Some Folk With Attitude

The folk of Wessex think of themselves as free, but are slaves to their own poor self-esteem, forever doubting their capacity for self-rule.  Nine hundred years after the brutal conquest of their land, they have so little pride left in them that they cheerfully reject at every election the escape route offered by regionalism, preferring to submit yet again to five more years of the London yoke.  Even a devolved assembly as limited as those of Scotland or Wales would give them some little voice, which could not be completely ignored when their fate is to be determined.  You can be sure the voices of London’s Mayor and Lord Mayor are both heard loud, clear and shrill, so why should ours stay silent?

Yet there remain also those who would stir the indifference of the majority to reconsider whether they could not in fact do better than this.  We stand in the midst of that agony of reappraisal that is British politics today, that realisation that the common wealth has been squandered for nothing but shiny baubles, the realisation that the bonds of serfdom are being re-imposed, literally through choice, because too many believed all that was too good to ever be true.  We stand in the midst of that agony, but we are not part of it.  We saw it coming decades ago.  We warned.  We were ignored.  So if we will be listened to now, we can speak with the cool certainty of conviction.

Politics in England needs to be transformed, with parishes, shires and regions, each tier in turn, as the territory widens, possessing a diminishing share of the responsibility (not power) of government.  Economics, here as everywhere, needs to be transformed, with democratic debate revolving around the benefit to the community of any investment, not its profitability for others.  Culture in Wessex needs to be transformed, turning a despised provincial existence into the golden thread linking a self-confident community to its past and future.  We aren’t looking for protest votes.  We’d rather have the support of those who believe that radical constitutional change is no longer an option but a necessity.

These are revolutionary ideas, with dangerous implications for vested interests.  There will be no place for the legal, financial or media sectors as we know them.  The clear writ of popular power will slice through them all.  Well-paid, parasitical jobs in London will need to be destroyed in their tens of thousands.  We may or may not believe in the class war.  The London regime certainly does, and acts accordingly.  For them, this is a struggle of the possessors and manipulators against the dispossessed and disinherited.  They are few, but they are united in their arrogance, greed and spite.  Are we united against them?  How many councillors or candidates will stand up and say these things that need to be said?

Ought these things to come to pass?  Yes.  Will they?  To say ‘yes’ to that question too is the first step in the process of attitude formation.  Old regimes do collapse.  Those who step forward to fill the vacuum are those who have bent their energies exclusively to attitude formation, to conditioning the minds of their folk to the inevitable.  Any inspirational movement, tightly organised and thoroughly aware of an uncompromising ideological line, can impose its authority on a fluid situation caused by the bewildering disintegration of former certainties.  That is precisely how the states of Baltic, Central and Balkan Europe emerged at the end of the First World War.  It is also how the virus of Thatcherism took hold.  In politics, it is the attitudes, not the reasons, that count.  Attitudes are the emotional ground out of which the reasons spring.

The most effective way to destroy old attitudes is to show that the society in question can be refashioned very efficiently using means considered beyond the bounds of respectability.  You can’t let local communities do whatever they like.  Yes you can.  You can’t judge investment priorities against the resulting community benefit rather than against the demands of private property and global finance.  Why ever not?  You can’t do without London-based expertise.  Want to bet?

In the perspective of history, a decade is little.  What is important to individual regionalists is to influence the attitudes of others to such an extent that the climate of opinion within which another generation of regionalists will work is more favourable.  Two steps forward, one step back will get us there in the end.  Our weaknesses may often be more apparent than our strengths but do not under-estimate our capacity to punch above our weight.

The same ratchet effect is true for nationalists: whether Salmond’s great gamble next year succeeds or fails, the debate it has opened cannot ultimately be closed until freedom is achieved.  We should capitalise on the result, whichever way it goes, since Wessex too needs to debate its fate.

We also need to ensure that we record, cherish and pass on the stories, of the marches and the motorway protests, of the flag-flying and the poll counts, of the pioneering pamphlets, and of those who have passed away.  Just as the nationalist movements have done, we should accumulate and document the regionalist past and present in order to inspire a regionalist future.  A future that will be there for the taking by those true to the deepest memories of why we act as we do.

Serfs For Sale?

“Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor liberty to purchase power.”

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1738)

If you’re going to keep on repeating lies, the risk isn’t that others will start to believe them.  It’s that you’ll start to believe them yourself and end up trapped inside them.

Thatcherites are now in that position, confronted by realities they failed to anticipate, mainly because they were convinced that the rest of the world plays by the same demented rules that they do.

Let’s start by taking a look at two of her favourite ideas.

