So what is the real story? Has the Great Recession dented ethical consumerism, or has the ethical consumer remained constant?

Consumers in the UK appear to be as ethical as ever, and the most ethical in Europe, according to a survey by IDG.

So how about this rival report by Mintel that says consumers are shying away from paying a premium for ethical or sustainable goods while they are under under the yoke of recession.

Can any readers resolve the apparent contradiction here?

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Often when someone fights against accountability, they make their opponent's case for them.

Take three recent instances:

Attempts by British oil trading firm Trafigura to gag the Guardian newspaper from reporting on a question posed by a MP in Parliament about the company's existing secret gagging order preventing the newspaper from reporting on Trafigura's dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. Had Trafigura succeeded in preventing reporting on the parliamentary question, it would have represented a stunning override of parliamentary privilege. The attempt was undermined effectively by people on twitter who took it upon themselves to make the question public.

Then there is the reaction of UK-listed and based Vedanta Resources to being told by the UK National Contact Point for the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises that the company had failed to consult on or look out for the interests of local people regarding its plans to construct a bauxite mine in Orissa, India. According to India's Business Standard, Mukesh Kumar, chief operating officer of VAL's Lanjigarh project responded:

“We condemn the findings of the UK-based agency. Our bauxite mining project at Niyamgiri hills has been cleared by the Supreme Court, the highest judicial authority in India. It is inappropriate for the agency of any other country to comment on a project being developed in India”

Even where that company is rooted in and takes advantage of capital markets in that other country?

Then there are the mounting attempts by corporations to shift their tax residence elsewhere from their actual base of operations in order to avoid tax (prompting this response from the UK tax authority) .

As corporations take ever greater liberties with the reach of democratic accountability, they make the case for global or at least extra-territorial regulation.

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Stephen Green, Chairman of HSBC and author of a new book "Good Value", has said in a BBC interview that he feels banks owe the public an apology.

This makes quite a change from the tales of "back to business as usual" emanating from Wall Street and London's Canary Wharf, and much more appropriate to the author of a book with the subtitle "Reflections on Money, Morality and an Uncertain World". I wonder though whether an apology is enough. Here's a reminder from my earlier post about what we can now view as:

the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression: an increase in the number of people around the world in chronic hunger and poverty by over 100 million, to 1.02 billion; between 200,000 and 400,000 more babies could die each year between now and 2015 if the crisis persists; an increase in global unemployment by between 29 million and 59 million people; one in eight US mortgage borrowers is behind on mortgage payments or facing foreclosure at the end of the second quarter 2009; pensioners relying on developed country stock market returns for their retirement incomes have seen their savings fall by 45%.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in the US holds out the promise of going beyond apologies and the inevitable return to customary way of doing business. It offers a public space in which public but impotent anger can be channeled into better understanding and a focussed demand for real change, generating and sustaining in its turn the political will for the necessary reforms.

London could do with a comparable public inquiry of its own.

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Was the chairman of the UK's financial watchdog just trying to impress concervatives when he expressed support for a tax on foreign exchange deals?

Development charities are delighted. And why wouldn't they be? The global economic crisis rooted in excessive risk-taking (rooted in remuneration policies that rewarded it) is estimated to have caused some 100 million down to the level of extreme hunger.

Personally I wonder whether a Truth and Reconciliation Commission could help bring some measure of justice by bringing together victims of the crisis perpetrators.

But a Tobin tax on currency transactions could help remedy the material impacts of the crisis rather than simply the emotional and cultural. It is argued that the tax brought in could be used to finance economic development for those who have suffered at the hands of the finance industry.

Lord Turner went on to comment that the UK's financial sector has "grown beyond a socially reasonable size". Hardly seems like posturing towards a future Conservative government to me; more like a note of sense from someone who is not only close to the action as a regulator now, but has himself been a business leader.

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As regular readers will know, I have been a little preoccupied of late so I learned rather late that the British prime minister Gordon Brown has decided to merge two ministries - the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills which includes responsibility for higher and further education and the existing Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform - to form the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).

The logic of the merger is the desire to align education with business’s needs for skills aimed at economic growth. This is how the government describes what the new department will do in relation to adult education:

Assess the changing skills needs of the UK economy, especially the intermediate and high skills vital in a global economy and design policies to meets them through public and privately funded life long training;
Invest in the development of a higher education system committed to widening participation, equipping people with the skills and knowledge to compete in a global economy and securing and enhancing Britain’s existing world class research base;
Continue to invest in the UK’s world class science base and develop strategies for commercialising more of that science;
Continue to invest in skills through the Further Education system to help people through the downturn and to prepare Britain for the future

My gripe with this (actually I left an impression of my balding pate on the ceiling) is that education serves a broader purpose than nurturing market participants.

