understand the significance of the neoliberal policy decisions of the ’80s and ’90s to the world we live in today, it feels important to start with a clear definition. In simplest terms the word ‘neoliberalism’ breaks down into ‘neo’ (from the Greek for ‘new’) and ‘liberalism’ referring back to the ‘liberal’ economists in the early part of the Industrial Revolution who first theorised the so-called ‘free-market’. For example, the University of Glasgow’s Adam Smith (1723–90) believed that this market functioned like an ‘invisible hand’ ensuring that the world’s resources would be fairly distributed to those who needed them. The ‘neoliberalism’ of the latter part of 20th century was like liberalism on steroids or liberalism without any moral reflection or concern.

In her book, This is Not Art: Activism & Other ‘Not-Art’, artist and writer Alana Jelinek also complains about the overuse of the term neoliberalism in the artworld without proper explanation and then, thankfully, offers a useful definition. She breaks the amorphous concept of neoliberalism down into three key economic principles or policies – privatisation, deregulation and trade liberalisation – which began to be implemented across the world at the end of the ’70s and in the ’80s when Margaret Thatcher’s government came to power in the UK and Ronald Reagan’s in America.9 These three principles or policies came to be accepted as the norm for the next 30 years.

Privatisation

Shortly after the end of the Second World War, Clement Attlee’s Labour government won a landslide victory with a mandate to implement socialist policy – to ensure ‘the common ownership and control of those things we all need to live happily and well’.10 They decided to do this by nationalising the ‘means of production’ – all our key services and infrastructure which they felt should be owned and run for the common good of the British people and not for private profit. The National Health Service was founded in 1948, the same year our railways were nationalised (then named ‘British Railways’). Our energy sector – gas, electricity and coal – were all taken into public ownership. There was a massive programme of social house building. From the ’50s into the ’70s major industries were also made public assets: telecoms, iron, steel, even cars (British Leyland Motors was part nationalised) and aeroplanes (British Airways).

When privatisation was first proposed as a way of reinvigorating these industries in the late ’70s by increasing ‘competition’, it appeared to many as a new and exciting idea. Thatcher’s government marketed it as ‘popular capitalism’. The plan was to sell shares in all these companies and that everyday folk on the street would buy them, people like Sid who featured in the British Gas ‘share offer’ advert I remember seeing on the telly in 1986. In the ’80s and ’90s nearly everything was flogged: telecoms in 1984, gas in 1986, electricity in 1990, buses were deregulated in 1986, railways in 1993, water in England and Wales in 1989,11 and much of our social housing stock was sold to individuals through the new ‘right to buy’ scheme.

A Brief History of Privatisation by Ellie Harrison, installed at Watermans Arts Centre, Brentford in March 2011. This interactive installation uses a circle of six electric massage chairs to re-enact the history of UK public service policy since 1900. Each chair represents a key service or industry and switches on when the date display reaches the year it was taken into public ownership and switches off again at the year it was privatised. (Ben Wickerson)

It was a story I attempted to visualise in my 2011 exhibition A Brief History of Privatisation (pictured opposite). When in 2013, David Cameron’s coalition government – picking up where John Major had left off – privatised the Royal Mail (which had been in public ownership of sorts since it was set up by the Crown in 1516), it was only the National Health Service still hanging on by a thread. The problem with ‘popular capitalism’, indeed with capitalism in general, is that it creates and intensifies inequalities12 – the more money you have, the more shares you can buy, the more power you acquire and, therefore, the more votes you get at the table. If people like Sid did buy shares, then they probably only had a tiny number to start with and more than likely sold them on to make a quick buck. The majority of all these companies – providing the essential ‘things we all need to live happily and well’ – are now owned by foreign investors.13 Of course they don’t care about the quality or cost of services in a country they don’t live in, for these absentee landlords it’s always only about maximising their financial return. Once manufacturing industries are no longer guided by the social good of a nation, operations are quickly moved overseas to exploit cheaper labour elsewhere. It’s not as if we don’t use steel anymore, we just import it rather than make it in Ravenscraig (the steelworks in North Lanarkshire closed in 1992, four years after the privatisation of British Steel in 1988). This is the process known as ‘deindustrialisation’ – outsourcing all the carbon-intensive work (and therefore carbon emissions and pollution) to other parts of the world.

