Autarky for All

What’s the point of political devolution in a world of globalist economics, where democracy can’t change a thing because there’s no world government to hold multi-nationals in check?  A good question, to which the answer is to reject not only over-centralised government but also over-centralised economics.  Demand autarky for all.

Autarky – self-sufficiency – is a principled response to globalist economics.  It’s a product of the ‘Historical’ school of economics that arose in 19th century Germany and included such giants as Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter.  Adherents maintained that economics could only be understood within the cultural context of a specific historical era, and not using standardised formulae or theories.  They were also often concerned with the plight of the common worker.  Autarky in the form of European preference has since been defended by the French Nobel Prize winner Maurice Allais.

Autarky is not against trade but views it as a way to obtain only those things that can’t be produced domestically.  The reason is to subjugate economics to politics, allowing ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’ to be expressed in broader, especially non-monetary terms.  The aim is not to exclude imports, but to exclude dependence, especially in terms of vital needs like energy and food that could become the subject of foreign economic reprisals.  This can be attempted at any scale but the full effect can only be seen to work at something approaching a continental scale, say an internal market running into the hundreds of millions of people and thus able to support the full range of products.  Any continent will do.  For example, why should the Chinese invest their surplus in Europe – or be allowed to do so by Europeans – when they still have unmet needs of their own?

The result is an avoidance of over-specialisation.  It therefore rejects many of the most sacred free market dogmas.  It’s the opposite, indeed, of economism, the idea that life is about short-term profit: always man as producer and consumer, never as colleague and citizen.  In The Wealth of Nations, Scotsman Adam Smith famously described how the manufacture of pins could be massively increased by division of labour.  Wessexman William Barnes, in Views of Labour and Gold, pointed out that such wonderful productivity levels have unacknowledged human costs.  There’s the insecurity in the market for jobs and wages that comes with having too narrow a skill, plus potentially the impaired health of repetitive strain or unwholesome working conditions.  Smith had largely admitted as much, and had seen a role for the State in relieving the results, but such reservations are rarely remembered when the story of the pin factory gets quoted today.

What’s true for the individual can be true for society at large: ‘economic growth’ continues without effective challenge as the supreme goal of public policy, despite the evidence that everywhere it results in huge environmental damage and social disruption.  Economics is said to be subject to ‘iron laws’, while everything else – ecology, culture, sentiment – is judged infinitely malleable.  Globalism, by insisting that nowhere is off-limits, that nowhere is allowed to defend itself, because that would be a ‘distortion’, encourages this race to the bottom.  Protectionism – economic protection – is everywhere decried but neither environmental protection nor social protection is possible without subordinating corporate actions to political will.

The United States is equipped with a very strong political will to use regulations and subsidies (and foreign policy) to pilot an economy that’s privately owned, though with public ownership of utilities and other resources on a scale that would astonish Thatcherites.  Paradoxically, the US is much better at all of this than we are in ‘socialist’ Europe, where we’re still over-reacting against the Cold War era in ways so accommodating to big business that they often appear suicidal.

From a long-term perspective, economism actually weakens economic power, because it under-values the other factors holding vulnerability at bay, such as political independence, assured resource availability and demographic stability (who pays the promised pensions?)  Note that all of these can be just as real, in a materialist sense, as economic factors, and in their long-term consequences can be even more transforming.

Markets are a means, not an end.  So too are States.  We currently have the worst of both worlds – anarcho-tyranny – in which States have largely abdicated their grand political function as governments but retained and expanded their bureaucratic power to regulate the problems arising from that political vacuum.  Ideas of sovereignty and a transcendent sense of history have been reduced to one of ‘managing the nation’ as a sort of imagined business: ‘UK plc’.

Western civilisation – which aims at substituting a universal market ideology for popular sovereignty – stands opposed to a European civilisation that values things other than price.  A European unity of purpose therefore demands the ability to define and defend something that differs from the familiar reality of being a protectorate of ‘the West’.  Subsidiarity needs an economic as well as a political dimension.  The solution with the lowest short-term costs attached may say ‘centralise’ but a holistic assessment may say the opposite.  Our political institutions must be ones that enable that judgment to stick.

Generals are often best-placed to warn politicians against militarism, against the hubris that will ultimately lead to catastrophic defeat.  Economists likewise need to warn against taking economics any more seriously than it deserves.

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.

Castles in the Air?

In our previous post we described the across-the-board hypocrisy of Wessex MPs who still claim to be able to deliver unlimited growth while simultaneously protecting all of the environment that locals cherish.

Wednesday’s Western Daily Press furnishes a classic example.  Bristol East MP Kerry McCarthy was reported as initiating a debate at Westminster on the protection of high-grade farmland.  She castigated the Government for the way in which this key issue falls through the gap between two departments, is not a priority for either, and yet is of vital importance to “food security, food sovereignty and the UK’s declining self-sufficiency in food”.  She went on to say that in 2011 DEFRA reported a huge loss of the best land to development over recent years, “although we do not really know the extent, as such data are not collected systematically”.

