Thou Shalt Not

Thursday last week saw a plethora of different elections across the UK and among these polls was a referendum in St Ives.  Local folk voted by 83% to 17% in favour of a policy to ban the building of new second homes.  Faced with a housing market described as ‘financial cleansing’ of the locals, that’s no surprise, though of course it does nothing to ease the pressure on houses already built.

Reactions ranged from great interest, among towns and villages elsewhere, including western Wessex, to threats of judicial review by appalled developers.  Wessex already has an example of this type of policy, in the Lynton and Lynmouth Neighbourhood Plan in Devon, but this could be argued as an exception because of its location within the Exmoor National Park.  What happens when exceptions become the new rule?

Ministers in Lunnon insist that this is the sort of thing up with which they will not put.  The law will be changed to curb these uppity yokels.  Cornwall is surely somewhere that only comes into existence during the holiday season and switches itself off afterwards.  Localism?  Oh, we really are having a laugh.

The current issue of the MK magazine Cornish Nation highlights the raw deal that Cornwall is increasingly getting.  A cross-border Devonwall Parliamentary constituency is looming, regardless of token recognition of the Cornish as a national minority.  (If approved, this will make it impossible for MK candidates to represent Cornwall and only Cornwall, just as it will make it impossible for us to represent Wessex and only Wessex.)  Last month, a paltry £150,000 a year grant to support the Cornish language – equivalent to about three MPs’ expenses claims – was peremptorily withdrawn, to widespread dismay.  Cornwall’s Grand Bard described this spiteful act, so damaging to the tourism offer, as “an ideological decision based on indifference and not a financial one based on fiscal responsibility”.

Last year’s ‘Cornwall Devolution Deal’ was so feeble as to be an abuse of the word ‘devolution’, so limited in scope that it did not merit legislation or even a Commons debate.  The key areas of housing and planning are excluded from the deal.  Instead, the centralist inspection regime has imposed on Cornwall a much higher housebuilding target than that deemed appropriate by the majority of local residents and also re-written the council’s affordable housing policies to undermine their effectiveness.

As if to pour petrol on the flames, the Court of Appeal yesterday ruled it lawful for the London regime to prevent councils seeking contributions to affordable housing from sites of 10 homes or fewer, overturning a previous ruling obtained by Reading and West Berkshire councils.  These small windfall sites, often redevelopment sites, are the sort that can make a significant – and generally uncontroversial – contribution to housing development in our towns and villages.  Excluding them means that councils are ever more reliant on the volume housebuilders to deliver their one affordable for every two market houses.

This in turn puts ever more pressure on councils to allow more market houses than are actually needed by the local population, leading to yet more second homes and an influx of retired folk whose social care costs later in life are met from local taxation, not from national taxation or by the areas in which they paid taxes when working.  Meanwhile, as the Revenue Support Grant is being squeezed out of existence its place is being taken by the New Homes Bonus, a shameless bribe to councils to build or lose out.

This all began in the 1980s when we largely stopped building council houses and loaded the cost of social housing onto homebuyers, who themselves are often struggling to afford the prices.  Landowners do nicely though, with three attempts since 1945 at capturing their heightened development value through taxation or public ownership overturned by the Tories and no fourth attempt in sight.

The point we have to hammer home is that you really do get what you vote for.  Cornwall elected the full set of six Tory MPs last year.  What did it expect to get in return?  Little victories like St Ives mean nothing if the one lot can still count on your vote ‘to keep the other lot out’.  Tory, Labour, LibDem.  All centralist and all rotten to the core.  So forget ‘the other lot’.  Be your own lot and deny them all the power to do your community lasting harm.

Bailing Out

‘A message from 10 Drowning St’.  That was the headline in Metro on Wednesday.  And the message is that it’s all under control, apparently.  Though not before time.  Metro also reported that residents in Somerset, who have faced the floods for weeks, said that recovery efforts only intensified after the crisis got closer to London.  Faye Cary, from Farmborough, told the paper: “Suddenly the Thames spills over and a few inches of water threatens homes – the Government are all over it like a diseased rash and the military are helping out already.”

