Wise Men (and Women) From The East?

January’s issue of BBC History Magazine includes an interview with Professor Linda Colley, described by Wikipedia as “a historian of Britain, empire and nationalism”.  It’s a very revealing article, to the extent that Colley articulates what are the common, unconscious prejudices of the metropolitan chattering classes – the MCCs – towards the past, present and future of these islands.  In 1999, when she held a post at the London School of Economics, Colley was one of several speakers invited by the Blairs to deliver a Millennium Lecture at 10 Downing Street.  This talk, Britishness in the 21st Century, was subsequently widely referenced by the British Council and other mouthpieces of the regime.

If we believe her latest piece, “London has been influential in lots of different ways, some of which have been benign: it does continue to pump a lot of money into the economy, for instance”.  It’s astonishing that someone as ignorant of the facts as Colley can achieve the influential position she holds.  London is habitually presented as the UK’s cornucopia, through comparing its contribution to tax revenues against a highly selective reckoning of money spent there specifically for its benefit.  Money spent there that is deemed, however questionably, to be for the benefit of the whole UK is excluded from the calculation. 

A historian of empire ought, one would think, to be more inquiring about how London’s wealth is amassed and at whose expense, since it mostly doesn’t come from growing or making things locally.  In double-entry terms, most of the money pumped into the economy is made up to correspond to an equivalent amount of misery inflicted, here or elsewhere.  The systematic eradication of the City of London would undoubtedly be the greatest advance in human freedom since the abolition of the slave trade.

While Colley refuses to be drawn on the outcome of next year’s Scottish referendum, her contribution does outline some ways in which Britishness might mount a recovery.  The three-headed hydra we shall need to slay comprises federalism, a written constitution, and a charter of UK rights.  Expect to hear all three argued to death by the MCCs over the coming years as a means of keeping real change well off the agenda.

We have explained before why federalism cannot work to turn an unequal union into an equal one.  There’s no point in labouring the numbers.  The word has a deceptively gentle ring to it, an air of fairness drawn from other contexts where federalism does work because the facts of geography are favourable to it.  It can’t make a silk purse out of the pig’s ear that the UK has always been.

How about a written constitution?  For England, it might work, as might a federal union of English regions (though better still a confederal one).  So it might too for the other nations of these islands, individually, as sovereign states.  What good could it do the UK?  To demand a written constitution in advance of sorting out the territorial power relationships is profoundly reactionary.

An unwritten constitution is fluid, allowing devolution to be expanded relatively easily as compared to getting a constitutional amendment passed.  The purpose of a written constitution – in the UK context – is to make constitutional change more difficult, especially through requiring the consent of the whole UK to any change.  So Scotland wants devo-max?  Fine, but only if the UK’s English majority agrees.  A written constitution, just like federalism, is more likely to fan the fires of separatism than leaving well alone.  It will make what could be an amicable dissolution into a bitter and even violent break-up if one part of the UK seeks to thwart the ambitions of another for self-government.  Those who advocate it have learnt nothing from Irish Home Rule save how to repeat the process in as horrible a manner as possible.

A charter of UK rights?  Yawn.  Just like a written constitution, this is a device to kick the debate into the long grass.  Who, honestly, is going to spend years sifting through all the citizens’ tweets of what they’d like included?  We can be sure that community rights to self-government won’t be allowed through.  The London regime is obsessed with individual rights and nothing else because it is local communities, united in indignation, that pose a threat to its dominance.  Individuals are no threat at all.  They can be repeatedly assured of how valued they are, even as everything they value around them is torn apart for profit.  (And, in law, private corporations, remember, are people too, with the same inhuman rights as everyone else but with bigger legal teams to enforce them.)  Eliminating every intermediate identity between the State and the individual is the essence of the still-dominant Jacobin worldview.  But there is more to the project even than that.  It isn’t just a device to avoid discussing the realities of property and power in a London-dominated island, and maybe entrench them further.  It’s also a device to avoid questioning what’s so special about the UK that it has to be the fundamental focus of that project.

The Coalition has wasted considerable resources on setting up a commission to look into a UK Bill of Rights and has received some interesting rebuffs.  One is to ask why the devolved areas can’t have their own.  Scotland has its own legal system, one very different from English common law.  Wales has its language issue.  Northern Ireland lives with sectarian nuances that may suggest different requirements from a charter that will succeed in keeping the peace there.  And if the UK is too big to be meaningful as the maker of rights, might it also be too small?  If we must have rights above the level of the basic nation, why not have rights that are European or universal?  What is it that the UK dimension adds?  What is it that we are supposed to all have in common that separates us from the rest of humanity?  What is the tradition appealed to in defining a ‘UK right’, ‘British values’, or whatever other piece of chauvinistic nonsense happens to be doing the rounds?

One such tradition could be that stodgy constitutionalism that is forever looking around for ways to make the ruling class do what is theoretically their job instead of ways to abolish them.  England, in particular, is awash with wannabe Wat Tylers waving Magna Carta and demanding the redress of grievances instead of questioning the basis of central authority itself.  Constitutional rights are the enemy of democratic choice.  In placing certain things beyond normal debate they fossilise into a dictatorship of the dead.  Though all dressed up as ‘de-politicising’ the issue, it’s actually all about de-democratising it.  Labour seem particularly keen on this as a means of retaining power even when out of power.  We don’t need ‘rights’, by definition limited.  We need freedom, bounded only by the freedom of others.  Should we respect the accumulated mess that is the constitutional status quo and further sanctify it, simply because we are assured that where we are is broadly speaking a good place to be?  Do we not know that starting from where we are assured that we are (even when we are not) is the surest way of being persuaded essentially to stay put?

