Wessex Regionalists

Experimental Subjects

2012-02-15T13:00:00.000-08:00

The local press today quote one of the Occupy Bristol folk as saying they abandoned their College Green camp after discovering they’d all been part of a sinister ‘social experiment’. The mind boggles.

Embracing All

2012-02-14T10:00:00.000-08:00

A frequent objection to decentralisation is that small-scale jurisdictions are prone to takeover by well-organised, highly motivated bands of fanatics. History furnishes examples, from Savonarola in Florence to the Anabaptists in Münster and the Calvinists in Geneva.

The threat is real but centralisation does not remove it. All that it does is magnify its consequences. There are two reasons why the threat is not what it seems.

The first is that small-scale dictatorships are more easily contained by their neighbours and so, unable to expand, they must ultimately implode due to lack of resources to sustain themselves in the face of a hostile world. Professor Leopold Kohr, in his 1957 classic, The Breakdown of Nations, compared the career of Adolf Hitler with that of Huey Long, Governor of Louisiana. Both were demagogues, harnessing popular discontent to accumulate personal power, but the boundaries of Louisiana set a natural limit to Long’s. Hitler as dictator of Bavaria would have been a comic, Chaplinesque figure. Long as U.S. President would not.

The second reason is that liberals wrongly assume that a large-scale jurisdiction will necessarily pursue the policies with which they agree. There is no reason why this should be so, and plenty of examples, especially from the Communist bloc, that prove the point. The larger the state territory, the more difficult it is for dissidents to flee successfully. The smaller it is, and therefore the more numerous its neighbours, the more numerous the options available for those fleeing and the more likely it is that one or more of those neighbours will be receptive to refugees. Decentralists oppose world government not because there are no problems that would benefit from discussion at the global scale but because, short of interstellar flight, there is no means of escape from repressive rulings.

As a matter of fact, small-scale jurisdictions do tend to be less liberal. Some Swiss cantons have quite a reputation for it. Put another way though, they recognise that actions – like those giving rise to social security payments – do have consequences. In a small community, these are clear for all to see but in a larger one are blurred by being shared between many more folk, who individually have little influence over what the policy and the payments should be. In a small jurisdiction the link between population and resources is self-evident and the pressure therefore exists to keep them in balance. Naturally, this requires a limit to the size of economic units as well as political ones: tentacular corporations are incompatible with effective local accountability.

If small communities are more ‘conservative’, should radicals seek to empower them? It’s a question that’s been asked ever since the French Revolution, when Parisians opposed regional autonomy because they saw it as creating bastions of reaction.

If we wish to be consistent and avoid the charge of hypocrisy, then we must answer affirmatively. Radical politics worthy of the name has to move beyond substituting enlightened despotism for the unenlightened kind. We are not living in the 1790s, when a reactionary countryside might starve a revolutionary capital into submission. In 2012, all our communities should be free to make their own decisions, whether we approve of them or not.

And how should they make them? That too is their decision. Just as no country welcomes interference in its constitutional affairs, neither should city, town or village. Nevertheless, we as a party active in such affairs advocate the rebuilding of community on the basis of a living local democracy. This is not, contrary to Westminster thinking, something that can be created by legislation, doled out to the trusted few who meet the prescribed criteria. It does not arise from legal decisions but from ethical ones. It is the result of a shared commitment to inclusive participation in civic life. We have to be careful to distinguish traditions that bond a community together from privileges that drive it apart. We want knowledge of our history to inspire us, but not to the extent that it becomes a dictatorship of the dead.

The principles at work here are not limited to the constitutional. A living local democracy, truly empowered, would start to question many things we have always taken for granted. Why do so many Wessex acres belong to doubtless decent chaps who have them only because an ancestor was a crook and flatterer at the court of King Henry VIII? Why do so many other acres belong to financial institutions with no long-term stake in Wessex society? Why are so many of our homes and farms owned by those who made their money in activities of dubious legality in the City of London? To take back the ancient land of Wessex for the folk of Wessex today is the kind of rallying call we need. At the heart of our party’s vision is the idea of ‘the community of Wessex’, resident in most cases upon ‘the territory of Wessex’, an inclusive community that exists for everyone, not just for those who currently make up the moneyed class. And we are growing it, bit by bit.

Everyone’s Fault But

2012-02-13T13:00:00.000-08:00

More ‘creative thinking’ from the banksters and their buddies...

And note well the comment from one respondent here, especially towards the end. Draining the Labour Party of its strength remains THE key task for genuine radicals today, including in Wessex, where it has no conceivable future if not as a parasite clinging to more powerful forces long-based outside our region.

Ill Repute

2012-02-10T17:00:00.000-08:00

Eric Pickles was interviewed on Channel 4 today, defending the right of local councils to begin their meetings with Christian prayers. The Communities Secretary is often a half-hearted localist but half a heart is better than most politicians can muster. He is, of course, right that it should be for councils to make their own decisions about procedure.

In doing so, however, councils need also to consider their reputation. Bideford Town Council, in deciding to assert their rights in court rather than become an inclusive municipality, and then failing to win the case, have put their town on the map for all the wrong reasons. It’s now open season for cartoonists to question whether the town still has its stocks, and pillory, and ducking-stool. Maybe the occasional skimmity-ride. Can’t even rule out a witch-burning or two. ‘Bideford’ and ‘bigoted’ merge effortlessly in the headline-writer’s mind. And now that they’re fused, it’ll be no easy job to get them parted again.

Divide & Strengthen

2012-02-10T13:00:00.000-08:00

Readers may recall that we drew attention to a long-standing attempt by the London regime to hamper the growth of Wessex consciousness. That is to say, the exclusion of regional flags from the list of those that may be flown without official permission. Fortunately, Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has listened enough to issue a discussion paper on liberalising the controls on flag-flying. This proposes to allow the flag of any ‘current or historic UK traditional region’. If that includes the Wessex Wyvern, as it must, then well done that man. What a shame Labour’s control freaks couldn’t have brought themselves to do this years ago.

Perhaps the most interesting consequence of the draft wording is that the London regime has been forced to concede that traditional regions actually exist. The proof is that that they have traditional flags. Which folk fly. And which are recognised by the Flag Institute, precisely because folk do fly them.

The existence of an area with a flag does not necessarily mean that it has democratic institutions to match. Some county flags exist, which represent the traditional county, including modern unitary authorities that stand apart from the county council. Cornwall has a flag but is divided between two unitary authorities, one for the mainland, the other for the Isles of Scilly, though both are constitutionally part of the Duchy of Cornwall. England has a flag, but no parliament exclusively its own. Wessex has a flag but…

Nevertheless, it’s a start if folk can as freely show their loyalty to Wessex as to, say, Wiltshire or England. It also demonstrates flexibility and pragmatism from the Coalition. No doubt there are those within its ranks that share both our distaste for the Prescott zones and our dismay that more traditional alternatives have been so thoroughly discouraged by officialdom.

Our hope is that the ‘new regionalism’ now emerging, based around traditional geographical blocks like Northumbria and Wessex, will also be more appealing to advocates of an English Parliament and to civic nationalists in England, as part of a general constitutional transformation.

The presentation of the Prescott zones, for example in the 2002 White Paper, was remarkable for the absence of any reference to common English interests distinct from those managed at UK level. We do not think they are numerous. Real regions could deal with most things by themselves, just as the Scots and the Welsh do. But the assumption was made that the UK would deal with such common English interests as did arise (and, given the limited devolution planned, these would have remained extensive). There was no suggestion that inter-regional co-operation might have any role in this, despite the tentative moves in this direction by the unelected regional assemblies and RDAs forming their own networks. Indeed, the White Paper was explicit that the UK Parliament – with its potential for West Lothian interventions – would continue to legislate for education and health policy. Allegations of unfairness over such arrangements were inevitable.

So the stage was set for an English nationalist backlash against regionalisation. That the regions drew most of their powers up from Town Halls and County Halls, not down from Whitehall, added the other millstone.

It needn’t have been like this. A better man than Blair or Brown might have approached matters in a more generous spirit, recognising that losing control over some areas to Labour’s opponents was an honest price to pay for safeguarding it in its heartlands. You cannot devolve, yet micro-manage at the same time, and still be seen to be fair. Labour sided with the mandarins against the people of England because it was in its UK-wide political interests to do so. It could not be seen to be abandoning its supporters in Tory-majority regions by urging them to discover their own path to regionalism, one more fitted to democratic regional character. Hence Brown’s obsession with Britishness, with himself as the means of holding it all together.

Labour’s stance allowed regio-sceptics to claim that England was being wiped off the map. It wasn’t true. England wasn’t on the map anyway. Few distinctively English institutions exist, by comparison with Scotland and Wales. Administratively, England is ‘whatever’s left over’ of the common State. That’s why it’s been so remarkably elastic over the centuries, variously taking in Cornwall, Wales and bits of France. It also wasn’t true that division equalled negation. England is divided into counties and still exists. Australia, Canada, the U.S.A., Germany and Switzerland all have federal constitutions yet still exist, despite a degree of autonomy at state level that we in Wessex can but dream of. Divided? Yes, but constructively so. Conquered? Certainly not. Strengthened? Undoubtedly. The creation of alternative conversations within England would lead to a much richer society, politically and culturally. For example, the regional media would be boosted by having new opportunities to cover debate in regional parliaments.

In fact, the fear of ‘losing England’ had little to do with the regions and much more to do with the London regime’s desire to hold on to its control over them within a UK framework. It could cope with regions, especially lots of little ones with hardly any powers. What it could not cope with was the idea of regions banding together to deal with all-England issues. It could not cope with the idea that it is not for the UK to micro-manage England, using Scottish Labour MPs to enforce its will. Our own future choice of allies may well depend on whether Wessex is to be a region within the UK or a region of an independent England. And that’s an outcome that’s largely driven by the Scots too.

Whatever happens around us, our focus remains Wessex. We have no time for those who would have us sacrifice Wessex to the greater glory of an ‘England’ that in practice is an unapologetic facade for London dominance. We keep our distance therefore from the type of English nationalist who sees in all things regional a plot to weaken England. The Anglo-Norman type of nationalist, who regards a ‘strong’, united English State as necessary in the face of threats coming thick and fast from all directions. It’s actually rather un-English and not the kind of analysis we support. It doesn’t make for a more co-operative, mutually respectful world to see enemies everywhere. But even if the analysis were true, defence and foreign affairs are never devolved matters in a federal constitution. And the more decentralised England becomes, the easier it is to apply moral pressure on others to decentralise too. Looking at the success of those who’ve already done so, it’s an abiding wonder that everyone doesn’t see the logic in empowering as many communities as possible. You fly that flag then – and don’t let the bullies say nay.

Realising Some Virtual Potential

2012-02-07T11:55:00.000-08:00

A Cornish blog at the weekend called attention to the fact that the debate on the UK’s constitutional future is now on the move once more. Scotland may go it alone. The North wants recognition. Will Wessex be left behind?

It’s up to us. We do not, as a matter of principle, respond to blogs, websites or other media too closely associated with the despised London parties. Experience shows that they are influenced by the prospect of losing seats and by absolutely nothing else. Why should we be surprised about that? Best not to waste energy on these clunking dinosaurs, nor, worse still, give them the recognition their centralist egos crave. Other forums are open and receptive to us and should be used to build support for the Party. We are on Facebook and Twitter – @WessexRegion – and always on the look-out for new opportunities to spread the word, while acknowledging that we cannot be everywhere at once. Nor should we always try to be, where the content is clearly just a troll fight that puts off serious readers. But intelligent debate has to occur somewhere and print is, remember, a dying medium.

Luddites may quibble. The Internet is a huge user of electric power, clamouring for space in a sustainable future. Yet even its opponents will find themselves using it more and more to make their arguments. If you want to change the rules, you have to be in the game.

Jam Tomorrow: New Labour and the New Jerusalem

2012-02-05T23:00:00.000-08:00

The defeat of New Labour’s assembly plan for the north-east corner of Northumbria, in 2004’s referendum is often claimed as proof that regionalism is finished. Advocates of a triumphalist English Parliament cite polls showing support for regional assemblies now trailing at 9%. They forget that polls used to show a thumping majority in favour, UNTIL it was revealed how little was actually likely to be devolved. That contrast suggests that what is needed is not a timid approach to region-building that starts with a committee here or a partnership there but a systematic dynamiting of the whole Whitehall machine in favour of full-blown regional parliaments, and no half measures.

A recent academic paper records, in excruciating detail, how useful idiots in the ‘North East’ zone were led on by New Labour to bring about the demise of a project the leadership never really wanted to succeed. The belief that voters would back not real devolution but a costly means to go on lobbying for real devolution backfired badly. Back to the drawing board then.

So when Peter Hain this week sought to re-open the regionalisation debate, his contribution deserved to be greeted with a healthy dose of scepticism. Labour in opposition always acts as if no-one has any memory of just what these ghastly crooks got up to while in power. Nice try, Peter, but it doesn’t fool us.

The truth is that as far as Wessex is concerned, Labour is not the opposition. It has never enjoyed a majority here and so cannot be expected to welcome a self-governing Wessex. If we want an opposition to what the Coalition, building seamlessly on Labour’s work, is now doing to us, then our only hope is to build our own.

Just Say No

2012-02-05T01:00:00.000-08:00

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale includes a scene of community punishment. Not punishment IN the community but punishment BY the community. The oppressed Handmaids are goaded into participating in the execution of enemies of the regime, ‘particicution’ to use the precise term. For the fascist-fundamentalist state in the novel, the method of execution is a very deliberate means to neutralise opposition. Who did the killing? The elite who decreed the punishment, who took no physical part in it, or those common folk who did, each fearful of betraying any lack of enthusiasm?

One or two posts here have highlighted how the London regime has recruited military parades and remembrance events to its campaign of mawkish hypocrisy, in a bid to make everyone feel a part of the illegal, immoral wars waged in our name. We shouldn’t be taken in. We should continue to demand justice. We should continue to fight to reverse the current rule that only those who vote for mass murder may live at No. 10.

Last weekend, Channel 4 screened Roman Polanski’s film, The Ghost, in which a British ex-PM is on the run from justice. One of an ever-growing number of biting satires in which Tony Blair, or a character modelled on him, finally gets what the viewer expects to see. The fictional justice has to make up for the lack of the real thing. There’s laughter and relief, but sadness and frustration too that politics has failed, that war crimes suspects can walk freely in Britain and laugh at justice. Never forget: this happens because voters continue to return the war crimes suspects to Westminster as their honourable representatives. No-one else is to blame for this state of affairs but your neighbours and theirs, all denying their manifest responsibility for collective guilt.

Creating public complicity in war crimes has been a useful learning experience for spin doctors everywhere. They have learnt how to fine-tune fear into unquestioning support for intervention, and a smooth media-silencing of those deemed less than patriotic. In recent days, as the scandal over bankers’ bonuses – not, of course, the systemic issues surrounding them – continues to escalate, we have begun to glimpse ‘Phase II’.

There’s been plenty of bleating from the City and its friends about a ‘lynch mob’ mentality towards the bonus culture. The stock answer to public outrage has been disarmingly simple. That it is taxpayers’ money involuntarily invested in the failed banks and if taxpayers want their money back then they have to pay whatever is asked to those responsible for rescuing it.

It really isn’t that simple. If the banks can be turned around at all, it won’t be quick. Stricken businesses don’t make miraculous overnight recoveries. Remember Rolls-Royce. Remember British Leyland. A prudent investor might well ask how much more this is all going to cost. Might it not be cheaper to pull the plug? Switch off the life support?

Many jobs would be lost. In London. In Birmingham. In Halifax. In Edinburgh. Not so many in Wessex, and the money freed up could replace those with others that do more good. The Cheltenham & Gloucester business is in the process of being sold anyway. Lloyds and NatWest branches make nice wine bars and restaurants and no doubt there are other assets for which there’s still a market. It’s not as if these are firms we couldn’t live without. There is massive over-capacity in the banking sector and using taxpayers’ money to stave off the long-overdue reckoning isn’t pretty.

Often there is a cost to be paid to get clean of an addiction. You want to give up smoking? Well, do it now. Don’t wait until you’ve had the ‘benefit’ of smoking what you’ve already bought. Past governments haven’t shied away from writing-off colossal assets when it suits them. Margaret Thatcher happily sterilised hundreds of millions of tons of irreplaceable coal reserves in order to destroy her political opponents. Coal at least can be burnt. Most money can’t, because it only exists as entries in the banks’ accounts. Let’s get real, and concentrate on staying real in the dangerous years ahead.

It’s important for the regime that we collude in its financial as well as its military ventures. It’s important for us that we don’t. We need sounder priorities than those that most voters chose in May 2010. We pay our taxes so that public services can be provided in return. We don’t elect Governments to speculate with our money. Never mind Stephen Hester waiving his bonus: when are Alistair Darling and the rest of those involved going to turn out their pockets and pay us back for the bad bets they made in 2008?

But that needs to be just the start. We need to rediscover the power of politics to look ahead in defence of the common good. We might, say, repudiate the national debt to the extent that it was incurred to fund wars of aggression, in other words, illegal expenditure. Banks need to be reminded that all debts owing to them are null and void because they created the pretended ‘money’ out of nothing and so did not offer genuine consideration in return for allowing the loan to be secured against real-world assets. The heart of our economy is a scam, folks, and we let it continue at our peril.

Political transformation has to start from within. That’s why we need a one-word response to those who would entrap us within the spider’s web of deceit that passes for ‘the way the world is’.

The Consolation Prize

2012-01-28T10:00:00.000-08:00

On Thursday, voters in Salford decided in favour of having a directly elected mayor. It was also a local decision to call the referendum in the first place. Bristolians are being forced to hold a poll whether they like it or not, under the so-called Localism Act. The £475,000 it will cost has to be met by council tax payers initially, then reclaimed from the London regime.

It’s what known as a ‘confirmatory’ referendum. Not that the outcome is being prejudged, you understand, but Bristolians should be under no illusions which way they’re being instructed to vote.

With the Government’s consultation on elected mayors attracting just 19 responses across England, the policy hasn’t attracted huge public interest, despite all the hype. The turnout for mayoral referenda has been low. In Salford on Thursday it was just 18.1%. Barbara Janke, the Leader of Bristol City Council, has warned that “the electorate is palpably apathetic and there is a real danger of having elected mayors imposed on Bristol by a tiny minority of enthusiasts if the referendum turnout is low enough.” If so, it could all end up a costly mistake. In 2009, voters in Stoke-on-Trent changed their minds and abolished their elected mayoralty.

Next November is local democracy month. The Government announced its intention on Wednesday to hold elections for 11 directly elected mayors across England – if approved at referenda in May – on what’s being dubbed ‘super Thursday’. At the same time, elections will also be held for Police and Crime Commissioners, of which there will be seven in Wessex (also taking in Buckinghamshire and Cornwall due to incongruous boundaries). Bristol is the only city in Wessex that will be forced to vote on having an elected mayor.

We’re suspicious of moves to concentrate political power in fewer and fewer hands – the ‘Little Society’ that Cameron, Clegg, Miliband & Co are all driving forward. The argument that other countries do things this way is worth examining on its detailed merits but not as an argument in its own right. That sounds too much like globalisation for globalisation’s sake. Does Bristol need a Boris? No. It needs some real politics, not a media-savvy, business-friendly buffoon to be used as a mouthpiece for who knows what interests.

According to communities minister Greg Clark, elected mayors can give “strong, visible leadership” to cities. “This is an opportunity for each city to transform itself for the better,” he claimed. So are a lot of things. Having a big personality in charge won’t automatically make any difference at all. The powers that are needed are not being devolved. The big regional and sub-regional issues of environment and transport don’t sit within tight city boundaries and any mayor who thinks the surrounding areas, with their own electorates to serve, will bow to his or her will is in for a shock.

So why the focus? A few years ago, one of our members phoned in to BBC Radio 4’s ‘Any Answers?’ programme to ask why devolution was not being extended to Wessex. Quick as a flash, Jonathan Dimbleby said that the (then Labour) government was offering elected mayors. An irrelevant response but indicative that the message is that reorganisation of existing local powers is all that voters in England deserve. The creation of unitary authorities, such as Wiltshire Council, sits in the same category. Reshuffling the pack. Adding no new cards.

In 2000, the Fabian Society published one of their revealing, if turgid pamphlets, one entitled The English Question. Professor Gerry Stoker contributed a critique of regionalism, concluding that elected mayors are a better solution than handing out regional government to the English as compensation for not being Scottish or Welsh. It might be asked in reply what compensation it is to rural Wessex to be offered an elected mayor for our largest city, which accounts for just 5% of our population. The drive for elected mayors is a metropolitan idea with nothing to say to the vast majority of Wessex folk, except that their future is expected to be shaped by someone for whom only the urban few get to vote. It ought to be astonishing that it’s acquired the momentum that it has. But as a device to divert attention from the democratic deficit at regional level, its success should be no surprise at all.

Whose Regions?

2012-01-27T13:00:00.000-08:00

An earlier post this week examined the consequences for Wessex if Scotland votes to dissolve the union. It could be a unique opportunity to demand and to create a new England, with regionalism and decentralisation built in to its fabric. More likely, it could usher in a new age of political repression, economic polarisation and cultural uniformity as the British ‘establishment’ morphs effortlessly back into an English one. Yesterday’s post suggested that work is already underway to undermine the process of regional reawakening, laying claim to aspects of Wessex culture deemed seriously ‘national’, while dismissing the rest as hilariously ‘local’.

A third strategy favoured by the establishment has long been to make a fake and pass it off as the real thing. The official, authorised regions of England. What other kind can there then be? We are familiar with their most recent incarnation as the Prescott zones, themselves based on World War II civil defence regions. World War I produced a similar map and so on back to the Civil War and the Protectorate that followed, when Britain was divided into 11 military districts by Oliver Cromwell. Major-General John Desborough was in charge of enforcing centralist diktat in a south-western district that comprised the very same counties as the South West zone today. Major-General William Goffe commanded Berkshire, Hampshire and Sussex – roughly half of the modern South East zone. The first instance of administrative devolution in England is believed to have been the Customs outposts set up by Edward I to raise funds for his wars of conquest. Earlier still, the Domesday Book itself was drawn up by commissioners organised into seven circuits, notable chiefly for the way they ignore familiar Anglo-Saxon precedent.

Those who would frustrate regionalism will always do so by posing as its friends. Effective regionalism cannot exist without effective regions and the definition of the region can be organised in only two ways. Of these, the preferred approach in England has always been to define from above. To define from below, as Spain did in the 80s, is judged impossible, a non-option that could only lead to chaos if applied here and so not in the best interests of regionalism and its supporters. Trust us, old chap, we’ll see you through. Usually, it’s just a matter of dusting off the set of regions used last time, tweaking here and there to add a soupçon of novelty. England ends up with eight or nine regions, roughly comparable in population and therefore in caseload for the civil service. Never mind that the Cornish identity is routinely ignored, that the north and the midlands are each partitioned or that Wessex suffers from its very own Iron Curtain with blinkered thinking either side.

If identity is to be respected, and regions generally given the clout they need, England could do with fewer regions, defined not by what Sir Humphrey says but by the basic popular geography of the country. The north – Northumbria – is as much part of the highland zone as Scotland and Wales. The midlands – Mercia – are divided from East Anglia by the Wash and the Fens and from Wessex broadly by the estuary of the Severn and the watershed of the Thames. The big, named blocks of Anglo-Saxon politics are not some thousand-year-old irrelevance. They arose where they did because that is how the land works, when viewed from within and not from London.

There is one sure way not to get this outcome. And that is to let the interests of ‘England as a whole’ prevail. Give the job of region-definition to a select committee of MPs, a royal commission of the great and the good, or even the hacks of Fleet Street, and the answer will always come back to the one Sir Humphrey first thought of. It’s because for all of these groups, what matters isn’t the region; it’s the centre and their own relationship to it. They either cannot conceive of an England where power is genuinely dispersed, or else they fear and loathe it as a barrier to personal ambition. There’s also an unacknowledged circularity in this fantasy of a national conferring about boundaries. It will never happen unless the case for regionalism is widely accepted in principle. And that will never happen unless folk can already see what it is they’re going to be identifying with.

So, of course, with the job left to civil servants the number of regions is always going to be needlessly high. The higher it is, the fewer decisions the regions can make for themselves without treading on their neighbours’ toes. Which means the more decisions need to be ‘co-ordinated’ from Whitehall. The more regions there are, the less is the ‘headroom’ between the region and its local authorities, the greater the chance of friction, and the greater the scope for Whitehall to play knight in shining armour riding to the rescue of municipal damsels in distress.

The number of regions impacts directly on their powers too. Business interests want as few points of contact with different state bodies as they can arrange, so will always lobby to keep powers centralised. Multiply the number of regions and you multiply their causes for concern. With a sparing number of regions, law-making and tax-setting powers can be devolved to real regional parliaments. With a number nearly into double figures, you’ll be lucky to get a nominated advisory council packed with old retainers. And that means that a referendum to endorse regional devolution is unwinnable. Why vote ‘Yes’ to nothing?

Decades – nay, centuries – of debate and discussion about the governance of England’s territory ought to have led us to a solemn resolution. Never to trust the establishment to draw our boundaries for us but rather to refute their patronising assumption that those on the ground can’t do a better job of it ourselves. Not by an arbitrary cutting-up of England into meaningless zones but by a careful linking-up of communities to form regions that echo real places, with names and flags and ways of speech and thought so deep that no spin doctor could summon them into being or magic them away again. Devolution, regionalism, decentralisation. Whatever you call it, it’s about making our own decisions. And no decision can be more fundamental than to define the political units to which we choose to give our loyalty.

Whose Poet?

2012-01-26T16:44:00.000-08:00

“'William Barnes, you say? What possible relevance could he have today?' 'Well, I suppose people who like Dorset might be interested, or some local historian or Wessex regionalist, but as for me…'. So goes the reasoning of many. It is false reasoning...”
Fr Andrew Phillips (2003), in the foreword to a reprint of Barnes’ Views of Labour and Gold

Nice piece in the (London) Guardian yesterday about William Barnes. Nothing about Wessex though, the place that Barnes himself revived in 1868, after centuries when the word was seemingly only used by historians.

The journalist seems to think that Barnes can be promoted as the English equivalent of Robert Burns. The Wessex equivalent, fine, with Barnes Night (22nd February) an established tradition in parts of Dorset and now spreading further afield. But a national poet for England? A poet who wrote in the Wessex dialect? No doubt the London hacks will all want his poems translated first before they read them. Can’t be having them in wurzelly, ‘inaccessible’ language now, can we? Dorset dialect is dead, implies the article. Maybe, in the trendy parts where hacks hang out. They really do need to mix a bit more.

Perhaps national poet isn’t too far-fetched. For Fr Phillips, Barnes “is someone of whom not only Wessex should be proud, but all England, and indeed one whose vision is today of global importance.” Yet we do think Wessex is something other than just another name for England. East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria are not fictional places whose inhabitants have no legitimate opinions, nor great poets of their own to proclaim. Besides, to see Barnes purely as a poet would be to belittle the man, who should be remembered for many talents.

Views of Labour and Gold, first published in 1859, is a treatise on political and moral economy that deserves to be read everywhere, but especially in Wessex, from where its wisdom arose. It speaks prophetically against the powerbrokers in London and beyond, of ‘Saxon Economics’, and reminds us that work and money are our servants, not our masters. It’s not just for fans of Dorset, or local historians, but definitely for Wessex Regionalists too.

Whose England?

2012-01-25T01:00:00.000-08:00

Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget.
For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.

G.K. Chesterton, The Secret People

Ten years ago last month a petition of 50,000 signatures calling for a Cornish Assembly was delivered to Downing Street, to the home of a Prime Minister renowned for his commitment to devolution. As long as it was to a pattern that he’d thought of first. Cornwall, Mercia, Wessex. All were equally ignored, all equally off-message.

The anniversary was marked by an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons, tabled by three Plaid Cymru MPs. Such motions are a means to publicise a particular event or cause, enabling MPs to show support by signing. In the case of the Cornwall motion, all of ten MPs in fact, including the sponsors. No matter. That the Westminster Parliament – supposedly existing for the benefit of us all – cannot bring itself to debate the future governance of one of our constituent nations will only deliver a further boost to the nationalist vote.

Reactions to the idea of Cornish self-government have been as expected. The usual nonsense about lack of viability – despite the evidence that the small nations of the world are often the richest and happiest. And the supposed trump card, played by one commentator at the Huffington Post: “What next? Independance for Wessex, East Anglia, Yorkshire etc. etc.?” Well, tell us where the problem lies. Are folk in these areas not capable of making their own decisions? Is it a Celt-only thing, this ability to be free of London’s suffocating influence?

