Ending Invisibility

Colin Bex continues his efforts to highlight the connection between regionalism and resistance to climate change.  Read his latest report here.

Presi in Paris

“We know and we have seen that conferences are events which bring together important people who are unable to act on their own, but who together are always able to resolve that in fact nothing can be done...  Why is [Europe] unable to forecast and prevent one crisis after another?...  Today the European spirit and its people believe in superficial and secondary things...  but what does renewal mean?  A rule of thumb is that the depth of renewal must be at least equal to the size of the problem...  The task, therefore, Dear Friends, is not to do a few things better – we must do more than that.”

Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, addressing his party’s congress, December 2015

The world is not short of problems, current or predicted.  One published list of converging catastrophes foresees a perfect storm brewing, reaching its zenith sometime around 2020 and built from the extrapolation of seven great trends that reinforce one another:

• Political and cultural stalemate, especially in an ageing Europe unsure of its place 
  
• Demographic replacement, including of skilled and productive by unskilled and unproductive populations  
• Social chaos in the global South as the effects of late industrialisation ('development') spread around the world 
• Economic collapse, brought about by physical limits to growth to which a speculative, debt-driven financial system has no answer  
• Armed conflict, a response to population growth against a backdrop of diminishing resources, inflamed by fanatical religious cults  
• North-South confrontation underpinned by ideologies of equitable treatment at odds with political reality in one direction and resource reality in the other 
• Ecological collapse, of which climate change is one component 

This month’s climate change conference in Paris was set up to tackle one important part of the last of these challenges, and only that, though its actual deliberations showed how inseparable they are all becoming.  That lack of joined-up thinking is the problem that may be the key to the rest.

WR President Colin Bex was in Paris, on the fringes of the conference, flying the flag and meeting other representatives.  Colin’s request for official accreditation, as the leader of a UK political party, was ignored.  The implication is that alternative politics has nothing to offer the world, even though it’s alternatives to the failed status quo that are most urgently needed.  Developing the links made at events like the Paris conference is vital to advancing our own alternative.  Colin reports that the demonstrators he met were very positive in their outlook: “Not least on account of atrocities visited on Parisians recently, the demonstrators are motivated by feelings of peace, love and respect for and in solidarity with all in the city, especially those who continue to encounter grief and other suffering as a consequence, and accordingly they are committed to generating an exclusively peaceful and friendly experience.”

It will take much more than this however if the world is to turn away from catastrophe.  Yes, there is a deal, and yes, it says world leaders will try to limit global warming to 1.5°C.  But there are no means to actually achieve this.  The collective reductions promised by world powers only head us closer to 3°C.  And even those reductions are not legally binding.  Governance is surely key, especially the decentralisation of power so that those who make decisions are surrounded by the consequences and cannot run from them.  This is bad news for those who would like to make climate change the cause upon which a campaign for lawyer-led world government can be built.  But it need not be incompatible with combining wider moral responsibility (thinking globally) with the vision of a co-operative community (acting locally).  Or with the notion of a bridge between them (planning regionally).

France has often been in the news this year, faced with terrorist attacks, a climate conference, and now elections for the country’s revised regions (their areas still largely botched by control freaks in Paris).  There has been much coverage of the fortunes of the far Right Front National in those elections but almost no mention of the result in the one Mediterranean region that nature prevents Paris from gerrymandering.  The island of Corsica – conquered by France in 1769 – has elected a regionalist government for the first time.  To much alarm in Paris, which has responded to demands for political and cultural concessions with the usual huffing and puffing about France's immutable constitution.  The new President of Corsica's Executive Council, Gilles Simeoni put things into a better perspective: "We want dialogue with Paris and political solutions but it is also an undisputed fact that we belong to the Corsican nation and Corsican is our language."

In Spain, pro-independence and pro-sovereignty parties made some intriguing advances in yesterday's elections, which also produced very bad results for the established Madrid parties.  In Corsica and Catalonia, as in Scotland, Europe is leading the way to a decentralised politics that also recognises the challenges of inter-dependence.  What is failing these places, what is failing Europe, and what is failing the world, is a system of old imperial states unable to manage the transition to a radically different kind of future.

