tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3395466471397124872024-03-16T02:18:40.154-07:00Wessex RegionalistsDavid Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.comBlogger382125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-63832291497370331732022-02-22T02:02:00.004-08:002022-02-22T02:02:00.173-08:00Here We Are<p>Our story continues at <a href="https://www.wessexregionalists.info/" target="_blank">https://www.wessexregionalists.info/</a><br /></p>David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-26517332900932534452016-06-15T01:00:00.000-07:002016-06-15T10:04:09.761-07:00Another Europe is Possible‘Believe in Britain’, they say.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And why not ‘Believe in Europe’?<span style="font-family: "arial";"> Grassroots Out have taken to
arguing that Brexit isn’t ‘anti-Europe’ at all, rather as if the SNP had
presented independence as being pro-British.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Confused?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The underlying idea is
that the EU is not just at present objectively anti-European – in its
submissive attitude to others it clearly is – but that it’s also incapable of
changing into anything better.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The UK can be
improved, easily; the EU, never, so let’s not try.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s more than inconsistent with the facts.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Facts get selected and
highlighted to inform perceptions of past and present, and future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>British unity is a historical fact, but so
too are the Auld Alliance, the Danelaw and the Celtic languages of the Atlantic
arc, all of which cut across it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
British royal family is German, the royal motto is written in French, and all
our talk of democracy and politics is down to the Greeks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of that suggests a need for flexibility
of thought, but also of political institutions to match it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Does that mean that there’s
a European ‘demos’ in any meaningful sense?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If the answer is ‘No’, then the usual suspects are to blame for keeping
things strictly inter-governmental and so preventing its formation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Have they ensured that there can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">never</i> be one?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s a very different question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Stresses build solidarity:
there was never a time when everyone within the UK felt fine having a British
identity but it was made to work by those who feared a worse alternative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Europe’s
case it could be that its puny 19th century nation-states get picked off one by
one by the new global players.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
demographic squeeze as Third World populations
form an ever-expanding proportion of humanity will force closer co-operation
because the alternative to Europeans thinking of themselves as one people may
be that they cease to exist at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Always beware the illusion of permanence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">That’s something that also
obscures the realisation that a successful campaign for Brexit would only
launch in its wake a new campaign for Bre-entry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘Remain’ is not as attractive an option as
‘Remain, but’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The unattractive nature
of ‘Leave’ is magnified by the fact that ‘Leave, but’ is ruled <a href="http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/06/13/introducing-apathetics-for-remain/" target="_blank">out</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But for how long, and on what humiliating
terms might Brexit be reversed?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">The UK and the US
are two countries separated by a common language: politically the UK has more in
common with the European social democracies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Culturally, we perhaps under-estimate the Old World’s
shared legacy of experiences like aristocracy, peasantry and buildings over 500
years old.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That happens only because we
don’t share enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The more one reads
in translation of mainland political theory the more obvious it becomes that
importing the minimalist politics of the wild frontier and the big open spaces
just because it’s in English can only be damaging to England.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The US
is not Europe’s enemy but it does need to be
understood as a commercial and ideological rival.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are we going to stand up to it all on our <a href="https://www.chathamhouse.org/publication/britain-eu-and-sovereignty-myth" target="_blank">own</a>?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Wessex</span><span style="font-family: "arial";"> is a European region, as authentic as Normandy, Tuscany or Bavaria.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Europe is an
idea in the making, despite its growing pains, and so is open to influence. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>England
and Britain
are ideas that too often are used to curb our aspirations for self-government
and not to nurture them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They shouldn’t
be mere glove-puppets for a London-focused regime, but that’s what they’re <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-36388364" target="_blank">fast</a>
becoming as regional identity continues to be ridiculed and diminished.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Among our friends and allies
in Celtic nationalist parties and in regionalist movements across Europe, the
EU is given the benefit of the doubt not from any love of the big but from love
of the small, and from the realisation that we cannot work together to cherish
the small within a nation-state straitjacket.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The idea that we can have the regionalism we want nesting within a
retained nation-state framework is refuted by recent history, in which nation-states
have frequently done everything they can to destroy the regional identities
from which they’re built.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Besides, for
those whose region sees itself as a nation that cannot thrive under another
nation’s yoke, only a European framework will do.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">The idea of neat nesting is refuted
too on many of Europe’s borders, where authentic
regions straddle lines drawn through them by absolute monarchs, sustained by
dictators, and enforced today by one-dimensional bullies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>France’s
borders separate Flanders from Lille, its
historic capital, German-speaking Alsace from
the rest of Swabia, Savoy
and Nice from the rest of Piedmont, Roussillon from the rest of Catalonia and three
provinces of the Basque Country from the other four.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not to mention Brittany
from Cornwall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other examples are Tyrol (Austria/Italy), Pomerania (Germany/Poland) and Scania
(Denmark/Sweden).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s by rubbing out
those lines that we progress to allowing better choices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If regionalism is about having the
flexibility to do things regionally, intricate EU regulations are bad
news.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, for some, the news is not as
bad as the olds that they’ve lived with for a very long time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Regions require headroom,
which a united Europe governed by subsidiarity
provides, and thus there’s no contradiction in demanding both.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our founder, Alexander Thynn, stood as a
‘Wessex Regionalist & European Federalist’ candidate in the first
Euro-election in 1979, for the seat of ‘Wessex’ (in reality, not Wessex, just Dorset
plus parts of Hants and Wilts).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His
election leaflet offered a 24-point programme entitled ‘Wessex within a
Federal Europe’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In these days of
negligible vision, it pays to be reminded of what it said:</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">“1:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
Parliament at Strasbourg should furnish a
political platform where the voice of Wessex
can be expressed as participating within a Europe of Regions, rather than a Europe of Nations.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">2:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>We
should look forward to the emergence of a United Regions of Europe, that might
be compared with the United
States of America.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wessex will be one of these
Regional States.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">3:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
should be a European Head of State: some much revered elder statesman, to be
elected by the Parliament at Strasbourg.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">4:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>All
decisions of the European Supreme Court of Justice should be upheld and
implemented by the authority of the European Parliament.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">5:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
should be a gradual transfer of sovereignty from Westminster
to Strasbourg
in three important spheres:</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">(a)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">the control of the armed forces</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">(b)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">the control of foreign policy decisions</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">(c)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">the control of the economy.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">6:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
supreme officers within the European High Command should be responsible to Strasbourg, with the
entire British armed forces serving under this command.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">7:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Strasbourg must debate
the foreign policies of all Western European nations, so that they can be fully
co-ordinated.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">8:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
should be a European Foreign and Consular Service, responsible only to the
Parliament at Strasbourg.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This will replace the present national
system.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">9:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Strasbourg must encourage
European monetary union, with due regard to the transitional problems that this
may involve for the weaker currencies.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">10:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The Parliament
at Strasbourg must furnish Europe
with a uniform tax structure (involving income tax, super tax and capital gains
tax) applicable at the same levels within all European nations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This will not preclude the right of national
or regional governments to raise taxes by additional methods, if they so
choose.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">11:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Wessex and all
other regions should receive a substantial tax rebate from such taxation
revenue, apportioned in accordance with their per capita and per hectare rating
as European Regions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This rebate should
be spent as the regional assemblies see fit.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">12:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Another
large portion of all federal taxation revenue should be paid annually into the
regional fund at Strasbourg, with a view to
effecting a gradual redistribution of capital and social resources over Western Europe at large.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">13:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A
further portion of the federal taxation revenue should go into a European
redevelopment fund, with a view to assisting those nations such as Britain with
peculiar transitional problems, or generally assisting towards the cost of
unifying the nations of our continent.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">14:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Applications
should be made to the European Parliament to shoulder the cost (from out of
this redevelopment fund) for changing the British road system from left to
right.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">15:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
cost of linking Britain to France by
several bridges and tunnels should also be financed from this fund.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">16:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
Common Agricultural Policy should be modified so as to ensure efficiency in
farming, without destroying the idea that Europe
should become agriculturally self-sufficient.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">17:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
representatives from Wessex should seek to ally themselves with the
representatives of those European regions where farming is practised
efficiently, asserting our mutual interests against regions where farming is
practised inefficiently, or where the interests of agriculture as a whole are
subordinated to industrial interests.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">18:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Strasbourg must
co-ordinate and control the scientific and technological research of its member
nations, so as to attain maximum efficiency and co-operation.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">19:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
operation of multinational companies in Europe
should be carefully monitored, so as to avoid any upsurge of their influence to
a degree that cannot be safely controlled by the elected representatives of the
people.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">20:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Strasbourg must take charge of energy policy within Europe, which should be carefully planned to allow for
the situation that will arise after our oil supplies have run out, involving
heavy investment in alternative energy research.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">21:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Strasbourg must take
general charge of environment policy, to ensure that national standards are
consistently high.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">22:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
standardisation of weights and measurements according to the European metric
system should be pressed forward to its conclusion.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">23:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A
uniform electoral system of proportional representation, with single
transferable vote, should be adopted by the Parliament at Strasbourg before the next Euro-elections.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">24:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Research
should be undertaken at Strasbourg for a computerised voting system, for future
adoption, whereby the voting strength of each delegate from a regional state is
registered automatically within the European Parliament in direct relation to
the number of people that the delegate’s party can be shown to represent.”</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">As with earlier radical
causes like Chartism, readers will be able to judge for themselves how much has
been achieved, how much would now be modified or discarded, and how much,
sadly, remains undone.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">The case for regionalism
would be the same even if the European mainland wasn’t there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Government that serves us all means getting
power, wealth and talent out of London.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Set that case in the context of a Europe of regions though and it starts to become a
reality, however clunkingly, and however unimaginatively the eurocracy is
forced by its Member States to react.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Deny that framework and it’s not that the argument dies: it’s that it
reverts to being a nice idea that’s obviously right but which London,
triumphantly unchallenged by any wider view, will simply never allow to happen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because the anti-Brussels rhetoric has a clear
beneficiary.</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-2184708742221876562016-05-25T01:00:00.000-07:002017-11-21T11:50:05.672-08:00An Empty Space?The second issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wessex Citizen</i>, edited by Keith
Southwell and Rick Heyse, is now <a href="https://issuu.com/wessexcitizen/docs/citizen_issue_2" target="_blank">online</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Many thanks to all who contributed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Earlier this month we mentioned the current – seventy-second – issue of
MK’s equivalent, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cornish Nation</i>, which
this time gave us a brief mention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Joanie Willett, reporting back on the General Assembly of the European
Free Alliance recently held in Corsica, wrote:
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">“One of the Parties that MK members became acquainted
with was Yorkshire First.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.”</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">That might be so, and the WR
Council has resolved to make enquiries, though as we’ve <a href="http://wessexregionalists.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/ourselves-alone.html" target="_blank">noted</a>, it’s been done
before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More than once.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps every generation has to give it a try
and there’s certainly no shame in emulating success.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>WR is different though, mainly because of how
far official recognition of our regional identity lags behind.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Cornwall</span><span style="font-family: "arial";"> is not just home to a distinct nation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s also (apart from the Isles of Scilly,
who have their own council) a single unit of local government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The complaint isn’t that Cornwall is unrecognised; it’s that it’s not
recognised enough, or in the right way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The motto ‘One and All’ sums it up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The argument that ‘there’s no such place as Cornwall’ isn’t heard
though, because it’s not conceivable.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is part of the <a href="http://wessexregionalists.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/missing-wessex-reward-available.html" target="_blank">legacy</a> of the Blairite ‘big push’
for top-down regionalisation that has never fully gone away.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">(Interestingly, the National
Trust used also to be loyal to Prescottism but this year’s handbook departs
from it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Apart from South Humberside,
now placed with the rest of Lincolnshire, the basic Prescott geography is
respected everywhere <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">except</i> the South
West and South East, where the Trust has introduced five new groupings of its
own invention, plus a separate Cornwall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If the NT now has so much property in Wessex that its presentation needs
to be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this</i> fragmented, maybe Wessex
needs a National Trust all of its <a href="http://wessexregionalists.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/trust-not.html" target="_blank">own</a>?)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>South Humberside apart though,
this was still a claim that worked with rather than against the Prescott geography.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Wessex</span><span style="font-family: "arial";"> is different because faced with that geography our response
is that we wouldn’t have started from here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We devoted most of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Case for
Wessex</i> to explaining why Wessex
is, to quote Thomas Hardy, a ‘practical provincial definition’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">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?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The London
regime always realises its mistake and pulls back from taking things further.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then busily covers up the evidence while
encouraging others to do likewise.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Alternatively, it hides
behind forms of official recognition that don’t require Wessex to be
defined.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another example would be awarding
our earldom to the Queen’s youngest son.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When in 2011 Prince William
became Duke of Cambridge, the reaction was more like ‘how nice’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their full potential for obstructing self-government
has yet to be tested.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Yet another trick is to use
‘Wessex’ as the name for
something smaller than Wessex,
like Wessex Water, or the Wessex Regional Health Authority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Some regions have their
capital city at their centre.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
central geographical feature of Wessex
is the empty expanse of Salisbury Plain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(Our big cities are round the edge, places of exchange with a wider
world.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That sense of a hollow centre is
often how it feels politically.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’re
told that we’re campaigning for a region that most of its residents don’t
recognise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet that’s a throw-away line;
it just avoids the need for any further thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thinking too about the
opportunities we now have to build a radical Wessex movement from the bottom up.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We had until then been ramping up the number
of candidates at each election.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead,
we were kept out of electioneering for over a decade, times when it looked as
if we might not survive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Tories claimed
that raising the deposit was necessary to deter ‘frivolous’ candidates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It didn’t.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>All it did was deter serious candidates without the Tories’ access to
loads of <a href="http://www.democraticaudit.com/?p=1587" target="_blank">money</a>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">And it shows how worried
they were, as well they ought to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So if the current
set-up is designed to deny us our identity, culturally and politically, then we
should feel honoured rather than surprised.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Let’s get on with re-awakening it for ourselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That means, above all, not trying to
influence those who have power but rather to do everything in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">our </i>power to sweep them aside.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Happy St Ealdhelm’s Day</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-12146521039361905422016-05-18T01:00:00.000-07:002016-05-24T15:14:30.626-07:00Wider Still and Wider?Leaflets for this year’s
Royal Bath & West Show are starting to drop through letterboxes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Far be it from us to suggest that the show is
run by a far Right clique but the leaflets <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i>
easily confused with party literature for UKIP or the BNP, draped in more Union
Jacks than you can shake a halyard at.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Far be it from us to suggest either that the organisers aren’t aware
that they run the premier agricultural show in Wessex: the Countess of Wessex was Show
President in 2010 and 2011 and since then has been Vice-Patron.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The B&W is one of the few longstanding
organisations that have served both ‘the West’ and ‘the South’ within Wessex: its
full name for many years was the Bath & West and Southern Counties Society,
the result of a merger in 1868.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Before
the permanent showground at Shepton Mallet was established in 1965 the show was
held all over Wessex, with
occasional forays as far as Swansea and Maidstone
(and on two occasions even Nottingham).