Hold that thought while considering Scotland’s bid to bound from its bonds. David Cameron’s recent attempts to treat the First Minister as the junior partner in the governance of Scotland have done incalculable harm to the unionist cause. They may even mark a turning point in the history of these islands. Yet the ostriches cannot see a thing. Most hilarious of the gypsy’s warnings wheeled out this week is one suggesting that the United Kingdom might, in a fit of post-colonial spite, veto Scotland’s application to join the EU. The SNP’s response, that Scotland would be a succession state, not an accession state, is sound, but they deserve better opponents. A United Kingdom without Scotland? Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Cameron? Bleached of its blue, the Union Jack would be at best the flag of the United Kingdom of England and Northern Ireland, with the Principality of Wales (and Duchy of Cornwall). More likely, the show would be over long before the ostriches raised their heads and shook the sand from their eyes and ears.

The Welsh Government has made good use of the past dozen years, consolidating the plethora of agencies, boards and committees that used to run Wales into the makings of a self-confident, inclusive democracy. (We set out our own plans to do the same for Wessex back in 1982, but this side of the Severn remains as disorganised as before – and it shows.) The peace process in Northern Ireland has created a fluidity that in turn has enabled nationalists to operate on an all-Ireland basis to an extent not seen since before Partition. Will the Province survive the demise of the United Kingdom? Probably not.

England has never demanded its independence to anything like the same degree as its neighbours. With a permanent 85% majority in Parliament it really hasn’t needed to: none of the huffing and puffing about the West Lothian question has ever led anywhere beyond crude party advantage. But it may now be staring independence in the face whether it likes it or not. And that means a lot of catching up to do.

The first line of defence is that of the abusive spouse contesting a divorce. It’s so UNFAIR that Scotland should have the right to vote for independence when England doesn’t have the right to vote to stop it. What about all those who feel British above all and who face having their identity taken away from them? (Honestly! I need you, so I can feel good about myself. Don’t you dare leave!) One poll suggests that, given a chance, English voters would in fact be even more keen to vote for Scottish independence than Scottish ones.

The Campaign for an English Parliament can probably be blamed for half of that, forever harking on about the Barnett formula and other forms of selective accounting. The facts are, most likely, that Scotland subsidises England, that both Osborne and Salmond know this, but that the former daren’t admit it. And WITHIN England, regional disparities are huge. London receives more public spending per head than Wales, despite the obscene levels of personal wealth enjoyed by its top echelons. If an English Parliament could address regional disparities, so could a British one have done, but hasn’t. Only regional parliaments can make that difference. And the other half? Well, Salmond can be blamed for that, if blame is the word. If the SNP leader has so annoyed English voters that they want to see the back of his whole country, that’s the achievement of a very canny politician.

So what next? The second line of defence is to fight it out over the marital home. It’s to shrink Britain so that it becomes England, a lesser Britain. Not the real England, content within its own borders. This is an England motivated not by any positive thoughts about itself but by continuing negativity towards the Celtic separatist challenge. It is a supremacist, irredentist England, clinging to every clod, actual or potential, from Berwick-on-Tweed to British Antarctica, claiming Gwent as Monmouthshire and Cornwall as a conquered county. It’s the political equivalent of an amputee believing his limbs are still there to respond to his will. It’s a surprise no-one seems to have thought yet of claiming Calais, which returned MPs to the English Parliament at Westminster long before County Durham did.

The third line of defence is over custody of the future, of the soul of England. What does it mean to be English? What SHOULD it mean? The English identity is – or ought to be – a hotly contested concept. The match is lit but the fuel has yet to be ignited. What we can expect to see, if an independent England starts to seem likely, is an explosion of interest in defining its essential character, in seizing the prize.

Billy Bragg apart, there has been little sign of urgency about building an alternative to the right-wing narrative of ‘the warrior nation’, two world wars and one world cup. In the short-term, the most likely scenario remains that England will be defined as a unitary state, run from London, licking its post-British wounds by inflicting new ones on others. The battle lost, the war can still be won. By making sure that no-one else can challenge London hegemony. Freed from the need to offer a decentralist veneer to save the union, such a new England would have no room for regional structures in any shape or form. The politics would be jingoistic, to inhibit independent thought. The economics would be – no, already are – rabidly libertarian, substituting market forces for anything that might engender loyalty to a territory smaller than England. The culture would be, even more than now, that which promotes a uniform past, present and future.

It ought to be a cause for comment that such a vision owes an extraordinary amount to Celtic nationalism, even though Celtic nationalists, in Cornwall, are liable to be among its first victims. The idea of England as political nation, with one law, one executive, one parliament, mirrors the idea of Ireland, Scotland, Wales or Cornwall as political nation. The idea of Britain is not challenged by any of these because it leads to bad government but because Britain groups as one nation areas that assert politically their own separate national status. Celtic nationalists are often the staunchest advocates of an English Parliament precisely because it looks like a neat and tidy solution to the national question. Whether it actually is so is another question entirely. Historically, Celtic nationalists haven’t shown much interest in a well-governed England living next door. They’ve been more interested in maintaining their differentials in an exchange of blows with an ever-adaptive British state. And that’s meant a certain hostility to regional devolution because it leads to the all-too reasonable point that Wessex, with the same population as Scotland and Wales combined, is at least as capable of running its own affairs.

Nationalism means an England no less badly governed than it already is as part of the UK. London would remain dominant, regional differences would continue to go unacknowledged. Those differences matter at a profound cultural level, though the case for regionalism would be no less real even if they did not exist. Firstly, it is simply inefficient to refer decisions to London when they could be made much closer to home. Secondly, decisions made in London ‘in the overall public interest’ are not effectively informed by the perspective of those who live elsewhere and so in practice always reinforce London’s dominance. And thirdly, as we move into the post-oil age, the argument for smaller political units built around clusters of regional-scale infrastructure will be at least as compelling as ancient cultural loyalties.

Those loyalties are not about to disappear. There’ll always be an England, but it will have a different meaning and role once it has to share the limelight with Wessex, Mercia and the like. It will have to, because the sane, humane, ecological England we need is one that respects and values its regions even more than itself – just as regions in turn need to treasure their counties, cities, boroughs and so on. It’s the only England worth having, the only England that deserves to emerge triumphant from the forthcoming cultural and political struggle. In truth, it’s not about England, and never has been. It’s about whose England. And who gets to choose between the paths.

The Sack of Wessex

2012-01-24T05:00:00.000-08:00

Pressure is being piled on MPs to toughen scrap-metal legislation in a bid to stop thieves stripping out our infrastructure in search of a quick profit.

There was a time when metal theft was more or less restricted to opportunist pilfering from building sites and removing lead from the roofs of abandoned churches. Not any more. The wholesale looting of metal has lately developed into organised international crime on an industrial scale, causing widespread damage, danger and disruption.

Churches in rural locations are targeted by well-equipped gangs operating under cover of darkness who will return on several occasions until they have taken everything. Fundraising for the repair of historic buildings puts a heavy burden on local communities; some congregations have been brought to the verge of bankruptcy and are facing the closure of their church.

Churches are particularly vulnerable to the consequences of theft of roofing material because insurance payments for damage are capped at £10,000. Repair bills can easily exceed this when rain seeps in where metal has been taken, causing damage to plasterwork and pews. And then there is the cost of replacing the roof. English Heritage has been impelled to abandon its policy of requiring ‘like-for-like’ replacement when a church roof is restored, knowing that traditional lead and copper will simply be plundered. Church bells and other treasures can be targeted too. Not even war memorials are sacred now. When the metal elements listing the names of the fallen are ripped off, the very record of history is obliterated.

Lead is in demand worldwide for lead-acid batteries and a constrained supply has fuelled speculation, driving the price higher. Even more lucrative is the trade in stolen copper which is in particular demand in emerging nations such as China, India and Brazil, so that even a few yards of cabling can net over £100 for the thief. It is reckoned that the theft of copper from lineside installations alone has cost Network Rail over £40 million in the past two years. When copper wire is removed, the signals stop working and trains have to stay where they are or be cancelled or diverted; there is no costing the time lost and the anxiety suffered by countless passengers delayed by such incidents, which are currently running at the rate of eight a day.

Even the telephone lines have not been spared, cutting off subscribers and disrupting 999 services. In some cases BT vans have been stolen by criminals who can use them to pose as legitimate workers, tear out the wires at their leisure and arouse no suspicion. Agricultural vehicles, tools and equipment, garden gates, railings, children’s swings and even metal beer kegs are also easy prey. CCTV is no obstacle: the thieves just take the cameras.

When, in the predictable chaos following the fall of Saddam, news reports told of Iraqi infrastructure grinding to a halt as equipment of all kinds was stolen, it was easy to be complacent. Iraq is Iraq. Britain is Britain. Now it is clear that the skills involved in metal theft are universally deployable and it has come into the province of serious organised crime. It is regarded as less risky than robbing a bank but potentially just as rewarding. So far, fatalities have been limited to the criminals themselves, including, astonishingly, folk attempting to steal live cable from pylons, but it can only be a matter of time before an innocent victim suffers more than mere inconvenience. Manhole covers are an obvious target and an obvious source of concern.

It has been proposed in Parliament that the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 1964 should be replaced by new legislation imposing a single licensing scheme with greater powers for the courts to shut down scrap yards that do not comply. Metal could not then be legally purchased without proof of identity and address and all trade would have to be carried on through accounts rather than with the traditional, mostly undocumented cash payments. So far, deregulatory ideology has held up the legislation and there are no signs of early action from the crooks’ best friends in power. (Crime, along with waste, increases GDP by stimulating demand for replacement items, so the Coalition are very much in favour of both.) Meanwhile, an increasing number of undertakings which use copper wire are coating it with ‘smartwater’, each preparation of which has its own ‘signature’ enabling its owners to be identified, in the unlikely event of it being recovered.

In the short-term, legislation is required urgently. So too are more stringent policing, greater community vigilance, and a tackling at source of the drug culture that underlies so much criminal activity. Now that metal theft is an established lifestyle, even a fall in commodity prices is no deterrent: in fact it acts as a spur to more theft in order to sustain value.

We are becoming an increasingly wired society, dependent on telecommunications, especially the Internet, for more and more of our daily lives. Rail transport, the backbone of all future planning for the movement of goods and passengers over any significant distance, is likewise vulnerable. Renewable energy installations, such as solar panels, also offer the lure of metal content. Economic growth, fortunately at an end in the materially obese countries of the developed world, is, for now, continuing to play a role amongst the emergent economic giants of the south and east. Their aspiration to lift themselves out of absolute poverty is a noble one. But it should not be achieved through tolerating predatory attacks on our own civilisation as we enter the era of ‘peak everything’. We have to be resolute about that. And instead of trying still to impose our way of life on other countries, it’s time to wake up to the pressing need to protect it at home.

Needling Doubts

2012-01-23T05:00:00.000-08:00

News reaches us that Occupy Bristol are finally departing from College Green, after weeks of treating PUBLIC open space as somewhere to set up their own Third World shanty town, having first failed to find anywhere more relevant to squat. Surprise, surprise, there are syringes all over the place. It seems that those who wanted to sort out the world couldn’t even sort themselves out.

The Occupy movement have been exposed as a disgraceful disappointment to reformers everywhere, setting back necessary changes by at least a generation, just as the ‘establishment’ planned all along, no doubt with the aid of police insiders. Any fool can be ‘anti’ capitalist, or claim to speak in the place of the millions who actually voted FOR the status quo. It takes brains to articulate a viable alternative and WORK for it consistently. All the ideas needed already exist. We’ve been accumulating them and arguing for them for over 40 years. We’ve even been willing to share them with Occupy folk who will listen.

Are they interested? In building a political party, one of a network of regional movements committed to radical transformation? No. In growing a new, sustainable economy to spearhead transition to a world free from London dominance? No. In rediscovering and revitalising our own unique culture, through living life in a land of which we can all be proud? No. So guess who’s laughing all the way to the bank.

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

2012-01-21T11:00:00.000-08:00

Politics - featuring the unacknowledged death of localism.

Philosophy - or the message behind the medium.

Economics - coming soon to a petrol station near you.

Because understanding what’s happening is the first step towards influencing it.

End of the Beginning

2011-12-31T01:00:00.000-08:00

When the London Stock Exchange closed yesterday, it became possible to compare the year-end positions for 2010 and 2011. The FTSE 100 was down 5.6% over the year. Banks fell more sharply. Oil and gas shares rose. The High Street remains in dire straits, partly due to the impact of online shopping, partly due to you know what. This is also the time of year when rents have to be paid, the straw that breaks the Christmas camel’s back.

A year’s data is no better guide to economic trends than to climate change (though 2011 was the second warmest year recorded in the UK, second only to 2006). But the economic data is not other than we might expect. Growth is over, banks are dead in the water, and as the price of fossil fuels rises, so the profits accruing to those who still have them to hand will increase. What consumption survives is much more hard-headed and conscious of costs in the round.

And politics? Well, the choice is no different to usual. Either one of the London parties, all now steaming towards a corporatist merger with big business to protect the interests of the rich and powerful. Or the regionalist alternative, putting communities first, within the context of a world that is fast changing for ever.

Horrific Outbreak of Democracy in Paris

2011-12-27T10:00:00.000-08:00

The French Parliament appears to be on the brink of allowing mistakes in regional boundaries to be corrected by a vote in the départements directly concerned. The new law would remove the right of voters in the wider region to veto change – a right that, in effect, keeps folk locked in an administrative marriage to which they never consented.

It may come as a surprise to our readers that any right of referendum already exists in French regional law. We certainly don’t have it in England. As far as the London regime is concerned, we’re thick yokels who couldn’t punch our way out of a wet paper bag. Folk who wouldn’t know a credit default swap from a collateralised debt obligation, let alone be capable of defining our own identity.

So there’s no vote in prospect for Hampshire on whether it’s right for the historic capital city of Wessex to be in a different region from the majority of our shires. Nor in Cornwall on whether it’s right for a Celtic nation to be in an English region at all.

Peace & Goodwill?

2011-12-25T01:00:00.000-08:00

This September, those who died in terrorist attacks on U.S. cities were commemorated, ten years on. Although the death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan combined is over 300 times the death toll of 9/11, few words were spared for the victims of those U.S.-led crusades for oil, unleashed under the pretext of fighting terror, with terror. Those who care at all will not care enough to withhold their votes from the politicians responsible and cast them in a more sensible direction. Although about 71% of Britons think the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, according to a ComRes poll for ITV, most tolerate the lies, the lies about ‘our boys’, devoting themselves to ‘keeping us safe’, that we may ‘sleep at night’. Well, wake up!

In October, the conflict in Afghanistan involving western troops entered its second decade. It has cost the UK taxpayer £18 billion and rising. Deaths among the British armed forces have reached 392, among Afghan civilians over 8,800.

Today, we ought to reflect on how little it has all achieved.

Saddam Hussein was tried and executed, for unrelated crimes, while Osama Bin Laden was not tried at all but executed anyway. In contrast, our own conspirators are still very much at large. Some of those, like David Cameron, who voted for war in 2003 enjoy all the trappings of high office, courtesy of the British electorate. So should we now accept Tony Blair’s advice, to ‘draw a line and move on’? It’s true that such issues may seem a long way removed from devolution but they do demonstrate the pressing need for change in our constitutional arrangements. If ‘our leaders’ can be excused justice for reasons of state then there is NO justice, no equality under the law. And the longer they’re allowed to get away with it, the more they’ll feel capable of doing the same again.

Meanwhile, 3% of Wessex continues to be occupied as training grounds by those preparing for the next pre-emptive strike to keep the peace. A less cynical, less Orwellian world used to call them wars.

Almost nightly, our screens are filled with the uniformed portraits of the latest casualties in Afghanistan. Newsreaders don’t normally tell us the names of everyone who has died in a preventable accident at work. Or in collisions on our overcrowded roads. Is it because morale is so low that those ‘heroes’ foolish enough to take the Queen’s shilling are paraded before us? So that, surely, we ought to nod helplessly and approve of them wasting their lives in a pointless cause? British soldiers are NOT ‘heroes’. For two reasons. One is that heroes save lives, not take them. The other is that there is nothing heroic about this shabby little war.

What most appals those who lived through the Second World War is that rampant militarism now goes unchallenged. The priority of disarmament has given way to the priority of ‘intervention’, as if ‘our’ government had some right to act not just as world’s policeman but also as world’s political surgeon. As the dust settles in Libya and talk turns to the contracts for reconstruction, we can see the real agenda all too plainly. As ‘statesmen’ look around for something to restart the engine of ecocide, plenty of advice will suggest that trade follows the flag, that the markets demand greater and greater offerings of human hearts. There’s even a name for it: weaponised Keynesianism. Globalisation – aggressive trade liberalisation coupled with contempt for sovereignty, identity and democracy – is a crime against humanity, a desperate bid to win control of the world’s resources before they run out. Daft, but true.

‘Royal’ Wootton Bassett now has the same initials as Red, White & Blue. It began to enter the national consciousness by spontaneously honouring the war dead passing through. It ended up receiving an honour of its own, for which it never asked, an honour some find manipulative and tawdry. The Mayor told journalists that he expects locals will carry on calling the place simply ‘Bassett’. The establishment could not spare the Queen to present her Letters Patent in person this year but deputed the Princess Royal to convey to the townsfolk the thanks of “the whole country”. Thanks for what? Thanks for “responding with dignity and respect to the losses that this country’s operational responsibilities have forced upon us”. Forced? And when exactly did a war of choice become violence under duress? Perhaps the Queen, as ultimate commander-in-chief, would like to answer that question at The Hague?

We are all Cameron’s conscripts, despite the best efforts of the Peace Tax campaign. It has become unacceptable in most circles to voice any criticism of the remilitarisation of our society. Laws are being twisted to punish those who do, trampling on fundamental rights of free expression in a chilling evocation of the flag desecration laws found in totalitarian states. True patriotism cannot arise from coercion and it would be a despicable thing if it could. The burning of Remembrance Day poppies as a protest against the continuing fact of war does appear to be on the increase, an ugly sign of ugly times. Does it show less respect than allowing the warmongers to lay their wreaths of hypocrisy? Who then are the real criminals?

We are all instructed, even by the young Lefties of the BBC, what to think and feel about RWB and Carterton, and much else surrounding the British murder machine. It’s time the truth was able to be told and fingers to be pointed in accusation. Because regime change begins at home.

Nuking Weymouth

2011-12-15T23:55:00.000-08:00

According to financial analyst David Malone today, “2012 is going to be the year of unrest and repression.”

A London establishment that has spent the last decade, and more, treading heavily on the world has now invited the world round for a spot of sport. And is getting worried. It might be a very good idea not to be in southern Dorset next summer, in view of some of the scenarios now being modelled.

Of course, nothing at all may happen. But a lot of useful experience in crowd control and the like will have been gained...

Missing the Obvious

2011-12-12T09:00:00.000-08:00

There’s a water crisis looming. The Coalition wants us all to be more careful. Hippy conservationists seem to agree that water meters, dual-flush toilets and garden water butts will take the pressure off. Maybe sharing showers or bathwater would help. All of which is nonsense. It’s nonsense because we would actually have more than enough water if we’d limit ourselves to a sustainable population. Climate change, if it proves to be anything more than a corporatist hoax, may make the shortage worse but the real cause is letting folk live where the water ain’t.

Over the past 90 years we have seen a long-term drift of England’s population from north to south. The northern cities, supplied from reservoirs in the Pennines, the Lake District and Wales, are not short of water, just inhabitants to use it. The southern cities, growing unsustainably, depend on squeezing water out of exhausted aquifers and planning new reservoirs on good farmland. Bristol has a clutch of reservoirs supplied by rain off the Mendips yet still has to import half its drinking water from Wales via the Gloucester & Sharpness Canal. The Thames valley has a significant water deficit, which re-opening of the Thames & Severn Canal may partly relieve. Swindon remains a growth area, despite drawing its water from the Thames and the groundwater source that feeds the Kennet, one of the most heavily abstracted rivers in the country. There’s talk of building a national water grid to redress the imbalance between supply and demand but there are limits to how much the gathering-grounds of upland Britain can realistically deliver, not least because water is heavy and pumping it uphill uses scarce energy.

Obsessed with markets, Ministers seem more keen to allow users to switch suppliers and investors to extract profits than to focus on managing resources sustainably, let alone democratically. (We should never forget that municipal water departments were STOLEN from local folk by the London regime in a series of moves between 1973 and 1989. No compensation has ever been paid: the proceeds from privatisation funded tax cuts for the rich.)

The fact is that we’re all being taken for idiots. The forthcoming shortages are self-inflicted. Pulling together, Blitz-style, to do our bit for water conservation is the kind of script that well-meaning Guardian readers love. Like the mythical slow-boiled frog, they cannot see that the problem can ONLY get worse so long as development in Wessex continues. No doubt they’ll be among the first to offer up their garden shed to ease the housing shortage too.

Freedom cannot thrive in high-density environments. Throughout the history of human settlement, urban areas have always been more tightly regulated than rural ones, because the pressures on resource management are greater. The point is the same whether the subject matter be fire regulations, waste disposal, clean air or congestion charges. Professor Leopold Kohr, in The Breakdown of Nations, warned that density also has direct social consequences: “the police force of communities, to cope with the ever present danger of sudden social fusion, must increase at a more than proportionate rate as the population increases, not because larger cities harbour proportionately more bad men than smaller ones, but because, after a certain point, social size becomes itself the chief criminal.”

The obvious is being missed: that it is always better to have the foresight to prevent problems arising than to panic over what is ultimately the inability to devise any lasting solution compatible with liberty.

Occupied by London

2011-12-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

Witney’s witless MP, David William Donald Cameron, was in Brussels this week to bargain over a new European treaty. He didn’t get what he wanted in return, a hands-off approach to regulation of the ‘socially useless’ activities of the City of London. That’s no surprise. He could hardly have chosen a less popular cause to die in the Channel for.

The City IS the national interest? The Coalition promised to rebalance the British economy, away from casino chips towards real stuff instead, to at least acknowledge the 90% of GDP that doesn’t come from financial services. But like a dog returning to its vomit, they just can’t let go. There’s been much talk of ‘moral hazard’ in propping up dead banks but the greatest moral hazard is that the UK Treasury is so addicted to skimming off a tiny part of the City’s wealth in tax that it will do anything to save it from a well-deserved collapse.

The strategy is now taking shape. The UK is to be simply an offshore tax haven. Wessex and East Anglia are to be commuter, weekender and retirement zones, with excellent road and rail links to London (and nowhere else). Political correctness laws are to be deployed to suppress our dialect and customs. Local decision-making is to be restructured to entrench the friends of London in power and open up the countryside for development to accommodate their wage-slaves. Human rights laws are to be used to enforce the right to live anywhere and demand the house-building to make it possible. Public money, raised from local folk but taken to London to count, is to be doled out to communities on the basis of whether or not it will be spent to advance London’s agenda.

Shrill voices will be on hand to denounce any criticism of the masters of the universe, whose skills with numbers, battered as they are, are all that stands between us and disaster (for them). We can expect ‘financial terrorism’ laws to be introduced to ban the spreading of information on how we can bring down bad banks by co-ordinated switching of deposits. Free markets have had their day – the beneficiaries have new rules to write now.

Our President, Colin Bex, was in the City of London this autumn, helping out with the ‘Occupy’ protests. It’s about time that Wessex occupied London because they’ve occupied us for centuries. The Normans started it, then in the 14th century the Duchy of Cornwall was endowed with lands across Wessex, to support the Prince of Wales and his family in a lavish lifestyle at court. And on campaign, in places like Afghanistan. No, France, actually, but nothing’s changed. Our railways overwhelmingly point east-west because they were built to supply fresh meat and milk to the capital. From farms owned by absentee landlords living it up in London. And still it goes on. Large parts of Wessex are military training grounds, where the occupation of our depopulated villages is literal. We even have to pay a special tax to be allowed to fly our own flag.

Wessex Regionalism is about ending the occupation. It’s about breaking the chains that shackle us to London, yoked by a political class that serves the interests of a financial class that treats us with contempt. Wessex Regionalism is about reclaiming the right to proudly be ourselves in our own land. Indebted to no-one.

Crooks In Command

2011-12-08T16:00:00.000-08:00

The Western Daily Press leads today with a story about an open letter from wildlife groups in Wessex and Cornwall “incredulous” about the Coalition’s “stunning disregard” for the natural environment, citing the Chancellor’s recent description of it as a “ridiculous” barrier to economic growth.

Tony Richardson of the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) responded robustly that “We are keenly aware that more than any other region we trade on the quality of this environment. Far from being a barrier, it is difficult to see how economic recovery can be achieved here without safeguarding the very thing that makes the region attractive to visitors and a good place to do business.” Then he spoilt it all, by continuing, “We are not anti-development but we have to proceed with wisdom – with careful planning, under the requirements of the regulations, development can work for both wildlife and the economy.”

What’s wrong with that? Where do we begin!

First of all, we have NO sympathy for green groups that treat Westminster politicians with any respect whatsoever. We appeal to them to join the Party and work for the eradication of the whole top-down Westminster system that allows Osborne and his kind any say in the first place. Stop the fawning, and start the resistance!

Secondly, why, oh why, do seemingly intelligent folk insist on making their continuing ritual obeisance to Mammon? ‘Of course, we’re not against growth, as such, just…’ No? Well, we certainly are. Living within environmental limits is either meaningless waffle while our planet burns or it implies a cap on development. Now.

A third point is illustrated by another story from the WDP today: a vision from a group of “influential business leaders” calling themselves The Initiative. (Or is it The Matrix? Something like that.) Their blueprint for Bristol in 2050 calls for a population increase of 500,000 and vast urban sprawl that would swallow up Bath and much of the Green Belt. The RSPB simply have no idea of what they’re up against. Folk like The Initiative care about nothing but the destruction of the environment to advance their own private wealth. There are a lot of them about and they aren’t the least bit interested in what the RSPB think.

From the same WDP page comes news that new powers could be devolved to cities like Bristol – but only if they vote for an elected mayor first. Bribery used to be the word for that and we used to have laws against it. We live in an increasingly closed, post-democratic world where “business leaders” are treated like gods, where local democracy is restructured to give them exclusive control of the common wealth and where national democracy, such as it is, lives or dies at the whim of rating agencies whose own competence is pitiful.

One of the silliest questions that can be asked about our policies is, ‘Are you pro-business, or not?’ The answer all depends on what sort of business it is. It’s very important to distinguish between good businesses and the rest. There are businesses playing their part in the transition to a sustainable society, businesses finding new ways to reduce resource use in a world where all that has sustained us in the past will be shrinking. The best businesses are those seeking to make themselves smaller, by doing more with less and expanding leisure time. You could call it economic anti-growth. But ranged against them there’s also the dark side: the businesses who don’t realise that ‘business as usual’ is over. Until they learn that it is, they’ll go on making millions miserable by their contempt for the environment and our quality of life. They may not be criminals as the law stands. But those who make morally crooked choices do not deserve to be excused justice in an appropriate form. We’ll be fighting every inch of the way to ensure they get it.

Where Does All The QE Go?

2011-12-01T23:55:00.000-08:00

Not difficult to guess!

The Campaign for Real Constituencies

2011-12-01T23:45:00.000-08:00

Followers of this blog will know that we have consistently opposed the Coalition’s efforts to force all Parliamentary constituencies to be the same size, along with all of the nonsense this will mean on the spot. County boundaries respected since the first ‘knights of the shire’ attended the first Parliaments over 700 years ago are no longer sacrosanct. A large part of Devon will share an MP with a large part of Cornwall. The same thing will happen to Dorset and Wiltshire. Gloucester Cathedral will no longer be in the Gloucester constituency but in the Forest of Dean. (It’s not possible under the new rules for the Gloucester seat to be left alone: it has 315 voters too many!)

The Boundary Commission’s consultation on its initial proposals closes on Monday and we have today sent in our response, which is reproduced below.

The Wessex Regionalist Party offers the following comments on the review.

1. We believe that the legislation governing the review is fundamentally flawed in its devaluing of community identity. We also believe that MPs failed to understand that limiting variation in the size of the electorate to no more than 5% would mean that shire and other local loyalties could no longer automatically be respected. We believe that the Commission has a responsibility not only to carry out its task within the remit of the legislation but to convey to those responsible the degree of public disquiet at what may be unintended consequences of that legislation.

2. We welcome the Commission’s proposals where they succeed in respecting the traditional boundaries of Wessex shires. We remain concerned that important local boundaries within shires, notably those of the City of Gloucester, have been treated insensitively.

3. Without prejudice to our primary position that constituencies in Wessex should not cross the traditional shire boundaries, we suggest that the proposed ‘Warminster & Shaftesbury’ constituency could be named ‘Heart of Wessex’. There is a precedent for this in the former European Parliamentary constituency of Wessex (1979-84).

The Traditional Choice

2011-11-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

One member of the public commented on the website of The Guardian (a London newspaper) yesterday that:

“I feel our sense of tradition and our warmth towards our old institutions needs to change, we need to stop thinking they are there to take care of us. If they are to continue to exist, they need to do so within a mandate of our choosing, rather than us existing within one of theirs.”

