International Simultaneous Policy Organization

ISPO

URL = http://www.simpol.org/dossiers/dossier-UK/html-UK/interface-UK.html

Contact: [email protected]

Description

"The International Simultaneous Policy Organisation (ISPO) is a growing association of citizens worldwide who use their votes in a coordinated, effective way to drive all nations to co-operate in solving our planetary crisis. ISPO goes beyond merely demanding greater political accountability by offering citizens a new way of restoring genuine democracy lawfully and peacefully, one vote at a time."

Maura O'Connor:

"created by British businessman John M. Bunzl. Bunzl has been inspired by his readings of integral philosophy and is using its principles to create a system that he believes could “transform the international economy such that it operates in harmony with the global natural environment.” Bunzl’s ambitious model hinges on the theory that if international leaders implement policies at the same exact time, fears of putting their respective countries at a competitive disadvantage will dissipate and nations could begin to cooperate with one another as a genuine community. Bunzl’s proposed policy changes for the first year of SP implementation would include increasing the regulation of international financial markets, canceling Third-World debt, banning and dismantling all nuclear weapons, and halting genetic engineering and its application in agriculture, industry, and medicine. Bunzl himself recognizes that “persuading all countries to adopt SP sounds like an incredibly tall order, and indeed it is.” (http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j36/global-gov.asp)

The Simultaneous Policy Strategy

"The key is for citizens to adopt SP. By adopting SP, we pledge to vote in future elections not for a particular politician or party, but for any political party or candidate, within reason, who has signed the pledge to implement SP. Alternatively, if we still have a preference for a particular party, our adoption signifies our desire for our party to sign the SP pledge. Adopting SP is no risk for anyone because the implementation of SP only proceeds when all or sufficient nations have signed the Pledge. By transcending party politics, SP gives global citizens a powerful tool to drive politicians to replace destructive global competition with fruitful international co-operation.

So, instead of voting for the largely indistinguishable and redundant policies of political parties, by adopting SP we're taking global policy out of the their hands and instead creating our own policy. AND we're turning the tables on ALL politicians, presenting them with a compelling 'carrot and stick' proposition:

THE CARROT: Since SP is only to be implemented by virtually all nations simultaneously, there’s absolutely no political risk to politicians who sign the Pledge because they need not fear any economic competitive disadvantage. Indeed, they can support SP while continuing to pursue their existing policy programmes until such time as all nations have signed the Pledge and implementation proceeds. And by signing the Pledge, politicians can also benefit from the much needed bloc of electoral support that SP-adopting citizens represent.

THE STICK: On the other hand, failure to sign the SP Pledge could cost politicians something more precious to them than anything else. With more and more citizens adopting SP, and with parliamentary and congressional seats and even entire elections increasingly being won or lost by small margins, they face defeat by rivals who have signed the SP Pledge to attract the growing SP voting bloc. Even if relatively small, that bloc could make the life-and-death difference between winning and losing for individual politicians, parties, and whole governments.

So by adopting SP, we citizens around the world, whether we have a party-political preference or not, can now use our votes in a new and effective way to drive our politicians to cooperate in implementing simultaneous solutions to mounting global problems.

SP is also a no-risk proposition even for corporations, many of which would submit to responsible environmental and social legislation if they knew all of their competitors, no matter where in the global marketplace, would be subject to the same laws and regulations.

So by adopting SP we're creating a powerful support system for all people and institutions who want to do the right thing. SP becomes the rallying point and strategy for the emerging "superpower of peace and justice" to achieve its aims. It provides a safe, sensible, democratic and lawful way for all people of good will – from citizens to CEOs, from anti-globalists to compassionate conservatives – to take back the world for the good of our planet and for the fundamental social values that bind us." (http://www.simpol.org/dossiers/dossier-UK/html-UK/interface-UK.html)

Interview

Of John Bunzl, conducted by PCDN's Maha Hilal :

On Simpol

Can you talk about the concept of Simpol and talk about the types of policies that fit within the Simpol purview?