News this is not.  We’ve been saying it all for years.  And years.  And years.  But it's an issue rarely on the political radar.  When it does appear, it's often hiding behind more fashionable ideas like 'urban food growing', the subject of the debate in which Ms McCarthy spoke.  Yes, allotments and gardens matter, but being hobby peasants won't keep us all fed: we need serious farming too.  The fact that MPs are debating the protection of allotments but are continuing to sidestep the bigger picture is an indication of how little they understand or care what goes on outside the big cities.

Kerry McCarthy’s party is Labour.  Her party did not in government, and does not in opposition, have any policy to curb population growth.  It’s even keener than the Conservatives – if that’s possible – to concrete over southern England in pursuit of astronomically high housing targets.  If you want homes for ever more millions Kerry, and you rightly won’t sacrifice our farmland to do it, please tell us, where will you put them?

On Whose Side?

Population Matters Magazine, in its current issue, includes an article by Ian Grace, described as a professional planning officer with more than 30 years’ planning experience.  It’s always good fun to watch when someone inside the system breaks ranks.  The article makes points that are well worth extracting:

“…If you want to house 100,000 people, you will need to build 56,000 housing units.  To do this you will need to allocate 3,700 acres of land for housing.  This population will also need land for schools, work places, shops etc., gobbling up more countryside.

The British public are becoming increasingly hostile to such provision.  The Saint Index measures public attitudes towards new development.  Their findings indicate that about 85% of the adult population are strongly opposed to further development in their area.  In addition, the Saint Index suggests that a growth based agenda, such as that favoured by the Prime Minister and most senior British politicians, is actively supported by only 6% of the population!

There is a tendency to think of population growth as a third world problem.  However, when I was born in 1959, Britain’s population stood at 51 million.  It is now 62 million and by the time I pass on it is likely to stand at 72 million.  This is a 40% increase in our national population in one lifetime.  Such a rate of population growth is very significant and, in my view, totally unsustainable, and yet our government, purportedly dedicated to sustainable development, has no opinion on the subject – other than that we must provide for it…  As a result, every town and large village in southern England is currently besieged by speculative housing proposals – many of which are likely to be approved.

Most of these proposals are met with ferocious local opposition from residents and their elected representatives.  MPs, in particular, line up with the opposition and refuse to acknowledge that many of the unpopular developments in their constituencies are merely the result of policies which they voted for in Parliament.”

That’s the problem.  MPs from the London parties don’t do as we tell them but instead submit to the party whip and hope we’ll never notice the betrayal.  And that’s why they need to be replaced, by those who love Wessex and the truth, not lies and lucre.

The same magazine also includes a letter from Barrie Skelcher pointing out that restrictions on housing development around nuclear power sites, in place since the 1960s, have now been abandoned.  They really are that determined to cram them in.

The Great Burh

“Paris…  A city that must have been magnificent in the Twentieth century, Dimitri thought.  He had few memories of it.  He was only ten in 2016, when his family had fled the city plagued by anarchy and hunger to return to Russia.  Most of the monuments had been burnt and destroyed, and its museums and treasures had been pillaged during the civil war that had broken out before the Great Catastrophe.  Today, the autonomous state of Ile de France was carrying out restorations and reconstructions, but Paris was unlikely to ever return to its former glory.  The only way to learn what the Mona Lisa, Sainte-Chapelle, the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre looked like was to visit virtual Websites with 3D images.  Dimitri Leonidovich sighed in sadness at these unpleasant thoughts...”

French writer Guillaume Faye’s 1998 book, recently translated as Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age, is part novel, part polemic.  Politically on the European New Right, Faye casts conceptual fireworks capable of illuminating anyone’s perspective.  You don’t have to agree with every word to reel at the deepest insights.  He is no optimist but rather the most rigorous realist:

“Deprived of its quasi-religious basis – belief in progress as a historical necessity – the present civilisation has started its decline…  The ascending line of progress, which was meant to lead to the redemptive eschatology of a heavenly end of history, is now being replaced by the winding, unpredictable and mysterious flow of this very same history.  An intellectual revolution is taking place: people are starting to perceive – without daring openly to state it – that the old paradigm according to which ‘the life of humanity, on both an individual and collective level, is getting better and better every day thanks to science, the spread of democracy and egalitarian emancipation’ is quite simply false…

It will take twenty or thirty years for the pernicious effects of growth to manifest themselves, but after a deceptive phase in which living standards appear to be improving (and which is now coming to an end) they will certainly hit hard.  The increase in production and trade leads to new forms of cooperation, but also multiplies the causes of conflict and expressions of nationalistic chauvinism – and everywhere feeds the counter-fire of religious fanaticism.  Communication is branching out across the world, while solitude plagues individuals and a sense of despair takes hold in communities.”

Europe’s place in this world is a highly vulnerable one, open to ‘cultural cleansing’ by once-colonised peoples now demanding their turn at dealing out domination, death and destruction.  An effective response cannot just be about defence but must embrace collective security in every sense.  Doing nothing is not a viable option: less than 40 years ago, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria were all relatively stable societies, to which the saying 'stranger things have happened' would simply not be applied.  Faye’s solution is the European Union, but not as we know it:

“The solution to help us defend ourselves must be a radical one: a ‘good’ federation (one I believe should be based on autonomous regions) capable of imposing itself as a genuine state and exercising a weighty influence on the international scene as a real world power.  A federation of this kind could only emerge after a shock, once the pseudo-federation we have now has shown all its impotence and noxiousness.

