A Tale of Two Cities

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

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

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

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

History is Sunk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

London Pride

Here is why the power of London, and the Britain it represents, must end.  For all our sakes.

It's time for regionalism, the only constitutional change that will turn England the right way up.

Independence for Europe?

“No European can be a complete exile in any part of Europe.”

Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796)

It was a curious coincidence (or was it?) that on the same day that David Cameron dressed up as success what was clearly failure, the USA announced a quadrupling of its defence spending in Europe.  It’s a reminder that Europe remains occupied, because there’s no such thing as a free lunch.  The price of Europe’s defence is paid in other ways, such as submission to TTIP.

An independent Europe would require a European Union that worked, one that allowed much more to be done locally and regionally, while focusing on what actually needs doing at European level.  The fear that a European army could be used against dissenting countries within the EU is real enough.  The rhetoric coming from Brussels about enforcing (western) ‘European values’ on eastern Member States – that have democratically made different choices – chillingly demonstrates that.  But there are other reasons why the EU has no comprehensive common security policy.  Public debate contrasts two arenas of independence.  If the UK leaves the EU, as UKIP wish, should Scotland leave the UK, as the SNP wish?  What of the third arena, the independence of Europe as a whole, independence against the world?  Is it too big an ask?  Or are we just not seeing the wood for the trees?

We’ve long argued in favour of a ‘third option’ for Europe.  Our version is one that rejects unhelpful centralism, whether it comes from the EU or from its Member States.  That this requires fundamental reform of the current institutions is a given.  What the deal negotiated by Cameron does is demonstrate the difficulty of any reform happening at all.  The diplomacy, designed to retain the UK’s place in Europe, is likely to have had the opposite effect, inviting its critics to present the EU as unreformable.  The ‘concessions’ are cosmetic, as they were intended to be.  No powers will be returned to the UK.  Few were seriously requested in the first place.

It took the London regime 950 years to become as inflexible as the EU has become in just 60.  The only thing that could correct that would be a directly elected European government.  One with a popular mandate to break the costly inertia of government-by-treaty and force through reform of all the EU institutions.  Eurosceptics would hate that, because their answer to claims that the EU is undemocratic is to abolish it.  Democratising it is the other answer, the one that no-one must offer.

If Cameron has dealt the eurosceptics a winning hand it’s a pity.  The EU, by opening an umbrella across nation-state rivalries, has created an irreplaceable opportunity for small nations and historic regions otherwise silenced by tub-thumping jingoism.  Those down the west side of Britain can now choose to organise themselves as part of the Atlantic arc.  Those down the east side can see themselves as part of the North Sea rim, or a cross-Channel grouping.  Ancient enemies can be viewed at last as neighbours, friends and allies.  The Cornish and the Bretons can no longer be ordered by London and Paris to hate each other.  It’s such an advance that it could be outweighed only by something monumentally stupid emanating from Brussels.  No doubt that can be arranged.

There’s the problem with the ‘Leave’ campaign.  Brussels loses, but who then gains?  Wessex does not, and cannot, benefit from a stronger UK.  The UK, like England, has proven in practice to be mostly a metaphor for London financial interests.  In politics, it’s an expensive luxury to have two opponents at once.  A choice of Brussels over London is therefore a logical one to make if London is standing in the way of regional devolution and Brussels is not.  It’s also difficult to see how a Europe of the regions could be constituted without a Europe to, at the very least, agree collective security against external threats.

Reality has fallen short of aspiration not because Europe has failed the regions but because the nation-states have failed both the regions and Europe.  Despite some promising signs such as the Committee of the Regions established under the Maastricht Treaty, the EU remains eternally the creature of its Member States.  It’s been powerless to prevent the abolition of France’s historic regions or in England the substitution of unwanted elected mayors for real devolution.  Its only contribution to the debate over independence for Catalonia or Scotland has been to look for problems.  The EU needs friends with a broader vision.  It hasn’t a clue how to find them.

