ROOT OF ALL EVIL?
How to make spiritual values count.

Latest Reviews:

Maggie Lunan in Coracle (April, 2004)
David Boyle in Liberal Democrat News (23 January, 2004)
Le Roux Schoeman in The Church of England Newspaper (9 October, 2003)
Will debt undo us? published in the Church Times (3 October, 2003)
Lynne Robertson in Life & Work (October, 2003)
Keith Tondeur in the Christian Herald (20 September, 2003)
Simon Nixon in The Tablet (13 September, 2003)
Erik Cramb (Dundee, August, 2003)


Published 2nd September 2003 St Andrew Press.
Price £7.99 paperback (208 pages) ISBN 0 7152 0805 5

Root of All Evil? — Now available from all good bookshops
or can be ordered direct from Saint Andrew Press (email):
121 George Street, Edinburgh EH2 4YN, Scotland
Telephone: +44 (0) 131 240 2252

"She could become a prophet of our time". — Maggie Lunan in Coracle (April, 2004).

"... chatty and anecdotal in style, but don’t let that kid you ... this is a profound and disturbing book Chapter 5 is dynamite: it could shake the UK to its very foundation." — Harry Reid, former editor The Herald.

Who wins when the financial market-place seduces us to adopt double standards?

Just in whose interest is it, for the UK population to be up to its eyeballs in debt?

How does our childhood shape our views on money and why are these attitudes so difficult to shift?

Just what is social capital and how rich can it make us?

If God made the land for the people, why do we have so little of it?

In ‘Root Of All Evil? How To Make Spiritual Values Count’ award winning columnist and author Antonia Swinson shows us how we can make our spiritual values count, even if we are, as in the UK, crushed between an enduring feudal social order, and a rampant US style market economy. In this personal journey through the world of modern finance and entrenched vested interests, Swinson dares to challenge the financial establishment which has enslaved the post war generations to Mammon and charts an escape route back to financial salvation.

Antonia Swinson is an acclaimed writer and award winning journalist and broadcaster. For six years she wrote the ‘Passing Comment; column in the Business section of Scotland on Sunday and for two years contributed the groundbreaking ‘Mammon’ column in the Church of Scotland monthly magazine Life & Work. Swinson also writes regularly for The Big Issue Scotland , New Consumer Magazine and Land & Liberty Magazine and is an occasional contributor to BBC Radio 4’s ‘Thought For The Day’, and Channel Four’s ‘Faith Without Walls’.


Appearances:

International Book Festival :
Charlotte Square Edinburgh, 19th August, 2003
Tickets from www.edbookfest.co.uk or phone 0130 624 5050
St John’s Festival of Spirituality
Princes St, Edinburgh: 22 August, 2003 (07.30pm)
Faith & Finance in a Dangerous World (£5 — tickets at the door).
Ottakars Bookshops (please phone for tickets):
— Glasgow: 9th September, 2003 (0141 353 1500)
— Ayr: 10thSeptember, 2003 (01292 262 600)
— London: 16th September, 2003 (0208 780 2401)

Background:

In the mid 1980’s, after short careers in the theatre and film business, Antonia Swinson began her career in journalism, on the Women’s Pages of the Daily Express. She was TV critic for the Daily Express from 1987-1989 and a regular contributor of features to the Sunday Express Magazine and the Daily Telegraph. In the early nineties when her second child was born, she took a career break from journalism to write her first novel and work as Programme Director for South West London Common Purpose, a not-for-profit educational programme for senior management. During this period she developed a strong interest in corporate responsibility, and contemporary issues such as racial awareness — experience she put to good use in April 2002 when she forced drinks company Tennent’s to abandon its controversial World Cup ad campaign, for which she was awarded Commended UK Newspaper Feature Writer of the Year last November, at the WorkWorld Media Awards in London.

Swinson regularly gives seminars and workshops both on money management and what she has termed ’conviction journalism’, most notably at last year’s Edinburgh Book Festival. She is a strong advocate for the introduction of Land Value Taxation (LVT) in this country to replace some existing taxes; ground breaking pieces in the New Statesman and Business AM last year, directly led to the Scottish Parliament debate on LVT in January 2003.