Bex & the Bankers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That Figures

The Campaign to Protect Rural England is good at collecting statistics.  It may be no more than a gnat on the side of the development elephant but at least it knows how to document the scale of the deception being practised upon us by the London regime.  However, there is rather more to the data than a first glance suggests.

Localism, we were promised.  Figures published by CPRE – in a pamphlet optimistically called A Landmark Year for the Countryside – show that in the last accounting year (2013/14), Whitehall overruled 67% of the major housing refusals by local councils.  In 2008/09 it overruled just 31%.  That’s a measure not so much of which party is in power or of philosophical attitudes to localism but of how far the easy solutions have been used up, leaving the controversial ones to follow.  There are currently plans to build 700,000 homes in the countryside, including 200,000 on Green Belt land. 

Government figures estimate that previously developed – 'brownfield' – land could accommodate 1.5 million homes, but 1.5 million isn’t enough for the population growth that the London parties favour.  And CPRE must know this, even if it won't admit it: assuming 2 persons per home, the current net immigration rate of 250,000 a year, and even that no homes are sold to the existing population as it spreads out or re-locates, 1.5 million homes is only 12 years supply.  Besides, brownfield land is more expensive to develop, leading housebuilders to claim that in order to make a profit they'd have to charge housebuyers more.  Or reduce their contributions to local infrastructure.  Not only that, but some "brownfield" land is beautiful parkland, such as that surrounding Victorian asylums.  Some is deep in the countryside, such as disused airfields that might more rationally be dug up and returned to farmland.

There's another statistical deception that also goes unnoticed.  It's said that the supply of brownfield land is continually being renewed as old uses are abandoned, leaving factories, warehouses, hospitals and the like to be redeveloped.  That's true, but if the uses are relocating to greenfield sites – which they often are – then countryside is lost just as if it had gone for housing.  We just don't get so worked up about the figures because they aren't presented in the same high-profile way.  It's also assumed that non-housing uses have more of a 'right' to expand into the countryside, being socially or economically 'essential' and with less flexibility over where to locate.  It's all part of the prejudice that measures development as 'progress' but is selective about measuring the loss to those rural environments into which development is progressing.  Successive governments – though not this one – have had targets for the proportion of housing built on brownfield sites.  None has dared have a target for any of the other uses.  And so no-one grasps the overall picture.  Politically, no-one wants to.  There's something inherently negative about measuring the total loss of farmland rather than the increase of goodies that take its place.  Folk might even panic about where their future food will come from.  As well they might.

CPRE is a fine example of a safety valve, ‘moderately’ and deferentially expressing what needs to be uncompromising rage if it’s to be effective.  Its stance only serves to perpetuate the myth that planning decisions are essentially ‘fair’ and ‘reasonable’, rather than bought by the development lobby through party donations aimed at changing national policy.  CPRE naively supports HS2, thinking it might reduce the building of new roads and runways.  It won’t.  You’ll have those too.  Its pamphlet congratulates its Northumberland branch for ensuring that 70% of new homes in and around Newcastle will be on brownfield sites.  So 30% will be on farmland?  Is that sustainable development?  If that’s the best that can be achieved on Tyneside – a depressed area if ever there was one – what chance does the Wessex countryside have?

Choosing to be Beggars

Last week, an environmental coalition – Butterfly Conservation, the League Against Cruel Sports, the Mammal Society, the Ramblers, the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts – held a ‘Rally for Nature’ at the Palace of Westminster.  Why?  To lobby MPs ahead of the next election, reminding them of how important nature is.

MPs need reminding.  Because across Wessex, wildlife is under siege.  In Alton, for example, there’s currently a campaign to save its wildflower meadows from housebuilders.  This area is a beautiful example of Hampshire countryside and a haven for butterflies.  Spearheading development at Alton is the Homes & Communities Agency, a central government quango.  Yes, it’s our own taxes that are paying for our destruction.