I believe the right strategy would be to lead a revolution within the European Union, in such a way as to radically transform it – and not make a backward-looking return to the nation-states system, which in any case would be incapable of defending us.  In history, only structural changes can reverse what exists and bring revolutions about – not circumstantial changes…

The only hope for salvation in this dark age of ours lies in the attempt to build a federation – the great federation Nineteenth century visionaries had foreseen: the United States of Europe.  A federation of this kind would be capable of standing up to the American one, of creating a protected and self-centred continental economic space, and of curbing the rise of Islam and demographic colonisation from Africa and Asia…

Despite all its defects, I believe the present European Union will be the prelude to a genuine federation, according to a dialectic process: for when catastrophe hits, the present Union, in its impotence, will have to undergo revolutionary change (this, and not any dangerous restoration of the nation-state model is the path we will have to pursue)…  a powerful Europe, in my view, cannot but derive from the federation of autonomous European regions, as the great differences in size between European nations prevents the building of any viable federal and political union (as shown by the current, stupid attempt to do so).

For this reason, we must approach the European Union of today with Machiavellian cynicism in order to subvert it from within…  Quite simply, this appalling Union has the simple yet great merit of making the whole world reason in terms of Europe.  It also has the advantage of assigning a greater significance to regions, the future bricks of a federal empire, which are connected to the kind of ethnic identity the cold and crisis-ridden states of today have lost…  The future regions must be granted large powers with respect to internal matters (cultural, linguistic, educational, etc.), as a return to regional identity on a European level would only contribute to our common strength.  Different but united: for united we stand, divided we fall.”

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…?”

The Extravagance of Austerity

Good chancellor, bad chancellor.  George Osborne played a little double act with himself this week.  It started with lots of spending announcements.  A whopping £15.1 billion on roads and £2.3 billion on flood defences.  Oh, and Bicester is to be a new town.

Then there was the Autumn Statement, seized on with the claim that public spending as a share of GDP could be heading back to the levels of 80 years ago.  A golden age as far as the Tories are concerned.  Grinding poverty, plus all-round militarism.  The Jarrow March and the Blackshirts.  Plus the Greenshirts having a go at the bankers: sounds familiar?

How do we reconcile spend, spend, spend with a policy of downsizing that has no end in sight?

The spending announcements are real, but not all new.  Some just firm up details of spending already announced.  And at Bicester, many of the houses have already been built.  Smoke and mirrors then.  Just what you’d expect from a government with a former PR man at the helm.

The roads programme can be unpicked from many angles.  One is to point out that an opportunity to rebalance the national economy away from over-reliance on London has been under-played.  The self-fulfilling prophecy of ‘invest in success’ has triumphed again, with £250 million re-pledged for yet another Lower Thames Crossing near Dartford.  At least development at the estuary would take some of the pressure off the environment (and house prices) in eastern Wessex.  But not a lot.

Wessex gets at least £500 million for two miles of tunnel to by-pass Stonehenge.  Cornwall and Devon have been agitating for years to put the environment of Somerset and Wiltshire at their service, speeding up access to the London market.  Why is the London market so much more important than any other?  That’s where the money is.  And why do we allow that to happen?  Turning the A303 into a motorway in all but name won’t just increase accessibility to London.  It will increase accessibility FROM London, cutting precious minutes off the drive to the weekend cottage in Salcombe.

But for how long?  The strategic vision for roads spending does not include the words ‘Peak Oil’.  Instead it reassures us as follows:

“In the short to medium term, as domestic production declines, our dependence on imported oil and gas will grow and we will become increasingly exposed to the pressures and risks of global markets. Over the same period, global energy consumption is anticipated to increase significantly, implying increasing competition for available resources. Despite this, fuel costs are not projected to rise significantly over this time period.”

Apparently, that’s all down to increased fuel efficiency.  And wishful thinking.  And beyond the short to medium term?  Infrastructure is for the long term.  Are we planning for the next five years, or the next fifty?  Are we buying the wrong kind of infrastructure because no-one will admit to the necessity of a radical re-think?  We aren’t building a resilient future, because we can’t accept that the comfortable present is just an illusion.

So the spending plans are all part of hiding the harsh facts.  The real state of public finances ought to give real cause for concern.  An analysis of the background to the Autumn Statement done by The Independent (a London newspaper) shows that the plan to boost growth relies on boosting borrowing by the general public:

“According to the small print in the latest report from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the public is forecast to add to its pile of unsecured lending, which includes credit card debt and bank overdrafts, by £360bn over the next five years.  If the public fails to spend, then growth would collapse and the Government’s deficit would be likely to start increasing again.  The £360bn figure represents a £41bn increase on the OBR’s forecasts just nine months ago and would take households’ unsecured lending, as a share of total household incomes, to a record 55 per cent by 2020.  That would be well above even the pre-financial crisis unsecured debt ratio of 44 per cent.”

Add-in secured lending, like mortgages, and total household debt is projected to rise from £1.7trn to £2.6trn by the end of the decade.  With that figure rising faster than incomes, the ratio of total household debt to household incomes will rise from 169% to a new high of 184%.  But this has to happen if public spending is to be cut, because economies are sustained by spending and if the Government is unable or unwilling to run a big budget deficit, then someone else has to.  (Even though governments, as a lower risk, can borrow more cheaply than anyone else.)  Like all Ponzi schemes, it’s about using an imagined future to sustain the actual present.  And it’s a trick that only works so long as the population continues to grow and natural resources continue to come on-stream to support it.

