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.

Infra Digging

Public opinion remains divided over the wisdom of bombing Syria.  Much less so than the House of Commons, which this week allowed the red mist of ‘hitting evil hard’ to out-vote reasonable doubts over what military action can achieve without a lasting political solution in sight.  Who benefits, besides the suppliers of Brimstone missiles at £183,000 apiece and those who eventually win the contracts to rebuild a country’s shattered infrastructure?

There’s something quaintly 20th century about the UK joining the aerial posse over Syria when the evidence is that the Paris attacks were planned from within Europe.  And funded from where?  It could be anywhere.  Which means that foreign policy alone cannot guarantee home security.  BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday broadcast a documentary on the threats posed by growing reliance on the Internet.  With hackers becoming ever more sophisticated, cyber war is joining nuclear war in the thinking of those whose job it is to predict and avoid catastrophes.  Hackers who gain even temporary control of a national power grid could do real damage by overloading critical equipment that can take two years or more to repair.  And where there is chaos there are casualties too.

Austerity and resilience make bad bedfellows.  Cost pressures are driving the transition to ‘digital-by-default’.  But digital-by-default is a fair weather system.  Rip out the back-up, rely on microwave signals, not copper wire, computer programs, not manual valves and paper manuals.  Then cope with a real crisis.  It’s not just about the back-up technology.  It’s about retaining the skills you need to operate it.  From the floods of 2014 to Fukushima, it’s still knowing what levers to pull when the screens go dark that makes all the difference.

Britain has a great deal of ageing infrastructure.  There’s a real drive on right now to upgrade it.  But it’s not just about running to stand still.  UK population is still rocketing, while the increasing frequency of extreme weather events means that previous standards of protection simply aren’t good enough.  So far, not so good.  The UK, the world’s fifth largest economy, was this year ranked 27th by the World Economic Forum when it comes to delivering quality infrastructure.  So critical is this problem that governments stripped bare by privatisation are turning to global investors to fund it, even ones about whom there are entirely reasonable security concerns.  That’s a measure of how far governments of all parties have abandoned their primary responsibility to uphold our way of life.  The investment being sought is competing for cash with other parts of Europe.  Is there scope for better co-ordination?  Much of the continent thinks so and while the UK is agonising over Brexit, they’re pushing ahead.

Let’s assume that the UK gets the investment it wants.  Now, who gets that investment next?  Where does the Middle Eastern and East Asian capital all end up?  What are the new national priorities?  The Conservatives have set up the National Infrastructure Commission, headed by ex-Labour man Andrew Adonis, to answer those questions.  We can be sure of two things.

One is that London will receive vastly more than its fair share.  We’ve shown before the extent to which this happens.  The reason it happens is that the nations and regions outside London fail to elect sufficient nationalist and regionalist MPs to stop it.  It’s that simple.  Any provincial representative of the London parties can be easily bullied into voting more cash for the capital.  Because we all benefit from London’s prosperity, don’t we?  Because the ‘experts’ tell us it’s the best possible value for money, don’t they?  Because we’re all in it together, aren’t we?  As long as it’s public spending, Labour can’t think of a single reason to fault it.

The other certainty is that any regional dimension will be skewed in London’s favour.  This is a well-established principle seen in other centralised European countries.  In France, spending on motorways and high-speed railways has been designed to reinforce the Parisian view of France, linking cities deemed to be within the same official region, while ignoring links across those boundaries.  Brittany’s historic capital, Nantes is tied more tightly to other cities within the artificial ‘Loire Country’ region than it is to the rest of historic Brittany.  Rennes, capital of the administrative region of Brittany, has better links to Paris than it does to Nantes.  (Those who understand French can read more in a book called Bretagne et Grand Ouest by Pierre-Yves Le Rhun.)

Within the confines of still-inadequate devolution, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales have all developed national plans with a significant infrastructure component.  With devolution bedded-in, each has now reached at least its third round of plan-making.  England has no equivalent, national or regional, though the UK Government has what it calls a National Infrastructure Plan, in fact just a list of big projects taken out of context.  Powerful interests insist that only local clubs of councils, in theory equal partners in city ‘deals’ with the London regime but in practice wholly under its thumb, can plug the gap.  This is plain wrong, for three reasons.