Professor Colley offers no immediate answers to any of these questions.  Nor can anyone among the MCCs.  For all their accumulated qualifications, they simply cannot see that the London-based system of decision-making is not benign, never has been and cannot be made to be.  Their belief in the self-evident goodness of the UK, of the micro-management of Wessex towns and villages from London, is so entrenched that they will do everything in their power to suffocate any other way of debating the issues.  Instead, we must discuss how to make everyone British again, deferential to London, respectful of the wisdom and thankful for the gifts coming to Wessex from the mighty east.  Sorry to spoil your dinner party, chaps and chapettes, but that record is well and truly broken.

Tarzan’s Monkey Cage

Localism.  What does it mean?  It seems to mean that local communities can decide whatever they like but if they ever make the wrong decision, as judged from London, they will be severely punished for doing so.  And will know that they jolly well deserve it too.

Who’s a naughty community then?  George Osborne announced yesterday – see 2.209 in the Autumn Statement – some changes to the New Homes Bonus.  That’s the bribe, paid by London, paid for out of all our taxes, paid to local councils for the number of new homes built each year in their area.  Until now, the bribe has been paid even where the homes are approved not by the council but on appeal by the London regime.  How was that loophole missed?  Never mind, now the bribe will not be paid where the London regime itself gave the permission, in the teeth of local opposition.  It will keep the money (which ultimately, remember, is our money).

The community, who may have spent thousands fighting the appeal to save some treasured local environment, will now gain no financial benefit from the houses imposed upon them.  On the contrary, they will have to pay all the more from their own resources for the extra services required to meet needs generated by the new development.  Councillors will have to think twice, then twice again, before turning down proposals, even where the case for refusal is strong, because appeal decisions are entirely unpredictable.  Everything hinges on how the Planning Inspector handling the appeal is feeling.

In Margaret Thatcher’s first Cabinet, the post of Environment Secretary was held by Michael Heseltine, nicknamed ‘Tarzan’ on account of his trademark mane of blond hair.  Today aged 80, Lord Heseltine is still making waves.

In a series of speeches to local leaders this year he has argued that “We must not wait for ‘what London wants us to do’… we need a peasants' revolt and we need local people to argue their case and fight the dominance of London…  If you want your power back you are in a battle and you don’t win battles by cosying up to the enemy”, warning that there is a “war going on in government about this whole localism agenda”:

“There's an inevitable battle going on in Whitehall.  There are those trying to protect their own interests.  So frankly, you'd better start protecting yours.  Lobby your MPs, and use the local and national media to drive your campaign.  This is not about giving in gently, which local communities have done for far too long.  You have to go out there and fight for it.”

Whenever Heseltine speaks or writes, there’s always a very firm agenda, evident or hidden.  Elected mayors.  City regions.  HS2.  It could be anything, and it isn’t always an agenda we’d endorse.  But it’s not impossible that Heseltine is sincere in believing that many more decisions could be made locally and regionally instead of centrally.  He may not entirely have lost touch with the idea that such decisions should be democratic ones, though that is not something he appears willing to champion.  As an ex-minister, he certainly knows what he’s dealing with in taking on the centre:

“If you let those monkeys loose they will cock it up – that’s what they [the Government] think.”

Less than a century ago, women were denied representation in Parliament.  It was argued that their brains weren’t up to handling complex political issues.  In other parts of the world, a franchise restricted by skin colour was the norm until even more recently.  Today these viewpoints are considered barbarous and indefensible by most of the world.

Yet the London regime is still able to over-ride democratically expressed local opinion just because it feels like it.  Just because it deems the locals incapable of making the right decisions on what their community needs and how to go about providing it.  Just because the decisions made don’t suit the whims of maxed-out growth junkies in London.  In a hundred years from now, the question will surely be why we put up with it for so long.  Why did we tolerate civil servants coming to our towns and villages to inquire into local decisions and reverse them?  Why didn’t we just toss the blighters onto the nearest muckheap like a free folk with any lingering self-respect would have done?

Not only didn’t we do it.  We did much less than that.  We actually voted for the London parties to carry on treating us as monkeys.  We went on chattering politely to them instead of recognising them as the deadly enemy they really are.  We fondly imagined that the bars of the cage were there to protect us when all they did was deny us the freedom to shape the future of our communities for ourselves.

Distant Thunder

"We have just received a document which has been given to the world under the title of a ‘Statement of Certain Scottish Grievances’…  The two most important heads of complaint are, that a revenue of £5,764,804, raised in Scotland, is transmitted to England and disbursed for Imperial purposes, and that the representation of Scotland is unfairly small as compared with that of England…  We would venture to suggest to the consideration of our Scotch friends the following two points:–  1.  Does Scotland contribute more than her fair share of the public revenue?  2.  Is the revenue disbursed in the wisest way for the general advantage of all portions of the empire?  If this be not so, no doubt it is the duty of every member – be he Scotch, English, or Irish – to raise the question in Parliament.  So, again, with regard to Parliamentary representation – the Scotch are dissatisfied with the present arrangement.  We share their dissatisfaction.  We are of opinion that the representation on this side of the Tweed is in an unsound condition, and it is our full intention to endeavour, by constitutional means, to get the inequalities redressed.  But does this constitute a reason for threatening to resolve ourselves once more into the kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, and what not?...  A politician who recommended such a course for the adoption of a minority would be justly deemed a fit subject for Bedlam; and yet, here we find a number of our Scotch friends – who are old enough to know better – affixing their signatures to a parcel of trash about Bannockburn and sticks of sulphur of which a schoolboy in his calmer moments might feel ashamed."

It’s an editorial from The Times (a London newspaper).  It could have been written yesterday.  Or even tomorrow.  It’s actually from the issue dated 7th July 1853.

