Molly Scott Cato: Difference between revisions

Molly Scott Cato MEP
Scott Cato questioning Jean-Claude Juncker at an open hearing hosted by the Green-EFA group on 9 July 2014
Member of the European Parliament for South West England
Incumbent
Assumed office 1 July 2014
Personal details
Born	(1963-05-21) 21 May 1963 (age 61)[1]
Nationality	British
Political party	Green Party of England and Wales
Domestic partner	Chris Busby (approx 1992–2004)
Children	Three
Residences	St Andrews, Bristol (from 2017)[2] Stroud (until 2017)
Alma mater	University of Oxford (BA/MA) Open University (MSc) Aberystwyth University (PhD)
Profession	Green economist, green politician

Sarah Margaret "Molly" Scott Cato (born 21 May 1963) is a British Green politician, academic, environmental and community activist, and green economist who is the current Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the South West England^[a] electoral region for the Green Party. She was elected in May 2014, and is the first Green Party MEP to represent the region. From 2012, until her election as an MEP, she was Professor of Strategy and Sustainability at the University of Roehampton.^[b] Scott Cato speaks for the Green Party on finance issues,^[4] and is known for her work in the field of co-operative studies.^[5] She has published on green economics, localism and anti-capitalism, and has contributed to works on the risks of nuclear power, the use of which she strongly opposes.^[6]

Scott Cato grew up in Bath, attending Bath High School for Girls,^[7] before reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Oxford, where her stated areas of interest included "the politics of Latin America and international politics".^{[citation needed]} After working in the publishing industry, in 2001^[8] she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (now Aberystwyth University) with a thesis on employment policy in the South Wales Valleys,^[4] including research into the Tower Colliery workers' co-operative.^[9] Her book, The Pit and the Pendulum, is based on this research. She holds an MSc in advanced social research methods from the Open University.^[10]

After working for the Oxford University Press from 1987 to 1998, Scott Cato tutored at Aberystwyth University in 2000, then, from 2001 to 2012, was Senior lecturer and Reader in green economics at Cardiff Metropolitan University (known for most of that period as the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, or UWIC for short). In 2007 she was appointed Director of the Cardiff Institute for Co-operative Studies.^[9] In 2012 she became Professor of Strategy and Sustainability at the University of Roehampton.^[11]

Scott Cato's academic work covers three main areas: firstly the green economy, that is, one which recognises planetary limits and achieves social justice; secondly the economics of co-operatives and social enterprises, and finally critical analysis of the existing monetary system, and alternatives which might replace it.^[5]

She has published widely on green economics, localism and anti-capitalism. She wrote Seven Myths About Work in 1996, updating it in 2002 under the title Arbeit Macht Frei and Other Lies about Work. She co-edited Green Economics: Beyond Supply and Demand to Meeting People's Needs in 1999 with Miriam Kennet. Her report, co-authored with Christopher Busby and Richard Bramhall, on the structure of government specialist science advice committees, I Don't Know Much About Science, apparently "influenced the structure of the government's new committee examining the effects of low-level radiation".^{[citation needed]}

In 2009 she published Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice, where she argues that society should be embedded within the ecosystem, and that markets and economies are social structures that should respond to social and environmental priorities. She includes examples of effective green policies that are already being implemented across the world policy prescriptions for issues including climate change, localization, citizens' income, economic measurement, ecotaxes and trade. In his review of the book in the Journal of Economic Geography Danny Dorling called it "a serious book written by the grown-up version of the kinds of people who are currently invading airports, chaining themselves to those coal trucks on the way to power stations and populating climate camps".^[12]

Her 2011 book Environment and Economy describes the main academic responses to the need to resolve the tension between economy and environment: environmental economics, ecological economics, green economics, and anti-capitalist economics. It covers topics including an introduction to economic instruments such as taxes and regulation; pollution and resource depletion; growth; globalization vs. localization and climate change.

