Peter Smith

My impassioned speech about the causes & solution to war, poverty and environmental destruction in a Q&A at the 2014 Putney Debates as a member of an invited guest panel after the screening of the film by Carlo Nero called the Killing fields in which I featured which you can whatch here: http://youtu.be/TTiVS2lhMuY The New Putney Debates aims to emulate the original putney debates wich saw soldiers and officers of Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army, including civilian representation, hold discussions on the constitution and future of England. These historic events saw ordinary soldiers take on their generals to argue for greater democracy and provided a platform for 'common people' to make their voices heard. These debates, forced by the Levellers, paved the way for many of the civil liberties we value today. The New Putney Debates can be viewed here: http://thenewputneydebates.com/2014/10/18/the-crash-cuts/ The Killing Fields Film that was screened at the...

The natural fear of immigrants is often displayed by many people, but that fear is manipulated by unscrupulous politicians for their own benefit. To understand why we must understand the deeper economic forces at play and reject guttural hostility to immigrants or the reintroduction of formally native animal species. This is demonstrated by Government efforts to trap the beavers in Devon or the pantomime of UKIP and Conservatives pretending to want to stop Polish plumbers and their ilk from entering the UK. Government policy is determined to enact effective legislation to stop us returning the former native animals of the UK but perversely seem completely unable to implement effective legislation to stop foreign workers working in the UK. Why? My thesis is that formally native animals when reintroduced will take 'rent' from 'rent seekers', those tha...

Sir Richard Attenborough & his Beaver Obsession Tributes pour in for this great man but it is fitting that just as his death marks and end of a venerated British Institution, his secret passion is flourishing and may be the best legacy of his life. Beavers are finally returning to Britain. And the story of beavers in Britain looks like a script for a future film; this battle of cinematic proportions is breaking out as we speak to save these beavers form the dark forces of dominion and insidious privilege that Sir Richard so detested. Many of Sir Richard’s most ardent admirers are today mourning his parting, but the many who understand his beaver obsession are preparing to do battle in the British countryside and stop the dark forces about to be unleashed upon the beavers in an attempt to remove them from the riverbanks of Devon’s river Otter. Sir Richard, though not  immediately taken by the profound story of the beaver was fascinated by his mother’s and brother ...

Hooray GDP is up, headlines are plastered across the papers this weekend. The UK beats GDP growth of all the major G7 countries. Britain can be proud of the work of our great financial leaders have done restoring the wealth to our country. But what does GDP measure, well the answer is not a lot. And a lot of our growth is just the fallout of lending more money into the housing bubble (which will come back to haunt us very soon, robbing the poor & hard working to feed the rich & lazy) As my Friend Fried Harrison points out in his thesis on 'ecocide'  http://www.sharetherents.org/thesis/just-prices-riches-nature/ "Driving the destruction are land-use and tax policies that reward speculators who engage in urban sprawl. We wreck habitats (deforestation), dump waste into the oceans, and even the heavens are littered with waste from disintegrating satellites. The catalogue of disasters cannot be blamed on nature. "People do not behave in such reckless ways wi...

"The Pricing of Everything" by George Monbiot: I loved Monbiot's latest lecture.  http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2014/jul/24/price-nature-neoliberal-capital-road-ruin He evens mentions Land Value Tax, but did not explore its link with the protection of nature and properly valuing nature. But there is one thing I disagree with in that we can use a system of valuing nature in our economic system, that does not have the downsides he so rightly points out in the failings of the Neo Classical economic consensus that is so fundamentally flawed. There is nothing wrong with ‘valuing nature’ the problem is not ‘valuing’ it properly, which Monbiot has been spot on. Efforts to value nature so far are complete rubbish, then even more importantly how does that value get internalised into our economy – again the neo-liberal ideas are pure rubbish in an economic sense.  But there is a way to value nature in a way that helps the economy and helps preserv...

