The Road to 2020

Nick Xylas polled 62 votes in Eastville on Thursday, a sound base from which to expand at Bristol’s next election in four years’ time.  In 2020 we’ll have a General Election to fight as well, so planning needs to start straightaway.  For Nick’s own reactions to the result, see the Eastville blog.

It was clear at the count that voters in this two-member ward are not so tribal as might have been supposed, with many splitting their choice between two candidates from rival parties.  The point needs to be made to voters whose first loyalty is to a party with only one candidate – the Greens and TUSC in this case – that giving the second vote to WR is a reasonable option.  It also means that a negative campaign would be counter-productive, though this is true of many places in Bristol given its genuinely multi-party profile.

The result wasn’t bad for a first go – across the city, one Tory and four FibDem candidates managed less than double this and at 0.849% of the poll it was in percentage terms our third best ever.  Second place goes to our founder, then known as Viscount Weymouth, who polled 0.855% when he stood in the first Parliamentary contest at Westbury in 1974.  First place goes to Tom Thatcher, who took 3% at Westbury in 1979.  Tom was a popular local farmer, active in the community, and so, naturally, we can’t agree that any similarity of name with the then Leader of the Opposition could have influenced the outcome.  Wessex voters are too smart for that.

Choice At Last

Our President Colin Bex and Secretary-General David Robins were in Bristol at the weekend to help our candidate for the Eastville Ward, Nick Xylas, with his campaign there.  All three are shown here at an impromptu stall set up in Eastville Park.

Nick unexpectedly had the chance to move to a new flat that same weekend, leaving him, equally unexpectedly, to rely on others to do much of the leafleting.  Fortunately, Nick had the process well-organised, with lists of addresses prepared for each polling district.  A surprising number of addresses were not on the electoral register at all, which may be down simply to folk moving house or possibly to the recent changeover to individual rather than household registration, which may have cost the unwary their right to vote this time round.  As we keep saying, the Victorians thought through electoral law very carefully and it’s suffered heavily from ignorant meddling over the past two decades, postal vote fraud on an industrial scale being the worst consequence revealed so far.  And what else is currently kept under wraps?  No wonder some question what, in the absence of real reform, is the point in voting.

Bad weather didn’t help us and it now seems highly unlikely that full coverage of the ward will be achieved ahead of polling day tomorrow.  The best we can hope for is that by targeting key locations within the ward we do our bit to ensure that news will pass around by word of mouth or electronic media.  Nick takes the long-term view that 2016 is primarily about learning how best to do a local election campaign, with the idea already in mind that 2020 and the run-up to it offer the opportunity to do the thing really well.  One suggestion is a regular ward newsletter – the Eastville Wyvern perhaps?

This is the first time that voters at a local election anywhere have had a Wessex Regionalist on the ballot paper, so we as much as they can make our mark.  Nick is the first WR candidate to contest a seat wholly located in historic Gloucestershire (the Wansdyke Parliamentary constituency, contested in 1983, included some Gloucestershire wards but was predominantly in Somerset).  With this election therefore we can claim to have raised our standard in every one of our eight historic shires.  And – who knows? – we may yet be pleasantly surprised when the results are declared on Sunday.

A Tale of Two Cities

Bristol City Council is still weathering the storm it brought down upon itself for not marking St George’s Day this year, having argued that the city is ‘too multicultural’ for such an event.  Lack of interest might have been a plausible excuse, but not that all cultures are valued except one.

Others do things differently.  Professor John Denham is Director of Winchester University’s Centre for English Identity and Politics.  Interviewed by Wessex Society for its magazine The Wessex Chronicle, he recalled the situation in Southampton during his time as a Labour MP there:

“I helped organise St George’s Day in Southampton and Southampton’s a very diverse city – so how do you have a St George’s Day which can involve everybody and yet is still an English festival?  The story we tell is that Southampton is a great English city, that’s been there throughout English history, and it’s always been made up of all the people who’ve lived there, which because it’s a port city has always been people from all over the world.  People can understand that you can be both English and very diverse, through your history and everybody that’s come together to make the city.  A couple of years ago I was working on this with a young Sikh woman councillor, born in Southampton, and we discovered that we both had had relatives in the British forces serving in the Far East during the Second World War.  That’s an example of how family and local histories can be inter-twined as part of a common story.”

The difference then is that Southampton projects the primacy of territory, locally and nationally – loyalty to place rather than to race – whereas Bristol appears scared of any continuity with its foundational past.  Curiously, when it comes to Wessex and the marking of St Ealdhelm’s Day, the roles are reversed.  Bristol is happy to fly the Wyvern outside the Council House (or ‘City Hall’, for the Anti-Mayor and his fellow deniers of distinctiveness); Southampton still sits in stony silence, unmoved by calls to fly.  Perhaps this will be the year Southampton sees sense?

Review of 2015

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 2015 Review has recently been forwarded to the Commission and here is what it says:

“The major event of the year was the General Election, which saw our President, Colin Bex return to Oxfordshire to again challenge David Cameron for the safe Tory seat of Witney.  The overall result was no surprise but Colin was pleased to see a 77% increase in his own vote and a midway ranking among the candidates, concluding that if voters remain willing to keep their options open this bodes well for the future.  Indeed, it was our best result since 2001.  The first-past-the-post voting system continues to disadvantage smaller parties; it creates presumptions about who is worth hearing that prevent a minor party candidate even putting forward an alternative point of view.  This was again the case at Witney, where Colin and other minor party candidates were barred from even attending the hustings.  Local press coverage was seriously incompetent, even to the point of publishing inexcusable untruths, though full colour feature articles in both editions of the Wall Street Journal ensured global awareness of the Wessex cause.

The importance of online activities was underlined by a sharp spike in viewing figures for the Party’s blog during the campaign.  In April, there were nearly 3,000 page-views, nearly double the peak of interest during the Eastleigh by-election in 2013.  In May, the Party was left without a core website following the catastrophic failure of the Zyweb platform that hosted it.  Thanks to Rick Heyse, a new Full Member with the requisite skills, the Party now has a new site – www.wessexregionalists.info – to which are gradually being added the range of features increasingly expected of a party website in the 21st century.  Colin Bex has been an active ambassador for the Party, attending conferences on climate change, in Paris, and democracy, in Brussels, and the June march in London against austerity.  On the march, he spoke with Jeremy Corbyn, soon to be the Labour Leader, about the need for regionalism.