Firstly, because its approach to place is wrong.  The emphasis on functional economic areas, the cities-first agenda of combined authorities and metro mayors, flies on the rhetoric of globalisation and the irrelevance of broad territory.  Equally though, it flies in the face of the fact that cities are not islands but depend for much of their life-support on those broad territories that the anti-regionalist consensus would like to ignore.  The places where you’ll find the water-gathering grounds, the power stations and the landfill sites.  Mayors-for-all is a timid retreat from real devolution, failing to provide joined-up government at the regional scale, the scale at which meaningful links can be made between the major infrastructure providers.  Highways England plan roads.  Network Rail plan railways.  So who’s planning transport?  No-one knows how much wealth is wasted by the silo mentality prevalent among the utilities.  These are companies set up to milk public services for private profit.  Poorly equipped regulators make matters worse because their remit is protecting the consumer from exploitation by natural monopolies.  It isn’t the wider public interest, so utilities are, for example, prevented from funding investment ahead of demand (but are allowed to use their own, unco-ordinated projections of what it will be).  Different aspects of a single scheme – like the new reservoir at Cheddar – get split between different control periods and held up accordingly.  None of this would be necessary if powerful regional assemblies ran the public utilities and decided their own priorities.

Secondly, because its approach to time is wrong.  There is much more to survival than economics, and getting cities fit to compete in a global economic system heavily dependent on oil.  In building sustainable regions it’s paramount that we build for the future, for how the world will be and not for how it is.  That means a process of infrastructure planning driven by long-term political campaigning, not short-term economic speculation.  It means building (or rebuilding) things like north-south rail links in Wales and Wessex, or improving those that run east-west across the Pennines.  These are schemes that struggle to pass any conventional cost-benefit test because that conventional analysis is weighted so as to reinforce the status quo.  One reason why such a huge amount of transport funding goes to London is that savings in travel time count as economic benefits of a scheme that can then be quantified in terms of the travellers’ incomes.  The more highly-paid the travellers, the greater the benefit assumed.  As taxpayers, we fund things like the London weighting allowance that drive up those incomes, and this in turn helps attract more public spending.  Low-wage areas are starved of transport investment because workers’ time is not valuable enough to tip the cost-benefit scales in their favour.  Decision-making needs to pay less attention to the biased outputs of computer modelling and get assertively political instead.

Finally, because its approach to people is wrong.  The devolution ‘deals’ are characterised by next-to-no public involvement.  The various closed-door Leaders’ Boards, Enterprise Partnerships and what-have-you that come and go exist in the legal shadows, inspiring no confidence either in their own permanence as entities of local governance or in the stability of the strategies they devise.  That’s no way to attract long-term investment or to act as the credible equal of the UK State.  And accountability?  The best you’ll get is to vote once every four years for a mayor you never asked to have.  The result is likely to be very low turnouts that undermine any claim to political legitimacy for the new single voice of the area.  It’s sad but true that the only reason to vote at all will be to keep out the candidate most likely to ignore the public and abuse the power to spend your money on his or her personal preferences.

With investment decisions now being planned that will shape our society for the next 30 to 50 years, strong regional voices are more important than ever.  We should remember that the regional dimension in England is closely related to questions of resilience.  In both world wars, regional structures were central to civil defence (and in between for organising the Government response to the 1926 General Strike).  The regions in use today – the boring zones still being touted as the only possible basis for elected assemblies – trace their administrative roots to the areas for which Regional Commissioners were appointed in 1939.  In the event of invasion, with London captured or destroyed, these men would have assumed all civil powers within their regions.  In Wessex, those men were, in the west, General Sir Hugh Elles, briefly replaced by Sir Geoffrey Peto, and in the east Harold Butler, later replaced by Sir Harry Haig.  Familiar names, no doubt, to those who needed to know.  An article in The Political Quarterly in 1941 commented that: “At last we have established regionalism, after much discussion and excessive delay.  But the experiment in regional government represented by the Regional Commissioners is utterly different from the kind of institution which was the subject of so much advocacy and controversy during the past three or four decades.”  It wasn’t the last time that principled regionalists would be disappointed by chronic imagination-failure in the corridors of power.

So it’s no surprise to see renewed calls for regions to take the lead in identifying their infrastructure needs.  In our previous post, we referred to Surveyor magazine’s coverage of local devolution.  Plans are already in place to develop Transport for the North into a statutory body by 2017.  The Midlands Connect Partnership is developing similar ambitions.  Andrew Pritchard of East Midlands Councils told Surveyor that the Government’s agenda is “having an impact on the way we do things.  We recognise if we are to compete for funding we have to take a more collaborative approach.”  This need not be limited to transport: Martin Tugwell of the Chartered Institution of Highways & Transport told the magazine that he welcomed the move to regional transport planning and said it should also extend to other infrastructure such as digital, energy supply and distribution and water networks.  Flood risk and waste management might be thought useful additions to that list.

With sufficiently determined regional leadership, this is an agenda that can be wrested out of the hands of the London regime.  If not, we shall see more London-oriented investment, packaged as ‘helping’ the regions plug in to what they need while in fact adding to what has colourfully been called London’s ‘vampiric suction’.  It can be done.  We just need a new set of MPs: they’re the obsolete infrastructure we really need to replace.