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OsgTqs2O-dE/VzuesTltvwI/AAAAAAAAAU8/VvqQc_KpxSsIpl8NMA7PxnHPHvyqfPk2gCLcB/s1600/RBWS.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OsgTqs2O-dE/VzuesTltvwI/AAAAAAAAAU8/VvqQc_KpxSsIpl8NMA7PxnHPHvyqfPk2gCLcB/s320/RBWS.jpg" width="152" /></a><span style="font-family: "arial";">But here we are<a href="http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/Royal-Bath-amp-West-2016-preview/story-29257730-detail/story.html" target="_blank"></a>: the ‘Great
British Festival of Agriculture, Entertainment, Food & Drink’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, for visitor numbers the B&W is well
behind both the Royal Welsh and the Royal Highland.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the inside pages, we’re told about ‘England’s
biggest celebration of rural life’, words incongruously accompanied by yet another
Union Jack.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Numerically, this is
contestable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yorkshire has a perfectly
good county show which styles itself ‘England’s premier agricultural event’
and its attendance figures lie in a similar range. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s no mention of Wessex at all
in the leaflet: even the ‘West Country’ only just slips in on the back page,
which tells us about traders exhibiting in the West Country for the first time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All in all, it sounds like a lost opportunity
for showcasing the region’s produce rather than somebody else’s.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">It seems that under its <a href="http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/s-new-guardian-promises-changes-improve-iconic/story-26005482-detail/story.html" target="_blank">new</a>
Chief Executive the B&W, instead of remaining what it is, and being good at
it, is determined to be what it’s not, another national festival that happens
to be located in Wessex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A bit like Glastonbury (and, <a href="http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/Sounds-like-success/story-29260988-detail/story.html" target="_blank">yes</a>,
Michael Eavis, this year’s President, is credited with sourcing the live
music).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In that case, it needs even more
visitors to fill the site and pay for it all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Now just short of its 240th birthday, the B&W has survived by moving
with the times but we hope it doesn’t bite off more than it can chew.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-big-question-what-is-the-royal-show-and-why-is-it-coming-to-an-end-after-170-years-1736176.html" target="_blank">fate</a> of Stoneleigh is a solemn reminder of
the risks ag show organisers must now constantly face.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’d like to say, <a href="http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/Royal-Bath-amp-West-2016-preview/story-29257730-detail/story.html" target="_blank">go</a> and support it while you still can, but if
it’s no more distinctive than many of the others, where would be the point?</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-16661645303253528602016-05-16T15:00:00.000-07:002016-05-16T15:46:07.442-07:00Post-Truth PoliticsIs an Eton
education good value for money?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From the
public’s point of view, it seems not, given Boris Johnson’s underwhelming analysis
of European history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/14/boris-johnson-interview-we-can-be-the-heroes-of-europe-by-voting/" target="_blank">lit</a> up the
weekend with his dire warning that the EU is little better than a Fourth
Reich.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For others, it’s the EUSSR, but
we’ve learnt to recognise that political consistency is no barrier when
conspiracy theories are in town.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
string-pullers can also be variously identified as Saudi
Arabia, the CIA, Mossad, the Vatican…
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">BoJo was backed by a fellow
Old Etonian, Somerset MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who told the media that<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: green;"> “</span>Philip II
of Spain, Louis XIV of France, Napoleon and Hitler all wanted to create a
single European power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What Boris has
said is the EU is following the footsteps of these historic figures but using
different means."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>Not so fast,
Jacob: an Oxford
history graduate should be rather more precise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Philip wanted a more powerful Spain, headed by himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Louis and Napoleon each wanted a more
powerful France,
headed by himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hitler wanted a more
powerful Germany,
headed by himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not one of these rulers
wanted a powerful Europe, an association in which all countries are regarded as
equals, a Europe designed to clip the wings of
imperial ambition on the part of unfettered autocrats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, the most appropriate equal of all of
them could be none other than BoJo, who wants a more powerful Britain, headed
by himself and up to who knows what mischief in the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those advocating a united Europe have done so
chiefly with the aim of ending centuries of internal strife through challenging
or breaking up the great powers: the Duc de Sully’s Grand Design (1630),
William Penn’s European Diet (1693), Auguste Comte’s Occidental Republic (1852)
and Mikhail Bakunin’s United States of Europe (1867) were all schemes with this
end in mind.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The fawning media remind us
that BoJo is a ‘classical scholar’, as if knowledge of the Roman
Empire is really that much help.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The entity most consciously modelled on it was the British
Empire, the Pax Britannica, greatly admired by Hitler, largely for
that reason.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>BoJo was quite right to say
that pan-European thinking does sometimes draw on the Imperium Romanum as a model.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Does he think that re-creating the Roman province of Britannia out of its post-Roman nations was
something different?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps drawing on
the legacy of Rome
is OK if <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">we</i> do it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>BoJo is also quite right that there’s little deep
loyalty to a common European identity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Nor will there be if he and other nation-state grandstanders succeed in
blocking its emergence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The question is
whether Europe in 2050 will be better off if
Europeans stop working together, as Europeans.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 309.75pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The EU referendum debate ought
to matter but instead it’s been reduced to a willy-waving contest among overgrown
schoolboys over who gets to lead the Conservative Party.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What should be a debate about an uncertain
future has been reduced to which unpleasant bit of history is judged most
likely to repeat itself, in altogether different circumstances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jonathan Freedland, writing in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Guardian</i> (the ex-Manchester London newspaper) on Friday,
highlighted the alternate reality of ‘post-truth politicians’, buffoons who
<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/13/boris-johnson-donald-trump-post-truth-politician" target="_blank">aren’t</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are the folk who form the
Government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If we voted for them then the
bigger fools are us.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">As usual, what’s never
injected into the debate is any criticism of the UK and how it’s governed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From a regionalist perspective, the European issue
comes down to whether ‘Leave’ or ‘Remain’ is more likely to deliver regional
parliaments in England powerful
enough to end London
dominance forever.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>None of the big
players will be asked that question by the media and so we won’t get an
answer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’d just like to point out that
if the EU is undemocratic, unaccountable, bureaucratic and corrupt, what's the
UK?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How is a multi-national structure alleged to
have been put together by banks and big business worse than a union that well
suited investors in the Bank of England, the Honourable East <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east-india-company-original-corporate-raiders" target="_blank">India</a> Company and
Lloyds of London?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who will defend, with
any sincerity, the further entrenching of a subsidiarity-free constitution
involving huge over-centralisation of power, wealth and talent in one small
corner of the country, an electoral system in which the vast majority of votes
are thrown <a href="http://www.makevotesmatter.org.uk/the-pr-alliance/" target="_blank">away</a> as worthless, and a Parliament that since 1571 has been firmly
under the City of London’s
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_remembrancer#Criticism" target="_blank">thumb</a>?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The frying-pan, however hot, is <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/john-grahl/no-alternative-in-europe-to-long-hard-struggle" target="_blank">still</a>
a safer place than the fire.</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-61711889132364925992016-05-14T08:00:00.000-07:002016-05-14T08:23:32.837-07:00Stacking UpLibraries news tends to be
bad news.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Closures mainly, accompanied
by the snarling of those who think that in the Internet age all books should be
burned, as useless relics of a barbarous past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Little thought is given to the social role of libraries as places to
meet and share, especially for the elderly and vulnerable, or their educational
role in actively promoting literacy.
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Some good news comes from
the LibrariesWest consortium, which <a href="http://www.librarieswest.org.uk/about/" target="_blank">links</a> Somerset
and the four unitary authorities in what used to be Avon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The public library services of Dorset and Poole will be joining the consortium in June.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a result, users will be able to access over
150 libraries ‘coast to coast’, from the Bristol Channel to the English Channel, using a single library card.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Items can be reserved, borrowed, renewed and
returned at any LibrariesWest library regardless of where borrowed from.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>LibrariesWest is also introducing a shared computer
system to manage loans and stock, offering online searches of a unified
catalogue of 2.5 million items.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The London regime’s expectation is that councils
will increasingly work together to reduce costs, including through pooling
their buying power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Financial pressures
and technical changes mean that it’s happening across a wide range of services,
from police and fire to archives and museums to smaller councils pooling back-office
functions like audit, payroll, procurement and IT.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Costs could be reduced and
effectiveness improved much more rapidly, and with much less pain, if Wessex
had an elected assembly to co-ordinate all these ad hoc efforts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, the Welsh Government’s National
Procurement Service has led the commissioning of a single library management
system for all 22 public library authorities in Wales.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is but <a href="http://nps.gov.wales/about-us/about-nps?lang=en" target="_blank">one</a> of its many initiatives,
designed to empower local economies as well as cut costs across the whole
public sector.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An assembly in Wessex would
have its own ‘invest-to-save’ budget to spend on driving forward regional
priorities, which could be very different from those that London thinks best
for us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wessex
needs to be free of interference from Whitehall
departments that, by imposing ideological solutions through institutional
silos, only gets in the way of sensible answers to challenging questions.</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-10343636449401650022016-05-12T15:00:00.000-07:002016-05-12T16:51:52.382-07:00Thou Shalt NotThursday last week saw a
plethora of different elections across the UK and among these polls was a
referendum in St Ives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Local folk voted
by 83% to 17% in favour of a policy to <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-36204795" target="_blank">ban</a> the building of new second homes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Faced with a housing market described as
‘financial cleansing’ of the locals, that’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/03/st-ives-second-home-referendum-financial-cleansing" target="_blank">no</a> surprise, though of course it
does nothing to ease the pressure on houses already built.