That truly is about the sum of it. And it’s also worth adding that there is in many cases a choice to be made between one set of traditions and another, between those of a folk culture from within and a ‘high’ culture from without. Often it is the outside view looking in that is privileged and the inside view looking out that is condemned to silence. The media will always seek out the local who agrees with their metropolitan outlook and dismiss the rest as quaint.

The Crown, the Church, the City, and, of course, Parliament, are traditions we are supposed to value. Our own traditions – our shires, our boroughs, our whole culture, especially our dialect – are not valued but are pulled and kicked about for advantage and amusement. Which is why central to any programme for constitutional reform must be a true empowerment of the regions, not as agents of whatever party happens to command a Commons majority but as something much, much more valuable than anything national can be. A living heritage with roots deep in the land of Wessex. THAT is a transformation to take us far beyond mere politics.

We Are WR

2011-11-01T01:00:00.000-07:00

From time to time we are advised, usually by non-members, that we ought to drop the word ‘Wessex’ from our name. Or drop ‘Regionalist’. Sometimes to drop the status of ‘Party’. Needless to say, we do not welcome advice from anyone who hasn’t paid a subscription. Saving Wessex is not a spectator sport. We are the Wessex Regionalist Party, always have been and in all likelihood always will be. Our founder got the name right – by thinking it through.

The last suggestion of the three is the easiest dealt with. We are a registered political party because there is still no better way to alter things than to seek to unseat those who are getting things so badly wrong. For us to abandon that ambition would be to consign Wessex to continuing rule by the London parties, each of which offers simply a slightly different version of the same anti-Wessex agenda.

We are proud to be The Party for Wessex. We are NOT “regionalists” in the sense of subscribing to some all-England or wider creed with which Wessex has to comply. We have no reason to be patient with those who believe in building regionalism but not in building regions. Yet. (If not now, then when? Or do we go forever round in circles while the metropolitan chattering classes either fail to make their minds up or back the wrong horse, as they did so spectacularly in the case of the Prescott zones?) We are not interested in settling for less autonomy than we need, out of sentimental respect for a “national unity” that in practice means we get outvoted and suffer the imposition of irrelevant policies. But we ARE regionalists in the sense that we are not separatists who would deny the interconnectedness of the world, or despise voluntary co-operation to address the pressing issues that confront humanity. Those are debates to which we hope to contribute the distinctive Wessex perspective, informed by a cultural heritage that we safeguard for all. That is why we are WESSEX Regionalists.

We have a vision for Wessex and it is not a nationalist one: it is a regionalist one and our name makes that clear. For us, the region is but one link in a chain of subsidiarity stretching from the parish to the planet. It is, however, of pivotal importance and its total absence from the political structure of England is a hole we strive first and foremost to fill. We emphasise the region because it is what allows the other components of the structure to function properly, neither struggling with matters beyond their capacity nor bloated with detail, remote from the citizen. The region is big enough to cope, small enough to care. That is why we are Wessex REGIONALISTS.

Western Spring

2011-10-30T01:00:00.000-07:00

WR President Colin Bex speaks truth to power on the streets of London.

Noz vat, keneil

2011-10-28T01:00:00.000-07:00

Good night, friend. In Breton.

Tuesday saw the funeral of Yann Fouéré, who died on 20th October at the age of 101. A life-long advocate of Breton and other minority rights, founder of the Movement for the Organisation of Brittany and other political and cultural movements in Brittany, co-founder of the Celtic League and the European Free Alliance, Fouéré’s most iconic contribution to political thought was the idea of ‘the Europe of a Hundred Flags’. The phrase is a translation of the original title of his 1968 book, L’Europe aux Cents Drapeaux, published in English in 1980 as Towards a Federal Europe: Nations or States?

The phrase is much more inspiring than the book, which now appears very dated. All regionalists who have not yet achieved the degree of autonomy they desire will be disappointed with the pace of change, the resurgent intransigence and tactical slyness of the nation-states and the lack of genuine interest from those now busy building a bankers’ and bureaucrats’ Europe on the ruins of idealism.

Nevertheless, we are pleased to have counted Fouéré among our allies, just as he was to give ‘Le Wessex’ an honourable mention in his magazine, L’Avenir de la Bretagne. His book was too early for us to receive a mention there. What the book does say is that the future English region-states are “foreshadowed in the eight economic regions into which England has already been divided” but that “some adjustments may be required as far as the limits of these regions are concerned”. Commenting on the situation in the late 1970s, it goes on to say that “France and Spain are lagging behind England”. Not any more!

Despite his flexibly federalist leanings, Fouéré posed a warning: “Could Zone No. 6 or the West-North-West Region kindle in the hearts of their citizens some kind of local patriotism, which is the condition of a vigorous local life? On pain of being purely artificial and devoid of every human warmth, the region-states should be inspired by a spirit of resistance to absorption and assimilation. If not, they would be like dead cells, and dead cells cannot make up a living body. They would soon be swallowed up by a unitary European state, using its centralized and despotic power to destroy the freedom of men and regions.”

John Prescott tried to give us precisely the kind of map that Fouéré condemned. We begged to differ and fought top-down regionalisation every inch of the way. We were right, and are right, in believing that when regional government finally triumphs it will not be under the logo flag of some ‘South West’ or ‘South East’ assembly but when the fiery standard of Wessex comes to be unfurled over the first gathering of our region’s Witan in near a thousand years.

Tackling the Taboos

2011-10-26T02:00:00.000-07:00

“There are those who say the system is broke. It’s not. That’s how it was built. It is there to make rich people richer.”
Bilbo Goransson

In parts of Wessex, second homes are an epidemic. In the coastal communities of south Devon, including towns such as Salcombe, second homes and holiday lets now account for over 50% of the housing stock. For those who don’t live in south Devon – and it could equally be parts of Somerset or Dorset – try imagining the scene. Every other home, empty all winter. The locals? Who?

South Hams District Council has done what it can. It has recognised the harm to communities that results when family members are ripped from their roots by lack of affordable housing. Schools, shops and facilities suffer.

Before 2000, the council’s priority was to protect the environment. Since 2000, it has been to get affordable housing built. Not a popular policy with everyone. Council officials have faced death threats. Folk feel that their environment is under attack, as well they might.

The sad fact is that conflict is an inevitable consequence of the law as it stands. Because the Londoners won’t forgo their cosy cottages, local authorities face an unpalatable dilemma. Build – and destroy farmland, landscape, tranquillity, road safety and the rest to accommodate ever greater numbers, eroding the very attributes of rural living that attracted the newcomers in the first place. Or don’t build – and see the community die. A not-so-holy alliance between planning departments (seeking fees) and building firms (seeking profits) means that bricks-and-mortar is the stock answer to any social problem, always preferred to truly constructive thinking.

There is another way. The way that keeps the housing stock stable but gives priority to locals when vacancies arise. It works well in the Channel Islands. It would work well in Wessex, were it allowed to. Empty and second homes could be taxed out of existence. Change of use to a second home could require planning permission. If all else fails, the public sector could step in and buy those homes whenever they come on to the market and rent them to local homeless folk. You remember. Council housing? The very opposite of current policy, where Right to Buy discounts are to be increased, allowing more and more tenants to effectively steal public assets, and where ‘affordable rents’ are now to be redefined as 80% of market rent, regardless of whether local incomes are anywhere near that figure. The Wessex Clearances are underway then. As Robin Stanes put it in his history of Devon, “If it has lost much of its native idiom and rural style and if the Devonshire dialect is now seldom heard – and mocked when it is – that probably does not bother the new Devonians, the incomers who probably now make up the majority.”

When Labour ruled the roost, it labelled second homes a localised problem requiring localised solutions, but always denied us the powers and resources to do anything but moan. Solutions do exist but to reach them will mean putting people and place above property and privilege. Lack of money is the worst possible excuse for not doing something. Money is infinite, just an accounting convention, a symbol for the finite real resources that society either squanders or puts to good use. It is society’s job, though its democratic institutions, to allocate and re-allocate resources, through defining and re-defining the scope of the property rights it will recognise, to achieve just outcomes. It’s time it got on with it. Until then, we shall continue to ask the question: can we, environmentally and socially, continue to afford a part-time populace? Or must the price of their fun in the sun be a lifetime of squalor for the ordinary folk of Wessex?

Happy King Alfred’s Day.

The Wrong Type of Railway

2011-10-25T14:00:00.000-07:00

Transport developments continue to make the headlines this month. Figures for rail use so far in 2011 suggest that this will be a boom year, with the number of passenger journeys at its highest since the mid-1940s, and the highest in peacetime since the 1920s. The Independent (a London newspaper) commented in its editorial on 17th October that: “Soaring petrol prices is one of the principal factors powering the growth in train travel, and as a return to the days of cheap petrol appears inconceivable, it would be wise to bank on the need for continued rail expansion. Yet there is not much sign that the Government has taken this on board.”

Enough of that rolling on the floor laughing. Of course, petrol prices are still ridiculously low but at least there are some who realise, however imperfectly, that the only way is up, just as there are those who realise that growth really is dead, even if they have yet to see the body. There will be huge investment in the railways in the years to come. The London regime has embarked on one of the biggest rail development programmes since Victorian times – 2,700 new carriages, £900 million for electrification, and the Crossrail and Thameslink projects. Not to mention High Speed 2 ruffling Tory feathers in the Chilterns.

The question we should all be asking is whether this is money well spent. Will it help decentralise the UK and facilitate the re-formation of substantially self-sufficient regional economies? Or will it re-inforce provincial subservience to dictates from the London branch office of the global banking scam, and so disastrously delay our transition to a sustainable way of living?

Left to the market, the answer might well be the former. The highest growth this year has been in journeys taken in London and the south-east rather than in the long-distance travel that politicians like to talk up into a series of glamorous grands projets. Another growth area has been in use of small rural branch lines – precisely the kind of lines that used to be considered the network’s biggest liability. No doubt that pattern would have been even more marked if so many services outside the south-east had not been rendered inaccessible through branch line closures. “The argument deserves to continue, therefore,” opines the Indy, “over whether future investment should be targeted towards further improvements to high-speed, cross-country routes, or plugging the woeful gaps in our often neglected commuter and branch line services.”

No prizes for guessing our choice. Or that the London regime has the opposite view, knowing full well that the £30 billion cost of HS2 would drain the rail sector of the resources, financial and human, needed to do anything really useful at this time. (Besides creating a climate of confrontation and fear that could turn a lot of decent folk against rail development as such.)

North Warwickshire MP Dan Byles told his colleagues recently that HS2 is “such an important national project that, regardless of whether you as an MP are for or against it, you need to know the issues at stake. Every family in the land will end up paying for this.” The Institute of Economic Affairs has said that there is no business case for HS2. The Economist magazine wrote that: “the effect of such projects in other countries has often been to strengthen the competitive advantage of an already dominant city.” Paris has gained the most from the creation of a high-speed network with itself as the central node and London now seeks to repeat the feat. The HS2 Action Alliance has concluded that what is needed to benefit the north and midlands are “transport improvements that improve the efficiency of their labour markets, not ones that expose them to greater competition from London” (‘competition’ subsidised, of course, by all us poor provincials). Dismantling the fake regional structures of the Prescott era without replacing them with a genuine regional alternative will make that turn-around harder to achieve. According to Ed Cox, director of the think-tank IPPR North, handing powers to Scotland’s devolved government and London’s mayor while ignoring everything in between has allowed those areas to advance economically while others suffer.

We’ve been saying all of this for 30 years now: that what’s needed is a Wessex-oriented transport system to link our principal towns and cities to each other, not to London. And the same goes for every other region in our position. The great centralist lie is that Whitehall rule is fair rule, that the national interest is the sum of regional interests and not something that in fact is structurally biased in favour of the south-east corner of these islands.

Sneering at regional solutions, as the Coalition does, and insisting that cities and their hinterlands – ‘Local Enterprise Partnerships’ – are the expected basis for sub-national collaboration is economically illiterate. Like it or not, rural areas do exist and do have a contribution, increasingly important, to make to our sustainable future. As a strategic rail link, the Wessex Main Line is not just Bristol’s commuters at one end and Southampton’s at the other, with an empty bit in the middle and the main focus of attention catching connections for Paddington and Waterloo. It is the backbone of a region, which is why the London regime likes to run it down and turns a blind eye to the overcrowding. And will go on doing so until we retrieve the power to set our own priorities.

Bright Sparks

2011-10-15T23:00:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago yesterday there began a brief spell when our region had its own train company, Wessex Trains, which basically ran the former Western Region local services, excluding the Thames valley and south Wales. The original plans for the franchise would have seen it eventually take over the remaining ex-Southern Region diesel-hauled services on the Exeter-Waterloo route. That idea – and the franchise itself – was killed off in 2006 on the irrational ground that London commuters, poor things, might suffer if more than one company shared access to Waterloo station. After that, the more nostalgic trainspotters could sleep easy too, knowing that the GWR/Southern divide would stagger on largely unblurred into the 21st century and that rail planning regionally would continue to be about getting folk up to London and not – perish the thought – about seamless travel around Wessex.

Thanks, or rather no thanks, to the London & South Western Railway and its successors, many of the lines in south-eastern Wessex were electrified using a live third rail, instead of the overhead wires more generally used. Not clever. In 1904, Professor Silvanus P. Thompson had warned that “the live rail is itself already an obsolete device. It is an engineering blunder. I would therefore ask whether the time is not right for public opinion in some effective form to step in and prevent the railway engineers of England from committing our railway system any further to the dangerous and unnecessary device.”

Clearly the time was not right. Bournemouth to Weymouth was electrified using third rail as recently as 1988, when British Rail’s Class 442 Wessex Electrics were introduced to operate the service. Eastleigh to Fareham was infilled in the 1990s. But last winter, realisation finally began to dawn that third rail just doesn’t like cold weather. Ice forming on the rail can break contact and so the train effectively breaks down. The answer is to run de-icing trains, but then what to do if their path is blocked by trains that have broken down already?

And so the thinking has started. In June this year, Peter Dearman of Network Rail suggested that the third rail network will need to be converted to overhead at some point. It has reached the limit of its capabilities, especially as train technology continues to advance, and it is not sustainable to continue with a system where 25% of the power is lost from heat. The capital costs of conversion work out cheaper than renewal of the existing equipment, needed within the next 10-20 years in any case – a once in 40 years opportunity that must not be lost. The disruption in the short term will deliver increasing benefits over time.

A Commons select committee looking into how well the transport system dealt with last winter’s conditions recommended a series of steps to improve matters. Ultimately, “the Secretary of State should commit the Government to the long-term aim of replacing the existing third rail network with a more resilient form of electrification.” The Department for Transport’s response confirmed that “the rail industry is assessing the case for replacing the third rail system over time with an overhead electrification system. Such a system would be more energy efficient as well as providing better resilience in severe winter weather… However, at this stage it would be premature to commit to the very substantial investment which such a change would involve.”

Since Wessex was the last victim of the third-rail blunder under British Rail, it will be interesting to see if it is also the first area to be converted. Unlike other areas to the east, constrained by sea, there are important connections with other local routes, at Weymouth, Southampton and Basingstoke. As conventional overhead electrification is also rolled-out on the former Western Region lines, so the technical excuse for not treating the whole of Wessex as a unit for local rail services will recede into history. Welcome back, Wessex Trains?

One-Way System

2011-10-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

“Localism is about liberating the natural desire of local communities to become more prosperous. The notion that communities choose decline and reject prosperity is perverse, wrong-headed and not based on evidence.”

So says Eric Pickles. Two questions then for the obese obfuscator.

If he’s that sure that local communities, left to themselves, will destroy their environment, accepting growth over decline (because the middle way of conservation has been neatly airbrushed out of the argument), why does he need the safety net of the Planning Inspectorate to overturn their decisions if they go the ‘wrong’ way?

And why has he published a 65-page draft National Planning Policy Framework that tells them precisely what decisions to make?

The existence of the leash is the proof of the lie.

We have responded to Pickles’ current “consultation” in the degree of detail it deserves. With a single sentence: “We oppose the concept of a National Planning Policy Framework, imposed by central government, as fundamentally incompatible with local democracy.”

The Biggest Society

2011-10-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

Communists and fascists agreed that an efficient society requires a strong element of focused terror – the fear of physical attack. We may think we have moved on but in fact, ever since the 70s, we have been moving back, back towards an older idea that an efficient society requires a strong element of unfocused terror – the fear of economic insecurity.

Nothing better illustrates this slippery slope than the Coalition’s plan for privatisation by stealth in the NHS, which having been waved through the Commons by the glove puppet party has recently begun its progress through the Lords. At our policy meeting last month we agreed a statement on health, namely that the Party:

· condemns the introduction of market forces into the NHS and the corresponding erosion of democratic accountability for the use of public funds;

· notes and condemns the fact that the drive for marketisation has been and continues to be supported by all the major London parties, denying any effective choice of direction;

· notes that in Scotland and Wales the NHS remains true to its founding principles and is organised through local health boards, co-ordinated by the respective devolved health ministers;

· notes that health policy for Wessex is made nationally by the London regime and is imposed on Wessex regardless of local or regional opinion;

· believes that health care should be provided by, or in close collaboration with, elected local bodies with unfettered powers to make decisions and to scrutinise and correct the decisions of others in this field, where not solely concerning the exercise of personal clinical responsibility;

· sees a role for regional action to support local choices, similar to the role of the health ministries in Scotland and Wales and the former regional health authorities in England, and demands that Wessex should form one such regional unit;

· recognises that a major cause of ill-health is the pressured nature of our society and calls for a fundamental reassessment of priorities so as to improve future health at source.

The Coalition parties claim as their aim the replacement of the Big State by the Big Society. Underlying this thinking is no great philosophical depth but simply a desire to rebrand more public assets for private benefit. Having found the State mired in debt, thanks to their banker chums, the only room for manoeuvre they perceive is to get the voluntary sector into debt too.

Less stupid folk will recognise straight away that the biggest society of all, the most comprehensive expression of the common good, IS the State. The real challenge is not to monetise and dismantle its institutions but to decentralise and democratise them, recreating opportunities for volunteers to exercise their skills and enthusiasm WITHIN the public sector, not through some amateurish substitute for it. The ongoing process of stripping out democracy, cutting the number of councils, cutting the number of councillors, giving them less to do, tying them up in rules that ruin their role, handing power to paid officers, executive members and elected mayors to do secret deals with the propertied and moneyed classes, is but the doing of a clueless flock of sheep, now well on their way to be butchered.

A Rock and a Hard Place

2011-10-09T01:00:00.000-07:00

For those who value our environment, and those who care about the future, there is a distinct lack of choice on offer from the London parties. The Tories and their glove puppet want to turn the planning system into a developers’ charter, telling us that localism doesn’t, after all, do what it says on the tin. With characteristic cynicism, they tell us instead that: “Only through empowering communities will we succeed in gaining their buy-in for development.” The intention is to maintain “a strong set of national policy principles to provide direction to local councils to ensure that sustainable development decisions are made.” Tory (and glove puppet) nanny knows best, just like Labour nanny did. And still does?

Surely not? There must be an opening here for Labour to confess and repent? Not according to Jack Dromey, Labour’s shadow communities minister (that’s ‘shadow minister for communities’, not ‘minister for shadow communities’, before you start to get spooked). The man told a fringe meeting at the party conference that Labour would reintroduce regional ‘imperatives’, including top-down housebuilding targets. Moron. We already have two to three times the number of homes that a sustainable population requires. And nowhere near the amount of farmland needed to support the one we actually have. He’ll start telling us next that we need ‘growth’ in order to save the planet.

New New New Labour

2011-10-08T01:00:00.000-07:00

Time was, long ago, when among the London parties a leader’s speech to conference was about how best to put the party’s purpose into action. Not now. Today the leader is there to explain what the party’s purpose is. Or is this week. Or until the polls suggest the nuance isn’t quite honed yet. What underlies the purpose isn’t principle but simply lust for the perks of office.

The truly fascinating thing is that the pundits can’t see anything wrong with this. The Labour Party ripped out its purpose – Clause 4 – in 1995 and threw it away. To be replaced with what Alex Salmond described at the time as ‘mush’. Labour’s concept of the common good was flawed by its French Revolutionary leanings – too distrusting of democracy, especially the endless variety that flourishes with local choice – but at least it existed. Labour believed in the common good, not ‘greed is good’. And now it doesn’t. So why does it still exist? Every one of those BBC and Guardian journalists who yearns for another ‘1997’ moment is missing the obvious. Labour was created to deliver a vision of a better society it has now rejected wholesale. What was a dynamic has become a ritual, designed to keep in being an organisation whose purpose has been hollowed out, leaving behind a shell party to be filled with any vacuous thought that passes through. Better by far it was put out of its misery.

At our policy meeting in May we considered how best to describe our Party’s own position on the political spectrum, concluding that we’re ‘radical decentralist’ rather than ‘Centre-Left’ or ‘progressive’. While there is sympathy with the latter positions, they are too vague to describe our own programme and are easily co-opted by hostile forces.

Radical decentralism is viewed as having three dimensions – a constitutional dimension (localism/regionalism), an economic dimension (co-operation/mutualism) and an environmental dimension (ecology). Unlike the Coalition parties, when we talk of localism we do really mean ‘power to the parishes’, power to decide whatever they like, without nanny setting limits. Unlike Labour, when we talk of a co-operative economy we want to see an end to corporate power, the introduction of a three-day working week and ultimately production, through voluntary association, for use and not for sale. Unlike any other party in Wessex, when we talk about protecting the environment we don’t qualify that goal by saying ‘but only so far as it doesn’t slow down economic or population growth’. For us, ‘decentralisation’ isn’t just a slogan to be betrayed. ‘Radical’ means what it says too. Someone has to say it because, increasingly, it needs to be said. And if no-one else will say it, we’re only too happy to oblige.

Eradicating Ecocide

2011-09-28T14:00:00.000-07:00

Go for it!

Peak Credulity

2011-09-25T16:00:00.000-07:00

Must be conference season for the London parties, no?

Ringing the Changes

2011-09-25T15:00:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago – before computer problems kept us from posting to you – Bournemouth found itself in the national news. It’s to become the first part of the UK to require landline users to phone the whole number, including the area code, for local calls, even to next door neighbours.

Why? Not because there are too many folk needing to be connected but because the proliferation of phone companies has led to increased pressure on the supply of numbers.

Changes like these must lead one to question whether competition always makes things better for the customer. Remember when, under a monopoly supplier, directory enquiries were free, because giving out numbers meant more calls would inevitably follow?

How much simpler life would be with just the one phone company to consider. It could even be locally owned and controlled, as the Portsmouth Corporation Telephone Department was until 1913. Hull’s was until 1999 and is still independent of BT. Trunk lines are an unavoidable add-on but the GPO Telephones had a regional structure until privatisation. There was even a South-Western region that extended to Southampton. Wessex Telecom calling?

Knowing Our Place

2011-09-25T13:00:00.000-07:00

Alex Salmond, setting out the Scottish Government’s programme at Holyrood earlier this month, poured scorn on Tories who had described plans to promote ‘Scottish Studies’ as ‘indoctrination’. “I cannot imagine any other nation,” he said, “where teaching your own history, arts and literature in an impartial way would be dismissed in such a negative fashion.”

Try south of the border, Alex. We’ve been arguing for decades that Wessex Studies needs to be offered as a university course and elements from it incorporated into day-to-day teaching in Wessex schools. Other regions are faring much better. Norwich has its Centre of East Anglian Studies. Newcastle has its Centre for Northern Studies. Leeds Metropolitan University also has its Institute of Northern Studies and offers a Master of Arts course in the subject. Even little Cornwall has its Institute of Cornish Studies at Penryn.

It’s nothing to do with lack of material. Wessex isn’t just Alfred the Great. It isn’t just Thomas Hardy. It’s Stonehenge and Avebury, ancient chalk figures, Roman baths and villas, Arthurian legend, abbots, barons and wool merchants, Queen Elizabeth’s sea dogs, Monmouth’s Rebellion, Swing rioters, Tolpuddle Martyrs, I.K. Brunel and Westland. It’s our dialect and our writers, from William Barnes to Pam Ayres. Our artists, from Stanley Spencer to Beryl Cook and David Inshaw. Our music, from the Wurzels to the Bristol Sound. Actresses like Liz Hurley, Kate Winslet and Emma Watson. Our cheese and cider, real ale, and good old recipes. And the land itself, its forests, moors, heaths and downs, its richness of wildlife and heritage. THIS is what our tourism and marketing folk should be selling, not some dead-end ‘South West’ that turns its back on anything and everything that’s not superficial and ephemeral. And if they need expert help, our universities should provide it. Let them prove they’re part of Wessex life and not simply living off Wessex.

Cycling At The Edge

2011-09-05T18:00:00.000-07:00

“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
Kenneth Boulding (1910-1993), founder of evolutionary economics and co-founder of General Systems Theory

One of the philosopher Bertrand Russell’s best analogies was ‘the inductivist turkey’. A repeated experiment apparently gives the same answer every time. Has an eternal truth has been discovered? Never. It only takes one fresh, contrary observation to disprove the hypothesis. The turkey receives food every day. For 364 days. Without fail. Until the day it becomes food itself.

Yesterday’s Mail on Sunday included an unexpectedly erudite piece, penned by Bristolian William Rees-Mogg, who used to edit top London tabloid The Times but is much better known in Wessex as head of the landowning family with political ambitions from rural north-east Somerset.

Rees-Mogg’s theme was the business cycle, and more especially the long wave cycles into which individual business cycles fit. These are known as Kondratiev waves, after the Russian economist, shot by Stalin, who analysed them in the 1920s. Others had already grasped the idea of successive technological eras. Patrick Geddes at the beginning of the 20th century contrasted ‘palaeotechnic’ industries, led by coal, iron and textiles, with the emerging ‘neotechnic’ world of oil, electricity and chemicals. Kondratiev, and later Schumpeter, added much more detail. The historical economic data is just about sufficient to trace cycles of boom and bust all the way back to the South Sea Bubble in 1720.

The theory suggests that the boom is kick-started by capital investment to replace worn-out plant such as machinery, blast furnaces or vehicles. What synchronises this investment across competing economies is technological development. New products, or new ways of making old ones, give competitive advantage, so everyone is busy investing in plant in rapid succession to stay in the game. The bust comes when all that costly plant is starting to wear out and the market is too saturated for anyone to take the risk of replacing it. Especially, of course, when the financial sector has become top heavy in relation to the real economy.

According to Rees-Mogg, we’re now in one of the big dips in the Kondratiev long wave, a dip not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. History should warn us that wars are usually a sure way to perk up production. Rees-Mogg’s prognosis is not that bad. His educated guess is that the depression won’t end until 2020. It’s only a guess, as the dead turkey would testify, but is it a credible guess? In fact, it’s more than likely that 2020 comes and goes and still there’s no growth, but we can certainly agree that no spectacular upswing will happen before then.

Which should make us protest all the more forcefully against the antics of Osborne and Pickles in the press this weekend, both adamant that they will deregulate the planning system to, in their fevered imaginations, stimulate growth. OK, let’s take this slowly then boys. If there’s no underlying push for growth in the economy then deregulation will not stimulate it. Businesses without markets will not get loans and will not want to build. Housebuilders will not be moved by those who want to buy but cannot get mortgages. The quantity of development that takes place will be the same, regulation or no regulation. All that will happen is that the quality of development will plummet. Development will happen in the wrong locations, judged over the long term, cherry-picked according to the random nature of landownership. It will be cheaply built, to poor environmental standards. Developers will be let off making a contribution to funding the new schools, parks, etc. that their development makes necessary. Cash-strapped local folk, who may have fought the development tooth-and-nail, will pick up the bill instead. Wessex towns and Wessex countryside alike face ruin, for nothing. The Coalition’s planning reforms are a cowboys’ charter that promises an El Dorado it can never deliver. Growth is over. Fact. With Peak Oil looming, that’s even more certain than Christmas.

It’s also pretty certain that the cycles of economic change will continue. Just not in a context of growth. A world that at last realises that resources are finite will start to divert them from sunset industries into sunrise ones as quickly as possible. We will, for example, see a big shift towards resource efficiency and clean technology. Expect too a big revival in railway engineering as demand picks up for rails, signalling, power supply and rolling stock. Most items will be imported to start with, mainly from France, Germany or China, but there are advantages in being the last and therefore newest entrant to the market. Wessex will be starting out with some of the most modern engineering facilities in the world. Optimum sites for them need to be in the planning stages now. (Money to invest? You could do worse than buy former railway land at Bristol and Yeovil, two places with existing reputations for engineering excellence and poised to move from aerospace into rail.) All these sites need to be safeguarded against short-term fantasists who’d cover them with shopping malls and tiny little boxes for locals temporarily priced out of buying real homes by Londoners fleeing the mess they’ve made of their own world.