A wholly Conservative Government took office in May with some two-thirds of the electorate either not supporting or actively opposing it.  It has demonstrated a deep hostility towards regionalism and local democracy, even as financial pressures compel public services to re-organise on a regional basis.  It continues to advance the view – shared with Labour – that the imposition of unwanted elected mayors is a preferable substitute for substantial devolution to democratic regional assemblies.  In the second half of 2015 our attention shifted to the May 2016 local elections.  Nick Xylas was endorsed as the Party’s candidate for Bristol City Council, Eastville Ward and much activity has focused on developing a framework for that campaign.

Policies adopted during the year have emphasised our radical difference from the current mainstream.  The Party now explicitly supports a confederal ‘Europe of a Hundred Flags’, more democratic governance of public limited companies and a referendum on the future of the monarchy, while opposing child genital mutilation, ritual slaughter and the renewal of Trident.  We continue to benefit from the ‘Scotland effect’ as the SNP consolidates its hold and voters in England also look around for alternatives to the failed London parties.  The level of justifiable optimism within the Party is higher than for many, many years.”

Devo Min

There are quite a few bright spots for Wessex folk to cheer about in today’s budget – and not just a freeze on cider duty – but look beyond the headlines.  It’s good to see money for children’s A&E in Southampton, but isn’t the rest of the NHS on life support?  A “more resilient train line in the South West” (in other words, dealing with Dawlish) is backed, though this actually only extends to a feasibility study that’s currently stalled.  We mustn’t forget the “£20 million to help young families onto the housing ladder in the South West”, funded from the 3% stamp duty surcharge on additional properties.  Osborne says that’s a reward for good behaviour – “proof that when the South West votes blue, their voice is heard loud in Westminster” – but if we controlled our own resources and made our own decisions the cynical bribes wouldn’t be necessary.  With MPs in the South West still being urged to rebel over HS2, it seems they could do with more than a little regionalist help in turning up the volume.

We’ll be studying the financial detail before commenting further on those aspects that naturally fall within the Chancellor’s brief.  Meanwhile, we can comment at once on those that don’t but are there anyway.  ‘Devolution’, so called, can’t be taken seriously so long as it’s viewed as part of some national productivity campaign, no more than a footnote in the Government’s spending plans.  Constitutional change should be about democratic renewal, not the further empowerment of unaccountable business interests.  Are we happy too with the theft of our publicly funded schools in their entirety?  Theft it is, to nationalise the powers of a tier of government closer to the people, without its consent.  Where’s the referendum on that?

That’s why the devolution deals announced today are so pitiful.  If the local councils agree, there’ll be a Mayor for ‘Avon, Mk. II’, on top of the one Bristol already has, and despite the one Bath has just rejected.  Other parts of Wessex are still trying to line up their bids for more of the same.  In East Anglia, councils willing, there’ll be a Mayor too, heading the first region-wide elected administration in East Anglian history.  Like it or not, there won’t be a Mayor of Wessex.  Which is just as well.  We demand the open, transparent debate of a legislative assembly, like Wales or Scotland, not a behind-the-scenes fixer placed beyond accountability for a full four-year term.  The whole mayoral obsession is part of a failure to understand that London’s dominance over England is about the inter-regional distribution of political power, not the fact that it has a Boris and we don’t.

As with the North East referendum in 2004, what’s currently on offer may end up rejected locally as too little to bother with for the democratic and financial costs attached.  We’ve maintained a bold alternative that’s been rejected by all the London parties, essentially for the mortal sin of being ambitious in what we propose for Wessex.  All we need say in response is, where’s your vision then?  End the excuses, start rolling out REAL regional devolution, and do it now.

History is Sunk

“My Lords, a nation gets awarded the character that it deserves.  By neglecting to promote some aspect of this character, that aspect becomes increasingly insignificant within the image which other nations regard as our worth.  And this might also hold true for the way future generations of our own nation come to regard what we ourselves were worth…

There is a danger if the arena for artistic performance is permitted to become too centralised, with the regions required to focus upon what is going on within the capital city to discover the potential of their own individualistic excellence.  The situation will become healthier if we can revive the notion of there being a thriving local culture within each region, proud of its own traditions, and of its aesthetic potential.

Government should therefore assume the responsibility to promote the re-emergence of the English regions, so that they are encouraged to create their own local artistic excellence in distinction from one another, and in competition with one another to draw the maximum number of tourists to come and be entertained in the significant regional manner.  But this should involve the creation of regional assemblies, whose main purpose will be to tailor the quality of life within that territory, so that its true individualism can be perceived for what it best might become…

Then finally there is the question of improved display: a display at sites of easy access for the region as a whole.  It should not be necessary for an aspirant artist to visit the capital city to discover the inspiration for his native art.  The finest collections should be on his very doorstep.  And the regional assemblies should be in a position to allot funds to transform existing museums so that they can fulfil this required function – funds which should also be used to put on arts festivals where the special character of the region can be publicly proclaimed.

The artistic potential of the nation is thus indirectly linked to the Government’s ability to enable the English regions to re-emerge in a spirit of their most colourful individualism.  So the most significant step which government could take today, in the encouragement of the arts, will be in the creation of our regional assemblies; and I urge that this step should be taken without delay.”

Alexander Thynn, Marquess of Bath, addressing the House of Lords, 18th March 1998

Not a lot to ask, you might think.  After all, the provincial cities of Germany and Italy are cultural powerhouses, attracting tourists in their millions.  In contrast to France or Spain, theirs is the legacy of not being unified politically until late in the 19th century and so continuing to benefit from particularistic patronage.  In England, sadly, few listened to our founder’s words, and today the curtain is coming down on culture in the provinces.