Unenlightening Europe

Quelle surprise!  As we noted in September, France was an easy target for terror.  So, ten days on from the Paris attacks, how’s the reaction unfolding?

Canadian blogger Vlad Tepes sums up the polarisation:

“The most important thing you can do when people you don’t know are murdered by Muslims in an act designed to promote the primacy of Islam, is show your moral superiority to people who would like to take meaningful action by demonstrating grief…  People tripping over themselves in self-sacrifice, trying to tell the people who want them dead or enslaved how there will be no ‘backlash’ instead of at the very very least going en masse to the mosques and screaming: ‘stop the hate’.”

Eloi turning on the Morlocks then?  But would that help or not?

And when the candles and the flowers and the teddy bears have been cleared away, what will remain?

There’s little serious anger that carries through.  From a position of strength, that would be good news.  From a position of weakness, it only underlines that weakness.  The silence is nervous.  It’s well-known that the ISIS strategy is to destabilise Europe, to make normal life unpredictable, to create the conditions in which submission to the gangsters’ will seems the safest option.  Part of that strategy is placing Europe’s leaders apart from the led.  They won’t be targeted.  They’re too useful as they are: mostly perceived as bumbling, incompetent, and lacking any will to defend their people.  Get rid of them and you only invite the more determined to replace them.

François Hollande ramps up the rhetoric but results will be another matter.  Pending anything better, la gloire is back.  France is bombing Raqqa, because France is now at war.  France was bombing Raqqa anyway, because that was just fooling around?  The tricolour has been much in evidence across the globe.  It’s forgotten, for now, that its history is no more glorious than the swastika’s.  Remember the Vendée, the génocide franco-français.  France’s politicians, gathering last week at Versailles, belted out their national anthem, as we’re all now encouraged to do.  ‘Do you hear, in the countryside, the roar of those ferocious soldiers?  Let's march, let's march!  Let an impure blood water our furrows!’  Yes, they still get away with that, but it’s not our Europe: it’s a gory theatre of the absurd, founded upon a lie (that France in 1792 was not the aggressor).

Hollande insists that he will defend the Republic.  Not so much France.  Not so much the French.  La République, a hate cult of hypocrisy, historic enemy of European regionalism, the proto-fascist State over which Hollande presides, one that despite his best efforts still cannot bring itself to legalise any indigenous language on its territory besides French.  (To quote Musa Anter, a Kurdish writer assassinated in 1992, "If my mother tongue is shaking the foundations of your state, it probably means that you built your state on my land.")  Republican values are the new Falklands factor – the art of war turned to domestic political advantage.  A false flag operation?  We’ve no evidence, but the motive is clear enough.

France likes to think it has a special relationship with the Mahometan world, one strangely informed by a millennium of conflict with it, real or imagined.  Charles Martel at Tours.  Roland at Roncevaux.  St Louis on Crusade.  Napoleon in Egypt.  Charles X seizing Algiers.  Charles de Gaulle letting it go.  It’s not actually the most promising basis for peaceful co-existence.

Nor is Britain’s record.  A century ago the UK made promises to the Arabs and the Jews.  It would be simplistic to say that the promises to the Jews were kept and those to the Arabs were not.  Neither got everything they expected.  But the Arabs, and the Kurds, got a lot more than they bargained for.  Promises of self-government if the Ottoman yoke were thrown off became the reality of a new colonial yoke.

In 1920 an insurgency broke out in Iraq against the British occupation.  RAF bombing of the area continued throughout the decade.  The Air Ministry considered it useful practice for other territories where “armed forces are required to give effect to British policy and uphold British prestige”.  Not least because it was so much cheaper than deploying ground troops.  Squadron Leader Arthur Harris reported after several such punitive raids that: "The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage.  Within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out, and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured, by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape."  At the time of the Arab revolt in Palestine in the late 1930s, Air Commodore Harris, as he then was, declared that "the only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand, and sooner or later it will have to be applied".  Ancient history this may now be, but the lands cursed with oil have a particular way of keeping the past in mind as they navigate the present.  The wonder is not that Europe suffers from terrorist atrocities.  It’s that patience proved so long-lasting.