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Reactions ranged from great
interest, among towns and villages elsewhere, including western Wessex,
to threats of judicial review by appalled developers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wessex
already has an example of this type of policy, in the Lynton and Lynmouth
Neighbourhood Plan in Devon, but this could be argued as an exception because
of its location within the Exmoor
National Park.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What happens when exceptions become the new
rule?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Ministers in Lunnon insist
that this is the sort of thing up with which they will <a href="http://www.planningresource.co.uk/article/1321835/minister-attacks-neighbourhood-plan-policy" target="_blank">not</a> put.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The law will be changed to curb these uppity yokels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cornwall
is surely somewhere that only comes into existence during the holiday season
and switches itself off afterwards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Localism?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oh, we really are having a laugh.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The current issue of the MK
magazine <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cornish Nation</i> highlights
the raw deal that Cornwall
is increasingly getting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A cross-border
Devonwall Parliamentary constituency is looming, regardless of token recognition
of the Cornish as a national minority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(If
approved, this will make it impossible for MK candidates to represent Cornwall and only Cornwall,
just as it will make it impossible for us to represent Wessex and only Wessex.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Last month, a paltry £150,000 a year <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-36104716" target="_blank">grant</a> to
support the Cornish language – equivalent to about <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/interactive/2013/sep/12/full-list-mps-expenses-ipsa-data-interactive-2013" target="_blank">three</a> MPs’ expenses claims –
was peremptorily withdrawn, to widespread dismay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cornwall’s
Grand Bard described this spiteful act, so damaging to the tourism offer, as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“an ideological decision based on
indifference and not a financial one based on fiscal responsibility”.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Last year’s ‘Cornwall
Devolution Deal’ was so feeble as to be an abuse of the word ‘devolution’, so
limited in scope that it did not merit legislation or even a Commons
debate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The key areas of housing and
planning are excluded from the deal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Instead, the centralist inspection regime has imposed on Cornwall a much higher
housebuilding target than that deemed appropriate by the majority of local residents
and also re-written the council’s affordable housing policies to undermine their
effectiveness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">As if to pour <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/judgment-paves-way-to-build-more-homes-on-small-sites" target="_blank">petrol</a> on the
flames, the Court of Appeal yesterday <a href="http://www.landmarkchambers.co.uk/news.aspx?id=4068" target="_blank">ruled</a> it lawful for the London
regime to prevent councils seeking contributions to affordable housing from sites
of 10 homes or fewer, overturning a previous ruling obtained by Reading and West Berkshire
councils.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These small windfall sites,
often redevelopment sites, are the sort that can make a significant – and generally
uncontroversial – contribution to housing development in our towns and villages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Excluding them means that councils are ever
more reliant on the volume housebuilders to deliver their one affordable for
every two market houses.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">This in turn puts ever more
pressure on councils to allow more market houses than are actually needed by
the local population, leading to yet more second homes and an influx of retired
folk whose social care costs later in life are met from local taxation, not from
national taxation or by the areas in which they paid taxes when working.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Meanwhile, as the Revenue Support Grant is
being squeezed out of existence its place is being taken by the New Homes
Bonus, a shameless bribe to councils to build or lose out.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">This all began in the 1980s when
we largely stopped building council houses and loaded the cost of social
housing onto homebuyers, who themselves are often struggling to afford the prices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Landowners do nicely though, with three
attempts since 1945 at capturing their heightened development value through
taxation or public ownership overturned by the Tories and no fourth attempt in
sight.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">The point we have to hammer
home is that you really do get what you vote for.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cornwall
elected the full set of six Tory MPs last year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What did it expect to get in return?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Little victories like St Ives mean nothing if the one lot can still
count on your vote ‘to keep the other lot out’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Tory, Labour, LibDem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All
centralist and all rotten to the core.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So
forget ‘the other lot’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Be your own lot
and deny them all the power to do your community lasting harm.</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-16242209632680085492016-05-10T15:33:00.000-07:002016-05-10T16:12:57.733-07:00The Road to 2020Nick Xylas <a href="http://www.bristol.public-i.tv/core/portal/webcast_interactive/223205" target="_blank">polled</a> 62 votes
in Eastville on Thursday, a sound base from which to expand at Bristol’s next election in four years’ time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 2020 we’ll have a General Election to
fight as <a href="http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/Mayoral-election-won-lost/story-29243061-detail/story.html" target="_blank">well</a>, so planning needs to start straightaway.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Nick’s own reactions to the result, see
the Eastville <a href="http://wr4eastville.weebly.com/blog/and-the-winner-is" target="_blank">blog</a>.
<br />
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">It was clear at the count
that voters in this two-member ward are not so tribal as might have been
supposed, with many splitting their choice between two candidates from rival
parties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The point needs to be made to
voters whose first loyalty is to a party with only one candidate – the Greens
and TUSC in this case – that giving the second vote to WR is a reasonable
option.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It also means that a negative
campaign would be counter-productive, though this is true of many places in Bristol given its
genuinely multi-party profile.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">The result wasn’t bad for a
first go – across the city, one Tory and four FibDem candidates managed less
than double this and at 0.849% of the poll it was in percentage terms our third
best ever.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Second place goes to our
founder, then known as Viscount Weymouth, who polled 0.855% when he stood in the
first Parliamentary contest at Westbury in 1974.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First place goes to Tom Thatcher, who took 3%
at Westbury in 1979.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tom was a popular
local farmer, active in the community, and so, naturally, we can’t agree that any
similarity of name with the then Leader of the Opposition could have influenced the outcome. Wessex voters are too smart for that.</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-55200776222749986292016-05-04T11:11:00.000-07:002016-05-04T11:44:37.335-07:00Choice At LastOur President Colin Bex and
Secretary-General David Robins were in Bristol
at the weekend to help our candidate for the Eastville Ward, Nick Xylas, with
his campaign there. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All three are shown <a href="http://wr4eastville.weebly.com/blog/moving-towards-the-election" target="_blank">here</a>
at an impromptu stall set up in Eastville
Park.
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Nick unexpectedly had the
chance to move to a new flat that same weekend, leaving him, equally
unexpectedly, to rely on others to do much of the leafleting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fortunately, Nick had the process
well-organised, with lists of addresses prepared for each polling
district.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A surprising number of
addresses were not on the electoral register at all, which may be down simply
to folk moving house or possibly to the recent changeover to individual rather
than household registration, which may have <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-34652008" target="_blank">cost</a> the unwary their right to vote this
time round.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As we keep saying, the
Victorians thought through electoral law very carefully and it’s suffered
heavily from ignorant meddling over the past two decades, postal vote <a href="https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/04/fear-the-banana-republic-postal-ballot/" target="_blank">fraud</a> on
an industrial scale being the worst consequence revealed so far.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And what <a href="http://evolvepolitics.com/twitter-erupts-bbc-struggle-keep-tory-election-fraud-wraps-may-elections/" target="_blank">else</a> is currently kept under wraps?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No wonder some question what, in the absence
of <a href="http://mebyonkernow.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/how-do-we-get-from-battle-buses-to-fair.html" target="_blank">real</a> reform, is the <a href="https://psephologyfromtheperiphery.wordpress.com/2016/05/03/the-big-yawn-devonwall-police-chief-election-stirs-up-apathy/" target="_blank">point</a> in voting.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Bad weather didn’t help us and
it now seems highly unlikely that full coverage of the ward will be achieved
ahead of polling day tomorrow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The best
we can hope for is that by targeting key locations within the ward we do our
bit to ensure that news will pass around by word of mouth or electronic media.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nick takes the long-term view that 2016
is primarily about learning how best to do a local election campaign, with the
idea already in mind that 2020 and the run-up to it offer the opportunity to do
the thing really well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One suggestion is
a regular ward newsletter – the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eastville
Wyvern</i> perhaps?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">This is the first time that
voters at a local election anywhere have had a Wessex Regionalist on the ballot
paper, so we as much as they can make our mark.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Nick is the first WR candidate to contest a seat wholly located in
historic Gloucestershire (the Wansdyke Parliamentary constituency, contested in
1983, included some Gloucestershire wards but was predominantly in Somerset).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With this election therefore we can claim to have raised
our standard in every one of our eight historic shires.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And – who knows? – we may yet be pleasantly
surprised when the results are declared on Sunday.</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-88180970545674326392016-05-01T05:00:00.000-07:002016-05-01T05:13:33.398-07:00WessexitOf all the reasons for
remaining in the EU the most compelling arises from quietly contemplating the
alternative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Being marooned on a small
island run by Gove, Johnson and IDS is a chilling prospect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It also smacks of betrayal of those elsewhere
working for a better Europe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The <a href="http://sputniknews.com/europe/20160425/1038562733/denmark-eu-brexit-denxit.html" target="_blank">Danes</a> in particular fear isolation
without their sceptical British friends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What needs testing – and testing hard – this month and next is the idea
that Brexit would unleash a decentralist wave upon whose crest regionalists as
much as eurosceptics will surf smoothly to success.
<br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">That was the idea dismissed
this week in a front-page report in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Western
Boring Views</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mark Berrisford-Smith,
head of economics for HSBC UK Commercial Banking, told regional business
leaders in Plymouth
that negotiations over Brexit, and associated economic uncertainties, could
pre-occupy Government for years, delaying other decisions, with the
decentralisation agenda being one item moved to the back burner.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Of course, ministers could
clear their desks of unnecessary distractions by pressing ahead with that
agenda right now, but that sort of trust has never existed between central and
local government and no amount of crisis will create it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our diagnosis is that the sickness goes to
the heart of the relationship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Earning
central government’s trust should be no part of local government’s job; central
government should exist solely as the obedient servant of the localities that
elect it and if it fails them it should <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/22/george-osborne-school-regime-spelling-test-local-authorities-exam" target="_blank">expect</a> to be abolished forthwith.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wessexit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">So let’s not get too excited
by the idea of devolution, Osborne-style.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It’s not what we’ve campaigned for all these years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Municipal
Journal</i> last week allowed Cllr George Nobbs, Leader of Norfolk County
Council a page to share his frustration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Beneath a photo of the East Anglian flag and the headline ‘Killing off
devolution’, he wrote:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">“There is no more enthusiastic proponent of regional
devolution than myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have supported
the idea of moving powers from Whitehall to East Anglia all
my adult life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When on Budget day the
Chancellor announced a draft deal for East Anglia
I nailed my colours to the mast in the most literal way, flying the flag of East Anglia
from Norfolk County Hall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However,
remarkably, the institutional arrogance of central government seems set to give
us a deal that cannot be sold locally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As it stands not one of the three counties that make up the ‘Eastern
Powerhouse’ look likely to be able to sell the current deal to members or
residents…</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">The current ‘devolution deal’ was the result of a
knee-jerk reaction to the Scottish referendum result and bears no resemblance
to any other form of devolution in the UK, other than the insistence on the
office of a London-style mayor for rural England…</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">The office of elected mayor is fine for London but universally opposed in shire county England.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Senior government ministers have said time
and time again that in the past devolution has failed because it was
top-down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They had learned, they said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This would be bottom-up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We could design our own deal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We would be in the driving seat, they
said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When we urged them to consider any
alternative to an elected mayor (because we couldn’t sell it to our citizens)
they said it was non-negotiable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘No
mayor no deal’ was the answer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were
not even prepared to consider changing the one word mayor for another title.”</span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">First it was Prescott, now it’s
Osborne.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can have any colour of
devolution you want as long as it’s black.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>So black you can’t see what’s going on. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The mayoral model is non-negotiable because
it’s part of a London-party consensus that values opaqueness above all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The democratic model, taking decisions
openly, in full view of the press and public, and transparently, subject to the
forensic examination of political debate in council chamber or legislative
assembly, is judged not fit for purpose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>End all the politics, we’re told.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Actions, not words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things, and
without continual accountability it’s very easy both to do things wrong and to
do the wrong things.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Next month, we’re told, we
need to reject the unaccountable Brussels
bureaucracy in favour of, well, what?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>How is accountability unfolding <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/27/local-government-failed-state-mayors-george-osborne-unpopular-plan" target="_blank">here</a>?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We need to put our own, British values first, apparently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Values like privatising our schools and our
NHS, transforming them into profit centres far beyond any hope of democratic
redress.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">We’ve been told many times
that the dissolution of English political unity would be too high a price to
pay for the benefits regionalism brings, even if the regions reflect
deep-rooted identities like Wessex and East Anglia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet the displacement of our historic shires
by ‘Greater Lincolnshire’, ‘North Midlands’, ‘Tees Valley’ and other mayored
innovations isn’t viewed as a problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Nor
is it viewed as part of the ‘euro-plot’, as would any attempt to give England the
regional governments now standard across all large west European
countries.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Ben Page, Chief Executive
of Ipsos MORI, also writing in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Municipal
Journal</i>, noted, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“The new rash of
elected mayors for improbable geographies face some real challenges in getting
noticed in any way at all.”</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s
just it though.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They’re not there to be
noticed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A revolution in how England is
governed is now underway as secret deals are lined up for sign-off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Personality mayors and commissioners for
made-up areas will preside as local services are handed wholesale to global
financial interests.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Do the public care?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According to Ben Page’s data they do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Around half (49%) support the principle of
decentralising local decision-making powers, with only 17% opposed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are two main worries that are shared by
58% of those who don’t support devolution.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">One is the spectre of
‘postcode lottery’ – the fear that services would start to vary between areas
to an unacceptable degree (though it’s surprisingly acceptable for the Irish or
the French to have different standards).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Keeping the number of English regions well below double figures is one
way to minimise this fear: the present hotch-potch of ‘improbable geographies’
is going to have to be sorted out sooner or later and the sooner the
better.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another way is to make
devolution real, so that regional politicians cannot blame Whitehall if they fail to match the standards
of the best.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The second worry is that
politicians in the provinces aren’t up to the job and so can’t be trusted with
real power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s hardly surprising:
real talent isn’t going to be attracted to run an ever-shrinking range of services
subject to ever more intrusive interference from ministers and their civil
servants anxious about poor performance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Breaking that vicious circle is easy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Tolerate responsibility through the ballot box, open up the
opportunities and the talent will come.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Or, to be more accurate, it will stay exactly where it is and not be
lured to London.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">If being locked indoors with
the Tories is the best reason for opposing Brexit then a good second is that
the debate has been framed in terms of sovereignty instead of subsidiarity and
on those terms Brexit poses an unacceptable risk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That risk is that sovereignty regained will
be sovereignty hoarded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All Europe needs a debate on what can be done closer to the
people than it is today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if that
means identifying things that are done <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">too</i>
close to be done well – because there are some activities that can now only be
effective on a scale beyond that of the classical nation-state.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">It needs to be a European
debate, not a British or English one, because only in the idea of a Europe of a Hundred Flags can small nations and historic
regions achieve the recognition the nation-states are determined to deny us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We hear a lot about how the EU is a malignant
conspiracy to destroy those nation-states and their historic identities long-forged
in good old-fashioned lethal conflict.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Michael Gove looks forward to ‘patriotic renewal’, while Jacques Attali
fears another Franco-German war before the century is out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Meanwhile, the British State for which we’re
supposed to boldly patrify shows how much it really cares about our identity, turning
our ancient shires, the roots of our democracy, into clone-zones of the
metropolis and topping each with its own little Caesar.</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-8252737162263421992016-04-30T23:55:00.000-07:002016-05-01T03:46:57.040-07:00A Tale of Two CitiesBristol City Council is
still weathering the storm it brought down upon itself for not marking St
George’s Day this year, having argued that the city is ‘<a href="http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/Bristol-multicultural-St-George-s-Day/story-29167059-detail/story.html" target="_blank">too</a> multicultural’ for
such an event.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lack of interest might
have been a plausible excuse, but not that all cultures are valued except one.