Cameron’s negotiations are but a small part of the big European picture.  It’s easy to denounce them as a distraction when Europe is grappling with the migrant crisis but the two issues are intimately connected.  With migrant-related crime reported (inaccurately, but influentially) to be running unchecked in Germany, the temptation for British voters to raise the drawbridge may prove irresistible.  The very process of the referendum helps the ‘Leave’ cause.  With the SNP’s amendment of a four-nation lock rejected, the voting unit is ‘the British people’, about whom we shall no doubt be hearing quite a lot.  Among other things, the vote should tell us whether or not they still exist.

It could be the last opportunity to breathe life into British exceptionalism, the idea that there is ‘Europe’ and there is ‘Britain’ and the two are as different as chalk and cheese.  Never mind that 40% of British DNA is shared with the French, evidence of a common past stretching back into prehistory.  Never mind that English is a Germanic language, overlain with Latin, closely linked to Frisian and West Flemish.  Never mind that the oldest secular work in Byelorussian is a 1580 version of the Cornish tale of Tristan and Isolde.  Never mind that the EU’s chief negotiator, Donald Tusk, is a Kashubian with a surname that’s the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish for ‘German’ and a first name that’s decidedly Scottish.  Never mind that Ireland isn’t going anywhere and will be a constant reminder that Europe exists to the west of Britain as well as to the south and east.  Never mind that Europe is a web of cultural connections, while the UK is a forced accident of geography.  Never mind.  The UK can run to Washington and Beijing for a pat on the head.

As Norway’s ‘fax democracy’ shows, it won’t make a scrap of difference to how the rest of the EU makes decisions, nor to its power over the UK economy.  British foreign policy for centuries was to maintain the balance of power in Europe as it built up an overseas empire.  Divide, and conquer.  That’s history now, in both respects, but the way the UK is debating disengagement from Europe and planning new forays into the wider world suggests that a great many folk have failed to notice.

Exceeding Expectations

We’ve always enjoyed watching Mebyon Kernow’s progress and learning from what they get right, or very occasionally wrong.  Our association dates back to the 70s, when the founding generation of MK members was still at the helm.  It was the era of grainy, photocopied leaflets and duplicated magazines, produced in a political climate that is barely conceivable today.  British nationalism wasn’t the preserve of UKIP.  It was the mainstream consensus and any questioning of parliamentary sovereignty or cultural uniformity was treated to torrents of abuse.  Even Cornish nationalist arguments struggled to escape the confines of a unionist past, to cast off deference to the Duchy and loyalty to Liberalism.  A web of self-censorship was the accustomed response to an uncomprehending electorate.

The 80s saw a reaction against the colonels and the county set – with new policies that were radically Left-wing, but not exceptionally Cornish – amid great reluctance to accept that all parties, and all communities, have a Left and a Right.  Today MK has settled down to a synthesis that reflects where the wider world has got to.  Still radical, but more confident in asserting a Cornish dimension because Cornishness can now be much less defensive about itself.  The flag is flown widely, as Cornwall’s flag, no longer accused of being simply the flag of a political movement.  The language is used in schools, in local government offices and for tourism purposes, not so harrumphingly derided as a sign of deliberate division at odds with a gloriously united kingdom.  This year saw it praised by folk as diverse as comedian Ed Rowe and poet Benjamin Zephaniah.  Cornwall is changing, because peripheral Britain is changing and becoming a place more at ease with itself.

There’s one very big problem though.  Cultural confidence hasn’t led to political confidence and without that Cornwall continues to be subject to colonial-style government, both externally in terms of powers denied and internally in terms of aspirations curbed.  All of that is evident in the feeble ‘Devolution Deal’ its political and business elites have been handed by the London regime.  MK Leader Dick Cole commented that “From our perspective, it is not ‘democratic’ to give more influence to unelected bodies with limited democratic legitimacy such as the Local Enterprise Partnership, and it is also extremely disappointing that Cornwall has failed to secure any new powers over planning or housing.” 

