The Vision Behind the Coventry Pound Proposal
Coventry has a
track record in globally recognised innovation. This is who we are
and is part of our unique culture as a city. Our success in becoming
the City of Culture 2021 motivates us to leave a lasting legacy. This
vision has developed its current form independently of this important
year, and the pandemic that precedes it. Both recent and upcoming
events combine circumstances that increase the need which this vision
addresses and multiply the opportunities it offers.
In the
forthcoming BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures, Mark Carney, ex-head of the
Bank of England, currently UN special envoy for climate action and
finance, will be addressing the inability of financial systems as
currently structured to adequately address the multiple global crises
of social inequality, ecology, climate and pandemic events (1).
The structure of money, forms of taxation and how public finances are spent, powerfully influence patterns of trade and employment, and also the quality of communities we are part of and the environment that sustains us. These systems are deeply interwoven. Consequently, patterns of government, tax and money, as we know these, have mutually reinforced each other, in the sense that attempts at piecemeal reform are heavily constrained by systemic interactions.
But is the kind of
money that we know the best or the only kind possible? Is it possible
for other forms of money – perhaps leading to new approaches to
taxation and public spending – to coexist? Money experiments such
as the Bristol Pound (2) and Coventry
LETS (3) have shown that complementary currencies can coexist
with conventional money, in the same provisional sense that early
powered flight became possible but was initially unsuited to mass
adoption. The Coventry Pound proposal (4) builds on this practice by
including a local authority for the first time, initially as a
commercial participant, in the sense of it being the lead issuer,
largest spender, guarantor and sales commission recipient. This may
then seed and cultivate an agenda to re-purpose Coventry Pound sales
commissions that are due to the local authority initially as a
commercial consideration, as a lawful replacement for conventional
taxation in respect of Coventry Pound transactions benefitting
individuals and small businesses within the local authority area.
Shifting the tax
base from value-added income or sales to transactions has the
potential to create a trading context which will advantage
individuals, small traders, the self-employed, and family owned
businesses. Taxation, as with earlier sales commissions, will be
automatic, eliminating form filling, filing, tax assessment and
bureaucracy by becoming an integral part of the digital transaction
and payment process itself. This radically simplified context will
not suit global corporations whose unconstrained growth has been at
the expense of smaller businesses. Trans-national companies will be
expected to find this new context unattractive so will prefer
conventional money, tax avoidance accountancy and finance.
Local currencies
offer potential for sustainability, regeneration and reuse, where the
output of one process becomes the input of another, by preference for
the transaction being localised (5). This enables participants to
trade and work for and with each other based on our human
consideration for one other, in place of workers following rulebooks
set by global corporations which always drive the hardest and
cruellest bargains and which local laws allow in order to deliver
shareholder value. Involving a local authority in the use of its own
locally issued money, and as a key driver of the local economy that
this new money enables will allow very many new family businesses,
community, charitable and cultural expressions to bloom, while
envisioning a more sustainable, equitable and vibrant city to those
outside.
Once introduced in Coventry, the author's vision is that local authorities
worldwide will likely want to follow this lead.
References
(1) BBC 2020 Reith Lectures, https://www.bbc.co.uk/showsandtours/shows/reith-lectures-2020
(2) The Bristol Pound, https://bristolpound.org/
(3) Coventry LETS recorded several thousand transactions between 400 account holders from 1992 to 2015. Transactions were recorded using a money unit local to this group of individuals who provided goods and services to each other. https://coventry.letsystem.org/
(4) The Coventry Pound as proposed, describing also the history of the proposal and some of the challenges to be overcome. https://covcd.copsewood.net/proposal.html
(5) This paper explores features of an economy that is both sustainable and regenerative. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3184/003685015X14467291596242
This paper in the public domain. Please redistribute and reformat as required. The most recent text will be maintained at https://covcd.copsewood.net/thevision.html