Antonia Swinson is also the critically acclaimed writer of three novels of financial fiction, all of which also have a fine arts background, and are currently on the financial fiction reading list at the University of Exeter library. The Widow’s Tale is set in the recession-hit Mayfair art world in 1990; the second, The Cousins’ Tale, is set in East Lothian and has received high praise both from critics and fellow writers including Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood, while the third The Love Child set in Largs, inspired Times columnist Libby Purves to write: ‘Swinson is almost a new Balzac in the way she intertwines relationships and money’. It was in publishing this book in 2000, that Swinson stunned the literary world by revealing that Anthony Trollope , post office employee, secretly wrote his most celebrated novel Barchester Towers in Scotland while secretly accepting hospitality in the castellated home of a leading government postal supplier. The story behind the coup is described in God & Money; this world-beating research is now accepted secondary source material.

Antonia ‘s first non fiction book: Root Of All Evil? How To Make Spiritual Values Count is set to court controversy once more, as she draws from years of observing the glories and insecurities of everyday financial behaviour and the expensive personal consequences to ordinary people of entrenched vested interests. In August 2003 Swinson be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and in leading bookshops.

Swinson studied English & Italian at Edinburgh University. She is currently Chairman of the Society of Authors in Scotland and a Fellow of the RSA and an advocate of the power of social capital — a keen user of local alternative currency (LETS) and an enthusiastic allotment holder. She is also the second generation to uncover the truth behind happily ill-gotten gains on Scotland’s west coast . Her late father Arthur Swinson wrote the sixties best-seller ‘Scotch On The Rocks’, the facts behind Whisky Galore. Antonia lives with her husband and children in Edinburgh.


Root of all Evil? How to make spiritual values count.

The Prodigal Son - a parable for the holidays

Libby Purves, August 05, 2003

Summer reading, particularly in the unique peace of a seagoing bunk, has a special intensity. Summer re-reading is even better. As I sailed slowly up the Baltic I rediscovered a book I had not touched for thirty years: E. M. Forster’s Howards End. The shock of recognition was aggravated by three decades of hindsight. It struck some violently contemporary notes, and chimed in with another brand new book, to which I will come in a moment.

For it is, like many great Victorian and Edwardian novels (and unlike most of the sexual, romantic, violent or fantastical novels of today), very much about money. In Forster and Henry James, as in their predecessors, Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope, there is a solid, unsentimental recognition that money does matter. Forster’s metaphor is from weaving: money is the warp, the stretched framework across which you put your chosen weft — culture, luxury, friendship, adventure, altruism, debauchery or, indeed, just more money. His concern is that in the West you cannot weave a 20th-century life, even through human relationships, without the warp of money.

Set against the briskly callous Wilcox family, his heroines, the Schlegel sisters, are anxious to do good, and fret over how best to use the “gold islets” of private income that lift them above the submerged poor. They long to give the City clerk Leonard Bast, whom they pick up in the Wigmore Hall over an umbrella muddle, a chance to live more fully through the high culture and free thought that he craves. They hold confused debates about this, stopping short of robust reconstructive socialism but admitting that there is little point in “driblets ... these puny gifts of shillings and blankets” when what is needed is a big enough islet of gold for Leonard Bast to stand upright and determine his own life.

Meanwhile, Bast himself runs into ever deeper trouble and ends up dead. It is a marvellous novel because it tries to give relative value to all three corners of life: prosperity, human relationships and art. Like Priestley’s play An Inspector Calls , it has its task made easier by belonging to a pre-welfare age, when it really was simple to draw a straight line from the carelessness of the wealthy to the shipwreck of the poor. Today the lines are blurred: exploitation of the world’s weakest is tidily institutionalised, and the plight of our own poor is blurred by welfare dependency. The “abyss” of Victorian and Edwardian fiction is still there, but it is mercifully harder to tumble into, even when the ministry fouls up your tax credit payments.

Notions of art and its function have changed, too, with broadcasting, cheap books and street-upwards cultural movements. I do not think that many modern Leonard Basts feel the need to take their threadbare umbrellas and shilling tickets to the Wigmore Hall to hear Beethoven, not with Classic FM and £1.50 bargain CDs. Nor would the average call-centre clerk of today feel humbly honoured to be given tea and literary chat by a pair of arty spinsters.