The London regime remains adamant that devolved powers are only available to those areas willing to give 100% support to its own objectives.  One of these is de-democratisation – handing powers to unelected bodies and replacing what democratic debate does exist with elected mayors and fewer councillors.  Another is the whole ‘turn your environment into cash’ scam of growth and development.  Devolving only the power to lock yourself in to someone else’s vision would cause riots in Scotland or Wales.  So why are there none in Cornwall or the English regions?

To be fair, these things do take decades to reach fruition.  It took Wessex 40 years to go from first steps to legal recognition of our flag.  It will take a while yet for politics to pass from the hands of a generation that can’t see the point of what we’re about (or even views it as dangerous) to one that can’t see why we should wait any longer.  That’s why, in Gramscian terms, achieving cultural hegemony is so important: it makes political change easier, to some extent automatic, while without it political success can only be ephemeral.

The current issue of Cornish Nation reports on the defection to MK of Michael Bunney, a much-respected member of the Labour Party and former county councillor.  In a statement to the media, Michael said: “After 22 years of membership of the Labour Party, and having been a parliamentary candidate, I have taken the decision to leave Labour and join MK…  In so many areas of policy, the one-size-fits-all approach from London has damaged Cornwall.  Planning policy is ruining our beautiful landscape.  House building targets are enforced on us by Westminster and yet there still aren’t houses for local people and the Government prevents Cornwall from tackling the problems of second homes.  Economic policy has enforced cuts in Cornwall, while vast sums are spent on infrastructure projects elsewhere, such as HS2…  MK exists to represent all the people of Cornwall, whether they were born here or have chosen to make our beautiful Duchy their home.  I believe it is time for a new generation to join the campaign for Cornwall and that only MK can unite all people in working for the best interests of our local communities.”

Those east of the Tamar may well be asking how they too can have some of this.  Where can they find a political party that is open to new ideas benefitting the place where they live and the people who live there?  As far as the shires of Wessex are concerned, they need look no further.  We’re here for them all, to be for Wessex no less than what MK strives to be for Cornwall.

Gearing Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valuing Europe

As tens of thousands flock in renewed hope to join the Labour Party, much of the last Shadow Cabinet has walked off in disgust at the thought of actually having to believe in something.  Yes, British politics is about to get much more interesting.  Jeremy Corbyn though is no friend of Wessex.  So long as his party remains implacably opposed to proportional representation it continues to block the road to real reform.  Democracy is still defined as an election that Labour wins.  And there will be no more devolution.  Corbyn’s primary loyalty is to the tribal organisation that is Labour, even though Labour, a 19th century, British nationalist relic, is wholly unsuited to 21st century challenges.

A sign of the times is Corbyn’s suggestion that segregated, women-only train carriages might be re-introduced, to assure the safety and comfort of female passengers.  No-one dares call to account the men who make the female passengers unsafe and uncomfortable.  Europe, nasty old colonial Europe, has lost the will to set moral boundaries against wrong-doers and to challenge any crossing of them; in these besieged circumstances its only other possible response is to retreat from its aspiration of inclusiveness into the formation of physical barriers, safe spaces, gated communities, panic rooms, to roll out the barbed wire along its borders again.  Labour’s next idea for the protection of women will doubtless be compulsory headscarves for them all.

Corbyn’s first act as leader was to attend a rally in support of refugees.  Should that be “refugees”?  Quite possibly.  Some are undoubtedly genuine – at least in intention if not necessarily in definition – while others can be matched to those Bangladeshi and Pakistani passports found flung over hedges in Serbia.  The whole country-shopping world wants to be Syrian now because to be Syrian is the stated path to becoming European.  The Germans this week started unpicking the Schengen Agreement, having belatedly realised that they’ve bitten off far more than they can chew.  Frau Merkel’s Bavarian allies, with their own regional parliament and politics – a kind of German Scotland – are among those now breaking ranks.