‘Money is no object in this relief effort’.  So the Prime Minister assures us.  But money is never far below the surface in discussions about priorities.  The Environment Agency has explained that Treasury rules require an 8:1 ratio of benefits to costs, so flood defences will tend to protect high value properties – those of the rich – ahead of low value ones.  Therefore, if the average house price in Surrey (£419,957) is over twice that in Somerset (£205,141), Surrey will qualify for spending on flood defences twice as soon, even though the mayhem and the misery may be exactly the same.  The reason why the average house price in Surrey is higher is centuries of public spending in and around the capital of the British unitary state.  Verily, unto them that hath shall be given.

For economists, disasters are almost as good a driver of growth as wars.  The more ruined carpets and furniture there are, the more replacements will be ordered.  There are concerns about looting too, though for economists crime is almost as good a driver of growth as....  And the public health issues give a whole new meaning to Cameron’s goal of ‘getting rid of all the green crap’.  Free market fundamentalists love a good epidemic.  State action to stop one would be unspeakably altruistic and that would never do.

According to the BBC earlier this week, Thames Water has faced sustained criticism from its customers in the Lower Thames Valley for not knowing where its sewerage assets are located or how to protect electronic control systems from the floodwaters.  If that’s true, it’s no great surprise.  Private Eye this month reported that Thames Water – which manages its tax affairs from the Cayman Islands – has put away nothing for a rainy day.  Since 2000, it has paid out £3.6 billion to its (now largely foreign) shareholders.  A normal company earning a commercial rate of return on capital invested?  Or a cash-sucking parasite allowed to exploit a natural monopoly for profit, with no corresponding requirement for competence?

Is the blame game fair?  Well, yes.  On 5^th February, the website of the (London) Guardian published a map showing the exceptional rainfall recorded in the Upper Thames Valley in January.  Newbury MP and former environment minister, Richard Benyon, tweeted that he feared the flooding in the Lambourn Valley was reaching levels not seen since 2007.  It takes no great scientific ability to work out that the water would within the week be overflowing the banks of the Thames and seeping through the chalk and gravel into east Berkshire towns and villages.  Long enough to at least organise the filling and distribution of sandbags, one would think.  Instead, the general feeling is one of abandonment.  The Morning Star reported on Thursday that Environment Agency staff, doing their best to help, had been withdrawn from some areas in the face of public hostility directed at the one contact point with authority that actually ventured out.  This is the Agency still faced with losing hundreds of staff to Cameron’s austerity drive.  ‘Money no object’?

It’s entirely understandable that communities are pulling together to find their own self-reliant ways through current difficulties.  Small local councils, their funding cut to the bone, are in no position to respond.  Christchurch, in Hampshire, has been told off by the London regime for charging for sandbags.  Christchurch does not have huge resources.  London does.  What else is Christchurch supposed to do?  Where is the national response that will take the strain off extremely finite local budgets?  And why do the Tories always expect things that benefit them to be provided free, while others are expected to pay for items no less necessary?  It’s cruel but fair that those who wanted the cuts to collective provision should be among those to suffer the consequences.  It's just such a shame others have to suffer too.

We have argued before that a community-benefit State in Wessex does not need an army.  It needs a regional defence capability that can protect us from the full range of threats we now collectively face, and will continue to face into an ecologically much harsher future, very few of which bear any relation to conventional military objectives.  Food, water, power, transport.  Nothing is actually as secure as it’s been made to look.  So where’s the Territorial Army when it’s needed in Wessex?  Filling bodybags rather than sandbags, in parts of the world where it has no business to be.

Commentators are beginning to ask whether this year’s weather will change British politics.  It ought to, as communities come to recognise a shared sense of being abandoned by the State they pay to protect them.  Their reaction will determine its future.  For years we have seen politicians, in thrall to the City, treat the environment as something that can safely be ignored, certainly as less important than the Alice-in-Wonderland world of high finance, the world of make-believe money.  Damaging the real, natural world in order to sustain the illusion of that imaginary, numerical world has become what they do, along with paring public services to the point where they collapse in a real emergency.

