A Happier Wessex

What colour is Wessex Regionalism? Our campaign colours are yellow and green, reflecting our core concerns with personal/communal liberty and the ecological challenge, as well as our agrarian roots, the downs and the vales, the chalk and the cheese. Blue and red could have been equally appropriate, given our commitment both to heritage and traditional identity within Wessex and to a co-operative economy and world-class public services, democratically run.

It’s a fact that none of the major parties can offer that comprehensive combination. None shares our vision of a region at ease with itself and at peace with the world.

Libertarians let us down by extending personal liberty so far into the economic sphere that any sense of common humanity is lost. The green movement won’t lose what has been termed ‘the mad taboo’ on population growth, rendering itself irrelevant as it re-arranges the deckchairs on that infamous ship. The Conservatives are now deeply divided, one wing living up to the name, the other, metropolitan and globalist, seeing no point in conserving anything. Labour, infested by New Left hippies and Fabian control freaks, is “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, hungry for power but at a loss to remember what moral purpose inspired it to seek public support in the first place.

Looking around us, we can see also the various Celtic nationalist parties, with whom we share large areas of common ground in detailed policy terms. Small is, usually, beautiful, and the nationalists start with the great advantage of inhabiting territories that are both small and officially recognised. Wessex is small too, compared to England as a whole, but official recognition is some way off. Once that happens, the momentum will be unstoppable because it is only through regionalism that we can become the happier society we know to be possible, a society incompatible with our present, centralised, Disunited Kingdom. No wonder recognition has been so rigorously resisted by dyed-in-the-wool killjoys who believe they have something to lose.