Fortunately, Jean-Claude Juncker has a cunning plan.  To set quotas and spread the migrants around.  Easier said than done, because the capacity to take in more people is not uniform.

David Cameron has offered to take 20,000.  If the current patterns of refugee allocation continue, just under half will end up living in the north of England.  That’s because the UK’s failure to achieve balanced regional development means it’s cheaper to house them up there.  Since 2012, when the contract for managing the distribution of asylum-seekers was handed to Serco, the number of asylum-seekers in the north-west has risen by 50% but fallen by 20% in London.  Cameron’s Witney constituency has contained not a single refugee since 2008.  Do as I say, not as I do?

Natalie Bennett, Leader of the Green Party has put in a much higher bid than Cameron’s, for 240,000 refugees, based on 2 million Europe-wide and the UK’s proportion of total EU population (12%).  That’s a city the size of Plymouth or Southampton.  It’s roughly 100,000 families, or at 12 houses to the acre, 8,333 acres of farmland, the equivalent of concreting over 2 or 3 whole parishes.  And this is the Green Party?  It’s just so very easy to sign away the environment of others without asking.  Do those calling for more migrants to be accepted think the cities will take them all?  That there will be no consequences for the fields they can see out of the window, fields already under pressure from London overspill as the pampered capital boils over?  Not even Lancashire is infinite.  Germany has a shrinking population.  Its rate of natural increase – the excess of births over deaths – is negative, at -2.87 per 1,000 population.  The UK’s is positive, at 3.01 per 1,000.  That’s why Cameron’s numbers make some degree of sense and his critics’ make none.

Juncker’s agenda has two parts.  The first deals with quotas, on which EU leaders yesterday agreed to disagree.  The second redefines ‘refugee’ to include not only those fleeing war or persecution but those fleeing poverty too.  Now, it should be clear from their mobile phones and credit cards, not to mention the means to pay the smugglers’ fare, that today’s migrants are not as poor as they used to be.  Developing countries have developed beyond the point where such journeys were simply impossible and into new circumstances where they’re now the epitome of ambition.

Nevertheless, relative poverty continues to drive that ambition and Juncker, in pandering to it, has invited almost the whole world to come to Europe.  In doing so, he may have destroyed the EU itself, because a desire for national suicide is not as widely shared as his policy would suggest.  Opening the doors of the European house and fining those countries that keep the doors to their own rooms closed allows the EU to be portrayed not as defending Europe but as orchestrating its destruction.  In the absence of an alternative Europe, one proud of Europe’s achievements and determined, for the sake of the whole world, to preserve them at all costs, the chief beneficiaries of this stance will be the parties of the nationalist Right, opposed equally to the EU and to regionalism.

Instead of naming and shaming the Gulf states whose actions and inactions contribute most to shaping the crisis, the Brussels-Berlin axis is pointing the finger at EU countries defying a European line that hasn’t actually been fully agreed   It’s become an issue of reputation management, as befits a regime of PR men.  What will the world think of Europe if supranational order cannot be substituted for a diversity of national opinions?  Europe’s reputation must be defended, even as Europe itself is not.  No sacrifice by Europe is too great to secure favourable headlines elsewhere in the world.

It’s alright though, because Europe will be destroyed in the name of ‘common European values’.  The chutzpah is certainly admirable.  If countries have to be fined for failing to adhere to these common values, how common were these values in the first place?  What price respect for subsidiarity and national democracy?  Defining common values is always fraught with difficulty, because if they’re common then they cannot just be imposed.  To define European values is to define their counterpart, un-European values, and we’re then into some very familiar McCarthyite territory.  It’s one reason why we won’t define ‘Wessex values’.  We’ll define Wessex Regionalist values – and we have done – and we’ll advocate them, but what’s our choice won’t be everybody’s. 