The London parties may not get away with it much longer.  Ecology is bigger than economics.  From having no choice but to build on floodplains, to accommodate an ever-rising population, to having no choice but to build ever more expensive defences, to keep the houses dry, all the sums are going to have to be reworked.  Someone is going to end up paying and it won’t necessarily be those with the greatest ability to pay, nor the greatest reason to be made to.  It’s very traditional that the victims of natural disasters (like floods) or social disasters (like riots) receive more sympathy than the victims of economic disasters (like unemployment) but it’s at times like these that folk begin to ask why these distinctions are made.

Since the London regime lacks the will to think long-term, and therefore collectively, it needs to give way to those who can.  We’ve bailed out the banks, for no good reason; now we’re bailing out flooded households and businesses that also took one risk too many (a risk increased, through no fault of theirs, by building and other land use changes upstream).  We’d be better off bailing out altogether from a failed system and co-operating regionally to promote sustainable solutions.

Underpinning our thought-through actions there needs to be a lot more respect for science.  Yet on Thursday, the Climate Change Secretary, Ed Davey called for the Government to take on nature instead of working with it.  Farmers and their representatives, who have always understood far less about holistic water management than they pretend, would have us believe there’s a townie conspiracy to put wildlife ahead of their profits.  Angry folk wanting something done, and politicians wanting to be seen to be doing it, even where it’s counter-productive, are joining the worldwide war on science.  As with climate change, it’s infantile to believe that rejecting the facts will alter them.  In the absence of responsible politicians willing to explain those facts, it’s not unlikely that the long tradition of effigy burning on the Levels will start up again soon.

Politicians need to be standing up for science, not giving in to sectional interests.  In 2010 Parliament passed the Flood & Water Management Act.  It set up a process for requiring sustainable drainage systems to be installed in new developments.  Scared of the building industry, the Coalition has still not implemented those provisions.  Since the floods of 2007 there has been a string of reports spelling out what needs to be done.  The result?  Legislation that has been emasculated, resources that have been withheld.

Instead of building resilience, a London regime that is clearly nothing but the City’s glove puppet has gone on imposing more and more homes on reluctant communities and so added more and more to the problem.  We cannot expect its conversion to sanity, now or ever.  And so it follows that Wessex, along with every other region of England, must seek its own answers and then take back the power to put them into practice.

The Worker’s Hire

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

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

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

They hang the man, and flog the woman,

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

Anon., The Goose and the Common

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hands Off Our History!

On Monday a letter appeared in the Bristol Evening Post advocating a radical overhaul of local government in Wessex, linking this with the name of our Party. The proposal was to sweep away both districts and counties in favour of Jacobin-style ‘cantons’:

“the Canton of Oxford would include much of Berkshire, parts of Buckinghamshire and parts of Wiltshire. Kingswood and Long Ashton would come into the Canton of Bristol...”

Needless to say, the truth is that these views are not those of the Wessex Regionalists, a party that values our heritage most highly. We oppose the Prescott zones of ‘The South West’ and ‘The South East’ precisely because they are soulless, a dull denial of the richness that life in an old country offers. Wessex suffers economically, socially and environmentally because its identity lacks institutional, democratic expression. It is not animated by power, nor is power over the region reined-in by a deep sense of civic duty to it. It would be the height of caprice were we to take the very opposite view of local government. Anyone who has examined the evidence will see that where historic shires cease to be the focus of political power they wither away, largely because map-makers and the media then cease to make use of them. If we want our shires to live on, then we must use them.

And live on they must. We need to nail the lie that county government is an invention of the Victorians. Their achievement was to democratise what was already over a thousand years old. When the new unitary ‘Wiltshire Council’ comes into being it will be as the successor to Wiltshire County Council, which in 1889 took over the administrative powers of the county justices sitting in quarter sessions, themselves the successors to the mediaeval sheriff’s court. And so on back to Alfred and Ine. It was in Wessex that the first shires were created, around 1,300 years ago. Nowhere in the world can claim such a pattern of continuity. English county government is part of humanity’s common heritage, no less precious in its own way than the Pyramids of Giza or the Great Wall of China.