What strikes westerners as not-quite-cricket is the worldwide extra-territorial jurisdiction that religious regimes claim, in defiance of international norms.  Killing cartoonists is the ever sharper expression of an idea that began in the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran and which the civilised world failed to challenge effectively.  In the UK we may tend to remember the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.  In France it’s more likely to be the murder in Paris of Shapour Bakhtiar, a remarkable man who was secular Iran’s last hope.  But all such incursions into European sovereignty pale into insignificance set against the western assumption that eastern regimes exist to be changed at will, whatever the locals think.  However tempting it is to bomb Syria without UN authority, the result will be more anti-western feeling, coupled with more European guilt for the collateral damage (damage that’s only terrorism by another name).  Or if nothing is done, an equal and opposite guilt for inaction.  If Europeans are to defend themselves, they must first question on what terms they think it proper to decide the fate of others.

Europe’s defence is bound to become more inward-looking because Europe is forming a smaller and smaller proportion of the world’s population.  (Its share is expected to halve between now and 2050.)  The ultimate triumph of universal human rights is no longer assured, because the expanding populations of the world may have no use for them.  They may view them with indifference, or with hostility.  Either way, Europeans need to be more watchful of what happens to their own rights and make that task their first priority, because it may be that no-one else will.  Europe is busy renouncing its enlightenment heritage because others find it offensive.  Since only those with something to hide are offended by the truth, it would be better not to retreat from the enlightenment but to shine the torch deeper, into our own society and into others’.  But that’s not what will happen.  On the contrary, we’ll continue to allow victims to be created by allowing others to use the value system of the victims’ own society against them.  Nice work for lawyers.

As terror attacks escalate, so the paradigm by which Europe’s rulers rule crumbles.  It survives only so long as it offers satisfying explanations of why the world is as it is.  European unity has been shaken by the migrant crisis, with one of its most unambiguous achievements – the borderless Schengen area – now in tatters.  Counter-terrorism demands closer co-operation across borders, better sharing of intelligence, perhaps a Europe where unity is enjoyed by the rulers even as it ceases to exist for the ruled.  It’s not a Europe that necessarily requires the EU, democratic or otherwise, which may be one reason why the EU is under political challenge.

Predictions of Mahometan conquest are far-fetched but only because they’re wrongly framed in military terms: a formal State structure can survive long after the internal reality of which active minority wields power in society has been utterly transformed.  One only has to look at Tower Hamlets under Mayor Lutfur Rahman to see how easily the corruption of Bangladesh can be reproduced wholesale in a London borough if standards are not upheld.  Given the London party consensus that elected mayors are better than open government, we can only expect to see more of this.  But even Europe, tolerant, self-loathing Europe, ever apologetic, ever happy to accept that two wrongs make a right, has a tipping point, a point of calling to account.

Expect far Right, anti-EU parties to fill at least part of the vacuum left by the collapsing paradigm of the politically correct.  Expect xenophobia to make no distinction between guilty and innocent: a presumption of innocence is essential for justice, but not for security.  It’s not impossible to imagine some countries taking things as far as mass expulsion of religious minorities deemed too troublesome to remain, especially once those countries are outside the EU.  It’s what happened in Spain in the 17th century, a move obviously considered worth it despite the economic damage it wrought.  Many of Spain’s moriscos ended up in north Africa, swelling the ranks of the Barbary pirates who took their revenge on Europe’s coastal communities, including those in Wessex.  Terrorism is nothing new and neither is the suite of possible responses.  About the only ‘self-evident truth’ is that the less Mahometanism there is in Europe, and in the world, the less terrorism there can be.  That calculation, that suspicion of the murky middle ground, that condemnation even of the fiercest fighters against the likes of ISIS, is the real tragedy.  Europeans aware of their history and confronted once again by an ideology that demands the death penalty for thought-crime may rather be safe than sorry.  It doesn’t lessen the tragedy.

If far Right parties fill part of the vacuum it’s also true that they can’t fill it all.  There are equal opportunities for other visions of Europe: most vitally a Europe of small nations and historic regions, decentralised, democratic, inclusive (of those willing to be included), yet passionately protective of traditional rights and committed to international justice rather than to the addictions of repression and war.  It’s a strong possibility in the longer term, but getting there could be a close-run thing.

Jeux Sans Frontières

Events in Paris this week have exposed Europe’s anxieties to the full.  Let’s consider some of the possible reactions.

On the far Right, and among the not-for-prophet movement generally, this is I-told-you-so time.  Even those who disagree with the politics must find recent analysis strikingly prescient.  And at least it’s an opportunity to highlight some double standards.

Then again, cui bono?  Who benefits?  Will Le Pen prove mightier than the sword, deepening the backlash?  About the only certainty is that there will now be further restrictions on civil liberty in order to intensify the ‘war on terror’.  Threats to national security will be enumerated, movements for autonomy doubtless among them.  Those who like the theory of a false-flag operation – a few fanatics supplied with guns and training by the security services and then shown the direction to go – will point to other conspiracy theories that turned out to be at least partially true.  The humanitarian catastrophes that have resulted from intervention across North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia are too systematic and repetitive to be put down to incompetence.  Those in charge know what they’re about.  The challenge for anyone else is to say what that is, though for starters what do the letters O.I.L. spell?

