Founder of the International Simultaneous Policy Organisation (ISPO)

The greatest barrier to solving our global environmental, economic and social problems is destructive competition between nations to attract capital and jobs, harming society and the environment around the world. The Simultaneous Policy offers a solution and also outlines a political campaign which transcends party politics and offers the prospect of global transformation and survival.

The Simultaneous Policy is a lucid analysis of globalisation and a compelling solution to global problems such as global warming, out-of-control global financial markets and the growing power of transnational corporations.

"It's ambitious and provocative. Can it work? Certainly worth a serious try."

"It is a good idea. What we need is politicians who will give this issue a high priority."

Polly Toynbee The Guardian

Ed Mayo Executive Director, New Economics Foundation

"Your idea for a simultaneous policy is excellent.... Lets hope that people start to listen to this important message."

Helena Norberg-Hodge
Director of the International Society for Ecology & Culture

"...the basic concept is excellent.... Let me know what develops!"

Jakob von Uexkull
Founder and Chairman, Right Livelihood Award Foundation

"The Simultaneous Policy is a creative proposal to accelerate progress toward a sustainable global economy. Many movements and grassroots globalists working for these goals can coalesce around such innovative initiatives."

Author of "Beyond Globalization: Shaping a Sustainable Global Economy"

Dept. of Sociology, Boston College, MA, USA

Prof. Christopher Leo - Dept. of Politics, University of Winnipeg, Canada.

Published by: New European Publications, 14-16 Carroun Road, London SW8 1JT, UK. Tel/Fax: +44 (0)20 7582 3996.

Price: £9.95 Paperback (£12.50 including postage & packing if ordered from ISPO)

International Simultaneous Policy Organisation, P.O. Box 26547, London SE3 7YT, UK. Please make cheques payable to "ISPO". Payments can also be made via http://paypal.com

All profits go to supporting the SP campaign.

Manuscript copies are also available in Portugese and Spanish. Please contact ISPO for details jbunzl@simpol.org.

International prices (Including postage and packing): UK £12.50 USA $20.00 EU €23.00 (or equivalent in Eurozone currency) CH Sfr.36.00 AUS A$38.00 Denmark Dkr.170 Sweden Skr.210 Canada C$32.00 Japan ¥2200 NZ NZ$46.00 For prices in other currencies please contact us.

"Working from an East-West perspective in which the interdependency of Buddhism combines with the economics of E.F. Schumacher, Bunzl argues for a program of restoring social control over the blind destructiveness of corporate globalisation by simultaneous government policies across world borders. The need for simultaneity of sovereign state action is an important new dimension of a debate affecting all planetary life." John McMurtry
Author of "The Cancer Stage of Capitalism"

"Bunzl is, I feel, the first writer on the ‘sustainable society’ to advance beyond rhetoric and grapple with the problem of how such a society might be achieved."

Executive Director, One World Trust (in his personal capacity)

"…we concur with your comprehensive and insightful analysis of the challenge before us. We also agree that social and environmental programmes are being subordinated to the demands of the global economy and that, if there is a meaningful remedy to hand, yours is as constructive as any we’ve seen to date." Roger Doudna

Dr. Farhang Sefidvash
Coordinator, the Research Centre for Global Governance, Brazil

"I must admit that the Simultaneous Policy is a very provocative document. When you start reading this document, it evokes sharp reactions within you because it challenges the alternative visions and ideas that are closer to your heart and mind. But, by the time you finish it, you realize that there are a host of alternatives to existing alternative visions and strategies for the betterment of our lives."

and expert on energy issues.

Researcher in Economics and Sustainable Development

Green Socialist Network – London

"…the SP proposal is a practical means of moving toward global governance. It should be an effective means of achieving cooperation where any individual government that behaves co-operatively will be disadvantaged until all other governments also do so. …I wish you the best of luck with your important work."

Author of 'Evolution's Arrow: the direction of evolution and the future of humanity.'

"Mr. Bunzl's vision of all nation's agreeing on a Simultaneous Policy of co-operation for world peace, sustainable world development, and alleviation of poverty is mankind's one hope of a sustainable quality lifestyle for all." J.W. Smith
The Institute for Economic Democracy - USA

"Tim Noonam of the World Business Academy envisions an Intellectual Overhaul that would lead to a Worldwide Megashift in the perception of Reality, the kind of shift which according to him, historian Lewis Mumford claims has occurred only three or four times in recorded history. The late Dr. Willis Harman, Founder of the Institute of Neotic Sciences, prophesized that the latter part of this century would witness a fundamental Transformation; to me, the Simultaneous Policy has all these potentials. What a great Intellectual and Academic Project for this century!"