To attack this heritage as so many ‘relics’ or ‘fossils’ is empty cant. The antiquity of the counties is actually neutral as a fact. It is the interpretation placed on their survival that is crucial. To the ideological moderniser, it is self-evidently time to sweep them away. To other minds, their very resilience points to something worth a closer look. If the counties have already survived a millennium of social upheaval and technological change it is important to understand their strengths and at least to demand the proof that radical change is now, suddenly, justified. The ‘experts’ have their own agenda and their claims should never be taken at face value.

The metaphor of ‘sweeping away’ is always revealing, because it suggests something unhygienic about the status quo, something untidy, something that gets in the way of doing some other, unstated thing. It is no accident that demands for the reorganisation of local government on the lines of ‘city-regions’ or ‘metropolitan areas’ emerge at times of development stress. One such period was the late Sixties, when so much of our heritage was ‘swept away’ unthinkingly, leaving us to regret its loss at our leisure, bewailing the short-lived bag of beans we received in return. ‘City-regions’ are always a developer’s charter because they place the land around cities under the political control of city-based authorities, allowing the destruction of the countryside to accelerate. They are singularly inappropriate in Wessex. We are a rural region where cities know their place. And it is not lording it over the rest of us.

Like counties, cities, as we have known them, are under attack. Both major parties are enthusiastic about elected mayors. We are not. Our aim is a widening of local democracy, not its contraction, and Mafia-style ‘boss’ politics is no part of our vision. Democratic debate and voting in open meetings should not give way to dodgy deals in the privacy of the mayor’s parlour. The eclipse of our once-vigorous civic life by new, secretive models borrowed from business is one of the great tragedies of our time and must be reversed if local democracy is to be renewed. Advocates of these ‘Mafia mayors’ tell us that the powers of local councils need to be concentrated if they are to be effective. That, it must be pointed out, is because there are now so few powers. The job of a local politician is no longer to help make decisions but to talk to other people, elsewhere, who wield the real power. That is why the ‘new Caesarism’ is rampant and folk have stupidly let it happen by voting for one or other of the London parties.

Hand-in-glove with the structural turmoil has gone a new vocabulary. Emblematic of this was the creation of ‘De-clog’, the Department for Communities and Local Government, currently headed up by Bleary Hazel. Its remit is to promote ‘community cohesion’. Since real communities cohere naturally – by definition – it is clear that the control freaks have been exceedingly busy on this one. First, destroy real, stable communities. Then create new, unstable ones by decree, like the Prescott zones or local city-regions. Then help yourself to a job for life using State coercion to hold them together.

Our solution is simply to put right the damage. Our Party’s policy is to restore traditional local government areas and status, including Berkshire County Council (abolished by the so-called Conservatives), the traditional county boundaries, and borough status to charter towns. Structures should be accountable for the use of their powers at the smallest practical level, with nothing done by a wider area that a more local area feels it can do for itself. We demand committees, not cabinets. We seek the formation of new, smaller districts, based on the old, ecologically-sound hundreds and run by parish delegates. We oppose area boards that deny voting rights for the communities being ‘done to’. We have a wonderful tradition of local self-government that is slipping through our fingers. It is time to seize it back, to make it truly local – and to ensure that it really is all about government and not the costly smoke-and-mirrors act we endure today.

Whither Wessex?

