An analysis by Greenpeace in 2016 revealed that the Queen was one of the top recipients of EU money, with her Sandringham farmland alone coining in £557,707 that year, with a similar sum every year. ... And What Do You Do?, Norman Baker, October 2019
Prince Khalid Abdullah al Saud, who owns champion racehorse Frankel, has reportedly described his farming interest as a hobby. Juddmonte Farms, which he owns through an offshore holding company in Guernsey, received £406,826 in farm subsidies [in 2015]. Source
The CAP's disastrous effects on the environment, small farmers, animal welfare, Africa and human health, have been well documented, but it is the persistence of the CAP, after years of its obvious failings, that should astonish us. It happens, in my view, because big government is remote government. It doesn't concern itself with the needs of ordinary people, because it's beholden to powerful vested interests: not just big business, but its own government agencies.
And it's not just agriculture.
Increasingly, the complexity both of society and our policymaking
process is being weaponised in favour of the people who own and run
corporations, or the people they pay (in or out of
government) to understand and influence policy. Government and their
paymasters can get away with this because we accept a policymaking
system that doesn't explicitly target outcomes that are meaningful to
ordinary people. Currently policymakers can - indeed must - express
their decisions as vague declarations of intent and changes in
institutional funding and composition, or legislation. Their focus is on
the supposed means of achieving vague outcomes, rather than on the
outcomes themselves.
A Social Policy Bond regime would, in contrast, have to be explicit about its objectives: transparency and accountability are built into a bond regime, as surely as they are excluded from the current policymaking apparatus. Insane, corrupt programmes, such as the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (now accounting for 35 percent of the EU's budget), have platitudinous, vague, mutually conflicting goals that sound high-minded but actually end up shovelling vast sums of taxpayers' and consumers' money into the bank accounts of agribusiness corporates and their lobbyists. If outcomes were built into policymaking, as they would be under a Social Policy Bond regime, such policies would get nowhere. Instead they have lasted for decades, at great cost to everybody except a few millionaire businessmen and landowners, a burgeoning, parasitical bureaucracy and lobbyists. Oh, and fraudsters.
The CAP's continued existence is a clear signal that we need to make systemic changes in the way we formulate policy. Instead of allowing overworked or corruptible officials and politicians to guess how we can best solve our complex and dynamic social and environmental problems we would do better to target the outcomes themselves and reward the people who help achieve them. The goals of a Social Policy Bond regime would be clear and stable: the ways of achieving them would be up to bondholders who would at all times be motivated to be efficient in the pursuit of society's goals. Transparent, comprehensible, meaningful goals, and investors motivated to achieve them: that would be the most effective way of closing the gap between politicians and the people they are supposed to represent.
A Social Policy Bond regime would, in contrast, have to be explicit about its objectives: transparency and accountability are built into a bond regime, as surely as they are excluded from the current policymaking apparatus. Insane, corrupt programmes, such as the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (now accounting for 35 percent of the EU's budget), have platitudinous, vague, mutually conflicting goals that sound high-minded but actually end up shovelling vast sums of taxpayers' and consumers' money into the bank accounts of agribusiness corporates and their lobbyists. If outcomes were built into policymaking, as they would be under a Social Policy Bond regime, such policies would get nowhere. Instead they have lasted for decades, at great cost to everybody except a few millionaire businessmen and landowners, a burgeoning, parasitical bureaucracy and lobbyists. Oh, and fraudsters.
The CAP's continued existence is a clear signal that we need to make systemic changes in the way we formulate policy. Instead of allowing overworked or corruptible officials and politicians to guess how we can best solve our complex and dynamic social and environmental problems we would do better to target the outcomes themselves and reward the people who help achieve them. The goals of a Social Policy Bond regime would be clear and stable: the ways of achieving them would be up to bondholders who would at all times be motivated to be efficient in the pursuit of society's goals. Transparent, comprehensible, meaningful goals, and investors motivated to achieve them: that would be the most effective way of closing the gap between politicians and the people they are supposed to represent.
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