If we were to seek out Europe’s values today we might find a fusion of classical and Judaeo-Christian ideas, tested and modified through centuries of conflict: religious and civil wars, the struggle against totalitarianism, the ever-changing challenging of perceptions and prejudices.  The result isn’t fixed by any means and there are threads within European thought that if developed further will take us in very different directions.

So whose ‘common European values’ are we talking about here?  Who are they designed to exclude?  In the event of conflict, do the elites plan to side with the natives against the migrants, or the migrants against the natives?  Every elite needs a thug class to implement its orders, one whose roots in society don’t go too deep.  Will assimilation give way to a forced ‘meeting in the middle’, producing a culturally embarrassed Europe in which fear masquerades as tolerance and guilt as inaction?  Or will the natives wise up to the fact that it’s only they who are being asked to forgo their identity out of politeness to their guests?  It may read like a scene from Michel Houellebecq’s Submission but Saudi Arabia has reportedly offered to fund 200 new mosques across Germany to meet the spiritual needs of migrants.  If these are permanent buildings, ‘migrants’ may be the wrong word and ‘colonists’ the right one.

Those elites certainly have a problem.  Gordon Brown’s attempts to define ‘Britishness’ were a joke.  No real, living culture needs a public debate on what it is and isn’t.  It has better things to do.  ‘What does it mean to be English?’ is another angst-ridden query.  If Englishness is that invisible then it’s probably dead.  Chauvinistic answers won’t fool anyone for long.  To be English is, uniquely, to value freedom above all.  Really?  More than the Scots did in the Declaration of Arbroath?  More than the French in ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’?  More than the Germans in ‘Mit Gott für Freiheit und Vaterland’?  Language barriers often blind us to the essential unity of Western thought.  They also blind us to the fact that there are other world traditions for which liberty has no value, for which liberty, far from being hard-fought-for, is hard-fought-against.

To have no sense of your own values – and of how untypical they really are in the global context – is to assume that everyone is equally nice, no matter what they believe, think or represent.  For the drinker, everyone is welcome to drink; for the person with no culture, or one sunk in a cultural coma, everyone is welcome, with no pressure to fit in.  If you no longer have values, you have no grounds to reject anyone else.  Not even if your society is living at its environmental limits, its quality of life about to tip into the abyss because the safeguards of its culture have been systematically disregarded.

If you stand for nothing, then you fall for everything.  It isn’t the classless society that lies at the end of all differentiation and of every history: only the culture-less society will achieve that.  Common European values are easy enough to define when all they amount to is a vacuum.  And nature, as we used to know, abhors one of those.  Perhaps Europe’s values are best left unspoken, but nonetheless fervently held.

Pop Goes the Weasel

“Governments with money centralise and claim the credit.  Governments without cash decentralise and spread the blame.  Those are not the views of a hardened media cynic. They are what I was told by one of the Tories’ top policy wonks before the election.”

Nick Robinson, BBC Political Editor, December 2010

Surprised?  Why?  The masters of the universe move in circles where cynicism is a sign of sophistication.  The double standards are everywhere: privatise the profits, socialise the losses; what goes wrong is the last lot’s fault, what goes right is all down to us; introduce a Localism Bill, then use it to set limits to local discretion.  The long-awaited discussion on English devolution turns out to be a discussion on English votes for English laws.  Devolution from the centre to the centre.  Westminster, faced with the unpleasant necessity of discussing devolution, turns inwards and debates instead its own procedures and party interests.

It’s more than tiresome and we believe the lies less and less.  The Lord Mayor of London insists that she is not a member of the establishment.  If she’s merely a member of the Outer Party, what is it you have to do to join the Inner Party?

Don’t despair.  Politics does work.  If, and only if, you vote for change and then keep on voting for change.  Tony Blair’s government was as centralist in outlook as any but was forced by inherited circumstances to devolve power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.  The political dynamic produced one other devolved assembly, for the one area of England that needs one least.  London.