Here’s another item from that newspaper, this time reporting a Commons debate on Irish Home Rule, held on 2nd July 1874.  J.A. Roebuck was first elected to Parliament for Bath, in 1832, when he was among the most radical of the radicals, even leading the campaign in 1834 to free the Tolpuddle Martyrs.  By 1874, now representing Sheffield, he was among the most reactionary of the reactionaries:

“Mr Roebuck said he wanted before he left the House to express his opinions upon this great question…  He had to ask himself whether this proposition to give a limited Parliament to Ireland was for the benefit of the whole United Kingdom.  The arguments that had been used in support of this motion were arguments which, if carried to their natural and logical conclusion, would call back the kingdom of Wessex and re-establish the Heptarchy.  That was the real effect of the arguments of hon. gentlemen who had talked about Nationality... he called upon hon. gentlemen who represented Ireland to desist from talking about a fantastic Irish Nationality and calmly to consider this question in the large and generous spirit in which he wished to address himself to it.”

The point common to Roebuck and the editor of The Times is that constitutional change produces a domino effect.  Before you start, it helps to know where you’ll end up.  The Irish Home Rule debates inspired the first faint movements for Home Rule in Scotland and Wales.  It was the breakthroughs by Scottish and Welsh nationalists in the 1960s and 1970s that inspired our own founding.  Suppose England does become an independent state, shorn of its Celtic dependencies.  What sort of England should it be?  A mini-UK, continually sucking power, wealth and talent to London?  Or an England with strong regional institutions to hold that trend in check?

The frequent response from those in England is that events among our neighbours have no effect upon us.  It’s all put down to being part of the English character, which it is, but only in the sense that the English seem to have given up on politics in the belief that in our top-down society we have no ability to change anything.  (We don’t, which is why we need to build our own.)  A history of our future might reveal that our surroundings mattered quite a lot.  Joining the EU has been hugely beneficial in exposing English thought to ideas previously judged unsound by the London regime, ideas like popular sovereignty and subsidiarity.  That the EU itself does little to honour these ideas is not the point; the point is that our own thoughts now have other tracks to follow than those laid down by ever-suspicious Normans and Tudors.  Devolution, or even independence, will go on surprising us too.  Without leaving our own island, we can go and see things being done differently, then come home and ask ourselves why we can’t equally be constructing a new society.

One recurrent theme in politics is the divide between the revolutionaries and the gradualists, between those who believe that nothing will change until everything changes and those who believe that concessions can be wrung, and wrung to the point where a real transformation is clearly visible.  In one sense, it’s a false distinction, since only a movement that has gradually built itself up is in a position to launch revolutionary change.  The real distinction is perhaps between those who push on to the goal and those who pause half way.  Always bearing in mind, of course, that the goal itself may be changing over time as the context for your community’s life also changes.

Reading the Scottish Government’s White Paper on independence, it’s not hard to see it as a claim that, while everything is capable of changing, nothing will actually change very much.  Many more decisions will be made in Scotland, but a host of cross-border arrangements will remain in place.  Scots will still be able to watch EastEnders and Doctor Who.  Independence will deliver all of the positives that are claimed for it, while the cross-border arrangements will mitigate all of the negatives to the point that no-one will think them worth noticing.  It all sounds so reasonable that you wonder why it hasn’t happened already.

It very well might be as reasonable as it sounds, a simplification of our constitutional architecture that will benefit both sides of the border.  A long-overdue unbundling that will turn the anomaly that is Scotland within the Union into one part of a grown-up family of nations with enduring social ties.  No-one outside the far Right will argue today that the Republic of Ireland should re-join the UK.  One reason for that is not its treasured independence but the continued diluting of it where this makes sense: all those cross-border arrangements that allow life to go on without unnecessary hassle.  Some are quite unexpected: the Department for Transport in London remains partly responsible for lighthouses around the whole of Ireland, 91 years after the south left the UK.  Attempts to alter this following the Good Friday Agreement have been abandoned; the legal complexities are just too great.  Transitional arrangements for Scottish independence may be equally complex, and equally not as transitional as they first appear.

Independence then is NOT the final step if what you seek is total separation.  But why would you seek that extreme solution, if you can make your own decisions as a sovereign entity but still be on good terms with the neighbours?  It’s not just a question for the Scots.  It’s a question for us too.  It’s a question for those who say that England can’t be regionalised, nor can local self-government be constitutionally guaranteed, because the fruits of sovereignty are indivisible.  It’s centralism or nothing; London power or nationalist revolution.  Only if you insist.

In 1956, the party that we (among others) can claim as our predecessor, Common Wealth, published Our Three Nations jointly with Plaid Cymru and the SNP.  Besides names familiar to WR members, like John Banks and Douglas Stuckey, the authors included names familiar on a wider stage such as Gwynfor Evans and Robert McIntyre.  (Despite the title, O3N is one of the first books to acknowledge the possibility of autonomy for Cornwall, as well as for the English regions.)  We can hardly fail to wish Scotland luck as it first debates, then judges how much autonomy it currently requires.

The Victorians were often a far-sighted lot.  They recognised that the dispersal of decision-making would alter the character of these islands irrevocably.  They were right to predict that, but quite wrong to fear it.  The post-imperial era will only truly begin when power returns to where the story began.  When it returns to Wessex.

Receiving The Water Bill

DEFRA – to some cynics the Department for Eliminating Farming and Rural Activity – is piloting a Bill through the Westminster Parliament to change how the water and sewerage industry is regulated.

It tells us that “privatisation of the water industry has been successful in attracting over £116 billion of investment… Without this investment, water companies would need to collect all of the money needed to upgrade the infrastructure from their customers, which would make bills around a third higher than they currently are.  Water companies would also have to collect money from customers in the year that they spend it on a ‘pay as you go’ basis, which would make bills more volatile from year to year.  The Government places a high priority on ensuring that the water sector continues to remain attractive to investors…  We need to encourage greater innovation and efficiencies alongside this investment, and to deliver it without undermining the reputation for stable regulation which attracts investors to the sector.”

