Why Credit’s Due: Reclaiming Pride in Boro

By Rob Hawkes and Robyn Ollett

The summer of 2025, like the summer of 2024 before it, has been one of heightened tensions surrounding the issues of race and immigration in the UK. This year, Union Flags and St George’s Crosses have adorned innumerable lamp posts, motorway bridges, roundabouts, and zebra crossings – ostensibly as expressions of national “pride” – following a series of anti-immigration protests outside the Bell Hotel in Epping, which had been housing asylum seekers. In late July and early August 2024, racist riots erupted in towns and cities in England and Northern Ireland, including in Middlesbrough (where we both work at Teesside University). The false narratives fuelling this combination of nationalistic fervour and xenophobic violence are that “illegal” immigrants to the UK are luxuriously treated at the expense of the “indigenous” population and that there is only ever an either/or choice between caring for “our own people” and providing basic support to those fleeing war, persecution, and/or starvation overseas. Underpinning these divisive myths is a pervasive logic of scarcity: there is not enough to go round.

This, inevitably, is also a logic of exclusion. If there is not enough for everyone, the only option is to leave some of us out. This, in turn, always means harming those who are already marginalised and perpetuating cycles of violence and disempowerment. Refugees and asylum seekers, disabled people, people of colour, LGBTQIA+ people, unemployed people and other benefits claimants all regularly face accusations of being a burden on or a threat to British society, or of failing to show sufficient gratitude or respect towards the supposed values and standards of the nation, or all of the above. Time and again, we are told that the costs of supporting the vulnerable must be met by “the taxpayer” (and note that “the taxpayer” is never themselves imagined to be among the vulnerable). Thus, the logic of scarcity and exclusion rests on a pernicious and demonstrably false understanding of the UK’s money system. Meanwhile, misleading messages abound in the racist narratives that spread across social media, whipping up violence in our streets.  

In Middlesbrough, on October 18, 2025, we are hosting a free public screening of Maren Poitras’s documentary Finding the Money, which tells a very different story about money and taxation. This is the first in a series of events as part of Where Credit’s Due: Making Money for Ecosocial Justice, a project supported by Teesside University’s AHRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) and developed in dialogue with Boro Doughnut, Curious Arts, the Dorman Museum, and Money on the Left.

Debunking the famous lie “There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money,” Finding the Money demonstrates that the truth is the complete opposite. Following a group of economists who reject the conventional understanding of money, the documentary sets out the key ideas of the Modern Monetary Theory (or MMT) perspective. In the UK, as in the USA, taxes (and therefore “the taxpayer”) do not pay for public services. Currency-issuing governments create money whenever they spend. As counterintuitive as this may sound when we’re so used to thinking of governments as budgeting just like households, there is such a thing as public money and public money belongs to everyone. Moreover, all money is credit, and credit is due to more people and more places than the present logic of scarcity and exclusion will ever allow. 

We care passionately about our town and the people who make up our communities, so we are dedicated to taking action and helping people understand that, despite what politicians and journalists might tell us, there is enough to go around. As Kate Raworth affirms in Doughnut Economics (2017) “the design of money – how it is created, the character it is given, and how it is to be used” has major implications for the way we live our collective lives. What we need now is the political will to imagine and design alternatives to the current orthodox monetary system, which is based on and encourages these false narratives and zero-sum trade offs.

Our project seeks to build an intersectional network of like-minded people by gathering existing groups and rallying others to the cause of imagining and striving for new ways of designing, issuing, and sustaining the credit that our communities desperately need and deserve. Raworth’s book has inspired a global movement for ecosocial justice through the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL). The ideas are fairly simple: we indeed can meet everyone’s needs within our planetary boundaries if we reconfigure our perspective on infinite growth and design systems that work towards the goal of not just surviving but thriving within our ecological limits. Doughnut Economics, like MMT, fundamentally challenges the false choice created by the economic orthodoxy between prosperity and social inclusion. 

Recognising that Middlesbrough is a place where current credit flows regularly ignore or actively exclude those communities which are often the biggest contributors to local cultural and economic life – LGBTQIA+ groups, NGOs supporting refugee communities, and those supporting green initiatives – and we would like to explore what it would look like if public credit creation specifically sought to support spaces and initiatives that foster inclusion rather than division. We’ve seen riots scapegoating people suspected to have arrived on our shores by small boats. We’ve seen muslim friends and neighbours have their houses and businesses vandalised. We’ve seen children, families, and individuals scared to leave their homes or places of work or study. Then, in the aftermath of the riots, we’ve seen the people of Middlesbrough represented as “thugs” or as “half wits” too stupid to recognise the “idiocy” of smashing up their own town: division only sows more division. Queer communities, on the other hand, have long shown that pride is a celebration of inclusion, not the opposite. Meanwhile, as we affirm at Money on the Left and as the MMT framework helps us to recognise, money has never been as straight or as exclusionary as conventional wisdom would have us believe.

It is essential that we think about the ways in which we credit and represent our community and our town, as the stories we tell about our communities and the people that build them are intimately bound up with the way we account for them in monetary terms. If we allow racist, ableist, and classist narratives to shout the loudest, that has a direct impact on the self-worth of everyone in our community. It might, therefore, be helpful to unpack the ways in which the people of Middlesbrough have been represented to better understand the interconnectedness of aspersions visited upon those who live here, those who participated in last summer’s riots, and those who continue campaigns which feign nationalist pride while intimidating racial others. For instance, perhaps ironically, the term “thug,” which was repeatedly used to describe rioters, has racist origins: the Oxford English Dictionary explains that a “thug” once meant “a member of a society or cult of robbers and murderers in India known for strangling their victims.” Moreover, the OED notes that the term “may be considered offensive (esp. in U.S. use when used by a white person in reference to a black person […]).” Meanwhile, words like “imbecile,” “moron,” and “idiot,” which are regularly mobilised to mock rioters and racists, were once part of a system of organised ableist violence against people classified as mentally “defective.”

Reconfiguring recognition, taking pride in our community, and reclaiming our self-worth are central to our aims for this project and this connects our local efforts to the objectives and ethos of the Global Donut Days, a four-day, community-led festival, held online and in-person around the world in the days leading up to our first event in October. We hope to start a new conversation about monetary design and its implications in and for Middlesbrough, encouraging those who attend and participate in our events to imagine the possibilities for participation and inclusion that credit creation in, by, and for the people of Boro might open up. As the Money on the Left Editorial Collective recently proclaimed, “It’s Time For Complementary Currencies,” forms of community credit which, as Raworth puts it, can help us “become full participants in nature’s cycles.” By building an intersectional network of people to explore ideas around community currency and consider where credit’s due, we join a worldwide effort to foster regenerative and inclusive economies. We hope you will join us in becoming part of this broader movement toward economic systems that recognise the full range of human identities, capacities, and contributions.