<br />
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Others do things
differently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Professor John Denham is
Director of Winchester University’s Centre for English Identity and
Politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Interviewed by Wessex Society
for its magazine <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wessex Chronicle</i>,
he recalled the situation in Southampton
during his time as a Labour MP there:</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="MsoPageNumber"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">“I helped organise St George’s Day in
Southampton and Southampton’s a very diverse city – so how do you have a St
George’s Day which can involve everybody and yet is still an English
festival?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story we tell is that Southampton
is a great English city, that’s been there throughout English history, and it’s
always been made up of all the people who’ve lived there, which because it’s a
port city has always been people from all over the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People can understand that you can be both
English and very diverse, through your history and everybody that’s come
together to make the city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A couple of
years ago I was working on this with a young Sikh woman councillor, born in
Southampton, and we discovered that we both had had relatives in the British
forces serving in the Far East during the
Second World War.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s an example of
how family and local histories can be inter-twined as part of a common story.”</span></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="MsoPageNumber"><span style="font-family: "arial";">The
difference then is that Southampton projects the primacy of territory, locally
and nationally – loyalty to place rather than to race – whereas Bristol appears scared of
any continuity with its foundational past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Curiously, when it comes to Wessex and the marking of St Ealdhelm’s Day, the
roles are reversed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bristol
is happy to fly the Wyvern outside the Council House (or ‘City Hall’, for the
Anti-Mayor and his fellow deniers of distinctiveness); Southampton
still sits in stony silence, unmoved by calls to fly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps this will be the year Southampton sees sense?</span></span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-89430594698632181142016-04-25T15:00:00.000-07:002016-04-25T15:39:21.839-07:00Review of 2015Every year when we submit
our accounts to the <a href="http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/" target="_blank">Electoral Commission</a> we are also required to provide a 'Review of Political
Activities' covering the year just gone.<br />
<br />
The 2015 Review has recently been forwarded to the Commission and here is what
it says:
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">“The major event of the year was the General
Election, which saw our President, Colin Bex return to Oxfordshire to again
challenge David Cameron for the safe Tory seat of Witney.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The overall result was no surprise but Colin
was pleased to see a 77% increase in his own vote and a midway ranking among
the candidates, concluding that if voters remain willing to keep their options
open this bodes well for the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed,
it was our best result since 2001.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first-past-the-post
voting system continues to disadvantage smaller parties; it creates
presumptions about who is worth hearing that prevent a minor party candidate
even putting forward an alternative point of view.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was again the case at Witney, where Colin
and other minor party candidates were barred from even attending the
hustings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Local press coverage was seriously
incompetent, even to the point of publishing inexcusable untruths, though <span style="color: black;">full colour feature articles in both editions of the </span></span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial";">Wall Street Journal<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> ensured global awareness of th</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">e Wessex cause.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">The importance of online activities was
underlined by a sharp spike in viewing figures for the Party’s blog during the
campaign.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In April, there were nearly
3,000 page-views, nearly double the peak of interest during the Eastleigh by-election in 2013.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In May, the Party was left without a core website
following the catastrophic failure of the Zyweb platform that hosted it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thanks to Rick Heyse, a new Full Member with
the requisite skills, the Party now has a new site – </span></i><span style="font-family: "arial";"><i><a href="http://www.wessexregionalists.info/" target="_blank">www.wessexregionalists.info</a>
</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">– to which are gradually being added the
range of features increasingly expected of a party website in the 21st century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Colin Bex has been an active ambassador for
the Party, attending conferences on climate change, in Paris, and democracy, in
Brussels, and the June march in London
against austerity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the march, he
spoke with Jeremy Corbyn, soon to be the Labour Leader, about the need for
regionalism.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">A wholly Conservative Government took
office in May <span style="color: black;">with some two-thirds of the electorate either
not supporting or actively opposing it</span>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It has demonstrated a deep hostility towards regionalism and local
democracy, <a href="http://wessexregionalists.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/the-value-of-difference.html" target="_blank">even</a> as financial pressures compel public services to re-organise on
a regional basis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It continues to
advance the view – shared with Labour – that the imposition of unwanted elected
mayors is a preferable substitute for substantial devolution to democratic regional
assemblies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the second half of 2015
our attention shifted to the May 2016 local elections.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nick Xylas was endorsed as the Party’s
candidate for Bristol City Council, Eastville Ward and much activity has
focused on developing a framework for that campaign.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">Policies adopted during the year have emphasised
our radical difference from the current mainstream.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Party now explicitly supports a
confederal ‘Europe of a Hundred Flags’, more
democratic governance of public limited companies and a referendum on the
future of the monarchy, while opposing child genital mutilation, ritual
slaughter and the renewal of Trident.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
continue to benefit from the ‘Scotland
effect’ as the SNP consolidates its hold and voters in England also look around for alternatives to the
failed London
parties. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The level of justifiable
optimism within the Party is higher than for many, many years.”</span></i></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-33159192986045637272016-04-07T18:00:00.000-07:002016-04-07T18:29:29.921-07:00Keeping It Under Your HatWith 11.5 million documents
to read through, we’ve not heard the last<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/commentisfree/2016/apr/06/simon-jenkins-power-of-press-panama-papers-investigative-journalists" target="_blank"></a> of the revelations from the Panama
Papers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>David Cameron is on the
defensive, though Jeremy Corbyn’s attacks are blunted by the fact that his
party was once led by one half of the Blair couple, now rumoured to be worth a
<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/tony-blair/11670425/Revealed-Tony-Blair-worth-a-staggering-60m.html" target="_blank">cool</a> £60 million.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If Labour’s a party
with the interests of the common man at heart, it certainly hasn’t acted like
one.
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Equally revealing is the
information that Cameron blocked EU plans for greater transparency over
trusts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It brings into sharp relief
what’s at stake in the EU referendum because the issue presented as pro- or
anti-Brussels can in fact be reversed and presented as pro- or
anti-London.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Brexit won’t deliver
regionalism but it could very easily produce a London regime on steroids.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Johnson as Prime Minister, ousting the
fatally discredited thinking of the Cameron / Osborne axis, but even more in thrall
to City backers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Massive deregulation
paving the way for active promotion of the UK as <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/panama-papers-david-cameron-uk-tax-avoidance-tax-havens-overseas-territories-a6968791.html" target="_blank">the</a> place for the globally
corrupt to do business.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>London
helping itself to still more of the national wealth while denying other parts
of the UK
still more of the powers needed to turn themselves around.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Openly, the fight for Brexit is being fought
in the name of democracy, and on that score sound points can be made, <a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/will-britain-leave-eu-over-panama-papers-how-david-cameron-may-affect-brexit-vote-2349347" target="_blank">but</a>,
behind the scenes, kleptocracy would be the real winner.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">A clear pointer to the
direction of travel appeared this week when Dominic Grieve highlighted that
tax-dodging is an industry that provides a great many much-needed <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/britain-should-not-crack-down-on-tax-havens-as-it-would-destroy-their-livelihoods-senior-tory-mp-a6969121.html" target="_blank">jobs</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In places like the British
Virgin Islands that matter so much to all of us, if we can just remember
where they are.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It does indeed provide
jobs, socially useless ones, just as it destroys socially useful jobs by
denying the public purse the funds with which to sustain them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such is the mentally <a href="http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2016/04/07/panama-papers/" target="_blank">sick</a>, insecure society
that Thatcherism has spawned, ferreting around for whatever bits of work are on
offer from a parasite class to whom caps must forever be doffed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dismantling the tax havens is technically a very
easy thing to do; it’s just politically impossible to pass the necessary legislation
because of a longstanding Wesm’ster consensus against it. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">George Osborne’s plan to
nationalise all local authority schools, and then privatise them – a bit like
the Dissolution of the Monasteries – is another pointer to the direction of
travel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Academies don’t have to teach
the national curriculum, so it will presumably disappear, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/mar/18/ideological-zeal-behind-academies-and-loss-of-parent-governors" target="_blank">along</a> with parent
governors and any other vestige of democracy that might give children the wrong
idea about how our society can be run.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Why would you <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/jan/23/national-curriculum-review" target="_blank">need</a> a national curriculum, written down and open to
challenge, when it can simply be ‘understood’ by the chief executives of the
big McSchool academy chains?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Understood, that is, to mean teaching that a fraudster is just a better
entrepreneur than the competition, that tax-dodging is wealth creation and that
the only thing the law-abiding individual need ever fear is the over-mighty
State?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dis-education and mis-education
are the new battleground because what you don’t know can’t hurt you, can it?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Englishness is many things
but one of the most cherished is a love of secrecy, or privacy as it’s
usually termed, a pathological distrust of the other that underpins the
rejection of any potential for collective action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s why we prefer houses, even in city
centres, to the flats that those on the mainland regard as a far more rational
use of land.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Across most of Scandinavia, tax returns are public documents: folk don’t
have hang-ups about what they earn or the tax they pay on it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps they believe they really have earned
it: so many of our top ‘earners’ know deep down that their salaries are out of
all proportion to their real social value.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>English society, obsessed with covering up the truth in order to protect
a ruling class who aren’t worth their privileges, is a society at war with
itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rulers keep winning by
setting each serf against all the rest and presenting themselves as the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/commentisfree/2016/apr/06/simon-jenkins-power-of-press-panama-papers-investigative-journalists" target="_blank">good</a>
guys.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s been like that for 950 years.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The system was imposed from
outside, from Normandy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Can it be overthrown from within, or will it
take some major help from Brussels
to achieve our liberation?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The history
of those 950 years furnishes one very clear answer.</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-85892492140105050912016-03-16T16:00:00.000-07:002016-03-16T16:46:07.172-07:00Devo MinThere are quite a few bright
spots for Wessex
folk to cheer about in today’s budget – and not just a freeze on cider duty – but
look beyond the headlines.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s good to
see <a href="http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/14347556.George_Says_Yes__Success_in_campaign_for_children___s_A_E_cash/" target="_blank">money</a> for children’s A&E in Southampton,
but isn’t the rest of the NHS on life support?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“more resilient train line in
the South West”</i> (in other words, dealing with Dawlish) is backed, though
this actually <a href="http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/policy/single-view/view/rail-in-the-2016-uk-budget.html" target="_blank">only</a> extends to a feasibility study that’s currently stalled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We mustn’t forget the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“</i><i>£<span style="font-family: "arial";">20 m</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><i><span style="font-family: "arial";">illion to help young families
onto the housing ladder in the South West”</span></i></i>, funded from the 3% stamp
duty surcharge on additional properties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Osborne says that’s a reward for good behaviour – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“proof that when the South West votes blue, their voice is heard loud
in Westminster”</i>
– but if we controlled our own resources and made our own decisions the cynical
bribes wouldn’t be necessary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With MPs
in the South West still being urged to <a href="http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/South-West-MPs-urged-rebel-HS2-region-gets-7/story-28697862-detail/story.html" target="_blank">rebel</a> over HS2, it seems they could do
with more than a little regionalist help in turning up the volume.
