Digital Billboards & Green Economics for Tories

‘Advertising on roadside presents a multitude of street-level opportunities, targeting your audience while they are engaged in some form of transportation. OOH International can provide your campaign with enormous opportunities across many roadside advertising mediums. Surfaces such as phone boxes and lamp-posts can be transformed from outdoor furniture into purveyors of your business, with options escalating as far as fully wrapped buildings and motorway trailers.

The commuter of today spends more time out of their home than previously in history, which means that your publicity will be vastly strengthened by a carefully organised plan. As advertising platforms have the possibility of illumination, there is nothing limiting your visibility – from dusk until dawn, your brand can unavoidably walk alongside the public as they engage in their daily journeys.’

This is an extract from Out of Home International’s website – the company which Mayor George Ferguson wants to install digital billboards in Bristol.*

The Greens were mocked in the Bristol City Council meeting today for their opposition to digital billboards. One Conservative declared that he could ‘not understand Green economics’, on the basis that we were against austerity but also against generating income from digital billboards.

I’ll explain it to him.

Green economics arises from the very simple scientific fact that there are finite natural resources on this planet. Using up these resources rapidly – mining, soil degradation, overfishing – creates a poorer world in the long term. In addition all sorts of complications arise from the extracting, processing and disposing that industrial production and consumption incur. We now have climate change and toxic waste on a massive scale as a result of the accelerated consumption of natural resources.

We depend on our environment to continue providing us with the basic physical necessities of life – food, clean water, warmth and shelter. The famous Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has these as the most fundamental.

Advertising exists to promote consumption. It does exactly the opposite of what we need to do. Along the way it creates a host of other problems for mental and social wellbeing, creating discontent and objectification of people, undermining the next tier of Maslow’s pyramid (for some excellent insights see http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ziad-elhady/the-dogma-of-advertising-_b_2540390.html).

What Green economics offers is the idea of investment in wellbeing rather than in growing consumption (which is the basis of GDP orientated economics). We want enrichment of people’s lives – hence we are opposed to an austerity that cuts vital services and the incomes of people who need help. We want investment in technology and systems which minimise and reverse environmental impact. We believe that a fairer taxation system could provide this. We don’t need digital billboards to fund this investment – that would be counter-productive.

The Tory councillor who could not understand Green economics was operating in a paradigm where profit and income generation are thought to be intrinsically good. It is ‘self-evident’ to him that any profit is good profit. This is part of a fantasy culture where consumption can be infinite. Greens are accused of not living in the ‘real’ world; in fact we are the only political movement which fully acknowledges the limitations of the planet.




*It turns out it is a different company with a very similar name. The principle holds however.

How to really improve mental health

 “I want this to be a country where a young dad chatting at the school gates will feel as comfortable discussing anxiety, stress, depression, as the mum who is explaining she sprained her ankle.”

Nick Clegg to Liberal Democrat Autumn Conference, 2014.

It has – and this is a good thing – finally become fashionable for politicians to call for mental health services to be high on their agenda.    And the Liberal Democrats are making this a key plank of their election campaign, having committed to an additional £500m a year for mental health services.

Of course, any extra funding to the NHS is welcome.  But the devil, as so often, is in the detail:  how it is spent is key.

Green Party policy supports the concept that mental and physical health is equally important and often inter-related.  Our stance is holistic. It is hard to think of any Green Party policy that does not aim to improve the quality of life for everyone. 

For the Greens, mental health is promoted through a positive society with security of income and housing for all, with access to nature, based on equality of opportunity. It is not achieved with a stress-inducing programme of austerity, benefit sanctions and reduced public services, all of which the Liberal Democrats have gone along with over the past 4 years.

In a previous job I worked as a manager for a small mental health charity in Bristol. We provided self-help groups aimed at people experiencing anxiety and depression. However, since the service was open to anyone, we found that up to 50% of our attendees were actually suffering from mental health conditions which had formerly required secondary mental health care: bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and personality disorders were common.

We had repeated episodes of people coming to our groups in great distress, sometimes deeply suicidal, often summarily discharged by services that they depended on. The trusting relationships they had - often painfully - built up with mental health staff were suddenly terminated. In many cases, the strain they were under was compounded by the threat to their incomes from disability assessments and tribunals.

We were sometimes worried that we wouldn't see some of these people again.

Many mental health conditions need sustained, often lifelong, care. The NHS, in contrast, is now geared towards turnover.

Target setting and the endless search for cost-effectiveness means that people who need on-going support to maintain even a basic level of wellbeing are screwing up the figures. The impetus is towards getting them off the books and turning attention to those who can (hopefully) be sorted with a quick fix.

Back in the office, we faced another problem. As a small charity, secure funding was becoming harder to find. The trustees were keen to consider NHS-commissioned work as an option.

At that time the so-called ‘talking therapies’ in Bristol were being re-commissioned under a new system (Any Qualified Provider), which supposedly offered opportunities to small voluntary organisations. There were plenty of loopholes to jump through to be eligible but the real obstacle was the price that was on offer. Unlike a traditional tendering process we did not put in a bid based on the costs of providing a service, but a fixed amount was on offer and we could apply to supply a service for that figure.

When I looked at the numbers it just didn’t add up. Ours was a low cost service but it looked as if we might not break even; in fact we could have ended up subsidising the NHS with our other income (from grants and fundraising).

The only service that would be able to be provided at this price would be extremely short-term and shallow. It would have to be run by a large organisation with significant economies of scale – with all that that implies   And, crucially, the long-term effectiveness of these therapies was not being properly evaluated:  results were measured at 3 months, and never again, and no-one was counting re-entry to the system.

In short, the NHS market, set up by Thatcher, extended significantly by Labour, and bound into by The Coalition’s Health and Social Care Act 2012 (which Clegg refuses to repeal), is not working in favour of UK citizens. Nowadays even the commissioning process itself is being put out for commission!

Genuine and sustainable mental health policy

Good general public policy will increase mental wellbeing but we recognise that there will always be people needing care, and a good mental health service is an integral part of a healthy society. The Greens will promote mental health at three levels.

The first will be making people’s lives more equitable, secure and less stressful through wide-ranging public policy.

The second will be to repeal the Health and Social Care Act and return the NHS to a non-profit, publically-run body, where medically trained people can deliver care in ways which benefit the people needing their services. The health service will be entirely in public ownership.

The third is to fund the service adequately. In direct contrast to the programme of austerity that is crippling this country - the current economic policy of all the other major parties - the Green Party will pay NHS staff adequately and provide them with the necessary resources to research, treat and care for all people with mental illness.

What the Greens want to see is not just a dad feeling ‘comfortable’ discussing his mental health problems, but a dad who has fewer anxieties and stresses in the first place and, if he needs them, is able to access similar services as the mum who has sprained her ankle.