That sense that there isn’t a trustworthy narrative is bound to be destabilising.  Its consequence is fear and more fear, coupled with appeasement as a means to restore breathing space.  Freedom of expression will not be defended (if anything, the pressure will be to remove freedom of non-expression in the hunt for the non-conforming).  Liberals and anyone to the left of them will certainly not defend it, because it’s a fixed principle and liberal power depends on being able to manipulate a debate and steer its unfolding, contradictory development.  Power, for them, depends on the ability to set, and to arbitrate on the setting of, social and cultural boundaries.  An uncompromising defence of free expression is a nuance-free zone in which born control-freaks can make neither mischief nor money.  There can be no political correctness where nothing’s incorrect.

Migrants, and perceptions of migrants, play a relatively small part in what’s essentially a struggle for hegemony between the elites of Left and Right.  That being so, we cannot expect measured but steadfast leadership from either side.

The closing of the European mind is a mark of Europe’s lost place in the world.  You don’t annoy the oil sheikhs.  You rant against the terrorists, not their funders in the Gulf, whose wealth you court.  Does the Royal Navy’s new base in Bahrain serve any credible military purpose, or is it a taxpayer-funded shop window for the UK arms trade?  The BBC’s Robert Peston last month suggested that the dramatic slide in the oil price has been deliberately engineered to put high-cost oil extraction – fracking, deep sea, etc. – out of business.  And after that, the price will again rise.  It’s all a game, mes amis, c’est tout un jeu.

The Eastern Question

“‘Fighting’ was one of the most honourable words in the vocabulary, ‘the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man’, as Thomas Hughes put it…  Of course, the fight had to be for a good cause.  But one of the effects of imperialism had been to imbue very large numbers of people with a religious belief in Britain as the great force for good in the world…  That England could be in the wrong was almost inconceivable.”

Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (1981)

One of the key arguments in the debate on Scottish independence is that a splintering UK would lose the ability to throw its weight around in the world.  Is that an argument against independence, or one of many strong moral arguments in favour, one of the instances where Scotland’s gain is also a gain for others, here and abroad?

When David Cameron writes, as he did in the Sunday Telegraph last week, about Britain’s ‘military prowess’, he hopes the lack of connection with other issues won’t show through.  He heads the government of a country that is supposedly bankrupt (though, as we’ve noted, in no hurry to pay down its debts).  Local services are being more than decimated, while food banks proliferate.  Never mind ‘charity begins at home’.  What about ‘competence begins at home’?

The incompetence of the London regime explains why our energy security has been outsourced.  It’s why the next nuclear power station in Wessex will be built by two rogue states if ever there were, the French and the Chinese.  The French, whose position on minorities is 200 years out-of-date.  So much so that if France applied to join the EU today it would risk a refusal on human rights grounds.  And the Chinese?  China is an economic giant and emerging superpower but arguably has the worst human rights record of all.  Just 25 years ago in June, troops of the People’s ‘Liberation’ Army mowed down students demanding reforms before the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing.  Justice is still awaited.  France and China share an image of themselves as modern, enlightened states that in fact carries forward the contemptuous centralism of absolute monarchy at its worst.

In 1969, following the crushing of the Prague Spring, two young Czech students burned themselves to death in Wenceslas Square.  Their example has been widely repeated, notably by autonomists in India and by victims of the European sovereign-debt crisis.  But nowhere do the figures equal those in Tibet, where 35 cases were reported in 2011/12.

Do we hear about these deaths?  No, we do not.  Gaza, yes, Lhasa, no.  Whole editions of Newsnight are devoted to every little flare-up in the Middle East.  China might as well be another planet.  That can’t just be because there are fewer Tibetan Buddhists at the BBC than Jews, Arabs and Maoists.  Acute oppression makes news headlines; chronic oppression does not.  Those who have rockets to lob at their neighbours are, from a relative perspective, the lucky ones.  The unlucky are those whose oppression is so total, whose fear of reprisals is so great, that their voices are never heard.

The United Nations should be standing up for the oppressed everywhere, without favouritism.  It faces huge difficulties in doing so.  It is composed of the winners, the states that exist and not the unrepresented peoples who are still in the queue.  The least that British diplomacy can do is nudge it in the right direction.  Can British diplomacy do that?  Or is the shadow of empire cast too long?  Are we too busy doing our own thing, exercising our military prowess?  Bombing other countries, then sanctimoniously patching-up the injured and welcoming (or not) the refugees whose homelands our actions have disrupted.