Wessex Regionalists have been articulating our vision of the future since 1974. Futurology is our specialist subject and it’s painful to watch the rest of Wessex take so long to catch up. Even seemingly good ideas like Transition Towns have been hijacked by hippies who think old railway lines are for country walks and not the backbone of our future regional transport system. Small is beautiful but thinking big has its place. Especially when dealing with ideas about the long term, a space and time almost defined by difference from the here and now. Along the way there are many things to learn, and re-learn. Skills. Attitudes. Values. Some things will be new. Others will certainly be coming round again. Wessex itself is a bit of both. The best overall metaphor for the future we’re preparing today is not a circle or a wave but a spiral, taking the best of the past onward to a new level.

The Magic Roundabout

2011-09-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

“Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.”
William Morris, A Dream of John Ball (1888)

We don’t mean the roundabout in Swindon. We mean the political one we’re trapped upon, watching riders from the other parties switching horses. Hey presto! Red Tories. Blue Labour. How do the yellow party beat that? Should they bother? At all?

Politics is a dynamic artform so consistency is a rare thing. Perhaps the extreme case is to be found in Hungary, where the Socialist Party now champions privatisation and means testing. In the words of one of its leaders, “The historic task of the Socialist government is to roll back the frontiers of the welfare state.” To understand how this came about, it is necessary to appreciate that Hungarian socialism was defined by its struggle against conservative nationalism (and ultimately fascism). What started off as a battle against capitalism by socialists has become a battle against nationalism by internationalists. So it is the Socialist Party that now wants more EU integration, sells off State assets to non-Hungarians, does the least to help Hungarian minorities in surrounding countries and generally welcomes the triumph of the global free market. Red flag anyone? No fair offer refused.

We have our own, less blatant experience of the same, from Thatcher’s wooing of the working class to Mandelson’s New Labour, "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich". When Revenue & Customs figures show that the bottom half of the population now own only 1% of the wealth, compared to 12% in 1976, a little yearning for simpler times is understandable.

Nietzsche wrote about the genealogy of morals but political ideas too have their roots, however tangled they are now becoming. Concepts of Left and Right that go back to the French Revolution may be reaching the end of their usefulness, along with the fossil fuel bonanza that enabled their sparring, but nothing has yet emerged to supplant them. In English politics, the two-tone divide stretches even further back, back to the Civil War.

Yet the largest pitched battle of that war to occur in Dorset was not fought between Cavaliers and Roundheads. It occurred in August 1645 when a force led by Oliver Cromwell, outnumbered at least 2 to 1, defeated the Clubmen on Hambledon Hill. The Clubmen, armed neutrals, were fed up with both sides. While others argued over who should run the country, they actually were the country, the ‘Country party’, as a contemporary source described them. Clubmen of all areas, royalist or parliamentarian, had much in common: a firm attachment to ancient rights and customs against a greedy, arbitrary and centralising State, a vague nostalgia for the good old days of Queen Elizabeth, and an enduring belief in the traditional social order, even if it did need some prodding to do its duty.

Unlike the Levellers, the Clubmen had no plans to plot a revolution. Their aims were more modest but also more down-to-earth. Above all they sought peace and prosperity, to preserve their local situation, regardless of political happenings elsewhere. Historians who dismiss the Clubmen because they had no ambitions for political change at national level are rather missing the point. They rose up, with no greater motive than the desire to protect their own hearths and homes, because national politics as a whole had failed them.

Clubmen were not unique to Wessex but Wessex is where they were concentrated and at their most sophisticated in the demands they formulated. We can rightly view them as Wessex heroes not because they had any notion of Home Rule but because they believed that national politics should serve them and not that they should serve national politics. Of all the parties for which they might have voted today, the Wessex Regionalists come closest to their ‘live and let live’ localism.

So what are the barriers to applying such a philosophy? Predominantly they are formed, still, by the national character of party politics, dented only by nationalist and unionist minorities on the fringes. That politics remains remarkably 17th century in outlook. The traditional Right is less liberal on social issues and more so on economic ones. It may have abandoned the Divine Right of Kings but its political inheritance is still a theological one: sin is to be suppressed, while wealth as proof of virtue is to be sought. The traditional Left has the opposite stance because it is more secular and scientific, more concerned with the material world than with the afterlife. Those attitudes are the ultimate fruits of an empiricism that began with the direct study of scripture in place of submission to hierarchy. Hence, the sins the Left condemns are those against equality of opportunity, not of personal behaviour. The quasi-religious language and imagery of Marxism have been exhaustively analysed. In so far as the Left are heirs to the Puritans, it should come as no surprise that their following in Wessex has never been great, except when the basics are mixed with a dash of visionary indignation that appeals across classes.

The main political traditions agree that there is only one answer. Their own. Neither is comfortable with the idea that answers can vary according to time, place and circumstance. That one side of a hedge a different policy can apply than applies on the other side. Changing that stubborn refusal to live and let live is what any regionalism worthy of the name needs to be about. If throwing off the yoke of uniformity is the negative side of the piece, then the positive may well be the vague general groundswell at present in favour of co-operation and mutuality. Whatever they may claim, these objectives are all alien to the core instincts and survival chances of the London parties. Which is why they’d much rather have us all going round in circles, getting nowhere fast.

Panic Over?

2011-08-31T11:00:00.000-07:00

“The question remains whether, as the Berliners say, ‘the situation is desperate, but not hopeless,’ or ‘hopeless but not desperate,’ as the Viennese used to put it.”
Walter C. Dowling (US Ambassador to Korea), 1957

Consider three documents. The first is the State of the South West Report 2011, which informs us that human activity first exceeded the planet’s biocapacity some time in the 1980’s, that the situation continues to worsen (para. 7.18.1) and that if everyone consumed resources at the same rate as residents of the ‘South West’, we would need 2.64 planets (7.18.3). We are already living far beyond environmental limits, despite official pronouncements that we are – apparently – working hard to stay within them. The UK’s is one of the highest ecological footprints in the world, lower than those for the USA and Australia but considerably higher than those found in other developed nations with a high quality of life such as Italy and Japan. Worse still, the ‘South West’ zone has a greater eco-footprint than the UK as a whole, despite the perception of Wessex as a ‘green’ and ecologically-aware region.

Why are we so bad? Food (26%), transport (21%) and housing (21%) are the largest contributors to the ‘South West’ footprint. Transport should come as no surprise. We have a highly dispersed settlement pattern that is dependent on the private car, coupled with the long-term rundown of regional rail services compared to the London fringe. Overall, our largest towns and cities perform better than our rural areas and, broadly speaking, the further west the urban area lies, the better its results become. Commuting to London might be dragging down our figures but relative wealth seems a more likely explanation for this, with the greenhouse gas footprint in particular increasing eastwards as higher average household income fuels higher consumption.

The second document, Footprint Results for Local Authorities, draws comparisons between 2001 and 2004. (More recent data is not comparable: the two earlier snapshots allow us to examine trends.) Pages 11 and 12 show the ‘South West’ as the largest area in England to have deteriorated over that period in terms of eco-footprint, and the largest in Britain in terms of carbon footprint. Despite all that greenwash. Nothing can disguise the fact that development which is ‘less bad’ than it used to be is not the same as ‘good’, or that the footprints won’t reduce if we keep adding more feet.

So what of the third document? The draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) sets out the Coalition’s thinking on planning – and the ‘limits to localism’ it seeks to impose. It decrees a ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’. Alarm bells should begin ringing at once. You either have sustainability or you have development. To attempt both is to guarantee failure. You may as well stand on your feet and your head at the same time.

But worse is to come. According to the NPPF, ‘sustainable development’ means ‘sustainable economic growth’ because “without growth, a sustainable future cannot be achieved”. This is not just a misunderstanding. It is a wilful inversion of reality. As a rule, the higher the rate of economic growth, the higher the degree of environmental degradation that results. The only way an economy can appear to grow without harming the environment is if the transactions all involve buying and selling things that don’t actually exist. Think banking. Think toxic assets. A sustainable economy need not be a static economy – our recent policy review committed the Party to support economic change in place of economic growth – but unless the total amount of activity is kept within strict environmental limits there will be no economy.

So who’s listening? None of the London parties. Even the Greens talk about ‘green growth’, without reminding us what therefore needs to contract if the ecological books are to balance. As for the media, no chink of light is ever permitted to penetrate the articles and discussions that pore over economic orthodoxy as if it meant a thing. Orthodox economics has become for our day the Big Lie, which, if it’s big enough, most people will end up believing. So much for education. We seem to be edging towards a scenario like the last decades of the Soviet Union, when ever more desperate remedies are applied to ‘save’ the system. A system that those who can add two and two correctly know is bound to fail. For the rest, evidence is not just ignored: the true believer cannot see it at all. A Blairite conjuring trick will soon reconcile infinite growth with finite resources. Development is environmental protection.

Standing up to a lie is personally threatening. The gut reaction is to protect one’s security and stability, to not rock the boat. After all, how far does the remit of the security services actually extend? Passively, or worse, the deceived defend the lies and the lies go on getting bigger as London politicians push the boundaries just a little bit further.

Fortunately, faced with such nonsense, sane folk are duty-bound to ask the searching questions. Let’s take one example.

Is man-made climate change a hoax? If it is, then we need to ask what is it a cover for? There is good reason to think that it may form a gentle introduction to the much more intractable issue of Peak Oil, though along the way it gives a heck of a boost to demands for a world government with dictatorial powers. The so-called ‘debt crisis’ illustrates how easily global governance, even now, can be manipulated to ‘deliver on austerity’, transferring astronomical amounts of public wealth into private hands with barely a whimper of real protest. More locally, the imperative of ‘green growth’ can recruit hordes of dewy-eyed useful idiots, to campaign, for example, for heavily subsidised wind farms instead of the low impact community wind, hydro and bio power that a decentralised society might actually need.

If man-made climate change is NOT a hoax then the actions of politicians, advised by the best science available, are rationally inexplicable. They would by now have abandoned all this pretence about growing the economy to pay off the bankers. They would have slammed on the brakes and radically transformed the financial system to support a rapid transition to a steady-state economy. Instead they insist not only that growth must continue but that environmental protection must be switched off for as long as it takes to accommodate even more growth in population and consumption. All to re-pay debts that were created out of nothing. Imaginary debts, which could be paid off at once with imaginary money and no-one would be any worse off than when they started.

So if man-made climate change is not a hoax, we must conclude either that London politicians are stupid enough to ignore the warnings of the world’s top scientists, or else that they fully realise what they’re doing. That they genuinely love money more than they love their own children and grandchildren, whose future they’re throwing away for the sake of a silly numbers game. Either way, they have to go. Or it will be time to panic after all.

Back to School

2011-08-30T01:00:00.000-07:00

This month, young Eric was at it again. Pickles’ Communities & Local Government Department issued new planning rules for schools, ordering local councils to allow good schools to expand and threatening the cane if they exercise their own democratic judgment.

This is, to put it bluntly, an idiotic policy, created by idiots, for idiots to apply. A sensible person would ask why there are good schools and bad schools. As taxpayers, we fund both kinds so we have an interest in seeing the bad schools turned round as soon as possible. Children are trapped in those bad schools and someone ought to be speaking up for them. Now. Setting up a ‘free market’ in which schools compete to poach each others’ pupils is the kind of harebrained scheme we might expect after 30 years of the Thatcher experiment but it’s simply no way to get results quickly and fairly. Why not just find out what the good schools are doing right and get the bad schools to do the same? Before marketisation, when there was still a sense of the common good, best practice circulated rapidly. Now it’s commercially confidential, a secret you can’t have unless you pay for it. Childish. And it damages children’s prospects for the sake of someone’s big ego and their lucrative career.

It also causes chaos. Parental choice means one lot of children being ferried from A to B, passing another lot being ferried from B to A. Between a twelfth and a fifth of all traffic in the morning peak is accounted for by the school run. What do these folk imagine will happen when oil prices make this kind of nonsense impossible?

Earlier this year, our policy review meeting took a view on education, which is that we see it as part of building better communities, growing out of inclusive schools at their heart. Schools that cherish all and are cherished by all. Schools that won’t let their children down and which won’t be let down by the community that funds and manages them. Recognising the primacy of individual and communal autonomy, fully inclusive schools are a Party aim rather than a requirement, to be achieved where supported locally but not imposed where they aren’t wanted. Parishes should decide whether private schools are to be tolerated on their territory.

Current national policy, seeking to undermine community schools rather than enable them to achieve more, is State-sponsored looting by the most mouthy, selfish scum our society has yet spawned. The promoters of ‘free schools’ deserve to be in jail for diversion of public funds, sharing a cell with a freshly convicted rioter or two. And if there’s room, a few Labour advocates of ‘academies’ sponsored by the likes of creationist car dealers. The whole London party consensus on the education system is that it’s fair game for social vivisection. Do any of those involved want better schools in their area? No. They want a better school in their area, from which they can benefit through dismantling democratic accountability to the whole community.

Our view is that all public funding for private and faith schools should be withdrawn because of their potential to divide communities on class and religious/ethnic lines. Educational apartheid is a real possibility in larger cities but we shouldn’t forget the special problems of rural areas, which are the main concern of a party devoted to the needs of Wessex.

Many of our village primary schools are Church of England schools, largely as a result of our particular class history in the 19th century. In England as a whole, in January 2002, 32.8% of State schools were identifiably faith-based. (The local figures that follow are also from January 2002 but given the direction of Government policy since then they are very likely to have increased: the national figure for January 2008 was 33.2%.) In parts of Wessex the figures were very much higher than the national average: 60.9% in Wiltshire, 56.3% in Dorset, 51.4% in Oxfordshire, 49.6% in Somerset, 48.1% in Bath & North East Somerset. (Cornwall, with its Nonconformist heritage, comes in very much lower, at 17.4%, as do other traditional mining counties like Derbyshire and Durham.) Wiltshire’s 60.9% was exceeded only by Westminster and Wigan, both urban areas where parental choice has the possibility of meaning something. When your village school is run by the CofE and so is every alternative for over 10 miles, ‘choice’ may have rather a hollow ring to it. In fact, it reveals the whole idea of parental choice to be a fantasy dreamed up by folk in posh London suburbs who have no idea of the unavoidable reality in much of the countryside.

Many parents feel cheated. Many are very upset, because in 2003 the Archbishop of Canterbury issued instructions to his schools that they should see themselves as small churches, holding confirmation and communion services for their captive congregations.

It is arguable that Church dominance of much of the Wessex schools system is a badge of regional difference and as such something that ought to be cherished. Anglicanism has been as much a part of Wessex’s regional culture as Puritanism in East Anglia or Methodism in Cornwall. It should continue to be, if that’s what folk want. The question is, how much power do they really have to change it if it isn’t?

It must be right that local choice and local control should be meaningful and at present they are not. Non-communicants are second-class citizens. Before reform of the House of Lords in 1999 we had in effect an ‘established Party’ (the Tories) with a privileged role in government. The ‘Tory party at prayer’, our established Church, still has that privileged role in education. Its position is deeply embedded and protected by law, so that, for example, when village schools are closed and the sites sold the money goes into national coffers, to be mismanaged by the Church Commissioners. The Church nationally therefore actually benefits financially from the withdrawal of our village schools. Other concessions have been made over the years, such as the State taking on an ever greater share of the cost of maintaining these buildings, which it will never own and whose eventual sale will produce a massive windfall profit for others. Not forgetting, of course, the free transport to school. All that cross-bussing again.

If we were to design a schools system from scratch, to fit within the structure of government we advocate, community should come first. Parishes, or groups of parishes, should run primary schools. Hundreds, or groups of hundreds, should run secondary and further education. Counties should provide specialist services not viable at any narrower level. Everyone involved should work together to provide the best possible education for all, with no axes to grind. Schools funded by all should be for teaching and not for preaching. The availability of the facilities for dual use by the school and, out of hours, the wider community should be obligatory. Common sense? You might very well think that. We couldn’t possibly comment.

Dancing To Our Own Tune

2011-08-25T23:55:00.000-07:00

In yesterday’s Western Daily Press, Veronica Newman of the Campaign for an English Parliament wrote that “One of the arguments often raised against the establishment of an English parliament is that it would be playing into the hands of the European Union… dividing the UK into bite-sized chunks for the delectation of Brussels.”

It’s delightfully refreshing to see English centralists hoist by their own petard, after all these years of telling us that regionalism is a Brussels conspiracy to cut up England. The ‘Euro-plot’ gets waved about like a demonic scarecrow in a bid to deter any rational debate about much-needed constitutional reforms. Those who do so do not see the irony of their position. If to embrace regionalism is to be positively influenced by the continent, then to shun regionalism is to be negatively influenced just as much. Neither extreme allows an independent assessment of the case on its own merits. The fact is that the case for regionalism in England would hold together even if the continent did not exist. It has been talked about and written about in this country since at least Edwardian times. ‘Home Rule’ agitation generally goes back a further century.

That other European countries have decentralised suggests not a conspiracy but a wide measure of open agreement that taking decisions regionally makes sense. If Germany has 16 regional legislatures and Switzerland has 26, this does not appear to have weakened them. On the contrary, it may be one reason why they are more successful than most.

Wessex Regionalists are not fundamentally anti-EU, nor fundamentally pro-EU: we will not be drawn into a beauty contest between the frying pan and the fire. We are against unnecessary centralisation and committed to genuine subsidiarity. By ‘genuine’ we mean a system in which autonomy is always there to be claimed from ‘below’, as of right and without quibbling, not dispensed, grudgingly, from ‘above’.

Our position is one of principle, not expediency. We are happy to explain it but not to alter it. It is what sets us apart from the London parties, whose whole rationale is about deciding what can or cannot ‘safely’ be left to ordinary folk to decide.

The Return of the Region

2011-08-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

The leading article today in The Times (a London newspaper) is about the north-south divide. It reports a call – actually made back in March – from Paul Hackett of the Smith Institute for a ‘Council of the North’ to be established, “a body that would bring together politicians, business leaders and academics to speak for the region as a whole. Such a body last existed between 1484 and 1641. It was set up by Richard III to give more power to the north after centuries of depression. Mr Hackett pointed out that London had representation that was becoming increasingly strong, and Scotland and Wales were also able to argue their cause. He suggested that bringing together the North West, Yorkshire and Humber and the North East would strengthen the whole region’s voice.”

The history is broad-brush but the political point is well made. The figures reproduced are damning – especially that transport spending per head in London is three times higher than up north.

What does this have to do with Wessex? Plenty. The case for centralism is that it allows resources to be shared out fairly by an impartial elite seated in Whitehall. It is demonstrable nonsense. All it does is thwart regional initiative and favour those closest to the metropolitan power-base. In 1971, John Banks, later our Party’s President, wrote in his book, Federal Britain?: The Case for Regionalism, that centralisation “has meant the concentration in London of the best jobs in government and business, and the corresponding drain of talent from the provinces and smaller national areas. High incomes have been earned in the metropolitan region, which have then been taxed in order to subsidize the regions from which enterprise has been attracted to the high income area, in order to persuade some of it to go back again. It is ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’ economics, from which nobody can ultimately gain.”

We advocate a regional solution that can begin to redress unfairness in a dynamic and lasting way. We are regionalists, not separatists, and work with those in the Celtic nations and in other areas of England – even with ordinary Londoners – to dismantle the structures of arrogance that suppress us all. There is no place in our Party for those who wish to whine about Scots or northerners getting their hands on money that could have been spent in Wessex. Much of the money that apparently needs to be spent in Wessex is only needed because of reckless population growth outstripping the capacity of our public services to cope. Centralism has delivered a ‘lose-lose’ scenario where the older industrial regions are gutted and abandoned while Wessex disappears under concrete. Regionalism can hardly do worse than that.

Our Party puts Wessex first, always. But we seek to do it in an intelligent way, one that builds successful alliances that will benefit us at least as much as they benefit others. We have always been the Wessex Regionalist Party: proud of the fact that we view Wessex as a region – a community of communities that joins with others to form still larger communities as the need arises, in every case upon the basis of enlightened self-interest, not empire-building, nor uniformity for its own sake. In this view, we stand shoulder to shoulder with so many good folk throughout the length and breadth of Europe. We follow their progress with interest, as we hope they follow ours. A rising tide lifts all boats and, as we pursue our goal of self-government for Wessex, we trust we shall never be so blind to the world that we miss the signs of the turn, nor so deaf that we cannot listen and learn from the struggles and successes of our friends and neighbours.

Urban Harvesting

2011-08-10T20:00:00.000-07:00

Much has already been written about the unrest that has struck Banbury, Bristol, Gloucester, Oxford, Reading, Southampton and other places since the weekend. Over a long, hot summer, many more words will appear, whether or not the events themselves recur. After the political debate, the weighty inquiry will ponder and pontificate. Recommendations will be insubstantial and – where not ignored altogether – will be incompetently implemented. British government, doing what it does best.

At the end of the story, nothing will have altered. When the IRA blew up the Baltic Exchange in the City of London in 1992, and Bishopsgate the following year, that altered everything. The chaps with the cash told Major to get it sorted and attitudes to Irish affairs saw their greatest transformation in 800 years. Money talks. Emptying JD Sports and Foot Locker can’t compete with that.

If the changes likely are all cosmetic, what brands of make-up exactly are we discussing? Two, mainly. The debate that has been sparked will be dominated by the stale shibboleths of Left and Right, united by a fanatical desire to exclude anyone different from having a say.

The Right starts with the advantage of being in office, albeit not necessarily in power. Its short-term focus will be the exemplary punishment of wrongdoing, an exercise that will sadly disappoint its supporters. Offenders will not be roasted alive on spits. Few will even be sent to prison, unless other criminals are released early to make room and keep within budget. Sentences that go beyond the norm will be challenged by the defence as irrational. Looters will laugh, last, longest and loudest.

The long-term focus of the Right will remain exactly the same as now. On more looting of its own. The looters on the streets have learned their callous inhumanity from 30 years of loadsamoney liberalism. Free enterprise? The enterprise has been audacious, certainly, and the goods free, to be sure. That no money changed hands is a detail that will detain only those who fail to hail the dawn of a new business model, the next ratcheting-up of the Hayekian dialectic, more efficient, less altruistic, with 50% fewer parties to the transaction.

At the time of writing, the riots are confined to England. The Celtic nations, small enough to acknowledge the human scale, where a sense of community endures and the Right has been largely rejected, have escaped. So too has the continent, where the social democratic model survives in still better shape. There has been an Arab Spring, but no sign yet of a European Summer.

The Left comes to the debate with a confession it will not make. That having held power for 13 of the past 14 years, the events it condemns are largely of its own making. It has created a human zoo, an act for which it must not be allowed to avoid responsibility. Four decades of hippy thinking – that time and resources are infinite and that there are no right answers – have fostered a culture of excusing and celebrating what must nowadays always be termed ‘deferred success’. An older, blunter Left would have called a failure a failure and learned its lesson. The newer, parasitical Left dares not solve problems or it would be out of its well-paid job. Institutional empathy has to take the place of solutions, because success would be the new failure. At least the greying student revolutionaries who now run the show are having to think for once before deciding who their heroes are.

Tonight it was reported that Manchester suffered badly yesterday because its police were simply overwhelmed. Their available strength had been diminished by lending officers to keep the peace on the streets of London. It was last night too that unrest spread in Wessex, where previously only Bristol was featured nationally as the scene of disorder. Now we should be concerned. A chief constable’s top priority should be the protection of the force’s own area, lending to others only when that objective has been secured. Every Wessex officer sent to London is one less to defend those at risk in our own towns and villages. It will be instructive to see data on burglaries in the Cotswolds, the Vale of Pewsey or the New Forest while police from the Thames Valley, Wiltshire and Hampshire forces are elsewhere. When trouble flared in Stokes Croft in Bristol earlier this year, in the notorious ‘Tesco’s riot’, foreign police, from south Wales, were brought over to enforce the law. Police from another Wessex force might have been better received but there’s no prospect of that if they’re busy helping Londoners lance their own festering boils.

The possibility of being shot is actually highest in the countryside, not in inner cities. Rural areas are where the guns are, especially the ones held legally. And they’re needed, given the likely police response time if there is any incident. Events in London will lead to the questioning of many longstanding assumptions. Will Cameron’s goal of privatising everything but the police and army survive, or will they in fact be the first victims of the Big Society, as communities decide that if the protection they have paid for is not around then they need to start making their own arrangements? Farmers have already started, following a 17% increase in the cost of agri-crime in just two years. Livestock rustling has doubled in six months. Thefts of quad bikes are a particular plague in Wessex, as are high value tractor thefts in areas close to motorways. Heating oil has also been targeted since the price rose last year and it isn’t even a luxury yet.

Left and Right share the perspective of Jacobin individualism, one which seeks the elimination or subjugation of all institutions intermediate between the central State and the citizen. Neither can tolerate, or even comprehend, the idea of community responsibility, for good or ill. But we do not have to abandon a thousand years of progress in other fields to see that a system the Saxons knew as frankpledge, in which everyone is accountable for their neighbours’ actions, and for any failure on their own part to bring them to justice, creates a self-policing society.

Early in the 19th century, liability for riot damage was imposed on the hundred in which the damage occurred. The hundred was responsible to the king for keeping the peace, so if it failed in its duty, and the troublemakers could not be traced, it was only fair that everyone had to pay the compensation. In 1886 that responsibility was transferred to the police and so rests today ultimately with Council Tax payers in the county or larger area for which a constabulary is constituted. It’s a much fairer idea than insurance, where the future burden of higher premiums falls on the victim and never touches the perpetrator even indirectly.

You would think so. Except that under Labour a consultation paper in 2003 proposed to abolish altogether the last trace of the collective liability for riot damage. Why? Because insurance was seen as a better way, one that did not divert resources from the police, who should not be punished for not doing their job effectively. Top cops, of course, are now wriggling for the review to be revived, claiming that “in a context of cuts the public will see little sense in a shrinking police fund being diverted to pay for criminal damage”.

The public might conceivably disagree. It is no criticism of the frontline copper to say that, for those at the top, payment by results should work both ways. When so much investment has been made in ‘policing by consent’, for apparently so little return where criminals don’t consent to be policed, chief constables and police authority chairmen cannot just shrug off the results as the unpredictable nature of social complexity.

A lot of that complexity has just undergone a rapid simplification. The world will not be same again. When the dust settles, communities will be demanding that the authorities earn their keep, or the communities will keep their taxes. And maybe build for themselves something that history tells us will work.

Ecocidal Maniacs Rule!

2011-07-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
Noam Chomsky

From time to time, as resources allow, our Party intervenes in planning matters across our region, seeking to challenge the ‘growth agenda’ that is so rapidly destroying what makes it so special.

We are more astonished at the ignorance of planners than at the arrogance of developers but both sides are in league to ruin Wessex today, while simultaneously making it more difficult for us to adapt to the post-oil world of tomorrow. Planning has become a never-ending pantomime in which planners argue that the growth figures are high enough and developers try to convince some Government growth junkie that they aren’t. Who speaks the truth, that even the lower figures are insane and need to be slashed to nothing?

Our most recent intervention has been in the preparation of the ‘South Wiltshire Core Strategy’, which proposes the building of nearly 10,000 new homes, largely to accommodate London overspill, including damaging greenfield extensions to Salisbury and Amesbury. Under past legislation, objectors were guaranteed the right to present their case before a Government Inspector. Now, under legislation pushed through by Labour, Inspectors are free to decide what evidence they wish to hear. Or not hear. We asked to expose in detail the false reasoning behind this massive level of growth. And were ignored. The Inspector will hear evidence on how consistent the growth figures are with the aim of promoting growth: the regime’s ears are closed to anything sensible. As we wrote today to the officer organising the hearings:

“We are profoundly disappointed to read that the Inspector will disregard any further evidence critical of the County Council’s policy of collaboration with the London regime in imposing unsustainable development on the area. The need to move away from ecocidal policies of economic growth and population expansion is now desperate.

The London regime and its servants must surely understand that obstructing the presentation of the truth is not a rational basis for policy-making. Over the long-term, it threatens the very survival of the communities of Wiltshire and of Wessex generally. We can only conclude that that is the intention.”

Still Hating Thatcher?

2011-07-18T01:00:00.000-07:00

Our stall at the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival is becoming a well-recognised feature. Yesterday, we found a place in the marquee beneath the Portsmouth RMT banner (left, with Nick Xylas), which caused a little confusion until eventually its owners came to take it out for the traditional parade through the village.

The RMT’s Wessex Region banner bears a splendid gold wyvern. Sadly, we weren’t able to catch a glimpse of it on this occasion, although we were assured that it was around somewhere.

The only rail-related items on the stall were some membership forms for the New Somerset & Dorset Railway that we were hosting as a favour, and which were also among the most popular material. New S&D have certainly struck a chord with folk in rural Dorset now inching towards the points-change that will take them from ‘Re-opening – 0% probability’ to ‘Re-opening – 100% probability’. In how many years?