Monday Wehere

"Isn’t John Bunzl’s Simultaneous Policy good stuff?" Lucy Storrs

Two World Problems

The principal barrier to implementation of any significant measure to improve today’s environmental, economic or social problems, be they in advanced, developing or non-industrialised countries, is destructive competition. Global de-regulated capital flows and corporations know no national boundaries and by their ability or threat to move elsewhere, force nations to compete with one another for capital, jobs (and therefore votes) and ever scarcer natural resources.

With increased government reliance on capital markets to finance public deficits and on corporations to maintain employment, internationally mobile capital effectively precludes the implementation of any national policy that might incur market or corporate displeasure. The markets have consequently engineered strong leverage over the economic, social and environmental policies adopted by any country ensuring that only market-friendly, neo-liberal policies are pursued - regardless of the party in power. The result is the strangle-hold of pseudo-democracy in which, whatever party we elect, the policies delivered remain substantially the same. Since virtually all nations are part of an increasingly integrated global economy, they are all subject to the same strangle-hold. In advanced countries, it is exerted directly by the market itself, ably assisted by the WTO; in developing countries, by the market and through "structural adjustment" imposed by the IMF or the World Bank; in non-industrialised countries by the virtual absence of any foreign direct investment leaving them to the consequences of warfare, poverty, disease, increasing numbers of refugees and so on.

No nation can exit from this predicament by seeking to re-regulate financial markets because such action would cause capital flight, devaluation and inflation if not outright economic collapse. Similarly, policies that seek to address environmental or social problems requiring higher public spending or higher costs for industry are precluded on the grounds of uncompetitiveness, adverse market reaction and the threat of job losses. In de-regulating capital markets, nations have therefore unleashed a force they can no longer unilaterally control – a global competitive merry-go-round now spinning so fast that no nation can get off (unless it is forcibly ejected by the market itself).

This paper therefore argues, firstly, that politics – regardless of the party in power – has effectively been paralysed into a market-friendly position from which it cannot escape. Secondly it argues that fundamental changes to the capitalist system are essential before there can be any hope of closing the ‘sustainability gap’ or of expecting any tangible results from international agreements on reduced emissions. Thirdly, since capitalism can only be changed and controlled by politics - which has itself already been paralysed - we are heading for environmental, economic or social collapse without the means to alter that course. Solutions that fail to address the central barrier to reform that global free markets and international competition represent are therefore effectively dead in the water.

In spite of this state of affairs, this book sets out a feasible means not only of regaining control of global financial markets and corporations, but of going much further towards creating the conditions for a global society and economy more compatible with Nature and the needs of human nature. The disturbing growth of far-right political parties is a sure sign that failure to do so could well prove catastrophic. This book therefore argues that a fundamental transformation from international competition to global cooperation is required, for only through global co-operation between nation states can destructive competition be eliminated and meaningful changes implemented. Crucially, it also sets out a practical method of achieving this. It therefore represents something of a "missing link" without which the many solutions now being proposed by leading economists and ecologists are likely to remain confined largely to theory.

To break the vicious circle of global competition, both between nations and between corporations, all nations need to act simultaneously by implementing the Simultaneous Policy (SP); a range of measures to re-regulate global markets and corporations in order to restore genuine democracy, environmental protection and peace around the world. SP thus calls upon peoples all over the world to recognise the futility of conventional party politics and to unite both by taking policy out of the hands of politicians and, by force of their numbers and their votes, by bringing political parties into competition with one another to adopt SP. By separating the adoption of SP from its implementation, SP transcends party-political differences and allows voters, NGOs, politicians and governments to adopt it without risking their respective personal or national interests. It therefore represents political action of a kind not yet seen: a New Politics of cooperation and community which transcends both the divisions of conventional party politics and the dilemmas of maintaining international competitiveness. SP thus offers a real prospect – perhaps the only prospect – of beneficial change and survival.

This New Politics has profound implications for North-South relations, the global environment, world economics, global governance, Green parties, non-governmental organisations, international relations, national domestic politics and, not least, for the triumph of the human spirit.

John Bunzl – March 2001.