One of the easiest ways to grow the economy, here and worldwide, is to spend more on armaments, things created for the sole purpose of being destroyed.  Civilian expenditure meets human needs, which are finite.  Military expenditure is not subject to any such limit.  At September’s NATO summit in Newport, the UK successfully lobbied for defence spending to be raised to 2% of GDP across the alliance.  Military budgets ought to have some relationship to expected outcomes but a budget expressed in terms of inputs – a percentage share of GDP – looks very suspicious.  A 2% share doesn’t automatically translate into a given level of security, not least because it fluctuates with the size of the economy.  All it does for sure is sustain or increase NATO orders placed with the arms trade.  DO panic, because panic is good for business.

With the NHS, schools and overseas aid budgets protected, defence now set to be protected too, and pensions politically unassailable, the Chancellor has little room for manoeuvre.  Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies said this week that voters would be justified in asking whether Osborne was planning “a fundamental reimagining of the role of the state”.

Others are planning a fundamental reimagining of the state too.  Not so much in terms of its role as in terms of its territory.  Scotland and perhaps Wales may yet see a future outside the UK as more attractive than one within.  England will not be so lucky.  Our political establishment is so entwined with the City financial establishment that we can only break free by reimagining both our constitution and our economy, dispersing power and wealth to the regions.  And on a scale beyond what it’s acceptable to contemplate in London. 

It has to be, because the cost of maintaining the status quo is unsustainable and this cannot be admitted.  If power is to remain centralised it cannot remain even nominally democratic because that would cost too much, and if it’s to become truly democratic it cannot remain centralised because that would cost too much as well.  The really big savings come from letting go, from setting areas free to do their own thing, precisely what the likes of Michael Gove or Eric Pickles, or any other champions of ‘British values’ handed down from above, are in politics to prevent.

Those who wish the grip to tighten really need no identification.  Those who wish it to end are to be found among nationalist and regionalist movements across Europe, each one sparklingly particular, but linked in solidarity against centralism.  The politics of change today is territorial.  The choice is between non-government – in the sense of a state whose will to intervene has shrunk back to defending the property of a global elite – and self-government – in the sense of a society organised for the benefit of the community.

The Labour Party sits uneasily between these two visions.  Miliband – with his call for ‘responsible capitalism’ – is as determined as Cameron to outsource the job of government but thinks asking for things nicely might help.  Having ditched Clause 4, what remains of Labour cannot be other than fraudulent, all sound-bites and cheesy grins.  The public appetite for taking back the commanding heights of the economy is huge but Labour no longer knows how to tell that story.  In the Celtic nations it’s losing ground to those who can.  The English regions will follow.

One of the lies that Thatcher got away with all too easily was that the State doesn’t have any money.  All the money it has is money taken from taxpayers.  Not true.  That’s the kind of state that has sold off or given away every other source of revenue, from land, from minerals, from trading services and from sovereign monopolies.  And done so because it’s clear to the politicians responsible that a state dependent solely on taxation will be a precarious state.  It’s a state left without those assets that could have given it a high degree of practical independence (and which therefore now need to be repossessed).  The Thatcherite State, designed to be economically crippled, cannot avoid becoming politically crippled.  It’s a state with a death-wish, clinging to an exalted imperial vision it can no longer fund, digging an ever deeper hole for itself.

If that’s truly the state of the UK, then we need to imagine its replacements and work to bring them into being.  We must defend our local services, and link them regionally.  If the London regime won’t do these things for us then we need to do them ourselves.  Or it will take us down with it.

Green as Gravel

Natalie Bennett, Leader of the Green Party in England & Wales (& Cornwall) was one of the panel on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions? this week.  To the amazement of anyone concerned about the ecological crisis we face, she launched into an impassioned defence of massive urban development and a rejection of those measures that might keep population growth within locally acceptable bounds.

So, what’s the Green Party for?  Why does it pretend to be part of the solution when it clearly has the same analysis of the problem as all the other London-based parties?  Namely that the damage done by growth is to be cured by yet more growth.  It has over recent years courted the red-green vote, by playing up the red, but seemingly at the expense of the green.

All parties are constantly challenged to say what they would do to create more jobs.  A really courageous party would challenge the question.  We don’t need the maximum number of jobs.  We need the optimum number of jobs for the optimum size of population, given the sensible limits that define our region’s place in a sustainable world.  The UK has far, far too many jobs for its size, many of them in the wrong places and many of them financially profitable (for others) but socially useless and environmentally harmful.  That’s one reason why it’s importing folk at the rate of 250,000 a year net.  It also has a failed education and welfare system, because it has 2 million unemployed who should be matched to the jobs available and trained to do them if they lack the skills.  Come on, this isn’t rocket science, it’s the basic sustainability that corporate interests prevent us enjoying.