What utter rubbish!  What economic illiteracy!  Ever wondered how Victorian councils funded all those mighty civil engineering works?  You know the ones – the reservoirs, the aqueducts and the pipelines – that bring water from the hills to the cities, and which now grease the sovereign wealth funds of assorted dictatorships.  They didn’t do it by putting the whole cost onto one year’s rates bill.  They did it through access to capital markets, just as the water companies do now.  They issued bonds secured on the rates for however many years ahead were needed to pay off the debt.  After that, the profits were their own, though some deliberately didn’t think in terms of maximising profits: cheap, clean water was deemed its own justification.  That was in the days when pluralism ruled, the days before totalitarian liberalism intervened to order that every alternative to naked market forces must be shut down.  Except for those clothed in a highly lucrative and stable regulatory regime.

So today it seems the key question is no longer what needs to be done to maximise community benefit.  The key question is how investors can be attracted by having the scent of helpless consumers’ money waved before their nostrils by a succession of tarts posing as governments.  Attracted indeed to take part in what has been aptly termed ‘the tollbooth economy’, one in which the essentials of life are parcelled out among private monopolies.  It’s one where investors are no longer willing to lend to public authorities for a fixed return if instead they can have their own direct slice of the action, and have the poodle politicians to deliver it to them.

Wessex has ten main water suppliers, which are, from the Tamar eastwards, as follows:

·        South West Water (based in Exeter) – once publicly owned, now part of Pennon Group plc

·        Wessex Water (Bath) – once publicly owned, now part of the Malaysian group YTL

·        Bristol Water (Bristol) – always privately owned, currently owned by Capstone Infrastructure (a Canadian investment trust), the Catalan group Agbar (itself partly French-owned) and the Japanese group Itochu

·        Severn Trent Water (Coventry) – once publicly owned, now a public limited company

·        Thames Water (Reading) – once publicly owned, now owned by the Australian-based consortium Kemble Water (some of the shares in which are owned by the governments of Abu Dhabi and China)

·        Sembcorp Bournemouth Water (Bournemouth) – always privately owned, currently part of the Singaporean group Sembcorp

·        Cholderton & District Water (Cholderton) – always privately owned by the Stephens family as part of the Cholderton Estate

·        Southern Water (Worthing) – once publicly owned, now owned by the investor and pension fund consortium Greensands Investments

·        Portsmouth Water (Havant) – always privately owned, now a private limited company

·        South East Water (Snodland) – always privately owned, currently owned by Australian and Canadian investment funds

Why is there more private ownership than there ever used to be, and why is water now such an attractive and secure investment, especially for foreign investors?  Because we have a gutless State that expects our loyalty yet will not exercise its duty to provide and protect the framework of community life.  Its duty now is to the owners of capital and no-one else.  Concerns about financial engineering at the heart of the water industry go unheeded.

This should come as no surprise, given that the British State is irrevocably captured by the City of London.  Every aspect of potential policy is judged by whether or not the City benefits.  The City’s trade is no longer in facts but in fictions.  Without laws and the power of force to compel obedience to them, its wealth, and therefore the standing of the whole British economy, is as fleeting as the blips on its computer screens.  One reason why we as a party support deep cuts in the military budget is because we fear that the military today have no real role in the defence of the realm but exist mainly to enforce the City’s writ at home and abroad.  Third World regimes that seek to repossess their common wealth for the benefit of their own folk will not be tolerated.  (Think Suez.  Think Mossadegh.)  It can’t be allowed, not least because that sort of thing might even encourage us to do the same.

There are some superficially good bits to the Water Bill that will increase the supply to Wessex with minimal effort.  It will make it easier for those with private water supplies – farmers and industrialists – to feed the surplus into the public supply.  It will also make it easier for water companies to trade bulk supplies across their boundaries.  Not exactly a national water grid – which isn’t really practical – but a poor man’s version perhaps.  It’s not the solution because it’s not addressing the real problem.  We’ve noted before that Wessex is running out of water, for domestic and for industrial consumption.  The chalklands are being sucked dry and that’s because nothing must stand in the way of London overspill housing.  That’s the real problem we aren’t allowed to mention.

These measures at the margins aren’t going to transform the industry because they won’t alter the fact that the distribution network is a natural monopoly.  No competitor is going to lay a whole new set of water mains.  As with electricity, gas, telecommunications and railways, somebody owns and operates the network while being forced by the regulator to allow others access to it for a fee.  Those others can be little more than trading and billing operations, with a foreign call centre attached.  They don’t actually get their hands dirty at all.

So if there’s no real competition in the provision of real services, what’s the benefit to the consumer?  There isn’t one: it’s a tollbooth economy.  Indeed, in the water industry there is what is called the ‘special merger regime’, which means that even if a merger offers clear cost advantages to the consumer it might still not be allowed, if the number of companies would fall below that needed for comparison purposes if the regulator is to have any idea of what is really going on.

Public provision would be cheaper, if only the democratic sector would allow itself to have access to capital.  To do that requires a model of State action that is now all but illegal under international law.  The laws are made by the glove puppets of private capital, with or without public consent.  In politics, you can have any colour, it seems, as long as it’s blue.  The ongoing theft of public assets is legal; the repossession of private ones therefore requires first a revolution of the mind.

So the answer is?  Solidarity.  Among decentralists.  It isn’t to fight private centralism with public centralism on the Soviet or Labour model.  It isn’t to sneer at nationalists in Scotland or Catalonia for not seeing the ‘big picture’ and to predict their imminent demise at the hands of global finance.  It’s to recognise how they fit into the big picture, like every other bit of the jigsaw of resistance.  It’s to support local and regional initiatives wherever they may be, and never to lift a finger in defence of the property claims of private corporations.  (They’ve had their chance and they’ve abused it shamelessly.)  It’s to demand not the dissolution of the EU for the benefit of the liberal imperialist nation-states but its transformation into a true Europe of the regions, where subsidiarity really does what it says on the tin.  There’s no shortage of solutions, and never has been, only a shortage of mainstream politicians willing to argue for them.

Scotland and Wales, along with the Crown Dependencies, are part of the seedbank of alternative economic models.  Some better than others, no doubt, but all different from the One Solution imposed throughout the English regions whether we like it or not.