There continues to be a debate on whether, in a regional context, the Greater London Authority – the Mayor and Assembly – is the right answer to the question of London’s governance.  There are many Londons, some smaller and some larger than Greater London.  Other European capital regions – notably in France, Italy and Spain – are larger than the urban area alone.  But for Labour, and for Ken Livingstone in particular, there was unfinished business left over from Thatcher’s spiteful abolition of the GLC.  Putting it back together (but not too recognisably) was a political priority that also made a lot of sense administratively.  After 14 years of chaos, Thatcher’s City backers were persuaded that even the return of Red Ken was better than a decapitated capital.

The result is England’s only regional assembly.  Which creates some interesting anomalies.  Hilary Benn recently coined the ‘West Ealing Question’ – why can an Ealing MP not vote on buses in Ealing (a matter devolved to the Mayor) but can vote on buses in Benn’s Leeds constituency?  We might question whether MPs anywhere should be voting on buses or whether in a properly decentralised country they would find better things to do.  But buses are a good example to use.  London was the only part of England to be exempted from bus deregulation in 1985: congestion obviously is for the other man.  It’s the only area where the colour of the buses is specified by the authorities, because London’s iconic heritage must be protected while that of lesser cities was long ago sacrificed to the free market.

Wessex and London have about the same population.  So we should have no difficulty in claiming the same powers.  What might be more of a struggle is to achieve a fair funding formula that doesn’t favour the capital as present arrangements clearly do.  The Barnett formula doesn’t apply to the distribution of public spending within England.  So London is free to grab whatever its lobbying can obtain.  This is an issue we have covered in a number of posts, so let’s recap, with a spot of updating and expanding.

London contributes 22% of UK Gross Value Added, while Wessex contributes 13%, Scotland 8% and Wales 3%.  Wessex, with roughly the population of Scotland and Wales combined, comes out where we might expect it to be.  So why does London appear to be storming ahead, the economic engine of the UK?  Do its workers really go for it that much harder than everyone else?  Any analysis of what’s going on must question how much of the economic activity that ends up there has any geographical reason to be there, assuming that it was ever real in the first place.  London’s economic success cannot be entirely unrelated to its role as the political capital of a unitary state with access to the taxable resources of the whole UK.  Wessex folk even subsidise its sewers.  No doubt we shall subsidise its defences against sea level rise too until we can take it no more.

According to the National Infrastructure Plan, planned infrastructure spending per head in London is ten times that in Wessex.  Statisticians argue over just how big London’s lead over the rest really is – it’s easily pushed downwards by adding in nuclear power projects whose final customers are many miles away from the plant – but no-one can doubt that it’s massive.  And it’s set to get worse.

In 2010/11, London, with 15% of England’s population, got 34% of public spending on transport.  The South West, with 10% of the population, got 6%.  (The South West is the fourth smallest of the Prescott zones by population but received the least transport spending per head.)  Devolution, linked to a fair funding formula, could therefore roughly double our money.  Bristol might even get a real metro, with underground stations and wholly new lines, instead of the toytown version which is all that can be afforded while London helps itself to our taxes.  Instead of HS2, we could start to put places back on the rail network for the first time in 50 years.  Places like Gosport, claimed as the largest town in Britain without an operational railway station.  London is NOT the only desirable destination on the railways yet national thinking still assumes that it is.

Arts funding – from the London-based Arts Council and DCMS – is even more scandalous.  In 2012/13, London got £69 per head.  The rest of England got £4.60 per head, a ratio of 15:1.  The National Lottery was supposed to correct this geographical imbalance.  But what do we find there?  £165 per head in London, £47 per head in the rest of England: still 4:1. 

There’s also a qualitative aspect to cultural funding.  If budgets are centrally controlled, they will deliver the culture that the centre thinks we ought to have, not the one we choose for ourselves.  If quangocrats in London haven’t heard of Wessex culture then they aren’t going to fund it, because it won’t tick any of the boxes.  A similar attitude rules in planning, where development is always viewed as having a positive cultural impact.  That’s because the new facilities that it can fund, for cultural products to be displayed or performed, are usually more measurable in standardised terms than what’s destroyed to make room for the development.