Any campaign against imposed development has our support.  Wessex is, for us, a community of communities, every one of which must be truly free to decide its own future, without interference from those in London who think they know best. 

But how effective are these isolated actions?  The rallies.  The petitions.  The implorings?  Not very.  Look at Winchester.  At Twyford Down, the Department of Transport carved the M3 through one of the most heavily ‘protected’ landscapes in England.  Nearby, the battle for Barton Farm was lost, due to the winning combination of Winchester College as landowner, a dogged developer, and a government that spectacularly failed to deliver on localism.

The system can be beaten.  Occasionally, a developer goes away empty-handed.  But such cases are all too rare.  They serve mainly as ammunition for those who claim that the system works and that it can be beaten, with reasoned argument, and that therefore there’s no cause to change it.  Most folk don’t engage with the system until it impinges on them, and so they fail to see the bigger picture, the campaigners in neighbouring shires facing the same developers, the same arguments, the same strategies aimed at defeating them.  They place their faith in non-party pressure groups like County Wildlife Trusts or the Campaign to Protect Rural England.  More hardened campaigners refer to them as the ‘fluffies’, those who are simply too nice to win.

They really are their own worst enemies.  They lose because even when they do think politically they do not act politically.  Development is being imposed on Wessex by a Tory/FibDem coalition.  So what does Wessex do?  It votes Tory or FibDem.  Alton has a Tory MP (with 57% of the vote).  Its district council, East Hampshire, is 100% Tory/FibDem.  Hampshire County Council is 79% Tory/FibDem.  You get the lies you voted for.  These are folk from whom you cannot expect anything better.  And you chose them to represent your views.  Do they not represent your views?  Then why do you keep voting for them?

How do they get away with it?  ALL London-party politicians play pass-the-parcel.  MPs will insist that planning decisions are for local councils to make and nothing to do with them.  But councillors will point out that as decisions can be overturned by Whitehall they are never truly masters in their own house.  Some of them undoubtedly enjoy putting the blame on the faceless mandarins, knowing that voting loyalties are too tribal for this to make any difference at all come polling day.

Because who would you vote for if the Tories and FibDems disgust you?  The argument goes that there’s only one realistic alternative – the Labour bogeyman – and that ‘socialist’ Labour would be so much worse.  That’s widely believed because it happens to be widely true.  (Except for the socialism, transformed long ago into the petty spitefulness of political correctness, which, being obsessed with individual reward and punishment, is everything but social.)  Labour are the party of Big Growth.  But no more so than the other London parties.  Labour are worse because, as an urban party, they aren’t shy about destroying the countryside.  For them, protecting countryside is the hobby of the well-heeled who want to keep house prices up.

Maybe, but the butterflies have committed no crime.  Those who defend them may well be sincere in believing that a better England is not the overcrowded concrete jungle it’s becoming.  The problem for the Tories and FibDems is that the outrage is bound to grow as ever-more-sensitive sites reach the top of the ‘to build on’ list.  That’s when a belief in the free market reaches revulsion point.  Labour meanwhile, accustomed to State intervention as a means to facilitate growth, not to reverse it, are left hopelessly unable to respond to that opportunity.  Grand analysis gives way to marginal differences.  Should we build more flats in villages?  Or convert old Dutch barns in the middle of nowhere?  Would using floodplains for housing be fine if we just raised defences?  What’s the cleverest way to undermine support for the Green Belt?

No wonder UKIP are rejoicing.  UKIP can expect to pick up votes from three sources.  There are the true believers, those who think that to be really cynical is to be really cool.  Then there are the protest votes, finding a home, any home, that gives vent to their anger and frustration.  Finally, there are those who are easily fooled into thinking that UKIP is them.  Those who believe, for example, that UKIP is an anti-immigration party when it has made clear that it’s nothing of the kind.  It’s pro-immigration, but on the UK’s own terms.

