Watching Ethical Fashion Forums pundits on video today, I noted: 1h 25 38 Q: Investing ... reducing poverty in the UK? Ben Ramsden @ Pants to Poverty A: Yes. Thats crucial I think. There is another great undwear brand called Who Made Your Pants and they do some great work in Southampton ... upcycling ... new technology .... trend back to things made locally What he doesnt acknowledge is that Who Made Your Pants, or Mary Portas, are not invited to sit on the platform next to him. There is nobody to give the detail about how UK manufacturing pays towards a welfare state. Earlier in a speech -about 52- he said we dont need to ask for change; we can create change ourselves, but thats not how national insurance works or schemes like that work. If we as a group of people in a room start paying for a welfare state privately, and there is no law to make the people in the next room do it as well, they will be able to work on lower wages. The choice of advocates is one of Ethical Fashion Forum or Tamsin Lejeunes conjuring tricks. Advertise a discussion with universal words, then substitute sustainable for ethical after a minute or two, and make sure that all the guest speakers represent your own view of the world with nobody to talk about the most obvious ways of reducing poverty like the free hospital a mile away or the state pension. There was another clue about the view point that some of these people hold. I guess I can generalise a bit because they know each other. Pants and EFF share a postal address and met at a deskpace called The Hub Torrens Street which is something to do with Futerra Communications that another pundit on stage set-up with a partner who is a director of EFF. Tamsin Lejeune helped claim a grant to set-up Centre of Sustainability in Fashion with someone who now works there. Anyway, this is the clue. For us the focus was on India because Britain has a long history of trade with India ... put right ... past Tamsin Lejeunes thesis states that the East India Company rule could be a violent cartel, with non-cartel weavers maimed in punishment. She then writes - This process, coupled with trade restrictions already in place against imports of textiles, resulted in a reduction in lndias share of textile production to approximately 5% of world output by 1900 She attributes the idea to Tirthinka Roy, economic historian, quoting a tripod website no longer online and un-known to web.archive.org tripod/~INDIA_RESOURCE/eastindiahtml ROY, T (2004) I havent read this mans books but from what I can see from his online summeries, he thinks that this centuries-old globalisation caused change and specialisation on both sides. For example, Indian states came to specialise in growing cotton, and the industrial revolution in the UK developed cotton looms. tirthankarroy.net/Economic%20history.html If go one step further, I think this could be why nobody developed good machines for making cloth out of hemp plant stalks in the UK; these big thistle-like stalks made hemp for Royal Navy ships, but the trade declined in favour of cotton rather than get more sophisticated or turn to finer nettle stalks. If you buy a 1940s army surplus bag, it might be made out of locally-grown flax, but the last flax company which grew plants on Royal estates closed at the end of the war. Government was not interested and even banned hemp farming by mistake in the 1970s - a ban which has now turned into a licencing scheme with an EU grant to pay the £200 licence fee. Getting back from the ghosts to the present, one person called Tamsin Lejeune is in a position to choose who to invite to speak on Ethical Fashion Forum podiumns, and its not going to be someone who says buy from democratic welfare states like the UK.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 17:03:27 +0000
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