Nowhere more so than in Northumbria.  Last month, we drew attention to a spate of museum closures in Lancashire, contrasted with continued spending on a vacuous vanity project designed to really ‘put London on the map’.  Lancashire is not alone.  Across the Pennines, Bradford’s National Media Museum is facing the asset-stripping of its photographic collection, to be removed to London.  Cumbrian Melvyn Bragg has spoken out on radio against the closure of small museums.  In Co Durham, closures planned, threatened or implemented include the Durham Light Infantry Museum at Durham, the Monkwearmouth Station Museum at Sunderland and Bede’s World at Jarrow.  The last of these was an ambitious project to regenerate the town through tourism.  A new museum was built to re-interpret the Golden Age of Northumbria for today, complete with a reconstructed Anglo-Saxon settlement in the grounds.  Whatever that blighted area has been promised to make up for jobs lost in heavy industry – whether it was to be call centres, hi-tech manufacturing, retailing or tourism – has been promptly ripped from beneath its feet.  It’s now being robbed of the means to understand itself.  ‘History’ will be owned by the victors of one inter-regional power struggle, making another that much less likely to succeed.

Identity is inseparable from continuity: a place without a past lacks the materials from which to build its own future with confidence.  According to Historic England, 64% of folk in England value their local heritage.  Breaking this average down by Prescott zone, we find the figure rises to 71% in the North East, 69% in the South West and 68% in both London and the South East.  Four of the five below-average zones are where the Danelaw used to be.  Coincidence?  Maybe, but the fact is that where Alfred was acknowledged as overlord there was continuity of government and a physical survival of heritage on a scale that wasn’t true of Viking-devastated areas.  You value more where there’s more to value.

Wessex hasn’t been exempt from closures.  Bristol’s award-winning Empire & Commonwealth Museum, housed in Brunel’s original terminus at Temple Meads, was closed in 2008.  This was done with the specific intention of re-locating the collection to London, where, of course, ‘more people can see it’.  The logic is unassailable, at least for those too lazy to get a train to Bristol and walk a hundred yards.  Fortunately, the deal fell through.  Most of the collection was donated to the city of Bristol.  But the museum never re-opened.

Wessex hasn’t been exempt from closures.  Scotland and Wales have a choice.  Their national museums and galleries are devolved matters and they have devolved administrations to defend them.  We suffer from the affliction that is England, not the England of us all that values all, but the one-size-fits-all England that in practice means London.  All the key decisions are taken in London by those who live, work and play in London, who can grasp no other perspective and who feel deeply offended by the idea that one can even exist.  And, as Simon Jenkins pointed out last week, BIG projects are protected while it’s the little folk who suffer.

It might be argued that, in times of austerity, culture should take a back seat.  We don’t need to argue back that austerity is a posh word for corporate bailouts and tax evasion on an unimaginable scale.  Even if austerity had a credible justification, it would still be unfair that we’re not exempt from it but London is.  Loss-making museums in the provinces are being shut.  Throwing them a lifeline would be subsidising failure, we’re told.  Yet as taxpayers we all pay to keep London’s ‘national’ museums and galleries free to visit.  Even though there are national museums in Wessex that are not.  (For example, both the National Army Museum and the RAF Museum in London are free, but not Portsmouth’s National Museum of the Royal Navy.  How fair is that?)  Free admission to London’s attractions is somehow considered a service to the whole nation.  We’re even treated to patronising half-truths: “Arts Council funding for museums is lower per capita in London and the South East than in any other part of the country.”  We should hope so, given the millions London’s national museums receive as direct funding that bypasses the Arts Council pot.  How can there ever be a level playing field when money for London’s pets is top-sliced and the rest are left to fight over the crumbs?

Shouldn’t we expect this?  Isn’t being kicked and punched by the London regime part of being English?  Mustn’t grumble, must we?  Up north, regionalisation has been an on-off issue for over a century.  That’s a century in which to organise a political party to achieve real, lasting change.  A century of votes cast instead for the monkey with the red rosette.  And we’ve been as bad, even if our monkey’s rosette is blue, or sometimes yellow.  He or she is still more interested in a career in a London-obsessed system than in defying convention on our behalf.

Recent media coverage has been sure to present the museums story as one aspect of a north-south divide.  That’s a convenient narrative that can be played around with, baiting northerners about deprivation in pockets of inner London being just as bad.  It’s a narrative that actually helps to obscure something much deeper – the London-rest divide that no amount of ‘benign’ centralism or ‘socialist’ redistribution will touch.

It’s inevitable then.  Let’s move on to the ‘real’ issues instead.  No, it isn’t inevitable.  When Northumbria and Wessex strode the stage, London was on the periphery of events: Frank Musgrove’s The North of England: A History identifies no fewer than four eras of northern pre-eminence.  History reminds us that there are alternatives.  That’s why the teaching of history is being so heavily discouraged.

Richard Carter, Leader of Yorkshire First, commented on the museum closures as follows: "We are not against a strong capital, but this has to change, for the good of the country and for London too."  We’d go further.  The capital’s strength is both the cause and the effect of our weakness as it recirculates across the generations.  If London disappeared into a vast sink-hole tomorrow, Boris and all, we’d get by well enough without it.  There comes a point when patience with pretty promises from on high should no longer be judged a virtue.

Bristol Begins

Nick Xylas reports that preparations are well underway to contest Bristol City Council’s Eastville Ward in local elections this May:

“I have almost finished collecting signatures for my nomination papers.  The opening date for handing in nomination papers is 22nd March and the closing date is 10th April.  It doesn't help that Bristol Central Library will only be open at weekends in March due to the basement being converted into a posh school, severely limiting my access to the electoral register.  Anyway, I have set up a campaign website, and hope to add a blog to it soon.”

Content added to the site so far includes Nick’s biography and the mini-manifesto of policies for Bristol.

Gearing Up

Surveyor is the magazine for highways and transport professionals.  This month’s issue is headlined ‘Return of the Regions’ and opens to reveal an editorial by Dominic Browne, and more besides.  The editorial starts as follows:

“In January of this year the Department for Transport (DfT) launched a small (by government standards) pilot competition for local authorities to find ‘total transport’ solutions in rural and isolated communities.

To some this may have seemed fairly innocuous; a scrambled attempt to cover ground in local services left barren by revenue cuts.  Yet the guidance for bidders contained a line that appeared to herald something more than spin, smoke and mirrors; something that looked like an honest appeal.

‘Service integration has not been attempted on any scale up to now, so the essential first step is for local authorities to work out how to go about it.’

Events this month, where we have seen the wheel of public reform turn once more, recalled this line.