And so it goes: Third World immigrants might work for less than eastern Europeans.  Don’t mention the argument that filling a glut of vacancies by stripping developing countries of their most skilled workers is far from fraternal.  Or ask what it is that made those countries so relatively unattractive.  Above all, keep folk well-confused and focused on immigration – THEM – instead of on population, which is them AND us.  UKIP is yet another economically libertarian party, whose main gripe is that the EU, unlike little Britain, might just conceivably stand up for sovereignty and tell the globalists and the growth junkies where to go.

A vote for UKIP is not good, but neither is it bad.  In the long view, anything that breaks up the hereditary, class-based tribalism of British politics has to be a positive development.  The more fragmented the vote becomes, the less credible it will be to continue with first-past-the-post or with a media focus on just the ‘top three’.  Those who have left the Tories behind will have shown that it’s possible to move on.  And beyond UKIP, or maybe the Greens (enthusiasts for ‘green growth’, so hardly sound), lies what?  Territorial parties like ours have a vital role to play in the 21st century.  The long-term limitation of UKIP is that it isn’t actually interested in the territory of the UK, in the way that, for example, the nationalist parties are interested in the territory of Scotland, Wales or Cornwall.  For UKIP, the UK is just Airstrip One.  Any hint to the contrary in its 2010 manifesto need not be taken seriously, since its own leader condemned it as ‘drivel’.

Essentially, the smaller the territorial focus of politics, the better the chances of defeating Big Growth, because the closer the connection between those who make decisions and those who live with the consequences.  That might suggest localism rather than regionalism, let alone europeanism, but there’s no contradiction so long as subsidiarity is observed.  Wider solidarity can avoid one area being set against another for a third party’s benefit.  Regions, properly designed from below (not the Prescott zones imposed from above) can be a shield for local democracy, not its negation.

We want a self-governing Wessex because we want a completely different kind of politics, taking for granted changes like proportional representation to break the hold of the old parties here.  Instead of admiring Switzerland, with its self-governing cantons, citizen initiatives and binding referenda, why not imitate it?  What are we waiting for?  Why would we rather choose to be beggars before the lords and members of a despotic and self-obsessed Parliament, the guardians of an English democratic tradition that objective observers might judge to be no better than tyranny?  We should talk politics with our neighbours, because they are part of our ability to change whatever we choose, not with our MPs, who exist only to abuse the power we lend them.

In 1992, we issued a pamphlet entitled Your Region Needs You!  Its ever-more-relevant conclusion is as follows:

“Wessex is for its people West-Saxon or not, native or settler who cherish it for what it could be and should be.  But what of its future without regionalisation?  The answer is disaster! – The remedy in your hands…?”

Not Gingerbread Houses

What have we been saying?  That the range of demands increasingly being placed on our countryside could soon exceed the supply of rural land.

Now it’s been confirmed.  Cambridge University’s Institute for Sustainability Leadership has published a report – The Best Use of UK Agricultural Land – quantifying the UK-wide shortfall at up to 6 million hectares, or 15 million acres, by 2030.  (Wessex covers 3 million hectares or 7 million acres.)  You can read the headlines here and download the report here (right-hand column).

Some of the difficulty can be overcome by making multiple use of the same land – a woodland can be used for timber, biomass feedstock, water retention, carbon storage, wildlife habitats and recreation – but there are limits to this.  Our houses aren’t edible, so the land they occupy is land lost to food production.  In Wessex we have the added burdens imposed by London overspill housing, second and holiday homes and other external demands on our land area, for water-gathering, power generation or waste disposal.

As the report points out, the UK Government is failing to provide any leadership on the issue of land use in its broadest sense, not just development.  Scotland has a better grasp of the issues, but that’s just Scotland.  Many ecosystem services have no market price, so leaving things to market forces won’t deliver a sustainable solution.

The report makes interesting reading from a Wessex perspective.  It argues that the UK imports foods it could grow for itself, including foods in which it has a competitive advantage and could therefore also develop an export market.  Examples include apples – all those orchards grubbed up! – pears, plums, summer berries, pig meat, and processed products such as yoghurt and ice cream.  Wessex agriculture could have quite a future, if the policy framework is a supportive one.  But with no sign of joined-up thinking in Whitehall, it’s clear that Wessex will have to do its own planning and make its own decisions.

Anybody Listening?

The following extract from the current issue of Population Matters Magazine is written by its editor, Norman Pasley:

“There is great concern in Fareham about plans for a new town called Welbourne to be built on farmland north of the M27 motorway.  The debate is giving rise to many letters in the local paper, The News, from irate residents who don’t want it.

The choice is either building Welbourne or filling in the green gaps in Fareham between the motorway and the Solent.  There is no ‘do-nothing’ option – the population keeps rising.  In November, the Leader of Fareham Borough Council was quoted as confirming that Welbourne is needed.  Cllr Woodward mentioned various issues: the need for new affordable homes; Fareham’s rising population; growth in the local economy attracting new workers who need homes; existing residents trading up to larger homes; and our ageing population.  Between 1951 and 2011, Fareham’s numbers have more than doubled from 43,000 to 112,000.  If the same growth rate continues into the future, Fareham’s population will double again by about 2061 – to 224,000.  Has anyone thought about the consequences of such growth?

In December, The News interviewed the Leader of Portsmouth City Council.  Under the headline ‘Leader warns about uncertainty brought by population boom’, Cllr Vernon-Jackson provided population data supplied by the Office for National Statistics.  ‘It’s a national issue and the Government will have to work out how we are going to cope if it happens,’ Cllr Vernon-Jackson said.  In my view, he’s right about government getting involved.  ‘If it happens’?  It is happening – quietly, out of sight, every day, everywhere.  Portsmouth’s population is expected to rise by 9,000 people by 2021.  Almost entirely surrounded by water, the additional people can only be accommodated by constructing higher buildings in the city, thus increasing population density, or by building elsewhere.

A sum of £5m has been allocated for additional school places in Portsmouth to 2021.  The article didn’t mention the additional costs for: college places; social services; affordable housing; GP and hospital services; more and larger supermarkets; and relieving road and rail congestion.  Have these costs been estimated?  Who will pay?  Won’t we need higher local taxes and higher utility, food and transport prices?  The News article also states that the other six districts in [and adjoining] south east Hampshire: Fareham, Chichester, East Hampshire, Winchester, Havant, and Gosport could have an extra 46,000 people by 2021.  That’s an increase of nearly seven percent.  But I think we need to look farther into the future to see the true population growth picture – say to 2061 when today’s 17-year-olds will reach 65.  The present population of Portsmouth, and the six districts above, is 882,000.  If this grew by seven percent per decade, by 2061 the population would reach 1,228,000.  The extra 346,000 new people would need about 150,000 homes built on perhaps 6,000 hectares of land.  At what cost in taxes, natural resources, and loss of countryside, and so on?

I welcome these Councillors talking about population…  In my view, it’s high time national and local government found their voice and became outspoken about this most serious problem.  Starting today, they need to work in partnership with the people to do the right thing – plan for growth reduction.  Today’s young people have the most to gain by enjoying a less crowded and less damaged planet.  A friend of mine sent me this: ‘With increasing concerns about overpopulation, climate change and environmental degradation, a few of the passengers and crew are becoming increasingly concerned, but the winners are on the bridge and this ship will take some turning’.  It’s high time all the passengers and crew signalled the bridge to turn the ship!”

Clearly a man who asks the right questions.  But not one familiar with the right answers.  The existing political system has, whether by accident or by design, caused the problem and cannot admit it, let alone solve it.  So there’s no point whatsoever in trying to gain the captain’s ear.  The way forward – the only way forward – is to insist that the captain walks the plank.  The despotic, Norman-imposed Parlement at Westminster, dancing, as ever, to the tune of City swindlers, must be cast aside and replaced with a Wessex Witan that responds to the will of Wessex folk.