Growth isn’t necessary for economic reasons.  It’s necessary only for fiscal reasons, because without it the UK cannot pay the interest on the imaginary debts it’s been fooled by bankers into believing that it owes.  The continued refusal to confront this fact is what’s leading to planet-wide disaster as rising debt outstrips the capacity of the real, resource-limited economy.

The future needs green politics.  What it obviously doesn’t need is Green politics.

Democracy’s Debt

Malmesbury – the oldest borough in England – is one of many Wessex market towns on the front line in the struggle against London overspill.  The Coalition, for whose parties all constituencies in Wiltshire mainly voted in 2010, is doing its best to make sure that Malmesbury loses.

The National Planning Policy Framework – the NPPF – is one of those documents designed to worsen our quality of life, while assuring us of the opposite.  “Sustainable development,” we’re told, “is about change for the better.”  Who could disagree?  And who judges that?  Look at the detail then, say on congestion: “Development should only be prevented or refused on transport grounds where the residual cumulative impacts of development are severe”.  Whatever ‘severe’ means, which can be a right old barristers’ banquet.  What’s clear about the NPPF is that it expects things to get worse, and even encourages them to get worse, at least little by little.

Or take education.  In 2012, one of Eric Pickles’ Planning Inspectors turned down a proposal to build 77 homes on the edge of Malmesbury.  She refused to include in the reasons for doing so a local concern about school places:

“The situation concerning primary education is that due to an existing shortfall of school places in Malmesbury, the Council provides bus transport so that 14 pupils resident in the town can instead attend primary schools in neighbouring villages.  The future occupiers of the currently proposed development are likely to include 22 children of primary school age, and this would clearly result in pressure for more primary school places in Malmesbury.  There is the additional concern that the primary schools in neighbouring villages will themselves shortly be full.  I understand that there is currently no collective agreement as to the means by which the deficiency in primary education provision should be addressed…  However… in my judgment, the increased strain that the proposed new housing would place upon the already pressured primary education infrastructure of Malmesbury is not, of itself, sufficient reason to refuse planning permission outright for residential development.”

From time to time we encounter the argument that Wessex should grab whatever it can, the way London does.  If Wessex is growing then it needs the money for all the new roads, the schools, hospitals and leisure centres.  We should campaign for the Celtic nations and the north of England to be written off as economically hopeless and invest instead in success.

It’s not an argument we’d ever be comfortable making: ever since the 1970s we’ve been striving to protect what makes Wessex special and opposing its transformation by other regions that are more heavily industrialised and urbanised.  What Wessex needs is not more money to ease its transformation into a clone region but the power to reject that unwilled transformation.

The argument continues that transformation is what Wessex folk welcome: why else would they vote for the London parties?  But no-one, no voter, certainly no council leader, can have failed to spot that MPs from the London parties are quite useless in standing up for their communities’ right to make their own decisions.  Upon taking the Oath of Allegiance – a calculated insult to democracy, demonstrating our servile status – do they in effect surrender any loyalty to their constituents?  Apparently, they do.  The evidence is overwhelming and utterly damning.  They cease to be the voice of the voters and become instead mouthpieces for the regime or for the indistinguishable parties to which they belong.  It’s quite safe for them to do so, as long as their rivals do exactly the same.  All of them become convinced, if not already won over, that localities must act ‘responsibly’, ‘in the national interest’, all ‘doing their bit’ for the great common project directed from London.  And be overridden if ever judged to be slacking.

In Malmesbury, local folk have had enough of being dictated to.  They’ve got together to use the system to influence events, as far as they can.  They’ve drawn up a Neighbourhood Plan, with the full backing of Pickles’ department, or so it seemed.  In a remarkable piece of Whitehall farce, a planning appeal to build 180 homes on the edge of town was upheld when civil servants failed to let the Inspector know in time that the Government was taking a particular interest in progressing the Neighbourhood Plan.  A judge in Bristol allowed them to nullify the decision.  Now that judge has been overruled by the Appeal Court in London.  The developers are jubilant, having undermined the Neighbourhood Plan process and created a precedent that could see hundreds more homes approved in defiance of local wishes.

The FibDems’ prospective Parliamentary candidate for the area has called upon Pickles to resign.  Funny how your party can be in government for four years and then decide it was all nothing to do with them.  Meanwhile, the civil service assure us that lessons will be learnt and it will never happen again.  Sorry, but under true localism, where a developer’s right to appeal wouldn’t exist, it couldn’t have happened in the first place.

Don’t imagine that it’s only Malmesbury that’s been targeted for mass colonisation.  Just west of Wiltshire is Bath, where the demand for housing is insatiable yet must, on Government orders, be met anyway.  The Council this month agreed to remove land from the Green Belt.  With a heavy heart.  Fully recognising that the London regime leaves them no other alternative but to lose appeal after appeal and then be denied the funding to pay for the resultant infrastructure needed.  But not ONE of them took the opportunity publicly to tear up their London party membership card.

Among the consequences will be 300 new homes at Odd Down.  The Planning Inspector reporting on the proposal to the Council notes: “Overall, there would be a loss of Green Belt, localised harm to the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (nonetheless great weight should be attached to protecting this landscape); only slight harm to the Wansdyke Scheduled Monument, with a small benefit from planned positive management measures; and limited and localised harm to the setting of the World Heritage Site…  I consider that there are the exceptional circumstances to justify removing land from the Green Belt and for major development within the AONB.  The need for housing and the benefits of additional housing in this location at Bath outweigh the harm that would arise, taking into account the great weight that must be given to protecting the AONB and heritage assets.”

