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The Schumacher Enigma Human Scale Governance Job Sharing Yes to A Nobler Europe The Tawney Legacy The Goldsmith Agenda
Peter Etherden - a deepening of the profile
It costs a lot of money to be poor. An individual can run out of money and survive - but only just - and doing so is a skilled operation impossible to anyone with dependents and rarely conducive to happiness or personal harmony. So normal people belong to a money club. Here are some of mine.I am a portfolio person with lots of projects and microbusinesses on the go at any one time. One of these involves my working with a Stockholm-based colleague, a former presenter and producer on Radio Sweden International, laying down english soundtracks for swedish film companies. The swedish film industry pays me in kronor which they deposit in my account with Svenska Handelsbanken in Uppsala. I have been going back and forth to sweden for thirty years. In this time the number of swedish kronor I get for an english pound has fluctuated from six to sixteen and back again several times.
My swedish earnings are declared to the UK tax authorities, the two national tax computers exchange bytes with each other and then net off my tax along with a few thousand other individuals and companies with earnings in both countries. No doubt their tax inspectors then go off on business trips to bermuda, isle of man, the cayman islands and liechtenstein to try and catch me out.
My english bankers go by the exotic name of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank. I was banking with Midland Bank when HSBC took over. I keep my swedish and english money clubs apart - with the occasional funds transfer to top up on one side or other of the German Sea.
In 1996 Sir James Goldsmith founded The UK Referendum Party to provide the english, welsh and scottish electorates with an alternative to the 'Brussels Federalist Party' - the only other party running candidates at the 1997 elections to the Westminster Parliament, howbeit under the three different party brand names: Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat.
One of the side effects was to start a money club. Jimmy Goldsmith's money club helped keep the wolves from the door for a number of people, including myself, for a year. When he closed the club down, we went off and joined another club.
One of my more recent microbusinesses is a small publishing company which sells a couple of thousand Good Yacht Guides a year. Most of them stay in the UK but some of them find their way to boat brokers and marine surveyors in France, Holland, Belgium, Portugal and Spain who may choose to pay me in euros.
I keep the euros in a tin in the cabin of my 30-foot gaff-cutter and spend them in Boulogne on booze and baccy - bought after paying french tax. But as the french, unlike our puritan governors, decline to tax the pleasures of the working man, when I bring the contraband to england I save myself three quarters of the english price - which otherwise goes into supermarket profits and government coffers. Supermarkets importing wine at french prices do not have their trucks and containers impounded at Dover like the Renault van from Oldham or the Volvo estate from Burnley.
Since discovering the joys of interest-free banking at JAK (Jord, Arbete, Kapital) I am now a sophisticated international speculator, borrowing money at interest from HSBC in pounds, moving my personal increase in your money supply to a spread-betting account with IG-Index and gambling on the kronor, pound and euro by way of gold prices and the english property markets.
Net gains go to JAK so I can buy myself a cottage on Gotland or spend a term at Lund University researching shifts in the financial structure of the Hansa in the middle ages - without paying the usurer his pound of flesh.
Jimmy would be proud of me. Why not join the fun?
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Copies of this document may be obtained fromP.O.Box 36, Rye, Sussex, England
Tel/Fax: 01797 226397
e-mail: peteretherden@cesc.net
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