Published in "Fourth World Review" and in "New European"

This monograph provides a refreshing, lively look at the problems of globalisation and their possible solutions. For John Bunzl is not a politician or an activist, neither a bien pensant academic nor a professional conference-goer. Instead, he is the director of a medium-sized business in South London, who has thought about politics, society and the nature of man. Bunzl keenly admits that 'at the time of writing, my lifestyle is very much at odds with what I have written regarding the need to liberate oneself from the masters of greed and envy and recognise that "man cannot live by bread alone".' Yet that, in a sense, is the whole point of 'Simultaneous Policy'. Individuals can only transform themselves with limited success unless they act en masse. Similarly, it is impossible for nations, acting alone, to stem the globalist tide. Alone, they are powerless against transnational corporations and the 'free' movement of capital. As Bunzl knows well, this process does not really offer 'free trade' at all, but protectionism on behalf of the multinationals.

Bunzl's interest in economic and political reform began when he read E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, which he (rightly) regards as being as valid today as it was in 1974, when it was written. Schumacher called for a return to a human scale in the organisation of politics and economics. He articulated a growing nervousness about the growing centralisation of power, and in economic growth as an end in itself. For Bunzl, Schumacher's predictions of environmental degradation and the collapse of shared values have been more than realised. Far from bringing peoples and nations together, the end of the Cold War has intensified economic competition. It has removed from international capitalists the moral obligation to behave humanely and the pragmatic desire to do so. More than that, the fall of communism has been accompanied by the triumph of neo-liberalism. As mechanistic as 'vulgar' Marxism, this ideology places the market and economic growth above considerations of equity and or the need to preserve settled communities. Neo-liberalism's dialectic of change is global in scope and scorns local traditions, peculiarities or needs. The World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and other neo-liberal bastions impose their will increasingly on governments, North and South. In this sense, the old anarchist slogan is coming true: 'Whichever way you vote, the government always gets in'. Only now these governments are minimalist in social policy and tied to a free-market agenda.

The idea of a 'simultaneous policy' came to Bunzl when he looked at Europe's Green parties, admired their opposition to unprincipled, unplanned 'growth' but realised that they were impotent. Impotent because of, rather than despite, their growing electoral strength, since politics today mean compromise with corporate power, not the ability to change things. Resistance to globalisation has been fragmented, fissiparous and unstructured. Often, it is manipulated by violent extremists, as we have seen most recently with the 'May Day protests' in London. Many opponents of globalisation call themselves anarchists, reviving the [conveniently] untested philosophies of Bakunin, Proudhon and Kropotkin. Yet the system they oppose represents the unacceptable face of anarchy - the 'anarchy of production', as Marx called it, plus the breakdown of a coherent moral order. Bunzl realises that globalisation requires global solutions. A change of course requires nations to act together, much as they did when the United Nations was formed half a century ago, but at a much more profound level. If national governments cannot 're-regulate' business, a coalition of nation states, North and South, can do so. In Simultaneous Policy, Bunzl draws up a three-stage plan for social and political reform. Measures range from, in the first instance, the dismantling and banning of nuclear weapons, the banning of political funding by big business, working towards a series of 'change measures to transform major corporations and institutions into ones that are more compatible with a healthy society and environment'. Bunzl is not an 'anti-capitalist', like those who demonstrate on Western streets. Like the real (as opposed to simplified) Adam Smith, he wants individual enterprise to serve human need. Like Herman Daly, pioneer of the 'steady state' (or balanced) economy, he wants economics to be returned to its origins as a branch of moral philosophy. Economic systems, including markets, are man-made, and so it is nonsense to argue that we cannot control them.

The virtue of Bunzl's monograph is that it combines healthy idealism with a good dose of practical wisdom. His conditions for cancelling Third World debt are quite stringent, allowing plutocratic elites no room for manoeuvre. His work should be therefore be required reading for Robin Cook, Clare Short and Madeleine Albright (or whoever succeeds her). Bunzl is, I feel, the first writer on the 'sustainable society' to advance beyond rhetoric and grapple with the problem of how such a society might be achieved. He is aware that, as in so much else in life, the starting point must be the individual human being. This means that his intense political engagement is tempered by a sense that the underlying problem is moral and spiritual, not political. I feel that the 'simultaneous policy' idea is only beginning to take shape, and so there is far more to come from Bunzl. As such, I commend his work to our readers.

Other book reviews have appeared in the following publications and are also available. Contact jbunzl@simpol.org for details:

Resurgence: by John Coleman

Green Events: by Malcolm Aitken

Corporate Watch Magazine: by James Rees

CCPA 'The Monitor': by Diana Jewell

Positive News: by Ted Dunn

Fourth World Review: by Sir Richard Body

All these available in English only. Other reviews not so far published to our knowledge have been written by: Richard Stimson.