When the coalition government first came into power, the word regional was banned.  Localism was the new watchword.  This month saw the concept of regionalism bloom again.  Across the North and the Midlands two major bodies built of local authorities are ready to take on statutory powers for regional transport planning.  While in the West Country, Surveyor has been told there is an ‘aspiration for more formalised regional control of transport’.

Further south, we see major sub-regional groups developing.  In the East Midlands we have the two great communities of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire planning a joint combined authority and in ‘England’s Economic Heartland’ of Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, we have an integrated total transport plan blossoming that, in its conception, actually pre-dates the DfT’s competition.

Some of this goes back to traditional English regionalism.  The North, and to a lesser extent the Midlands, have always been comfortable seeing themselves as individual cultural entities, while some even still see Cornwall, another beneficiary of recent devolution, as a country in itself.  In the south, where demarcation is more of an economic issue, sub-regional transport planning may be more practical.  The capital of course, effectively a region in itself, already has the might of Transport for London working for it…”

Poor old South.  The devil’s in the demarcation, isn’t it?  Boundaries may be fuzzy but we know where the North and the Midlands are.  We might even be able to point out East Anglia, another traditional entity but now one sadly subsumed into the ‘East of England’ Prescott zone, where it rubs shoulders with north London.  But the South?  And the West?  Here it gets confused.

In 1919 Professor C.B. Fawcett published a famous, not to say infamous, work entitled Provinces of England: A Study of Some Geographical Aspects of Devolution.  It included a map of 12 provinces, defined by physical features and ignoring county boundaries.  The only nod to history was the re-use of certain names as labels of convenience.  Cornwall and Devon were combined as the ‘Devon Province’.  The ‘Wessex Province’ comprised no more than the Solent basin.  In between was an area stretching from the Wye valley to the English Channel, grouped as the ‘Bristol Province’.  Fawcett explained its name as follows:

“Round Bristol the popular regional name has been ‘West of England’ or ‘West Country’.  But our Bristol Province has no better claim to the name ‘West of England’ than the West Midland Province has, and a less claim than could be made on behalf of Devon; while the term ‘West Country’ has different local meanings from north to south of England – in Durham and Northumberland it refers to Cumberland and Westmorland.”

Generations of the more materialist regionalists have praised the prof for his objectivity and lack of sentiment.  Most fail to comment on the fact that in 1942 Fawcett revised his map, now with 11 provinces, several minor and some major boundary changes, plus a couple of name changes while he was about it.  Surely unassailable objective reality ought not to be that malleable?

Cultural geography is about people and the place they call home.  It picks up where physical geography leaves off and it’s what’s rightly central to any discussion about English regionalism from below.  It’s because that voice from below is so often suppressed that we have this difficulty with demarcation down south.  It’s why we’re assured that it’s absolutely all about economics, and the functional parameters of accommodating and responding to growth, and not at all about culture.

Is Cornwall part of the ‘West Country’?  For a Cornishman, the west starts at Truro and carries on to the Isles of Scilly.  Cornwall has the Cornish Riviera.  Devon has the English Riviera.  You might think the penny of national separation would have dropped by now.  So if England’s West Country extends no further west than the Tamar, how far east does it go?  According to a recent study of regional accents by YouGov, no further than Somerset.  Not even as far as Brisawl, me lover.

The ‘West Country’ is a slippery term because it’s defined by those living to the east of it.  It’s what’s down west from London and as London’s sphere of influence grows so the West Country shrinks.  Between the wars it was still possible to describe Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset as the ‘Middle West’ (the reference is from Lovely Britain, edited by Mais and Stephenson), somewhere too far west to be the Home Counties and not west enough to be the real West Country.

Wessex today is split west-east – between the ‘South West’ and ‘South East’ Prescott zones – but another line would be north-west / south-east.  Even in the days of our independence we had Wessex west of Selwood and Wessex east of Selwood, the diocese of Sherborne and the diocese of Winchester.  As with the Highland / Lowland line in Scotland, our geography has shaped our history, creating divisions for others to exploit if they will.  Whereas a self-governing region could work to strengthen the lines of communication that bind us together, the priorities of the London regime for centuries have been to follow the lines of least resistance, the tentacles that reach into deepest Wessex.  There’s the Bath Road, the Kennet & Avon Canal, the Great Western Railway and the M4 going to the west; the Portsmouth Road, the London & South Western Railway and the M3 going to the south.  Or so it’s presented.  The reality is that of travel in the opposite direction, for these are not primarily the bonds of a resilient and self-confident region.  They’re the great veins along which our region’s tribute flows up to London, never to be seen again.

The demarcation problem in ‘the South’ is insoluble so long as London is allowed to dominate.  The North and the Midlands aspire to break free of London and they have the distance and the spirit to make it so whenever they choose.  As Surveyor’s editorial notes, the South may be tending to see its future solely in terms of sub-regions, satellites submissive to the will of the Great Wen, not defined, as others are, in resistance to it.  So long as that’s the case then it deserves the environmental and social catastrophe that’s heading towards it as London overspill eyes its fields.

It doesn’t have to be that way though.  Wessex has a flag, Wessex has a patron saint, Wessex has its own, much abused dialect.  We have as much right as any Mercian or Northumbrian to govern ourselves.  In so far as we’re on London’s doorstep, our culture in the front line facing the steamroller, we have a stronger and more urgent case than they do.

Our first priority, naturally, is to jettison the idea of the ‘West Country’, a concept far too flexible for its own good.  Wessex is an alternative name that retains the idea of being placed geographically to the west of London.  It does so without the notions of ineradicable inferiority, mental dumbness and infinite recession into peninsular twilight that have characterised a view of the ‘West Country’ handed down from above.  One busy lopping off our eastern shires one by one.

Time to stand, men of the west.  And then push back.

History Made Here

G K Chesterton is often misquoted as saying that those who argue that 'you can’t put the clock back’ obviously know nothing about clocks.  It’s near enough to what he did write – that time only moves forwards but principles needn’t – to let stand.  What’s more, we’re seeing plenty of evidence of it just now.