Most of the time, over 95% of the world is at peace.  It shouldn’t be beyond the wit of man, acting collectively, to treat violence and the causes of violence, problems no more inevitable than smallpox or polio.  Unilateral action may be swift but it’s rarely decisive and it effectively absolves the rest of the world of its responsibility for collective security.  We need to confront the fear that if we aren’t acting as the world’s deputy sheriff, someone else will fill the vacuum.  The UN’s job is to prevent the vacuum emerging.  The sad fact is that our own efforts seem to have created far more vacuums than we’ve filled.

Look around the world for hotspots and you’ll see the Union Jack disappearing over the horizon, its mischief-making done.  Kashmir.  Palestine.  Iraq.  The Libya operation cost around £1 billion and only succeeded in replacing a crazy but competent dictator with a bunch of bandits.  While spreading conflict across the central Saharan states in its wake.  Leaving well alone was always a sensible alternative.  Now, when last week’s evil enemies are proposed as this week’s necessary allies, it makes even more sense.

The best intentions can go awry.  The 1916 Sykes-Picot accord is now viewed as a shameless example of European colonialists carving up territory that was none of their business.  Yet Mark Sykes, the British half of the deal, was a Yorkshire squire who fell in love with the Middle East.  He had his doubts about imperialism, thinking that "the White Man’s burden is a bag of gold".  He hated cities and their inhabitants (he was, after all, MP for central Hull) and greatly admired the nomadic life of the desert.  It was his deepest wish to protect the area’s ancient civilisation from corruption, "the smearing of the east" with the "slime of the west".  He hoped Sykes-Picot would provide the focus for emergent Arab nationalism.  Which in a much less predictable sense it now has.

In a globalised economy, actions have unexpected consequences.  The idea that Islamist fundamentalism was deliberately promoted by the British Empire in order to weaken Ottoman rule – and strengthen London’s influence in its place – is about as believable as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  The Brits backed fighters, not theologians.  But successful fundamentalism never lacks funding.  Oil is oil and if the Islamic State is financed by the oil wealth it now controls and by donations from others whose wealth also comes from oil, then we may indirectly be funding terrorism every time we top up the tank.

Muscular humanitarianism has been the subject of debate ever since Disraeli and Gladstone locked horns over the Eastern Question of their day.  But whatever its achievements, crusader-style chivalry starts to look insincere once we consider how cramped its priorities are by realpolitik.  In the 21st century, 19th century multi-national empires like the UK are not the best means of doing good and they only get in the way of other institutions better placed to deliver.  At the 2005 G8 Summit in Scotland, Tony Blair told the world’s press that “we are trying to do good”.  Might it not be far, far better for states like ours to stop trying to do good and simply be good?

Defence: Deceit & Denial

We’ve discussed before the centuries-old military occupation of Wessex by the UK’s armed services, and how this distorts both our economy and our objectivity in making moral judgments about foreign intervention or the ability to ‘project influence’ abroad.  There’s also an environmental cost.  Enter Tidworth from the north at present and you’ll find it a building site with, as at Amesbury, huge housing estates beginning to sprawl across the sensitive Wiltshire landscape.  It’s high time the British Army went home – the Channel Islands perhaps are what’s left of that – and left us in peace.

No chance of that under London diktat.  Gung-ho Cameron’s reshuffle last week saw a new man at the MoD.  Michael Fallon.  Are we safe in his hands?  Our money certainly isn’t, given that he moves across from Vince Cable’s Business department, where he was responsible for selling Royal Mail.  For £1 billion less than it was worth.  No wonder economic democrats are becoming more and more attracted to the idea of reversing privatisation of our public services WITHOUT compensation.

Talking of billions, David Cameron announced to the Farnborough Air Show, the day before the reshuffle, that, thanks to austerity, the London regime is now in a position to spend an additional £1.1 billion of our money on defence.

Anyone with eyes to see will know how good the MoD is at wasting public money on thoughtless procurement that is beyond insane.  This month, it launched the first of two gigantic aircraft carriers for which it doesn’t, beyond reasonable doubt, have any of the aircraft for which the ship was specifically designed, except for a full-size plastic display model.  Initial cost of the programme £3.9 billion, now over £6 billion and rising.

Next year, the MoD will be launching the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review, looking at future threats and how to address them.  So how come it can say today that it needs another £1.1 billion, given that priorities could conceivably change?  Will SDSR15 really be about identifying the threats and costing the response, or just about finding ways to convince the taxpayer to go on wasting the money already allocated?