The Treasury publishes regional data for what it calls ‘identifiable public expenditure’.  That isn’t the same as public expenditure by region.  Things that go on in London but are deemed to be for the indivisible benefit of the whole UK aren’t included, so London’s share will be an under-estimate.  About 14% of spending is ‘non-identifiable’ in this way.  It includes debt payments, some defence items and overseas representation but there are also costs, such as tax collection, that must have a geographical base within the UK.

It’s this under-reporting that allows Boris Johnson, for example, to present London as a net contributor to the rest of the UK by at least £5 billion annually.  If non-identifiable spending comes to 14% of the total, and that £5 billion is from the fiscal year 2009, when total spending was £634 billion, then 14% (£89 billion) leaves plenty of room in which to lose a mere £5 billion very easily.  We need far better politicians, of course, but it seems we also need far better accountants, to track what really happens to all of the ‘non-identifiable’ money that is spent within the UK.

Despite the under-reporting, in 2012/13 London got 107% of the UK average spending per head on services.  The South West got 94%, the South East 87%.  London got 135% of the average spent on economic affairs (substantially more than any other English region), including 184% of the average on transport.  It also got 158% of the average on recreation and culture and 157% of the average on public order and safety.  London exceeded the average in 10 out of the 17 statistical categories in PESA 2014, Table 9.16.  Nowhere else in England was so consistently well-funded and agricultural spending (15% of average) was the only category in which London fell below 79% of the average.  The South West was well-funded only on agriculture, defence and environmental protection (presumed to include nuclear decommissioning) and fell below 79% in 6 categories.  The South East did well only on science & technology and defence and fell below 79% in 8 categories.  The high spending in some northern regions – mainly on employment, health and social protection – can be seen as a measure not of the UK’s success but of its chronic failure.

Does this distribution of spending reflect need?  Not necessarily, because ‘need’ is itself a contested idea.  If London ‘needs’ more money because its population is growing and the city is pulling in poor folk from across the globe then perhaps it should stop.  London’s environmental unsustainability is being paid for by the rest of us who are doing things right.  The more we pay to deal with London’s infrastructural shortfalls, the more it grows, the more attention it attracts and the bigger the problems become.

If London ‘needs’ more money because the cost of providing services is higher then the same applies.  Do those services need to be in London?  London’s high costs are caused by its over-expanded economy relative to its territory.  Those who are convinced that regional assemblies would increase the cost of government should reflect on the lower property and labour costs that would be payable if more of government were done outside, and less of it inside, the M25.

Taxation is often presented as simply a class issue but it has a strong geographical basis that impacts on how daily life is lived in areas dominated by the affluence over which London presides.  Half of all Inheritance Tax receipts in the UK come from London and the South East.  That isn’t necessarily the result of thrift: much of it will be unearned ‘wealth’ produced by rising house prices, as government commentary makes clear.  (That the Prescott zones next in line after those two are the South West and the East of England is perhaps a reflection of their attractiveness as retirement zones for an ex-London elite.)  In London your house can make more than you do.  So no wonder the political pressure to abolish Inheritance Tax is unlikely to go away.

Labour’s plans for a ‘mansion tax’ have been labelled an attack on the middle classes, because in central London all house prices are mansion prices, aren’t they?  One estimate is that 85,500 of the 110,000 houses likely to be hit are in London.  Better by far that those provincials pay more than that Londoners should find themselves a bit strapped for cash, don’t you think?

Well, no.  It’s time we had a property taxation system that adequately reflects ability to pay.  Council Tax banding only reaches the foothills of serious wealth.  For as long as that happens, it means that the most regressive of taxes gives up the ghost before it has a chance to bite those whose accountants and lawyers can get them out of paying most other taxes.  So London goes on being a magnet for some of the world’s worst economic psychopaths.  The cost of living in London continues to rise for everyone there – and indirectly for everyone not there so long as we pay the difference through UK taxation and distorted public spending patterns.  Those spending patterns remain inevitable without real regional power to hold a London-obsessed Treasury to account.

