Food security: currently unable to feed our population in the event of any major ‘event’.

Energy security: It’s on the record that our energy reserve is dangerously low, plus our dependence on energy imports makes us politically vulnerable to those energy importers.

Answer: No, because we already have in place a regulatory framework put in place in 1961 that allows free movement of capital while recognising the right of governments to act in protection of national security and public order: the OECD’s Code of Liberalisation of Capital Movements. The United Kingdom is a founder member of the OECD and so has been legally bound by this Code from the outset.

The Code establishes the principle of free movement of capital while allowing governments to list sectors which are closed to foreign investment. So, for example, many countries do not allow foreign investment in nuclear weapons, for understandable reasons of national security.

The Code includes Liberal principles: non-discrimination, transparency, progressive liberalisation and unilateral liberalisation.

SWFs have been in existence since 1954, when Kuwait decided to invest its copious oil revenues to ensure that its economy had a future after the oil ran out, with few concerns expressed about their activities.

The recent interest appears to have been stimulated by the birth in 2007 of the China Investment Corporation at a time when China’s foreign exchange reserves exceeded USD 1.5 trillion, equivalent to more than USD 1,000 per head. Other emerging market economies, including India, are considering establishing SWFs. The fears expressed by politicians and publics in the United States, Europe and Japan over the activities of SWFs mirror those seen recently over acquisitions–or attempted acquisitions–of large companies in these countries by Chinese or Indian investors, including the fear that a foreign government might use the economic muscle resulting from such an acquisition to achieve a political goal.

However, in the past year SWFs, and even publicly-owned companies, from emerging markets have been seen instead as saviours of debt-ridden or failed companies. Notice has been taken of SWFs now seen as virtuous, like Norway’s state pension fund, with its relatively transparent corporate governance and well-established mechanisms of public accountability. SWFs are now understood to have provided a much-needed means of recycling surpluses and providing a cushion against recession in the global economy, not least by stabilising the economies of natural resource based economies.

Nevertheless, there are legitimate concerns about potential bad behaviour by SWFs, just as there are legitimate concerns about the activities of national governments. It therefore makes sense to develop codes of good practice which SWFs can use to reassure the citizens of their investment target countries. These are now being developed under the leadership of the IMF.

At the same time, the SWFs need reassurance that other countries will not raise protectionist barriers against them on spurious grounds. Guidelines for maintaining investment openness towards SWFs are being developed by recipient countries under the leadership of the OECD.

What is now needed is a re-assertion of the principles underlying the OECD Code of Liberalisation of Capital Movements and a set of guidelines that match current needs. This might include, for example, regulatory proportionality, i.e. defining the national security concern as precisely and narrowly as possible, using the most appropriate means of defending it, and doing so only as a last resort. All restrictions should be as transparent as possible.

The United Kingdom government, as a Member of the OECD, is therefore part of the process of maintaining an open investment environment in the face of public disquiet over the potential activities of SWFs. Rather than treating this as an issue to be kept under wraps while discussions continue, it should publicly welcome the IMF-OECD process, which complies with Liberal principles of maintaining freedom of investment alongside the right to protect the public interest.

I work in the Investment Division of the OECD on investment policy co-operation with China, India and other Asian economies. From my perspective, your paper could benefit from the addition of material from OECD studies of many aspects of the response to globalisation, which are evidence-based and reflect the experience of both OECD Member countries like the ones you refer to above and also many in the developing world, including “key” emerging economies including Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa. This work generally supports the position you outline above, combining free market economics with government responsibility for mitigating negative effects of globalisation. I would be happy to send relevant publications in .pdf form to save you having to locate and buy them from our online store. If I have time, I would also like to submit some comments, but I would first need to know to what extent they are likely to be taken into account, i.e. read by decision-makers, before deciding how much time to invest in this. The work we are now engaged in includes, for example, the development of guidelines for recipient countries of sovereign wealth fund investment and discussions with key emerging economies on application of responsible business conduct standards such as the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, the only such standard that is the subject of an international agreement among 40 countries, and which covers a wide range of business conduct, including transparency and disclosure, employment and industrial relations, discrimination, environment, fighting corruption, consumer protection, science and technology, competition and taxation. We are also promoting the Policy Framework for Investment among developing countries; this was developed by 60 countries, half of them OECD Members, the other half non-member developing countries. I would be happy to explain the relevance of these initiatives to your work on policy towards Globalisation.

It is those marginal communities that may hold the key to adaptation, in a changing world, like the tribal people of Sub-saharan Africa, whose ancient survival strategies may have a lot to teach us about how to preserve water and survive in a drought-stricken planet.

Somehow Western thinking prioritises marketability and profit over diversity and preservation of heritage. Although it is customary to pay lip service to “preserving diversity”, the reality of economic globalisation belies an arrogance of Western Societies that is deeply rooted in Ignorance, threatening to destroy what is unprofitable, regardless of its intrinsic value.

Western Markets require ever-increasing investments in those areas that promise future economic rewards; the privatisation of water is a case in point. When all water is privatised, only the more affluent shall have access to clean drinking water; unable to protect their environments from private concerns that extend their global power by acquisition, indigenous peoples will be driven from their homelands by the curtailment of free access to the prerequisite for life.

Yet it is they who can give us lessons, like the ancient farming techniques still practised in some areas of Chad, sharing the rainfall from one uphill field, down to its neighbours, in a sequence of small earth dams that retain water (and nutrients) just long enough to irrigate one farmer’s field, before breaching it to flow downhill, to the neighbour’s field. Thus a whole region survived the periods of drought, sharing a scarce resource equally and amiably.