At Bristol Temple Meads, the 1870s extension to Brunel’s original 1841 train-shed is to be brought back into use for the new electric trains to Paddington.  Maybe FirstGroup, one of our two Scottish rail-lords, will have a bloke in a stovepipe hat to wander about when it opens.  If so, he’s unlikely to admit how badly planned it’s all been, both track and trains.  The old train-shed has to be re-opened because the new carriages are too long (a means of economising on wheels) to fit the curved platforms of the current Temple Meads without scraping the sides.  No wonder the bold plans of the reckless engineer are proving to be a more inspiring legacy than anything that came between him and now.

Last month’s rebranding of First Great Western as Great Western Railway creates the opportunity to board a GWR train for the first time in 68 years.  (That’s not counting in this context the heritage experience of the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway.)  It is, according to FirstGroup, “using our history to create history”, capitalising on the past even as a major programme of investment for the future gets underway.  Nothing wrong with that, as an idea.  The SNP want to bring back an independent Scotland, last seen 308 years ago.  We want to bring back an autonomous Wessex, even after 949 years.

There’s plenty wrong though with the investment priorities.  Anyone riding in the standing-room-only sardine cans on the Wessex Main Line will know that if you’re not going to London you really don’t count.  Bristol could have a proper underground metro system for much less than the £25bn cost of London’s Crossrail 2 scheme, but it chooses not to.  The Somerset & Dorset line could be re-opened, re-connecting those counties’ centres to our two coasts, for a fraction of the £80bn being spent on HS2.  (In Scotland, thanks to the Scottish Parliament, the 35-mile Borders Railway was re-opened last month for £300 million and passenger numbers are already one-fifth of the predicted annual total.)  Instead, disused trackbed and station sites in Wessex are still being short-sightedly built over, to meet London’s inflated estimates of ‘housing need’.

Transport is one policy area where views set down by our founder, Alexander Thynn, in the 1979 ‘12-point programme’ as revised in 1992, remain as relevant as ever.  “Provision of a Wessex-orientated transport system to link our principal cities without having to depend largely on routes directed towards London, and with special emphasis on providing a satisfactory system of public transport”.  That’s what we said then and there can be no doubt that the coming decades will see ever-increasing expenditure on public transport as climate change and peak oil drive a transport revolution.  Away from the private car and back to a familiar model from the last century, less flexible but more sustainable and therefore the only viable option.  But if we don’t fight for Wessex and other regions to gain our fair share of that money, the London regime will as usual take much more than the lion’s share.

There’s more than one reason why FirstGroup would choose to bring back the Great Western.

One appears on the face of it to be simply fashion – there’s a 30-year cycle of centralist uniformity versus decentralist diversity that keeps on playing out in post-war public transport in the UK.  Is it just the preferences of successive generations of senior management and their marketing advisers, or something related to the investment cycle?  Either way, it’s not restricted to trains: some of FirstGroup’s bus interests now operate as ‘The Buses of Somerset’, and like the GWR there’s a new (and locally specific) green livery to replace the garish corporate one mocked as ‘Barbie’.

On the other hand, this could be a more permanent trend, like the worldwide revulsion against privatisation and corporate power.  Corporate transport conglomerates have a problem: the public doesn’t support them, with polls showing majority support for public ownership of trains, even among Conservative voters.  Going local and regional can be a logical corporate response to that, to build public support for NOT reversing Thatcherism and resuming the leftful course of history.  At the very heart of that is being allowed to bid for ever-longer franchises, frustrating any move towards rolling renationalisation.

Building brand loyalty therefore is an urgent defensive measure.  FirstGroup’s rebranding exercise aims to position the GWR as something bigger than an individual franchisee and something therefore to be cherished as an opportunity to do things differently.  Scotland provides a precedent.  The Scottish Government has decided that ScotRail is a publicly-owned brand, to be merely borrowed by the successful bidder that gets to run it for a limited time.  It’s a model with wider application, one that preserves a specific territorial identity against pressures for uniformity, whether they issue from corporate spin-doctors or from an Old Labour government.  It doesn’t necessarily prevent either pressure triumphing but digging-in is corporate rail’s best chance of remaining involved (though a publicly owned rail network doesn’t have to be uniform: the British Railways of the 1950s wasn’t).

Where this strategy fails to inspire is in its assumption that Brunel’s GWR makes a sensible area for purposes other than getting folk to and from London.  It’s no criticism of Brunel’s genius as an engineer to say that this shouldn’t be the basis for defining our regional identity, now and in the future.  Posters telling passengers of the plan to ‘give the west its railway back’ and build our ‘great western region’ may make sense in Bristol but they mean much less in south Wales.  North-south journeys within Wessex, or north-west to south-east, will remain a low priority.  South Wales and ‘Western’ Wessex, instead of better integration with north Wales and ‘Southern’ Wessex respectively, will continue to draw together into some Greater Severnside.  The Welsh Assembly won’t go gentle into that scenario, and neither should we.

X for Xylas

The WR Council met at Wokingham earlier this month.  A raft of new policies was agreed, about which readers may expect to hear over the coming weeks.  WR President Colin Bex reported on the election campaign in Witney and it was noted that page views on this blog almost reached 3,000 during April, double the number achieved during the Eastleigh by-election and roughly 20 times the figure for the 2010 campaign.  Regrettably, our core website has been down for some time following a catastrophic failure of the platform that hosted it, Zyweb.  A replacement is being sought and in the meantime we can still be contacted via email, wessexinfo@aol.com and at our Facebook page.

Looking ahead, one of the key decisions we took was to endorse Nick Xylas as a WR candidate in next year’s elections to Bristol City Council.  Nick is a freelance writer and publisher who was raised in Patchway and currently lives in the Eastville ward, which he plans to contest on our behalf.  In between, he lived for six years in the USA with his American wife and so can speak authoritatively on the differences between there and here that we would do well to cherish.  His current publishing venture – Parthenia Comics – is a range of comics aimed at adult literacy and ESOL learners.   Previous jobs include 15 years in the civil service and three years in US state government.

Wessex has been one of Nick’s interests since childhood: both the ancient kingdom and what a contemporary revival will look like.  Throughout his adult life, Nick has demonstrated a commitment to public service and social justice.  Half-Greek, half-Wessaxon, Nick is also well-placed to represent the cultural diversity of Bristol’s inner suburbs.  We’ll endeavour to report further on the campaign as it develops.  If you can help with highlighting neglected local issues or in any other way then do get in touch.

