The People v. The Profit

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell painted a picture of the future as a boot stamping on a human face, forever.  The boot now has a name.  TTIP.  The Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership.  Hammered out in secret talks between Europe and the USA, it will make democracy illegal, by giving corporations the right to sue governments for passing laws that restrict their profits, such as laws that raise environmental or social protection.

Campaign group 38 Degrees gave evidence this week to a select committee at Westminster.  One of their members described the experience as follows:

“This week I was shouted at by a group of MPs.

I'd been asked to explain to the Business Select Committee why 38 Degrees members are so worried about TTIP.  That's the dodgy EU-US trade deal that could bring further privatisation of our NHS.  But once I got there, they didn’t seem to want to hear why we were against privatisation.  Or why we want to stop American corporations having the power to sue our government in secret courts.

Instead they attacked 38 Degrees members for wanting to have a say.  They kept arguing that 38 Degrees members didn’t know enough to have valid opinions about the deal.  And when I said we don’t trust politicians to deal with something as important as this behind closed doors, the chairman told me to shut up!”

If, like us, you’re sceptical about the value of trade and concerned about the threat that trade poses to democracy, you’ll understand where he’s coming from.  TTIP has to be defeated but, in the long term, it’s just as important to defeat the mindset – totalitarian liberalism – that thinks something like TTIP could ever be acceptable in a society that values vital democracy.  We’ve become numbed to the idea that it’s not for business to compete for access to our markets, it’s for nations to compete for the privilege of investment by businesses.  Because if the businesses are disobeyed, they have the power (that we gave to them) to lay waste to everything.  Faced with the threat of our sovereignty now being for sale, defence is nowhere near enough.  Politics must re-conquer economics or go down fighting.  A boycott of US goods might be a start?

It’s just a shame that David Babbs – the man who now complains about being shouted at – is the man who decided only last year that the voters of Eastleigh ought not to hear from Colin Bex.

New Wessex, New World

Our attention was recently drawn to a couple of very interesting links.

The first link is to a blog that asks of Mebyon Kernow why it has a view on anything more than the internal affairs of Cornwall:

“…the MK manifesto is littered with ‘policies’ relating to national and global issues over which the party will never have any influence. It starts with MK’s ‘mission statement’: ‘Mebyon Kernow is a modern and progressive political party, campaigning for a better deal for Cornwall and a fairer, more equitable World.’ It was all looking good right up to those last six words. I’m sure many of us share their desire for a ‘fairer, more equitable World’ but in that quest, wouldn’t you be better off supporting organisations like Oxfam or the UNHCR? They are probably in a better position to deliver it than Mebyon Kernow.”

It’s a fair question and one that we too need to ask ourselves from time to time.

Strategically, there are two sound answers to the question. One is that a party whose long-term aims include having its own MPs at Westminster must be willing to engage with the full range of political issues, regardless of how much influence it currently wields. Or else lose votes to other parties that are willing. The other is that in a globalised world we must be alert to the indirect consequences that globalisation has for us, even as we do our bit to put globalisation into reverse. Another, tactical answer is that nationalist and regionalist parties have deliberately emphasised their outward-looking stance in order to refute allegations of chauvinism, isolationism and racism. Unionists and centralists fling such mud routinely, even though it would stick far more readily to themselves.

We believe that Wessex has the right to as much self-government as it wishes. We don’t think that would ever extend to independence but it’s not for us to say what future generations may think. As regionalists we’re comfortable with the idea that some wider decisions may best be made collectively, so long as we believe that it’s in our interests for this to be so. It’s not the case then that Wessex – or Cornwall for that matter – can only have a political movement that debates dog bins and bus shelters, and little more. Our voice has been silenced too long for us to allow others simply to assume that they have the right to speak on our behalf in the UK, the EU, or the UN. It’s our job to speak up for ourselves on every issue and to relate it back to our core beliefs.

Can the Wessex tail wag the world dog? Obviously not, but we can align ourselves with wider causes that benefit us, that help spread the values of political, economic and cultural decentralisation.

One such is the idea of the optimised, steady-state economy, which we have mentioned before, and which is the subject of the second link. The table there is a real call to action for those dissatisfied with the status quo. We need to take the crisis element out of economics, because – don’t panic – as everyone from Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four to Klein in The Shock Doctrine has indicated, the engineering of perpetual crisis is how social control is maintained.

Ultimately, however, we must not lose sight of our primary goal. It is very easy to be taken in by those who insist that everyone, everywhere, has to sink their particularisms in a unified campaign to topple the global power elite. And do we get our particularisms back afterwards? Not if history is any guide.

So there’s a balance to be struck between putting Wessex first and acknowledging the impact the wider context has. Between minding our own business (as much as possible) and showing solidarity (where we can be sure our understanding and empathy really are well-directed). Thinking globally, acting locally, but above all planning (and organising) regionally. Wessex: 95% of the effort, all the other causes: 5%. That sounds about right. But we do need to add that spice to life, if only to have the tools with which to paint a picture of a better Wessex than the one we inhabit today.

Mortgaging Democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy King Alfred’s Day.