The Plantation of Wessex

Last April, one of Eric Pickles’ Planning Inspectors opened a public inquiry in the Oxfordshire village of Bloxham.  The Coalition promised localism – local decisions made by local folk, without interference from London – but – as we have mentioned many times – their localism is a lie.  Under real localism, there would be no such thing as a Planning Inspector because there would be no such thing as a right of appeal against a local decision.

At the inquiry, local residents gave their views on a proposal to build up to 85 more houses on farmland east of the village.  One argued that: “There has been a remarkable expansion of Bloxham in the last fifty years.  Recent developments have been on agricultural land and have clearly put further strain on the village infrastructure…  Six farms within the village boundaries have been lost and due consideration should be given to future demand for agricultural land for food production and our future food security.”  A local councillor added that: “The village is already bursting at the seams with traffic and flooding problems, power outages and surgeries and schools that are at capacity.”

The Inspector, if he recognised the arguments at all, gave them short shrift in his report: “I accept that Bloxham has seen a considerable amount of development since 2001 and note that residents consider it to be now ‘full’.  However, … I cannot accept that the quantum of development can be a determining factor in this appeal…  Government policy is strongly directed towards an increase in housing designed to stimulate the economy.  Nowhere is there guidance that requires the retention of agricultural land per se for future food security.  This is not therefore a matter that can weigh against the proposed development.”

Pickles duly concurred.  His assistant issued a grant of planning permission, noting that: “The Secretary of State agrees with the Inspector that there are no grounds for weighing the loss of agricultural land per se for future food security against the appeal proposal.”  The Government’s view then is not that food security matters generally, but that other factors outweighed it in this particular case.  It is far more stark than that: it simply won’t acknowledge the problem at all.  And so the fantasy continues: Britain will build houses to accommodate a bigger workforce that will do stuff in ‘financial services‘ to pay the bills, enabling us to buy whatever food we need on world markets.  Until one day the food isn’t there, because the growers have kept it to feed their own growing families.  One does have to wonder if there isn’t a grand plan by self-loathing loons (Pickles included) to create the conditions for starvation in that old imperial power off the north-west coast of Europe.

So who is standing up for our farmland?  Farmers?  Landowners?  Certainly not.  Watch the food security card being played for all it’s worth in defence of subsidies, to go on farming marginal land that might be better used for wildlife or forestry.  But go on watching and the card magically disappears if good, productive land on the edges of towns and villages can be generously contributed towards solving the nation’s housing “crisis”.

Two quotes from Peter Clery’s recent polemic, Green Gold: A Thousand Years of English Land illustrate the point.  On one page he tells us that: “In a time of pending world shortages of food and fuel, a nation which relies too much on others to feed it is unwise to say the least.  The next war, when our land will again be crucial to survival, may not be military but a creeping economic attack.  Others, who work harder or more efficiently than we do, may outbid us for food on world markets leaving us even more dependent on what we can produce at home.  In any case, food issues will become more important and food will cost more.  The interests of bats and badgers will take second place in the public mind if there is insufficient bread in the shops.”

Yet on the very same page he also tells us that: “There are few landowners in England who would not be willing to release perhaps one per cent of their land for intelligent well designed housing or light industry and offices.  One per cent of farmland is some 220,000 acres – more than enough to meet the perceived housing need with increasing supply reducing the price to a more sensible relationship between plot cost and building cost.”  That’ll be 1% now, 1% later, 1% after that, and so on bit by bit to the crack of ecological doom.  Elsewhere, Clery is good enough to point out that 100,000 acres – roughly the area lost to motorways since 1945 – is 300,000 tons of wheat foregone every year, forever.

Such confused thinking is not at all unusual among those with a vested interest in making the most money from land.  We need to rethink not only the planning laws but also laws on the ownership, tenure and taxation of land if we are to remove the huge incentives for farmers to destroy the most basic tool of their trade.  Old Labour tried three times to establish a betterment tax to capture the unearned increase in land value upon change of use; three times their work was undone by the Tories.  New Labour, a perfect poodle of the propertarians, never bothered.

So if those most directly affected are not defending our land, who is?  If you’re a Tory, appalled at the development frenzy that Cameron’s gung-ho City yobs are now getting away with, where do you turn?  The LibDems?  The Chair of that party’s backbench housing committee is Annette Brooke, MP for Mid-Dorset and North Poole.  Her solution to the housing “crisis” is a wave of ‘garden communities’ of around 10,000 homes.  Where promoted by local councils and enjoying local support.  (As if.)  But according to Brooke, “local people will need to understand why they are needed”.  Classic London-speak.  It’s now the common currency of all three main London parties, this patronising tone that politicians use when they talk down to the implicitly thick electorate, whose views they’re supposed to be representing, not manipulating.

For as long as voters think they have only three choices, the only alternative to the Coalition parties is to re-elect the last lot of rogues who were unseated in 2010.  According to design consultant Andy von Bradsky, who has his finger on the Labour pulse, that party is more comfortable with top-down approaches.  It has no need to justify itself to a Wessex electorate that, thanks to the voters of the rest of the UK, can be safely ignored.  Labour’s housing review, led by Sir Michael Lyons, is looking at “how the pace of development might be forced”, according to von Bradsky.  Shadow housing minister Emma Reynolds, who sits for Wolverhampton, has suggested that up to five new towns could be created under a future Labour government.  Not all necessarily in Wessex, but who knows for sure?  The means envisaged aren’t at all subtle.  Either imposition through national legislation, or an unbeatable offer to exhausted councils desperate for an alternative to the salami-slicing of treasured environments that goes on daily thanks to the appeals system.

The best that can be said about the prospective plantation of Wessex with new towns is that it will concentrate the environmental damage in a few places instead of spreading it thinly.  Which is not a great recommendation.  It isn’t the fault of Wessex if London cannot manage its population and so casts envious eyes on our broad acres for overspill.  The Wessex dialect and the customs, traditions and memories that make Wessex special are in retreat across much of the east of our region.  It‘s not so much because of cockneyisation in principle that this happens – anyone is capable of adopting a mix of identities – but because we lack the political institutions – and even the cultural ones – to defend our regional differences and encourage native and settler alike to value them.  London sets the tone for us all and whatever London doesn’t value is trampled underfoot and ridiculed.

Suggest five new towns in Cornwall or mid-Wales and watch the active reaction take hold.  Suggest them in Wessex and the reactions will range from indifference to resignation.  What can we do?  What can you do?  Rip up that membership card from the party of self-annihilation: whether Cameron’s, Clegg’s or Miliband’s, or Farage’s too for that matter.  And join the party of the Wessex resistance instead.

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.

Looking Ahead

It’s happened.  The seawall at Dawlish has been washed away, leaving the main line railway track suspended in mid-air.

Fortunately, the London regime is known for looking ahead, anticipating such problems as arise from climate change and planning new infrastructure to cope with them.  It could have wasted tens of billions building unnecessary new lines in the London area, in response to the clamouring of bankers for shorter journey times to their provincial fiefdoms.  Instead it had the foresight to listen to real experts and re-open the line from Exeter to Plymouth via Okehampton and Tavistock – or any one of a number of alternatives – to provide a diversionary route.  What could have been a disaster – Plymouth cut off from the national rail network for up to six weeks – was thus carefully avoided.

In much the same way, the London regime listened to those warning that Wessex cannot take more housing and other development because its environment is at breaking point and can only get worse.  The regime responded by stopping any more building, either on floodplains or on the higher ground from which water runs off, and made it clear that the population of Wessex, far from growing even further, needs to decline from its current, unsustainable level.  Large-scale tree-planting was then undertaken, to retain excess water and provide the raw material for future renewable energy projects.

It would be nice to think that that’s what happened.  A government at Westminster dependent for its survival on the votes of Wessex Regionalist MPs would indeed have had to do all of the above.  As ever, it’s not the difference you can see when we’re elected that counts but the difference you can see when we aren’t.

Wales: A Way And A Warning

In 2012 we noted the Welsh Government’s plans to create a powerful, integrated environmental body.  Those plans took effect in April 2013 with the launch of Natural Resources Wales.