Some of our visitors were far-sighted enough to recognise that Wessex Regionalism will make the same transition, being poised today for the kind of take-off that Celtic nationalism achieved in the 60s. The importance of repeat attendance became clear from conversations with those who’d seen us at Tolpuddle before but this time were willing to take a leaflet, buy a car sticker and ponder whether we haven’t been right all along. It can be a wearisome day refuting ignorance and cynicism but that’s the kind of breakthrough that makes it all worthwhile.

Most of the stalls in the marquee had a ‘green’ rather than ‘red’ emphasis this year – a sign of times to come – with land rights prominently represented. Of course, there’s still one or two sad old bolshies to shuffle along and tell us that a One World Dictatorship is the answer and that devolution is divisive. It isn’t. We work with, not against, those in other areas who also want to take back power to make our own decisions, in our own communities, and not have them over-ruled by folk who think they know better because they live in the right London suburb and can pull the right strings.

If there was any theme, it had to be Maggie. Folk singers in the marquee wailed on about the miners’ strike and at least two different versions of a T-shirt circulated with the words ‘I Still Hate Thatcher’. After 21 years, 13 of them under New Labour, the insincerity is insensitive. How many of the wearers voted for Blair or Brown, and will vote with equal enthusiasm for any other red-rosette-wearing, warmongering control-freak who claims the corpse of radicalism from the morgue of British politics?

Thatcher won because she had a vision, one based on a denial of the common good, but she also won because Labour’s deluded insurrectionists drove millions of voters in her direction. That Labour has adopted Thatcherism as its creed is a kind of karma. Why? Because Labour helped to create it by its inability to articulate an alternative both attractive and achievable. Today there is only one party in Wessex still true to its radical roots. One whose voice will be heard increasingly loudly as the generations whom Thatcher and her Labour co-workers dispossessed take back our inheritance.

The Culture Killers

2011-07-05T23:00:00.000-07:00

Patronising smiles are the usual response when we point out that Wessex remains under the Norman yoke. Not so funny is the press release issued by Eric Pickles’ Department for Communities and Local Government today to mark the flying of the Somerset flag outside their London headquarters.

The historic Somerset does not in fact have a flag but the red dragon logo of Somerset County Council has been employed on this occasion to represent Somerset as a whole, including those parts outside the county council’s authority. This dragon is a local variant of ‘the Dragon of Wessex’, first adopted by the council as its emblem in 1906. The colour was changed from gold-on-red to red-on-gold when a coat-of-arms was granted in 1911, presumably so that Somerset would be distinguished from Wessex as a whole. The council’s motto too has a Saxon origin. Sumorsæte Ealle is a phrase from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, meaning ‘all those of Somerset’. It appears in the account of events in 878 that led up to King Alfred’s decisive victory over the Danes.

Imagine the surprise upon reading in Pickles’ press release that “The county of Somerset was a Norman creation.” The use of ‘county’ in place of ‘shire’ may indeed be attributed to the conquerors but to read the press release is to take away the impression that a couple of minor Norman barons are more worthy of acknowledgement than Wessex kings like Ine and Alfred who made a positive difference to Somerset. Any true Cuckoopenner will be reaching for their chequebook and joining the Wessex Regionalist Party this instant.

Our history ignored. Our dialect mocked. Our environment trashed. Our institutions destroyed. Our right to self-government denied. And the best the national debate on devolution can now offer is a Norman-style English Parliament to impose one-size-fits-all solutions and continue a centuries-old onslaught on regional identity. After 945 years, what really has changed?

The Hollow State

2011-06-21T01:00:00.000-07:00

Privatisation is the social equivalent of selling a kidney to pay the mortgage. Except that, under current circumstances, it’s not even your mortgage you’re paying but that of some crook you’ve never met but whose well-being you’re assured is fundamental to economic stability.

It was no accident that the real start of the privatisation drive co-incided with the rejection of devolution and the first attacks on local autonomy led by Margaret Thatcher’s government. Devolution offered the possibility that many nationalised industries could ultimately have become regionalised industries, subject to the kind of effective scrutiny that an overloaded Westminster Parliament could never provide.

Nationalisation had taken public services out of the hands of local authorities, where democratic accountability knew no bounds, and placed them in the hands of quangos whose managements were accountable to no-one. This was soon made clear by a Speaker’s ruling, in 1948, that MPs could not ask questions of Ministers about ‘day-to-day’ matters because (in theory) Ministers had no formal responsibility for detail (though a great deal of influence in practice). Such ‘inquisitiveness’ was strongly resisted by the Labour government, apparently on the grounds that it risked making Ministers personally responsible for far too much. But if Ministers did not control the industries they claimed to have acquired for the nation, then who did? The managerialist black hole into which great swathes of public life disappeared was no accident either. This was the inevitable result of the Labour Party’s instinctive fear of decentralisation and democracy, of the idea that there might be decisions taken beyond its own control and of which it might not approve. Better by far to leave the decisions to technocrats than to locals of another party.

The Thatcherite solution was to sell the family silver back to the family, who already owned it but understandably, at discounted prices, paid for it a second time and then re-sold at value when necessary to recover the cost. A generation later, the family are having to rent the silver back to be able to eat their dinner. Privatisation has now even reached the shores of the USA, that bastion of collectivism that never even realised just how pinko it actually was.

Initially, Thatcher’s privatisations had some decentralist characteristics. With real autonomy, local bus operators and regional electricity companies regained or acquired a sense of their own distinct identity. Boards were no longer appointed by Ministers in Whitehall but elected by shareholders, often with a substantial regional presence. But within the decade it was all going into reverse, small fry gobbled up by groups that soon went national, then international. The employee-owned ‘People’s Provincial’ in Fareham was hailed as a privatised bus company even a socialist might endorse, then conveniently forgotten about once stalked and devoured by the Aberdeen-based group First. Top managers who bought their companies and then sold out walked away with millions. Simply for being in the right place at the right time. Wessex had seen nothing like it since Jack Horner stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum.

The irony of Margaret Thatcher’s ideology, like that of Enoch Powell before her, was that if you support both national sovereignty and the free market the two will one day collide. And the market will win. In winning it may even boost the national sovereignty of others who refuse to play by these loser’s rules. What was once the South Western Electricity Board is now EDF Energy, a subsidiary of the French Republic. True blue? More like sacré bleu. At least we can say that France is only next door. Other infrastructure is owned by the Spaniards (Bristol Water), the Americans (Western Power Distribution) and the Australians (Bristol Airport). Wessex Water is owned by a billionaire in Malaysia. Did Maggie envisage that?

Our Party insists upon local and regional control over everything that is locally and regionally important. At a recent policy-making meeting it was agreed that land which is publicly-owned – or becomes publicly-owned in future – should be declared inalienable. Capable of being re-assigned, free, within the public sector, yes. Capable of being leased for a fixed term, yes. Capable of ever being sold again, never. Private ownership of land must be subject to limitations on acreage and a residency qualification. We are determined to face down those who believe our communities should be up for sale to the highest bidder. Property rights are our servants, not our masters, and our vision of Wessex is of a region where they are comprehensively re-written for the public good.

There is another vision. It is the vision of the big three London parties, carrying on in cackling consensus their work of eviscerating the State. Their ultimate aim is already publicly stated – a United Kingdom that has sold everything except the police and the military. The police to protect the interests of the super-rich. The military to go wherever in the world finance capital needs a helping hand. A post-democratic State without a heart. Just two hefty armoured fists, paid for by me and you. Their vision? Our vision? Your choice!

Debt, What Debt?

2011-06-05T10:00:00.000-07:00

We have long suspected that the so-called ‘debt crisis’ is an illusion, the result of some highly creative accountancy by City firms and their global chums, aided and abetted by those close to them in the cartel of London parties. David Malone, who blogs as Golem XIV, recently published evidence of just how bad this problem is – and ultimately of how badly we are being served by politicians we elect supposedly to look after our interests.

It is now taken for granted that the so-called ‘free market’ works on the principle that profits should be privatised and losses socialised. We are clearly far too polite to complain as our wallets are lifted from our pockets. Best not make a fuss. Perhaps when the bailed-out banks are sold, squillions of public money written off in the process, we might even get a few pennies back in tax cuts. Or maybe not.

Anger at the banks is not about to subside. But neither throwing tantrums nor throwing bricks will help. What has to change is the attitude that has become ingrained over the past 30 years of kleptocratic government, namely that knowing how to help yourself to the common wealth and get away with it is a sign of how smart you are. The best defence that bankers have is that nothing they have done is illegal. Too true. Most of it should have been illegal and certainly should be illegal in future. To get to that desirable state of affairs we first need a clearout of the current crop of politicians. The London parties are all unfit for their stated purpose and deserve not a shred of respect. All need to be uprooted from the Wessex communities they infest and be replaced by honest men and women who can point out when a banker isn’t wearing any clothes. Banking is a highly complex business that only the finest minds can understand. So too was mediæval theology and the monasteries got their come-uppance nevertheless. Self-serving nonsense is still nonsense, no matter how well-remunerated its exponents. And all it takes to set the ball rolling is for someone to start to say so.

When Will Wessex Flag Ban Cease?

2011-05-25T01:00:00.000-07:00

We are the dispossessed. Dispossessed of our liberties by the Norman Conquest. Dispossessed of our livelihoods by the enclosures. And now dispossessed by the Coalition as it flogs our communities’ assets to pay bankers their bonuses. Bonuses then spent squeezing us out of our homeland to make way for commuter mansions and weekend cottages. The speech of King Alfred is mocked as that of rustic idiots, while quislings in our councils try to gag users of our dialect. Today is St Aldhelm’s Day, still unacknowledged by the UK authorities as the feast day of our patron saint, as important to Wessex as St Andrew is to Scotland and St David is to Wales.

At least we can freely fly the flag of Wessex, the Wyvern, recently added to the Flag Institute’s UK Flag Registry, the first step towards its long-awaited official recognition. Surely we can?

No. We can’t. We can freely fly the Scottish flag in Wessex. Or the Welsh flag. Or the Cornish. Or the national flag of any country anywhere, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. But it is technically an offence to fly the Wessex flag in Wessex, unless planning permission has been obtained. Which can cost up to £335 and has to be renewed every five years.

This month the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, announced his “intention to launch a consultation to allow a wider variety of important and historic flags to be flown by people keen to celebrate their local and national heritage and culture”. We can’t wait. The last time the rules were reviewed, under Labour, county and saints’ flags were deregulated but regional flags were not. East Anglia’s flag, dating from the early 1900’s, has continued to be widely flown regardless. The Wessex flag is also flown by a growing number of individuals and organisations, including local councils. Labour, control-freakery at Warp 10, refused to decriminalise these harmless expressions of identity and continued to levy what is in effect a ‘stealth tax’ payable on our patriotism.

Pickles too has chosen his words with care: “local and national heritage”, not ‘regional’. His press release tells us that the Coalition will “make it easier for communities wanting to celebrate the contribution of our armed forces by easing rules on flying local regimental flags. Other local flags, and projects like environmental awards, could also all be freed up from existing bureaucratic restrictions.” The man himself says, “If people want to celebrate something that is important to them by flying a flag they should be able to do so without having to fill in forms or paying town hall officials for the privilege. We will make it easier for people to celebrate their allegiance to a cause, a county or a local organisation if they choose to do so.” The ‘R’ word we are looking for is still conspicuously missing. Ominously, the press release ends with the warning that any flags outside the extended categories will “continue to be prohibited without express consent.”

No doubt Pickles, deluded fool that he is, genuinely believes that the United Kingdom is a model of human rights and democracy. One where it is expected that folk will ‘celebrate’ the contribution of the Queen’s Own British Murderers to the needless deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. But that it must remain out of the question to allow an oppressed minority the freedom to fly our own flag in our own land.

We can and will fight back. Fly your Wyvern with pride. Drop Pickles a line. Let him know that our region is here to stay. And that he cannot fine or jail everyone who cares for Wessex.

We & They

2011-05-10T13:00:00.000-07:00

Our website currently includes a page of links to movements for autonomy among our neighbours – the Cornish, the Welsh and, within England, the Mercians. Our southern neighbours the Bretons and, within France, the Normans, are not neglected either. In a Wessex-centred perspective, within the Europe of Regions, we have no false loyalties to wider unities that do not, or will not, work for us. Cross-channel ferries are part of our economy, generating jobs in our coastal communities. Tartan tins of shortbread are not. In theory, what goes on in East Anglia or Northumbria, let alone Scotland, should be no more relevant than what goes on in Poitou and Picardy, our other neighbours’ neighbours. And as for Scotland, it might as well be on the moon.

In practice, what goes on in Scotland is very interesting indeed, because Scotland is the motor of constitutional change within our Disunited Kingdom. Thirty years ago, in the aftermath of a referendum defeat, even a relatively weak Scottish Assembly seemed a pipedream. A Scottish Parliament with an SNP majority was a foolish fantasy. That is not to say that the Union today is in jeopardy. A referendum on Scottish independence may well do to the SNP what the referendum on AV is now doing to the LibDems. Misreading the voters’ mood can have devastating consequences. Be careful what you ask for; ask only if you confidently command the charisma to carry it through.

Mischievous provocations by Unionists, however, such as suggesting a UK-wide referendum that gives English voters a veto over dissolution, will only stiffen Scottish resolve as the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn approaches. Even to float the suggestion is counter-productive and serious politicians will recognise that. The reality is that Labour is in deep trouble whatever form the referendum takes and whatever its outcome. Whether the SNP becomes the natural party of government in a devolved Scotland or takes it on to independence, the prospects for a Labour majority at Westminster are going to be severely dented. English regionalists should not think that Labour will soon be in a position to deliver devolution here, even if it wanted to. This realisation, which cannot spread quickly enough, leaves regionalist parties as the only viable option for those who advocate decentralisation and democracy. There are no shortcuts.

Meanwhile, the next four years at Holyrood will be interesting times. Thatcher hated Livingstone for building, across the Thames, a working model of everything she most despised. Salmond will be giving Cameron the same delightful treatment. The prospect of two Scots with two very different visions facing each other from their respective Parliamentary bastions will enliven political life for everyone. Abolition won’t be a way out for the PM this time. The lessons start with that simple fact, that devolved government is a constitutional, not simply administrative device. Nothing less than a civil war could remove it now. That is the kind of security against Westminster bullying that Wessex too so desperately requires.

That the SNP now dominates the Holyrood Parliament is another outcome we can welcome. Not because we care who the Scots elect to govern themselves, but for the boost this gives to a re-territorialised politics. More nationalist – and ultimately regionalist – MPs at Westminster would mean fewer Conservative, Labour and LibDem ones. That is the politics we support, because it is bottom-up politics, in which MPs work as advocates for the communities who sent them there, not for ideological factions manipulated by London-based think-tanks, funded by creeps and crooks, whose primary objective is the smoothing-away of the differences and distinctions that give variety and value to life.

A well-informed Cornish blogger, commenting on the AV referendum result, has suggested that the ‘No’ campaign won partly because UK politics overall are insufficiently ‘Scottish’ in outlook, in the sense of putting community first. (This defect was to lead AV to defeat even in Scotland itself.) There is something in this. The LibDems and all their works were punished, but in a range of cruel and unusual ways in different areas. They alienated their most ardent and hope-filled supporters by allowing themselves to become Tory glove puppets. They alienated floating voters by not providing a more responsible lead on over-population and over-development. Where they were strongest they suffered huge losses; where they were weakest they ended up entrenching still further the peculiarly nasty politics of the sado-monetarists, the slavering, reptilian denizens of a Daily Mail world of imperial destiny, swivel-eyed xenophobia and the mine, all mine social Darwinism that stalks the southern shires.

Such a stereotype also happens to be that of the typical campaigner for a ‘one-size-fits-all’ English parliament, gleefully envisaged as the means to spike all regionalist guns. We do not campaign for an English parliament. We cannot, because we cannot put the interests of England, or anywhere else, ahead of the interests of Wessex, nor put the latter ‘on hold’ indefinitely for the sake of somebody else’s priorities. If Celtic independence-all-round delivers an English parliament by default then we shall work within it, but the job of removing power from London goes on regardless. Without Celtic pressure, the decentralist cause within England would undoubtedly suffer a setback, which only a renewed drive for Europe-wide regionalisation might be expected to reverse. For Wessex to succeed, it must be seen as the equivalent of Scotland and Wales on the European stage and folk must be willing to look for such an equivalent. Instead, viewing the world from a truly parochial perspective, they will sometimes complain today that Wessex is ‘far too big’, then paradoxically declare that they prefer an English parliament that would be seven times bigger!

The task of differentiating Wessex from its neighbours, while working with them to undermine the foundations of uniformity, is acknowledged to be huge. It is also hugely worthwhile and, pursued with passion, can be hugely enjoyable too. The region is going to become the key political, economic and cultural unit of the post-oil age as old state structures render themselves irrelevant. Those who regionalise first will be those best placed to make the inescapable transition in a humane and democratic fashion. The Scots are way ahead. We’ll need to run if we’re to keep up.

Borrowed Labour

2011-05-05T22:00:00.000-07:00

London academic Lord Glasman is one of those leading Labour’s latest attempt at re-invention. He’s calling it ‘Blue Labour’, an appeal to small-c conservatives and to all who grasp the point about democratic collective action, to defend the places and traditions we cherish, to resist the rapacious appetites of global market forces. It sounds like a value-set that we ourselves might endorse. Apart from certain significant details found lacking. Notably the one called consistency.

These are values that we have proclaimed for decades, while Labour has been all over the shop. We protested when Labour wanted to concrete-over tens of thousands of Wessex acres to house a new working class of cut-price immigrants and the crashing waves of London overspill they generate, a policy it now considers a mistake. (Indeed it was, but a shamelessly deliberate one.) We spoke out against the agenda of unprecedented growth, with its maniacal excesses of road-building and airport expansion. We challenged Labour’s fawning acceptance of whatever deregulation and privatisation the City’s financiers demanded. We did what we could to slow the destruction of what few democratic checks and balances our feudal constitution offers us. We warned that there would be tears before bedtime.

Blair had no time for tradition, nor purpose for perspective: “New, new, new, everything is NEW.” So ran the people’s premier’s demented mantra. New, for better or for worse. Why should any of that lot have cared which? The trappings of power were all they craved. And what’s changed since? Labour is still out on loan, borrowed as the front door key to Number 10 by yet another generation of centralist control-freaks pretending to be what they never can be.

Sometimes Old. Sometimes New. Sometimes Borrowed. Sometimes Blue. That’s Labour. As changeable as a chameleon. And as trustworthy as a rattlesnake.

Resentment & Resistance

2011-04-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

BBC Radio 4 this morning picked at the dilemma facing the Coalition over planning. On the one hand are those concerned, genuinely or for electoral reasons, that our environment is being serially degraded by development and that something needs to be done about this. Handing control to local folk seems like a good start, though such ideals are always corrupted by whatever strings remain attached. On the other hand are those, led by the Chancellor, who insist that economic growth has to take priority, given the Government’s choice that it will place the bankers’ interest above all else. The bankers are winning, development is proceeding, as we would have expected. The City of London has always punched far above its weight in numbers because these are folk who know other folk who matter.

A government truthfully committed to localism would have been bolder by far. It would have started by abolishing the Planning Inspectorate, the agency that costs £45 million a year to run, the agency that sends Inspectors into our communities to over-turn the decisions of locally elected councils at the behest of the development industry. A mafia with briefcases. And if local democracy isn’t allowed to keep the developers out, where do locals turn next?

Next year will see the first elections for the post of Police & Crime Commissioner, or PCC. The plan is for there to be one for each local police force outside London, making seven for Wessex. (Two will be cross-border, taking in Buckinghamshire and Cornwall respectively.) The exact demarcation of powers between the PCC and the Chief Constable has yet to become clear, as have the rights of the Home Secretary to continue to interfere in local decisions. What is clear is the potential for these elections to result in PCCs publicly committed to using whatever discretion they do have to defend their communities instead of attacking them in the name of London-imposed laws. Developers who have obtained planning permission on appeal could discover that helping them remove squatters from their sites is no longer a police priority. In fact, we might even begin to see the first fair shoots of justice poking through. It has to start somewhere.

Review of 2010

2011-03-31T07:00:00.001-07:00

Every year when we submit our accounts to the Electoral Commission we are also required to provide a 'Review of Political Activities' covering the year just gone.

The 2010 Review has recently been forwarded to the Commission and here is what it says:

During 2010 the Party’s on-line presence was maintained and strengthened. The website – www.wessexregionalists.org – is linked to a Facebook page and to a blog. The latter proved particularly useful during the General Election in permitting a running commentary on the campaign independent of the negative bias frequently displayed in the mainstream media. Page-view statistics show that the blog has attracted readers from across the globe.

Colin Bex was elected Party President in February and at the same time selected as prospective candidate in the forthcoming General Election. It was decided to consider contesting Witney, the only Wessex constituency represented in the old Parliament by one of the three major London party leaders. Initial canvassing confirmed that this would be a good choice and Colin was duly nominated.

A folded A4 leaflet – ‘The Truth in Black & White’ – was distributed by Royal Mail to all constituents. At 50,000 copies, this was our highest-ever print-run. Publicity was also provided by the local press, with coverage in the Oxford Journal, Oxford News, Oxford Press and Oxford Times. Interviews were given by Colin to Banbury Sound, BBC Oxford (television and radio), CNN and to Dutch radio and by Nick Xylas to Japanese radio. The Wessex Wyvern standard was much used as a visual aid on the campaign trail and was commented on by David Cameron (the Conservative candidate) at the count. Major publicity appeared shortly before polling day in the form of a full-page article in the London Guardian of 4th May. This included a colour photograph of Party members with the Wyvern at Chipping Norton, sadly in bad weather that offered poor conditions for canvassing. The article was by Alexis Petridis, who had been tasked with writing a piece on an attractive smaller party and as a bonus found himself at the heart of national debate in the Leader of the Opposition’s constituency. A further report appeared in the Guardian on the Saturday after the election. Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail also visited the constituency and noted our candidate’s lively presence in Burford. Travelling almost wholly by public transport, Colin visited all the major towns and some smaller villages, including return visits in some cases.

Two public meetings were attended, at Woodstock and at Witney, both organised by local clergy. At Woodstock, all candidates – or their representatives – were accommodated equally and Colin was able to engage with the audience as he wished. In disgraceful contrast, at Witney parties – and others – without recent UK or current EU Parliamentary representation were excluded from the platform – 50% of the candidates – and the audience was forbidden to express disapproval of views expounded. Colin protested vigorously against this curtailment of balanced debate but without success. The organiser’s pre-selection of candidates deemed fit to be heard is symptomatic of the hypocrisy of an establishment that claims to seek wider participation in political and civic life yet increasingly restricts opportunities to do so to ‘approved’ channels only, which include the near-identical major parties.

Whatever discretion may or may not be allowed to the voluntary organisers of a public meeting, much less can be conceded to the public authority responsible for organising the election. West Oxfordshire District Council’s actions were generally fair and efficient but we consider it unacceptable that the microphone at the count was turned off once David Cameron had completed his acceptance speech and while others were still waiting to add their own remarks. This was an appalling discourtesy to candidates who should be entitled to equal treatment. It was also a discourtesy to the counting staff, as it is customary for candidates to thank the Acting Returning Officer and his assistants for their work. It may be that this action was inspired by a desire to allow the major parties to proceed to give media interviews without interruption; if so, it confirms our view that elections in the United Kingdom are not free and fair, because they provide additional facilities to some parties at the expense of others.

The televised debates between the three major London party leaders were another example of this unwelcome trend towards re-inforcing the existing distribution of power by denying critical voices a hearing. This structural bias is compounded by the disproportionate inputs of rich beneficiaries and the disproportional outputs of the FPTP voting system. It is to such factors rather than to any supposed deficiency in our own campaigning that we attribute the results we have obtained at recent elections. In standing, we are in effect acting as a political thermometer, testing the extent to which the electorate has or has not grasped the dire reality of its situation and become supportive of the radical changes needed to correct it.

In the New York Times of 9th June 2010, Stephen Farrell's 'Peace Protest, London-Style' included reference to Colin's candidacy and his view that the only reason Britain may pull its troops out of Iraq or Afghanistan would be on the basis of saving money. It would have nothing to do with legality, let alone morality.

In November, two WR officers who are also members of Mebyon Kernow – the Party for Cornwall attended its Annual Conference in Bodmin. We consider it important to support other movements for autonomy on the principle that a rising tide lifts all boats. In the case of Cornwall, success also helps to establish in the public consciousness both what our own borders are and the historical basis for them. We have nevertheless continued to resist all calls for any federation of efforts under an all-England organisation or philosophy that would simply mirror the centralism we oppose.

We were particularly concerned during the latter part of 2010 at the implications of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. This, by requiring cross-border constituencies in order to meet an inflexible electoral quota, will prevent both ourselves and Mebyon Kernow fielding candidates across our respective territories, the whole of those territories and nothing but those territories. The defence of local and regional integrity is at the heart of our world-view and we are ill-served by Jacobin arrangements that treat politics simply as a question of which brand of a single global ideology should dominate the House of Commons.

Localism, R.I.P.

2011-03-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

We have long been critical of the Coalition’s localism agenda. Not because we disagree with it in principle. Far from it. We would devolve power further and faster, and instead of dismantling those anti-democratic regional institutions we would democratise them in the form of a Wessex Parliament – the ‘Witan’ – an accountable voice for the region able to mount an effective challenge to Whitehall bullying.

We disagree with the Coalition’s plan because we don’t believe a word of it. It was always going to be a one-way street. (For example, giving communities the power to allow more housing than the local council wished to see but not less.) Now we are hearing phrases like ‘guided localism’ to describe what the Coalition really wants. Nick Raynsford, a former Labour minister, said that “for all that ministers want to talk the localism talk, they find it hard to resist interfering in local decision-making when it suits their wider public relations agenda”. And as a former Labour minister, Raynsford knows about that temptation, all too well.

The Localism Bill is still making its way through the Commons but George Osborne admitted this month that the Tories, like Labour, may promise people-power but all they will deliver is profit-power. What he is reported to be saying is that he wants to make it much easier for companies to obtain planning consent for new projects – even if they go against the wishes of local residents. When this sort of thing happens in China there’s an almighty stink about human rights violations. When it happens here, protesters are labelled ‘deficit deniers’ and plainly told that there’s no alternative to rebooting the same failed system that got us where we are.

There you have it. Did you vote for these crooks? Will you be doing it again? And again? And again?

Must Try Harder

2011-03-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

One of the authors of the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report, published by the World Economic Forum this week, has branded Britain an ‘appalling’ tourist destination. Though coming seventh out of 139 countries studied, poor marketing, among other factors, let the country down.

Seventh place was earned largely by high standards of public health, the current level of air services and availability of car hire, as well as an improvement in price due to the lower exchange rate of sterling over the past two years. Set against this, the UK was placed 84th on government expenditure on travel and tourism, at 43rd on the effectiveness of its marketing and branding, and at 46th even on the timeliness of providing tourism data.

Reactions are as expected. VisitBritain hit back (rather weakly) to defend its tourism strategy, claiming that, with the Royal Wedding, the Diamond Jubilee and the 2012 Olympics coming up, there has never been a better time to come to the UK as a tourist.

The idea that anywhere outside London might be worth seeing in its own right is obviously a difficult one for these folk to process. Their timeline of British history manages to stretch 'Romano Britain' to 1065, neatly avoiding any mention of those troublesome Saxon chaps. (Please remember that our taxes are paying for this rubbish.) Meanwhile, Britain’s top 10 regional foods are said to include 3 from Scotland, 2 from Wales and 1 from Cornwall. After deducting the generic category of ‘British cheeses’, that leaves just 3 from the whole of England and 2 of those are from the Thames estuary. Ten words about Cheddar cheese are all that we get.

The end of cheap oil will happen within the lifetime of many now living, so if anyone is going to see the world they may as well do it now. With its history and landscape, music, food and drink, Wessex has plenty of wonderful opportunities that cry out for creative marketing. If our tourist industry would just get up off its knees, stop pandering to a London-centred view of Britain and start selling Wessex for all it’s worth. And not just abroad. Watch television for any length of time and lush advertisements for Scotland or Wales will show up. Where’s Wessex in all of this? Largely silent and invisible, as ever, by our own suicidal choice. Let's pull together and put Wessex on everyone's map. If we want them to come, the least we can do is let them know that we're here.

Fool's Gold

2011-03-05T10:00:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday, the Coalition announced that it would no longer be giving money away to China, Russia and a long list of other countries. Opinion polling suggests that two-thirds of voters query the priority given to foreign aid during this gloomy ‘age of austerity’ at home. (After all, this is money we borrow in order to give away and therefore have to pay interest on.) Labour, having espoused ‘joined-up thinking’ while in office, now denounces the targeting of aid to achieve security and other foreign policy goals. A surer target might have been to point out that the Coalition wants a Pig Society at home, where charity replaces the State and bankers pocket the difference, but wants to not only ring-fence but increase State intervention in other peoples’ countries.