What’s happening is being termed the second Sack of Bath.  Bathonians are content to let this happen because they’re far too polite to confront the London party bullies (nationally) and cowards (locally) and see them off.  The Tories are blaming the FibDem-run council for everything.  The FibDems are blaming the Tory-run government.  And they’re both right.

About the only good news for Bath’s environs is the rejection, for now, of the Duchy of Cornwall’s plans to build 2,000 homes on highly sensitive Green Belt land forming the south-western backdrop to the city.  No doubt they’ll be back, come the next salami-slicing exercise in just a few years’ time.  When you’ve been accumulating the estate here since 1421 you can afford to take the long view.  Never let it be said that Prince Charles is a committed environmentalist; there’s only one thing to which he’s committed and very firmly so.  We need to be equally committed, with appropriate allies in Cornwall and elsewhere that the Duchy has land, to dragging this feudal relic into the 21st century.

Further west still, North Somerset Council this month approved 150 homes on high-grade farmland (some of it Grade 1), seemingly accepting the developer’s view that a shortfall in the supply of land for housebuilding trumps even our future food security.  Now, if planning is about considering the long-term, especially resilience in the face of uncertain global circumstances, then it should provide for new housing to the extent that is compatible with agriculture.  What’s happening is the exact opposite.

Planners work with information on agricultural land quality that is often incomplete and becoming dated.  Issues such as optimum farm structure, severance of fields or the problems of farming the urban fringe are rarely even considered nowadays in a system dominated by pressure for development.

The London regime’s aim is “to boost significantly the supply of housing”, so as to meet the needs of a population that is being deliberately raised to breaking point and the demands of a financial system that sees homes, including multiple ‘homes’, as an ever-appreciating investment.  The housebuilding targets really do trump everything: even floodplains are OK to live on now, with the increased insurance costs passed on to everyone else through Flood Re.

And where do these housebuilding targets come from?  Not us, say the Coalition.  We don’t impose numbers like Stalinist Labour did, we leave it all up to local folk to decide.  Except that the number still has to be approved centrally and if it’s judged too low, local folk must go back and think of another one.  As North Somerset Council found, after a costly court case brought about through no fault of its own when the Planning Inspectorate failed to back a higher number put forward by developers, a failure judged ‘unreasonable’ by the court.  The Council was left to pay both sides’ legal costs; the London regime walked away, having so written the legislation as to put itself out of reach.

Back to Malmesbury again.  In that 2012 decision, the Inspector said of the Neighbourhood Plan, then at a very early stage of production, that “it is material to note that ensuring local communities have an increased ability to shape the development of their areas, through mechanisms such as Neighbourhood Plans, is a key plank of the government’s Localism Agenda.  This consideration needs to be balanced with the importance the government attaches to the role of the planning system in promoting growth…”

Well, there’s a surprise.  Democracy carries great weight.  But debt weighs more heavily.

UK public debt has rocketed in recent years, as the graphs here show.  (And what they don’t show, the off-balance-sheet items like the bank bailouts and the unfunded pensions ponzi.)  It’s a shock doctrine moment when communities up and down the land can be terrorised into surrendering some of their most cherished environments, to build the houses that will (allegedly) kickstart the growth that will enable the compound interest (now £40 billion a year and rising) to be paid on the mountain of debt that no-one has the will to manage.  And that’s because no financier will bankroll a party promising a property taxation and common ownership package that would remove any need for public borrowing.  Getting rid of debt is common sense in a world where resource constraints mean it cannot go on being serviced by growth.  In fact though, there’s no plan to eradicate the debt: fear of the debt is just the cover under which other things can be done.  Financiers, naturally, want the debt to grow and financiers have the willing ear of Government.

In the boom years, under Labour, the pressure for growth was equally strong but more pull than push, and environmental angst was always allowed some degree of public expression before being largely disregarded.  Nowadays, environmental protection is one of those painfully erected ‘barriers to growth’ being comprehensively torn down on the orders of global finance.

Billions continue to be wasted worldwide on corrupt practices like ‘defence’ that add nothing to human welfare.  A top-heavy London-based government acts as our master, not as our servant.  City slickers make off with our common wealth, going for a song.  These are clever folk, who know how to confuse us as to the difference between money and reality.  We need to be cleverer.

The Tyranny of Growth

“The substance of the eminent Socialist gentleman's speech is that making a profit is a sin, but it is my belief that the real sin is taking a loss.”
Sir Winston Churchill

What if the ‘real sin’ is neither, but to engage in a particular economic activity in the first place?  Is it a sin to leave the rainforest alone, or is it ecocide to destroy it?

Conventional economics is not neutral about the desirability of economic activity.  It places no limit to the extent of the economy.  Nor does conventional politics.  The centuries-old battle of ideas between laissez-faire and State intervention is over which can achieve the most growth in the shortest time at the lowest cost.