The first is that the private sector is good and the public sector bad.  Thatcher famously told a group of nationalised industry executives that if any of them were any use they’d be in the private sector.  It doesn’t take long to work out the corollary: that in her view public services should all be run by second rate managers to ensure that they fail.  The very services for which as Prime Minister she was responsible.

Today, many of those services are back in the public sector.  Owned by the Dutch, French and German governments, to name just a few.  And there’s the problem for Thatcher’s successor.  Either these nationalised firms are managed competently, which is impossible, since they’re State-owned, or they’re not managed competently, which ideologically would be much more comforting.  And if indeed they’re not, then David Cameron has just placed Britain’s energy future in the hands of incompetent State bureaucrats in Paris and Beijing.  Which means they’re doing a more competent job than he is.

Time for the second great idea.  The idea that the State doesn’t have any money of its own.  According to Thatcher, every penny it spends is wrung out of taxpayers, without whom it would be nothing.  It never was true, since at the core of every State is the common wealth, the rights of the community to things managed in common.  The air, the water, and in some cases still, even tiny little bits of a once-common heritage in land.  When publicly-owned industries make profits, those profits too flow into the common treasury.

Today they flow into other countries’ treasuries, allowing them to reduce taxation on their own folk.  In the case of railways, for example, our taxes go to pay operating subsidies to companies owned by the railway administrations of France, Germany and the Netherlands, allowing them to invest more in their own systems.  The case for public ownership of utilities is that these are natural monopolies, providing things we need in order to live and which, for various reasons, are impervious to competition.  The prices they’re allowed by regulators to charge are therefore little different from taxes.  And by allowing other governments to buy the right to make those charges, our own has in effect sold the right to tax us to foreign powers.  We are serfs for sale.

None of this was supposed to happen.  Nationalised industries were to be replaced by lots of little local companies all competing for business.  Not national and international conglomerates able to dictate terms to any government daft enough to let them.  Totalitarian liberalism is unrepentant, since if this is what the market produces then it cannot be questioned.  The problem never lies with the market.  It lies with the alternatives we champion, with our failure to understand the rationality of values far superior to the choices we are capable of making together.  For the liberals, we, the customers, are the problem when we unite in our refusal to play by the rules.

Public anger at the sell-off of Royal Mail and at the deal struck over Hinkley C with French imperialists and another foreign regime, one with an even worse record on human rights, will not abate easily.  Too many things are happening all at once for that.  The failure of even the Co-op to act responsibly, destroying a treasured institution, has folk of goodwill grasping at any straw that will re-assure them that the future is not one long dark night of corporate piracy without end.  In the process, they will clutch at many straws that will soon blow away in the wind.

The first thing we need to realise is that the UK, as it has long been understood, cannot form part of the solution.  It’s too late for that.  Attlee’s Britain no longer exists.  His model is not repeatable and it would be a ghastly mistake even to try.  It was always bound to be a betrayal of truly democratic principles, as our forebears in Common Wealth argued at the time.  The industries nationalised were managerialised, not democratised.  Yes, there was a Scottish Region of British Railways, but no Scottish Parliament to oversee it.  There was a Wales Gas Board, but no Welsh Assembly.  In England there were ultimately regions for electricity, gas and water, for railways, for hospitals, and for many other things.  But how many of them matched?  How many were designed around areas that made sense as the basis of future elected regional governments?  Few, if any.  No wonder it all ended so badly.  Thatcherism arose in the 1970s as the establishment response to demands for devolution-all-round.  It preserved London-based power by transferring the keys to Britain from Whitehall to the City, which is now in the process of handing them on to the Chinese.

The second thing is to beware any attempt by Labour to tap into the demand for re-nationalisation.  For Labour, the nation is Britain and the clamour is there to be manipulated in defence of a centralised union under its absolutist control.  There are better ways, ways offered by the nationalist and regionalist movements of these islands.  Labour, to misquote Aneurin Bevan, is simply the future refusing to be born.  It was revealed this week that London and the south-east of England continue to be the principal beneficiaries of the mess for others which those in power there have long sought to engineer.  With more to come.  Labour will equally continue to argue that the social distribution of power is everything, while its geographical distribution is irrelevant.  Despite centuries of evidence to the contrary, millions will go on believing it.

The third thing to note is that restoring common ownership in a modernised form today has been made more difficult by the British State’s determined attempts to bankrupt itself.  How is it all to be paid for?  Even if assets are deprivatised at the same 30-40% discounts at which they were privatised, that is still a huge amount of money.  Surprisingly little is said about how easy it is to find the money to buy problem assets, like toxic banks, or failing airports in Scotland, Wales or Cornwall.  Politically too, it’s a smoother path to attend to precious lame ducks than to prise assets seriously worth having from the grip of more reluctant sellers.  It’s the profits, not the losses, that need diverting from the private to the public realm.  Marx and Engels are rarely read these days but they did wickedly point out that those who make such a fuss about the sacred character of property rights are the heirs of those who got rich by treating past property rights with contempt, say during the French Revolution, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, or the Norman Conquest.  A little less reverence where rights do more harm than good would be no bad thing.  In a real crisis, the City’s worldwide paper ‘assets’ will amount to nothing at all.  What’s on the ground is what will count.