NRW is the end result of a long process of bringing together powers that were once spread very thinly.  Forty years ago, those powers belonged to no fewer than seven different authorities or types of authority:

• the Countryside Commission (based in London) dealt with landscape and recreation

• the Forestry Commission (based in London) dealt with forestry 

• HM Factory Inspectorate (based in London) dealt with air pollution

• local councils dealt with waste disposal

• the Nature Conservancy (based in London) dealt with wildlife

• river authorities dealt with fisheries, land drainage and water pollution (Wales had seven)

• the Welsh Office (based in Cardiff, but actually run from London) dealt with the farmed environment

Now, for the first time, one organisation can look at the environment in Wales as a whole, in a joined-up way.  It still has to deal with cross-border issues, but it has no single English equivalent.  It will go on dealing with four separate bodies (the Environment Agency, the Forestry Commission, Natural England, and parts of DEFRA).  Could they be similarly unified?  Well, yes, and it has been talked about, but given the size of England the resulting organisation would be a nightmare of administrative complexity.  It could only work effectively through a network of regional offices, in touch with events on the ground, and this Coalition really doesn’t like doing regions.  The Welsh example isn’t exactly replicable for England.  It is replicable for Wessex.

The Welsh environment is a precious heritage, pivotal to defining what Wales is culturally.  For us, the Wessex environment should be viewed as no less precious and pivotal.  Yet under the London regime it isn’t deemed worthy of the same integrated approach to ensuring its protection.  Given the pressure from London for endless overspill housing, that’s a catastrophe in the making.

Wales then is worthy of study, and often emulation.  But let’s not jump to the conclusion that all’s well west of the Severn.  Some of the devolved choices made haven’t worked out, with education and health policies in Wales coming in for some sustained criticism.

Most importantly, Wales, unlike Scotland, has failed to grasp what an opportunity devolution is to really do politics differently.  It remains governed by a Labour Party that ultimately answers not to Wales but to Ed Miliband in London.  Plaid Cymru, having led the campaign for self-government over the past century, can only sit and watch the opportunity slip away.

It is when Labour implements policies that are no different from the Coalition’s that you see how the promise of devolution has been subverted.  Take the Planning Bill, published in December.  Launching the Bill, housing and regeneration minister Carl Sargeant said that the Welsh planning system needs to be repositioned from regulating development to enabling appropriate development.  He could have been quoting Osborne or Pickles.  Regulatory capture again: forcing the regulators to act as cheerleaders for the industry and to ask no questions.  In a typical piece of Labour nonsense, detailed rules are to be prescribed for delegating decisions to council officers, to avoid ‘inconsistency’ (as Labour describes local democratic choice).  The Welsh Government also wants to regulate the size of planning committees (no fewer than 11 nor more than 21 members) and the procedures they follow.  Has it really nothing better to do?  Does it understand decentralisation and localism any better than the Coalition?  It appears to understand them less.

Last month, just to demonstrate how far the plot has been lost, the Welsh Government revealed plans to plunge local government in Wales into its third comprehensive reorganisation in 40 years.  County councils like Anglesey and Pembrokeshire, restored in 1996 after a 22-year gap, are now set to vanish again after little more than 17.  Cutting the number of councils in Wales by half or more will also mean fewer councillors, less scrutiny of decision-making and more power for the bureaucracy.  Meanwhile, since key services like police remain non-devolved in Wales, any talk of a better integrated public sector will continue to come up against constraints imposed by the London regime.  You can blame the Tories under John Redwood for the 1996 reorganisation - and its failure to ask how, if at all, this would fit a devolved Wales - but you can blame all three main London parties for still not answering the question of what shape devolution will ultimately obtain.

Wales shows how devolution can mean better governance.  It also shows how, left in the hands of Labour, devolution can fail to deliver its full potential.  Constitutional change is a necessary step towards political change but it is not a sufficient step.  Real change comes only with a willingness to reject the London parties at the ballot box.

Our Silent, Supine Cities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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