Is growth necessary?  If growth is zero, the same quantity of goods and services is constantly being brought into being, so provided the workforce to produce them and the population to consume them also remain constant, no-one is any worse off than before.  The lack of growth causes panic only because so many decisions are based on the idea that growth will continue, and so it must continue.  In this game, the only options for those in control of the economic process are to increase their income through attacking the environment (growth) or through attacking society (austerity).  Just stopping the treadmill is unthinkable.

In reality, the model has to be modified in a number of ways.  Population is not constant: even within a constant total there will be ongoing changes in the age structure that affect the size of the working population.  Natural resource costs are not constant either: as the energy cost of accessing resources increases, so does the overall cost even of maintaining a constant output of goods and services.  The implications are that we ought to be debating what kind of society we wish to see in the future, and within what limits, rather than blindly following the assumption that we can have more of everything yet lose nothing important in the process.

Public policy, which is well-placed to uphold the holistic view that the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment and not the other way round, is increasingly not up to the job of framing that rounded debate.  The problem of regulatory capture is becoming acute, with even the most environmental of national agencies, such as English Heritage and Natural England, now seeing their remits redefined to support development at pretty much any cost.  Massive damage is happening, but we are assured either that we are wrong to perceive it as negative at all or that the benefits outweigh the harm.  Either way, it is our values and priorities that are attacked as the ‘problem’, not the damage that is being done to them.

There is no clear mandate from the electorate for governments to implement a totalitarian liberal agenda – one that marginalises any view that there is more to life than consumption – yet that agenda is being rolled out anyway.  The idea that the State should promote pro-growth policies is an old one, but one previously balanced by others.  One traditional conception of the State is as neutral adjudicator between competing interests.  It is a role that cannot be fulfilled if the State has repeatedly thrown in its lot with one side.

Libertarians may point out the extent to which fiscal considerations compel the State to back the ‘wealth creators’, to the detriment of others, in order to go on funding its spending commitments.  It is certainly worth asking if the UK is living beyond its means precisely because it is the UK.  Radical decentralisation – and even independence in some areas – could cut the cost of government substantially by reducing distances between the decision-makers and their decisions, as well as by curbing unproductive military expenditure.  (Libertarians in fact tend to be quite protective of the coercive forces of the State: they’ll happily pay for the security of others’ persons and property, just not their education or healthcare.)  But radical decentralisation also risks empowering those with a democratic, anti-growth agenda, potentially placing barriers in the path of universal growth, and so has many enemies.

Research suggests that large industries are very good at capturing large governments and then using them in ways that are detrimental to local areas that lack the constitutional power to resist.  The much more robust response to the financial crisis in Iceland as compared with that in the UK – or the EU generally – illustrates the point.  The reverse may also be true – that small governments are vulnerable to capture by small industries concentrated in small areas.  The domination of local councils in seaside resorts by hoteliers and restaurateurs is a familiar theme in Wessex.  There seems much less reason, however, to suggest that this isn’t what local voters want.  A balance seems most likely to be achieved where there is a diversity of industries, in terms of both range and scale, such as might be expected at the regional level or in areas not dominated by one sector that is a major source of public revenue.

Other means of limiting regulatory capture include appointing staff with a public or voluntary sector background in preference to those with a business background.  The whole ‘revolving door’ culture which has been assiduously cultivated over the past 35 years has been fatal to perceptions of integrity but is the inevitable consequence of disregarding the need for government to remain neutral when dealing with commercial interests.  ‘Experience of the real world’ isn’t helpful if all that is learnt is the fine art of corruption.  How are politicians to rely on impartial advice that is potentially tainted, by past connections or future prospects?  The rebuilding of integrity in public administration is as important as devolution itself in creating the kind of Wessex we wish to see.  Why not have more of a ‘them’ and ‘us’ relationship between business and government?  It’s a whole lot healthier, because it isn’t the job of government to help the private sector.  It’s the job of government to govern.

One other side-effect of the revolving door culture has been the corruption of the language, so that the democratic sector now sees itself as serving ‘customers’ (rather than patients, students, arrestees and so on).  The implication is that all relationships can be, and ought to be, reduced to cash, which in turn reinforces the idea that life is economics and economics alone.  The democratic sector needs to be different in its whole outlook from the commercial sector, precisely because its difference is its justification.  Making things ‘more businesslike’ can be a catchy way of saying that there should be a constant search for efficiency but take the analogy too far and the organisation ends up totally efficient but totally ineffective.

Last month, the Leader of Blaby District Council, in Mercia, took the astonishing step of describing himself as naïve in believing his party’s policy on localism, as it had been expressed in opposition.  Yet he’s still a member of that party.  To overthrow the tyranny of growth before it wipes out every decent human value requires a whole range of actions.  Mass resignations from the London parties, of course.  But also the replacement of political structures that privilege the least attractive economic interests with new structures that place decision-making beyond their grasp.  That revolution starts in the mind, with a simple substitution of loyalty to Wessex for a worn-out loyalty to London that has been comprehensively betrayed.

If Enough Is Never Enough

“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best.”
Otto von Bismarck, 1867

Bismarck’s most famous quote is characteristically double-edged. Understood passively, it implies working within the constraints of the world as we find it. But to what end? Understood assertively, it implies redefining those limits, steadily moving the goalposts onto new territory. So that what was previously impossible becomes possible. And what was previously possible – for others – ceases to be so.

