Wanted: an NHS

“The power which causes the several portions of the plant to help each other, we call life… intensity of life is also intensity of helpfulness — completeness of depending of each part on all the rest.  The ceasing of this help is what we call corruption.”

John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Volume 5 (1860)

Cornish academic Bernard Deacon tweeted this week that if you think Labour can be trusted on the NHS you should remember what they did to it last time they were in power.  It was a year at the weekend since the death of one-time Bristol MP Tony Benn, who predicted a revolution should anyone abolish the NHS.  Well, there’s been a huge amount of tampering and so far we’re still waiting for the reaction to start.  That’s partly because of the cross-party consensus that the NHS is to be dismantled by stealth and partly due to an unwillingness to consider less familiar parties to support in defence of it.

Simon Jenkins, writing this week in The Guardian (a London newspaper), suggested that what’s needed is a more integrated service.  Why aren’t pharmacies based in doctors’ surgeries?  A very good question.  In recent years the NHS has spent a lot of money relocating surgeries to better premises, sometimes a long way from their old ones, but the pharmacies haven’t necessarily moved with them.  Why is it not thought through from the patient’s point of view? 

If we had a real NHS, with all prescriptions free, there’s no reason why pharmacists, like doctors and nurses, should not be an integral part of it, even if they remained as private businesses under contract.  The NHS could, for example, save the cost of printing paper prescriptions, the order simply passing from the doctor’s screen to the pharmacist’s to be made ready for collection before the patient leaves the surgery.

For a generation now the idea has been that we need to break up and privatise the last of the ‘socialist monopolies’.  A UKIP spokesman even described the NHS as the ‘Reichstag bunker of socialism’.  (Next time the cheeky chap’s in Berlin he might like to check the geography: the Reich Chancellery bunker, if that’s what he meant, was nowhere near the Reichstag.)  They’re all barking up the wrong tree, quite possibly the money tree of private profit.  What the NHS needs is not less socialism but more, with full integration of all caring services in each locality and region, and full democratic accountability for all non-clinical decisions.  Plus, of course, the flushing-out of PFI and all other forms of vampire finance.  If the State has to go crawling to bankers for the cash to do good then the cash is plainly in the wrong hands to begin with.

The NHS thus re-imagined would be a prime example of the community-benefit State in action.  That is to say, a State that organises essential services, whether publicly or privately delivered, for the benefit of the community, not that of funders or providers (whose interests are NOT the same as the community’s).  A State therefore in which elected representatives ask searching questions about why things are done as they are.  It’s about getting more out of less, rather than hoping for increased resources that in the longer term will not be there.  The community, as the beneficiary of what works, must also be the judge of what works.  It should be unthinkable to bypass the community in favour of bureaucratic assessments over which the community does not have the final, or indeed any, say.

Health and well-being at an individual level are also the product of the health and well-being of the environment and the society that we inhabit.  Preserving, rehabilitating and enriching our land and our culture are part of creating a sense of home in a world where roots are increasingly being torn up.  The defence of Wessex must be about meeting all our irreducible needs, without encroaching on the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.  That was where the classic definition of ‘sustainable development’ was leading us but, since posterity doesn’t have the vote, the current generation is taking much more than its fair (or healthy) share.

Regionalism is neither necessarily of the Left nor necessarily of the Right and so is open to allegations of inconsistency from both.  The fact is that it’s strictly empirical, guided by what sustains our communities in reasonable liberty, reasonable security and reasonable comfort.  It cannot create health any more than it can create happiness.  But it can remove the barriers that remote and undemocratic centralism and its matching market obsessions have erected against both.

Building: the Resistance

The resistance to building is building.  There’s now a national alliance, Community Voice on Planning.  Here’s what’s currently centre-screen on their home page:

“Please don’t forget our DAY OF ACTION on 12 APRIL.  The theme is ‘Listen to the People’s Voice on Planning’

This is a sample of some of the Events that we know of so far:

·        Rural Oxfordshire Action Rally (ROAR) is calling all action groups, parish councils and residents to join them as they present a united front opposed to the senseless concreting over of green fields surrounding our towns, villages and hamlets in the name of economic progress.  They held a rally in Witney on Saturday 24 January.  Their next rally will be in Wantage and is hosted by the Wantage and Grove Campaign Group.  It will take place on our day of Action 12 April.  So if you are in the neighbourhood please join them at 11am.

·        Save the Countryside has moved its annual walk from May to the shared date of 12th April.  They are organising a 2 hour walk with refreshments around the perimeter of the green belt land area proposed for an estate of 4800 houses on the NW of Cheltenham.

·        East Devon Alliance are holding a double funeral for Death of Democracy and Death of the Countryside with 2 coffins, speeches on national (NPPF) issues, District Council and Litany of contentious developments across the district, to be held in park outside District Council Offices at 3pm on Sunday 12 April.  Groups with placards from across the district, petition etc.”