Sure. The whole idea of the Simultaneous Policy (Simpol), is all or sufficient nations implementing policies simultaneously. The whole idea, then, is to break this vicious circle of destructive international competition.

The kind of policies that could be included in Simpol’s range of policy measures is actually incredibly broad. In principle, it could include any policy that's desirable, but which a single nation or a restricted group of nations like the EU cannot implement for fear it would make its economy uncompetitive. That could include policies to solve climate change, Tobin tax, corporate regulation, corporate tax, regulation of the financial system, and so on. In fact, Simpol could include just about everything the global justice movement is calling for.

In fact it’s because the movement has not spotted the vicious circle of destructive international competition, and so has not developed any response to it, which explains why it has not been successful. Because, without simultaneous action, no really substantive reform is possible. So Simpol, potentially, could be a global movement builder in that respect—if NGOs and others start thinking world-centrically. But anyway, that's just the policy side of Simpol.

The other side is how you actually get all those policies implemented? And this is where I think Simpol is really exciting. Because, when citizens sign on to the Simpol campaign, they write to their Member of Parliament or Congressman or, at election time, to all the competing candidates of all parties, saying to them: “I'm going to be voting in future elections for ANY politician or party - within reason - that signs up to Simpol. Or, if I have a party preference, I want my party to sign up to it”.

Now, the point about saying “ANY” is incredibly powerful because there are many congressional and parliamentary seats, and even entire national elections, now being won or lost on very low numbers. And that means it won’t take many citizens supporting Simpol to make it in the vital electoral interests of all politicians to support the campaign.

Indeed, elections are often on a knife-edge because it doesn't make much difference anymore who you vote for. Why? Because all politicians in power, of whatever party, have no choice but to keep their economies competitive! The result is what I call “pseudo-democracy”: we still have the mechanics of free and fair elections, but it doesn't mean much anymore, because whoever gets in, they all have to implement pretty much the same policies. So even if you voted in the Green Party, it would have to abandon most of its cherished policies because they would inevitably cost business more and so make the U.S. economy uncompetitive.

So that's why, with Simpol, a relatively small number of citizens can have a huge impact. They can turn the tables 180 degrees, firstly by making their own global policy agenda – an agenda we’re calling the Simultaneous Policy – and by telling politicians that we’ll be voting for ANY politician or party – within reason - that signs up to Simpol.

Using that process, at the last general election here in the UK, a tiny number of us who were active on Simpol got 200 candidates from all parties to sign up and, of those, 24 are now sitting in parliament. The number of us it took to do this was, maybe just 5! In some parliamentary electoral areas, we actually got all three main competing candidates—Labor, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat—to sign up. So whichever one got into parliament, we won! So, in a way, you could say we’re turning the whole political system on its head. We're actually turbo-charging party-political competition to produce its very opposite: global cooperation. The leverage we have is incredible.

I'll give you another example: in one electoral area, in the West of England, the sitting Conservative MP at the previous election, had won the seat by just 150 votes. Then, at the last election, one of our supporters wrote to him and said, “I'll be voting for ANY politician or party, within reason, that signs up to Simpol”.

Now, you can kind of imagine what went through the politician’s mind. He probably thought, “Holy cow, if there's a few more of these Simpol supporters in my constituency that I don't know about, I could lose my seat! So I’d better sign up quick because if I don't, and my competitor does, I could be out”.

Now, how many of our supporters were actually in that constituency? Well, just one! But we never tell politicians precisely how many supporters we have in their area, so we keep them guessing. So you can see how, with Simpol, citizens can once again make their vote into the most powerful force for global change.

Although pseudo-democracy is making a sham of conventional party politics, Simpol is appealing to people not to run away from politics altogether, because we surely won't solve global problems without politics. So the question is how do we come back to politics, but at a higher level where we no longer engage at the nation-centric level of choosing lamely between one party or another, but come back at a world-centric level where we make all politicians compete to do what we want them to do. Simpol offers us exactly that. So, I believe we have a powerful opportunity - a very powerful proposition - to offer the global justice movement.