Fallon, writing in the Sunday Telegraph this weekend, pushed all the buttons his fan club of empire loyalists like to see pushed.  A shopping list of mega-money kit is spelt out, framed by the familiar narrative of ‘keeping us safe’.  Go on, push that fear button.  Except that no-one can define how safe we are, if we are at all.  Quantity of defence spending does not automatically translate into quality, or any kind of value for money.  The UK has the biggest defence budget in Europe (huzzah!) and the fifth largest in the world (gadzooks!).  But will an aircraft carrier, with or without planes, protect us from an angry young man fuelling zealous fantasies from a laptop in Bradford or Birmingham?  Will £1 billion spent on military hardware be more beneficial than £1 billion spent on actions designed to remove the tensions that lead to conflict, actions such as breaking down political authority into the smallest practical units?

‘Keeping us safe’ makes assumptions about who ‘we’ are.  Are we part of a global peace initiative – safety for all – or is it rather more partisan than that?  Are we entitled to be kept safe if we keep insisting on making the world less safe for others?  And, in the much broader sense, do the key threats to our way of life in Wessex come from overseas, from homegrown terrorism, or from the very London-based regime that pretends to be protecting us, all the while interfering shamelessly in our internal affairs?

Who does benefit from defence spending?  Not necessarily the armed services but certainly the wider ‘defence community’ of arms manufacturers and the like.  This month, the London regime published the MoD Permanent Secretary’s performance objectives for 2014/15.  These include “ensuring that MOD contributes to the Government’s growth strategy by supporting Defence Exports”.

There you have it.  All the moral depravity of a Prime Minister proud of being the death industry’s honorary top salesman.  Yes, it’s jobs, but can those in the industry not do other work, work that they don’t have cause to be ashamed of?  And can we have a defence policy that doesn’t, like every other spending-based policy of this Government, have an underlay that is all about servicing ever-expanding debts to private bankers?  It’s a statistical certainty that the more defence sales the UK makes overseas, the higher the probability that one day the weapons will end up being used against our own.

Bailing Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anchoring the Future

Popular history has it that the Royal Navy was founded by King Ælfred the Great.  It’s not quite accurate – his father, King Æthelwulf also had a fleet of some sort – but the idea of England’s first sailor-king has maintained its powerful hold on the imagination.  So if naval shipbuilding in England began in Wessex it seems the wheel has come full circle with its ending at Portsmouth.

The phrase ‘end of an era’ is the body blow most feared by communities that depend upon a single sector.  Eras do end though, and Portsmouth’s loss, of 940 jobs, is not the first or the worst to be faced by a shipbuilding community.  In 1991, WR was represented at a meeting of the Campaign for the North, held at the King’s Manor in York, once home to the King’s Council in the North Parts, the Tudor and Stuart monarchs’ equivalent of a Government Office for the North.  CfN’s John Ellis reported that on Wearside some of the most modern shipyards in Europe were in the process of being demolished.  Attempts to rescue them had been frustrated by deliberate government policy: it had already been decided that the industry was to go and enterprise was therefore deemed futile.  It was rumoured that Sunderland was sacrificed to save jobs on Clydeside.  Building ships was what Sunderland did, and had done for over 600 years.  It had a lot in common with Portsmouth – the local papers were printed by the same firm, Portsmouth & Sunderland Newspapers Ltd – though Sunderland focused on civilian ships and Portsmouth built for the Navy.

Portsmouth and Sunderland share something else: a process of transformation driven by faceless organisations not accountable to those most directly affected.  Industries are destroyed, communities abandoned as ‘surplus labour’.  Governments lack the backbone to intervene early and positively in a farsighted way to make painful transitions less so.

Prioritising Clydeside over Portsmouth looks like a highly political move ahead of next year’s referendum, even though the business case is entirely sound.  Downing Street described the closure as being in the ‘national interest’, whatever that is supposed to mean (and it can mean many things).  Had it been Wessex agitating for independence, the calculations might not in fact have been any different but the politics would have had a sharper edge and Portsmouth might well have come away with a better deal already agreed.  Much of the mitigation is due to be signed-off only today.  Despite BAE's strategic review having been public knowledge for nearly two years, the publicity for the 'city deal' still presents its implications as an afterthought, which is what they appear to have been.  The staggered timing could perhaps be described as cruel but it is what local politicians wanted, not wanting Whitehall claiming all the credit for others' work.  That's inevitable in a top-down system.  Of course, it’s still possible that if Scotland does vote ‘Yes’ the priority could change again but Portsmouth shouldn’t hold its breath.

Positive intervention now to help the community of Portsmouth get back on its feet is the least we should expect from the London regime.  A government that did long-term planning would have started years ago.  It hardly comes as a surprise to ministers that naval shipbuilding capacity is going to be cut: they are the ones who place the orders and pay for the clear-out if none are forthcoming.  The whole of the defence contracting business is effectively an arm of government, dependent upon its largesse.

