Lucre for Lucifer

Driving home from Yorkshire yesterday, I listened to Sir Ronald Cohen explaining the Big Society to Eddie Mair. The idea is one he claimed to have invented, long before it occurred to the war crimes suspect in Number 10. The banks, dear things, are going to be funding most of it, for one obvious reason. The State is maxed out on its credit card. So too are businesses and individuals. That only leaves the voluntary sector to be dragged into the mire of debt.

York’s heritage is cared for by a plethora of voluntary organisations. There is the York Civic Trust, sponsors of those elegant enamelled plaques (left) that adorn historic buildings. There is the York Conservation Trust, whose ownership of many historic properties in the shopping streets protects them from unthinking alteration in the name of commercial progress. There is also the York Museums Trust, latest addition to the constellation, which now manages the municipal attractions.

The idea that councils should divest themselves of museums and galleries, libraries and archives, is gathering pace. For much of the 20th century the trend was the other way. The council as the representative body of the community was considered a safe pair of hands, in much the same way that the parish church has served as the obvious repository for a village’s collective past. The tide started to flow the other way with the abolition of the Greater London Council in 1986. Now more and more we inhabit a post-democratic world where shadowy boards of trustees do deals with private philanthropists, whose very existence is a measure of the growing inequalities of wealth.

The war crimes suspect would have us believe that getting the State into debt is bad but getting volunteers into debt is not. Which is unsurprising. Social innovation is a fancy term for dreaming up ever more fiendish ways to extract surplus value. The core contradiction of capitalism is that wages must be kept down to protect profits but incomes must be kept up to fuel the profitable consumption of goods and services. Debt fills the gap.

Debt in turn is a source of profit for those endowed with the mathematical skills to manage it, society willing. Society usually is, even when the calculations go pear-shaped. Occasionally, folk are bright enough to see through the veil and the money-lenders are then punished, for being too clever by half.

One such reaction occurred in York in 1190 when the city’s Jews became the victims of a pogrom. Having taken refuge in the castle (today’s building, left, is later), they all ended up dead, some murdered by the besiegers, most dying in a suicide pact, an English Masada.

Europe’s Jews were hated as usurers but indispensable for that same reason. In the later Middle Ages, others got in on the act, initially by finding ways round the Christian prohibition on usury. Lenders first made money not through the charging of interest but through the manipulation of exchange rates. Out of their profits, the Italian bankers funded some of the world’s greatest art. What we do not see is the other side of the account, the suffering of those through the centuries whose lives have been ground down by debt. Often as not, and as now, the result of deliberate government policy.