Deregulation

Then there’s the principle of deregulation. While Thatcher’s government were busy overregulating some aspects of society, introducing that infamous ‘Section 28’ – ‘the first new homophobic law in a century’,14 they were deregulating in terms of the ‘flow of capital around the world’.15 In 1986, Margaret Thatcher and her Chancellor Nigel Lawson created a ‘big bang’ on London’s Stock Exchange, with sweeping changes to the way the financial sector was regulated, or not. They moved trading in stocks and shares from a face-to-face endeavour to something done from behind the computer screen. They abolished the fixed commission on trading, which meant that people could now make more and more money by sitting on their arses pressing buttons. They ended the separation between traders and financial advisors which led to less impartiality and more dodgy deals. A flurry of company mergers and takeovers helped pave the way to the many ‘too big to fail’ bailouts and financial crises we’ve had since. And finally, they opened the doors to international investors.16

These first two neoliberal policies alone – privatisation and deregulation – help explain why most of Britain’s utilities are now owned by foreign companies. For example, ‘Scottish Power’ is actually owned by the Spanish multinational Iberdrola and ‘ScotRail’ is run by Abellio, the commercial arm of Nederlandse Spoorwegen – the railway company owned by the Dutch state. In England, ‘Thames Water’ is now owned by a consortium of international investors from Canada, Abu Dhabi, Australia, China and more.17 All of them exploit and profit from our basic needs to heat our homes, travel to work and drink water. One of the most insidious aspects of privatisation and deregulation has been the continual marketisation of every aspect of our lives and the increasing amounts of money we all now need just to survive.

Trade liberalisation

The third key neoliberal policy is trade liberalisation. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and what right-wing commentators claimed as the triumph of liberal democracy across the world, global trade negotiations quickened pace. The World Trade Organisation was founded in 1995 (as a successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs & Trade) to help facilitate and encourage international trade, thereby ‘supporting economic development and promoting peaceful relations among nations’.18 In her book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, Naomi Klein shows how these trade negotiations unfolded in flagrant denial of the impact of man-made carbon emissions on global warming, which had also emerged into mainstream public discourse in the late ’80s.19 Even Margaret Thatcher herself devoted her entire address to the United Nations General Assembly in 1989 to ‘the threat to our global environment’ which, she said, was ‘the challenge faced by the world community’ that had ‘grown clearer than any other in both urgency and importance’.20

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had been founded in 1988 with the aim of initiating an international agreement on emissions reductions to limit the onset of global warming and preserve a climate on earth which could continue to support human life. It held its first annual international Conference of Parties in 1995 in Berlin (COP1), with the first legally binding treaty – the Kyoto Protocol – agreed at the summit in Kyoto, Japan two years later (COP3). Meanwhile, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) continued in its completely contrary mission of helping ‘trade flow as freely as possible’,21 by getting more and more countries around the world to join its club. Its ambition of signing up China was accomplished in 2001. The WTO now has 164 members and 23 observers representing a vast majority of countries in the world. But, as Naomi Klein writes, nowhere in any of these trade negotiations was the fundamental consideration:

How would the vastly increased distances that basic goods would now travel – by carbon-spewing container ships and jumbo jets, as well as diesel trucks – impact the carbon emissions that the climate negotiations were aiming to reduce? How would the aggressive protections for technology patents enshrined under the WTO impact the demands being made by developing nations in the climate negotiations for free transfers of green technologies to help them develop on a low-carbon path? And perhaps most critically, how would provisions that allowed private companies to sue national governments over laws that impinged on their profits dissuade governments from adopting tough antipollution regulations, for fear of getting sued?22

And so carbon emissions have been increasing unabated ever since – more than half of all emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1750 have been released in the 30 years since 1988 – the three decades in which, with the help of the IPCC, we were meant to be urgently reducing them.23 So, put simply, these three neoliberal policies – privatisation, deregulation and trade liberalisation – have facilitated globalisation: the rapid transitioning to a world economy, and the hugely increased movement of goods and people and the explosion in carbon emissions that has inevitably resulted.

The New Economics Foundation (NEF) is a think tank founded in 1986 to promote a different way of structuring our economy, which takes into account the hidden costs of globalisation by putting ‘people and the planet first’. They highlight the three key consequences of neoliberal policies as being:

• hugely increased social inequalities,

• catastrophic environmental destruction, and

• frequent financial instability and uncertainty

It is neoliberal policies which have created the triple social, environmental and economic crises that we now face. But the worst outcome of all has been the falling levels of human well-being. NEF show that ‘people’s well-being is largely based on how we interact with other people’,24 and that in our neoliberal era, it’s the quality of our relationships and the strength of our real social networks (not our online ones) that has suffered the most. NEF write: