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.

Bex & the Bankers

Colin Bex was on the march against austerity held in central London on Saturday (left).  His attire included 'that T-shirt' from the 2005 election campaign in Dorset South.  (The question 'Westminster Diktat?' appears above an image of the Cerne Abbas giant labelled 'Clubmen Arise' and beneath it the answer, 'Roger & Out!')  Colin reports on the event as follows:

“Turn-out was quite impressive – but nowhere near where it needs to be.  Until a 65 million multi-cultural British population musters at least 1,300,000 (2%) of its number onto the capital's streets against the criminals at Westminster, there will be no progress – 650,000 (1%) is insufficient.

Some of the Muslims departing to be brutalised by ISIS recently voiced their recognition of the blatant betrayal which characterises the early third-millennium British establishment.

I was within an ace of nobbling Russell Brand to tell him to steal our ideas (as I did Jeremy Corbyn), and to stop telling his fawning fan-club not to vote, but as he quit the rostrum, he leapt over the barrier and sprinted down Victoria Street to avoid being mobbed – or being engaged in a conversation with me unfortunately...”

It wasn’t Colin’s first public appearance since the election.  Last month he joined a ‘Positive Money’ demonstration outside 10 Downing Street – and afterwards in Parliament Square Gardens – supporting presentation of a petition for conversations with the Government to re-cast the monetary system by way of a Money Commission.

Our aim is not just to turn politics the right way up, so that local areas dictate to the centre, which acts solely as their executive agent; it’s to turn economics the right way up too, so that it becomes the means to conserve life on earth rather than to destroy it.  This month, scientists reported that a mass extinction of species is underway, caused by humans, and of which humans risk becoming part.

Underpinning this destruction is the obsession with economic growth, with having more and more of everything for more and more people, while never counting the environmental cost.  Economic success is defined in terms of rates of return that exceed the rate at which the environment renews itself.  Political interests have become slaves to economic interests who take and do not give.  Real wealth is extracted through unjustifiable levels of rent and speculation safeguarded by public policy; we need to renew politics so that economics can be made subservient to it and those abuses thereafter ended.  A sane economy must cost factors of production responsibly, for example through land value taxation and public ownership of public utilities.  One of its mantras must be ‘resource efficiency, GOOD; resource depletion, BAD’, another, equally, must be that we really are all in it together and that making ourselves greener by outsourcing our pollution to less developed countries is cruel, not clever.

The meme now circulating in politics and the media is that the banker-bashing is over, that normal times are returning.  It’s bad news if they are, since the revelations of corruption certainly haven’t abated.  The surface has barely been scratched.  Not only are the suspects still at large but there has been no fundamental reform of the institutions they helped to wreck.  The taxpayer is still footing the bill and, short of a revolution, is unlikely ever to be repaid.  The UK Government worries more over the possibility that crooked banks here might re-locate their headquarters than over how we might build an economy that is not dependent upon them.  In their blinkered imagination, politicians believe that devolution is all about creating new, go-getting ‘global cities’ like London.  A Northern Powerhouse in Manchester and Leeds.  A Western Powerhouse in Bristol and Cardiff, or Plymouth and Exeter.  A Southern Powerhouse in Hampshire.  It’s all about bowing down to money.  None of it’s about standing tall.

In the short-term, pouring millions of the unhappy onto London’s streets keeps alternative ideas alive and helps them circulate.  It must always be understood that it has no impact on a government determined to govern – up to 2 million were there in 2003 to oppose the Iraq War that happened regardless.

In the medium-term, it must be realised too that voting for anyone but the main London parties is the only remedy.  We, the people, punished Blair, Brown and Cameron for Iraq.  No, we didn’t, did we?  We’ve re-elected the war criminals three times over now and still wonder why terrorists mean us harm.

In the long-term, we'll have no need of events in London.  In the long-term we want rid of it.  We want its political, economic and cultural power over us set at nought in a free Wessex powerful enough in its own right to ignore it – and maybe laugh at how its fake democracy and its fake finance were ever taken so seriously.

We Are Not London

We know where London is, but is the rest of England also London?  It seems that the London regime would like to make it so.

Manchester has a proud history and a distinctive identity.  Or used to.  Yet Greater Manchester Transport has become ‘Transport for Greater Manchester’, because that’s the word-order they now use in London.  And yesterday, George Osborne announced a Boris for Greater Manchester, just two years after the city voted down the idea of a directly elected mayor.  The new man or woman will take control of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, whose members have surrendered their democratic rights in return for a promise that a few more crumbs will be devolved to the area.

Apart from Bristol, all the big cities ordered to vote on having an elected mayor rejected the idea, but Osborne is determined to roll it out regardless, with Leeds next in his sights.  Osborne’s job, of course, is to run the Treasury so the fact that he’s now become the expert on local government structures shows how deep purely financial interests now reach into the dark heart of policy-making.  Or maybe the minister actually responsible, Yorkshireman Eric Pickles, knows better than to court controversy on the wrong side of the Pennines.

The Mayor will take over some or all of the role of Police & Crime Commissioner for Greater Manchester.  Perhaps the thinking is that with more to do, he or she might even motivate voters to turn out, something they won’t do for the PCCs.  In last week’s PCC by-election in South Yorkshire, turnout was 15%.  In the first round of PCC elections in 2012, one ballot box in Newport famously contained not a single paper.  Why can’t we just dissolve the people and elect a new one?  Where’s the point in offering them anything when they’re clearly not interested?  Oh, but they are if they’re Scottish.  Scotland’s independence referendum, with an 84.5% turnout, shows that the fault doesn’t lie with the voters.  It lies with those who keep asking the wrong questions, creating new posts that no-one outside the London-based think-tanks ever asked for, disrupting local arrangements that were well understood.  Come along now children, we’re going to the polls today.  Shan’t.  But you know it’s your civic duty to sign away your power with the mark of an illiterate.  Not going to.

Well, good for them.  We’ve always had a sense of solidarity with those up north who have their whole world regularly turned upside down by the social vivisectionists in London.  Their governance, their economy, their identity, all are things to be experimented with until the region conforms to London expectations.  (Serve them right, you may well say, for voting for London parties instead of for their own and you’d be correct that they have less and less excuse now.)  So they’ll be getting a Mayor of Greater Manchester and a Mayor of West Yorkshire.  But if all of the recently established Combined Authorities for the conurbations are now to be turned into mayoralties, what of Tyneside / Wearside?  That’s one area where things are different.

There’s still plenty of talk of creating an Integrated Transport Authority for Greater Bristol – a new Avon County Council in all but name – and the idea is unlikely to go away any time soon.  The same thinking resurfaces at times like this in South Hampshire.  The fact is that it’s yesterday’s solution.  Tyne & Wear had an Integrated Transport Authority until this year, when it was abolished in favour of the North East Combined Authority, a wider body taking in the surrounding counties.  If you want better transport, it has to be better for everyone, not just the cities.  It has to be about developing a transport network, and for that you need a regional perspective.  The North East Combined Authority is a step in that direction, being not much smaller in area than the regional assembly that voters rejected in 2004, though it lacks direct elections or significant new powers.

So when Osborne completes his roll-out, will there be a Mayor of the North East?  Where does the nonsense end?  Ed Miliband, not wishing to be outflanked, is promising powers to arbitrary groupings of shires, to be known as ‘county regions’.  Will they be getting mayors too?  The Mayor of Cornwall & Isles of Scilly?  The Mayor of Heart of the South West?  With Manchester Londonised, and Leeds next, is English local government all doomed to find transparent, deliberative democracy phased out in favour of an elective dictatorship of personality politicians forming a scrum round the Treasury’s big ball of money?  Rugby is perhaps the wrong analogy.  This isn’t Rugby.  This is Eton.  (Or maybe St Paul’s.)

David Cameron has bought-in to the current fad for empowering England’s big cities because it enables any more radical action to be kicked into the long grass.  Shame on Ed Miliband for not seeing this.  It’s a fad however that deserves to be comprehensively deconstructed:

1.                  Cameron is not to be trusted on decentralisation.  He promised ‘localism’: an end to Whitehall interference in local decision-making.  Instead he has allowed Whitehall to obtain new powers to interfere, while making none of the really big changes that are needed.  Whole Whitehall departments such as Communities and Education have no other significant function but to interfere in local decision-making.  They wouldn’t be missed.  So why the delay in scrapping them?

2.                  The ‘cities first’ agenda isn't about fairness.  It degrades the importance of the lives lived by those of us who are not in the big cities.  If cities are trusted to make their own decisions, why hold back the countryside and small towns?  Have they nothing to contribute?  Why do they need to be micro-managed from London if others don’t?

3.                  It will be nice for some to get more powers, but aren’t these the same powers – or some of them – that have been taken away from local government over the past 70 years, by Labour efficiency men and Tory ideologues?  Don’t the strings attached make any concessions meaningless?

4.                  The idea of cities as drivers of economic growth is flavour of the month.  But other economic geographies are available – like the South Coast Metropole or the M4 Corridor.  These are geographies that transcend local government boundaries but fit naturally within the boundaries of a Wessex region.  Should radicals even be welcoming the idea of economic growth anyway?  Can we be sure that it’s not just a euphemism for environmental, cultural and social devastation, here or abroad?  Who benefits, besides the bankers?

5.                  City-regions, whatever their boundaries or powers, are just a different kind of local government.  They're a distraction from the business of real regionalists, which is to devolve power to the nations and regions of Britain.  Cities won’t have assemblies with law-making powers and exclusive control of the NHS, education policy, regional railways or the environment.  Cities deserve more power, but so do we all.  Regional devolution is the bold, substantial way to deliver that.

6.                  Applying extreme surgery to local government in order to replicate the ‘London effect’ is missing the point.  London is more successful and other cities less so not because it has an elected mayor but because London houses the UK Government and benefits from its largesse.  A Boris for every big city is no more than constitutional facadism if that regional concentration of power and resources is not addressed.  A Boris first, then we might think about devolution, is the kind of insulting, controlling behaviour that proves London is not serious about sharing.

The cities agenda is intimately linked to the roll-out of elected mayors.  And that's very much about taking decisions out of the public glare of the council chamber and into closed rooms where Big Business and Big Government can do deals with the lone, bullyable individual in whom all power is vested.  This isn't about opening up democracy; it's all about shutting it down.

And it doesn’t matter which party is in power.  A ruling-class consensus emerged sometime in the 1990s that English local government was to be changed over to an American / continental model, something that had been discussed on the fringes of power since at least the 1970s.  Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, on the other hand, have no elected mayors, but devolution there provides an alternative focus for strategic decision-making that arguably makes them unnecessary.

The collegiate style that has served England well for centuries is an anomaly.  But how to get rid of it?  Blair tried the fanfare approach.  Choose how to be governed, by demanding a referendum!  Few found the offer appealing.  Cameron / Clegg applied more pressure.  Compulsory referenda, with the previous right to undo the decision withdrawn.  Bristol apart, it still didn’t work.  So Osborne is sent in to twist the arms of civic leaders until they say that yes, in the name of our unconsulted electorates, we volunteer to give you everything if you’ll give us just a little.

There may or may not be a good case for elected mayors but there probably isn’t.  The fact that only calling in the heavies produces results suggests that the case is not one normally found compelling.  The fact that other countries do things their way isn’t a convincing argument in itself for following suit.  If it were, then any comparison with American or continental practice would reveal the existence of state or regional governments.  And where are they in the Coalition’s harmonisation scheme?  The case for following foreign practice in that respect is much, much stronger than the case for elected mayors.  Not least because it would be a fundamental shift in the location of power, rather than a reshuffling of an existing pack to reduce transparency and increase the scope for keeping local government on a tight leash.

Analysis of what’s going on is, sadly, far too easy.  Our politics is built upon the idea that power and money reside in London and that our best chance of seeing those things used for our benefit is to bow deeply and tug our forelocks hard. 

The London regime has no power but that which our votes give it.  The London regime has no money but that which our taxes give it.  (Even its stupendous debts would be impossible to run up without a reasonable expectation of them being honoured at some point.)  While we have no quarrel with the ordinary folk of London, a new politics, a politics of regional renaissance, must work ceaselessly to deny it both these things.  Because we too, in all of the regions, have a voice to be heard and a vision of a better life to be lived.

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.

Here We Go Again

The regions are being rebuilt, even under the Coalition.  Last week a consultation began on the formation of a ‘combined authority’ for Durham, Northumberland and Tyne & Wear.  It will take over transport, economic development and regeneration powers from the seven member councils.  It’s almost the regional assembly all over again, and will be if the five unitary councils in the Tees Valley join later.  Similar combined authorities are being set up in other metropolitan areas, though none on this scale.

Within Wessex, councils in Devon and Somerset have pooled their economic development role and share a fire & rescue service.  There are rumours of forthcoming mergers in other departments too.  Sometimes this sort of co-operation can move us in the right direction, as in fire control services, which are now co-ordinated across most of southern and central Wessex, defying London’s divide-and-rule obsession with the ‘South West’ and the ‘South East’.  Such developments are essential to improve our region’s resilience in large-scale emergencies.  What is of great concern to us is when co-operation stops short of the Wessex level because London insists on a different agenda.

This seems to be the case with the ‘combined authorities’, all of which are part of a drive to create a ‘city-region’ scale of governance rather than a truly regional one.  Cities matter a lot to this government, as they did to the last.  The belief is that concentrating decisions and resources in cities, at the expense of the countryside, will produce some sort of economic miracle that will benefit everybody.  So we all need to doff our caps to those creative, entrepreneurial, interconnecting urbanites without whom we would be nothing.  Sounds familiar?  Yes, it’s the London view of the world turned into a general theory of economics.

Underpinned in policy terms by ‘city deals’.  Despite the faint echo of Roosevelt’s New Deal (which was much more wide-ranging), the real inspiration for the term is the Thatcherite obsession with contracts, with shaking hands on a mutually beneficial transaction.  The problem is that this isn’t a contract between equals.  What city deals are about is our cities signing-up to support for government policy, however distasteful, in return for getting back some of the money the London regime has taken from them in tax.

The original idea of putting cities centre-stage by means of elected mayors has been largely shot down by the electorate.  It was always going to give rise to questions about the scope of their mandate.  Giving elected mayors powers over hinterlands that have no say in their election was too undemocratic even for the London regime to defend.  City-regions – joint authorities for cities, suburbs and surrounding countryside – are Plan B.  They’ve been discussed among the elite for around 50 years and are now flavour of the month not only with the London regime but with the half-free Welsh Assembly, which wants similar structures for the Swansea and Cardiff/Newport travel-to-work areas.  That way the Assembly can continue to preside over a fragmented, colonial economy instead of tackling the real job of building a genuinely free and integrated one.  Municipal leaders in the English regions have exactly the same priority: keep it so local it hurts.  All because, in their experience, shaped by the capricious acts of the London regime, the regionalist alternative is a leap in the dark.

City-regions give the appearance of decentralisation without the reality.  Their powers are drawn up, not down.  They are small, manageable, and no threat at all to the London regime.  They can even be played off, very aggressively, against the aspirations of small nations and historic regions, contrasting a supposedly sophisticated global-cities-club identity with rooted territorial identities now to be judged passé.  They breed suspicion about the motives of neighbouring cities.  They erode traditional local government without replacing it with anything that has a compelling identity of its own.  They entrench the idea that life is urban-centred and that nothing larger than the travel-to-work area is real until the level of the sovereign UK is reached.  That’s why they’re flavour of the month.  And no-one should be fooled into thinking otherwise.

Growing Into What?

Labour announced last month that it will return to its bad old ways with a vengeance. Towns and cities will be given ‘the right to grow’, that is, the right to build over adjoining land. Neighbouring areas that resist will simply be stamped upon.

It appears that Ed Miliband really is thick enough not to realise that the last time ‘the right to grow’ was out and about it was known as Lebensraum. There’s a lot more to that than Godwin’s Law: it’s an entirely serious point. Miliband, like all big nation-state politicians, cannot grasp the vital analogy between national sovereignty and local autonomy.

Invade a country uninvited, with tanks, etc. (because you have an expanding population and the power to dismiss as worthless what others treasure) and that’s a crime. Invade the countryside uninvited, with bulldozers, etc. (for exactly the same reason) and that’s trumpeted as a progressive social policy. In the world which WR strives to create, it’s still a crime. The policy is that of a bully, dressing up a love of force in pretend social conscience, and with an environmental conscience approaching zero.

Oh, but we have a housing crisis! We do not. We have a population crisis, thanks to Labour. And whom does Labour punish? The reckless masses of the burgeoning towns and cities? No. It punishes the innocent. The rural areas that just want to be left in peace. To grow food for THEM.

Labour really doesn’t do agriculture. Even more than the market fundamentalist wings of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, Labour is blind to the fact that ‘growth’ has to displace something that is already there and which has a value in its own right (even before Peak Oil bites). The ‘growth’ that all the London parties crave is not taking place into a vacuum. It isn’t just a load of worthless scenery disappearing beneath those bulldozers. Growth is taking place into a resource – our farmland – that represents our future.

That resource has a value, or at least a price, but how it is valued by policy-makers drastically under-estimates its worth.

Consider the ‘blue finger’. It’s a strip of high-grade farmland on the edge of Bristol, so called because, as Grade 1 land, it is coloured dark blue on Agricultural Land Classification maps. It has a long history of market gardening to meet Bristol’s food needs. There is a local group, the Blue Finger Alliance, devoted to its protection.