The Founding Fixers

Avon Local History & Archæology – ALHA – does exactly what it says on the tin.  It’s an organisation for local history and archæology in the Avon area, serving some 80 affiliated societies, with a collective membership of about 10,000.  Founded in 1976, it has outlived Avon County Council, recognising the economic and social – and therefore historical – unity of the area, not so much separate from as special within the grand historic counties of Gloucestershire and Somerset.  In 2011 ALHA launched its annual Joseph Bettey Lecture, named after the Bristol academic responsible for Wessex from AD 1000, Rural Life in Wessex 1500-1900, The Landscape of Wessex and other books that present our history from the inside looking out, not the outside looking in.

ALHA also holds an annual spring conference, with this year’s entitled ‘The rocky road to democracy and freedom: from king John to mayor George’.  In the wake of Magna Carta, Bristol’s first mayor may have been the one chosen in 1216, another concession made by ‘Bad King John’.  The first directly elected one followed in 2012, the renowned, red-trousered Wintonian, George Ferguson.  London’s first mayor was in 1189, the first directly elected one in 2000, yet more evidence of how Bristol tends to mimic London’s every move.  Professor Murray Stewart’s closing talk at the conference, ‘The elected mayor: democrat or autocrat?’ provoked vigorous audience reaction.  As well it might, because one of the reasons for having an elected mayor was identified as “more direct communication with central government”.

So it seems that having an elected mayor as the key to city devolution is less about restoring civic confidence, more about training better beggars.  It isn’t about giving local folk the power collectively to shape their own lives; it’s overwhelmingly about putting in place a network of local fixers who can be summoned to Whitehall for instructions whenever any smoothing needs to be done.

Keep that point in mind, because there’s a familiar theme behind every local government reorganisation.  At the time of the ‘big bang’ reforms of 1974, official explanations referred the reader to the problems: the previous local local authorities were “too small” and there were “too many of them”.  Size can be a problem: there’s a relationship between it and functional competence and that’s what underlies the idea of subsidiarity.  Being over-numerous though is not a problem for local authorities or the communities they individually serve.  It’s not a problem they have any reason to recognise, let alone worry about.  It’s only a problem for outsiders, more especially for those who have to deal with them all.  The drive for fewer and fewer councils is about improving the London regime’s range of effective control.

Every reduction in the number of councils is accompanied by a reduction in the number of councillors.  Replacing committee government by cabinet government has concentrated power even further and left the remaining councillors with little to decide, and therefore little reason to stand.  Progressively replacing elections by thirds with whole council elections is already cutting by two-thirds the number of opportunities for democratic involvement by voters.

The ultimate aim is surely to have directly elected mayors everywhere, covering huge areas – though certainly short of regions, which pose an actual threat to centralism.  A gaggle of municipal Caesars voted into dictatorial power for four years, with no means of popular redress in the interim.  The result is ‘stable government’.  But it’s not what could be described as bottom-up vital democracy.

Do not imagine that what has begun in the big cities will not touch the shires.  The current Cities & Local Government Devolution Bill allows for mayors for combined authorities that include all (or just part) of a county council area.  A quarter of Ireland’s county councils have chosen to style their chairman ‘mayor’.  Although these county mayors are not executive mayors, they set a precedent that may, one day, produce an elected Mayor of Devon or Hampshire or Somerset.  Not very long ago, a Mayor of the North East – Greater Tyneside but with a vast rural hinterland – was perhaps the most preposterous idea in politics; now it’s a real possibility.

This is a measure of how unconservative the Conservatives can be in re-shaping the meaning of words.  It’s also a measure of London’s ability to get areas that are nothing like London to imitate its thoughts and actions, whereas doing things differently is actually what’s needed to give them an advantage over it.  The onward march of the mayors is but one example of this.  Tony Blair’s devolution of power to London was designed to evoke as few memories as possible of the old Greater London Council during Ken Livingstone’s term as its last Leader.  So the GLC became the GLA, the Leader became the Mayor, and London Transport became Transport for London.  Since then, we’ve seen Transport for Greater Manchester, Transport for New South Wales, Transport for Edinburgh, Transport for Ireland and, most recently, Transport for the North, which the Government now proposes to put on a statutory footing.  The first step to a northern regional government?  There’s unlikely to be a Transport for Wessex: the chronic under-funding of our region demonstrates the London view that if we think we have transport problems we must be imagining them.

Against this dismal backdrop, the Cornish experience is all the more remarkable.  Devolution of power to Cornwall is finally happening, so one cheer for that.  It’s inadequate and it’s undemocratic, so only the one cheer.  What’s to be devolved will allow better integration of public services and therefore produce better outcomes for less money.  It’s the case for devolution in a nutshell.  But what’s to be devolved will not allow Cornwall to decide its own future.  The crucial powers over housing and planning needed to halt the destruction of Cornwall’s communities and environment remain in Greg Clark’s hands, demonstrating that devolution is not defined by what’s devolved but by what’s retained.  Governments, aloof from it all, keep the important powers; councils take unpopular decisions they couldn’t shape but will be blamed for anyway.  Inadequacy is compounded by a lack of democracy; key powers are to be handed not to Cornwall County Council but to quangos like the Local Enterprise Partnership, to those who have never fought an election, let alone done so successfully, yet are still allowed to set local priorities because they’re rich.  It’s like the 20th century never happened.

What’s most remarkable about Cornwall however is that local institutions that already exist are being entrusted with anything at all.  Cornwall is the first rural county to make such gains, just as it was the first royal duchy back in 1337: forms of precedence that all help to build a case for more powers to follow.  It’s also the first area not to be forced down the mayoral route considered de rigueur for the conurbations, where a single directly elected focus is currently lacking.  (The Government was recently defeated in the Lords on this point, but that’s far from being the end of the parliamentary debate.)  It has to be said that if the conurbations lack an elected focus it is the Tories that the Tories have to blame for that because it was they who abolished the relevant county councils in 1986 and 1996.  Without putting in place a regional replacement worthy of the name.