How revealing that all three examples are in Wessex, truly the front line in saving England from the octopus.  A look through the list of CoVoP’s member organisations reveals many more gatherings of besieged and desperate local folk who can’t understand why localism doesn’t mean that locals get to decide.

Pressure groups are better than nothing, of course.  But who are they lobbying?  And why do they expect to be listened to?  Are they corporate donors to party funds?  Are they on the Minister’s Christmas card list?

Is it not all a waste of time, without a willingness to unseat the politicians responsible for the problem?  Nothing will change in Wessex until all of the London parties are destroyed at the polls.  We wish our countryside campaigners the very best of luck; we’re also ready to welcome them as members when, as sure as bricks follow corn, they lose the battle.

Our Silent, Supine Cities

It’s been a good week’s viewing for fans of Wessex history.  On Monday the BBC ran a repeat of Michael Wood’s portrait of Alfred the Great, warming up for Neil Oliver on Tuesday, who wove a documentary about the king’s bones and their present whereabouts.  If it was supposed to be an exclusive, it didn’t work.  The press ran the story over the weekend, so it was no longer a surprise to learn that a single surviving bone excavated at Winchester’s Hyde Abbey is either Alfred’s or his son’s.  At most one bone of William the Bastard is thought to survive, in Caen, so it’s disappointing to think that Alfred has only a 50:50 chance of matching that.

There’s a slight possibility that other, scattered bones still lie beneath the site of Hyde Abbey but who will fund another excavation?  Wintonians down the centuries have had something of a love-hate relationship with their heritage, as the mixed fortunes of Hyde demonstrate.

From time to time, the city inspires a generation to really care about its past, present and future, and then slips back into its philistine ways.  We received news this month that the local civic society, the Winchester Residents’ Association, has wound up after 40 years.  Two of its stalwarts, Chris Webb and the late Alan Weeks, will be familiar to WR members as defenders not only of the city’s identity but of that of the wider Wessex region.  We can see in the demise of the Residents’ Association a metaphor for what is happening right across Wessex as a caring generation finds that there is no-one else to whom it can hand on the torch.  Thatcherism has bred a fractured and dis-spirited nation, of utilitarians contemptuous of the joy of learning and of cynics unable to believe that voting or campaigning can prevail against them.

An obituary for Alan Weeks in the Hampshire Chronicle in 2010 commented that his indefatigable campaigning had been based on a strong sense of right and wrong:  “He had a very simple view that people in Winchester must understand how important Winchester is.  He could not understand people who didn’t.”

There is no doubt that Winchester is special.  Nor is there any doubt that the threats to what makes it special have come thick and fast – motorways, urban sprawl, central area redevelopment – and while campaigners can point to some marvellous victories there have also been crushing defeats.  The water meadows at St Cross were saved from the road builders but Twyford Down was not.  It stands as a scar upon the Wessex landscape that will easily outlive humanity.  Housebuilders have deep pockets, deep enough to hire the best lawyers to take on even the London regime and over-turn its decisions if they go the ‘wrong’ way.  Barton Farm, so long the subject of citizens’ protests, is set to become a carpet of yuppy-box homes for those hurrying for the early train and another day doing despicable things in the City.  (Why do Londoners want to live in Wessex towns and cities?  Is it for any other reason than that they’ve made such an almighty mess of their own?)

If concerned residents no longer gather in their associations to express their faith in democracy, is it because local politicians have at last got the message and mended their ways?  Have the associations rendered themselves unnecessary?  Absolutely not.  Most historic cities of Winchester’s scale and vulnerability – Bath, Cambridge, Durham, Oxford, York – are protected (at least in theory) by Green Belt.  Not Winchester.  Residents still fear that the green backdrop to the city will disappear beneath housing within their lifetimes.  The city and county councils have their orders from London to build, build, build and the carrots and sticks are such that the orders must be obeyed.  Local opinion is to be fobbed off, not followed.

Local politics is the usual Tory/LibDem contest that is no real contest at all.  (The two parties are evenly matched on the current city council.)  Labour won the Parliamentary seat once, in 1945, to universal surprise (though having Eastleigh’s industrial workers helped in those days), losing it again five years later.  Wintonians have had three opportunities to elect a Wessex Regionalist MP and taken none.  Decades of conditioning have persuaded many that they are part of a London-leaning ‘South East’ rather than of Wessex.  Occasionally, conversations will start up in the city’s pubs about how Wessex could do with Home Rule.  Great idea.  Who’s going to organise it?  Oh, someone else.  Someone less busy.

And in the absence of Home Rule, Winchester is slowly ground away, made uniform with every other dormitory town within reasonable distance of London Waterloo.  Its fields are replaced by houses; its historic buildings are replaced by flats; its identity, instead of being cherished, is subverted for profit.

Winchester’s bus station, a city landmark for generations, is due to close to make way for the retail-led Silver Hill redevelopment.  The developers promised a replacement.  Now the economics suggests that it will be deleted from the scheme in order to preserve the latter’s viability.  We can see in Salisbury how that works.  Salisbury’s bus station closed this month, the buses were evicted and passengers now queue at bus shelters set up in the mediæval streets.  On pavements too narrow for the flow of pedestrians to pass comfortably behind them.

The fate of the bus stations is a sign of the times.  Privatisation of profits, including those from redevelopment.  Socialisation of losses, and of the expense involved in providing somewhere for the buses to park.  Andover and Bournemouth are determined to build new bus stations.  Clearly, there are still some who care, but how to motivate the rest?

The decline of collective responsibility happens because we accept a model of economics and politics that decrees that the community doesn’t matter.  That there is no such thing as society.  That government must help everyone to achieve their ambitions for their own lives, not those of others.  That government, be it in the form of bigger unitary councils, elected mayors, or straightforward regulatory capture through ‘partnerships’, exists to oil the wheels of commerce and certainly not to provide the context for civic virtue.  It’s tragic that Salisbury, Winchester and so many other places in Wessex are being ruined, often irreparably, but by our inaction we signal that it’s our choice.  And who in our individualistic, inward-looking world will dare argue against that?

Defending the Defensible

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot.
Rudyard Kipling, Tommy (1890)

Never in the field of current affairs have there been so many unflattering headlines about the military as we have witnessed this weekend. Marines accused of murder. Retired top brass accused of corrupt-(ish) practices. The Territorials to be renamed the Reserve and made to fill the gaps in regular provision. Gaps brought on by a semi-bankrupt nation attempting still to play at being a world power to please empire loyalists in the shires.

It seems Britain’s establishment continues to crave ‘influence’ in the world largely because its upbringing inhibits it from respecting the autonomy of others (at home as much as abroad). Greed is good, according to Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. You want it? Grab it. Why ever not? After three decades of regulatory capture, of rules rewritten at the expense of social and environmental stability, the dividing line between enterprise and theft has become increasingly flexible. The self-interested men (and women) are our new heroes.

New Labour, inspired by American neo-cons and ably supported by the Opposition, took Gekko’s doctrine to a new level. Violence is good. Especially with the ending of the Cold War, the cold-blooded killing of people in other countries has become an acceptable and sometimes popular tool of normal politics. And so a part too of the cross-party consensus. Since 1945, the UK has been involved in more military operations than any other country, including the USA, and there is no sign of this belligerence diminishing.

We are all sucked up into the vortex and expected to play our scripted part, ‘celebrating’ ‘our’ armed forces even as they convert psychologically damaged raw recruits into long-term victims of PTSD, shooting to order in illegal wars that have no moral purpose, never did and never will. The armed forces have become in effect a cult: the disciplined use of rational means in pursuit of utterly irrational ends.

Back to 1945 then. Remember the four ‘D’s of the Potsdam Agreement? Opinions differ as to what exactly they were but de-militarisation, along with de-nazification, features in everyone’s list. The Germans were to be cleansed of their militarist past because it was a bad thing. Our own militarist past – and PRESENT – still require similar attention. Will it take a well-deserved, comprehensive defeat to bring that about? And then what? If we want a military we can possibly consider to be doing a worthwhile job then the best way to start may well be to abolish the whole lot of it and think it through again.

So, from the beginning, why do we need the armed forces at all? What good do they do? Several countries get by without having any. Iceland is one, yet it still won the Cod Wars of the early 70s, humiliating the Royal Navy by a combination of diplomatic pressure and fisheries protection vessels engaged in sea rage. Ideally, military spending everywhere would be nil. Spending directed towards military objectives is almost always waste (though research can lead to civilian applications that transform our lives for the better). If it leads to war, the waste is ghastly. If it doesn’t, it’s still money that could have been spent on better things. The challenge is to so organise our affairs as to minimise the need for military spending, especially as conventionally understood. The real need is for an emphasis on tension reduction, rather than on the received wisdom that violence is a necessary part of the human condition, let alone one to be glorified. No easy thing to do, but so much better than the alternative. And the key lesson remains that tension can be raised as surely by too much military spending as by too little: so don’t be the one who started it.

Looking ahead, conflict seems as likely to require military software as military hardware, as rival teams of hackers work to bring down each other’s critical national infrastructure. More brain, less brawn? Quite possibly. As defence blurs seamlessly into counter-terrorism, surveillance and interception, as movements, not states become the enemy, so the internal/external divide dissolves and questions of civil liberty arise to challenge what is being done, by whom, to whom, and for whose benefit. ‘National security’ is becoming an increasingly unconvincing reason for not discussing national security.

It may well be that the military mind of the future will be even more focused on systems and logistics. Valuable skills exist in dealing with crisis situations, in military aid to the civil authorities when circumstances overwhelm the response normally available. Natural disasters furnish the best example, as when the Army was asked to help out in Cheltenham and Gloucester during the floods of 2007. It’s not just about manpower, not just about soldiers filling sandbags. It’s also about the strategic thinking needed to put in place parallel systems, such as for distributing drinking water or back-up generators. And to do so on timescales that bureaucracies or businesses, for whom the unexpected is a rare event that usually cannot command instant resources, would find truly challenging. Amidst all the rhetoric about outsourcing and encouraging the public sector to take risks, it’s worth pondering the consequences for resilience when contractors fail or risks go too far. (Remember G4S.)

Military planning is at the other extreme from financial whizz-kiddery: what matters, what has to be argued for, is what needs to be done, where, how and when, not what the price tag says. It’s about physical realities, not made-up money, which in the Mad Max scenario of the future isn’t worth a thing. When the Soviet Union collapsed after 1990, legal ownership, bureaucratic regulation and money were all bent to the will of those who had physical control over the material resources. What mattered wasn’t who had jurisdiction over the factory but who controlled the machinery, the energy sources to run it, and either the co-operation of those who could work it or access to enough violence to take it over anyway. Another parallel could be the fall of Rome, when the senatorial landowners merged with the barbarian chiefs to lay the foundations of feudalism. If we would avoid rule by diversifying drugs barons, local warlords and ruthless opportunists generally, then collective security needs to move up the agenda, sharpish.

During the decades either side of 1980, computer consultant and Welsh nationalist writer Derrick Hearne set down his political philosophy in three books: The Rise of the Welsh Republic, The Joy of Freedom and The ABC of the Welsh Revolution. Today more than ever they deserve detailed study, not least because Hearne’s aim was to map a route to survival in what he predicted was the forthcoming Age of Scarcity, looming larger now than then. Equally rejecting big monopoly capitalism and big bureaucratic socialism for the alternative of a ‘community-benefit state’, Hearne visualised a Wales in which markets and interventions therein were led to support rather than destroy communities. It was a no-nonsense vision with universal youth conscription for public works, including the building of a new rail network, a focused exports policy modelled on the Japanese zaibatsu, and utter contempt for Labour’s legacy of cowed colonial cronyism. Not all of this programme is transferable: the English have a deep distrust of large standing armies, and hence of conscription, and are, on balance, quite right to feel that way. That said, there are thought-provoking arguments all round.

In building his ‘model’ of a free Wales, Hearne the computer consultant was keen to set up some creative tensions and feedback loops. The institutions he described were designed to balance short-term economic thinking with long-term strategic thinking. The latter role he assigned to the Army of the Republic as ideological guardian. It’s a role often played by the military elite in countries struggling to escape from a past world. Atatürk’s Turkey is perhaps the best-known example. Outside Switzerland, it’s not a role that sits easily with democracy, but in Hearne’s not unrealistic future, democracy would have to work hard for its survival. His suggestions were intended to assist, not hinder, that goal. Indeed, the primary purpose of his proposed army was not to wield weaponry at all, but willpower.

The Army’s job was to identify, create and maintain the facilities and stocks required for survival, including survival of an economic blockade. There is, Hearne pointed out, a difference between an economic planning consideration, based on investment returns, and a survival consideration, based on the worst-case scenario. One concrete example he gave was that “the Army would insist upon a reserve stock of steam locomotives and their attendant servicing facilities, which [economic] planners might find somewhat quaint”. In Wessex, a comparable example might be the battle to protect farmland, as the source of our future food supply, against those ‘economists’ who consider its short-term residential development value to outweigh any need to think ahead. Food security. Energy security. Environmental security. There are more threats out there than we might care to think.

There are many terms used to describe the kind of strategic thinking needed. ‘Horizon scanning’ is one. And there are many ways of applying that thinking. One is to think simply about the future of everyone, as in really caring about posterity. Another is to look back as far as forward in the life of a specific community, as in the Seven Generations concept. What is lacking is any mechanism for turning such thoughts into action. Think-tanks often appear disconnected from the day-to-day policy measures that really need to start to be turned around now. The military are much more used to grasping the connection between objectives and resources and both the opportunities and the threats presented by change.

We condemn the misuse of taxpayers’ money to fund needless wars, to subsidise the arms trade and to keep some of the most beautiful countryside in Wessex out of bounds. (Nor should we belittle the political consequences: the occupying forces in the Devizes constituency number 11,000, plus their families, easily more than the Tory MP’s majority.) But we also need clear perception and resolute action to build a viable future for Wessex in uncertain times, when many military skills could prove their worth in a mixture of crisis management service and survival think-tank. Time for some creative tensions of our own?

Rights & Wrongs

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise.”
Voltaire

The London regime has invited comments on a UK Bill of Rights. But where do ‘rights’ actually come from? The official line is that they’re concessions made by government towards the governed. Politics is defined by the struggle of the latter to defend and, where possible, extend them. Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, the Bill of Rights, the Great Reform Act. Our island story places these historic documents on their pedestals not just to remind us to be grateful for what we have received but to distract attention from what we are still denied. A real self-governing community would have whatever rights it desired: the very word would probably lose all meaning.

Today, any discussion about rights has been crippled by three decades of political correctness on the one side and totalitarian liberalism on the other. Neither is helpful to an understanding of the full range of rights that can exist and can be championed politically. In fact, there is a third point of view that has been systematically marginalised.

There are broadly three kinds of rights – individual (human) rights, property rights, and community rights (constitutional rights retained in common). For the real enthusiast, human rights are something we ‘discovered’ in the 17th or 18th century, just as if they were Newton’s laws of motion. Free speech comes closest to being an objective right, since in Popperian terms the progress of knowledge is impossible if the status quo cannot be criticised. Elsewhere, there is little acceptance of the fact that rights are both asserted and resisted and that the balance of argument can fall on either side. Some ‘rights’ claimed, it is right to deny.

Individual (human) rights are those we are born with. Property rights are those that belong to property owners, who are only rarely born with their property entitlements. Yet international human rights make no distinction. The right to private property (and not just personal property) is defended as fanatically as the right to life, if not more so. Public property is not protected at all and can be, and often is, stolen to order through forced sales or legal redefinition. We have gone from Proudhon’s ‘property is theft’ to today’s ‘private property is sacred, even when (or especially when) it is held illegitimately, whereas public property, democratically managed, is to be regarded as a barbarous relic’.

We reject these dogmas because our policies run directly counter to them. Limits should be placed on how much of Wessex any one person may own. Those not resident in Wessex should have no right to own our land at all. And it is OUR land, because title to it is granted by the community and can be withdrawn by the community. Land ownership in Wessex is a privilege, not a right, to be used or else forfeited. We reject submission to universal human rights, not because we do not see value in the bundle overall, but because lurking within it are rules that constrain us from pursuing policies that are both reasonable and necessary in a just society. Universal human rights are compatible with democratic decentralism only where they reflect a genuine consensus.

Mention of collective, community rights usually brings out all the screaming banshees of liberalism to denounce them as the justification of tyranny. Really? It’s quite simple. Your village is agreed 99% to 1% that the field over there should not be developed for housing. But its owners have property rights. Planning won’t save you – it’s a stitch-up that always favours the growth junkies. You have to win, and keep winning, every time. They only have to get lucky once. So the field gets built on. Democracy?

Liberals despise democracy because it curbs their rights, especially their right to exploit environmental property for private gain. We have a wider vision, one that values the community’s right to defend itself against imposed change. Would you like to be able to know who your new neighbours are and veto them if they’re unsuitable? Why should that right be limited to those rich enough to buy the houses either side of them? Should newcomers automatically get the right to vote, before they know anything about the community they set out to transform, permanently, for the worse, before they move on to their next victim?

We have always said that Wessex is for those who care about its future, whether native or settler, but we’ve also striven to devise means to prevent its ruination by those who would turn it into a copy of the urbanised and industrialised regions they left behind. We’ve considered a tax on newcomers – but that discriminates more against the poor than against the rich. We’ve considered withholding the right to stand for election from those who’ve lived here less than, say, five years – but that discriminates against what may be much-needed ability. Withholding the right to vote for a number of years may well strike the right balance, giving time for newcomers to actually understand and appreciate the community they wish to change.

All the above is grist to the mill. Our first task, however, is to roll back the frontiers of the mental terrorism that for 30 years has told us all that our only right worth having is the right to show how little we care about anything that cannot be expressed in selfish terms. Public service is not dead – but the modes of thinking that underpin it are certainly on life-support. We now need to operate before it’s too late.

Tax – and Spend Better

“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes

What defines a community? Among other things, it requires trust. It requires it because it calls for a lowering of the barriers that separate the private from the public. At whatever level, it’s about sharing. Time. Money. Identity.

One reason for believing that corporate capitalism is NOT compatible with democracy is that a permanent state of competition requires permanent distancing from others, and a pervasive culture of secrecy. What the Government does can be prised open, at least at the margins, under the Freedom of Information Act. In contrast, whatever the private sector does, even if it has huge consequences for the community, is ‘commercially confidential’. That is not a distinction compatible with any genuine democracy. Among other things it implies is that whenever there is a conflict between public interest and private interest, the latter is given a substantial advantage in access to the relevant information.

Nevertheless, we are witnessing a long-term trend towards a more open society (despite strenuous efforts to curtail it, especially in the realm of judicial process). In the age of the memory stick, even the best kept secrets can be all round the world at the click of a mouse. It makes resistance to openness all the more bizarre. For nearly 130 years, the Land Registry was a government department that guaranteed title to privately owned land but whose records were not publicly accessible. Now they are, and no-one can see what harm it ever did to release them. We are having a great debate in Britain about whether politicians’ tax returns should be made public for all to view online. Why just politicians? In Sweden, the law is that everyone’s tax returns are public documents. There is nowhere to hide. Taxation is a transaction with the State, so not to publish tax returns is to protect private interests at the expense of full accountability for the exercise of the public interest. HMRC have come in for justifiable criticism of the deals they have done over corporate taxation. Transparency is the way to end that. If it drives a few top bankers to a less scrupulous tax domain, then great. We’ve tolerated them, even venerated them, long enough.

Transparency sounds like a good idea. But can it be abused? That’s partly what’s under discussion at the Leveson Inquiry, where the right to invade privacy is defending itself from attack by the right to avoid harassment. Politicians are increasingly resorting to moralising – whether over press freedom or over tax avoidance – to condemn practices that are legal but which they see a need to question. That’s a bad road to go down, because it’s an admission that the legislation needed to eliminate these practices is too complicated to draft. (Though actually it isn’t, if the nettle is grasped.) And so applying social pressure is said to be the only way to get things changed. It’s a bad road because members of society should know, in black and white, what the limits are on both sides, both what the State demands, and what they are free to do beyond that. Grey areas are where persecution flourishes.

We’re a party that believes in the community and so we’re necessarily a party that believes in high taxation, while still enabling all individuals to have the means to support a comfortable level of discretionary spending. Community cannot thrive under the fashionable feudal arrangement whereby it exists at the whim of super-rich philanthropists (those with more money than friends). It has to have the financial security that comes from common wealth.

Does that mean that avoiding paying tax is wrong? No. If it’s that wrong then it needs to be made illegal, and if it’s not illegal then either it can’t be that wrong, or somebody has leant on the politicians and we need to straighten them out. Resistance to taxation has many motivations. Greed is one. But so is morality. Is it more immoral to avoid paying taxes, or to pay them, knowing that they will be used to fund terror bombing in Asia? Much of the money raised in taxes is wasted. It’s wasted because there is no real, detailed accountability for how it’s spent. There aren’t enough elected representatives with real, detailed control over budgets to be able to carry out the necessary scrutiny. Councillors and MPs have been marginalised by the managers. That’s why we need regional devolution, to break Whitehall down into manageable chunks, and why parishes need real power, including the ability to veto local spending they consider of no benefit to themselves. The political pyramid needs to be turned the right way up, so that instead of communities going cap in hand to Whitehall to plead for their money back, Whitehall has to justify every penny it spends to them.

Talk of plugging loopholes suggests that the tax system requires nothing more than a little fine-tuning. In fact, it could do with a major overhaul. A Land Value Tax to deter speculation and prevent derelict land lying idle, for the first time integrating planning policy, land ownership policy and revenue-raising across the board. Or taxation of the increase in value of housing on re-sale (at 100%, allowing for inflation and improvements), to stabilise house prices and divert speculative funds into more productive activity. High taxation of empty and second homes, to finance the repurchase of privatised council houses, avoiding the need for new housebuilding. The current Inheritance Tax threshold lowered to capture the huge wealth built up in the London suburbs by families who have done nothing more active than enjoy rising house prices brought about by the over-heated economy of the capital. And is not David Cameron’s refusal, against the wishes of most other EU countries, to impose a financial transaction tax, which would ‘hurt’ his friends and supporters in the mainly London-based financial sector, also ‘tax avoidance’ of a sort? Finally, we learned last week that, over the past two years, HMRC has written off £10 billion in unpaid tax. Is it really that difficult to extract or does HMRC just need a good shaking?

Property taxes are among the easiest to collect and the hardest to avoid. HM Treasury allows billions in potential revenue to slip through its hands every year because of ideological obsession, and desperate fear of the Daily Mail. Not only that, but property taxes can be used as policy tools in their own right to steer events in a beneficial direction. Sometimes, they can be regressive in their impact. But that means that they need to be carefully designed, and integrated with the welfare system, not that they should be shunned.

We’ve had 30 years of ‘no tax please, we’re British’ and know too well the signs of public squalor for all that are the flip side of private affluence for the few. Higher taxes, well-targeted, can transform that situation. They won’t happen without radical decentralisation because folk rightly suspect that their hard-earned money will otherwise be squandered by murderous scoundrels. Allowing communities the power to decide their own priorities is not just the only way to reconcile taxpayers to tax. It’s also through local debate about what those priorities should be that we might start to rebuild a sense of community and the fabric of a functioning civil society. The first priority for any ‘Big Society’ then, locally, is to demand a refund of the taxes so wrongly paid to London.

Embracing All

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Identity Theft

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

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

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

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

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

The Rotten Parliament

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

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

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

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

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

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

Killing Community, Killing Democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mortgaging Democracy

“Will the Tamar Bridge be sold?” That was the question posed by the Western Morning News earlier this month. And not just the bridge. Torquay’s Torre Abbey was mentioned too, though in both cases the relevant local councils denied any sale plans.

Gordon Brown’s announcement that he plans to sell off our public assets was, the paper told us, treated with derision by the councils. It went on to note that “while not able to directly force local authorities to sell their assets, fears have been voiced that the Government could slash the annual grant awarded to each council”, leaving them little option but to sell. While the report described such a move as “sinister”, the editorial went on to back the strategy. Well, it would. We’re talking about the Northcliffe press here, owners of the Daily Mail (the paper that backed the Blackshirts).

Sinister indeed. Which is why local communities in Wessex may well ask what the Government thinks it’s doing targeting local public services for cutbacks now that it’s spent all its money on bailing out the City of London. The real culprits in all of this are laughing literally all the way to the bank. Whether the public sector is a willing seller or an unwilling one, the deal only works if there’s a willing buyer. And there’s no shortage of them apparently. Financial institutions are always awash with money to buy whatever government offers for sale at knockdown prices. So where’s the banking crisis?

Or the budget crisis? There’s always money to fight needless wars, even if doled out so grudgingly that soldiers’ lives are even more needlessly put at risk. And Labour and the Tories are agreed that overseas aid should be protected – and increased. Not to put too fine a point on it, public services in this country are being cut so that those in other countries can be expanded. At our involuntary expense. King Alfred the Great famously sent alms to India in fulfilment of a vow taken when besieging the Danes in London. India today has no need of alms, having nuclear weapons, a space programme and even a foreign aid budget of its own. Yet need or no, it is one of the beneficiaries of our largesse.

Asset sales don’t make sense if you end up renting the asset back for ever and a day. They aren’t about keeping taxes down. They’re about keeping democracy down. Labour claims to be the party of modernisation, the party that refuses to let the present be controlled by the past. It would be truer to see it as the party that lets the present be controlled by the future, as debt slavery constrains the options of generations yet unborn.

For the Conservatives no less than for Labour, the idea of local authorities that own next to nothing is an attractive one. It’s their people who will benefit from the consultants’ reports, the legal fees, the management buy-outs. The issue for regionalists and other decentralists is that local assets, once sold, cannot be guaranteed to remain locally controlled. Bus services run from the Town Hall are answerable to the electorate of the town. Bus services run from a head office in Northumbria or Scotland are answerable to shareholders who may never have even heard of the place being served. The case for local or regional public ownership of the so-called ‘natural monopolies’ is partly about preventing the abuse of a dominant economic position for private profit. But these days it also forms a powerful component of opposition to globalisation, a strong pair of hands resisting the magnet of corporate concentration. No wonder the WTO makes privatisation its primary goal.

Councils that are nothing but bundles of contracts can’t see the point of vital democracy. No-one needs to hear the views of councillors any more because if they’re not in the small print already they can’t be made to count. (Poor service has to be tolerated until the contract is renewed.) If it’s not about debate but only about deals, the councillors are redundant. Step forward elected mayors to do the powerbroker thing, to talk tough with big business and big government. Elected mayors are not a sign of strong local democracy but the very opposite. They are what happens when a community signs its civic life away for a fistful of empty promises.

Happy King Alfred’s Day.

Hippies in Denial

This time last month (30 May), there was a gathering at Glastonbury Town Hall to discuss the town’s ‘transition’ to a post-oil world. It began with a talk from a leading light in Transition Town Totnes (TTT), the pioneers of transition thinking in the UK. Sadly, amidst all the joyful envisioning of local self-sufficiency, there did seem to be a few basics missing. It was like the 1960’s all over again, a fantasy world where everything is possible. In truth, in the future, everything will not be possible and hard choices will be needed.

We were told to expect millions of ‘climate refugees’ and make plans to welcome them to our communities. It seemed not to have dawned on anyone that, since a post-oil economy will not support more than a fraction of our current population, we should most certainly not be trying to add to it. Among the key characteristics of the future brainstormed in workshops was the hope that this would be a world of ‘happy, smiling people’. From time to time they might well be that, if instructed to be. Just not while they’re busy killing each other for possession of productive land and its outputs.

TTT’s website carries Buckminster Fuller’s famous words, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” That’s partly true. It’s how successful nationalist groups have dismantled the empires from which they have struggled to free themselves. You defeat the enemy by systematically disregarding its authority. But those who make it sound all that simple are in for a shock.

Transition towns will find that when Tesco want to build in their midst, or there’s a new trunk road coming up the valley, the answer doesn’t lie in digging the allotment. Gandhi won because he was fighting the British. Gandhi versus Hitler or Stalin would have had a very different outcome. The planning system today is owned by the likes of Tesco and the Highways Agency. With every passing day, Labour makes it more so. The Tories’ only cavil is that the supermarkets and the motorways aren’t being built fast enough.

Local action, however twee, is not going to make the difference it needs to make until there is a region-wide reaction against Westminster diktat. A Wessex Parliament will do what local initiatives cannot. It will ensure that the price structures are in place to help local producers compete fairly. It will rebuild the region’s rural railways, renewably-run, to enable communities to exchange goods of the highest quality. It will protect productive land from crazed housebuilders by establishing an optimum population level and sticking to it. It will redefine the housing market to ensure that local people are not squeezed out as a result. It will counter any wider power that fails to place Wessex interests first. In short, it will work for our communities and not against them.