We have reason to be suspicious of all the wildly whirling agendas. Tying vulnerable economies into providing us with the food and other resources we won’t provide for ourselves is not an ‘ethical’ foreign policy. It would be far better to leave well alone so that others can choose for themselves their relationship with development. Instead we underwrite with guns the elites who seize the crops to keep us fed. And then we wonder where Third World immigration comes from. Wouldn’t you want to follow the crops to see where they go?

The latest wheeze, to link aid to security, has all the markings of Danegeld. Don’t bomb us or we won’t pay you not to. So for how long do we pay? We paid the Vikings until they decided to help themselves to England. We paid the Barbary pirates for two centuries, so it looks as if the Somali ones need never work again.

But the biggest part of the big picture is that which describes our place in the global economy. We are told that our quality of life must be sacrificed to enable UK plc to ‘compete’ in world markets. We must join the race to the bottom, striving to match the costs of economies that rely on what is little better than slave labour. The word ‘compete’ is used in quotes because we are told that China, India, etc. are our competitors in this life-and-death struggle, yet we have been happy to subsidise their space programmes and nuclear weapons development, however indirectly, through foreign aid. If the competition were genuine, we would not be doing all in our power to enable their industries to undercut ours. The reality is that UK plc is a monstrous myth. No British government has any interest in our prosperity. It only cares for its own.

The alternative is protectionism, which ticks all the boxes. Especially, it accustoms us to an economy less dependent on moving goods around, which will become less of an option as the Oil Age ends. Nothing scares the financial class like the ‘p’ word. Which is why we are not allowed to mention it in polite company. But we have. We have ever since our 12-point programme in 1979, which argued for current revenues from our natural resources to be invested in building a region self-sufficient in energy, nutrition and all essential manufactured goods. Since then, Wessex has lost 32 irreplaceable years, lost in a Maggie-in-Wonderland world of ever-increasing prosperity and ever-expanding credit for which the first of many bills has now arrived. So don’t dare say you weren’t warned.

Naturally, as regionalists, we are not talking about ‘Imperial Preference’ here. Goods imported from, say, Brittany or Normandy imply a smaller carbon footprint than those from Northumbria or Scotland, let alone Canada or New Zealand. We cannot have jingoists in London or Paris imposing malignant barriers to trade with our neighbours. But trade rules that reflect the true cost of burning precious oil to bring us what we could have obtained locally, regionally or inter-regionally cannot come soon enough. Many good trends are becoming evident right now - Wales has voted for more powers, oil prices are rocketing, London politicians are looking increasingly out-of-touch with reality. Now is the time to seize this opportunity and make the case for local life and regional rule. Here, there and everywhere.

Joined-up Looting

2011-02-25T23:00:00.000-08:00

Plans to sell off forestry land have been put on hold as the Coalition confesses that it misjudged the public mood. The plans will be back. All three of the main London parties are committed to continuing privatisation in order to fund big giveaways to their respective backers.

The great fire-sale is driven by five key principles.

The first principle is that if it makes money, it must be sold to the bankers. In the case of forestry, the trees come with a very helpful tax regime attached. The State, having lost the revenue and given away the capital receipt, must then raise taxes to fill the gap. Bankers know how to arrange their affairs to avoid paying those.

The second principle is that if it doesn’t make money, it must be sold to a voluntary group, under the threat that it will otherwise be shut down. These groups need to raise capital to finance the purchase and any future investment. Banks extract interest in return. If, or rather when, the voluntary groups fail to balance the books, the banks can repossess and sell the assets. The failure of the voluntary groups will provide baseline data about costs that will then enable multi-national corporations to price their bids for State funding to provide any services still deemed vital.

The third principle is that taxes must remain high, even though services are in decline, in order that the State may continue to shovel money into bankers’ pockets. Banks will continue to make profits on debts they have created out of nothing. The UK’s government debt is now £2.32 trillion, of which the cost of bailing out Lloyds Group and RBS accounts for £1.3 trillion. Smaller banks are already included in the larger figure. RBS lost £1.1 billion last year but paid out £950 million in bonuses anyway.

The fourth principle is that property rights must continue to take precedence over human rights. David Cameron recently set out his vision of a State that has withdrawn from everything except provision of the coercive power – the police, the intelligence services, the judiciary and the armed forces. The Pig Society does not extend to farming out justice to local vigilantes, nor security to foreign mercenaries. Cameron knows just enough history not to want to share the fate of Vortigern. His vision nevertheless is a starkly regressive one. The poor are to be taxed to pay for protecting the interests of the rich, not the other way around.

The fifth principle is that any opposition must be neutered, employing ever more draconian laws and sophisticated psychological manipulation to disarm any criticism of the elite consensus. The new emphasis on cyber-security is not about fighting off virus attacks on critical infrastructure but about monitoring and disrupting any organised reaction to the looting. Meanwhile, Cameron’s establishment of the Behavioural Insight Team at Number 10, building on Labour’s ‘Mindspace’ project, demonstrates the extent to which politicians from all three London parties now view voters as no better than lab rats to be subjected to ‘libertarian paternalism’.

The alternative we seek is a Big Democracy, one where the power of money to corrupt our lives is reined in and other values, like accountability, inclusiveness and stewardship, are re-asserted. It also needs to exist as of right, not as a hand-down from the PM that can be swept away at the first sign of a bad headline. This requires leaders less testicularly challenged than Cameron, Clegg and Miliband, all of whom are too close by far to the City of London to take it on. Like the rest of the essentially fraudulent (but allowed-to-be-legal) globalised ‘competitive’ (reptilian) economy, the City must become a thing of the past. Its ill-gotten gains need to be redistributed to local communities to begin the work of restoring all those life-enhancing qualities that the financial class has so long despised.

The coming ecological crisis will require clear thinking about real things. Things like food, fuel, regions, resources, skills, land and clever technology. It will have no room for sociopathic bankers, and they know it. It does no harm to remind them that their crimes against humanity and against the planet will end. And will Big Bang then become Big Whimper? We shall see.

The Infamous Five

2011-02-15T12:00:00.000-08:00

In 1945, the Labour Party campaigned to destroy Beveridge’s 'five giants' of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. In 1997 and each subsequent election it tried the same trick, the latest pledges being to “secure the recovery”, “raise family living standards”, “build a high tech economy”, “protect frontline services”, and “strengthen fairness in communities”. All a bit desperate really.

It has been said that Labour deserved to lose last May, while the Conservatives did not deserve to win. That’s how it turned out, though happily for David Cameron the third party was waiting in the wings, to hand him the keys to Number 10 anyway. Since then, nostalgia for Labour has been growing daily as memory decays. Here then is a reminder of what we have lost, five reasons why we should detest the whole lot of them, five reasons to vote only for parties that advocate real change worth having.

1. Labour took power promising an ethical foreign policy. It left power embedded in American-led wars for oil. Illegal wars sold on the basis of lies. Tens of thousands have died needlessly, deaths for which Labour’s leaders, no less than their Conservative collaborators, must stand trial. A by-product has been the increasing re-militarisation of our own society, with death in war now once more normalised and any criticism of armed intervention smothered in the name of patriotism. Meanwhile, our arms trade continues to make a killing.

2. Labour’s onslaught on civil liberties was relentless. Historic freedoms of expression, association and assembly have all taken a terrible mauling, along with many guarantees of due process. The icing on this loathsome cake was a hideously expensive identity card scheme, expressing Labour’s view that the People belong to the State and not the State to the People. Overall, Labour’s actions, at home and abroad, have increased, not reduced, the terrorist threat.

3. Labour’s contempt for the environment has been a badge worn with pride. The challenges posed by runaway population growth have been met with reckless indifference. Only the collapse of the mortgage market, High Court challenges under European law, and finally a change of government have prevented the destruction of tens of thousands of acres of Green Belt and other protected countryside in Wessex. Half-hearted attempts at a sustainable transport policy, all stick and no carrot, provoked a predictable backlash.

4. Labour’s piper-payers called the tune. Propped up by rich donors as an insurance policy against the declining popularity of John Major’s Tories, New Labour continued the policies of privatisation and debt-based public finance that have got us where we are today. It did nothing as vital industries passed into the hands of international investors devoid of local loyalties. Labour’s leaders would sell their own grandmothers; they already have sold everyone’s grandchildren.

5. Labour once again bungled devolution, just as it did in 1979. This time it got Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London away but this was always the limit of its enthusiasm. It hitched itself to a set of unworkable regional boundaries inherited from the Tories, then deliberately obstructed grassroots movements in Cornwall, Mercia and Wessex pointing to a more promising way forward. In local government it refined the Tory policy of arrogant interference and dismantled public debate, substituting executive members and elected mayors for meaningful scrutiny and collective decision-making.

We attack Labour not because we are happy to see Wessex under Coalition rule. We are far from happy. We attack Labour, as we attack all the London-based parties, because each falls short of our vision for Wessex. We attack the other two for what they are. We attack Labour for trying to fool folk that it is what it demonstrably is not.

It's That London Again!

2011-02-11T10:45:00.000-08:00

Good news, for some, but not for all. Yesterday, Vince Cable’s Department for Business, Innovation & Skills announced arrangements for the winding-up of the Regional Devastation Agencies. Wessex will breathe a sigh of relief now that their reign of tendentious mediocrity is drawing to a close. Wessex does not need ‘development’. It needs conservation, along with the rest of our abused planet. Instead, with ‘local economic partnerships’ filling the void, we are promised, according to Cable’s department, “a new economic delivery landscape”. No joined-up thinking is allowed, no imaginative marketing of the Wessex regional brand. It all comes down under the Coalition to something as boring as functional labour market areas instead.

Bad news, for some, but not for all. The assets built up by the RDAs are not to be handed over to local communities as we have argued they should be. At least not in Wessex. In most cases they are to be sold, to help pay off the Government’s silly, imaginary debt to the banks (who created the debt out of nothing, like all bank-created money). There is an exception. In London, all the assets of the London Development Agency will pass to the Greater London Authority, to “give the GLA an important portfolio of regeneration assets to support its new responsibilities for housing and regeneration”. London, apparently, is a functional labour market area, and a world city too. So, it’s all right then, isn’t it, that we wurzels should slave for its benefit and be denied a voice of our own?

The Land is Whose?

2011-01-25T01:00:00.000-08:00

The Forestry Commission is a big player in Wessex. Within our borders we have two of the great royal hunting forests, the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire and the New Forest in Hampshire, both still regulated by their mediæval Verderers’ Courts. Treasured parts of our heritage. Except that for Cameron, Clegg & Co they are just treasure. The Coalition aims to sell off much of the forestry estate in England and won’t rule out selling everything.

Locals are incensed. In the Forest of Dean a mass protest is underway, organised by HOOF – Hands Off Our Forest – which the local Tory MP, Mark Harper is pointedly snubbing. His chances of retaining his seat may now be receding faster than you can say 'timber'.

A thousand years of tradition are there to be sneered at by today’s Tories, whose promises that there’s nothing to worry about are worth precisely nothing. When the Thatcher/Major regime sold off some parts of the forestry estate, almost all of it went without any binding commitment on public access.

This time will be different, of course. The ‘Pig Society’ is all about local control. That’s if locals are willing to buy what they already own, and there are plenty of Guardian-reading muppets now running around trying to raise the money to do just that, with the wretched Woodland Trust playing the pied piper. There is a case for community ownership of forest land, but ownership by the Crown in trust for the community is not incompatible with local control, in place of centralised direction. The problem lies with breach of that trust, when politicians treat common property as a piggybank to be smashed when they run short of cash to fund a vicious foreign policy and the never-ending bankers’ banquet.

State forestry is not part of some dependency culture sprung up in the wake of an over-generous welfarism. In Wessex as in the rest of Europe it is the product of centuries of evolution. Today the forests are managed for leisure as well as commercial timber production. In the past they grew oaks for the Navy and before that housed game for the king. But ultimately, where there is no proof of purchase, they are land owned by the Crown in default of any private owner, a public resource, not simply a commercial asset.

The public estate in Wessex remains considerable, despite recent sell-offs. In 2001, Kevin Cahill published Who Owns Britain. Although errors of fact and a dubious political agenda run right through that book, it has no rival as a guide to the modern pattern of landownership in Great Britain and Ireland. Using its figures, we can work out that the Crown Estate Commissioners own 57,556 acres of land in Wessex, plus most of the foreshore and the seabed, the Duchy of Cornwall 89,380 acres, the Ministry of Defence owns or leases 153,879 acres, the Forestry Commission 131,985 acres, local authorities at least 49,239 acres. The total comes to 7% of the land area of Wessex, the equivalent of Berkshire or Oxfordshire but still far below the figures for some countries, including the supposedly 'free enterprise' USA, where the public domain covers an area larger than India. Little of our public estate is managed by those accountable locally. The main exception has been the smallholdings owned by county councils but they have been busy cashing those in. Bristol City Council is doing its best to catch up with the counties, recently publishing plans to sell off some of the city’s parks.

Land reform is off even the Labour Party’s agenda, along with all kinds of public ownership. One more reason not to vote for a party that has no idea why it exists. The result is that the land is managed not in accordance with any democratic vision but often single-mindedly for profit, with any benefits for wildlife or the landscape or the community squeezed out at needless expense by specific public subsidies instead of happening because they’re the things that ought to be happening. Psychologically, the need for public land is overwhelming. No-one, out in the country for the day, should be made to feel like a feudal vassal, welcome only as a source of revenue and deference.

In 1925, C.S. Orwin and W.R. Peel published The Tenure of Agricultural Land. They presented the case for nationalising rural land, upon the basis of a scheme which they worked out to be as decentralised as possible. “Anything”, they said, “in the nature of ‘management from Whitehall’ would be fatal”. They proposed to organise most matters on a county basis, sub-divided into districts of approximately 30,000 acres each, supplemented by a county forestry team. The figure is necessarily an average, as the need for management varies with the intensity of the agriculture in each county. But it is worth noting that in Wessex 20-30,000 acres is about the average size of a hundred, the Anglo-Saxon sub-division of a shire, and so represents some natural wisdom about the scale of economic organisation in the countryside. Other reformers have sought to take things further still, Thomas Spence’s scheme of 1775 being for inalienable parochial ownership of all land in each parish.

As we move over the course of this century ever closer to conditions of ecological emergency, so we face a choice. We can allow our land to be bought and sold, fenced off and exploited for private gain, often by those with no roots in our communities and no intention of putting down any. Or we can insist that the ‘common treasury for all’ is respected as such, managed and used accordingly.

Identity Theft

2011-01-18T01:00:00.000-08:00

John Penrose is a Conservative MP, for Weston-super-Mare. He is also the Coalition’s Minister for Tourism and Heritage. Conservation. Heritage. Two good grounds, surely, for thinking that here is a man who understands the value of long tradition and historic continuity? No. Not in the least.

Mr Penrose supports the gerrymandering Bill that seeks to make all constituencies – except three in the north of Scotland – fit into a statistical straitjacket that allows no more than 5% variation in the number of electors. You and we both know that this means that constituencies will no longer fit within county boundaries. There will be at least one that crosses the Anglo-Cornish border and at least a third of the Isle of Wight will need to share an MP with the Hampshire mainland. Mr Penrose, a man with a Cornish surname, might be expected to take an interest in such matters. We might at least expect him not to stick his head in the Weston mud over them. So here’s a quote from the man:

“I think it’s important to stress that, until the Boundary Commissions have done their work, the problems you’re worried about may not turn out to be nearly as bad as what you’re foreseeing.”

You don’t believe us then? Read Lewis Baston’s report in December (together with its follow-up report this month) for the think-tank Democratic Audit. He recently warned that ministers would "repent in leisure" their decision to combine the equalisation measures with the referendum on AV voting, in a single Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. Democratic Audit calculate that all but nine counties in England would be forced to share a seat with a neighbour under the 5% rule, while none would have to do so if the margin were increased to 10%.

We no more than Mebyon Kernow want a situation where rival campaigners for autonomy are fighting for each other’s votes on opposite sides of the Tamar. Yet we are fast approaching a situation where our right to contest seats in Wessex, the whole of Wessex and nothing but Wessex is taken away. Time to stop this travesty is running out. We look to Their Lordships’ House to deliver the lesson in constitutional history that the Commons appear all too lazy to learn for themselves.

Remaking Politics

2010-12-08T02:00:00.000-08:00

“I do not believe in struggling to take power, but to build it.”
Hugo Blanco

Growth is what everyone wants. Apparently. So we can pay the banks the interest on the money they created out of nothing.

We could join in too and become a pro-growth party. Just like the other 'choices' on offer. All hurtling towards the cliff’s edge at breakneck speed.

Or maybe not. A sick consensus may be a consensus but it is none the less sick for that. And it is our job to change it.

That won’t be easy. Our economy is so hard-wired for growth that failure to grow results in unemployment, political repression, war and other harmful consequences. We need to organise ourselves better so that growth isn’t the only road to prosperity and well-being because, ultimately, in a finite world, we cannot go on that way.

We are grateful to the Optimum Population Trust for drawing our attention to the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE). Some radical policy recommendations from that source can be viewed here.

The CASSE don’t yet have anything to say about devolution for Wessex but it certainly looks like the sort of agenda with which we could engage. Politics needs to be remade, comprehensively, to face the challenges of the 21st century in a non-domineering way. Our movement, for being ourselves in our own space, enjoying life within our reasonable means, is part of that building of power in place of fear.

Fixing and Faking

2010-12-05T01:00:00.000-08:00

“What is happening to Stonehenge does not reflect the increasing accord that is supposed to come from progress and rationality.”
Christopher Chippindale, Stonehenge Complete, 1985

Last month, £10 million of lottery money was awarded for the building of new visitor facilities for Stonehenge, to be sited a mile and half west at Airman’s Corner, with a transit system to a drop-off point near the stones, enabling the current car park to be removed. “We want to get rid of the traffic and modern clutter,” said an English Heritage spokesman. “At the moment we are not doing it justice.” EH still has to find a third of the £27.5 million total cost of the project, which received planning permission in June despite high-level criticism of how it will integrate into the landscape.

Marcus Binney, architecture correspondent of The Times (a London newspaper), produced a thundering response to the EH plan to “turn Stonehenge into a toy-town with visitors approaching in dinky electric vehicles”. “Will the Heritage Lottery never learn?” he wrote. “While Britain’s heritage crumbles it fiddlefaddles with daft and hideously expensive interpretation and exhibition centres, doing increasingly more harm than good with its politically correct schemes which have no place in an era when money should be concentrated on essentials and emergencies”, on “front-line rescue of natural and man-made heritage, and not on frills and embellishments.”

Quite so. Once it’s gone, it’s gone and no amount of replicas and substitutes will make up for that. The Ministry’s management of Stonehenge has never inspired confidence. After the stones were gifted to the nation an archæological dig was carried out in the 1920’s. It was carried out so incompetently that it amounted to the destruction of one half of the site while recovering hardly any useful data. Conservation interests have battled ever since for attention against the insatiable demands of the tourist industry. When the Antrobus family owned the stones, access was eventually controlled for the first time with fencing and a gate, but as much for the site’s protection as for private profit. Under public ownership, ostensibly in the public interest, the locusts must go where they will. Numbers are now so huge – three times what they were 50 years ago – that since 1978 the stones themselves have been roped off and the trippers have to traipse past and gawp from a distance. The average visitor spends just 20 minutes at the site. Official reports have seriously attempted to argue that a loss of real archæology can be offset against new access arrangements to produce a net positive outcome for the nation’s cultural heritage. Or at least for the EH bank balance. This is the organisation, remember, whose past chairman suggested letting out the catering to McDonalds.

Stonehenge is pivotal in more ways than the purely geographical. It marks the point where all the escalating agendas of destructive transformation in Wessex converge. The road lobby is one of the most persistent arguers, demanding the dualling of the A303, its diversion or undergrounding, all so that Londoners are not held up by botttenecks in their mad dash down to the weekend cottage in Cornwall. It finds a ready ally in EH, incensed by the fact that drivers can get a great view of the stones without paying a penny. That, rather than air pollution, is what the talk of removing the roads on Stonehenge Down is really about. Having been there for generations they are arguably part of the history EH was supposedly set up to defend. To remove them is as unhistorical as the ‘restorations’ of ancient Athens and Rome that erased mediæval structures whose story seemingly got in the way of the official line. Our Ministry of Works did much the same in the 60’s with its heavy-handed stripping back of the friary sites in Gloucester to their bland mediæval skeletons.

That is the problem with interpretation. It tells us far more about ourselves – our own pre-occupations and prejudices – than it ever can about the past. Archæology can only rarely hint at the sounds and the organic colours of prehistoric life. Those of Amerindian cultures often get pressed into service to fill the sensory gap. Handled with care, that can be an imaginative improvisation but otherwise it can subvert the reality that we simply don’t know. Professional interpretation can be very dismissive of the wishful thinking displayed by New Age pagans when it comes to re-creating the past. Rightly so, where devoid of reasonable foundation. But its own efforts are not necessarily categorically different. The ideological pressure to make the Stonehenge experience the multi-media ‘Stonehenge Experience’ becomes overpowering.

EH is a badly designed organisation. Its role as touristic showman inevitably compromises its other role as independent adviser on heritage priorities. The Coalition’s plans to streamline the quangos, throwing still more responsibilities into the mix, will only add to the muddle. EH’s presentation of properties in Cornwall has been condemned for its cultural insensitivity on another nation’s territory. Scotland and Wales have their own heritage bodies and we look forward to Wessex too taking control of its own past. A Wessex equivalent of EH will need to take property management out of the hands of policy makers and fund distributors so that there is a level playing field for all.

It’s tempting to suggest offering the lot to the National Trust, but Mrs Thatcher tried that one early on in the 80’s, a time when several local councils were also having a clear-out in the Trust’s direction. The Trust realised soon enough what was afoot, looked the nation’s gift horse in the mouth, found it didn’t come with an endowment for maintenance in perpetuity and rightly turned it down. EH was Mrs T’s Plan B. The Trust used to be a heritage-conscious organisation but we honestly can’t say it is now, not since earlier this year when it abolished its Wessex region. In favour of a ‘South West’ one, aligned exactly with the Prescott zone of the same name. Independent of the Government? You must be joking. The control freaks have got inside and the Trust is doomed to become a satellite of Whitehall, dutifully rolling out whatever deracinating initiative comes with the money. A complete overhaul of the heritage sector is now needed to place our past back at the heart of the community and prevent it becoming increasingly the plaything of the London-centred chattering classes.

Changing structures will not change the future of Stonehenge without wider changes in our society. The frazzled language we use to describe it is degenerating fast, with must-see exciting world-class iconic heritage separating us further and further from any real understanding of what is before us. It cries out for a little boy to point to the nakedness of it all, that Stonehenge is a clever arrangement of rocks in a field, about which we know next to nothing, and that our attempts at greater knowledge are often counter-productive. If tourists are disappointed, then it was wrong to have promised them a prehistoric Disneyland.

Management of the site is becoming ever more complex because of the ever-increasing demands placed upon it. (Regulatory power always expands in proportion to the ecologically destabilising effects of economic and population growth, especially in high-density situations like cities and tourist hotspots.) When, in the early 1950’s, visitor numbers were one-seventh of what they are today, the grass wore away each summer but recovered in the off-season. Not any more. A sane policy has to put a stop to the philosophy that maximising the number of ‘quality visitor experiences’ is the name of the game and the devil take the hindmost. If EH is serious about wanting to protect Stonehenge, why does it market it so aggressively, while other properties with greater capacity to absorb visitors are neglected? As with growth generally and the pressures it places on all our resources, putting up the ‘Full’ sign would not be a bad move. Living within environmental limits means saying no sometimes. And really meaning it.

Six Months

2010-11-30T16:30:00.000-08:00

That’s all it took. All it took for the Coalition’s true programme to be made manifest. It talks the talk about decentralisation and localism but does it walk the walk?

We await with interest the so-called Decentralisation & Localism Bill. We shall withhold judgment until we can read it, but recent pronouncements on housing and education suggest that Downing Street’s dictionary differs from our own.

Take the much-vaunted return of planning powers to local councils. Scared of being told off for not concreting over our farmland fast enough, the Coalition wants to bribe councils to allow house-building by paying them a ‘New Homes Bonus’, contrary to the principle that planning permission is not for sale. Across England, the bribes will cost the Treasury almost £1 billion. Now, let’s be clear about this. Decentralisation, in the planning sphere, means they take our money off us, in the form of taxes, and won’t let us have it back unless we dance to their tune. Even the usually dense Western Boring Views, in its editorial of 13 November, could see through this one, doubting there would be many takers and opining that controls on second homes need to be looked at too. What, put people before property? Is that the rumble of the tumbril we hear in Derriford?

Housing is as nothing compared to what is happening in education, where Michael Gove is looking to dictate every last detail of what happens in schools. Can anyone tell us what his department is actually for? Schools are run by professional people. Answerable to governors, who include parents. And supported by the children’s services departments of elected local councils. Gove’s department spends £60 billion a year, apparently on doing other people’s jobs for them. It doesn’t even appear to know, or care, who else does what. A now infamous letter inviting schools to apply for ‘academy’ status went out to head teachers, even though it is the governing body and not the head teacher which is responsible for the status of the school.

So mistrusting are Gove and his chums that at one point they seriously intended to take over the entire schools budget and allocate it centrally from Whitehall, direct to schools, cutting out communities completely. The latest report is that Gove & Co have caved in, but we expect this one to make a comeback. Their current plan is to seek to make directly-funded ‘academies’ the norm and so achieve their aim by stealth. Setting up the quango to run such a system – the Education Funding Agency – remains a White Paper commitment. Local authorities as a group have bargaining power with Whitehall that 24,000 individual head teachers can only dream of. And Wessex, if it had the autonomy now enjoyed by Scotland and Wales, could simply tell Whitehall to shut up and go home.

Freedom from council control – alias the council safety net – may turn out to be a case of from frying pan into fire. Like the rest of the ‘Big Society’, what this is really about is dismantling cost-effective but publicly-provided support services in favour of privately-provided ones that cost more but tick the box of moving resources out into the global financial markets. (Rules are being bent to prevent in-house bids.) The books are then balanced by reducing the range and quality of services. One of the benefits of local control over funding is that councillors have been able to speak up for the social and environmental benefits of village schools, protecting them from the professional bean counters. Under centralism, all that will change, as no provision for local top-ups seems likely to be made. We can look forward to savage cuts, with village schools across Wessex going the way of village shops, pubs and post offices.

Maybe not all just yet. Tory voters in marginal seats will be safe for a while. But in due course, with Labour back in the driving seat, won’t its reptilian desire to punish rural England rise to the surface as always? And what is to stop a future Labour government re-organising schools right across England by cutting off funds to those that won’t bend the knee? Centralists gather in power, then they lie and cheat to hold on to it. The more power they gather in, the more desperate they become to prevent the other side sharing in the spoils. Even when, as now, you really can’t tell the difference between them.

If you voted for the Tories, you shouldn’t complain when they set out down this road. If you voted for their glove puppets, what ever were you thinking? And if you still reckon that Labour are going to become reformed characters and start putting communities in charge, well, we’ve certainly heard that one before.

Non Homo Insula Est

2010-11-30T12:05:00.000-08:00

No man is an island. The famous words of John Donne, Dean of St Paul’s in London. Written in English, translated here into Latin.

Why Latin? A cloud of celebrities ranging from Joanna Lumley, a native of Kashmir, to Boris Johnson, former MP for Henley-on Thames, has recently been gathered in support of the proposition that Latin should again be taught in schools. Presumably in those areas that still have grammar schools it still is. For what good would be a grammar school that eschewed Latin grammar?

If Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’, complete with its laboured mis-labelling to the locative case, comes to mind most vividly for those who learnt Latin at their alma mater’s knee then a pause for thought is needed. From the traditional date of Rome’s foundation in 753 BC to the end of the western empire in 476 AD is 1,229 years. The post-Roman afterlife of Latin to the present is 1,534 years and it is not an uneventful tale. Textbooks are largely silent about what remained the international language of churchmen, scholars, scientists and diplomats until modern times. We know a 17th century Swedish king as Gustavus Adolphus because news of his actions travelled in Latin. So too did those of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, Columbus and Erasmus, Copernicus and Linnaeus. We know the Chinese sage K’ung-fu-tzu as Confucius and the emperors of India and Russia by the name of a Roman assassinated over two thousand years ago (and who probably spoke Greek when he really wanted to impress). Et tu, Brute? Kai su, teknon!

For a Europe that needed to communicate with itself, Latin long ago became the earliest Esperanto. French eventually displaced it as the language of diplomacy, German as the language of science, and English ultimately as the language of everything, but until nationalism made neutrality a nasty word, Latin reigned supreme. The Kingdom of Hungary, the multi-lingual melting-pot of the Carpathian basin, insisted that Parliamentary debates were conducted in Latin as late as 1847. Some thirty years ago, an attempt was made to use Latin on the floor of the European Parliament but the speaker was ruled out of order. The Parliament has 23 official languages but Latin is not one of them. Those who believe the EU to be more super-state than club of nation-states might reflect on that lack of a language that transcends borders.