"At a number of places in his celebrated Imperialism (1902), J. A. Hobson used southern England as an image of the successful, imperialist side of British capitalism: a countryside of plush ‘parasitism’ drawing tribute from overseas via the City, supporting ‘great tame masses of retainers’ in service and secondary industries, and riddled with ex-imperialist hirelings. ‘The South and South-West of England is richly sprinkled with these men’, he continued, ‘most of them endowed with leisure, men openly contemptuous of democracy, devoted to material luxury, social display, and the shallower arts of intellectual life. The wealthier among them discover political ambitions… Not a few enter our local councils, or take posts in our constabulary or our prisons: everywhere they stand for coercion and for resistance to reform.’"
Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, 1981

Next year, political Wessex hits 40. It was towards the end of 1969 that the then Lord Weymouth first mooted the idea of a Wessex identity for the purposes of tourism promotion. Of course, even then, his ambitions were more extensive than that. So how far has reality today caught up with them?

St Aldhelm’s Cross and even the Wyvern are now to be seen flying from public buildings in Wessex, and the list of towns and cities doing so will doubtless grow. Aldhelm is becoming more widely recognised as the patron saint of Wessex. A Wessex Anthem has been written by a Dorset dialect poet and set to music by a composer from Gloucestershire. Our wonderful dialect is attracting new scholarly interest. We even have our own Earl and Countess, a fact of recognition for which we can almost forgive their meagre efforts to live up to the title. The infrastructure of a community is taking shape.

For many of these feats, except the last two, the credit must go to Wessex Society, which Party members helped to launch in 1999, on the 1100th anniversary of King Alfred’s death. The Society has, quite rightly, taken on a life of its own. The membership today includes a peer, a bishop, an MEP, three MPs and the popular musicians Acker Bilk and Gordon Haskell. While some Society members are also Party members, the vast majority are not. It would be false to assume that to be patriotic about Wessex is to be sympathetic to Home Rule. Yet no regionalist can be unhappy that Wessex is finding pride in itself again.

And not before time. While the letters pages of our region’s papers are dominated by those droning on about Brussels, or the unfairness of Scottish devolution, Wessex is being torn apart. Not by the regulators of straight bananas. Nor by some anti-English conspiracy. But by the money men (and women) of the City of London. Our homes, our farms, our deep-rooted businesses, all are simply opportunities for them, opportunities to place their own pockets above the common good. And who can blame them? If we let our politicians let them then we have only ourselves to blame.

In News from Nowhere (1890), William Morris coined the term ‘cockneyisation’. Morris, a Londoner himself by birth, saw it as the process by which crass commercial values seeped up the Thames valley, consuming all they found, oblivious to charm and beauty. Morris was horrified by what he saw in his own day. What would he make of Basingstoke or Didcot now?

Some have suggested simply abandoning the east of Berkshire to London, much as some Welsh nationalists have toyed with re-defining Wales as the Welsh-speaking parts only. Such counsel leads nowhere. Once every limb has been amputated, where is there left to call home? We insist that nothing is up for surrender. If the Cockneys laugh at the Wessex accent, then it’s time to laugh back and remind them where they’re now living.

Gently, of course. Because we make no distinction between native and settler who alike love Wessex. Take away in-comers and our Party would collapse. There are all too many Wessex natives who have been taught to despise their heritage for us to be choosy.

But if it’s not about race, it’s very much about space. New homes by the hundreds of thousands are planned and we’re entitled to ask searching questions about why our farmland is to be destroyed to make way for them. We’re still awaiting even a half-convincing answer.

Folk are rightly upset about what’s happening. ‘Change’, we’re told. Yes, but what sane person supports change when it’s irrespective of better or worse? What we demand is the restoration of politics, of the right to make choices democratically and to see them implemented, not side-stepped. For that, Wessex needs a party it can call its own.

We know that New Labour has no mandate in Wessex. Wessex has never voted Labour, yet has periodically suffered the consequences of votes cast in Scotland, Wales, London and the big cities in Mercia and Northumbria. Neither the Conservatives nor the Liberal Democrats have any solution to this. Both seek to control the Westminster machine themselves, and letting Labour in from time to time is the price they’re willing to pay. A Wessex Parliament would keep Labour out, for good, unless Wessex voted Labour. A Labour government at Westminster – or equally a Tory or LibDem one – could no more impose its policies on Wessex than it can today on Scotland and Wales. A vote for the Wessex Regionalist Party is no wasted vote. A vote for either of the main opposition parties is a wasted vote because all they can offer is to buy time before Labour is back with a vengeance.