Our former secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs has been making his true views know now that he has been sacked & is smarting from the negativity he received for his policies Owen Paterson: I’m proud of standing up to the green lobby “…I leave the post with great misgivings about the power and irresponsibility of – to coin a phrase – the Green Blob. By this I mean the mutually supportive network of environmental pressure groups, renewable energy companies and some public officials who keep each other well supplied with lavish funds, scare stories and green tape. This tangled triangle of unelected busybodies claims to have the interests of the planet and the countryside at heart, but it is increasingly clear that it is focusing on the wrong issues and doing real harm while profiting handsomely.” “Yes, I’ve annoyed these people, but they don’t represent the real countryside of farmers and workers, of birds and butterflies. Like the nationalised...

Peter Smith, CEO of the Wildwood Trust presents ideas and examples of rewilding projects that protect rivers and town from flooding. This lecture was to the Oxford Union's Nature Conservation Society in June 2014.

In what can only be described as a lacklustre Queen’s speech the venerable old Monarch spelt out some wonderful news for landowners & developers – clearing the way to allow them to benefit hugely from the granting of planning permissions and the sale of publicly owned land. Much of the increase in the land value, worth billions, to be siphoned off without tax to the offshore accounts of some of the UK’s wealthiest individuals. Not only is the wealth and income of the 0.1%, who own most of the land in the UK, about to be increased, for no effort on their behalf, but changes in the way we subsidies landowners, through agricultural grants and tax breaks are to boosted, just as we continue to slash support for the poor and efforts to protect our wildlife. Capitalism for the poor and state controlled socialism for the rich! But there is one thing going on in the UK that could help our wildlife and benefit people by cutting water bills and saving our towns from flooding. This act...

Pulling together the threads of 'Georgist Economics' and 'Green Economics' I had a recent online discussion on 'economic rent' and it s role in 'Green economics'. Sparked by an interest in Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher, he was a ‘devote’ of Henry George and the same economic thought adopted by Joseph Stiglitz and many modern ‘green economists’.  This has come into the news this week with a dream team of modern economists (Stiglitz, Krugman & Durlauf) debating the launch of ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’, by Thomas Piketty, who has captured the zeitgeist with his modern interpretation of the classical ideas of what constitutes capital and the role of inherited wealth suppressing economic freedom and equality and highlighting the role of 'economic rent' which has been so fastidiously 'airbrushed' from modern economic texts and political debate. T he economic thought...

Interesting the solution to the problems of flooding is the same for many of the problems facing Britain in the economic, housing and environmental crisis: Tax land values. This is because marginal farmland which is only farmed because of enormous taxpayer subsidies, and produces little food, will come out of production and can revert to flood plain and naturally water absorbing wild land - saving us from the flooding My press release on these issues of flooding: Beaver & Rewilding have the answer to the UK's Flooding Problem. _____________________________________________ Peter Smith, Wildwood Trust Chief Executive said: “It took the death of school children in a catastrophic flood event to shock the Dutch authorities to really tackle flooding on the Rhine; one of their answers was to stop farming on flood plain and to create a giant natural wetland, managed by wild horses, to prevent this tragedy from happening again.” _______________________________________________ ...

Copied from my local paper - a Profile of me... By Joe Bill. Photos:  Ady Kerry Wildwood Trust boss giving nature a second chance    Peter Smith looking to re-introduce British animals  European Beaver in their living quarters at Wildwood nr Canterbury, Kent, 14th January 2013. WHEN you think of the stereotypical nature enthusiast with a passion for protecting endangered species and safeguarding the natural environment, a former boxer, turned nightclub bouncer, charity chief and revolutionary economist, is unlikely to be the vision which springs to mind. Yet Peter Smith is the unorthodox man at the helm of the Wildwood Trust - a charity dedicated to the conservation and re-introduction of British wildlife. It also runs what is rapidly becoming one of the country’s most popular wildlife parks. The idea of the park is not only to educate, explained Mr Smith, but to take visitors back to a time when the UK was rich in animal species; from wolves to wil...