Cadbury's - money, meaning and chocolate

Thousands of words have been written about the hostile takeover of Cadbury Schweppes by Kraft and no doubt many more will be written in the future. A lot of focus has been placed on the purely financial aspects of the transaction - the share price at which the Cadbury's board finally felt they had no choice but to recommend the deal, the amount of debt Kraft is taking on to finance the deal, the crucial role played by hedge funds in loosening up enough shares to make the deal feasible, the huge profits they stand to make from it and so on.

Other writers have focused on the possible consequences of the deal for the Cadbury's workforce (with job losses beng described as "inevitable" by outgoing Cadbury's chairman Roger Carr) or for Britsish industry more widely. While these issues are of course highly important, I've been trying to work out why the news just strikes me in some hard-to-get-at way as profoundly sad and regreattable. After all..Cadbury Schweppes is a multinational in its own right which has hoovered up many much-loved brands and commendable smaller companies (eg Green & Blacks) along the way. So why should I feel any sentimental attachment to it as an independent company that extends much beyond whether I still like the taste of Dairy Milk or not?

The answer occurred to me this morning in a weird flashback to junior school days. When I was 8 or so, Cadbury's ran a national essay competition for schools. We were shown a film about where chocolate came from, how the coca beans were grown in West Africa, were brought to England and turned into chocolate bars in Bournville and about how Cadbury's had been set up in the early 19th century and were model enlightened employers . Several children entered essays from our school and I was one of several winners - and had the excitement of six or so different Cadbury's chocolate bars arriving in the post for me a little while later. (And that felt like the riches of Croesus).

So in that one small episode, I had new knowledge about the world, a sense of what an English company did, of its history and the particular history of a place (Bournville) that I could conceivably visit and some delicious products I could eat all rolled up into one. And I realised that one of the many reasons why industry is important is because such enterprises DO imbue our communities and landscapes and towns with a tangible and mysterious and magical sense of place and drama and achievement - and we feel a sense of belonging with them too, however remote. And this does not happen, by and large, with service industries or administrative offices - who was ever thrilled by the sense of knowing how management consultants work or by having a call centre as the local large employer?

And..if we allow our industries and long-established companies to be parcelled up and sold off one by one by venture capitalists and corporate predators and hedge fund managers, as so many have already been, we lose not just jobs or brand names or political face - we lose something of our history, our sense of community and of ourselves.

The Moral Economy - 1

I went to a really interesting and inspiring event this morning: a talk by Stewart Wallis of NEF about the "moral economy". The audience was a gathering of folk from the arts world and Stewart's theme was the current and coming global economic, ecological and social crisis and what part the arts might play in responding to and addressing it. Stewart's analysis of the failings of the current economic system seemed to me to be spot on:

• Our consumption of finite natural resources and our damage to natural ecosystems is simply unsustainable
• The distributions of income and wealth within and between economies have reached grotesque and historically unprecedented levels in the last few decades
• The global economy is unstable - as the recent banking crisis has demonstrated all too painfully
• "More is no longer better" - in the West, we are no longer being made happier or have higher levels of wellbeing as a consequence of having more material possessions. Instead we have record levels of depression and other mental illnesses.

In response to this situation, we need a revolution in social values - away from seeking only to maximise narrowly-defined financial profit or personal financial wealth or national GDP and towards a more holistically-defined concept of personal and social wellbeing. I would add that we need to (re?)discover the ability to think and decide from the standpoint of what will benefit us all, not just what will benefit ourselves or our immediate families. In other words, we need to make a transition to a "moral economy" in Stewart's terms.

The arts community is surely in a potentially powerful position to respond to and help address some of these challenges. Theatre, literature, film/TV and the visual arts in particular can be powerful media for radically new ideas and imaginings about how society could be organised to be developed and communicated, to large numbers of people at once and to some extent by-passing the often reactive and sometimes plain obstructive forces of government and the mainstream media.

So..perhaps we need not only creative works that show us how things are (pace Dickens, Zola, Steinbeck, An Inconvenient Truth, Enron, Guernica etc) but some imaginative and radical works that show us how things could be..in a constructive sense rather than the Hollywood disaster movie sense (or even The Age of Stupid).

We also need to engage whole communities in a multi-stranded debate about how society needs to change in very practical ways - and arts venues and facilities and their community programmes could be important resources to be used in that process.