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">We’ll be studying the
financial detail before commenting further on those aspects that naturally fall
within the Chancellor’s brief.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Meanwhile,
we can comment at once on those that don’t but are there anyway.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘Devolution’, so called, can’t be taken
seriously so long as it’s viewed as part of some national productivity campaign,
no more than a footnote in the Government’s spending plans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Constitutional change should be about
democratic renewal, not the further empowerment of unaccountable business
interests.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are we happy too with the theft
of our publicly funded schools in their entirety?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Theft it is, to nationalise the powers of a
tier of government closer to the people, without its consent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where’s the referendum on that?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">That’s why the devolution
deals announced today are so pitiful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If
the local councils <a href="http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/1billion-devolution-deal-Bristol-region-looks/story-28936550-detail/story.html" target="_blank">agree</a>, there’ll be a Mayor for ‘Avon, Mk. II’, on <a href="http://www.somersetguardian.co.uk/North-East-Somerset-MP-warns-plans-new-West/story-28935530-detail/story.html" target="_blank">top</a> of the
one Bristol already has, and despite the one Bath has just
rejected.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other parts of Wessex are
still trying to line up their bids for more of the same.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In East Anglia, <a href="http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/George-Osborne-announces-East-Anglia-devolution/story-28934753-detail/story.html" target="_blank">councils</a> willing,
there’ll be a Mayor too, heading the first region-wide elected administration
in East Anglian history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like it or not,
there won’t be a Mayor of Wessex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which
is just as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We demand the open, transparent
debate of a legislative assembly, like Wales
or Scotland,
not a behind-the-scenes fixer placed beyond accountability for a full four-year
term.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The whole mayoral obsession is
part of a failure to understand that London’s
dominance over England
is about the inter-regional distribution of political power, <a href="http://wessexregionalists.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/we-are-not-london.html" target="_blank">not</a> the fact that
it has a Boris and we don’t.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">As with the North East
referendum in 2004, what’s currently on offer may end up rejected locally as
too little to bother with for the democratic and financial costs attached.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’ve maintained a bold alternative that’s
been rejected by all the London parties,
essentially for the mortal sin of being ambitious in what we propose for Wessex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All we need say in response is, where’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">your</i> vision then?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>End the excuses, start rolling out REAL regional
devolution, and do it now.</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-12396712548046064872016-03-14T11:11:00.000-07:002016-03-14T12:48:18.467-07:00More, or Less? You ChooseYes, you do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because just when you think that London,
after all it’s had so <a href="http://wessexregionalists.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/pop-goes-weasel.html" target="_blank">far</a>, can’t get greedier yet, along <a href="http://www.railtechnologymagazine.com/Rail-News/crossrail-2-must-be-developed-as-a-priority-and-delivered-by-2033--nic" target="_blank">comes</a> Crossrail 2.
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The ‘National’
Infrastructure Commission last week recommended that the scheme – a north-south
rail link across the capital – should be funded at once, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“as a priority”</i>, so it can open in 2033.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its Chairman, Lord Adonis, said that London needs Crossrail 2 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“as quickly as possible”</i> to relieve
congestion on Tubes and trains.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Crossrail 2 will help keep London moving… we should get on with it right
away”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>The smart money is on funding
being announced as soon as Wednesday’s budget.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Now, it’s arguable that
Crossrail 2 is an excellent scheme that will indeed deliver the benefits
promised.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But so too are many
others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wessex cities don’t have congestion
on their underground metro systems because we’re still waiting for them to be
built.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many of our market towns could do
with their trains <a href="http://wessexregionalists.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/tunnel-vision.html" target="_blank">back</a>: many have mushroomed in size since the trains were lost
through dodgy accounting under the Beeching axe.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The initial east-west
Crossrail cost £14.8 billion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Crossrail
2 will cost between £27 billion and £32 billion, at 2014 prices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Adonis’ Commission recommends that London should contribute
more than half the money.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why not all of
it, since it’s of no benefit whatsoever to us?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What about getting us moving too?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Why not a moratorium on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">any</i>
new national funding for infrastructure in London until the rest of the ‘United’ Kingdom
has caught up?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For how long?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>About 100 years should do it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Why does this happen?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>London’s
MPs don’t form a Commons majority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
fact, 89% of MPs represent constituencies outside London.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Even adding in London’s
commuter belt doesn’t take us anywhere near a majority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So why do our MPs so submissively vote for
our taxes to be poured into this bottomless pit?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why do they soak up the lies from ‘experts’
that this is a good investment from which we all benefit in the end, even as we look around us at our shrivelling community landscape?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s time our politics – so good at
pretending to represent social class divisions – grew a geographical dimension
to match.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The SNP have shown how it’s
done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The <a href="http://wessexregionalists.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/a-taste-of-wessex.html" target="_blank">revolt</a> needs to come <a href="http://www.wessexregionalists.info/newslink/renewed-vigour-at-annual-general-assembly" target="_blank">south</a>.</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-39153571051008903472016-03-03T08:00:00.000-08:002016-03-04T14:23:50.756-08:00Ourselves AloneOne of the most persistent
demands made of us by non-members is that we should work to set up a
confederation of decentralist parties, on an all-England
or all-Britain
basis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a course of action fraught
with difficulties, rather like trying to get the cart to go before the horse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So let’s take it apart, piece by piece.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Get set for some iconoclasm.
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The first assumption is that
confederation is the politics of the present.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And that it’s working.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">It’s that the UK, or maybe the British
Isles grouping, is moving towards a confederal model and that
political parties need to organise to reflect this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are indeed some institutions arising mainly
out of the Good Friday Agreement that appear to be quasi-confederal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s the British-Irish Council, based in
Edinburgh, the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, based in Belfast, the North/South Ministerial Council, based in Armagh, and the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly,
which moves around.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The British-Irish Council
meets twice a year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Would it be missed
if it didn’t?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Probably <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British%E2%80%93Irish_Council" target="_blank">not</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a nice day out of the office but it does
nothing that couldn’t be done by email.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Guernsey
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">might</i> want to align its marine energy
policy with Scotland’s, but
alignment with Brittany and Normandy seems a more practical proposition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s the perfect example of what’s wrong with
that form of confederalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It starts
with the idea that we need an institution to co-ordinate things, and then looks
for things for it to co-ordinate, instead of asking what needs to be done and
how.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">If anything, a confederal Britain
is the politics of the past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It comes in
any number of models but they all draw a line round the British Isles to keep
them together and to exclude the rest of Europe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Often there’s a confederal capital envisaged
as neatly placed on the Isle of Man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
might well have worked, circa 1910, but this is a boat that sailed with Irish
independence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Areas with a shared
history or language don’t always make for a good confederation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Especially when some were forced by others to
share their history and language whether they liked it or not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the expense of other links they could have
made, such as a Celtic grouping.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So that
just leaves a shared geography, like old television weather maps that ignored
the very existence of the European mainland.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Fog in Channel: Continent isolated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That isolation is not wholly irrelevant – it keeps migrants in Calais who’d rather be in Dover – but the <a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/31/a-moat-defensive-english-channel-separating-migrants-calais/" target="_blank">moat</a> defensive is a
poor basis for common security in the era of global powers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The unification of the British
Isles was driven by a series of military necessities that have now
passed and need not dominate our politics today.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The second assumption is
that confederation is the politics of the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or could be, if we all work at it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">This seems highly
unlikely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those who urge a confederal
organisation upon us fail to take into account that the various movements
within the British Isles have existed for
different periods of time, have established themselves electorally to
strikingly different degrees, and have very different ideas about the
constitutional solution they’re working towards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You won’t be seeing Nicola Sturgeon sitting
down to chair a coalition of cripples that in Plaid’s case cannot get beyond
four MPs and in the case of the rest are still struggling to get into
Parliament.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The SNP’s openness towards
regionalism in the north of England
<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/SNP/11745037/SNP-unveils-plans-for-MPs-to-focus-on-England.html" target="_blank">is</a> a really interesting development but it has to be seen for what it
is: Scottish foreign policy in formation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If the result is a better-governed England
then that’s a result for everyone, but a better-governed England, or Wales,
or Cornwall is,
rightly, not the SNP’s primary concern.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What motivates a territorial party isn’t the rightness of
self-government for all, even though solidarity helps share many things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What motivates a territorial party is the
rightness of self-government for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">us</i>,
regardless of what others may think.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The assumption is that we’ll
be better-placed to engage with Westminster
politics if we pool resources.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A single
press office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A single lobbying
machine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Never mind the complexity of
ever agreeing on anything, this gives Westminster
a respect it doesn’t deserve.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It only
sucks us in and turns us into a supplicant pressure group.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The lesson we should learn from the SNP is
that success comes to those who go it alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In the film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Michael Collins</i>,
Eamon de Valera is given the line, ‘We defeat the British
Empire by ignoring it.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
quote attributed to Gandhi about being the change you wish to see is another
way of expressing the same idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Never
under-estimate the opposition, that’s true, but never under-estimate yourself
either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Wessex Regionalists <a href="http://wessexbureau.net/" target="_blank">have</a>
a London Bureau but it won’t be in London
that we make our breakthrough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It could
be in Bristol.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It could be in Winchester.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It could be in any one of our urban or rural communities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We guarantee that it won’t be in London, however helpful a London branch might be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the metropolitan chattering classes like
the idea of a free Wessex
then let them spread the idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Either
way, we don’t need their permission to exist.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">A further problem inherent
in the idea of pooling resources is that to pool is to mutually recognise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Three overlapping regionalist groups in Northumbria and at least two in Mercia
require some careful judgment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
shouldn’t be in the business of picking winners on others’ turf but that’s
what’s demanded by any co-operation that goes beyond maintaining contact and
exchanging experiences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We could sit
down and agree the map with others and feel really good about that, until some
new group springs up, refuses to be bound by discussions to which it was not
party, and starts the whole thing up again.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The third assumption is that
confederation is an idea whose time has come.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Why has English regionalism
failed to take root?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One answer is
because it fails to nurture those roots.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Every generation comes to regionalism thinking that it invented it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That no-one had ever thought of it
before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But there is a genealogy of ideas
and it’s as fascinating as any family tree.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Among Celtic nationalists, there’s a longer continuity of organisation
that enables stories of the earlier stages of the struggle to be conserved and
passed on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They stand on the shoulders
of giants, they know it, and they can name them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They have national libraries, where the
pioneers’ papers are preserved, and academics who will treat them as a subject
worthy of serious study.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">We are the oldest
regionalist party in England,
launched in 1974 and formally constituted as an organisation in 1980.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet we’re still discovering things about
those who argued before us for a contemporary Wessex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Charles Kingsley, William Barnes, Thomas
Hardy, Rolf Gardiner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Amnesia sets in
early.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kingsley and Barnes were both writing
in the 1860s about a contemporary Wessex, yet a decade later Hardy
introduced the concept into his novels and went on to tell the world it was all
his own work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Unless we work harder at
developing a collective memory, this is the sort of thing that will go on
happening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It happens today because too
few English regionalists are fully committed to their regions, viewing
regionalism as just one of a host of good political causes, some of which align
with regionalism while others cut across it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Some genuinely fear a descent into ‘narrow’ nationalism, to such an
extent that they can’t even see the sense of putting their own region’s
interests first.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, such a fear is
unfounded: we have a common interest with the north of England in
keeping their economy alive so that their population doesn’t drift south and
destroy our countryside.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The London regime, supposedly
looking after the common national interest, has betrayed us both.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Those who are new to
regionalism and can’t understand why there isn’t a national body –
co-ordinating, directing and generally bossing the regional parties about – do
