James Robertson obituary

James Robertson, who has died aged 95, was a writer and thinker at the centre of a growing movement around a green and people-centred economics. An associate of radical writers such as EF Schumacher (Small is Beautiful, 1973), Ivan Illich (Tools for Conviviality, 1973) and Hazel Henderson (The Politics of the Solar Age, 1981), he wrote 14 books over four decades that were central to a body of thinking characterised as “new economics”.

A contemporary term for these thinkers was that they were “futurists”, charting how changes in economy, society and technology would shape life to come. For James, this was to be a new economic order, an enabling force that would conserve nature. He recognised that the ability of the Earth’s resources to sustain economic life – and even our survival as a species – was at stake. However, rather than separate environmental from social concerns, he saw them as an integrated challenge, open to creative renewal.

In his 1990 book Future Wealth, for example, he contrasted the emphasis on state spending to tackle sickness with the idea of prevention and a “health-promoting economy”. He also asked why labour is organised through the dependencies of a job, and why we assume that we need to find an employer to help us work in any kind of meaningful way. While his term for new ways of working – ownwork – never became public currency, he was widely cited as an influence by pioneers and advocates of teleworking and an increase in the levels of self-employment.

In terms of government action, James was a long-time proponent of a “citizens’ income”, an unconditional payment shared with all adults that would meet their basic needs, and he was the first to explore the case for combining this with two other alternative economic policies – a land value tax, as advocated in the 19th century by the American political economist Henry George, and an energy tax, as championed by his German contemporary, Ernst von Weizsäcker.

Together these innovations would allow for welfare reform and the abolition of taxes on labour and business. The role of the state in this scenario would be to act as a guardian of the public commons – sharing the benefits with citizens and charging those who would take from it, such as polluters or land speculators.

A closely connected cause that he championed was that of monetary reform. The ease with which financial markets make money out of money led him to compare the situation to a game of cricket in which teams try to make runs not by playing on the field but by betting on the success of the two batters at the crease. A first step, he argued, was for the state to take back from private banks the right to create new money. A second step was to allow for new currencies to emerge, tied to more local economies.

In line with John Ruskin a century earlier, James also wanted to restore to the word “wealth” its original meaning of well-being. If economic activity is a result of hidden costs such as speculation and pollution, then it is detrimental to wealth in this sense, he said.

He was also a critic of economic growth, a topic of continuing debate among green economists today, arguing that the future would need to see a shift from an “income generating” to a “cost saving” economy.

The future that James envisaged has not yet landed, but the movement he helped to spur remains active, and is attracting a growing number of advocates. One focus area for his supporters is the New Economics Foundation, a thinktank he co-founded in the mid-1980s and which, with his encouragement, I joined as its chief executive in 1992.

Born in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, to Nancy (nee Walker) and Sir James Robertson, a senior civil servant, James was educated at Sedbergh school, Cumbria, during the second world war and went on to study classics, history and philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford (1946-50). After graduation he moved into the civil service with the Colonial Office, where he was provided with a front row seat to view one of the most sweeping changes of postwar Britain – decolonisation.

At the Colonial Office he helped to draw up development strategies for Mauritius and Seychelles (awakening in him, he said, doubts about the competence of the Treasury), and in 1960, having proven his worth, was asked to accompany prime minister Harold Macmillan on his six-week tour of Africa, during which Macmillan announced that “the wind of change” was blowing through the continent – a phrase that was devised by James himself.

What gave a personal twist to the tour was that James’s father was, at the time, the last British governor general of Nigeria, hosting the prime minister and his own son in the entourage.

After the tour with Macmillan, James worked as private secretary to the cabinet secretary Norman Brook, and remained in that position for three years before being posted to the Ministry of Defence. On a path, perhaps, to the top of the civil service, he was, however, frustrated by the reluctance of those within the system to open up to change. He started therefore to question the system itself, and in 1965 left it.

He went on to set up and run the Inter-Bank Research Organisation (IRO), a thinktank funded by all the major banks to examine and promote innovation in the UK monetary and financial system, and had his first book, Reform of British Central Government, published in 1971.

Leaving the IRO in 1973, taking with him a profound interest in monetary reform, he became an independent writer and lecturer. In 1975, with his partner Alison Pritchard, whom he married in 1979, he established the biannual Turning Point newsletter to catalogue and connect practice and thinking around options for a new economy and society.

In that context he suggested that decolonisation as a practice could be extended more widely to society and the economy. The empires that were ripe for change were the money system, patterns of employment and our relationship with the state, including systems of health, welfare and education.

In 1974 the Sunday Times published an article he wrote under the headline “Can we have a non-profit economy?” This prompted the release later the same year of his short book Profit or People? The New Social Role of Money, an early stakeholder manifesto that became the first of a series of specialist but influential books over the following years in which he outlined his evolving thinking on economic and social alternatives.

Working with the journalist Harford Thomas, he also co-edited an Alternatives Manifesto, a lengthy article published in 1978 in the Guardian that offered a challenge to the thinking of the political parties in the context of an expected general election. In 1984, when leaders of the G7 nations came to London, he helped to organise a counter event, The Other Economic Summit, which led to the formation of the New Economics Foundation.

Tall, gracious and open-minded, he was once described as “that most subversive of men, the eminently reasonable revolutionary”. The former Green MEP Molly Scott Cato described him as “the grandfather of green economics”.

He is survived by Alison.

James Robertson, economist and author, born 11 August 1928; died 9 November 2023

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