There’s much to dislike about Labour, but not all. Strip away the PC twits and the wolves in sheep’s clothing and there remains a faintly beating radical heart. It was a movement that Wessex could, in the right hands, have endorsed. Looking at the deep blue map of today, it’s hard to imagine that less than a century ago Wessex was a predominantly Liberal region. It was a region with a strong tradition of mutual support, as shown by a thriving network of friendly societies. But it was also a region rightly suspicious of the collectivist instincts of the rising Labour Party. So much so that it has ever since preferred the safety of voting Tory.

Wessex Regionalism is a philosophy that necessarily reflects the political complexion of the region itself. But it’s also one that taps into the unfinished business of old-fashioned liberalism. Not the spiteful, totalitarian kind embraced by Thatcher and Blair but the truly radical programme of constitutional reform and social emancipation cut short by the rise of hard-line socialism. It was no accident that the wartime Common Wealth party had its origins in Wessex, a party advocating vital democracy, common ownership and morality in politics. Nor that WR office-holders over the years have included at least three ex-members of CW’s own Executive Committee.

Dissatisfaction with what the major parties all offer is growing. Extremists are likely to be the beneficiaries if no more attractive alternative is presented. Frustration is turning to anger and anger to rage. The alternating wings of the Laboratory Party have conspired to deprive us wholesale of the control over our lives that we have a right to expect. Decisions that used to be made at the level of individual schools or hospitals are now made in London, either by ministers or, increasingly, by the courts. Decisions on housing and planning that used to be made in town and county halls are now made by quangos stuffed with business interests and reporting to Whitehall-knows-best. Buses, electricity and water – vital services that used to be locally owned and controlled – now belong to the Scots, the French, the Germans and the Spanish. How long before the Russians and the Chinese follow them in?

Common sense dictates the appropriate scale of any service or enterprise. Nothing should be done at a wider level that can be done as well or better at a more local level. Whether it’s a public service or a private enterprise the same rules should apply. While there’s a plausible case for aerospace or pharmaceuticals to be organised on a continental scale, given the high development costs and need to meet U.S. competition, things like buses, electricity or water are tied to their local and regional geography. There’s no case for international empires in these sectors, except to maximise market share. And that’s a case we should have the right to reject.

Politics? Yes please. And the sooner the better.

Two Cheers for Sir William

“The Green Belt is a Labour achievement, and we mean to build on it.”
John Prescott, 1998

Last Saturday, at the AGM of the Swindon-based National Trust, its chairman, Sir William Proby, announced plans to buy up Green Belt land threatened by Labour’s housebuilding craze. Sir William’s critics are wrong to see anything extraordinary about this: the Trust’s founders were passionate in their defence of open land. Its first chairman, Sir Robert Hunter, came to the Trust from another body that now has its headquarters in Wessex: what is known today as the Open Spaces Society, based in Henley-on-Thames.

With the passing of the 1947 Town & Country Planning Act by a Labour government, it might have been thought that the countryside was safe and the need for voluntary action superseded. Sadly, not so. Labour can dress things up as it likes: ‘sustainable urban extensions’, ‘sustainable new communities’, ‘eco-towns’. The public aren’t fooled by greenwash: they know State-sponsored sprawl when they see it. The reason why Sir William only merits two cheers is that the drive for population growth hasn’t been confronted head-on. Overcrowding is with us now, not some time in the future. Under Labour, extreme opposition is needed to have even the slightest hope of preventing ecocide. Infiltration, protest, legal challenge, civil disobedience, as well as so-called ‘criminal damage’ on development sites will doubtless all play a role.

Labour apologists have been quick to condemn the Trust for defying the will of a democratically elected government. The reality is quite different. Elected by just over 20% of registered voters, Labour can claim no mandate from the other 80%. But a recent poll showed that just over 80% of us are Nimbys (Not in My Back Yard); only 20% are happy to see their surroundings destroyed by the ‘greed is good’ mentality now poisoning our political life. Labour 20%; Nimbys 80%. Do the arithmetic before pontificating about democracy.