Welsh Water, though initially privatised along with the rest, is now owned by a not-for-profit company.  Scottish Water has never been privatised, despite Gordon Brown’s attempts to put it on the sales list to fund his spending habit.  Scotland’s independence White Paper issues a call for Royal Mail in Scotland to be returned to public ownership.  Scotland’s canals have never left, while those in England & Wales now have.  The Coalition plans to privatise English Heritage, judging conservation to be no part of the core functions of government.  Alex Salmond and his colleagues could hardly be clearer that they won’t be following suit: “This Government does not measure the worth of culture and heritage solely in money – we value culture and heritage precisely because they embody our heart and soul, and our essence."  It’s a different world.  Everything in England that ought to be cherished is regarded instead as a resource to be exploited, preferably by foreign capital; England itself is viewed as nothing more than a base for economic and military aggression.

Why the difference?  It comes down to the fact that in the Celtic fringe the home State and the community are viewed as complementary, not as sworn enemies.  In Scotland’s governance, the contribution of civil society is welcomed as that of a critical friend.  In England’s governance, the contribution of civil society is welcomed as that of an abused domestic servant, carrying the burden of ‘the Big Society’ while the toffs trouser the cash that is meant to pay for the services our government used to provide.

The problem is that it isn’t ‘our’ government and never has been.  The mixed economy and the welfare state were a fleeting illusion in England because England isn’t English.  England is Norman.  Scotland’s constitutional bedrock is the sovereignty of the people.  England’s is that the Crown in Parliament can do no wrong.  It can be held to account only in accordance with concessions it has chosen to make.  Magna Carta doesn’t apply in Scotland because it was never needed there.  It is applauded in England only because the English are the most conquered subjects of all.

Hope lies in the regions, not in London.  The political and economic elites that govern the UK from London are completely interchangeable through the revolving door of jobs and directorships.  That system cannot be taken over.  Labour tried, and failed so miserably that it was Labour that was captured instead.  Increasingly, those in Scotland and Wales now recognise that.  We need to follow them into making our own decisions.  To be English, rather than simply Anglo-Norman, is not to dream of occupying the citadels of power but to deny them the legitimacy they crave.  It is to build the regional alternative, to link up with the technicians and the administrators, with those who are sick of the bankers and the lawyers, with all those who can envisage a better way.

Before nationalisation, the electricity industry included companies with some rather interesting names: the Cornwall Electric Power Company, the East Anglian Electric Supply Company and the Wessex Electricity Company.  In water, there was the Wessex Water Board, later subsumed into the Wessex Water Authority.  In telecommunications, Post Office Telephones had a South-Western Region that stretched as far east as Southampton.  In radio and television, the BBC’s West Region once did the same.  And we once had Wessex Trains.  Wessex has had so many opportunities to get it right, to form a joined-up, self-reliant region within a free England and a co-operative Europe at peace with itself and the world.  So many opportunities.  And every one of them thrown away to take up again the London yoke.  The message needs to be hammered home again and again: if you can’t join them (and you can’t, without betraying all around you), then beat them.

Write Lines

Although politicians from the London parties routinely associate the words ‘education’ and ‘choice’, the thing most striking about their policies is that they offer the electorate no choice at all.  Would you guess, from following the roll-out of academies and free schools, the constant undermining of local democratic choice, which party was in power?  The transition from Labourtory to Torylabour is seamless.

(Note, however, that despite this unanimity there are no academies or free schools in Wales, where education policy is devolved.  Welsh Labour and UK Labour are increasingly different parties.  The choices offered therefore are not determined by what the party is called but by the milieu in which it operates, in Labour’s case by whether it has a nationalist rival to keep it true to its roots.  An interesting lesson for Wessex!)

The parties are equally united in their enthusiasm for more taxpayer-funded faith schools, notwithstanding the recent scandal in Mercia that was absolutely predictable and irrespective of whether it is the faith element that is actually key to standards.  On Michael Gove’s watch, a deal with the Church of England will allow it to incorporate former community schools with no religious character into its Diocesan Academy Chains, with bishops having the power to appoint governors.  The non-religious choice is being squeezed out as provision is outsourced.  In our rural areas, where the CofE dominates primary provision, choice doesn’t exist and never has.

Does the faux-Maoist mantra of constant revolution in the classroom and the abdication of any common responsibility chime with public opinion any more than the similar churning of the NHS?  No, it doesn’t.  According to a YouGov poll recently, only a third of the adult population approves of State funding for faith schools; nearly half actively disapproves.  Meanwhile, free schools are being desperately flogged.  Planning rules have been ripped up, to allow children to be herded into redundant cinemas, factories and prisons, with local communities barred from commenting on anything besides noise and traffic.  All because local communities, through their councils, might otherwise sabotage the Coalition’s flagship policy.  So if free schools can’t pass the local democracy test, let’s not have local democracy.

Here’s a radical decentralist alternative.  One, abolish Gove’s job, along with his entire department.  Two, devolve all schools spending to councils.  Three, let them make every decision that cannot be made at the level of the school itself.  Decisions such as planning and building new schools in line with population changes, schools they are currently banned from initiating, as totalitarian liberalism insists they be.  Or making provision for area-wide services, such as educational psychology, the music service and, where cost-effective, school meals and transport.  Heads should be able to find better things to do than waste their time juggling budgets for outside contractors.  Four, tell the evangelical bishops and the misogynist imams to fund their own hobbies henceforth unless they can fairly win control of their council first.  Five, scrap academies, free schools and all other experiments in segregationist child abuse and reinstate community-accountable education.  Six, for a proper level playing field, give all schools the same freedoms that these cotton-wooled cuckoos enjoy.  And above all, seven, remind voters that the way to get rid of a bad Labour council with destructive education policies isn’t to transfer all its powers to a bad Tory minister in London.  It’s to vote for real change.

