by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
A new Home Front needed could be both a question and a statement and, as far as I am concerned it is the latter. It is a fact that we do need to approach the issues facing us, in Britain and not just in Britain, with the same kind of ideas as was the home front of World War Two in this country and also in the United States.
The recently launched report booklet entitled “The New Home Front” written by Andrew Simms and published by Caroline Lucas, MP, The Green Party, talks a great deal of sense.
We must put ourselves on a modern war footing, so to speak, as regards to dealing with the issues of climate change, as well and especially, energy security, aka peak oil, and food security.
The report mentioned above just give food for thought. Now it is up to us to put ideas into action and it is up to other writers to produce new guidebooks as to the how to of many things, in the spirit of those books, booklets and pamphlets that were published and distributed during the Second World War. Many, of that I am sure, need some little books to give them ideas as to how to do this or that as many of the needed skills, from cooking from scratch to darning sock and sewing on a button seem to have become lost in the years of plenty.
The first declaration of war in this new war on the home front must be directed against waste; and I mean here waste of all kinds.
As a nation we waste millions of tons of perfectly good food annually and this is just something that cannot continue. In fact it cannot be allowed to continue. Waste such as that is criminal and this waste comes equally from our homes, as well as government canteens and those of institutions and businesses.
Worse still is the fact that another millions of tons of food get wasted between the field and the consumer, and this is, yet another issue, in the same way as it is criminal that the fruit and vegetables that have fallen off a market stall or those that have a few small blemished are not permitted to be given away even to the needy.
When the booklet talks about fining waste, I wonder how they intend to deal with supermarkets who throw just in date or food with one more day to run into the dumpsters and then pouring bleach over the packages in order to spoil it. That really is criminal.
The same also is happening to other things.
Stores routinely destroy goods that they have taken out of the box in order to put on display to such an extent that they get thrown into dumpsters and the physically bashed to bits so that they cannot be used by anyone. And not, they will not sell you a display model in 99.9% of cases and the reason given generally is that they could not guarantee that everything is in the box (most of the time the box is somewhere) and the manual might be missing, etc. Even if you offer them indemnity and such they are not prepared to sell it, at no price. They rather destroy the goods.
The author of the booklet I mentioned says more than once that we must learn how to make out products last and it is great to do that and I am all for it. The problem nowadays, as we have discovered more than once, is that goods are not made to last and have a obsolescence factored and built in. One, two or maximum three years, with most things, with a few exception, and as to being able to repair things; forget it. Most goods are made in such a way that repair is either going to be multiple times of new purchase price or repair simply is impossible by design.
We must demand a return to old values; to values of being able to make things last and to have things made that do last and are repairable.
We definitely need a new home front for such a home front might bring about the changes that are needed for the world to come back down to normality. And we need people learning the skills required to live in the new order of things.
To this end we will need to gather knowledge and skills, in the form of the written and the spoken work – the latter then taken down and turned into written – and audio visual material, so that people can learn and relearn, some of it by trial and error, of how to do things and fix things.
Some of us prepared years ago to acquire the necessary materials and skills, aside from our own practical knowledge, in order to be able to do such things and those of us that have thus learned things could be today – I should think – act as instructors to others. It was thus in the old days and must be like that again.
The new home front must be started now and it must begin with each and every one of us.
© 2011