But the global justice movement will not understand this all the while it continues to think nation-centrically. So its consciousness—its way of thinking—needs to move up to that world-centric level. And that lag in consciousness, I think, accounts for the fact that, even though I've been at this for 13 years now, we're still at a very early stage. So it takes time and patience.

How are individuals empowered in the Simpol process?

Well, let me come back to that example in West of England and that single supporter who got the Conservative candidate to sign up. Because after the candidate signed up, that supporter rang me and said “John this is great because now I know we've got them all in the bag. Now that one's signed up, the others have got to sign up too!”

What was so wonderful, then, was the feeling of empowerment that our supporter had. The feeling that “gosh, yes I can come back to politics and I can actually call the shots”. So that's the feeling I would love to convey to people; that Simpol allows each of us to come back to politics at this higher, global level; a way we can actually use our votes in our national elections to drive a global process of global cooperation. If we could get that message across, we could change the world tomorrow.

I don't know if you remember Live Aid and Make Poverty History rock concerts that went on some years ago in Tony Blair's time as the Prime Minister. If, instead of putting on a silly white wrist band, half a million people had instead signed up to Simpol and so effectively turned round en masse to politicians and said: “We're going to be voting for ANY politician that signs up to Simpol, politicians would be running around like scalded cats! They just wouldn't have any choice but to sign up or else risk losing to their political competitors.

Of course a lot of people will say, “Politicians will sign up to anything but then they'll only break their promises later”. But if I may say so, they're not thinking straight. Because what you have to remember, firstly, is that Simpol doesn't get implemented until all the sufficient nations are on board. So for a politician, there’s nothing for them to renege on, until that time comes. So for them to sign up to Simpol only to cancel it later wouldn’t make any sense. It would only be saying to Simpol’s growing voting block, “please don't vote for me”. So if there's enough of us, any politician that reneges would just be cutting their own political throats. So there's absolutely no logical reason for a politician to cancel their pledge at any point until the date for implementation arrives.

And by that time, I think global problems are going to be even more acute than they are today. So, by that time, and because simultaneous implementation would be in everybody's interests anyway, why would they want to avoid it? By that time, even people like George Bush will support Simpol because it will be the only way to survive!

I'm actually a businessman myself and business people are not stupid, they know we've got big global problems. And they want to be in business for the next 20 or 30 years, not just the next two. So, ultimately it’s got to be in everybody's interest to sign up to something like Simpol, which, because it’s implemented simultaneously by all, means that nobody loses out unduly to anyone else. It’s a level playing field proposition. So, although, for example, a corporation may have to put up with lower profits in a post-Simpol world, the point is that all other corporations would be in exactly the same boat. So the relative profitability—and the relative competitiveness—of all corporations would stay the same.

I think that's the whole point, because what corporations and business people fear most is not lower profits as such; its lower profits that they're subject to but not their competitors. So these are all good reasons why, as time goes on and people's consciousness starts to move to a world-centric level, Simpol or something like it will take off very strongly.

Can you talk about the two parts of Simpol with respect to democracy? That being the political process and policy development?

In terms of policy development, I said earlier that Simpol could include basically any policy that nations can't implement alone for fear of becoming uncompetitive. But the important thing is that these policies would not be decided by me, or by any officer of Simpol or by any council of wise elders or anything like that. It would be decided by citizens; the citizens who sign up to Simpol.

So Simpol, if you like, is a global, bottom-up direct democracy initiative. It’s a form of direct democracy in the sense that, because of our voting power, politicians effectively become passive tools for implementing the policies that citizens decide upon. You see, they don't have any choice in the matter effectively. If there's enough of us willing to vote one way or the other, then politicians have no choice but to sign up regardless. The policies, then, are totally in the hands of citizens who support Simpol and we are developing a process to allow our supporters to participate in that process. And so that side of Simpol is entirely democratic.

Now when it comes to the political support side of Simpol, the process by which citizens tell their politicians that they will be voting for any politician or party that supports the campaign, that is also democratic because, even though a very small number of people can drive politicians to support Simpol, in our Founding Declaration we state that Simpol cannot be implemented without citizens in all democratic countries having had a referendum to say that they support it.