so probably because they’re unaware of what’s already been tried.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The newcomer’s voice often pipes up that
‘that was then, this is now, we can make it work today’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, so long as the issues are no
different the outcomes will be no different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If this isn’t grasped intuitively, it just has to be learnt the hard
way.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">In 1980, Anthony Mockler, on
behalf of the Wessex Regionalists, convened a seminar in Oxford
to which he invited all the civic nationalist and regionalist movements then
active within the UK.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The result was the Declaration of Oxford: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“We, the signatories of this Declaration,
representing various movements for autonomy, declare that we are joined
together in determined support for the right to self-government of communities
and nations within Britain
and against the centralism of the Westminster
Government.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>The signatories besides
ourselves were Cowethas Flamank and Mebyon Kernow (both from Cornwall), the Orkney Movement, the Shetland
Movement and the Campaign for the North.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Plaid Cymru maintained a semi-detached interest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The SNP remained aloof.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Having met, it was agreed to
be useful to keep in touch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Oxford seminar was the first of 14 held between 1980 and
1994, from Durham to St Austell and Bristol to Norwich.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was an absolute consensus that links
were good, at most a network, but not an organisation that risked replicating
the very centralism we opposed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Paul
Temperton, Director of the Campaign for the North, warned against anything that
would evolve into some kind of British Regionalist Association with its headquarters,
inevitably, in London.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">One thing that did emerge
from the seminar series was a magazine, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Regionalist</i>, which ran from 1982 to 1992.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Each issue included a feature article about a small nation or historic
region and by the time of the last issue every part of the British Isles had
been covered, along with Brittany and Normandy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The seminars and the magazine were seen as a
way to involve new people who weren’t members of any existing
organisation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Three attempts were made
to get an East Anglian regionalist group off the ground, but apart from some
regional flag-flying the East still dozes to this day.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">By the mid-90s the original
impetus had been lost, though contacts lasted informally into the 21st century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The usual thing happened: people took their
eye off the region.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We had discussions
about whether there were different kinds of devolution, cultural, and economic,
as well as political, and whether they ought to join up or be kept apart for
the sake of balance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was about as
far removed from the integrated vision of Wessex Regionalism as it’s possible
to get.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And we said so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We had a longstanding debate too about
general decentralism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Should we involve
the Greens, or limit ourselves to movements with a specific territorial
basis?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That debate <a href="http://thecornishrepublican.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/plaid-snp-and-greens-call-for-electoral.html" target="_blank">still</a> hasn’t gone
away, with the SNP and Plaid backing the English Greens in last year’s
election.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They could at least have
pointed out that in Cornwall and some parts of England there’s another choice, one that doesn’t
involve a party who in Scotland
and Wales
are the nationalists’ rivals.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Meanwhile, in 1999, we helped
to establish a new focus of joint activity, all-English this time rather than
all-British.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Confederation for
Regional England also included groups from Kent,
Mercia and Northumbria,
all signed-up to yet another high-sounding document, the Stourbridge
Declaration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We left after three years,
alarmed at the time and expense involved in national meetings that offered us
nothing and only diverted energy from the regional campaigning that alone can
make regionalism work. Worse still was
the pressure to agree a unified English regionalist position on policy issues. We struggled to get across the point that if
one size fits all, you don’t need regionalism.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The Confederation proved to
be one of those luxury items that it’s nice to have but isn’t necessary, or
indeed helpful if its role is undefined.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Using it to try to plug gaps in the regional map is a noble idea, except
in so far as this can become a case of ‘prompting the witness’ as to what
regions there should be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A better way to
generate allies in currently unorganised areas would be to set the example of a
strong movement in Wessex
for them to emulate, rather than through national co-operation between existing
movements all of which currently are relatively weak.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Especially if all are constrained to proceed
at the pace of the weakest.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The fourth assumption is
that confederation is a good reflection of where we wish to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So that, regardless of whether or not the UK is
perceptibly moving towards confederalism, this is the solution we ought to
favour.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">In some ways, this is a
repetition of the second assumption and is flawed to the same extent, namely that it
perpetuates a discourse about the good governance of the UK that is increasingly alien to those who
reject the UK.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And what can be said of the UK can also be said of England.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The idea of confederation is a kind of
comfort-blanket for those who aren’t really ready for regionalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It reassures them that there’s some
safety-net, some mechanism for enforcing the common good, for reining-in those
who actually do want to set their own priorities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For those who aren’t convinced of the Scottish
nationalist case, it holds out the hope that the UK can survive in some ghostly form
that continues to exert influence from beyond independence.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">A region-centred view of the
world isn’t bound by past alliances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Yes, there may be cultural issues on which a free Wessex would wish to work with
other English regions – as well as English-speaking areas elsewhere or areas
with related languages, like Frisian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Yes, there are geographical issues on which a free Wessex would wish to work with others throughout
Great Britain,
such as transport links.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But neither England nor Britain defines a Wessex-centred
world.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Wessex</span><span style="font-family: "arial";"> has a number of neighbours.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They don’t include the Scots.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As well as the Londoners to our east there
are the Welsh and Mercians to our north, the Cornish and Irish to our west and
the Bretons and Normans to our south.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Which of these should we refuse to work with because they don’t neatly
fit the priorities of Westminster
politics?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">In a Europe
of regions, our friends could come from <a href="http://www.e-f-a.org/home/" target="_blank">even</a> further afield.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our founder, Alexander Thynn, proposed that Wessex should be promoted <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“as the political and economic ally of all other agricultural regions
within Europe, to operate in defending common
interests against their transformation by those regions which are more highly
industrialised”.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He also highlighted
the interests of coastal regions as contrasting with those of the continental
interior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor are our links as a region
confined to Fortress Europe: Wessex
has important cultural connections with <a href="http://www.math.mun.ca/~wessex/wordpress/" target="_blank">Newfoundland</a>,
Massachusetts and Virginia, among others.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Those who urge upon us the
necessity of formal co-operation do so with the best of motives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Experience and reflection show that it can be
not a springboard to success but a straitjacket that curbs the aspirations of any
authentically regional group.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’ll
cheer-on our neighbours but we can’t do their job for them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any more than they can do ours for us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While remaining ever-aware of our
surroundings, we need to reach deeper, not wider, to grasp the essence of Wessex.</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-29036946938015194662016-03-02T23:11:00.000-08:002016-03-03T00:24:37.433-08:00South By Southwest<i><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Guest contribution by <b>Nick Xylas</b>,
WR Council member and prospective candidate for Bristol City Council, Eastville
Ward</span></i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10.0pt;">As someone who has lived in both Wessex and the
American South, I can’t help but be struck by certain similarities between the
two.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both are primarily rural and
agricultural regions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both have
low-status accents that provide a lazy comedic shorthand for ignorance and
backwardness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And both have areas that
have been hurt economically by the loss of their textile industries, whether
it’s the Cotswolds or South Carolina,
where I lived for 6 years.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10.0pt;">There is, however, one major
difference in their regionalist traditions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The main regionalist / Celtic nationalist parties in the Disunited Kingdom are all on the Centre Left.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Southern patriot movement, on the other
hand, is a creature of the fringe far Right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That master of the political dog whistle, Ronald Reagan, used “states’
rights” as a euphemism for segregation: an extension of Nixon’s Southern
strategy to woo mostly (though not exclusively) Southern racists, who had
abandoned the Democratic Party over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, into the Republican fold.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The success of this strategy can be seen today in the current popularity
of Donald Trump, who has become the Republican front runner by proposing to
deport Mexican immigrants en masse and to strip American Muslims of their
constitutional rights (though it should be pointed out that Trump leads a very
crowded field, and only enjoys the support of some 25-30% of Republican primary
voters).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10.0pt;">As a result of this, support
for the right of the federal government to override the will of individual
states has become a totem of liberal orthodoxy, and there is no left-of-centre
decentralist tradition to speak of.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Anyone on the Left supporting states’ rights in a literal, rather than a
euphemistic sense, is an aberration: an isolated phenomenon like the handful of
monarchists that exist in the USA,
in defiance of that country’s entire history.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Like Wessex Regionalists and Celtic
nationalists, the Southern patriots identify themselves through the use of a
flag.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this case, they use the battle
flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, commonly (though incorrectly) referred
to as the Confederate Flag.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Based on the
Scottish saltire, to reflect the Scots-Irish heritage of many Southerners, it
was incorporated into the state flag of Georgia in 1956, two years after
the <i>Brown v Board of Education</i> court decision that led to the
desegregation of American schools and, since then, has become a symbol of
defiance against Yankee destruction of “traditional Southern values”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The flag was still flying outside the South
Carolina Statehouse in the state capital, Columbia,
when I lived there, but public protests have since forced its removal.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10.0pt;">There have been attempts to forge a
Southern identity that isn’t entirely based on racism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some revisionist historians have suggested
that the “recent unpleasantness” (the tongue-in-cheek way that Southerners
refer to the American Civil War, aka the War of Northern Aggression) wasn’t
really about slavery at all, but about supporting a confederal over a federal
form of government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This seems to be
based on wishful thinking, however, <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>as it completely
ignores the fact that every single Confederate state included a clause in its
constitution protecting the institution of slavery and prohibiting its
abolition.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Demographics in the South are
changing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whilst de facto segregation
continued long after its de jure abolition, the old racial barriers are
breaking down, and the younger generation are far more accepting of a diversity
of races, religions, nationalities, genders and sexual identities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The current Republican governor of South Carolina, Nikki
Haley, is a woman of Indian extraction, elected by the general public against
stiff opposition from the good ole boy network within the state party.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The challenge will be to reflect this new
reality without erasing the South’s identity and heritage altogether.</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-63534665035610819512016-03-01T15:00:00.000-08:002016-03-01T15:45:47.228-08:00History is Sunk<i>“My Lords, a nation gets awarded the character that
it deserves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By neglecting to promote
some aspect of this character, that aspect becomes increasingly insignificant
within the image which other nations regard as our worth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And this might also hold true for the way
future generations of our own nation come to regard what we ourselves were
worth…
</i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">There is a danger if the arena for artistic
performance is permitted to become too centralised, with the regions required
to focus upon what is going on within the capital city to discover the
potential of their own individualistic excellence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The situation will become healthier if we can
revive the notion of there being a thriving local culture within each region,
proud of its own traditions, and of its aesthetic potential.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">Government should therefore assume the responsibility
to promote the re-emergence of the English regions, so that they are encouraged
to create their own local artistic excellence in distinction from one another,
and in competition with one another to draw the maximum number of tourists to
come and be entertained in the significant regional manner. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But this should involve the creation of
regional assemblies, whose main purpose will be to tailor the quality of life
within that territory, so that its true individualism can be perceived for what
it best might become…</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">Then finally there is the question of improved
display: a display at sites of easy access for the region as a whole.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It should not be necessary for an aspirant
artist to visit the capital city to discover the inspiration for his native
art. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The finest collections should be on
his very doorstep.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the regional
assemblies should be in a position to allot funds to transform existing museums
so that they can fulfil this required function – funds which should also be
used to put on arts festivals where the special character of the region can be
publicly proclaimed.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">The artistic potential of the nation is thus
indirectly linked to the Government’s ability to enable the English regions to
re-emerge in a spirit of their most colourful individualism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So the most significant step which government
could take today, in the encouragement of the arts, will be in the creation of
our regional assemblies; and I urge that this step should be taken without
delay.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Alexander Thynn, Marquess of
Bath, addressing the House of Lords, 18th March 1998</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Not a lot to ask, you might
think.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, the provincial cities
of Germany and Italy
are cultural powerhouses, attracting tourists in their millions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In contrast to France
or Spain,
theirs is the legacy of not being unified politically until late in the 19th
century and so continuing to benefit from particularistic patronage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In England, sadly, few listened to our
founder’s words, and today the curtain is coming down on culture in the provinces.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Nowhere more so than in Northumbria.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Last <a href="http://wessexregionalists.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/london-pride.html" target="_blank">month</a>, we drew attention to a spate of
museum closures in Lancashire, contrasted with continued spending on a vacuous
vanity project designed to really ‘put London
on the map’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lancashire
is not alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Across the Pennines,