We live, increasingly, under a system of totalitarian liberalism, where democratic choices are assumed to be limited to superficialities, to whether Leader A appears to have more charisma than Leader B. Because nothing striking separates them on policy. The London parties fight for control of the centre ground when what is actually required is to roll up the centre ground and re-locate it. Lenin did that in 1917, not just for Russia but for the world. Thatcher did it in 1979. The scale of the challenges we face today demands no less a transformation. Do it now and we at least have some chance of avoiding the suffering they both relished imposing.

Last week’s news was dominated by population growth. We ought to be alarmed that human numbers are exploding but the BBC – what a vile organisation that’s become – was shamelessly biased in its coverage. Those for whom growth is an opportunity rather than a problem received significantly more prime airtime for their views. Once again we were assured that growth is good, that it will pay for our pensions and our long-term care. How thick do they think we are if they believe we won’t spot the flaws in their population Ponzi scheme?

With impeccable timing, last week also saw the publication of the latest issue of Population Matters Magazine, a periodical put out by the pressure group Population Matters. It certainly does matter, especially on the frontline of the battle against growth, here in Wessex. Norman Pasley writes of his own experience in Hampshire:

“Last year I remember a flurry of letters in the Hampshire Chronicle – mostly generated by members of the Winchester Population Matters local group – about the population pressure on Winchester’s primary school places and classrooms, and the controversy about taking cherished green spaces for more housing. 

In April this year, Jonathon Porritt gave a talk to 225 people in Winchester. Also in April I gave a talk to 120 members of U3A in Fareham called, ‘As we journey to 2050, do we need to look after the planet?’ The audience were on-side, the hour went well, and they asked lots of questions. Only 30 people took my hand-out (it seems you can’t inspire everyone!).” 

So concerned folk puzzle over what, if anything, they can do. Elect dozens of Wessex Regionalist MPs and thousands of Wessex Regionalist councillors. Every one of them unafraid to defy Westminster’s anti-Wessex laws because they understand the fundamental illegitimacy of top-down rule. That much ought to be obvious. But all the while the puzzling continues, so does the destruction. It rolls on because totalitarian liberalism insists that the locusts must go where they will. Green Belt is invaded. Villages double and triple in size. Roads slash the countryside. So much beauty. So much history. So much food security in an uncertain future. Lost, for what?

A false promise of prosperity from perpetual motion, fuelled by a system of debt-driven finance that inexorably ratchets up the damage. Blessed are the accountants, for they shall devour the earth.

A different approach isn’t difficult to define. Moving to a steady-state economy, tackling unemployment through shorter working hours, not through ever higher levels of socially useless activity that piles on more stress. Measuring success other than in monetary, GDP terms. Anti-globalisation and defence of the common wealth. A community-benefit State that does not shrink from ruthless punishment of those companies that put profit before people and place. Repudiation or rescheduling of debt wherever it is doing more harm than good. The inspirational books have all been written. Their prescriptions are well-known. Political debate manipulates them where it can and ignores them where it can’t.

Labour in 1997 and the Coalition in 2010 both came to power promising to rein-in the insaner plans for housebuilding that we have witnessed. Prescott promised to replace ‘predict-and-provide’ with ‘plan-monitor-and-manage’ but in no time he was back to ‘think of a number and double it’. Pickles promised localism, but then admitted that the only discretion devolved was how to accommodate growth, not whether to do so. (A case of ‘you pick the beauty spots to destroy, so we don’t have to shoulder the blame’.) We know, of course, that by 20th century standards housebuilding is currently at a rather low level (hurrah!), but the damage it does is cumulative and in the past there was at least an understandable reason: slum clearance and post-Blitz rehousing. Today we do have a choice but are failing to exercise it openly. It is being made for us by those who think they know best. No wonder there is such widespread despair at the failure of the London parties to articulate real local concerns honestly and consistently.

Breaking the pro-growth consensus requires a whole new level of campaigning. We are engaged with the intellectual debate, the ‘metapolitics’ that defines the centre ground. And, being a political party, we are engaged with the more rough-and-tumble world of demonstrations and elections. We need both, to sharpen the weapons of argument and to use them, to stand in the vanguard of a movement for change in Wessex.

Against us are ranged two camps. There are the boneheads who think that an ever-expanding population inhabiting a finite environment is an opportunity for innovation (if they’re LibDems), for profit (if they’re Tories) and for repression (if they’re Labourites), not a problem that an ecologically aware and freedom-loving society ought to confront before it reaches catastrophic proportions. And then there are the airheads who won’t even discuss the issue because it’s too difficult for them to cope with. The mentally cauterised who imagine that there has to be some racist sub-text behind population concerns (so how DO you raise them?) or that to complain about the loss of all that we value is only subjective after all, while their own selection of values has to be objective truth because they learnt it in first year sociology.

Simon Ross, writing in Population Matters Magazine, put it thus:

“Developmental and environmental groups, particularly, seem determined to ignore the ‘elephant in the room’… The Campaign to Protect Rural England’s charter to ‘save our countryside’ from development carefully avoids addressing England’s high population density and population growth. Such groups are one focus for our lobbying but we may have to wait some time for a change of heart.” 

It’s a nuanced assessment, but it ignores the gaping chasm of reality. Time is something we just don’t have.