So although Simpol’s political support process is quite coercive because a very small number of citizens can drive politicians to sign up, ultimately nothing can be implemented unless everybody agrees. So ultimately it is completely democratic insofar as nations themselves are democratic, because Simpol can only be as democratic as nations allow.

But that brings me on to another question which I guess you were probably going to ask, which is how do we involve non-democratic nations in Simpol?

The answer is that we would only invite them to participate at the very late stages of the campaign. If, for example, we had been very successful in democratic countries and this whole movement became global and incredibly powerful and it became a question, not so much of if Simpol would be implemented, but when, at that point you would invite China or any other non-democratic nations to participate in the process. And they of course would realize that any policy they propose has to be agreed upon by everybody else, otherwise it just won't happen. So it’s not that China or any other country can force its views onto any other country. In fact, with Simpol, every country has an equal stake and power. But again, with global problems getting worse, the pressure for cooperation gets stronger and so every nation will realize, I think, that whatever it wants, it’s got to be agreeable to everybody else because, without that, you can’t have global and simultaneous implementation. So I think that's important.

Where has Simpol been put into practice to date? What have been the results and how do you measure success? I know you talked about a couple of examples where it’s been put into practice.

Well, Simpol is about putting global policies into practice and of course that has never been done before! So, to that extent, we can't point to any success in terms of implementation. But in terms of the political support process, like I said, a very small number of people in the UK managed to get 200 candidates to sign up of which 24 are now sitting Members of Parliament. We also have some pledged Members of the European parliament and MPs from one or two countries around the world who support the campaign. In addition, we have one or two small political parties who have made Simpol a part of their official party policy. We've got supporters, individual citizen supporters, in about 70, over 70, countries around the world.

So it’s very early days, but its growing. We've launched a campaign recently in Germany, another one in Austria and we're hoping to get more active campaigns going in the USA and Canada shortly.

The only other thing I should perhaps say is that the idea of simultaneous action is actually as old as the hills. Because if you think of any governance community, whether it was tribe, a Middle Age small-state or a nation-state, every law that was decided was implemented “globally”, in the sense of applying to the entire community concerned, and simultaneously because it comes into force on a certain date. So, you know, if the U.S. Congress and Senate pass a new law or an amendment to a law, it comes into force on a certain date and it applies to all states in the Union. So it’s “global” and simultaneous. If you want to ban smoking in your house, you make it apply globally, that is, to every room in the house and to every person who comes in or out of the house, and you apply it simultaneously because it applies on that date onwards. You wouldn’t apply it to one room today and to another tomorrow because otherwise, you'd still get a smoky house. So the whole idea of simultaneous policy implementation is actually nothing new and there are references in biology and in other disciplines and walks of life which attest to that.

What is the business model for sustaining Simpol?

The business model at the moment is that we are operating hand to mouth right now. But when consciousness rises sufficiently, I think there will be some very big people with some very deep pockets who will see that this is something worth supporting. So I'm hoping that we'll get some major funding soon. But right now, we don't have any. But in some ways, to actually communicate a project like Simpol, we have the internet, we have videos, we have various tools and they don't necessarily cost a great deal of money. But ultimately, to really push the campaign strongly and globally, we will need serious funding. But as of today, that isn't yet available." (http://www.internationalpeaceandconflict.org/forum/topics/pcdn-interview-with-john-bunzl-founder-international-simultaneous)

On Global Governance

"Can you explain what you mean by conceptualizing problems nation-centrically?

Yes, let me give you an example. Let’s take the problem of horrendously excessive bankers’ bonuses. Most people, when they’re confronted by this get very angry. They get angry with greedy bankers and they get angry with their government for not regulating the banks, or for not taxing them. But that's because they’re seeing the problem nation-centrically. They think our government needs to act and believe our government has the power to act.

