Locally Made, Locally Traded...

We went over to Ludlow this morning and spent a couple of pleasant hours mooching around the fine old market town, which wears its history proudly on its sleeve. Pictured, our morning coffee at a very quaint and pleasant tea-rooms there. The curious thing about the disparity between the horizontals of the glazing bars of the windows and the line taken by the window sill is not an artefact of the wide angle iPhone lens, but illustrates clearly that the sill slopes wildly to the left and toward me taking the photograph. As with so many of the older buildings there, they are gradually settling one way or the other, taking their window and door frames with them along the way. The town, however is also showing some signs of the economic malaise prevalent across the country. Whilst still a prosperous place, there are shop closures that a few years ago would have been unimaginable, testimony to the treacherously fine line that small businesses tread in a world dominated by wealth and corporate business.

Sad to say that the ultra-wealthy and their companies are bleeding the rest of society dry, and, as I've been quacking on about for decades, the answer to turning this tide of greed and despoilment is staring right back at us from history itself: cooperative action at a local level. It worked before to turn the tables on big capital, and can do so again. It just takes the will to organise and say no to the demigods and demagogues of mammon: at the end of it all, we, the common people, the hoi polloi, are the ones who feed and succour these leeches in their 'enterprises'. 'Twas ever thus, but we have managed to rise above the mire before, and we can surely do it again: a new, devolved, economic model is drastically needed to achieve this, and fortunately the precedents are there to guide us towards a fairer and more equitable society. We just need to revisit the history of the development of cooperative socialist thinking and take heed of it in order to kick back: hit the bastards where it hurts: in the balance sheet,  and hard...