So who represents the Nimbys in Parliament? Not Labour, apparently. Their ‘Communities’ Secretary, Hazel Blears, has declared war on us.

How about the Conservatives? Hoots of laughter all round. They started the current trend of destruction back in the days when Tarzan served the Wicked Witch. When Berkshire County Council fought back against imposed housing targets, one London editorial thundered that if Berkshire is not willing then Berkshire must be coerced. So much for local democracy. The Conservatives ultimately did more than coerce Berkshire; they abolished it, putting an end to over one thousand years of county government. So much for conservation, so much for conservatism.

We can move swiftly past the Libby-Dibbys, whose commitment to local democracy is demonstrably patchy and unprincipled.

The fact of the matter is that compromises with greed and pride have left the Nimby majority with no voice at Westminster. That institution is run for the benefit of the City of London and the politicians’ own egos. If we want democracy, then we must build our own. The Wessex Regionalists are committed to placing planning decisions with the people they specifically affect, in the parishes, and ending all Whitehall interference, without exception.

Half the problem with planning is the politicians, the other half is the planners. Politicians generally have insufficient grasp of the subject to notice when planners are pursuing their own agenda. Beware in particular of demographic projection, an advanced branch of sorcery that deserves to be taught at Hogwarts. That’s after the students have mastered cost-benefit analysis and sustainability appraisal, two further opportunities for garbage-in, garbage-out.

Planners’ professional body, the Royal Town Planning Institute, is at the forefront of moves to get the Green Belt scrapped. Many planners today are not employed publicly but privately, by developers, or in ‘planning consultancy’, a form of environmental prostitution. Their influence ensures that destructionists are the movers and shakers in the profession’s counsels and conservationists are in retreat. Even if this weren’t so, planning, with its emphasis on bricks and mortar, will always tend towards built solutions because these require the employment of more planners.

Built solutions are not the only kind. We could, for example, get a grip on migration, both into the UK and within it, by positive as well as negative measures. To help our young people get housed, we could have a system of local preference in parts of the housing market, as works well in the Channel Islands. We could impose punitive taxation on house price increases and on empty and second homes. If EU laws need to be set aside to achieve our aims, then we should get on and do just that; it’s called subsidiarity. What we need is much less planning but much better planning, as part of a more holistic approach to all policy-making. To get there we shall need to remove the pressures that now cause us such grief.

Alternatively, we can go on building on our farmland and let our grandchildren starve. In 2005, the UK was only 60% self-sufficient in food. That means we import 40%, from countries whose own swelling populations may lead them to cut off the supply long before the end of oil will force yields back to pre-industrial levels. Without food there is no freedom. Churchill once wrote that the only time he thought the war against Nazi Germany would be lost was when U-boats were sinking convoys in the Battle of the Atlantic. Today, the UK has 27% more population than it did back then, but less farmland, and, just for good measure, far fewer fossil fuel resources too. Wessex Regionalist policy has always been to re-invest with the ultimate aim of regional self-sufficiency in energy, nutrition and all essential manufacture.

Wessex Regionalists are not anti-change but, unlike other parties, we want to see change for the better, not change for change’s sake. So give your planners hell (they’ll hear plenty enough from developers). And replace your politicians. Because ‘living within environmental limits’ isn’t just a slogan. It’s a fact of life we evade at our peril.

Who Cares About You?

Not the London-based parties. As MPs’ expense claims reveal, they’re far too busy shoving their snouts in the trough. With snouts down, eyes are off the ball and Wessex is being robbed. A couple of examples must suffice for now.