But when you move up to a world-centric level of conceptual thinking you realize that banks operate in the competitive global market where they are more or less forced to pay these top bonuses. Because if they didn't, they’d only lose their top people to other banks. So with world-centric thinking you not only see this, but also that individual governments can't regulate because any government that moves first to do so, would only lose their banking business to some other country.

Now, I'm not suggesting individual governments can’t do anything at all, don't get me wrong. What I'm suggesting is that only global cooperation amongst all, or virtually all, governments can really solve the problem. Generally speaking, most people today still believe too much that their government has the power to solve these kind of problems. But in a globalized world, the fact is they don't. But because people still think they do, they get very angry when their government fails to act. They just think their government is negligent or corrupt. But the real fact is that, because of the vicious circle they’re stuck in, governments in a globalized world only have about 20% of the power they would really need. The other 80% can only be achieved, in my view, by some form of global governance or simultaneous action. So when we move to world-centric thinking, we realize that only global governance can solve today’s global problems.

What is world centric thinking? (I know you've kind of touched on this)

World-centric thinking would really be a recognition that not just governments but corporations and banks are locked in this vicious circle. That’s because if corporations and banks don’t keep their stock prices up, they’ll lose out to their competitors. Meantime, as we saw, governments are locked in the vicious circle of not being able to regulate because of the fear of competitive disadvantage. So when you think world-centrically, you realize that actually this isn't about blaming and shaming corporations or governments. Of course that’s not to say there aren't some evil ones out there, but in the broad scheme of things, you start to realize that what we really need is global governance; that if you have a global economy, you have to have some form of binding global governance-we will never solve anything without it.

Take a look, for example, at the European Union and the Euro crisis. There you see that even the mighty EU is not big enough, is not global enough to withstand the power of global bond markets. Global bond markets, because they are global, and because Europe is only European, can run rings around Europe without any problem and will reduce one European economy after another to economic basket cases.

So, our thinking needs to catch up to this world-centric level where we deeply “get” that actually global governance is not some scary kind of ‘black helicopter’ idea of us being dominated by a monolithic government bureaucracy, but rather, that it’s a question of cooperation; of reaching a global agreement which releases us from the chains that global problems are now increasingly tightening around us. The Euro crisis is a perfect example of why only global cooperation will do. So it’s our thinking that really needs to change and move up to a world-centric, systemic level.

Can you talk about what it would mean to have a global economy?

Well we already have one. That means capital and corporations now move globally and relatively freely and can basically set-up where they want and can move resources and capital from one part of the world to another at the click of a computer mouse. So to my mind, we already have a global economy. What we don't have is the governance structure to hold it and regulate it. It’s like having the Olympic Games but without any rules or enforcement. You’d end up with a chaotic free for all. It’s actually not difficult to understand. Maybe I'm oversimplifying it, but that's how it seems to me.

What is the difference between government and governance?

I'm glad you asked that. When I talk about government, I mean a full, centralized government with all its attendant bureaucracy, as we would understand it in the U.S. or in Western Europe. This, then, is the Western conception of government and of course that is exactly the problem. Because, when people talk about global governance, what do we do? We take our mental model of national government and blow it up to the global level. So we think global governance will necessarily be the same as national government.

But to me, global governance is something quite different. What it means is that you can have the global regulations, agreements and enforcement that you need, but you don't have to have a centralized government in order to achieve it, and it doesn’t have to be top-down. And that's where the Simultaneous Policy potentially comes in.

The Simultaneous Policy (or Simpol for short) offers us a way for global governance to come from the bottom up. With Simpol, citizens not only use their votes to drive their politicians towards global cooperation, they also use the internet and various policy development tools to actually agree the policies themselves. I will explain later exactly how Simpol works but the point is that you don't have to have a centralized global government to achieve global governance. You can in principle achieve the necessary global coverage of regulations without some kind of monolithic, centralized global bureaucracy, which I think most people, including me, wouldn’t want to see.

I totally understand a lot people in the States, who are quite libertarian minded, some perhaps overly so, who have an instinct for freedom and for no more constraint or government than is absolutely necessary, and I would agree with them. But you don't need a centralized government at the global level. What you need is the regulation, negotiated compensations and agreement which make it in everybody's interest to cooperate.