No-one knew the value of Latin like King Alfred the Great. His biographer, the Welshman Asser, records that, although Alfred had visited Rome as a child, he did not learn the language until he was nearly 40. His motivation was to partake personally in the revival of learning that he launched after securing the kingdom against further attack. Today, among mainstream English nationalists, it is fashionable to argue the uniqueness of Englishness, to decry any hint of cultural impurity. Not so for Alfred, who looked to Mediterranean civilisation for his model and cultivated links with lands even further afield. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, begun in Alfred’s reign, is written in English, not in Latin. An early case of ‘up yours, Delors’? Far from it. The choice was imposed on Alfred by a dearth of Latin scholars in Wessex. In the terms of the time it was a sign not of cultural strength but of abject cultural weakness.

Wessex has been subject to many influences down the centuries, Celtic and Nordic, Latin and Greek, African and Asian. All lasting impressions deserve study because they aid understanding of who we are. Can our encounter with Latin provide us with pointers to the future, lessons about how we view our place in time and space and thought?

The first conclusion must be that the past is rarely as dead as current fashions dictate. A glance around Europe will identify nations and regions long suppressed and now firmly back in business, their languages spoken and written again, their flags flying from the citadels of the former dominant power. From Ypres to Warsaw, Berlin to Budapest, monuments and cities blasted to rubble have been painstakingly reconstructed just as they were. Catalans are ruled by their Generalitat, a name dredged up from early in the 18th century. Scotland’s Parliament was re-convened in 1999 with words that connected to its last sitting in 1707. On our own patch, those who feared we might never again hear the phrase ‘Bath, in Somerset’ have been proved wrong. For those who claim that nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, it’s worth noting that even Alfred, when he set about his revival of learning, was inspired to re-create the splendours of the later 7th century, when Wessex enjoyed its first Golden Age under the guidance of King Ine and St Aldhelm. Whether the history around us is cherished for the richness it gives to our lives, or wiped out as an affront to ‘progress’, is a matter of will. The belief of progressives, that policy must, like time, be ever advancing, is a belief that can admit neither to ignorance of superior knowledge from another era nor to the mistakes that result. At best the mistakes go uncorrected; at worst, history repeats itself in ways that are unexpected and unwelcome.

The second conclusion is that insularity cuts us off from part of ourselves. Nationalism, conceived of as a fortress, politically, culturally, economically, is not the way to go. In Shakespeare’s day, the moat defensive against the envy of less happier lands made sense. But it came at a cost, both in terms of autonomy denied within and fraternity denied without. Regionalism recognises that everywhere is a region of something else, in a world composed of communities within communities. Like fractal images, one nests within another, from the parish to the planet, and each has its place, its call upon our loyalty, as individuals and collectively, and in their defence we find meaning and solidarity.

The third conclusion is that the informed intellect can be a vital tool in carving out a new politics. Wessex must be vigilant in defence of its folk culture – including aspects of mass popular culture that stem from Wessex roots – but need not therefore reject high culture as foreign to its nature as a region. It must find a proper place too for those whose concerns are more material than cultural. For Alfred, society was composed of praying men, fighting men and working men. As a party, our equivalents are thinkers, activists and donors. All three are needed and we need more of all three.

The Pageant of Death

2010-11-15T15:33:00.000-08:00

“I have said that we must base our future thinking on the acceptance that nation states, individual, independent nations, can no longer really seriously influence the way in which the world develops. There is nothing that we or, I believe, any other single country can do on its own to affect these great trends of history and of the future… It seems to me that the accepted Clausewitzian doctrine of the military arm as an extension of national political power is dead and ought to be dead, and that we ought to be re-thinking, soldiers and politicians, the whole new interrelation between the political and the military establishment… I hope I may have stimulated the thought in some minds that some of the problems that occupy so much of our time and energy today are in fact false problems… We commit the familiar heresy, the Manichean heresy of creating enemies where none really exist in order to satisfy some irrational psychological need.”
Lord Chalfont, 1969

Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday. Across Wessex, and across the world, it was a time to reflect. To remember bad things that have happened to us in our collective past is meaningful, at least in part, for the opportunity it provides to learn from our experience. Yet learn we do not. The war to end all wars is still being fought and the Nobel Prize has been awarded to the Commander-in-Chief. War is peace.

One of the least forgivable actions of the Blair/Brown regime was to taint remembrance with controversy. The casualties of illegal and irrelevant wars now join those of just ones in thoughts and prayers. All those who take up arms against the Queen’s enemies are equally honoured, as custom dictates. Those who prefer to reject the crimes committed in our name may well ask, who is this bellicose woman, who makes enemies so easily?

Mainstream politicians have been very quick to wipe their bloody hands on the rest of us, in a brazen attempt to make us their accomplices. It began with cross-party talk about the 'military covenant', the supposed duty supposedly owed by society to those who supposedly defend the realm against the supposed forces of darkness. The phrase came from nowhere in 2000 when it was first codified in Army doctrine. It went unchallenged and now looks to be made binding upon members of the public. Under cover of concern that resources are inadequate to the military’s current mission and its aftermath, a sinister agenda is now fast infiltrating the civilian world. The spotlight is turned on military equipment, housing and healthcare. A better deal for those injured or bereaved. Those who dissent from the mission, those who would rather prevent injury and bereavement happening at all, are to be first sidelined and then persecuted for their conscientious opinions.

Gordon Brown commissioned the Davies report of 2008. Note carefully that this report was commissioned by a Labour government, a government determined to make the world a better place. Through ceaseless struggle and the glorification of violence. One of its key recommendations, soon acted upon, was Armed Forces Day, the brand new annual opportunity for the nation to express its gratitude to the services. MoD money was chucked at local councils willing to organise parades, to show off the glamorous hardware of war and permit recruiters to point yet more fools the way to dusty death.

Britain, like all the imperial powers of a past age, struggles to pull itself together. War is the unifying factor its politicians need. The Falklands War flowed from the incompetence of Mrs Thatcher’s government yet it ended up securing her a second term. Many of those Parliamentarians who in 2003 voted to wage aggressive war in the name of the British people have now retained their seats through two general elections. Brown, obsessed with ‘Britishness’, could have asked for no stronger symbol of it than ‘our boys and girls’ doing their bit for Queen and Country. Or at least for U.S. oil. It remains true, in F.D. Roosevelt’s words, that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. But fear, along with hate and arrogance, are tools that politicians and the media know how to wield. And will if we let them.

Can Wessex transcend its violent past and present? It will not be easy, for we have become to a high degree economically dependent on the manufacture or maintenance of weaponry and the training of service personnel. It all goes back a very long way. Even if scholars doubt that Alfred founded the Navy, it is a matter of record that Portsmouth Dockyard existed in the reign of Richard I, Devonport following in that of William III. The Army’s roots are shallower. It took up residence on Dartmoor in the early 1800s, at Aldershot in 1854, on Salisbury Plain in 1897. The RAF’s roots are necessarily shallower still, though it was here at the outset, and even before, His Majesty’s Balloon Factory at Farnborough dating from 1908. The MoD Procurement Executive came to Abbey Wood at Bristol in 1995.

Wessex has moved on before. The merchants of Bristol fought long and hard to save the centuries-old slave trade and with it the wealth that benefited not only them but indirectly much of Wessex society. Yet Bristol had its abolitionists too. Stroud has the one contemporary monument to abolition, the ‘Anti-Slavery Arch’. Wessex today can make a similar stand for peace. It can reclaim the land from beneath the tank tracks and the soldiers’ boots. For ours is an occupied region, doomed to re-enact the war preparations of Europe's unhappy centuries until saner counsel prevails. The MoD owns, leases or holds on licence over 100,000 acres of Wiltshire (12% of the county), 32,000 acres of Devon (14% of the Dartmoor National Park), 10,000 acres of Hampshire and 8,000 acres of Dorset. That it protects some of our finest landscapes, archæology and biodiversity from the rapacious grasp of agronomic and development interests is beside the point. Less bad is not the same as good and the money it all costs could be doing much more of the latter. Of course, there will be those who argue that Wessex Regionalists should back the cosy status quo in our part of the world but that is a low aspiration for a transformative party.

The recent Strategic Defence and Security Review marks a step towards the necessary rethinking but it remains an excuse for inertia while the assumptions of an ex-empire predominate. The UK continues to support the fourth largest military budget in the world, yet there is no reason to believe that it is any more vulnerable to attack than those countries whose budgets are smaller. Si vis pacem, para bellum – if you wish for peace, prepare for war – has been the universal advice of generals throughout the ages. It would be, wouldn’t it? We flatter ourselves that we are an intelligent species but the Campaign Against The Arms Trade has estimated that every minute the world will spend £1 million on arms while in the same time 15 children will die of poverty, famine or disease. The UK has become the world’s second largest arms exporter while lecturing others on peace and stability.

The real challenge of security is to be tough on violence and tough on the causes of violence. It is not, and must not become, what the London parties seek to make it, a smokescreen for the remilitarisation of society, for renewing the backbone of centralism. It is said that where there’s a will there’s a way. In the case of defence, there’s a way sure enough. For now, the popular and political will, at home and abroad, is what’s sadly lacking.

Playing the Poll Card

2010-11-10T16:00:00.000-08:00

"Be you never so high, the Law is above you."
Dr Thomas Fuller, 1733 (and others)

No sooner had Phil Woolas been stripped of his Parliamentary seat than politicians and the media started questioning whether it was right for judges to overturn the people’s choice. Democracy in danger? It is a fair question but one with an easy answer, so long as one respects the idea that power should be dispersed between the various branches of the State, the doctrine known as the separation of powers. New Labour, a totalitarian party, has no time for that sort of nonsense but others should have known better than to jump on the bandwagon.

The courts have a role in ensuring fair play because sometimes they are the only ones who can ensure it. If a candidate spreads lies about a rival’s character, it should not be left entirely to that rival to spend time and money putting out a rebuttal leaflet. That is a waste of resources and whose resources they are is irrelevant. There is a public interest in ensuring simply that seats do not go to cheats. Of course, if voters truly wish to be represented by a liar then their wish must be respected. The issue is whether they voted knowingly. If they did not, then annulling the result is what judges are for, as with any contract obtained by fraud. Banning the liar from standing again may be an intervention too far – there are arguments either way on that point – but it must be right that a result obtained by dubious means should not stand.

Decentralists will be delighted to see New Labour’s come-uppance. It was New Labour who created the Standards Board (now known as ‘Standards for England’), which the Coalition thankfully plans to abolish. This is a quango whose job it is to investigate complaints against local councillors. Councillors who have committed no crime but who are deemed to have offended against certain New Labour ‘standards’, for example by ‘speaking out of turn’, can be suspended from office. What this means is that if they do their job with passion and dedication, their constituents can be denied any representation. Not by the voters. Not by the courts. Just by committee folk, playing at being judge and jury.

Labour has always suffered from a pathological inability to distinguish properly between law and morality. For every case when it considers it acceptable to break the law, there will be hundreds of others where it seeks to impose sanctions for not doing things Labour’s way. In the light of Phil Woolas’ departure, calls for reform are inevitable, to re-assert these twin principles of infallibility and superiority. Election courts will be demonised as archaic and anti-democratic. In due course, the law will be changed to uphold the right to lie, at least if it’s your own team. And after that, honourable members will truthfully be anything but.

Constituencies & Contrasts

2010-11-05T15:00:00.000-07:00

In England, there are two kinds of Parliamentary election. We elect MPs to Westminster using First-Past-The-Post and MEPs to Brussels/Strasbourg using the D’Hondt regional list system.

One would think that arguments about fairness would apply equally between the two systems. Not so. The Bill now being railroaded through Parliament will, with very limited exceptions, require all constituencies to be within 5% of the electoral quota, no matter what damage that does to any sense of community.

But what’s this? Last week the Electoral Commission recommended that the ‘West Midlands’ Prescott zone should get the one additional MEP allocated to the UK under the Lisbon treaty. The electoral regions are defined in statute and their boundaries cannot be changed by the Commission. All it can recommend is to move the number of MEPs up or down as the distribution of population alters.

What if the same principle of ‘fairness’ advocated for Westminster elections were to apply instead? Well, if the population of the ‘South West’ were to fall relative to the UK as a whole, then the electoral region could perhaps be expanded into Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Hampshire. But as the law stands that is not allowed, because the electoral regions have to match the boundaries of the Prescott zones. And that is because Whitehall wants to claim the copyright on regionalism. The match is also one half of a mismatch: the new legislation seeks to destroy genuine communities defined from below on the basis of a thousand years of history, while legislation already in place protects fake communities imposed from above on the basis of boundaries first defined for civil defence purposes before World War II.

At this point, the forces of clunking bluster tend to wind up the gramophone and denounce European co-operation as The Revenge of The Hun, complete with top secret orders to regionalise on the basis of ‘a map I saw in Brussels’. Even collectively, the poor dears haven’t the brain power to work out that the map depicts the status quo, it doesn’t specify it.

Most large western European states have responded positively to the trend towards regionalism. For Germany, Italy and Spain it has been a vital part of restoring democracy after the years of dictatorship. Spain in particular took great care NOT to impose the boundaries its civil service might have preferred but to make a clean break with centralism.

Too good for the victors? Not at all. Even the French have their weak regional councils and in some areas they even managed to get the boundaries right (more by accident than design). The Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish have devolution. The Prescott zones were offered a dog’s breakfast instead. No EU directive requires regional assemblies, let alone specifies how regions are to be defined. The stupidity required to get wrong something as simple as returning power to the provinces you stole it from nine centuries earlier is the unique characteristic of Her Britannic Majesty’s Government.

Remember, Remember

2010-11-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

Certain MPs – and former MPs – who voted for the conquest of Iraq are likely to seek extra security after their names were again publicised on the Internet yesterday.

We do not condone illegal and arbitrary attacks on the innocent. Nor on the guilty. The mass killing of MPs who voted for mass killing is a rough kind of justice that some would impose but we would rather see justice meted out by a court qualified to try the very real accusations of war crimes that Westminster parliamentarians must face. It cannot come soon enough.

Let today’s unseating of Phil Woolas - for his exercise of the self-assumed ‘right to lie’ - be just the beginning of the retribution they have all so assiduously earned. The fireworks have started. It's time to enjoy the show!

Good Works, Bad Shouldn't

2010-10-26T02:00:00.000-07:00

"Þæt is nu hraðost to secganne, þæt ic wilnode weorðfullice to libbanne þa hwile þe ic lifede, and æfter minum life þæm monnum to læfanne þe æfter me wæren min gemyndig on godum weorcum."
"I desired to live worthily as long as I lived, and to leave after my life, to the men who should come after me, the memory of me in good works."
King Alfred the Great, in his translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy

The politicians who today are Alfred’s successors in power may be remembered for many things but good works are unlikely to feature in the list. Yesterday it was reported that Kerry McCarthy, Labour MP for Bristol East, had been cautioned for breaking electoral law. Despite having qualified as a solicitor, Ms McCarthy chose to reveal on Twitter the number of postal votes cast per party in the 2010 election, contrary to the Representation of the People Act 1983.

A caution is a paltry punishment for breaking the secrecy of the poll ahead of its close. The crime is less of a surprise. Lying and cheating are tools that come with the red rosette, tools embraced with glee by those so keen to win that they long ago lost any idea of why they should want to. They are what we expect of a party that lacks moral conviction, that doubts its ability to win by fair means, that secretly recognises the emptiness of its rhetoric, the contradictions of its message, the pointlessness of its existence when, win or lose, the consequences are the same.

We are a radical party, the natural heirs to the Common Wealth tradition, of co-operation as the basis of economics, democracy as the basis of society and morality as the basis of politics. We share a long-standing disappointment that the Labour Party rejects all of these things in favour of money markets, control freakery and ends-justify-the-means. Some seemed seduced by Blair’s bleating about the forces of conservatism, before the fleece fell off to reveal a lupine arch-privatiser and curtailer of civil liberties. Not us. This is Labour’s heritage, back to the first Fabian imperialists and later apologists for Stalin. The real sheep are those who think they can only vote for one of the three identikit parties of the establishment. Ed Miliband for PM? ? Why?

The Rotten Parliament

2010-10-26T01:00:00.000-07:00

The campaign to allow MPs to continue to represent real communities, shaped by geography, history and culture, has a growing following. It even has its own Facebook page.

The so-called ‘Conservative’ Party and its glove-puppet partners remain steadfastly committed to ripping up our history in the name of ‘fairness’. It really is no defence to say that ‘fairness’ must outweigh sentiment, as the boundaries of Scotland and Wales are to be protected while others of much greater antiquity are not. It is claimed that the constitutional history of the Union and of its constituent parts has to be respected. We do not disagree. But what of England’s internal history?

In Wessex, our shires have shaped the lives of 40 generations and more. For our politicians, such community ties seemingly count for nothing. For them, England is one vast canvas dotted with millions of interchangeable voting units. The localities and regions that came together – under Wessex leadership – to form the nation are there to be scrubbed out.

There is no doubting that there is a mandate for change, though by no means all areas will have voted for it. The Conservative manifesto pledged to "ensure every vote will have equal value by introducing ‘fair vote’ reforms to equalise the size of constituency electorates, and conduct a boundary review to implement these changes within five years". (Always read the small print before casting your vote!) Yet concessions have already been made. A few glove puppets in the north of Scotland representing large territories with sparse populations are cosily protected from the proposals. Special geographical circumstances elsewhere – such as the Isle of Wight – are not recognised and ought to be. ‘Equalisation’ has been defined as within 5%. Why not 10% and allow even more of those special geographical circumstances the room to breathe?

Last week MPs debated the clause that all this fuss is about. Amendments were tabled. And never discussed. So much time was spent talking about the reduction in the number of MPs – from 650 to 600 – that they never got around to the territorial issue. The amendments went in the bin.

So much for the ‘Mother of Parliaments’. If this is the standard of procedure we hold up as a model to the rest of the world you can stuff it. Mount it in a glass case. And give us back the power to make our own decisions in Wessex before common sense is affronted any further.

Killing Community, Killing Democracy

2010-10-10T03:00:00.000-07:00

Cornish patriots are gathering today beneath the Tamar Bridge at Saltash to protest against the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. There is even serious talk of hunger strikes. What is it that has brought this on?

The Bill paves the way for a referendum next May on replacing First-Past-The-Post with the Alternative Vote system. So far so good; Single Transferable Vote is a better system still but at least things are moving in the right direction.

The same cannot be said for the Bill’s other components. One implements David Cameron’s pledge to cut the number of MPs. Nearly one in ten seats will go. In light of the snouts-in-trough expenses scandal the public will not mourn their passing, even though a Parliament with fewer MPs will undoubtedly require more staff if they are to do the same job. The truth is that this move does not so much respond to the public mood as exploit it. The real reason for cutting the number of MPs is to cut the chances of a successful backbench rebellion. There are no plans to devolve decision-making to powerful regional Parliaments, such as the one we demand for Wessex. Ministers’ in-trays will remain as full as ever and so the number of Ministers will not be cut. Thus a larger proportion of the reformed House than currently will be on the Government payroll, their loyalty bought and the ability of the legislature to hold the executive to account correspondingly curtailed.

Hand-in-hand with fewer MPs comes a comprehensive re-drawing of constituency boundaries, with the margins for flexibility severely reduced. Stubborn geography gives way to even more stubborn statistics. Already we have seen some very silly constituencies that add one town to part of another and join them up with a slab of countryside in between. An obsession with numerical equality will deliver much more of this. It is the kind of obsession that in 1969 had the Royal Commission on Local Government recommend merging the Isle of Wight with Portsmouth. It is the kind of obsession that has the Cornish deeply worried. After 700 years as a Parliamentary county, Cornwall could be sharing some of its MPs with areas in Wessex. Which makes life very difficult for a nationalist party like Mebyon Kernow. It makes life very difficult for us too. And we face the prospect not only of a Devonwall constituency but of others like it right around our borders. Get set for Herecestershire, Oxhamptonshire, Berkrey and Hampsex.

At one level, this disregard for counties is just part of a sloppy modern trend, recently marked by Royal Mail’s moves to phase-out their use for postal purposes. At another, it is deeply ideological, the playing-out of a long-standing Jacobin desire to eradicate all intermediate identities that come between the State and the individual. Consider how Cameron’s new-style MPs will actually set about their work. Representing a meaningless area, a block of voters randomly generated, they can no longer act as advocates of the local and particular but must confine themselves to being the conduit between national politics and the atomised constituent.

The Cameron/Clegg axis of evil talks about promoting ‘community’ in the abstract while destroying it in the concrete, rounding on the very people who elected them. It may seem ‘fairer’ to insist that every constituency is exactly the same size, even where that means over-riding the views of local people on how they wish to be represented in their Parliament. Indeed, it is one of the demands made by the Chartist reformers in the 1830’s and one of only two that has yet to be enacted. But to think in these terms is to give Parliament an exalted status it has never deserved. Parliament should not be an assembly of directly-elected individuals representing blocks of 100,000 people each. It should be, in the ancient tradition, a gathering of the self-governing estates of the realm, to co-ordinate, not to rule. Localities should govern themselves, and regions should be the means to co-ordinate activities over a wider area. In a world turned the right way up, the very idea of ‘Parliamentary sovereignty’ over a subject people will be laughable. It will not matter how many people an MP represents because every single representative – or, rather, delegate – will have an unlimited right of veto so far as his or her own territory is concerned. Out-voting will be out-moded.

One of the ancient traditions still preserved in elections to Parliament is the issue and return of the writs. The instruction to hold an election in each constituency is issued by the Clerk of the Crown in Chancery to the High Sheriff (in county constituencies) and the Mayor or Lord Mayor (in borough constituencies), as it has been since the first Parliaments were summoned. The writ is returned with the name of the successful candidate endorsed. That is why the sheriff or mayor formally returning the writ is known as the Returning Officer, and why the local authority chief executive who oversees the day-to-day administration is known as the Acting Returning Officer. For some, including the Electoral Commission, this tradition is written off dismissively as ‘plainly redundant’ and ‘confusing’ to the general public but in truth is a harmless part of our heritage.

How this tradition will fare in a system where constituencies no longer match the geography of counties and boroughs has yet to be seen. A foretaste appears in a recent report from the Electoral Commission, who were tasked with finding out why long queues developed at certain polling stations back in May, with the result that many voters were unable to cast their votes before the polls closed. The brief seems straightforward. Find out what the Acting Returning Officer had done or had failed to do. Organisation of the poll was the responsibility of the local authority and no-one else. Yet the Commission could not resist slipping in to their report a call for radical reform, including the abolition of the ceremonial role of sheriffs and mayors, a role that has no bearing whatsoever on the issue under investigation.

We wrote to the Commission’s Chair, Jenny Watson, protesting at this deep lapse from professionalism. Ms Watson replied at length, singing the praises of her organisation but failing utterly to address the point. Such is the New Labour bureaucracy, hiding its ignorance of history and its lack of intellectual rigour behind a figleaf of patronising insouciance. For Watson, the electoral system is a creaking Victorian structure on its last legs. To anyone with brains it is obvious that the system worked well enough for the Victorians and any shortcomings today must therefore be laid at the door of the current generation of know-nothings. Well-crafted legislation is being picked apart by people whose blindspots appear deliberate and equally well-crafted. The expansion of postal voting has been accompanied by an explosion in electoral fraud. The Victorians could have told you it would.

We have been involved in elections for over 35 years and have seen the downward spiral as costs are cut and corners with them. Ballot box security will be the next area to go as plastic and cardboard replace steel and as stock-market pressure for early declarations means seals that can be applied and removed more swiftly. And all the time, the Electoral Commission fiddles while Rome burns, childishly proposing new laws because it cannot grasp how it is that the current ones are those that work best in current circumstances. The defence of democracy will be no thanks to that bunch of third-rate sociologists but rather to those who understand how we got where we are and how easy it can be to slide back again.

The pieces of the jigsaw are falling into place. First came the Electoral Commission, its role ostensibly to police political parties, in fact to agitate aggressively for the aggrandisement of its own powers. Now comes the breaking of the centuries-old link between the counties and their ‘knights of the shire’. Next will come the clamour to tidy-up the resulting anomalies. Why should local authorities be involved in running elections when their boundaries diverge so radically from those of the constituencies assigned to them to administer? The Electoral Commission’s final triumph will be when it is placed in charge of the entire process, directed by a tightly-knit group of politically motivated men and women from an office in central London. Everything from the registration of parties and voters to the casting and counting of votes. And then the stage will be set for State-sponsored electoral fraud on a scale to make even Robert Mugabe appear whiter than white.

England. A.K.A. London?

2010-10-10T01:00:00.000-07:00

We do not argue that Wessex is not English but we do argue that there is a debate to be had about the governance of England. A unified England is a centralised England – in many ways still a Norman England – and one that in practice is run largely for London's benefit, not ours.

Take the Olympic Games, to be held in London in 2012, for the third time. No other UK city has ever hosted the games, yet provincial cities elsewhere have (Barcelona being the prime example that is still looked up to).

According to a recent report in the Financial Times (a London newspaper), preparations for the games have delivered a publicly funded bonanza for companies in London and the South East but other areas are deriving meagre benefits. Companies based in London have won more than £2.7 billion of contracts, more than half the total £5.1 billion so far spent by the Olympic Delivery Authority. Looking at the other Prescott zones, we find that South East companies won contracts worth £805 million and those in eastern England £719 million. Companies in the North East and South West won just £9 million each. Distance is not the deciding factor: the North West won £97 million and Scotland £23 million.

The ODA claimed contracts had filtered down to companies outside London through sub-contracts: "Direct ODA contracts are the tip of the iceberg and there are hundreds of sub-contracts going to businesses through the UK-wide supply chains." However, it could not provide any evidence to support this claim, citing confidentiality.

Sure, London council tax payers are footing a slice of the bill. But so are we all. In 2005, when London won the Olympic bid, Seb Coe pledged that the games would "provide a unique opportunity for businesses of all shapes and sizes across the UK, providing essential goods and services for this historic event." Reality seems to differ.

No State To Be In?

2010-08-01T01:00:00.000-07:00

Lord Deben – the former Tory MP John Selwyn Gummer – wrote approvingly this week of the Coalition’s decentralist agenda:

“People who feel that they cannot influence big decisions in a globalised world are adamant that they should control the space around them. It doesn’t help to call it nimby. It is more ‘ideah’ – I Decide the Environment Around Here.”

Gummer’s analysis is incisive and perhaps over-revealing about the cards in his hand. For it confirms the moral poverty of the political consensus. Let local people fight each other over the crumbs. While the loaf disappears over the horizon.

Cameron’s Big (Global) Society takes up where Thatcher’s Big (Global) Economy left off. She was swept to power by an anti-statist backlash after Labour had, as always, abused the trust placed in it and swerved off in the direction of totalitarianism. For her, devolution was not about re-arranging tiers of government but about returning power to individuals to look after themselves. Cameron is not so crude, because his task is to transcend the limits Thatcher imposed on her own project. His attack is not on the principle of collective provision but on the inability of finance capital to benefit sufficiently from it. ‘Public service reform’ is about siphoning-off money that could have been spent on services and tying those services up in long-term contracts that prevent dynamic democratic accountability. Outsourcing deprives democracy of its lifeblood - information - because private contractors are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

Armchair slashers of public services have asked – and it is a fair question – why the Coalition has chosen to ring-fence spending on health and overseas aid and not other areas. Most commentators – Thatcher’s children as so many now are – have failed completely to question the ideological ring-fencing that is also going on. Cameron and Clegg may want a smaller State but that does not mean they want a weaker State. The Big Society is their means to make the strings less obvious but in reality they will be micro-managing with the same fanaticism as Blair and Brown. Targets and controls are giving way to incentives and call-ins. Power ring-fenced in this way is power undevolved. Ring-fenced too is the whole issue of stratospheric levels of private wealth. Looking at a Cabinet with 18 millionaires among its 23 full-time members, Karl Marx’s judgement, that the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie, acquires a remarkably contemporary resonance. (That figure of 18, by the way, is only 8 higher than Labour’s last Cabinet.)

State finances are in a mess. It’s the recession, stupid. So, allow us to sell off at rock-bottom prices what generations of taxpayers have accumulated. But sell to whom? If there are people with the money to buy public assets then these are people for whom there is no economic crisis but only economic opportunity. It’s about time it was pointed out, every time we’re told that ‘we’re all in this together’, that this is a feeding frenzy for financiers and nothing more.