Similarly, the denial of cultures, which often encapsulate millennia of wisdom on the need to judiciously use resources and arbitrate in conflict, results in a mentality that is predatory, even parasitic in its fundamental approach, fostering warmongers and insurrectionists.

Today, only where a culture is a saleable commodity does it find favour with Globalised, Corporate interest that recognise its economic worth, otherwise, it is displaced by mass “Kultchewre” that privileges “cheap” over quality and mass-produced “bling” over art and craftsmanship.

We must resist the drive to globalise both, commerce and culture, and instead preserve and protect the uniqueness of thought and belief, even where we disagree with its fundamental message.

Animistic belief is no less worthy than established, organised religion, and the fact that only a handful of native, First Nation survivors hold that belief is not a good reason to allow it to become extinct, by promoting mass cults of the Money Gods, and religions uniformity.

Similarly, ancient tribal laws, though often abhorrent to “civilised societies”, should not be viewed as legitimate targets for the Global Wisdom of the more numerous, “evolved” proponents of their own ideologies, social mores and customs.

From Aborigenals to Innuits, we are allowing global economics to destroy the patrimony that is human diversity, and the roots on which it fed: local producers on a small scale, selling their goods and services - of no value outside their niche markets- to a purely local community of consumers, often only able to barter their own produce in exchange.

The secret may lie in preserving the ecosystems in which these cultures evolved, allowing genuine conservation of habitats, through awarding Ethnic, Tribal Property Rights to the inhabitants of those ecosystems, as stewards of their own land, water and skies.

In such a perspective, the drive by global, corporate interest to fagocitate new environments and turn them into “resources” can be viewed as a push towards simplification, in the ecological sense, that would result in monocultures, vulnerable to sudden collapse, by removing all organisms, natural ecosystems, human communities, cultures and even languages that may be most resilient in those “niche” contexts.

Like the globalised banana crops, all descended from one single plant, have become vulnerable to micro-organisms that spread like wildfire, threatening whole economies with disaster, the new “opportunities” presented by GMO crops, mules that cannot reproduce, preported to be “safe for human consumption”, yet never really evaluated for their environmental safety.

Thus today we see Genetically Modified DNA entering the wild food chains or invading neighbouring “natural” crops, infiltrating into their very genomes and threatening to simplify them, to likely future detriment of the local populations, not to mention - once again - ecosystems.

Humanity is behaving like a gang of spoilt teenagers who want everything to be brighter, louder, glitzier and “cooler” than their forefathers, prepared to conduct uncontrolled experimentation with whole swathes of our Planet, because it is not they, in the first person who will have to live with the consequences.

An Entrepreneur is nothing more than a more efficient megaparasite.

(9. The UK’s poor quality transport infrastructure is costing us billions of pounds of lost time and business in the form of congestion. The railways are a mess. I don’t know what we can do with the railways, but we need to drastically expand our transport infrastructure in all areas: road, rail, sea and air if we are to maximize our global potential. I am not a transport expert, but here are a few ideas:
- a new central England super-airport to take pressure off the London airports, served by super-fast point-to-point rail links to all major cities within 60 minutes’ bullet-train-travel.
- more point-to-point rail services generally: they are fast and efficient, and easy to run.
- town centre congestion charges and road tolls across the country, with the profits ploughed back into more transport infrastructure improvements. (NOTE: as a liberal I am “anti” any national road pricing scheme. National schemes are unproven, unwieldy, could be abused centrally, etc)
- more mass transit services, locally owned and operated.

Government involvement should be at the lowest level possible, with an eye to creating good-quality markets wherever possible. The shambles of rail privatization should not be repeated.

(10. Abolish Employers’ NI, a tax on hiring people.

Bring in a Citizen’s Basic Income, so that every citizen has a large incentive to work rather than the super-high withdrawal rates benefits claimants are currently subject to.

Unilaterally drop barriers to trade and investment, attempt to join NAFTA, do whatever it takes to put the “free” into “free market”. Clearly we should keep a sharp eye out for international monopolies, cartels, etc, but the fewer charges we levy on business, the more businesses will come here. The easier it is for businesses to set up shop here, the more will do so.

(11. We should allow our children and teachers the ability to figure out for themselves which skills they will need. By putting in place a learning fund for each child that they can access throughout their life, we could put the decisionmaking power into the hands of the individual.

That said, it has been a great shame that we have seen the decline of science and technology as popular subjects at A-Level, degree level and beyond, and if we are to ensure that we maintain our technological advantage then I think that it is imperative that we massively incentivize the teaching and learning of science and technology, and also the basic research necessary to underpin scientific progress.

Teaching quality of sci/tech subjects seems to be being eroded by a government desperate to produce ever-higher exam results. We need to put the curriculum and the school inspection regime beyond politics, and ensure that both are overseen by high-quality individuals and committees that are not appointed by politicians.

Learning sci/tech subjects should be popular - those studying them enjoy intellectual jobs and large salaries later in life. For some reason, children do not want to do them. A learning fund out of which a child will pay for their own education could incentivize them to make the financially smarter decision. The government can help by ensuring funding for sci/tech endeavours (space travel, biochemistry) at all levels, from PhDs and other basic science activities to sponsoring “X-Prizes” for individual project successes.