What would global governance look like?

Well, first let me say that the way the world is trying to solve its problems now is a joke, because today’s international treaties only deal with one issue at a time, like carbon emissions. But the problem is that every single issue has winners and losers, right? So if you have just one issue on its own, like carbon emisions, you're never going to get cooperation because the big losers are never going to cooperate. That’s why the U.S. and China don’t.

But, if you took two complementary issues together, things could be very different. For argument’s sake, say we took a currency transactions (Tobin) tax and negotiated that alongside a carbon emissions agreement, you would then have billions of dollars raised from the tax to pay off the big losers on the carbon emissions part of the agreement. That's a pretty crude example, of course, but all I'm just suggesting is that, until we start mixing two or more complementary issues together that build opportunities for trade-offs, we will never, ever, solve anything. But mix two or more issues together, and you start to see that, actually, we can make meaningful agreements that are in everybody's interest. This, to my mind, is what global governance should start to look like.

To envision it, all we need to ask is: Why do we cooperate? We cooperate because it’s in our interest. So we need to think about how we make global cooperation in everyone’s interests. You know, most people think cooperation is about self-sacrifice, But, cooperation is actually about self-interest. But it’s question of how you organize it and manage it in such a way that it actually happens. And again, that's the kind of framework that Simpol offers the world.

...

How can be the advantages of cooperation between states be better promoted?

Well, this is a great question. The trouble, I think, is that governments are so pre-occupied and embedded in the whole mindset of how to keep their national economy competitive—they're so stuck in the competitive mindset—that they can't even think of cooperation. They can't even think about what we could do if we all cooperated together; if we implemented these things simultaneously; if we combined complementary issues together. Sadly, they can't even think about that. And that's why we need a bottom-up, civil society movement, to actually help our politicians to understand what cooperation is about and how they can actually achieve it. But I don't think politicians are going to do this by themselves and that's why it’s so important that we citizens use a tool like Simpol to get the penny to drop.

What is your opinion about consumerism and in particular, what do you think about the power of each citizen to stop buying goods whose production implies pollution, exploitation (of man's labour, natural resources of poorer countries and conflict or instability maintenance, etc) or any other form of oppression of life, as a tool for change from the bottom. Isn't this a good way to start thinking out of the box and seeing where the real power is?

I think ideas like ethical consumerism or fair trade are valid, but the problem is that, in our globalized world, the power of the individual consumer tends to be very diffuse. You can get consumers to act quite effectively on very immediate “lightening rod” issues. For example, some decades ago, there was the Brent Spar oil platform, which I think Shell wanted to dump into the middle of the Atlantic or something—I can't quite remember what the whole scenario was. But it was a huge “lightening rod” issue and consumers, by the thousands, stopped buying Shell petrol and that forced the company into changing its policy.

Now, that kind of action works when you've got a very focused, concentrated, immediate issue that galvanizes thousands and thousands of people. But the fact is, that 99% of our problems in the world don't revolve around an oil platform or some “lightening rod” issue and therefore, to get enough consumers to make enough difference at the same time to make all companies adopt sustainable behavior, is almost impossible. That's why, ultimately, we have to do this through politics, because the question is not how to make some trade fair, it is how do we make all trade fair. How do we solve this problem properly, not just piecemeal. To my mind, ethical consumerism is great and of course it should be supported, but it’s not really a substitute for the kind of global governance solution I've been talking about." (http://www.internationalpeaceandconflict.org/forum/topics/pcdn-interview-with-john-bunzl-founder-international-simultaneous)

Key Books to Read

• The Simultaneous Policy: an Insider's Guide to Saving Humanity and the Planet by John Bunzl.

• Global Domestic Politics – A Citizen’s Guide to Running a Diverse Planet. By John Bunzl.

Amazon

• People-Centred Global Governance - Making it Happen!, by John Bunzl. [1] ; download

More information

• International Simultaneous Policies for global equanimous development ; Video: https://youtu.be/gWW5LPBmwdo