The Union works very well for London.  The question the rest of us should ask is what we get out of it.  If we don’t like the way the money goes, then we need to organise politically to get it back.  The inflated weasel needs to feel the press of the pin.

That Artful London

After the 2008 financial crash, the investment bank Goldman Sachs acquired an unforgettable description, as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”.  England has been struggling with its own undying vampire squid for centuries, in the form of London’s political, economic AND cultural domination.

When it comes to culture, the figures are breathtaking.  So is the media silence about them.  (Where’s the media based, by the way?)  Do follow the link, explore what lies beyond, and gasp at the extent of London’s greed.  That money belongs to all of us and should be spent for the benefit of all of us.  To say that we can all go up to London any time and look at what’s been bought with it really won’t do.

In fact, it’s worth asking why we're still funding the growth of the ‘national’ museums and galleries when they don’t have the space to do justice to their existing collections.  How about a ‘one in, one out’ policy?  That is, that they can make new acquisitions only if they pass something else to ‘the provinces’.  It wouldn’t be difficult to draw up a list of artefacts from Wessex that could be displayed closer to home, the Wessex equivalents of the Elgin Marbles. 

Expect screams of outrage from the plunderers at any suggestion that the loot should come back.  Do we not know that we should feel nothing but pride that the whole nation has honoured our regional heritage by dispossessing us of it?  Upon leaving home, our treasures become our ambassadors in a far more important place.  Just don't try suggesting that London might surrender anything it prizes to New York or St Petersburg.

London’s artistic and museological establishment is a feudal pestilence lingering deep into the 21st century, still insisting on droit de conservateur.  Always ready to confuse their academic knowledge with the ability to weigh up locational justice.  Always ready to defend the status quo simply because it is the status quo.  Always unable to comprehend the hurt they cause by doing so.  And if the status quo is bad, remember that our taxes and lottery tickets go on and on funding the process of making it all inconceivably worse.

Whose Poet?

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

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

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

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

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

The Traditional Choice

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

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

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

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

Fixing and Faking

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

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

Marcus Binney, architecture correspondent of The Times (a London newspaper), produced a thundering response to the EH plan to “turn Stonehenge into a toy-town with visitors approaching in dinky electric vehicles”. “Will the Heritage Lottery never learn?” he wrote. “While Britain’s heritage crumbles it fiddlefaddles with daft and hideously expensive interpretation and exhibition centres, doing increasingly more harm than good with its politically correct schemes which have no place in an era when money should be concentrated on essentials and emergencies”, on “front-line rescue of natural and man-made heritage, and not on frills and embellishments.”
Quite so. Once it’s gone, it’s gone and no amount of replicas and substitutes will make up for that. The Ministry’s management of Stonehenge has never inspired confidence. After the stones were gifted to the nation an archæological dig was carried out in the 1920’s. It was carried out so incompetently that it amounted to the destruction of one half of the site while recovering hardly any useful data. Conservation interests have battled ever since for attention against the insatiable demands of the tourist industry. When the Antrobus family owned the stones, access was eventually controlled for the first time with fencing and a gate, but as much for the site’s protection as for private profit. Under public ownership, ostensibly in the public interest, the locusts must go where they will. Numbers are now so huge – three times what they were 50 years ago – that since 1978 the stones themselves have been roped off and the trippers have to traipse past and gawp from a distance. The average visitor spends just 20 minutes at the site. Official reports have seriously attempted to argue that a loss of real archæology can be offset against new access arrangements to produce a net positive outcome for the nation’s cultural heritage. Or at least for the EH bank balance. This is the organisation, remember, whose past chairman suggested letting out the catering to McDonalds.

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

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

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

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

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

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