“One of the Parties that MK members became acquainted
with was Yorkshire First. We have much that we can learn from each
other, and it would be a really interesting exercise to have some sort of group
meeting or conference of all the regionalist parties in mainland UK, including
the North East Party and the Wessex Regionalists, to see how we can combine our
voices in our campaigns for better, stronger, and more people-led devolution in
the UK.”
That might be so, and the WR
Council has resolved to make enquiries, though as we’ve noted, it’s been done
before. More than once. Perhaps every generation has to give it a try
and there’s certainly no shame in emulating success. WR is different though, mainly because of how
far official recognition of our regional identity lags behind.
Cornwall is not just home to a distinct nation. It’s also (apart from the Isles of Scilly,
who have their own council) a single unit of local government. The complaint isn’t that Cornwall is unrecognised; it’s that it’s not
recognised enough, or in the right way.
Cornwall Council has broadly the same powers as a London
borough, even though Cornwall’s
geographical isolation would allow it to do far more for itself, without
treading on any of its neighbours’ toes.
It’s treated as an English county when it’s actually something more that
just happens to be the same size as an English county. The motto ‘One and All’ sums it up. The argument that ‘there’s no such place as Cornwall’ isn’t heard
though, because it’s not conceivable.
Up north, the North East
Party and Yorkshire First both operate within the boundaries of their respective
Prescott zones,
boundaries still widely recognised by the public and voluntary sectors and used
for everything from Euro-elections to the English Heritage handbook. This is part of the legacy of the Blairite ‘big push’
for top-down regionalisation that has never fully gone away.
(Interestingly, the National
Trust used also to be loyal to Prescottism but this year’s handbook departs
from it. Apart from South Humberside,
now placed with the rest of Lincolnshire, the basic Prescott geography is
respected everywhere except the South
West and South East, where the Trust has introduced five new groupings of its
own invention, plus a separate Cornwall.
If the NT now has so much property in Wessex that its presentation needs
to be this fragmented, maybe Wessex
needs a National Trust all of its own?)
There is, of course, another
definition of Yorkshire, the Yorkshire of the ridings rather than the one of a
map drawn in London,
but any attempt to restore this is fraught with difficulties. The biggest risk, revealed in the work of the
Banham Commission in the 1990s, is of tokenistic proposals emerging to appease
sentiment rather than to accommodate it, new ridings with old names but the
wrong boundaries, which make things worse rather than better.
Until this year, a different
approach was evidenced by the Northern Party, voice of the historic North of
England – Northumbria – with
a united claim to all three northern Prescott
zones. South Humberside apart though,
this was still a claim that worked with rather than against the Prescott geography.
Wessex is different because faced with that geography our response
is that we wouldn’t have started from here.
We devoted most of The Case for
Wessex to explaining why Wessex
is, to quote Thomas Hardy, a ‘practical provincial definition’. Much more so than a South West that runs from
the Scillies to the Cotswolds and a South East that wraps round two-thirds of
London and whose extremities can only communicate with each other by passing
through a national capital that forms a separate region.
If Wessex is a
practical province, and not just a romantic image of myth and legend that
doesn’t even merit its own official tourist board, why isn’t it shown more on
maps? We must note that briefly and for
specific purposes it does come into being, as with the Army’s Wessex Brigade or
the short-lived Wessex Trains franchise.
The London
regime always realises its mistake and pulls back from taking things further. Then busily covers up the evidence while
encouraging others to do likewise.
Alternatively, it hides
behind forms of official recognition that don’t require Wessex to be
defined. Like recognising St Ealdhelm as
our patron saint or the Wyvern as our flag (and even allowing it to be flown
from public buildings, something several county and unitary councils are doing
today). Another example would be awarding
our earldom to the Queen’s youngest son.
The re-use of the title for Prince Edward in 1999 launched a tsunami of
sneering from the London press, ranging from
massive pride in not knowing where Wessex is to asking whether the brand
isn’t damaged for eternity, given that Wessex Water was once owned by
Enron. When in 2011 Prince William
became Duke of Cambridge, the reaction was more like ‘how nice’. The Wessexes
are one way of acknowledging that Wessex
exists but, like the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, they can be a
convenient device when needed for ensuring loyalty to the London regime among the grovelling classes. Their full potential for obstructing self-government
has yet to be tested.
Yet another trick is to use
‘Wessex’ as the name for
something smaller than Wessex,
like Wessex Water, or the Wessex Regional Health Authority. Another still is to associate aspects of
Wessexness, like cider or the dialect, with a vague area that won’t match county
boundaries, but simply not to notice how these things form bundles that add up
to an identity. There are lots of words
for folk from Wessex –
Wessaxon, Wessexer, Wessexian, or – best of all – Wurzel, but probably none
that would be acknowledged outside Wessex because if you don’t look
and listen you won’t find.
In all these respects, Wessex is less comparable with other movements
for autonomy within the UK
and more with mainland movements in the likes of Alsace,
Brittany, Moravia or Scania. These are likewise places that exist in the
heart but have been truncated, partitioned or even obliterated for purposes of
governance, by centralist states jealous of any rival for the people’s affections.
Some regions have their
capital city at their centre. The
central geographical feature of Wessex
is the empty expanse of Salisbury Plain.
(Our big cities are round the edge, places of exchange with a wider
world.) That sense of a hollow centre is
often how it feels politically. We’re
told that we’re campaigning for a region that most of its residents don’t
recognise. Yet that’s a throw-away line;
it just avoids the need for any further thinking. Thinking about how and why the London regime controls the space within which a Wessex identity
could flourish, and controls it with the deliberate intention of ensuring that
it doesn’t. Thinking about the ruling
class of Wessex, MPs and
councillors sitting for the London parties, media
hacks, academics, in many cases with anything but the good of Wessex as their
motivation. Thinking too about the
opportunities we now have to build a radical Wessex movement from the bottom up.
It’s easy for critics to
present the Wessex Regionalists as rather like one of those bands that were big
in the 80s and are still trying to make a comeback, playing the occasional gig
in obscure places like Witney. The fact
is that the raising of the election deposit in 1985 – it was more than trebled
– was a huge blow that stopped us in our tracks. We had until then been ramping up the number
of candidates at each election. Instead,
we were kept out of electioneering for over a decade, times when it looked as
if we might not survive. The Tories claimed
that raising the deposit was necessary to deter ‘frivolous’ candidates. It didn’t.
All it did was deter serious candidates without the Tories’ access to
loads of money.
And it shows how worried
they were, as well they ought to be.
Devolution for peripheral areas is one thing; devolution for the area
that encapsulates the deepest memories of statehood is an existential challenge
the UK
is ill-equipped to weather. So if the current
set-up is designed to deny us our identity, culturally and politically, then we
should feel honoured rather than surprised.
Let’s get on with re-awakening it for ourselves. That means, above all, not trying to
influence those who have power but rather to do everything in our power to sweep them aside.
Happy St Ealdhelm’s Day
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