Or… we can go on kidding ourselves that acting locally is enough, that Westminster is full of thoroughly decent chaps and chapesses, that Whitehall too really is on our side, and that if all this isn’t so then there must be some absolutely sound reason for it that we’re just too dense to grasp. More flowers anyone?

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.

A Smaller World, Please

Think globally, act locally. The sentiment is sound but the first instruction requires a lot less effort than the second. A lot less effort, because successive centralist governments at Westminster have made the second instruction well nigh impossible to carry out.

Take the example of planning, where local discretion has now been all but abolished. When the 2004 ‘reforms’ were pushed through at the behest of the power of money, community groups naively fell in behind them. The package included a requirement that councils bind themselves to a ‘Statement of Community Involvement’. Community groups thought that Christmas had come early. At last, councils would be forced to do as they told them, and not as elected local politicians wished. The reality is – and always was – that this was a smokescreen behind which decisions were taken away from the locality altogether. Now unelected civil servants decide everything of any importance in the planning world and matters are getting progressively worse. The Campaign to Protect Rural England had the true measure of ‘community involvement’ all along. As their poster proclaimed, “Your new airport goes here. What colour would you like the fence?”

When Labour politicians – and the Tory ones are no better – speak of empowering communities, the rhetoric translates into reality with so many caveats as to be deeply deceitful. A new generation of environmental protestors is now coming to the fore, one that will not be content with sit-ins and stunts that simply delay the bulldozers by days. Westminster diktat may find itself met with a more resolute denial of authority and legitimacy. We should not be surprised to see big developers and their pocket decision-makers vilified very personally as the public enemies they clearly are. No moral individual could defend those who are busily wrecking Wessex in the name of a despotic Parliament whose right to rule is nothing but self-proclamation backed up with tanks. When road protestors set fire to the contractors’ plant, can we say that that was a crime? And that what that machinery was doing to our land was a lawful act, advancing truth, beauty and goodness? We shall have to think again very thoroughly about what we mean by the law. The only certainty is that Westminster has no claim to be making it.

One pressing reason why power needs to be radically decentralised is that the planet needs this. World government is not the answer to the world’s problems. Small is beautiful not because it allows good things to happen, although it does, but because it prevents big, bad things being allowed to happen. Those who have to live with the consequences don’t willingly foul their own nest.

So a philosophy that puts Wessex first is not one that denies our interdependence with the rest of the world. Quite the reverse. We seek to contribute to a sustainable, equitable world where the health, security and liberty of all is paramount, regardless of race or creed. But we do that from our own land, by showing solidarity, morally and economically, not by gung-ho intervention where we’re not wanted. Humanitarian aid – well-organised by charities – is best kept quite distinct from political meddling. ‘Foreign policy’ is a fancy term for not minding our own business. It could be a very attractive as well as unique selling point for the Wessex Regionalists to be the only party whose foreign policy is not to have one. Globalisation is on the defensive – protectionism is making a comeback – and internationalism is up for redefinition.

Watching the television news it is hard to resist the feeling that anywhere and everywhere matters except home. Recent events in Gaza were tragic. But did they justify top billing night after night after night after night after night after night after night? Let us examine why foreign news has such a fascination for broadcasters.

There are the superficial reasons. One is that foreign correspondents cost money. If you have them, you use them. Not using them would only get you into trouble with the accountants. Another is that editorial control is in the hands of a generation whose background leads them to embrace the foreign and despise the domestic. Hippies who spent the 60’s out east don’t care much what happens in Easton or Eastleigh. The Middle East is ‘cool’, whichever side you take. And so it’s assumed that everyone else would want to give it the same gravity.

But there is a deeper agenda. George Orwell’s proles and his ‘outer party’ won’t have spotted it but the ‘inner party’ will have thought it through carefully.

Firstly, for every foreign story that dominates the headlines there is a domestic story that has been spiked. So what is the bad news that this is a good day to bury? Corruption in high places? Another piece of repressive legislation waved through Westminster without the public’s knowledge? Revelations about a failed Government policy? The squandering of public money? Your guess is as good as mine.

Secondly, foreign news fosters a sense of powerlessness. Domestic news makes folk angry and there is plenty they can do about it. They can change the government. Even change the system. But foreign affairs are by definition immune to the outcome of a British general election. Whether Brown, Cameron or Clegg sits in Number 10 makes no real difference to the sufferings of others thousands of miles away (unless British troops are involved). So when foreign news makes people angry, that is all it does. And belief in politicians drains away all the faster. And if politicians can’t change anything, why have them? When pundits now talk about a ‘post-democratic Europe’, its handmaidens are easily identified. They are the sirens wailing their song nightly upon our screens.

When cuts fall on the broadcast media, it is not the foreign correspondents who suffer. The first casualty is always regional news. Understandably so, since it often amounts to little more than ‘cat stuck in tree in Chippenham’. One of our key tasks in the years ahead will be to change the media organisations, so that they speak to us primarily about ourselves. Together we can then make that story interesting as local action increasingly challenges our oppressors. Yes, folks. The revolution WILL be televised.