Scott Cato joined the UK Green Party in 1988,^[10] before it became three separate parties for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland in 1990. She has been Co-Chair of the Green Party Regional Council and served on the Green Party Executive as Campaigns Co-ordinator.^[10] She wrote Seven Myths About Work as part of a Green Party campaign, Why Work?.^[13] She speaks for the Green Party on finance issues.^[4]

Scott Cato stood as the Green Party candidate for the remote Preseli Pembrokeshire constituency at the 1997 and 2005 general elections, resulting in sixth-placed results.^[14] For 2017, Scott Cato was selected by the party to stand for the constituency which saw its greatest-swing result in 2015, Bristol West, where the party finished second-placed in 2015, a seat with a high student and academic contingent to its electorate.^[15] She has been endorsed by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.^[16] She finished in third place in the 2017 election, with the Green share of the vote dropping from 26.8% to 12.9%.

In May 2011, Scott Cato was elected to represent Valley Ward on Stroud District Council.^[17] In May 2012, she became leader of the Green Group on the council and made an agreement with the Labour and Liberal Democrat groups to take overall control of the council, calling for "constructive co-operation" and rejecting the "tribalism of party politics" in favour of a "more inclusive" approach. She said, "We believe that no one party has a monopoly on good ideas and we will seek co-operation to achieve advances of our policy platform on an issue-by-issue basis."^[18] She became chairman of the council's Audit and Standards Committee in May 2013.^[17] At the council's AGM in June 2014, Scott Cato announced her resignation, to take effect from 1 July, the start of her mandate in the European Parliament.^[19]

In the May 2014 elections for the European Parliament, she was elected as an MEP in South West England for the Green Party, being the lead candidate on the party's list.^[20] The Green Party's share of the vote in her region was, at 11.1%, the highest of any electoral region.^[21] She had stood for the European Parliament on the Green Party list for the South West region at the previous election in 2009; in 1999 and 2004^[22] she had been on the Green Party list in Wales.^[10] She stated, after her election, that her priorities as an MEP would be finance and farming: "I'm from the South West – it's vital to our region, and I hope to get farming working in a more socially and environmentally friendly way".^[23]

On 1 July 2014, the start of her mandate, she was appointed a full member of the Parliament's Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs and a substitute member of the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development.^[1] In her first speech, also on 1 July, she expressed her opposition to the UK government's attempt to take away from her region control of £450 million EU convergence funding, saying: "Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly have a long history of using these funds efficiently and effectively".^[24]

In addition to her work on Stroud District Council, Molly Scott Cato has, since 2007, been a director of Stroud Common Wealth,^[25] a not-for-profit private company, limited by guarantee, which owns and develops property "for community benefit and to enable social enterprise development."^[26] She is a director^[27] of Transition Stroud, which aims to strengthen the community's local economy, to reduce dependence on fossil fuel and to prepare for climate change.^[28] Transition Stroud is part of the Transition Towns network.^[29] Shortly after she moved to Stroud in 2006, she joined Stroud Community Agriculture (SCA), and was elected to its "core group" of members.^[30][31] SCA is a community-supported agriculture project, organised as a co-operative, which provides locally produced organic food for its members.^[32]

She is one of the founders of the Stroud pound.

Molly Scott Cato was a member of the Management Committee of the Association for Heterodox Economics from 2010 to 2014^[33] and is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Co-operative Studies, published by the UK Society for Co-operative Studies.^[34] She formerly served as a member of the Advisory Group of the Equality Trust.^{[citation needed]} She was, from November 2010 to September 2013, a director and trustee of Meadow Prospect,^[35] the charitable branch of RCT Homes, a large social housing provider based in Rhondda Cynon Taf (RCT), and itself an Industrial and provident society with charitable rules.^[36] She is a Distinguished Fellow of the Schumacher Institute.^[37]

Together with Patrick Adams and her then partner, Christopher Busby, she founded Green Audit, an environmental consultancy and publishing organisation, in 1992, but later left the organisation, which continues to be run under Busby's direction.^[38][39]