On its website is an article on the true value of land, which exposes the false accounting used when deciding to take land out of food production and use it for something else, like housing or road building.

The benefits of a development, say a road, are measured over its expected lifetime, say 60 years. But the value of the food production lost over that time is ignored. Only the immediate compensation value of the farmland is measured. The cost of a scheme is what it takes to build; the benefits are calculated on a far more generous basis, so the result can never be fair to objectors.

Over the course of the 20th century, politicians have had to make ever more complex decisions about the use of resources, and technicians have therefore come up with ever more complex systems for measuring costs and benefits. But do they – can they? – get it completely right? Accountancy and economic forecasting are hugely political areas, where a little fiddling with the figures can turn a dead duck into the panacea for all our problems. Think HS2. At times it really has been about dead ducks, or at least dead geese. In the 1960s the choice of where to put a third London airport involved trying to assign a price to the wildfowl of the Thames estuary.

So: we try to measure the unmeasurable and yet we ignore what can be measured. Advantages are exaggerated and monetised, while dis-benefits are minimised or ignored and not monetised. Tiny time savings by individual travellers – minutes or even seconds – are aggregated up to persuade us that the result will be an economic boom. The result of all this false accounting is massive spending on the wrong kind of infrastructure and other development. Not the kind that will be needed in a regionalised future but the kind that results from projecting unsustainable trends into infinity. It’s high time for a new politics that values other values than ‘value’.

When we point out the bare facts, they are routinely dismissed. Weren’t the existing cities green fields once? Yes, of course they were, but adding more damage won’t make a better world. We’ve long passed the point where we can go on accommodating urban growth and still have enough land to be self-sufficient in food. The right of the cities to grow equals the duty of the countryside to shrink and always, always, to retreat, and that cannot be in anyone’s long-term interest.

Elected Mayors – An Afterword

It’s been an interesting week for local democracy. Last Wednesday, Doncaster’s elected mayor, Martin Winter, was seen doing his best to avoid giving an interview to BBC2’s Newsnight. Then on Friday the elected mayor of Stoke-on-Trent, Mark Meredith, was arrested on suspicion of corruption. Stoke is the city that has already voted to scrap its directly elected mayor and go back to the older, more broadly based form of local governance.

We must, of course, presume Mr Meredith to be innocent, but the thing about justice, famously, is that it must not only be done but be seen to be done. How much easier that would be if all municipal decisions came before open meetings, to be voted upon by all councillors, and not as now, taken secretly by the chosen few or just by Il Duce himself.

The gist of Newsnight’s report was that Doncaster folk are fed up with their mayor. The Council has passed two motions of no confidence in him but he refuses to go. His successes were said to be a number of big urban property deals, his failures the core services, especially to the outlying villages, that are basically the reason residents pay their council tax.

It all provides interesting background to the Tories’ proposals for elected mayors contained in their Green Paper, Control Shift. The benefit of an elected mayor, they say, is the ability to “enhance the prestige” of a city. Code for “smooth the path of property developers”? Is this an aim to be pursued at the expense of getting the basics right? The social workers well-managed, the potholes filled, the schools teaching soundly? It’s these issues that ward councillors deal with in their surgeries and they expect to see action taken. No chance then, if the mayor won’t go when it’s clear he’s outstayed his welcome.

The Tories, instead of respecting local democracy, want to force major cities, including Bristol, to hold a referendum on moving to a mayoral system, with a presumption in favour of change. Who pays for this expense? Do the Tories not know that if enough local folk – just 5% – want an elected mayor they can force a referendum already?

Of course they do. But where Labour leads, the Tories now follow. And that is towards a ‘managed democracy’ where we are asked loaded questions, about a filtered list of issues, within biased voting arrangements. The Swiss wouldn’t take it. They have direct democracy by referendum on issues raised by the public taking the initiative. And so should we.

Labour’s desperation shows in a document out for consultation until the end of this week. It aims to make it easier to get local governance structures changed, and harder to get them changed back again when, sure enough, they don’t work and folk are fed up with that fact. Wessex Regionalists are sick of Whitehall-knows-best, sick of being told what decisions are safe for us to make and which aren’t. And sick of the collusion between the London parties to keep the whole interfering nonsense chugging along.

By the way, happy birthday to the Earl. The Wessex Wyvern is flying over the Town Council offices in Weston-super-Mare to mark his festivities. Let this be the year he starts to earn his title and stops pretending there’s no such place as Wessex.

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.