Who has current responsibility for devolution?  The Ministry of Justice used to be the Department for Constitutional Affairs but constitutional affairs are now firmly the province of HM Treasury.  This became clear this month from the launch of a paper setting out the Government’s ‘productivity plan’, Fixing the foundations.  It contains some interesting facts, such as that London accounts for 28% of the UK’s GDP, while New York contributes 7% of the USA’s and Berlin just 5% of Germany’s.  The comment that ought to follow is that both those countries have federal systems of government that prevent the over-concentration of economic activity by preventing the over-concentration of political activity.  The printers seem to have missed that bit out.  An unfortunate omission.

There’s a section devoted to Mr Osborne’s fixation on elected mayors.  It quotes research showing that cities with fragmented governance perform badly.  It doesn’t point out that one reason why governance is so fragmented is that the London regime has taken power after power away from local councils because they can’t be trusted to toe the party line.  Returning a few with strings attached doesn’t address this key issue.  Moreover, so long as devolution is to business-dominated quangos rather than to those untrustworthy councils, joined-up governance will remain elusive.

So too, it seems, will consistency.  Fragmentation wasn’t judged a problem when the Tories abolished those county councils.  They talk too of a Northern Powerhouse, yet power is something that will not be exercised at the northern level: the Northern Powerhouse will be directed from the Chancellor’s office and delivered across a fragmented region by locally elected metro-mayors acting as his district commissioners.  How long is the north of England going to put up with this colonial-style regime?  It’s a vital question because the future of regionalism in England hinges on the willingness of northerners to lead the revolt against London divide-and-rule.  We’d love the revolt to start in Wessex but we face different issues – regions are different and that’s why we need to empower them all – and so we must watch and wait for our own moment of opportunity.

It cannot come too soon.  The Treasury’s paper bemoans the fact that England has as many as 353 councils, with 18,000 councillors, all able to put a democratic spanner in the works.  (It doesn’t point out that France has 37,000 councils, linked in a labyrinth of joint authorities, yet still manages to survive in the modern world.)  The tone is unmistakeably that economic survival depends on rooting out democracy.  Investors won’t come here if they have to persuade – in public – some irritating people who just don’t understand how corporate deals are done.  Without effective scrutiny, before decisions are taken, the whole thing is unavoidably suspect, but so what?  Greed is good, right?

Previous generations strove to bring the key economic levers under democratic control, to make business accountable.  Today’s is rushing headlong in the opposite direction, making democracy more businesslike, not in the laudable sense of efficient operation but in the altogether more unpalatable sense of making it less democratic.  If it starts with local government, it will not end there.  Why have MPs if we can have an elected Prime Minister, beyond criticism’s reach for a fixed five-year term?  (Mr Cameron referred this weekend to having to take “my Parliament with me” over Syria, as clear a case of lèse-majesté as can be imagined.)  Why have 200 separate states when we can have a single world president applying a single corporately written law?  Powerful institutions are what safeguard democracy, by being persistently awkward; powerful individuals are what undermine it, by attacking them as vested interests obstructing change.

The irony is that elected mayors, pushed again and again as an extension to and modernisation of our democratic traditions, are now being imposed on cities like Manchester that have already rejected them in referenda.  Bristol, meanwhile, is the only city to have voted to have an elected mayor under new legislation that prevents it voting to change its mind in the future.  The arguments for and against having elected mayors are essentially academic – and irrelevant – so long as the London regime is determined that we shall have them at all costs.

Castles in the Air?

In our previous post we described the across-the-board hypocrisy of Wessex MPs who still claim to be able to deliver unlimited growth while simultaneously protecting all of the environment that locals cherish.

Wednesday’s Western Daily Press furnishes a classic example.  Bristol East MP Kerry McCarthy was reported as initiating a debate at Westminster on the protection of high-grade farmland.  She castigated the Government for the way in which this key issue falls through the gap between two departments, is not a priority for either, and yet is of vital importance to “food security, food sovereignty and the UK’s declining self-sufficiency in food”.  She went on to say that in 2011 DEFRA reported a huge loss of the best land to development over recent years, “although we do not really know the extent, as such data are not collected systematically”.

News this is not.  We’ve been saying it all for years.  And years.  And years.  But it's an issue rarely on the political radar.  When it does appear, it's often hiding behind more fashionable ideas like 'urban food growing', the subject of the debate in which Ms McCarthy spoke.  Yes, allotments and gardens matter, but being hobby peasants won't keep us all fed: we need serious farming too.  The fact that MPs are debating the protection of allotments but are continuing to sidestep the bigger picture is an indication of how little they understand or care what goes on outside the big cities.

Kerry McCarthy’s party is Labour.  Her party did not in government, and does not in opposition, have any policy to curb population growth.  It’s even keener than the Conservatives – if that’s possible – to concrete over southern England in pursuit of astronomically high housing targets.  If you want homes for ever more millions Kerry, and you rightly won’t sacrifice our farmland to do it, please tell us, where will you put them?

Leccy Goes Local

Until 1948, the electricity supply in Bristol, as in many towns, was run as a council department, with its own power stations at Temple Back, Avonbank and Portishead.  In that year it was effectively confiscated by the London regime, without payment of full compensation, only to be sold on in 1990 as part of South Western Electricity, which is now owned by the French Government.

Now it emerges that Bristol is one of a group of cities looking to re-enter the energy market, working alongside the Bristol-based Ovo Energy, one of the smaller suppliers offering an alternative to the Big Six.  This is precisely what is needed in a world where so many alternatives to shameless profiteering have been closed off by the totalitarian liberals who dominate all three main London parties.

Does it go far enough?  Not yet.  Locally-managed power can be a real boost to more sustainable cities, integrated with urban heat networks, micro-renewables, smart metering and energy-from-waste.  And certainly not forgetting everything that needs doing to reduce demand through improved energy saving.  City and borough councils are as well placed today as in the 19th century to organise a more efficient energy distribution system.  The reason they got involved in securing local monopolies – in electricity, gas, trams, water, and even telephones – was because all these things involve digging up the streets; a little co-ordination avoids a great deal of inconvenience.  As we move inevitably towards an energy-poor economy, a well thought out strategy for making the most of what we have will make the difference between those cities that have a future and those that don’t.

Love the Land, Live the Life

It would make such a great slogan for our Wessex.  It is in fact already taken, as the English-language slogan of the Normandy Tourist Board.

There is such a thing, based not in one of the great cities – Caen or Rouen – but in a much smaller place, Evreux.  It exists despite the fact that officially Normandy doesn’t exist.  Officially, it is two separate regions, Lower Normandy, based in Caen, and Upper Normandy, based in Rouen.

