James Gibb Stuart Convener of the Bromsgrove Group

James, please tell us a bit about yourself.

I was a Territorial Army soldier when war broke out, and spent 1940 defending the beaches against the invasion which never came. By 1941 I had transferred to the Royal Air Force, and became an air navigator on Halifaxes, finishing my service career in India and China. Civil life took me back to the family business, and by 1962 I had moved into industry, servicing the new electronics complex which was building up through IBM in Greenock's Spango Valley. I started writing in 1978, bought out the old William MacLellan publishing business in the 1980's, and subsequently formed a new company Ossian Publishers Ltd., to focus on the money problem.

What sparked your interest in money reform?

In the early 1960's I was acquainted with Angus Graham, 7th Duke of Montrose, who was the then Rhodesian Minister of Defence 1965-66. Lord Graham was a convinced advocate of Government-created money, and as a member of the London-based Economic Research Council, had commissioned the money reformer Edward Holloway to do a survey for the Rhodesian Government in 1962, which had recommended financial independence. Holloway's recommendations had rubbed off on the Duke, and subsequently on me. There was a great flowering of ideas at that time. The international financial system had already begun its campaign to control Third World resources, and cared little about who suffered in the process.

You're well known in money reform circles for The Money Bomb, one of the first major popular treatments of money reform since the 1930s. What inspired you to write it?

By 1981 Edward Holloway had produced his landmark Government Debt and Credit Creation, I had studied its mass of research and statistics upon the role of the Bank of England in our financial affairs, and the need for a systemic reform was obvious. I had meanwhile joined the Scottish Monetary Reform Society, composed of Douglas Social Crediters, and access to their files and their thinking helped me put The Money Bomb together.

What was the public response to The Money Bomb?

The public at large saw very little of it, because the book trade and the media went out of their way to give it zero publicity. When it was first published in March 1983, a journalist of the London Evening Standard was disciplined for getting it on to the front page of an afternoon edition, a bookseller in the Barbican was threatened with loss of profitable franchises if he put it on window display, and a major bookshop in Glasgow, who had placed an initial stock order, subsequently wrote and asked me not to advertise the fact that they were carrying it. However, a small group of Tories under Margaret Thatcher did take it up as a means of stabilising the National Debt by using government-created money to fund the annual interest. Siren voices intervened, however, and she went instead for privatisation of our national assets -- selling off the family silver". Sixteen years further on, we've still got the debt; now about £250 billion, much as I had forecast; but they dumped her. I venture to think that had she been able to follow through on The Money Bomb recommendations, such could have been the benefits in terms of reduced taxation and social welfare improvements that she might still be PM!

What other books have you written?

On money, for the greens, Economics of the Green Renaissance. For the geo-politicists, Hidden Menace to World Peace, which explains why we can never have a peaceful association of free peoples till the abuses in the financial system have been eradicated. For those who want a primer on money reform, Holocaust Island, is a study of the introduction of money to a completely new society. We dramatised this as a 60-minute video called Survival Island.

Are you working on any new material?

Yes -- Fantopia**, to be published early this year, is an allegorical study of the social consequences when Government loses control of all new money coming into existence. It's a situation we face in Britain today.

How does the money reform scene compare now with when you first became involved in it? Have we moved on?

Largely through the spread of Internet facilities, there is a growing awareness of the financial chaos, greed and skulduggery which make millions mourn. We now have a broadcast medium blissfully free of the censorship which effectively cocooned The Money Bomb.

You are the Convener for the Bromsgrove Group. Where did the idea for Bromsgrove come from?

Bromsgrove takes its name from the locality in which the Group meets. Its inspiration came originally from Barbara Panvel, of Birmingham and Mumbai, India, who convened the first conference single-handed. She brought together a broad spectrum of social, religious and environmental opinion which quickly realised that money reform is an essential pre-requisite of reforms and improvements elsewhere.

What is the most important money reform point to get across to the public?

That the State, through some properly constituted State Authority, must revive the power of money-creation on behalf of the People, who presently suffer much in stress and taxation through what is otherwise a private monopoly.

What advice would you give to those attempting to convince others about money reform?

That they themselves thoroughly understand the principles upon which reform must be instituted, and observe the virtues of gradualness in the measures which are proposed. There is no advantage in advocating a total upheaval of the banking system, which works well for those it is intended to serve. Let us merely see that it is made to serve the People, with money as our servant and not our master.

Are you optimistic for the future?

I see a coming together of brains and energies and experience, which must one day force itself into the public arena. To quote an 18th century Romantic poet, "The world should listen then, as I am listening now."

** Fantopia, now available, appears in our "reviews" section.