But the great questions Forster raises do not go away, any more than his cry of “only connect!” is irrelevant to our fearful, selfish, fragmented, hurried society. The question of money, how it flows and what it means to the happiness and spiritual development of human beings, is still there. This is a good time of year to consider it, since — like Christmas — August is a time when we combine noisy lip-service to simple happiness with a maximum level of crazy spending and debt. We go on about children’s fun, family time and the aesthetics of travel, while trying not to recognise how much hard cash has to flow through our hands in order to affirm these soft human values.

That simple-looking child on the beach at Southwold is costing a fortune, from her unbleached cotton Christopher Robin hat and retro tin spade to her bunk-bed in the exorbitant holiday cottage; that bare-chested back-to-nature teenager in the Cornish surf is racking up debts to double his student grant; those carefree figures hiking the
moors or spinning for mackerel from a picturesque battered dinghy know perfectly well that their peasant-like summer fortnight is paid for by plastic debt which will rear up like a striking cobra when they get home. And we know, too, that there are modern Basts who don’t get holidays; which is why the excellent Family Holiday Association charity chooses this month to hit us with appeals.

This is not mere gloom-mongering. It is by way of a preface to the second book I picked up: an early copy of a refreshingly eccentric tome by the Scottish financial journalist, Trollope expert and occasional novelist, Antonia Swinson. It is called Root of all Evil? and purports to be a Christian analysis of how money influences every aspect of our lives, how it has got disgracefully out of hand, and should be whipped back into line with our real ethical and personal values. Mr Blair should immediately recruit Swinson to his new faith-and-policy review group, if he has the bottle.

Unbelievers may be infuriated by her casual references to God, but should persevere: Swinson is no sanctimonious God-botherer or parlour leftie. She is a hard-nosed, canny financial specialist with a hearty contempt for the sector’s cant, dishonesty, incompetence and what she dubs the “preventative incantation” that makes too many of her colleagues join in with fund managers and finance houses to bleat about the inevitable long-term wonderfulness of stock market investments.

In the wake of the dot-com bubble, Equitable Life, pensions, Enron and the rest, her own journalistic conscience is reasonably clear: as far back as 1997 the dour Swinson wrote of “a gut feel that something is going to wipe the smug grins off those pasty-faced baby-boomers ... what an interesting sight it will be when these people, with their identical backgrounds, education and lifestyle, finally stampede for the exit at the same time. The truth is that neither the bulls nor the bears really know what is going to happen, or when.” And she quotes the financial writer, Charles Mackay, in 1852, saying: “Men go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

Swinson’s solutions are as bracing and uncomfortable as her analysis. She dislikes consumer debt and those who push it, and scorns the weasel way we have of referring to debt — a bad word — as “credit”, a good word. She likes savings and “Lets” — the American-style local groups gathering momentum in communities all over Britain that buy and sell goods and services between themselves without using cash. She likes micro-credit schemes for small entrepreneurs and always prefers the local, the accountable, the personal. On the grand scale, she is a brave and (in many quarters) deeply unpopular proponent of land value tax (LVT), and there is real fire and fury in her chapter 5 about how the idea of taxing land ownership and giving the value of the land back to the people has been violently stifled for a century in Britain by landed interests, private and corporate and incurably secretive.

She reminds us that Winston Churchill himself tried and failed to propose LVT. Reading her account — too complex to summarise quickly — I found myself short of breath and thought of Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest, told by Miss Prism: “The chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational.”

Swinson is probably not right about everything. A hail of well-reasoned contumely will fall on her from churches, banks, classical economists and the stock market trades. But there is a surprising amount of fun and hope to be got from thinking differently, especially in this summer season when we devote borrowed thousands to kidding ourselves that we love the simple life. Near the end, Swinson gives us the parable of the prodigal son, adorning it with the journalist’s cry of “Follow the money!” Who, she asks, was profiting all this time from the young man’s folly? In whose interest was it to keep him prodigal?

The list is long: his hangers-on, all the retailers of riotous living amenities, the government enjoying his “increased economic activity” and relying on him to spend his way out of their consumer recession. Later on come the moneylenders who bail him out at high interest, and of course the owner of the swine that he ends up feeding, as cheap labour on starvation wages. The poor daft boy is not his own master at all, not for a minute. And, with the latest household debt figures hitting £878 billion, neither are most of us.

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