Apparently I’m not alone. The editorial in Times Higher Education was scathing:

“There have been widespread fears for some time about the corrupting effects of commerce on the academy: graduates have been encouraged by the Government to think not of the personal and civilising benefits of a university education, but only in terms of the extra cash they will earn...

With this move, the Government has gone the whole hog: it appears to have delivered higher education into the arms of Mammon, or at least into the hands of Lord Mandelson, the unelected Business Secretary and First Secretary. Its zeal for higher education supporting the pursuit of a knowledge-based economy has led to the creation of a department that takes its inspiration from entrepreneurial reality-TV shows.”

Even Margaret Thatcher’s former secretary of state for education, Lord Baker, remarked in the House of Lords:

"Universities are not basically about improving competitiveness or building industrial strategy. They are essentially custodians of scholarship, intellectual rigour and world class teaching.”

Lord Mandelson justifies the merger arguing that it is crucial in order to sustain a recovery even though the economy appears to be on the road to recovery without it.

He goes on to suggest that “it is possible to further boost the role of universities in generating our economic growth without in any way compromising the place of fundamental science or curiosity-driven research in their mix.” But can he and his ministry be trusted to do so?

While attempting to reassure universities that their autonomy and independence from government will be preserved, he warns that:

“There is a need to make sure we set the right overall strategic direction in the UK in terms of some of the key skills and specialist knowledge that we will need to excel in a global economy”

That strategic direction will be set by a ministry whose primary focus is serving business, a department which before the merger the environmentalist George Monbiot surmised “functions as a fifth column within government, working for corporations to undermine democracy and the public interest”.

We can already begin to see how this will pan out. An emergency plan to create another 10,000 places for university students this autumn is to be restricted to those applying for science-related courses.

Lord Mandelson demonstrates himself repeatedly to be a man of singular impulse. He recently urged the European Parliament – the lower house of the European Community’s bicameral legislature - to be "Europe's economic conscience", pushing European member states to work together to rebuild Europe's economic strength. I’m not sure what economic strength has to do with conscience but presumably throwing them together into one phrase was meant to soften a request that boils down to abandoning the non-competitiveness aspects of Parliament’s legislative remit including healthcare, research, environment, social policy and immigration policy.

The issue here is not whether “business” is good and can be trusted with adult education; it is whether in principle responsibility for educational policy should be placed in a department whose interest in education is so entirely instrumental and narrow.
 

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The test, developed by a UK psychologist, aims to help employers screen candidates for racism, homophobia or prejudice against disabled people.

Based on associative theory, the test attempts to measure our unconscious biases.

While discrimination needs a solution, there are concerns that the test will penalize those who have prejudicial beliefs or feelings, but who nevertheless manage to surmount these and act within the law.

The test could have value as a way of raising the topic of prejudice in the personnel development context - ie highlighting a concern of which the individual might well not be aware and equipping them with strategies for self-management. Identifying prejudice also opens the way to bridging the knowledge gap that underpins it through, for example, empathic experiences.

But as a recruitment tool? Sounds Orwellian to me, but then I'm a white male.

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John Ruggie, the UN Secretary General's Special Representative for business and human rights, made the comments to a UK parliamentary committee.

In reality, both international mandatory approaches and business driven voluntary approaches are problematic, he argued. The solution, at least in the short term, is to build a pragmatic patchwork of voluntary and mandatory initiatives.

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The head of Pirc, which advises pension funds responsible for assets worth £1.5tn, has called for German-style inclusion of workers on UK boards.

Alan MacDougall argues that such a move would provide corporate boards with a counterweight to entrenched interests.

Pirc also recommended that the voluntary corporate governance codes in place in the UK be replaced by rules enforceable by the Financial Services Authority.

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A new Equality Bill being presented to the UK parliament could force companies to publish their gender pay gaps by 2013.

According to the BBC:

"Ministers ...want to tackle the fact that - 40 years after the introduction of the Equal Pay Act - women in the UK still earn on average 23% less per hour than men."

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Starbucks is going Fair Trade in the UK, so is Cadbury.  Their U.S. counterparts aren't.  What's up with that?

This piece in CS Monitor pretty much sums it up:

"more than 70 percent of the British populace recognize the fair-trade mark, whereas consumer recognition in the United States is only 28 percent, according to recent surveys."

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