Scott Cato supports the EU boycott of goods from illegal Israeli settlements beyond the Green Line, thinks that this boycott should be widened, and supports measures to ensure that the illegal settlements should be excluded from EU relations with Israel. Her sympathy for the Palestinians dates back to time spent teaching in the West Bank when she was a student.^[40]

Scott Cato is a Quaker.^[23] She has three children.^[27]

• List of members of the European Parliament for the United Kingdom, 2014–19
• Energiewende in Germany

by Molly Scott Cato

• Scott Cato, Molly (2014), Can't Pay? Won't Pay! Debt, the Myth of Austerity, and the Failure of Green Investment (PDF), Weymouth: Green House, ISBN 978-0-9573738-6-0, archived from the original (pdf) on 22 February 2015, retrieved 23 June 2014 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
• ——————— (2013). The Bioregional Economy: Land, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-50082-1. Retrieved 1 July 2014. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• ——————— (2013a), The Paradox of Green Keynesianism (PDF), Weymouth: Green House, ISBN 978-0-9573738-5-3, archived from the original (pdf) on 24 February 2015, retrieved 23 June 2014 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
• ——————— (2012), Local Liquidity: From Ineffective Demand to Community Currencies (pdf), Weymouth: Green House, ISBN 978-0-9573738-0-8, retrieved 23 June 2014^{[permanent dead link]}
• ——————— (2011). Environment and Economy. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-47741-3. Retrieved 1 July 2014. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• ——————— (2007). "Green and Pleasant Land: Building Strong and Sustainable Local Economies in Wales". Contemporary Wales. 19. University of Wales Press. ISBN 978-0951493724. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• ——————— (2009). Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice. Earthscan. ISBN 1844075710. Retrieved 1 July 2014. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• ——————— (2006). Market, Schmarket: Building the Post-Capitalist Economy. New Clarion Press. ISBN 978-1-873797-51-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• ——————— (2004). The Pit and the Pendulum: A Co-operative Future for Work in the South Wales Valleys. University of Wales Press. ISBN 978-0-7083-1869-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• ——————— (2002). Arbeit Macht Frei and Other Lies about Work (PDF). Aberystwyth: Green Audit. ISBN 1-897761-23-6. Retrieved 1 July 2014. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• ——————— (1996). Seven Myths About Work. Aberystwyth: Green Audit. ISBN 978-1-897761-13-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

with other authors

• Scott Cato, Molly; Heatley, Brian (2012), Free universities! Re-configuring the Finance and Governance Models of the UK Higher Education Sector (PDF), Weymouth: Green House, ISBN 978-0-9569545-5-8, archived from the original (pdf) on 31 October 2013, retrieved 23 June 2014 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
• Scott Cato, Molly; Heatley, Brian (2011), Mutual Security in a Sustainable Economy A Green Approach to Welfare (PDF), Weymouth: Green House, ISBN 978-0-9569545-2-7, archived from the original (pdf) on 12 September 2012, retrieved 23 June 2014 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
• Busby, Chris; Bertell, Rosalie; Schmitz-Feuerhake, Inge; Yablokov, Alexey; Scott Cato, Molly (2010). ECRR 2010 Recommendations of the European Committee on Radiation Risk. Aberystwyth: Green Audit on behalf of ECRR. ISBN 978-1897761168. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help) online at archive.org
• Scott Cato, Molly; Busby, Christopher; Bramhall, Richard (2002), I Don't Know Much About Science Political Decision-Making Involving Science and Technology, Aberystwyth: Green Audit, retrieved 19 June 2014
• Scott Cato, Molly; Kennet, Miriam, eds. (1999). Green Economics: Beyond Supply and Demand to Meeting People's Needs. Aberystwyth: Green Audit. ISBN 1-897761-18-X. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Papers and articles

• List of scholarly papers at SSRN
• List of recent articles

• Scott Cato, Molly (n.d.), Sen and the Art of Market-Cycle Maintenance (pdf)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Molly Scott Cato.

• Official website
• Profile at the European Parliament site
• molly4bristol.org
• "Gaian Economics" blog
• "Green Economist" personal website
• Academic profile at academia.edu
• Stroud green party blog