Monbiot's "Declaration of Interests": Ideological Rhetoric or a Bloody Good Idea?

Confession: 

I used to detest George Monbiot's whining, liberal, right-on, global-greening claptrap; so much so that I believed that it bordered upon the solipsistic. That was usually because I rarely got beyond the first paragraph, or sometimes even the headline...

And then he appeared to be standing up for Nuclear Power last year and I thought, hang on a minute...read a whole article of his for the first time and realised that there was a rationalist hiding (in plain sight) within the rhetoric and I was converted. I still disagree with a number of his arguments (and there are, let's see now...lots of them) but each of them is blessedly well-researched and they are, largely, evenly balanced.

And then along came a little piece last week where he decided to lay bare his "interests", and by that he meant his income and (some of his) assets along with their sources by placing the information in the public domain. Well, on his website at any rate. That might qualify as the public domain, I guess.

His argument, in a nutshell, is that journalists should live by the same "rules" that they occasionally and gleefully insist that others live by; i.e. exposure of the personal financial arrangements of politicians, "slebs" and other worthy or unworthy people in the public eye. Fair enough. 



George Monbiot - Sufficiently
Comfortable to be Afflicted?

 His "Registry of Interests" includes his retainer from Guardian Newspapers; a fee that currently brings in £62k a year and a payment from Penguin Books that he hopes will come to £40k over the next three or four years for a book on "Rewilding", which might be about the reintroduction of wolves to Britain to deal with the problems of Traveller communities, but I imagine is more likely to cover the rare Yorkshire thistle, Red Squirrels and the like. Hope so. Incidentally, rewilding doesn't pass spellcheck unless you use a hyphen, but that would mean that his Penguin book might be "about" Rav Wilding, the telly copper, and nobody would give you £40 for that, let alone £40,000.

George also informs us he has a couple of lodgers who, collectively, give him around £5k a year. I assume that they have their own rooms, but even if they shared (and also assuming that George lives in London) then just over £50 a week each sounds anything but Rackmanesque. It's positively philanthropic. Not only that, but you get to share a house with a "thinker"! Just imagine the evenings-in around the fireplace with an organically-sourced ale and a bowl of mange-tout discussing rewilding. Bliss. I'll see if there's a waiting list.

No mention of receipts from his various books, however. Maybe they don't sell. But if they do, then to balance that, of course, he has all of his expenses for research assistance, travel, making pension provisions and running his office, I guess. On the other hand, he may just donate all the proceeds to charities but doesn't want to come across as too nice a chap.

He also gives detail of his savings...banking accounts that contain a measly £14k. It would be churlish of me to point out that he hasn't told us how much his house is worth or whether he's in negative equity, mortgage-free or somewhere in between but he has recorded that, apart from the one home, he has no other property or investments. Maybe there's a wealthy family out there too from which he may inherit squillions, but frankly I doubt that and neither is it any of our business unless you happen to be Cameron or Osborne or, indeed, the rest of the privileged toffs in government that have absolutely no fucking idea what a recession actually means to "ordinary" people. Then it certainly would be our business. 

Sorry...back to Mr Monbiot. By my reckoning, he's putting in his pocket, after deductions, a little over £50k a year which - on the Goodwin/Green Scale of Obscenely Undeserved Income (copyright pending) - barely causes a blip on the graph. 

The strap-line on Monbiot's web page is - “Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable” and whilst  his earnings could be described by some as "comfortable", he is most certainly not one that should be on the receiving end of the "affliction" he wishes, quite correctly, to be visited upon others. 

So: Well Done George Monbiot. Four words that I would never have set down (in that order) until recently. I have no reason to doubt his candour and he should be applauded for it rather than being subjected to a unfunny piece of sniping by Catherine Bennett in the Observer. I think she protests a little too much but not enough to make the list (see below).

But is he right to ask other journalists, columnists and commentators to do the same?

Short answer - YES!

Here's my top ten targets. I wonder if it's the same as his?

1) Polly Toynbee 

2) Fraser Nelson

3) Matthew D'Ancona

4) Peter Oborne

5) Little Richardjohn. 

6) Charles Moore

7) That Sieghart Woman
8) Trevor Kavanagh

9) Kevin Maguire

10) Nick Robinson