First off, amidst all the hullabaloo over Inheritance Tax thresholds, some very interesting figures have been downplayed. According to research by HBOS, 88% of detached property sales in London were above the tax threshold last year, 59% in the South East, but only 31% in the South West.
This reminds us of two things. One, that much of what is taxed isn’t the result of parental prudence but is windfall wealth, the result of house price inflation. This in turn is the result of a largely fraudulent, paper economy, centred on the City of London. Two, that the tax is the only way the rest of us can claw back any of that ill-gotten gain. Not that under this government there is any probability of the money then being spent in our direction. But even the theoretical possibility was better than what’s now happened.

Alistair Darling’s adjustment of the tax threshold was greeted with whoops of joy in the leafy suburbs (though the perceptive will see from the small print that it’s not quite as generous as journalists first made out). Meanwhile, villages in the west of Wessex have been preparing for another visit by chequebook-wielding Londoners on obscenely large incomes, looking to snap up a nice little cottage for the weekend. A BBC commentator suggested that the right policy on Inheritance Tax could now win elections, in the way that council house “sales” (more like bribes) did under Thatcher. That’s because marginal seats in the M25 doughnut ring determine who gets to ruin the country. A case of “to them that hath shall be given”.

In 1831, a large swath of central Bristol was burnt down by rioters incensed at the way Parliamentary reform was being blocked by a rich and self-centred minority. Hopefully, we shall not have to resort to the same tactics to get electoral and other constitutional reform today. The issues though haven’t changed one bit.

Inheritance Tax may or may not be the right way to capture the unearned value from capital gains. If it’s the wrong way then we need to look at alternatives. The principle is straightforward enough. Houses should be homes – nests – not nest eggs. Taxation of house price increases, after allowing for general inflation and improvements, should be set at 100%. If you’ve got money, go and do something useful with it instead.

Now for the second act of daylight robbery. With at least £5 billion already secured for the Olympics, London was doing very nicely out of the Wessex taxpayer. But the taxpayer’s generosity has now been signed up in support of Crossrail, a £16 billion rail link from Berkshire to Essex via central London.

That isn’t to say that Crossrail isn’t a good idea. But so are many others. It will inevitably create serious reductions in both speed and frequency of rail services to and from Paddington during its construction. This was pointed out by Richard Giles in a recent letter to the Western Morning News. He went on to argue a remedy: upgrading the Waterloo service to hourly by improvements already planned and just awaiting funding to the modest tune of £22 million, about one seven-hundredth the cost of Crossrail. While these improvements would still fall short of the 3hrs 8mins Exeter-Waterloo service of the 1960’s, or indeed the full double line infrastructure, approval or not will test whether Whitehall realises there are folk west of Maidenhead.
While Crossrail soaks up the money like a sponge, Bristol languishes without even the most basic Metro system. The largest city in Wessex is expected to put up with First buses, clogging the streets and fouling the air. Visitors arriving at Temple Meads station look around in vain for the city centre. In London, Newcastle and elsewhere, they’re taken there by an electric underground railway network. It extends out to the suburbs too. But there's no such money for Bristol. Not even to get a train to Portishead, still railless after all these years and all that housing. Bristolians have nothing special to look forward to and even an on-road tram system is viewed as ambitious. The Department for Transport has a phrase for this: ‘managing down aspirations’.

Detailed plans were actually drawn up for a tram system in the Fareham-Gosport-Portsmouth area, known as South Hampshire Rapid Transit. So where’s the money for it? There’s none, so it’s died. Gosport, with 70,000 people, remains the largest town in the UK without a rail service. After approving schemes in some northern cities, the Department for Transport has moved the goal posts. It now factors in as a crippling ‘cost’ the loss of revenue to the Treasury caused by motorists buying less fuel. Do you suppose the Department of Health would decide its policy towards tobacco on this basis? Crossrail didn’t get approval because it’ll get folk out of their cars but because it’ll shave a few minutes off the journey time from Heathrow to Canary Wharf. So we know who counts in Brown’s Britain.
If we’re now fully fed up with being treated as London's back yard and holiday home, and milked for every penny, then Home Rule for Wessex is the solution waiting to happen. The Wessex Regionalists will fight for this. The other parties won’t. So who cares about you?