Bradford’s National <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/02/bradford-photography-collection-move-vanda-reviled-vandalism" target="_blank">Media</a> Museum
is facing the asset-stripping of its photographic collection, to be removed to London.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cumbrian Melvyn Bragg has spoken <a href="http://www.thetranquilotter.co.uk/tranquil-otter-news/senhouse-museum-maryport/" target="_blank">out</a> on radio
against the closure of small museums.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
Co Durham, closures planned, threatened or implemented include the Durham Light
Infantry Museum
at Durham, the Monkwearmouth
Station Museum
at Sunderland and Bede’s World at Jarrow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The <a href="http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/bedes-world-closure-jarrow-sparks-10895338" target="_blank">last</a> of these was an ambitious project to
regenerate the town through tourism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A
new museum was built to re-interpret the Golden <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-medieval-kings-to-modern-politics-the-origins-of-englands-north-south-divide-47068" target="_blank">Age</a> of Northumbria for today,
complete with a reconstructed Anglo-Saxon settlement in the grounds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whatever that blighted area has been promised
to make up for jobs lost in heavy industry – whether it was to be call centres,
hi-tech manufacturing, retailing or tourism – has been promptly ripped from
beneath its feet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s now being robbed
of the means to understand itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘History’
will be owned by the victors of one inter-regional power struggle, making
another that much less likely to succeed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Identity is inseparable from
continuity: a place without a past lacks the materials from which to build its
own future with confidence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According to
Historic England, 64% of folk in England <a href="http://www.rtpi.org.uk/media/1343142/rohan_torkildsen.pdf" target="_blank">value</a> their local
heritage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Breaking this average down by Prescott zone, we find the figure rises to 71% in the
North East, 69% in the South West and 68% in both London and the South East.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Four of the five below-average zones are
where the Danelaw used to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Coincidence?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe, but the fact
is that where Alfred was acknowledged as overlord there was continuity of
government and a physical survival of heritage on a scale that wasn’t true of
Viking-devastated areas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You value more
where there’s more to value.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Wessex</span><span style="font-family: "arial";"> hasn’t been exempt from closures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bristol’s award-winning
Empire & Commonwealth Museum, housed in Brunel’s original terminus at Temple Meads,
was closed in 2008.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was done with
the specific intention of re-locating the collection to London, where, of course, ‘more people can
see it’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The logic is unassailable, at
least for those too lazy to get a train to Bristol and walk a hundred yards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fortunately, the deal fell through.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most of the collection was donated to the
city of Bristol.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the museum never re-opened.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Wessex</span><span style="font-family: "arial";"> hasn’t been exempt from closures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Scotland
and Wales
have a choice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their national museums
and galleries are devolved matters and they have devolved administrations to defend
them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We suffer from the affliction that
is England, not the England of us all that values all, but the
one-size-fits-all England
that in practice means London.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All the key decisions are taken in London by those who live, work and play in London, who can grasp no
other perspective and who feel deeply offended by the idea that one can even exist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And, as Simon Jenkins pointed out last <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/25/london-crossrail-elizabeth-line-transport-north-reverse" target="_blank">week</a>, BIG
projects are protected while it’s the little folk who suffer.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">It might be argued that, in
times of austerity, culture should take a back seat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We don’t need to argue back that austerity is
a posh word for corporate bailouts and tax evasion on an unimaginable
scale.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if austerity had a credible
justification, it would still be unfair that we’re not exempt from it but London is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Loss-making museums in the provinces are
being shut.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Throwing them a lifeline
would be subsidising failure, we’re told.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Yet as taxpayers we all pay to keep London’s ‘national’ museums and galleries
free to visit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even though there are
national museums in Wessex
that are not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(For example, both the National Army
Museum and the RAF
Museum in London
are free, but not Portsmouth’s National Museum
of the Royal Navy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How <a href="http://wessexregionalists.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/axeman-cometh_15.html" target="_blank">fair</a> is that?)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Free admission to London’s attractions is somehow considered a
service to the whole nation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’re <a href="http://advisor.museumsandheritage.com/features/museum-funding-a-continuing-battle-against-cuts/" target="_blank">even</a>
treated to patronising half-truths: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Arts
Council funding for museums is lower per capita in London and the South East than in any other
part of the country.”</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We should hope
so, given the millions London’s
national museums receive as direct funding that bypasses the Arts Council <a href="http://advisor.museumsandheritage.com/qa-with-gps-culture-on-their-new-report-to-better-regional-funding-for-the-arts/" target="_blank">pot</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How can there ever be a level playing field
when money for London’s
pets is top-sliced and the rest are left to fight over the crumbs?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Shouldn’t we expect
this?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Isn’t being kicked and punched by
the London
regime <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/melvyn-bragg-attacks-north-south-divide-as-jarrow-museum-closes-a6875861.html" target="_blank">part</a> of being English?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mustn’t
grumble, must we?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Up north, regionalisation
has been an on-off issue for over a century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That’s a century in which to organise a political party to achieve real,
lasting change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A century of votes cast instead
for the monkey with the red rosette.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
we’ve been as bad, even if our monkey’s rosette is blue, or sometimes yellow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He or she is still more interested in a
career in a London-obsessed system than in defying convention on our behalf.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Recent media coverage has been
sure to present the museums story as one aspect of a north-south divide.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s a convenient narrative that can be
played around with, baiting northerners about deprivation in pockets of inner London being just as bad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a narrative that actually helps to
obscure something much deeper – the London-rest divide that no amount of ‘benign’
centralism or ‘socialist’ redistribution will touch.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">It’s inevitable then. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let’s move on to the ‘real’ issues instead.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, it isn’t inevitable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When Northumbria
and Wessex strode the stage, London
was on the periphery of events: Frank Musgrove’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The North of England: A History</i> identifies no fewer than
four eras of northern pre-eminence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>History
reminds us that there are alternatives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That’s why the teaching of history is being so heavily discouraged.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Richard Carter, Leader of
Yorkshire First, commented on the museum closures as <a href="http://www.yorkshirefirst.org.uk/closed_due_to_london_s_vanity" target="_blank">follows</a>: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"We are not against a strong capital,
but this has to change, for the good of the country and for London too."</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’d go further.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The capital’s strength is both the cause and the
effect of our weakness as it recirculates across the generations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If London
disappeared into a vast sink-hole tomorrow, Boris and all, we’d get by well
enough without it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There comes a point when
patience with pretty promises from on high should no longer be judged a virtue.</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-83709471894433591082016-02-20T10:00:00.000-08:002016-02-20T10:59:45.012-08:00Bristol BeginsNick
Xylas reports that preparations are well underway to contest Bristol City
Council’s Eastville Ward in local elections this May:
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">“I have almost finished collecting signatures for my
nomination papers. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The opening date for
handing in nomination papers is 22nd<sup></sup> March and the closing date is
10th<sup></sup> April.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It doesn't help
that Bristol
Central Library will <a href="http://www.bristol247.com/channel/news-comment/daily/education/bristol-central-library-to-be-closed-in-march" target="_blank">only</a> be open at weekends in March due to the basement
being converted into a posh school, severely limiting my access to the
electoral register. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anyway, I have set
up a campaign website, and hope to add a blog to it soon.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Content added to the <a href="http://wr4eastville.weebly.com/" target="_blank">site</a> so
far includes Nick’s biography and the mini-manifesto of policies for Bristol.</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-36018577880986609262016-02-15T17:00:00.000-08:002016-02-15T19:50:40.782-08:00Autarky for AllWhat’s the point of
political devolution in a world of globalist economics, where democracy can’t
change a thing because there’s no world government to hold multi-nationals in
check?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A good question, to which the
answer is to reject not only over-centralised government but also
over-centralised economics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Demand
autarky for all.
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Autarky – self-sufficiency –
is a principled response to globalist economics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a product of the ‘Historical’ school of
economics that arose in 19th century Germany and included such giants as
Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Adherents maintained that economics could only be understood within the
cultural context of a specific historical era, and not using standardised
formulae or theories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were also often
concerned with the plight of the common worker.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Autarky in the form of European preference has since been defended by
the French Nobel Prize winner Maurice Allais.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Autarky is not against trade
but views it as a way to obtain only those things that can’t be produced
domestically.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The reason is to subjugate
economics to politics, allowing ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’ to be expressed in
broader, especially non-monetary terms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The aim is not to exclude imports, but to exclude dependence, especially
in terms of vital needs like energy and food that could become the subject of
foreign economic reprisals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This can be
attempted at any scale but the full effect can only be seen to work at something
approaching a continental scale, say an internal market running into the
hundreds of millions of people and thus able to support the full range of products.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any
continent will do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, why
should the Chinese invest their surplus in Europe
– or be allowed to do so by Europeans – when they still have unmet needs of
their own?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The result is an avoidance
of over-specialisation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It therefore
rejects many of the most sacred free market dogmas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s the opposite, indeed, of economism, the
idea that life is about short-term profit: always man as producer and consumer,
never as colleague and citizen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wealth of Nations</i>, Scotsman Adam Smith
famously described how the manufacture of pins could be massively increased by division
of labour.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wessexman William Barnes, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Views of Labour and Gold</i>, pointed out
that such wonderful productivity levels have unacknowledged human costs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s the insecurity in the market for jobs
and wages that comes with having too narrow a skill, plus potentially the
impaired health of repetitive strain or unwholesome working conditions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Smith had largely admitted as much, and had
seen a role for the State in relieving the results, but such reservations are
rarely remembered when the story of the pin factory gets quoted today.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">What’s true for the
individual can be true for society at large: ‘economic growth’ continues without
effective challenge as the supreme goal of public policy, despite the evidence
that everywhere it results in huge environmental damage and social disruption.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Economics is said to be subject to ‘iron
laws’, while everything else – ecology, culture, sentiment – is judged
infinitely malleable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Globalism, by
insisting that nowhere is off-limits, that nowhere is allowed to defend itself,
because that would be a ‘distortion’, encourages this race to the bottom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Protectionism – economic protection – is
everywhere decried but neither environmental protection nor social protection
is possible without subordinating corporate actions to political will.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The United States
is equipped with a very strong political will to use regulations and subsidies
(and foreign policy) to pilot an economy that’s privately owned, though with
public ownership of utilities and other resources on a scale that would
astonish Thatcherites.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Paradoxically,
the US is much better at all
of this than we are in ‘socialist’ Europe,
where we’re still over-reacting against the Cold War era in ways so accommodating
to big business that they often appear suicidal.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">From a long-term
perspective, economism actually weakens economic power, because it under-values
the other factors holding vulnerability at bay, such as political independence,
assured resource availability and demographic stability (who pays the promised pensions?)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Note that all of these can be just as real,
in a materialist sense, as economic factors, and in their long-term
consequences can be even more transforming.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Markets are a means, not an
end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So too are States.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We currently have the worst of both worlds –
anarcho-tyranny – in which States have largely abdicated their grand political
function as governments but retained and expanded their bureaucratic power to
regulate the problems arising from that political vacuum.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ideas of sovereignty and a transcendent sense
of history have been reduced to one of ‘managing the nation’ as a sort of imagined
business: ‘UK plc’.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Western civilisation – which
aims at substituting a universal market ideology for popular sovereignty –
stands opposed to a European civilisation that values things other than
price.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A European unity of purpose
therefore demands the ability to define and defend something that differs from
the familiar reality of being a protectorate of ‘the West’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Subsidiarity needs an economic as well as a
political dimension.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The solution with
the lowest short-term costs attached may say ‘centralise’ but a holistic
assessment may say the opposite.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our
political institutions must be ones that enable that judgment to stick.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Generals are often
best-placed to warn politicians against militarism, against the hubris that will
ultimately lead to catastrophic defeat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Economists likewise need to warn against taking economics any more
seriously than it deserves.</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-14838251235615173172016-02-15T09:00:00.000-08:002016-02-15T09:12:50.706-08:00London Pride<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/13/why-is-londons-garden-bridge-worth-as-much-as-five-lancashire-museums-ask-joanna-lumley" target="_blank">Here</a> is why the power of London, and the Britain it represents, must end. For all our sakes.<br />
<br />
It's time for regionalism, the only constitutional change that will turn England the right way up.David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-28312957651642528722016-02-05T18:00:00.000-08:002016-02-05T18:20:48.235-08:00Independence for Europe?<i>“No European can be a complete exile in any part of Europe.”