When the Wessex Regionalist Party began work, three decades ago, there were many fruitful discussions about the characteristics of different public services, and whether each was more appropriately run at local, regional, national or international level. There was a feeling that really worthwhile change would come about if the maze of different regional bodies – with overlapping boundaries – that provided electricity, gas, health, transport, water and other vital requirements could be rationalised and for the first time made democratically accountable to an elected regional authority for Wessex. For an older generation of radicals, this was gas-and-water socialism with a vengeance. It made perfect sense. Regional rationalisation would reduce costs directly, while introducing joined-up thinking about the region’s needs and how best to meet them. Regional democratisation would free-up the choked corridors of power in London, reducing the more hidden costs of an over-centralised structure. Moreover, it would re-instate that accountability to people on the spot that was lost when nationalisation swept up the fruits of municipal enterprise and threw them to arms-length boards with managements accountable to no-one but themselves.

Today, post-Thatcher, such a view may seem hopelessly nostalgic. Among parties with elected representatives, it is perhaps only the British National Party that still clings to it. Its 2007 local government manifesto called for the creation of a new tier “for the region, representing historic regions such as Wessex, Mercia and East Anglia”, which “would have symbolic importance, but only a small set of responsibilities which are most sensibly done at this level. These organic/historic regions would have nothing in common with the Euro Regions which are based on uniform population areas, not areas with a natural cohesive affinity. Typical regional responsibilities would be: tourism; utility provision (water, gas and electricity – even if these are privatised they would have to operate regional structures and be accountable to the regional assembly); certain transport responsibilities – trunk roads, railways, canals.”

The purpose of including this quote is not to endorse the BNP, or the far Right generally. The fact that such regional councils would function within a State capable of taking centralist diktat to new heights is revolting enough, before even venturing into the realms of BNP social policy. The purpose of including this quote is to pose the question: where is the Left’s response?

New Labour sold out, literally in many cases as it drove onwards the Thatcherite agenda of choice for the rich and powerlessness for the poor. Hopes that regionalisation might herald the rebirth of the public sector were dashed. A catastrophic failure of imagination saw meaningless names and boundaries imposed with a ministerial arrogance that provoked a ferocious reaction. The centralist machine hoarded its treasure, leaving regions nothing to do but steal the powers of local government. It was all so predictable. Nothing had been learnt beforehand and nothing will be learnt now.

In the 1990s, Wessex Regionalism acquired a strong strand of radical decentralism. Our philosophy is no longer content to file services at the appropriate level but is rather to insist that sovereignty rests with the parish. Anything more is voluntary and subject to the inalienable right of veto. Wider tiers are there to act as servants, not masters, of the parish community, with the pyramid of power finally turned the right way up. If, in consequence of this emphasis, Wessex and regionalism have seemed to some to have receded into the background then this was not intentional. It has been necessary to distance ourselves from the mis-application of our ideals by others. Regionalisation is not regionalism if conducted for the centre’s benefit. Coalition criticisms of the Prescott project now being so thoroughly erased from the administrative landscape are overwhelmingly justified. Our criticism is that there ought to be more to the debate than whether it is local or regional institutions that provide the better means for the centre to control events.

Coupled with this there has to be a re-appraisal of economic as well as political devolution. As taxpayers, we surely expect our representatives to be more than over-paid doormats for global financiers and industrialists. We surely expect them to do something for us, without the sharp-suited middlemen taking their cut. Wessex has to stand up for itself, rejecting equally Whitehall-knows-best and the zombie economics of ‘what the capital markets demand’. As our economy has grown in absolute terms, so it has also grown relative to so much else in life, so that what was once beyond economics is now given over to those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The end of cheap oil will force us to think again soon enough, requiring the re-localisation of our political, economic, social and cultural life in ways that challenge the unthinking belief that money is all. That will mean too a genuine role for genuine regions in protecting a quality of life so painfully re-assembled. Not gas-and-water socialism perhaps, but maybe its grandchild, community control over the sustainable infrastructure – energy, transport, communications, ecology – that we need to start planning for right here and now.

Uncommon Sense

2010-05-07T07:57:00.000-07:00

The electorate in the Witney constituency numbers 78,766, of whom 62 were far-sighted enough to cast their vote yesterday for Colin Bex. For the rest, as our society plunges from bad to worse, it will be a case of ‘we told you so’, and sooner rather than later.

Colin reported a busy day’s campaigning in Burford but clear signs that the turnout for David Cameron was already looking decisive. The Leader of the Opposition, with Sam Cam in tow, wafted around the count, exuding the arrogance of those for whom power is a birthright. The Cameron the media presents is scripted; from the actual man what you get is the sneer of cold command. Colin tackled him on his voting record over Iraq. He dismissed the question. All that was over and done with. History now. Justice could go hang.

The declaration of the result was a chilling reminder of the charade that is now British democracy. Cameron gave his acceptance speech, then he and his minders, along with the other major party candidates, were gone. No handshakes offered to the defeated (Colin would have so relished the opportunity to decline). No waiting to hear what others might have to say in the way of gracious congratulations. In fact, all the manners of a mobster.

It used to be traditional – and in some areas still is – for losing candidates to add their own thoughts about the election, especially to thank the Acting Returning Officer and all those members of staff involved in administering the poll and the count. As Independent candidate Paul Wesson stepped up to the mike, the power was cut off. West Oxfordshire District Council’s patience with democracy had abruptly run out.

Undeterred by discourtesy, he made his statement, condemning the media focus on Cameron that had denied the voters of Witney any chance to come to a balanced judgment on the merits of each candidate. As a long-term observer at elections in other countries struggling to understand democracy, he was now determined to seek international censure for the way British elections are run.

Colin followed, warning of the bleak future ahead, with taxes rising and services vanishing. He ended with the reminder that Cameron is a war conspirator, sharing equal responsibility with Blair and Brown for the vast numbers killed, maimed or displaced in Iraq and Afghanistan. A small band of a dozen or so gathered before the rostrum and applauded both speakers, one of the audience shouting that no-one in politics now represented the working class of the country. A man from Southampton reminded everyone that Winchester had been our capital. It was a more benign thought than anything now likely to come from London.

We posed with the Wyvern standard for press photos and Colin gave yet another interview to BBC Oxford. As we left, Nick Xylas was asked to give an interview to a Japanese radio station. You just couldn’t make it up.

The national results, denying the power of diktat to any one party, are the best any democrat could reasonably have hoped for. All small parties will take comfort from the victory of Caroline Lucas – a one-time resident of the Witney constituency – as Britain’s only Green MP. Her success – coming from far beyond the bounds of possibility not so long ago – was the well-earned result of sustained targeting in her Brighton seat. We shall be studying carefully how it was done.

Judged by our standards, the Greens are a centralist party. We take rather more comfort from the progress of Celtic nationalists, with Alex Salmond hailing the SNP’s results as the best in over 30 years and Dick Cole polling Mebyon Kernow’s highest result, 2,007 votes at St Austell & Newquay, on a swing of 4%.

The lesson is clear. Don’t moan. Organise!

Voting for a Change?

2010-05-05T16:30:00.000-07:00

Polling day ought to be a day of celebration. Complete with flags and bunting, brass bands and beer. 'Party' politics should mean just that. Tomorrow therefore ought to be an occasion when voters proudly step out to exercise the right of self-determination which past generations died to secure. Not the apologetic, furtive act that so many will be performing, if they can persuade themselves to do something so uncool, so unmarketised, so egalitarian as vote. So of what crime is it that they feel so ashamed?

Throughout the length and breadth of this septic isle, voters will be handing over their quality of life to be ripped to shreds by the London parties. The lie that there is no alternative to cuts has been repeated over and over by all three of the leading charlatans who have strutted their hour upon the screen. Though millions believe the lie, Britain is not ‘broke’; it is fact one of the richest societies in the world and its rich are getting richer by the day.

Lord Turner, Chairman of the Financial Services Authority, stated last year that much of what the banking sector does is “socially useless activity”. The voters, of course, will be the judge of that. And they will disagree. They will be telling the parties to cut – cut hospitals, cut schools, cut care for the elderly, just don’t cut bankers’ bonuses – because those are the priorities they truly want the parties to enact. Meanwhile, all three identikit leaders continue to support the waste of young lives in an unwinnable war of choice.

Voters in the Witney constituency have another option tomorrow. By voting Wessex Regionalist they can signal their dissent from the madness engulfing our world. In the coming months, when social unrest boils onto the streets, when perhaps the City of London itself is burning, when Brown, Cameron or Clegg goes down in history as the most hated prime minister ever, those who do will have the satisfaction of knowing that they did what they could to prevent it.

And having placed your ‘X for BEX’, why not then make your very own lapel badge to tell the world, ‘Don’t blame me – I voted Wessex’?

Busy, Busy, Busy

2010-05-04T23:50:00.000-07:00

All three Party officers – President, Secretary-General and Treasurer – were in Witney today canvassing in the run-up to polling day. With good weather for once, residents were willing to stop and talk and their reactions were very positive, especially among the young. Some of the latter proved to be just a fraction too young to vote this time – but next time maybe? Maybe next time indeed they could even be standing for the Party as well as voting for it. If the banker-owned parties have their way, these are people who will be paying for their parents’ mistakes for the rest of their lives and more.

The day got off to a flying start with a full-page article in the London Guardian (formerly of Manchester and not to be confused with the real thing). It could have been better – journalists always want to assess our policies for attractiveness before they’ve studied the threads that make them cohere – but attempts by other London papers have turned out worse. They know by now that all their tired favourites to ruin the country have lost the public’s trust but can’t quite bring themselves yet to look for real alternatives.

That was the start of a media frenzy, Colin giving interviews today to BBC Oxford (first television and later radio), CNN and even a radio station from the Netherlands. Administrative matters relating to the count needed to be sorted, then in the evening we dropped in on a talk organised by the Green Party and given by Danny Dorling, author of Injustice – Why Social Inequality Persists. The Greens have been model opponents throughout the campaign, recognising that different candidates appeal to different targets and displaying none of that back-stabbing doing-down that we have come to expect from the slashers, burners and grubbers. Nick Camerown is all the same and from the point of view of defeating it, the bigger the fourth parties’ vote the better.

Read All About It?

2010-05-03T08:33:00.000-07:00

Candidates' leaflets for the Witney constituency are now viewable here. As of today, two candidates - Aaron Barschak (Independent) and Howling Laud Hope (Monster Raving Loony) - seem not to have distributed any so how they plan to get votes is a mystery.

These two, along with Joe Goldberg (Labour) and Nikolai Tolstoy (UKIP), are also shy of telling us their addresses, hiding behind new rules that allow actual and prospective elected representatives to lock themselves away from the public gaze. Are they afraid of terrorists? Then why any of these four gentlemen should flatter themselves that they might be a target is another mystery. If the other six candidates have nothing to hide, why do they? At least a party candidate can be contacted via the party to seek information on his or her views. An Independent who won't declare his address might as well be on the moon.

We might ask what our society is coming to when those running for public office even have the right not to tell us any longer where they live, let alone exercise it. Transparency is a fundamental part of our democratic inheritance from the Victorians, an inheritance that is poorly understood and appreciated, with the result that electoral reforms since 1997 have arguably created more problems than they have solved. The failure to recognise that extending postal voting would magnify opportunities for fraud is one such example.

We understand New Labour's motivation for secrecy but we do not therefore respect it: politicians should be protected by the normal civil and criminal law and deserve no special protection simply because they are politicians. Those who are determined to find out where someone lives will do so anyway and such knowledge is not in itself objectionable. Rather than accepting the growth of a culture of intimidation and adapting to it, efforts should focus on deterring crime of all kinds, but especially that directed against the democratic process of free debate and decision.

If some of our politicians live in fear, they should examine their consciences. Thomas Jefferson observed that when the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty. When it comes to striking a balance, things are a whole lot safer under the second scenario than under the first.

Put Up - And Then Shut Up?

2010-05-01T10:10:00.001-07:00

In days of yore, when fair play ruled, candidates for elected office were judged by the voters on polling day. Now they are judged by the managers of our 'democracy' well ahead of that event. The media and others select those whom they think we should listen to and discard those whom we simply shall not hear.

A disgraceful example of this took place last night at Witney, where the local Churches Together group held a hustings. The equivalent event in Woodstock was well-run, with no assumption that the parties who did best last time should hog the limelight.

Scandalously, the Witney event was something else. The Rev. Richard Donoghue, the Methodist minister who organised it, had decided that only parties with recent or actual representation at UK or EU level should be on the platform, thereby excluding 50% of the candidates from the democratic process. Colin Bex stated in an open letter:

“It is shameful that not one of the candidates accepting a place on the platform raised an objection against Donoghue's imperious decision to order none of us to speak, just one example of what in my own election address I rightly describe as the 'farce' of the British electoral system.

I did not accede to being gagged by Donoghue's incredible exhortation that, not only being banned from speaking, those of us candidates in the body of the hall were only allowed to clap - not to express their disapproval - when deemed appropriate (similar to the prompters of a captive audience in a live-broadcast studio or pupils in a kindergarten school).

I refused to clap the dinosaur party candidates, I stood up and told the assembled company to vote Wessex, and shouted 'shame' and 'disgraceful' on numerous occasions against the lies and worse being pedalled by the dinosaurs' representatives throughout the proceedings.”

Independent candidate Paul Wesson played a divisive and doomed game of sycophancy, arguing that his record as a local councillor and quangocrat should entitle him to a place on the platform, whereas validly nominated candidates from minor parties could be safely sidelined as ‘jokes’. Reportedly he made no effort to challenge the ruling on the night. Colin commented:

“Had the ambient atmosphere in the hall been less like the consistency of a blancmange, and had I for example had your support, I would have been willing to help bring the proceedings to a premature adjournment including having been carried out by the police if necessary, which on several occasions I have done in order to win campaigns on other matters elsewhere in the past.

At least this would have got the press into gear and to report some active expression of the simmering anger likely to burst into social unrest in the coming months on account of the incredible arrogance and presumption of whatever of the dinosaur parties seizes power.”

More Truth In Black & White (& Blue)

2010-05-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

Bigotgate

Nothing Left Out

2010-04-27T23:45:00.000-07:00

Colin Bex has defied the sceptics by conducting his campaign almost wholly by public transport. Today he did need a lift, to fit in three towns in as many hours after an emergency change of plan.

Colin arrived by bus in Banbury this afternoon to be interviewed by Banbury Sound, the local radio station covering north Oxfordshire, including the northern part of the Witney constituency. The presenter was pleased with the recording, and disappointed that few other candidates had taken up the offer to air their views. The interview is planned to be broadcast on Tuesday, 4 May.

From Banbury it was on to Witney, to collect more election leaflets from the printers, then to Woodstock for a public meeting at the Town Hall. Organised by Woodstock Churches Together, this was an opportunity for voters to meet the candidates and ask questions of them. Candidates for the Greens and the Liberal Democrats were there in person, as was one of the Independents standing; the Conservative and Labour candidates were represented by local party spokesmen. Two Independents and the Loony and UKIP candidates did not attend.

Issues raised ranged from early-years education to the West Lothian question. Colin skillfully steered his answers to the case for parish power and regional self-government. A gasp of realisation ran through the audience when he proposed punitive taxation of the 5-10% of people who own 90% of the wealth, the money to be allocated to parish councils in proportion to their population to spend as they see fit. It had clearly dawned on many that here was a serious political party with truly radical plans for revitalising our local communities. In a week when the annual Sunday Times Rich List showed the richest 1,000 getting richer by £77 billion over a year that has been made so difficult for ordinary saps now facing service cuts of a similar magnitude, it was a message well-received.

Given the circumstances of the constituency, it was perhaps to be expected that the debate would line up as Tories versus the rest. David Cameron’s party came under sustained attack for its attitude to a hung parliament. Listening to the Tories, one would think such an outcome must lead at once to general economic collapse, perpetual barrenness of cattle, crops and women and the imminent arrival of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. If an anti-Tory coalition succeeded, not merely in dashing Wisteria Man’s hopes for five years of elective dictatorship but in finally banishing our mediaeval electoral system (last fit for purpose circa 1832), one can see why they might very well think that. ‘Hung parliament’ is a loaded term; Alex Salmond is right to prefer the term ‘balanced parliament’, though that does not go nearly far enough. What is actually needed is a ‘rainbow parliament’ representing the true diversity of public opinion in these islands. Just make sure that any coalition isn’t a government of ALL the talents or there’ll be no-one left to speak the truth.

At the end of the evening various candidates and spokesmen shook hands amidst the usual bonhomie. The Tory spokesman offered his hand to Colin, who pointedly refused it. A lack of due civility? Not at all. The major parties, dealing death and devastation in the name of money, are no better than criminal conspiracies. We live in hope that their leaders will one day – soon – be brought to justice.

Interesting Times

2010-04-23T23:50:00.000-07:00

After a busy day today touring the constituency, taking in Witney, Minster Lovell and Carterton, our candidate Colin Bex was snapped (left) at Woodstock, with Nick Xylas as standard-bearer.

Some 50,000 of our leaflets – headed ‘The Truth in Black & White’ – have gone off to the Royal Mail for delivery to constituents and should be hitting their doormats early next week.

Here are some extracts:

"Illegal wars; white-collar theft; ermine-flecked crime; ministerial bribery for personal gain, and now a national debt of thousands of millions of £s. This is but the tip of an iceberg pointing to further punishment and social unrest and it is why now as never before we all must ensure government changes from 'top-down' diktat to representative or 'bottom-up' democracy. We - as voters - are some of the only people who can ensure it happens.

Should you decide to vote, your vote for Wessex will count as a vote for the necessary changes - it will be neither a 'wasted vote' nor a 'suicide vote' as it would be were you to vote for any of the London party candidates - the more plausible they sound the less credible they are..."

Into Battle

2010-04-20T04:29:00.000-07:00

The following press release was issued today by Colin Bex, Wessex Regionalist Party candidate for Witney:

"Colin Bex (pictured left) has been nominated to stand in the General Election in the parliamentary constituency of Witney as candidate for the Wessex Regionalists, the party for Wessex. This is the sixth time he has contested a seat within the Wessex region since 1979.

Colin is co-founder and President of the Wessex Regionalist Party which, formally constituted in 1980, was formed to provide an opportunity for Wessex constituents to be able to vote for the advantages of a system of grass-roots democratic regional-local government as an alternative to centralised diktat handed down by the minority Westminster governments which, since the Second World War majority coalition, have been run serially in turns by one or other of the two larger now virtually indistinguishable London parties.

An architect planner with experience in the public and private sectors during 50 years both in Britain and abroad, Colin became directly aware of the unequal contest between the presumption in favour of development and the need to protect both the built and natural environment from mindless and unnecessary damage and destruction in the service of Mammon.

As a result, he has spent as much of his time campaigning against such aberrations including some to which as a young architect he found he had been contributing.

For full details of the policies and manifesto of the party, visit www.wessexregionalists.org"

Nonsense. Nonsense. Nonsense.

2010-04-14T16:19:00.000-07:00

So there we have it. Three practically identical guided tours of Fantasy Island, courtesy of the main London parties.

Now that the manifestos are out we can see that the all-pervading theme of this election is that the sins of the bankers are to be visited upon the users of public services, even unto the tenth generation. The current budget deficit is £167 billion; the cost of bailing-out failed banks and building societies comes to exactly £167.5 billion. Neat.

To do something about the deficit, the London parties agree, it is necessary to cut everything that matters to us (definitely not what matters to them). We will have “deeper cuts than Thatcher” (Darling), “painful and extensive cuts” (Osborne) or “savage” cuts (Clegg). It’s refreshing to know all three are in favour of more choice in politics. And while we’re busy making our minds up, we'll not notice the stench of corruption rising from the waters of the Thames.

Things that won’t be cut include the £5 billion annual cost of fighting a war of choice in Afghanistan on behalf of the oil companies. The £9 billion annual budget for building schools, hospitals, etc. in ever-richer competitor economies – such as India and China – will actually be increased by all three parties, while schools and hospitals here are being closed. Not only is this money we borrow to give away but the countries that save most and therefore have the most to lend include China. We borrow their money and then we give it back. And then, we give it back again, with interest.

Labour suggest that the way to improve public services is through yet more centralisation, with successful schools, hospitals and even police forces taking over failing ones. You don’t need to be Einstein to figure out that merging a small weak organisation with a small strong one is as likely to produce a big weak one as a big strong one. The Lloyds/HBOS merger is not so long ago that policy-makers can have forgotten that.

The police proposals are particularly worrying, a revival of Charles Clarke’s plans for forced mergers, creating regional constabularies to match the meaningless ‘South West’ and ‘South East’ zones. These in turn would be merely one step on the road to a single national police force under the political direction of a Labour Home Secretary.

We’re told the public sector hasn’t enough management talent to go round and so mergers are the only way forward. How about creating more talent by empowering all those junior managers crushed by a top-down bureaucracy? And making schools, hospitals and police properly accountable to local people through their locally elected representatives?

That’s a thought that ought to appeal to the Tories, who talk up the idea of empowering local communities. Yet nothing that is said by the Tories on this issue is to be believed, especially when it seems believable. The strings are as obvious as Pinocchio’s. To take one example, planning. Local communities are to get back the planning powers stolen from them by Labour. Hurrah! But in the same breath all their current planning powers over the siting of new schools are to be taken away, lest they be used to thwart Tory education policy. The Tory manifesto talks about developers having “to pay a tariff to the local authority to compensate the community for loss of amenity”. Wouldn’t we rather not lose the amenity in the first place?

The Liberal Democrats are no more believable. Didn’t Lib Dems collude with Labour and the Tories in blatantly trying to increase the disparity between the London parties and the rest by televised leaders’ personality contests? If we followed their advice to never vote for what we believe in but always ‘tactically’ then there’d never be choice, ‘real’ or otherwise. The Liberals would never have recovered from those days in the 1960’s when all six of their MPs could fit into a Mini. The Labour Party wouldn’t even have got started.

Nil out of three. And mention UKIP at your peril. That party of twisted paranoiacs have such an acute grasp of financial detail that they’re calling for a 25% cut in public spending while at the same time proposing to spend an extra £12.5 billion a year, double what they reckon they’d save by pulling out of the EU. Their plans include a 40% increase in defence spending with 25,000 extra troops, presumably to shoot those demonstrating against the loss of up to 2 million public sector jobs which have "no useful purpose whatsoever". Since a quarter of UKIP’s MEPs in the last Euro-Parliament either left or were convicted of benefit fraud, expenses fraud or false accounting it seems they are pretty indistinguishable from the rest that London has to offer.

In fact what we are seeing is the unedifying spectacle of a political class who, for all their sound and fury, signify nothing, having long ago stopped communicating with their voters. Not one of these manifestos has anything to offer Wessex. Not one will end Westminster diktat, returning power where it belongs – rooted deep in Wessex and its local communities. Only the Wessex Regionalists are now left to fight for that.

A vote for the Wessex Regionalists sends a signal to the London parties that alternatives do exist. Support for ‘others’ in the polls is running at a consistent 12%. This is 4% higher than it was at the equivalent stage in 2005, when in the event ‘others’ did better then than the polls predicted.

In seats without a WR candidate this time, our advice is clear-cut. Take a thick felt pen to the polling station. Spoil your ballot paper by writing ‘WESSEX REGIONALIST’ right across it, then underline this thrice. When the boxes are emptied, such papers are shown to all the candidates. Give them a message they won’t forget!

Fomenting Ferment

2010-03-25T19:20:00.000-07:00

Mess wi' we, would thee?

Alistair Darling has created quite a stir by upping the tax on our cider. Facebook's 'Leave Our Cider Alone!' group, created only yesterday, now has approaching 30,000 members. The Wurzels have pledged their support and the race is on to get 'I am a Cider Drinker' to No. 1 in the charts.

David Cameron has got in on the act, claiming that the Government "doesn't understand the West Country". In fact, media analysis shows that the Government understands only too well. With Labour support in the South West the lowest for any of the Prescott zones, the Government knows it has nothing to lose by hammering cider. You wouldn't expect it to go after whisky now, would you? But with House of Commons catering subsidised by the taxpayer, do any of them, whatever their party, understand anything?

A vote for Cameron is not a vote for change. The Tories stubbornly oppose the kind of constitutional reform that would place Wessex beyond Labour's grasp by returning to us - permanently - the power to shape our own lives. No matter how long they hold office, the Tories must lose again one day and Labour's votes, piled up in the nations and regions beyond Wessex, will again determine our fate. Until we vote for the one party truly committed to ending the see-saw for good - the Wessex Regionalists, the party for Wessex.

First Impressions

2010-03-25T19:07:00.000-07:00

Colin Bex, WR Prospective Parliamentary Candidate, was out in Witney today testing the ground for a possible challenge to David Cameron. No final decision has been made on the choice of constituency to be fought but the Leader of the Opposition does make a very good target. Voters who've had enough of the Government's voodoo economics will be thinking twice about an alternative out to outdo it in nastiness.

We met at the Angel, a pleasant pub in the Market Square, chatting to locals about their discontents before we got down to the main business of the day. Down on the High Street, with myself waving the Wyvern flag to attract interest, Colin handed leaflets to passers-by and engaged with their reactions.

The idea of Wessex was clearly attractive, especially to older folk who feel robbed of history itself by the Blairite project of 'modern' Britain. Being lumped in for regional purposes with Kent - on the other side of London - was unpopular too. There was some puzzlement over boundaries from those whose idea of Wessex is shaped too sharply by Thomas Hardy but once the local background was explained all doubts were dispelled. Oxfordshire was where Wessex started, where its first capital is recorded and where the Wyvern itself first flew as the battle standard of our kings. The town of Witney owes its existence to the Bishops of Winchester, who built one of their 24 palaces there in the Middle Ages.

Older voters and first-timers alike welcomed the possibility of a WR candidate, whose presence would at the very least widen their choice and at best provide real colour to what was expected to be a generally drab election campaign. David Cameron was seen as pre-occupied with posturing at Prime Minister's Questions and far too busy to be an effective local representative with time for his constituents, their problems or their views. Life-long Labour voters promised 'never again' and grasped at the opportunity to back a fresh alternative. With its Leveller, Chartist and William Morris connections, the Witney constituency has a radical heritage second to none. The WR message of local self-determination and freedom from London diktat met with particularly strong approval from all sides.

Heavy rain after lunch forced a change of plan. The afternoon was spent in Chipping Norton and Burford collecting local information, such as town maps and bus timetables. If Witney is the chosen seat, Colin intends to campaign by public transport, speaking to voters on the move. And in stark contrast to David Cameron's token greenism, there won't be a chauffeur-driven car coming along behind.

Review of 2009

2010-03-25T13:40:00.000-07:00

Every year when we submit our accounts to the Electoral Commission we are also required to provide a 'Review of Political Activities' covering the year just gone.

The 2009 Review has recently been forwarded to the Commission and here is what it says:

During 2009, thoughts again turned towards preparations for the forthcoming General Election. The Wessex Regionalists did not contest the European election in June – for which Wessex is sawn in two by regional constituency boundaries and then the pieces lumped in with other areas – but were pleased to see from the results that the unquestioned dominance of the three larger parties is on the wane. In Cornwall, Mebyon Kernow polled very well and in November two WR members attended the MK AGM and picked up tips on how they did it.

A general disillusionment with politics arising from the abuse of Parliamentary expenses has created a rare opportunity for smaller parties to gain a sympathetic ear. Nevertheless, we remain concerned that the media - particularly the broadcast media - fail to provide the balanced information about the contesting parties that legal equality on the ballot paper ought to suggest.

We continued to monitor dissatisfaction with Labour’s plans to impose over half a million new homes on Wessex, principally to accommodate London overspill. These homes are not wanted in Wessex and do not address our region’s housing needs. Our executive meeting in February was addressed by the Chair of the Shortwood Green Belt Campaign, one of a network of local residents’ groups opposing tens of thousands of homes planned for Green Belt land around Bristol. We are pleased to see that all these plans are now mired in doubt following a successful legal challenge to the Government’s approach.

Letters to the press continued, including an attack on the South West RDA for its abuse of the former Morlands factory at Glastonbury, occupied in January by local people opposed to unimaginative plans that treated their views with contempt. However, a bigger effort this year went into upgrading our presence in cyberspace, where we are able to present our case unfiltered. In the course of the year we launched our new web domain – http://www.wessexregionalists.org – and a WR page on Facebook. By the end of the year the website had attracted over 1,000 hits. Additions to the WR blog – http://wessexregionalists.blogspot.com – have continued to be made (a 50% increase this year over last), as well as an opening contribution to a new blog, http://regionalist.blogspot.com, which promotes the regionalist political philosophy.

The Party returned to the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival in July 2009, providing a busy stall on both Saturday and Sunday. The Festival was the first outing for our new recruitment leaflet, 'Who Cares About You?' We also took the opportunity while there to publicise other causes that we back, such as the campaign to re-open the Somerset & Dorset Railway, and to raise awareness of Wessex history and culture. The Government’s supporters at the Festival begged the electorate to vote negatively against the Conservatives, however disappointed with Labour. It was a poor defence of a dozen wasted years.