It was always predicted that centralisation would prove too unwieldy to work and last week, with half of all secondary schools now rebranded as academies, Gove had to fess up.  The idea of running tens of thousands of schools directly from Whitehall has been abandoned.  It will be replaced by eight regional bodies, to be known as ‘Headteacher Boards’ (HTBs).  What’s the betting that there’ll be a ‘South West’ and a ‘South East’?  And what happens to the viability of each HTB if the density of academies / free schools versus traditional arrangements varies from region to region according to what’s popular locally?  You know, that choice thing.

Two black marks for the price of one.  Not just an unaccountable, self-regulating firewall of a bureaucracy to save the Education Secretary’s skin when the wheels finally come off the three-party liberal bandwagon.  Worse than that.  One that is neither central nor local but, yes, regional.  How off-message can you be?  Why, even readers of the Torygraph are bemused by the ramifications.  What does the future now hold for Gove?  Detention, or expulsion?  We know what report we’d like to write.

British Balderdash Conspiracy

One reason why our publicity is largely channelled through this blog is that London hacks simply can’t be trusted to tell the unvarnished truth.  Wessex is a really straightforward idea with which they really struggle.

At the start of this month we gave an interview to the BBC.  Their researcher – who is actually from Wessex – was tasked with writing a piece on movements for regional independence in England.  You can read the result here.

Now, when a journalist is handed a brief that already contains all the answers, and just wants a few quotes to fit, giving interviews is something of a lottery.  You can say what you like, stress what you like, but words will be omitted to change the sense and other stuff will go in over which you have no control.  Journalism isn’t exactly a very forensic profession.  If you think it qualifies as a profession in the first place.

So even if you make clear, as we always do, that we aren’t seeking independence from England, that is how we are made to be.  Even if the answer to the question of where Wessex is on the map is to define its scope and point to its eight shires, the article reverts to the stereotype and it becomes Greater Dorset.  Wessex is more colourful than ‘The South West’ and ‘The South East’.  That’s our view, long-established and with good cause.  It isn’t more colourful than England and we wouldn’t claim that it is (only that it’s the finest part of England, in our unbiased opinion).

Three cheers then for Tim Berners-Lee!!!  For liberating the truth from journalists and allowing the oppressed to type it for themselves.

Some Folk With Attitude

The folk of Wessex think of themselves as free, but are slaves to their own poor self-esteem, forever doubting their capacity for self-rule.  Nine hundred years after the brutal conquest of their land, they have so little pride left in them that they cheerfully reject at every election the escape route offered by regionalism, preferring to submit yet again to five more years of the London yoke.  Even a devolved assembly as limited as those of Scotland or Wales would give them some little voice, which could not be completely ignored when their fate is to be determined.  You can be sure the voices of London’s Mayor and Lord Mayor are both heard loud, clear and shrill, so why should ours stay silent?

Yet there remain also those who would stir the indifference of the majority to reconsider whether they could not in fact do better than this.  We stand in the midst of that agony of reappraisal that is British politics today, that realisation that the common wealth has been squandered for nothing but shiny baubles, the realisation that the bonds of serfdom are being re-imposed, literally through choice, because too many believed all that was too good to ever be true.  We stand in the midst of that agony, but we are not part of it.  We saw it coming decades ago.  We warned.  We were ignored.  So if we will be listened to now, we can speak with the cool certainty of conviction.

Politics in England needs to be transformed, with parishes, shires and regions, each tier in turn, as the territory widens, possessing a diminishing share of the responsibility (not power) of government.  Economics, here as everywhere, needs to be transformed, with democratic debate revolving around the benefit to the community of any investment, not its profitability for others.  Culture in Wessex needs to be transformed, turning a despised provincial existence into the golden thread linking a self-confident community to its past and future.  We aren’t looking for protest votes.  We’d rather have the support of those who believe that radical constitutional change is no longer an option but a necessity.

These are revolutionary ideas, with dangerous implications for vested interests.  There will be no place for the legal, financial or media sectors as we know them.  The clear writ of popular power will slice through them all.  Well-paid, parasitical jobs in London will need to be destroyed in their tens of thousands.  We may or may not believe in the class war.  The London regime certainly does, and acts accordingly.  For them, this is a struggle of the possessors and manipulators against the dispossessed and disinherited.  They are few, but they are united in their arrogance, greed and spite.  Are we united against them?  How many councillors or candidates will stand up and say these things that need to be said?

Ought these things to come to pass?  Yes.  Will they?  To say ‘yes’ to that question too is the first step in the process of attitude formation.  Old regimes do collapse.  Those who step forward to fill the vacuum are those who have bent their energies exclusively to attitude formation, to conditioning the minds of their folk to the inevitable.  Any inspirational movement, tightly organised and thoroughly aware of an uncompromising ideological line, can impose its authority on a fluid situation caused by the bewildering disintegration of former certainties.  That is precisely how the states of Baltic, Central and Balkan Europe emerged at the end of the First World War.  It is also how the virus of Thatcherism took hold.  In politics, it is the attitudes, not the reasons, that count.  Attitudes are the emotional ground out of which the reasons spring.

The most effective way to destroy old attitudes is to show that the society in question can be refashioned very efficiently using means considered beyond the bounds of respectability.  You can’t let local communities do whatever they like.  Yes you can.  You can’t judge investment priorities against the resulting community benefit rather than against the demands of private property and global finance.  Why ever not?  You can’t do without London-based expertise.  Want to bet?

In the perspective of history, a decade is little.  What is important to individual regionalists is to influence the attitudes of others to such an extent that the climate of opinion within which another generation of regionalists will work is more favourable.  Two steps forward, one step back will get us there in the end.  Our weaknesses may often be more apparent than our strengths but do not under-estimate our capacity to punch above our weight.

The same ratchet effect is true for nationalists: whether Salmond’s great gamble next year succeeds or fails, the debate it has opened cannot ultimately be closed until freedom is achieved.  We should capitalise on the result, whichever way it goes, since Wessex too needs to debate its fate.