</i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Edmund Burke, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Letters on a Regicide Peace</i> (1796)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">It was a curious coincidence
(or was it?) that on the same day that David Cameron dressed up as success what
<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/02/eu-deal-key-points-what-cameron-wanted-and-what-he-got" target="_blank">was</a> clearly failure, the USA
announced a quadrupling of its defence spending in Europe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a reminder that Europe
remains occupied, because there’s no such thing as a free lunch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The price of Europe’s
defence is paid in other ways, such as submission to TTIP.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">An independent Europe would require a European Union that worked, one
that allowed much more to be done locally and regionally, while focusing on
what actually needs doing at European level.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The fear that a European army could be used against dissenting countries
within the EU is real enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
rhetoric coming from Brussels about enforcing (western) ‘European values’ on
eastern Member States – that have democratically made different choices –
chillingly demonstrates that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But there
are other reasons why the EU has no comprehensive common security policy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Public debate contrasts two arenas of
independence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the UK leaves the EU, as UKIP wish, should Scotland leave the UK, as the SNP wish?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What of the third arena, the independence of Europe as a whole, independence against the world?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is it too big an ask?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or are we just not seeing the wood for the
trees?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">We’ve long argued in favour
of a ‘<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/05/eu-no-longer-serves-people-europe-diem25" target="_blank">third</a> option’ for Europe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our version is one that rejects unhelpful
centralism, whether it comes from the EU or from its Member States.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That this requires fundamental reform of the
current institutions is a given.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What
the deal negotiated by Cameron does is demonstrate the difficulty of any reform
happening at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The diplomacy,
designed to retain the UK’s
place in Europe, is likely to have had the
opposite effect, inviting its critics to present the EU as unreformable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ‘concessions’ are cosmetic, as they were
intended to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No powers will be
returned to the UK.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Few were seriously requested in the first place.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">It took the London regime 950 years to become as
inflexible as the EU has become in just 60.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The only thing that could correct that would be a directly elected
European government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One with a popular
mandate to break the costly inertia of government-by-treaty and force through
reform of all the EU institutions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Eurosceptics would hate that, because their answer to claims that the EU
is undemocratic is to abolish it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Democratising it is the other answer, the one that no-one must offer.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">If Cameron has dealt the
eurosceptics a winning hand it’s a pity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The EU, by opening an umbrella across nation-state rivalries, has
created an irreplaceable opportunity for small nations and historic regions
otherwise silenced by tub-thumping jingoism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Those down the west side of Britain can now choose to organise
themselves as part of the Atlantic arc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Those down the east side can see themselves as part of the North Sea rim, or a cross-Channel grouping.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ancient enemies can be viewed at last as
neighbours, friends and allies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
Cornish and the Bretons can no longer be ordered by London
and Paris to
hate each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s such an advance
that it could be outweighed only by something monumentally stupid emanating
from Brussels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No doubt that can be arranged.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">There’s the problem with the
‘Leave’ campaign.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Brussels loses, but who then gains?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wessex
does not, and cannot, benefit from a stronger UK.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The UK, <a href="http://www.theoptimisticpatriot.co.uk/post/134849670548/eddie-bone-on-robert-tombs" target="_blank">like</a> England, has proven in practice to be mostly a
metaphor for London
financial interests.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In politics, it’s an
expensive luxury to have two opponents at once.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A choice of Brussels over London is therefore a logical one to make if London is standing in the way of regional devolution and Brussels is not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s also difficult to see how a Europe of
the regions could be constituted without a Europe
to, at the very least, agree collective security against external threats.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Reality has fallen short of
aspiration not because Europe has failed the regions but because the
nation-states have failed both the regions and Europe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite some promising signs such as the
Committee of the Regions established under the Maastricht Treaty, the EU
remains eternally the creature of its Member States.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s been powerless to prevent the abolition
of France’s historic regions
or in England
the substitution of unwanted elected mayors for real devolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its only contribution to the debate over independence
for Catalonia or Scotland has been to look for
problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The EU needs friends with a
broader vision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It hasn’t a clue how to
find them.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Cameron’s negotiations are
but a small part of the big European picture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It’s easy to denounce them as a distraction when Europe
is grappling with the migrant crisis but the two issues <a href="http://sputniknews.com/europe/20160204/1034231186/uk-us-polls-concerns.html" target="_blank">are</a> intimately
connected.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With migrant-related <a href="https://www.rt.com/news/330469-german-police-not-prosecute-migrants/" target="_blank">crime</a> reported
(inaccurately, but influentially) to be running unchecked in Germany, the
temptation for British voters to raise the drawbridge may prove
irresistible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The very process of the
referendum helps the ‘Leave’ cause.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With
the SNP’s amendment of a four-nation lock rejected, the voting unit is ‘the
British people’, about whom we shall no doubt be hearing quite a lot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Among other things, the vote should tell us whether
or not they still exist.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">It could be the last
opportunity to breathe life into British exceptionalism, the idea that there is
‘Europe’ and there is ‘Britain’
and the two are as different as chalk and cheese.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Never mind that 40% of British DNA is shared
with the French, evidence of a common past stretching back into prehistory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Never mind that English is a Germanic
language, overlain with Latin, closely linked to Frisian and West Flemish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Never mind that the oldest secular work in
Byelorussian is a 1580 version of the Cornish tale of Tristan and Isolde.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Never mind that the EU’s chief negotiator,
Donald Tusk, is a Kashubian with a surname that’s the Danish, Norwegian and
Swedish for ‘German’ and a first name that’s decidedly Scottish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Never mind that Ireland
isn’t going anywhere and will be a constant reminder that Europe exists to the
west of Britain
as well as to the south and east.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Never
mind that Europe is a web of cultural connections, while the UK is a forced
accident of geography.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Never mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The UK
can run to Washington and Beijing for a pat on the head.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">As Norway’s ‘fax democracy’ <a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2013/04/19/norwegian-model-poor-alternative-eu-uk-membership-eea-erna-solberg/" target="_blank">shows</a>, it won’t make a
scrap of difference to how the rest of the EU makes decisions, nor to its power
over the UK
economy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>British foreign policy for
centuries was to maintain the balance of power in Europe
as it built up an overseas empire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Divide, and conquer. That’s history now, in both respects, but the way the UK is debating disengagement from Europe and planning new forays into the wider world suggests
that a great many folk have failed to notice.</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-68904649078094584412016-02-05T13:00:00.000-08:002016-02-05T13:18:56.484-08:00Ending InvisibilityColin Bex continues his efforts to highlight the connection between regionalism and resistance to climate change. Read his latest report <a href="http://www.wessexregionalists.info/newslink/wessex-regionalists-at-climate-rising-conference" target="_blank">here</a>.David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-24653300215264771582016-01-21T10:00:00.000-08:002016-01-21T13:53:51.424-08:00Region's Real Radical ReadRecent months have seen an
influx of new members to the Party, all keen to be active in promoting its
message.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One result of that surge is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wessex Citizen</i>, a new independent e-zine edited by Keith
Southwell and Rick Heyse that aims to keep Party
discussions close to the radical edge.
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Issue 1 contains news of a
petition for a Wessex Assembly, items on fighting cuts and austerity, housing
and homelessness, radical history (with features on the Eastville Workhouse
Project and the Tolpuddle Martyrs), plus a report from the Republic
of New England on their campaign to
secede from the USA.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Read it <a href="http://issuu.com/wessexcitizen/docs/citizen_issue_1" target="_blank">here</a>.</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339546647139712487.post-75028088531324597972016-01-20T10:00:00.000-08:002016-01-20T10:00:10.075-08:00Squirming for Europe<i>“To contribute to the creation of a sustainable and
equitable global economy in which the health, security and liberty of all is
paramount, regardless of race or creed.”
</i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Aims of the Party: Charter
of the Wessex
Regionalists, 2001</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial";">The Chalice and the Blade</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial";"> is a book by Riane Eisler that sets out what could
be described as the feminist theory of European prehistory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The name comes from contrasting the
inclusive, feminine chalice or cauldron of plenty with the divisive, masculine
blade of hate-and-run.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unfortunately, it
can also become a metaphor for modern Europe’s
inability to respond coherently when control of its borders and internal peace
are challenged by aggressive young men.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Events in Cologne and over a dozen other central and northern
European cities on New Year’s Eve have acquired the label of ‘the European Groping
Jihad’ and left the Left reduced to nothing but hope.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Deborah Orr’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/09/the-left-must-admit-the-truth-about-the-assaults-on-women-in-cologne" target="_blank">piece</a> in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Guardian</i> (a London
newspaper) is a good example.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Orr’s Law
is that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“trying to ignore or suppress
politically unwelcome news is always a bad idea”.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As if we hadn’t noticed that Orr’s Law turns
on its head the <a href="http://wessexregionalists.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/wilful-neglect.html" target="_blank">actual</a> experience of the last few decades.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The shoddy thinking of those decades is
claiming the first of many victims and there’s a panic abroad in politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But if you want <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">perestroika</i>, it has to come with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">glasnost</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead,
restrictions on free speech are being increased in a desperate bid to stave off
the reset and reality-check.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/3058#.Vp5hHU-8r4Q" target="_blank">roots</a> of this lie with
neo-Marxist intellectuals’ hierarchy of victimhood, in which campaigns deemed
less significant at this stage of the struggle are subjugated to structurally more
important ones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Feminism to
anti-imperialism, for example.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a
<a href="http://nypost.com/2015/06/07/as-isis-brutalizes-women-a-pathetic-feminist-silence/" target="_blank">strange</a> world, one where the historic role of the Islamic State in challenging US global
hegemony requires the sufferings of Yazidi slave-girls to be pitilessly
ignored.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">At a more practical level is
the framing of solutions to problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Orr’s language is particularly revealing: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“we have to salvage nuance”.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The reality isn’t that we’re in danger of losing a sense of nuance, a
word that these days can mean just sitting painfully on the fence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s that we lost it long ago, in a pseuds’ soup
of cultural relativism where all humans are equal but the standards expected of
them are not and no-one can see what they are.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Inclusivity is welcomed but the terms of inclusion are left deliberately
vague so as to create livelihoods for the ‘project class’ who define and
redefine them daily.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nuancing and renuancing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just don’t remind them of what they said
earlier.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">From over-population to
over-consumption to over-development to over-centralisation, even to
over-topping of flood defences, the will to seek a solution to a problem is frighteningly
greater than the will to foresee it and then holistically prevent it arising in
the first place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a kind of
anti-Nietzschean Will-to-Discuss.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s
because the survival of the project class depends on there being really
intractable social (or it could be environmental) problems with which to
grapple, preferably with the aid of money diverted from a ‘less worthy’ cause.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">More complex and costly solutions
– such as re-locating refugees to Europe – are
always preferable to simpler ones – like helping them where they already
are.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Complex solutions offer the
prospect of future problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Solve the
problem now and your job prospects become the problem instead.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The food in the cauldron bubbles away but to
eat one day one must divide it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cold
logic is the action of the blade, the drawing of distinctions and the making of
decisions that enable life to be parcelled out in manageable ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It runs contrary to the chalice-inclined
thinking that all opposites can be reconciled, that all sacred cows may safely
graze together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Orr’s article shows,
the result of that has proved quite shocking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This isn’t to say that opposites can never be reconciled but it does
take more work than has been assumed and the results may be especially fragile.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And costs may be disproportionate, especially
when compared with other options.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">This matters not to the
project class.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not all migrants are
savages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not all are saints.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still, there can be no middle ground, only
nuanced walking on eggshells.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One
question raised by the groping jihad is just how much criminality Europe should
be expected to accommodate as collateral damage from meeting those humanitarian
obligations that African and Asian countries have so successfully evaded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the project class, the answer is
ready-made: it isn’t that ignorance of the law is no excuse, not even if you
plead the need for a ‘cultural sensitivity’ that won’t be returned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, it’s taxpayer-funded <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/20/world/europe/norway-offers-migrants-a-lesson-in-how-to-treat-women.html" target="_blank">classes</a> on how to
behave towards European women.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Magic
wand time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More problems welcomed, more
taxing of those who didn’t create the problem, who won’t gain from the solution
anything they didn’t already have, and might, but might not, get back the
peaceful society they once had and have since lost.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More jobs all round for the project class
though.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The groping jihad was news
this month, but not straightaway.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>National
media picked up the story about five days late, once it was all over social
media and could no longer be ignored.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Then news emerged that a <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/after-cologne-lets-dare-to-say-how-things-really-are/17833" target="_blank">story</a> about similar attacks in Sweden last
summer had been closed down in case it ‘played into the hands of the far
Right’.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">This is all very characteristic
of a European elite that considers itself invincible and so fails to ask
whether telling the truth or trying unsuccessfully to suppress it will do more
to ‘play into the hands of the far Right’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Covering-up actually upgrades one own-goal into two: the far Right are
able to claim that they were correct all along, not only in their views about
migrants but also in their views about the lying Centre-Left establishment.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Inept handling of the
migrant crisis has given a huge boost to the far Right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are only two circumstances in which
Right-wing governments come to power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One is the installation of an unpopular regime by force.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The other is the installation of a popular
regime by consent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is often
described as ‘populism’, as opposed to democracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Democracy is when your side wins.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Populism is when the other side wins, and so
is clearly wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Not <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/17/problem-populism-syriza-podemos-dark-side-europe" target="_blank">all</a> populism is
of the Right, however – Spain’s
Podemos is a populist party but one of the Left.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If far-Right populism makes inroads into
European electoral politics it will not be because the State has applied inadequate
constitutional repression to its parties or personal harassment to its leaders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will not be because of insufficient
censorship of social media comments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
will not be because politicians of the Left have rashly tried debating with the
Right and found themselves intellectually ill-equipped to do so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will be because the Left has treated
keeping ‘the cause’ on track as so much more important than truth and
justice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will be because its voters
feel betrayed and marginalised by disruptive, revolutionary priorities they do
not share.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Right is the fault of the
Left.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Embarrassing, but true: a reactionary is one who reacts against excesses. </span>Treat the majority as irrelevant to
the project and you’ll be the one to end up irrelevant.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Events in Cologne and elsewhere bring forward a
question that was bound to have to be asked one day: how can a supposedly
progressive Left sleep at night if it openly endorses those who pursue a
radically anti-progressive agenda?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How
did the principled defence of racial minorities (hardware) mission-creep into the
privileged defence of religious minorities (software)?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What business do anti-racism campaigners <a href="http://standforpeace.org.uk/extremist-speakers-at-uaf-conference-2014/" target="_blank">have</a>
working with pro-sharia supremacist groups?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Who is tail, who is dog, and which is wagging which?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the Left now finds the far Right heading
towards the autobahn of power then it has no-one but itself to blame.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the Left won’t end its cultural
relativism, if it won’t assert and defend the framework of enlightenment values
in Europe, unconditionally, then <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/civilian-defense-groups-on-the-rise-in-germany/a-18980998" target="_blank">watch</a> what
happens when a State paralysed by the predictable fails to defend those who pay
its taxes.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">From a historical
perspective, it’s possible to see the current mismanagement of migration as one
of those turning points that no-one would like to admit they’d seen
coming.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like the Reformation, the French
Revolution, or the fall of the Berlin Wall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The collapse of the EU is now a real possibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So too is the empowerment of parties of the
Right that are equally fanatical in defending national sovereignty <a href="http://www.e-f-a.org/services/news-single-view/?tx_ttnews[tt_news]=946&cHash=88bc5128d9348e2a19f227b99e1a5f34" target="_blank">and</a> in
denying regional recognition and autonomy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>All it takes is an arrogant establishment convinced that ideology <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">will</i> prevail over reality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Wir schaffen das</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The German copyright on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mein Kampf</i> expired last month, meaning
that the owners of the text, the Bavarian Government, can no longer block its
republication.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes you might
almost believe in history by numbers.</span></div>
David Robinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771605556010025142noreply@blogger.com0