Wessex is massively dependent on the UK defence budget.  And that is not a good place to be.  The military is the largest employer in Wiltshire and has a big presence in Devon, Dorset, Bristol and Hampshire.  Its presence is morally inhibiting, in the sense that a necessary speaking-out against the UK’s aggressive foreign policy can seem disloyal to the military communities in our midst.  It’s financially and politically debilitating, in the sense that we are dependent not only on public sector cash raised UK-wide but on an aspect of expenditure that is likely to continue to shrink as the remains of the British Empire come apart, and even the homeland starts to fragment.

We’ve been here before, with the defence policy changes in 1956/7 that abandoned the role of coastal batteries, in place since Henry VIII, and cut back an aviation industry that had continued to prosper for over a decade after the end of the Second World War.  The result was a wave of mergers, takeovers and restructuring that consolidated that industry to such an extent that only three major groups survived to nationalisation in 1977.  The resulting single group is now BAE Systems, which also runs what’s left of naval shipbuilding.

There’s no doubt that Portsmouth will find a new role – relatively easily, given its location – and equally no doubt that it needs both responsible government support and the freedom from centralist controls to be able to get on with utilising its talents.  Meanwhile, all of Wessex should ponder where the axe will fall next and how prepared we are for the inevitable ending of the era of British world power.

Thin Red Line In The Sand

In our massively over-centralised world, subsidiarity mainly means moving power back towards the individual and to the most local communities wherever possible.  But not every time.  It’s also about co-operation in place of competition.  It’s always about doing things at the right level, the smallest level that works.  The level at which global security works is global.

There are two kinds of rogue state.  There are those that do terrible things.  And there are those who go after them as vigilantes, impatient with international law and due process.  Those for whom it is better to do something than nothing, even if the very best outcome they can achieve is not to make matters worse.  More often than not we have seen how military action without a clear political strategy does anything but that.

Parliament’s rejection yesterday of military action in Syria will not prevent military action taking place.  But it does end the assumption that wherever there is a fight to be had Britain will be there, wearing the deputy sheriff’s badge.  Is it such a disaster for Britain if this time the US takes France along instead to share the burden of being le gendarme du monde?  France is the former colonial power in Syria, as Britain was in Iraq (and had made a few bold attempts to be in Afghanistan).  While the mandate may end, the colonists never mentally go home.

If yesterday’s vote marks the turning point in foreign policy that some are claiming it to be, what next for the British lion?

First of all, it really is time for a clean-up of government policy towards the arms trade.  The David Cameron who today is licking his political wounds is the same David Cameron who has hawked military hardware all round the Middle East as an unpaid commercial traveller for the death industry.  Do British companies not make anything else the Arabs might like to buy?  Medical equipment perhaps?

Second, we need to appreciate that projecting British power in the world comes at a cost.  Successive governments have met that cost by selling off the family silver.  The result is a growing mismatch between the imperial-era rhetoric of being able to influence events abroad and the commercial reality of having lost the ability to influence them at home.  Reading the roll-call of vital industries and assets that are now foreign-owned ought to bring into question just how British the hollowed-out British national interest now is.

Third, we really must press for an answer to the question of what the possession of nuclear weapons is supposed to achieve.  Are they a cost-effective addition to our security or just a status symbol?  Is there any realistic prospect of them being any more useful and relevant in the next 20 years than they have been in the past 20?  Do the Swedes or the Swiss lose sleep over not having any?

Finally, can we perhaps remember what the United Nations is for?  According to its charter, members reject the use of armed force, save in the common interest, and agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council.  Just because the Security Council doesn’t always agree with you doesn’t prove that the Security Council is wrong.  Its greatest flaw is of course the position of the five permanent members, who owe their seats – with the right of veto – to the fact that 68 years ago they won the Second World War.  It’s an untenable position, one that kicks dirt in the face of any who truly believe in the sovereign equality of all nations, the UN’s very first founding principle.

How to remake the UN for the 21^st century?  One course of action – cutting the Gordian knot – would be to dissolve it and start again with a new constitution that rogue states can veto only by not re-joining.  Another would be for the UK to do the decent thing, abandon its permanent seat and the veto and return the seat to the pool for others to have their chance.

It’s not an entirely fanciful scenario.  If Scotland becomes an independent state, what happens to the UK seat?  Russia was quick to claim the Soviet Union’s place and England would no doubt attempt to claim the United Kingdom’s.  Whether it would get away with that is anyone’s guess.  With the nuclear subs based firmly on Scottish territory, and no immediate prospect of being able to relocate them, expect some fine diplomacy, to say the least.