We also need to ensure that we record, cherish and pass on the stories, of the marches and the motorway protests, of the flag-flying and the poll counts, of the pioneering pamphlets, and of those who have passed away.  Just as the nationalist movements have done, we should accumulate and document the regionalist past and present in order to inspire a regionalist future.  A future that will be there for the taking by those true to the deepest memories of why we act as we do.

The Worker’s Hire

“They hang the man, and flog the woman,
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leave the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who takes things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

They hang the man, and flog the woman,

Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.”

Anon., The Goose and the Common

The Tolpuddle Martyrs formed a union because their plummeting wages barely kept body and soul together.  It wasn’t that farmers couldn’t afford to pay their labourers more; they just chose to keep the money to themselves in an era of over-supply of labour brought on by mechanisation.

Today, the idea of a ‘Living Wage’ is still alive and not-so-well.  The phrase is one that was being used over 80 years ago by the Independent Labour Party (not the same as the Labour Party), who made it the first item in their 1928 political programme.  The alternative to a living wage is what exactly?  In a society with any sort of conscience (or a reasonable fear of crime), the alternative is to make up the gap between wages and the cost of living through social security payments to those in work.  What that means is that well-run businesses that can afford to pay decent wages pay tax to subsidise the labour costs of badly-run businesses that can’t or won’t.  If you’re a businessman, why should you be paying for somebody else’s workforce?  They work for him, not you.

Do minimum wages destroy jobs by imposing demands the market cannot bear?  The point of a minimum wage isn’t to make it more difficult for employers to take on labour, even though that may be a consequence.  It’s to reduce the burden on taxpayers generally that is caused by allowing specific employers to take on labour at below true cost.  (Miliband’s call this month for tax breaks for employers who pay a living wage is flawed for this reason: the public purse still suffers.)

Depressingly, none of this is new.  In 1795 the Justices of the Peace for Berkshire met in Quarter Sessions at The Pelican Inn, Speenhamland, near Newbury.  They decided to raid the rates to supplement the wages paid by the local farmers, thereby staving off the threat of revolution.  The amount of the subsidy depended upon the price of corn and the size of the labourer’s family.  The ‘Speenhamland system’ had already been trialled in some parishes and was soon copied by parish after parish across southern England (it was never very common further north).  The results, predictably, were a large increase in the poor rate, improvident marriages, and a general pauperisation of the agricultural labourers.

Another similar scheme was the roundsman system, where the farmers employed paupers in turn and the parish subsidised their low wages.  In other districts farmers agreed to employ a certain quota of paupers according to the rateable value of their property (a system known as the labour rate).  Farmers, naturally, preferred subsidised pauper labour to the labour of free men because it was cheaper.  The independent labourers were frequently dismissed and in time became paupers too.  Folk grew accustomed to accepting relief, and demoralisation spread.  Malthus, whose famous essay on population was published in 1798, condemned outdoor relief as leading to an over-populated countryside.

Farmers as a class suffered too because of the heavy burden of the poor rate.  Moreover, while the guaranteed income prevented malnutrition and thus appeared to maintain productivity, it also removed labour market competition – and any incentive to work harder for the farmer’s benefit – and in this respect caused productivity to decline.  The result was the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 that replaced outdoor relief with the workhouse.  (In fact, in southern England a great deal of outdoor relief continued to be granted to able-bodied folk, which is one reason why Chartism never took hold in Wessex.)

Regulating wages by law has a long history, maximum wages being as likely a theme as minimum ones, though always for occupations at the bottom of the social scale and never for those at the top.  In the aftermath of the Black Death, for example, the Statute of Labourers 1351 sought to force wages back to pre-plague levels.  (It was never going to work, as supply was far less than demand and the labourers had never had it so good.)

An incomes policy that aims to be fair should treat wages and welfare holistically.  It shouldn’t rob efficient businesses to pay inefficient ones.  Nor should it allow low-wage employers to avoid contributing to the top-up by moving their tax affairs offshore.  International companies incapable of honest accounting shouldn’t just be fined: they shouldn’t be permitted to go on trading here.  We have plenty of our own folk capable of replacing them.

An incomes policy that aims to be fair shouldn’t tackle child poverty in ways that create incentives to have large families that others then fund.  Large families, often a burden on the taxpayer, are always a burden on the planet and we cannot expect responsibility from the Third World if we do not set an example.

An incomes policy that aims to be fair should recognise that when the London regime tells Wessex that we need hyper-growth in population to drive prosperity up, the reality is that a larger workforce competing for jobs will drive wages down.  Jobs can only expand in line with population if environmental resources are degraded at an accelerated rate.

History confirms all of this, but we don’t want to know about the past, do we?  We’d rather auto-pilot on raw emotions.  The truth is that past generations have responded to the very same emotions in sometimes disastrous ways.

But there is new ground to be broken.  Many schemes have been devised for income redistribution, including a basic income for all, in effect paying everyone what is currently paid only to the poor.  Why has it not been tried?  Is it because it demonstrably wouldn’t work?  (It long worked for child benefit, and small-scale experiments confirm its practicality.)  Or is it because its revolutionary potential is all too real?

Payments could be funded from a progressive income tax, an inheritance tax, a land value tax, or, if the idea of public ownership is successfully rehabilitated, from the returns on natural monopolies as a ‘social dividend’.  More radically still, new money could be issued directly to individuals instead of to banks, who would have to rely on attracting deposits to gain access to it.  The savings in administrative costs could be huge.  Tax and social security systems could be integrated and simplified.  So too could utility bills, council tax and ground rents if we think radically enough.  The region can make a good case to be the best scale at which to organise such things because it aligns with the technical requirements of many of the utilities.