Although there is a long-standing campaign to re-unite the two half-Normandies, there are also deep-rooted Jacobin desires to magnify, not lessen the harm to regional identity.  Both half-Normandies live under the constant threat of reorganisation by a centralist State that regards regional geography as malleable in the interests of its own survival.  There is the recurrent possibility that one will be merged with its Celtic neighbour to the west and the other with the area round the national capital.  Sounds familiar?  Can we learn from Norman regionalist resistance to this?  The WR Secretary-General, David Robins, recently made a brief visit to investigate.

French vehicle registration plates are wonderfully colourful, including besides the actual number an area code for the département and the regional logo.  You can buy stick-on labels for the département and region of your choice.  And, for once in France, choice means choice.  At Carrefour in Ouistreham you can buy stickers with the Lower or Upper Normandy logos.  Or you can be a true Norman patriot and prefer a sticker that displays the ancient ducal banner of two gold leopards on red.

(You can even buy a sticker that has the number 44 – for Loire Atlantique – beneath the Breton ‘gwenn-ha-du’ flag.  Even though, in the eyes of France’s leaders, Loire Atlantique isn’t in Brittany, because they say it isn’t.  In Wessex terms, ‘région Bretagne’, without Loire Atlantique, is like ‘the South West’, without Hampshire, since in both cases the historic capital is excluded.)

That Norman flag gets everywhere.  In Ouistreham it flies over one of the largest hotels, and over the wartime German blockhouse that towers above the port.  Even where you don’t spot the flag, you see not-so-subtle references to it in red-and-gold colour schemes, on buildings, in furnishings and on road signs.

Yes, the road signs.  Tourists are welcome in Normandy and their needs aren’t neglected as they are in Wessex.  The authorities know what they’ve come to see and are pleased to remind them.  Drive along the main roads to and from Caen and you’ll see the signs.  Images from the Bayeux Tapestry or from Norman architecture, done in pastel shades of pink and yellow.  Pointing out Caen – the city of Guillaume le Conquérant, Falaise – the birthplace of Guillaume le Conquérant, Bayeux – the tapestry of Guillaume le Conquérant.

Now imagine something similar on the A34 or the A303 – Winchester, the city of Alfred the Great, Wantage – the birthplace of Alfred the Great, Athelney – the refuge of Alfred the Great.  You have to imagine them because they don’t exist.  We don’t want tourists to come to Wessex, because there’s nothing to see here, right?  Because there’s no such place.  There’s the London commuter belt, and beyond that there’s the deckchairs and donkey rides.  And nothing more.  A Wessex Tourist Board?  Perish the thought.  The next thing we know the locals will be saying they want to cast off the London yoke.  Queue for the Brittany Ferries service at Portsmouth and you can watch the attractions of Normandy unroll slickly on the big TV screen.  What do we offer our visitors queuing on the Ouistreham side?  ‘South West England’.  They’re not even there when they disembark, but in the other ‘region’ next door, ‘The South East’.

So what impressions remain of Normandy?  Devastated after D-Day, Caen today is largely a modern, practical city, with, like many cities of the European mainland, an entirely new tram system, opened in 2002.  Purists will call it an electrically-powered guided bus and it’s due to be replaced with a real light rail system rather shortly.  George Ferguson, Mayor of Bristol, was interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Costing the Earth last week.  He said he'd love to spend billions giving Bristol "a fantastic new tramway system" like the one in its sister city of Bordeaux – the regional capital of Aquitaine – but Bristol doesn't have that sort of money.  And why ever not?  Answer that one George and you could be on your way to becoming the first Wessex Regionalist mayor.

Then there’s Bayeux.  Which has a lot more to offer than just the Tapestry.  No reproduction of that can ever convey the impact of the original.  The final scenes are full of revealing detail, once you get up close to the stitching that shows the two wyvern standards, the first fallen, the second held up defiantly against the imminent victors.  The first is gold, the second is red with a gold underbelly.  And so the registered colours of the Wessex flag too are red and gold, echoing both the Tapestry and the chroniclers’ references to a golden dragon.

We share rather more than you might expect with the old enemy.  Just as Cornwall and Brittany share black and white as their flag colours, so we share red and gold with the Normans, as we share geology, climate, a love of apples and pork, cheese and cream (though our cooking lags a little behind), caution, and a justifiable distrust of the national capital’s intentions.  They invaded us once.  We invaded them many more times in return.

It’s a bit like Scots-and-English at times.  You emphasise the differences or the similarities according to the agenda.  For every unionist who reminds us of Britain’s shared cultural and political heritage there’ll be a nationalist reminder that Scots have a shared cultural and political heritage with France.  It’s one that’s arguably been much more important in defining Scottishness – in terms of distinctive architecture, law, a sense of being European that is still resisted in England, and so on.  In a European context, Wessex, bound by its ferry routes to the mainland, has at least as much reason to make common cause with Bretons and Normans as with Scots or Northumbrians hundreds of miles away, the other side of Mercia.

And Wessex has a lot to learn.  Ouistreham’s high street has a small shop devoted solely to all things Norman.  It sells flags, foods, drinks, books, badges… well, just explore the website.  It’s the sort of thing that might be found in Cardiff or Edinburgh, and these days possibly Truro too, commercially focused but with definitely a nationalist crust to the artisanal loaf.

Despite it all, despite the occasional insistence that Normans are not to be considered as French folk, Norman nationalism is not, yet, mainstream.  It may not need to be.  Reality could in fact run ahead of ideology if budgetary pressures upon France force Normandy’s re-unification.  If the broader-based regionalist campaign to achieve that goal succeeds, to whom does a Norman regional government then look for reciprocal arrangements on our side of the Channel?  Who will speak for Wessex?

If we want to 'think Wessex', we have to be willing to look beyond jingoistic Britain for issues that resonate in the context of an entirely Wessex-centred geography.  Today, while we’re all thinking our brains out about what Scottish independence might mean for us if it comes to pass, let us not forget the much older associations of Europe’s Atlantic and Channel facades that have shaped us too.  ‘Fog in Channel; Continent cut off’ is a misconception that can raise a smile; too often it seems a political fact of life that does us no good at all.