The moral argument is compelling: since no-one chooses to be born into our society then our society has an obligation to ensure the basics of life to all who comprise it, without discrimination.  The political argument is equally compelling: universal public education and health care have created a middle class interest in securing the best for themselves that also secures the best for others.  The same would be true of universal welfare payments.

The first section of the National Assistance Act 1948 formally abolished the despised legal status of pauper.  It’s more than a shame that today’s London politicians and the right-wing media still haven’t caught up with the fact.  Instead they argue that the dismantling of universal systems is fair because the rich cannot be made to pay towards them and the only, feeble way to get back at the rich is through means testing.  Not so.  The way to plug the gap between an increasingly powerless poor and a class of super-rich who can laugh at sovereignty is through politics – and accountancy – with teeth.  If the rich choose not to contribute to society, then society, through its definition of the property and asset-movement rights it chooses to uphold, must cease to protect them.  In short, the law must die if justice is to be born.

Come On, Wessex!

WR President Colin Bex and Secretary-General David Robins were in Cornwall on Saturday, sitting in on the Annual Conference of Mebyon Kernow.  The venue was what used to be New County Hall, Truro and is now Lys Kernow (‘the Court of Cornwall’).  The building’s directional signage is all bilingual, in English and an expanding language still widely imagined by the imperial media to be as dead as the dodo.  (And there were even genuinely Cornish pasties for lunch.) 

MK, now with four councillors on Cornwall Council, is entitled as a party group to borrow the Council Chamber for meetings.  With Cllr Dr Loveday Jenkin in the chair, and the semicircle opposite filled with rows of Cornish nationalists, the sight provided a real sense of déjà vu, more like sitting in on a session of the future legislative Cornish Assembly.  (The empty seats in the photo are those which in a Council meeting would be occupied by Cabinet members and chief officers.)

The conference decided party policy on a number of matters.  A carefully balanced, scientifically grounded position on badgers and bovine TB was agreed, opposing culling while also being supportive of the farming community as the search continues for a workable vaccine.  The point was made that shot badgers are not being tested to see if they really do have TB (only to confirm that they were humanely killed), also that since TB can be carried by other mammals, such as deer, the culling route ultimately implies eradicating most of our larger wildlife.  The London regime’s policy came across as doing something for the sake of being seen to be doing something, whether it works or not.  And better not to ask questions in case it spoils their script.

Transport is another area where MK’s policy is researched with an impressive thoroughness.  The conference called for a statutory Quality Bus/Rail Partnership under the 2008 Local Transport Act, using a council-owned ‘arms-length’ bus company to return Cornwall’s public transport to local control.  These powers are equally available to Wessex local authorities.  Why are they so timid in using them?  Why do so many assume that FirstGroup, Stagecoach and the like can just get away with whatever they please?

Two themes dominated the proceedings.  One was the failure of the London parties to build a fair society, all of them viewing austerity coupled with tax avoidance as the new normal.  Why, asked MK Leader Cllr Dick Cole, do Conservative and LibDem councillors, ordered to make cuts in local spending, out of all proportion to the cuts being made to central government’s vanity projects, not send the necessary signal to Westminster by resigning from their parties?  Are their political loyalties more important than their duty to the electorate?

The other dominant theme was the accelerating destruction of environmental and cultural heritage through housebuilding, driven by dodgy data that supposedly informs us that there is no alternative.  All three main London parties are part of the scam, which in a Cornish context is exposed in a well-researched polemic, The land’s end?  The great sale of Cornwall by Dr Bernard Deacon.  The author told conference that massive suburbanisation is now destroying the essence of a distinctive Cornwall.

The Cornish are calmly but firmly angry, and they have every right to be so.  So are many in Wessex.  We heard that some of the research now being quoted in Cornwall comes from rural Wiltshire.  The difference is that the Cornish are doing something about it.  There is apparently more grit and determination in the little finger that is Cornwall than in the whole of England.

What is the English response to the great social and environmental crisis of our time?  It is to place a childlike faith in centralism to make things better.  It is to join well-meaning organisations like the CPRE and be always at pains to be moderate and reasonable in writing to Ministers of the Crown.  Why?  Psychopaths don’t respond to reason and moderation.  And what will happen in 2015?  The English electorate will vote one or other of the psychopath parties into power for another five years of legalised tyranny.

Celtic nationalists live under oppression.  They know the enemy well.  The English, in contrast, are not one folk but two part-folks.  There is the arrogant Englishness of the ruling elite, Norman to the core, especially the Labour bits of it (since if you ape your masters’ subtleties, the result will always come out as a clumsy parody).  And then there is the deferential Englishness of those ruled, the ones who won’t question the orders from London because, well, it’s ‘our’ government, isn’t it, so they must know best, right?

Wrong.  Wessex Regionalists are part of a truly revolutionary movement, one that wishes to see the world turned not upside down but the right way up, with sovereignty to the parishes in an England that governs itself on a human scale.  One thing the Celtic countries have to their advantage is a manageable territory that can be understood and loved.  England is a land of 32 million acres, with a population of 57 million.  To drive from one end to the other takes a whole exhausting day.  A human-scale England has to be a regionalised England.  Otherwise it will remain what it has been since 1066, one fully comprehensible and directable only from above by its haughty rulers.

To get to a human-scale England will take much action by many individuals.  There will be those who occupy green fields designated for destruction by democracy-overturning Planning Inspectors, and who suffer the blows of the police and private thugs sent there to uphold developers’ ‘property rights’.  There will be those who scale the offices of hated agencies and corporations to unfurl the Wyvern flag of freedom.  There will be those who stand in elections to oust the Tory, LibDibDib and ‘Labour’ representatives complicit in the destruction of one of the most beautiful and historic lands on the planet, a part of the common treasury of all humanity, born or yet to be born.

Or maybe there will be none of this.  Maybe we will just stand back and spend our time sneering at Celtic neighbours who have got life right.  Maybe we will just go quietly into the twilight.  Being English.  Not wanting to make a fuss lest we appear impolite.