Inevitably, such matters are ones of opportunity and pragmatism rather than a precise strategy to roll forward the State.  What we know is that the world is changing, and changing faster than we have been willing to notice.  The more successful countries of the future will be those already thinking long-term, say 30-50 years ahead.  Watch China’s moves in Africa, and now in Europe, and weep at our weakness in that regard.  Fortunately, we are not alone.  There are many, perhaps surprisingly many, parallel movements for change in small nations and historic regions right across Europe and beyond, opposed to dogmatic centralism in all its forms.  Wessex is one piece of a very big jigsaw.

So what are the basic tasks a self-governing Wessex should look to organise?  One list of ‘foundation occupations’ for any well-founded society that doesn’t wish to be occupied, economically any more than militarily, is as follows:

Category 1 – Occupations calling for the exercise of considerable professional skill, e.g. administration, justice, security, education, health.  To the extent that a society alienates these services it also alienates itself.  The identification of these professionals with the territory in which they work, its customs, its needs and its interests, is what gives a society its essential character.  Deprive them of the opportunity for loyalty to place and no-one else will feel any either.  There is room for unsubsidised, non-core private sector involvement in education, health and the law but public values are inevitably subverted if that involvement enters core services.

Category 2 – Occupations with duties where incentives are impractical, e.g. ambulance and fire services, post, prisons, traffic police, waste collection.  Target-setting is likely to be counter-productive if it ends up degrading the service provided.  There is therefore no substitute for managers sensitive to circumstances.  The private sector has nothing to offer that is not equally available to an adequately resourced public sector.

Category 3 – Occupations with specialist technical skills, e.g. electricity, telecommunications, water and sewerage.  These are areas where private sector involvement has often been the norm, but on a tight leash given how vital these services are to modern life.  It’s likely that we under-estimate the consequences of losing control over them.  It’s also likely that they’ll become ever more vital to our future and ever more vulnerable, e.g. to cyber-attack.

Category 4 – Occupations where productivity can be affected by the worker, and where worker co-operatives could therefore be organised, e.g. transport operation and maintenance.  The problems of worker co-operatives in these sectors do not relate to the organisation of work but to the funding of investment.  Every one of the transport co-operatives resulting from privatisation has since been bought out by corporate capital.  To guard against any repetition, that funding issue needs to be addressed.  Capital, according to William Barnes (in Views of Labour and Gold), is no more than that part of wealth that is rendered useful by labour.  Considered thus, there is therefore no reason why it should not be organised by means of a democratic process, though necessarily on whatever scale, or scales, is commensurate with the needs of a modern society.  Does a transport company with an ageing fleet always have to be bought out by those with the money to replace it, or are there other options such as asset leasing?

Category 5 – Occupations whose nature could change with circumstances.  This is where watching the signs really matters.  There are many services we normally entrust to the private sector, but what do we do when things are abnormal?  Where would we be without tanker drivers or those overseeing the logistics of supermarket deliveries?  To whom do they answer in a diplomatic crisis involving a foreign owner?  Let’s not panic. But let’s at least have the answers to hand in a self-governing Wessex region of the future that seeks to prosper in interesting times.

The age of scarcity into which self-government is born will require a range of ‘foundation projects’ as well as occupations, though these are less easy to predict from history.  Let’s not allow current prejudices to prevent us contemplating future solutions.  They not only can be radical but will need to be radical.  Today is the anniversary of the death, in 899, of King Alfred the Great, a Wessex hero, but also a warning to us.  Alfred took risks for the sake of Wessex, such as assuming responsibility for kingless Mercians and Northumbrians, that were soon to lead to the unification of England and, under the Normans, to the eclipse of Wessex for centuries to come.  All his investments of effort, in the physical infrastructure of military and naval defences, and in the defences of the mind provided by his revival of learning, were ultimately ineffective against the superior organisation and determined infiltration of hostile neighbours, despite their relatively small numbers.  High-tax, high-spend policies of the Alfredian kind, directed towards rebuilding and securing a worthwhile society, won’t always be effective, it’s true (a well-organised world actually makes a more tempting target for top-down takeover).  It's just that they're always better than not trying at all and succumbing to unintelligible chaos.

In the 1940s, Friedrich von Hayek wrote a famous critique of the State entitled The Road to Serfdom, yet still concluded that “In no system that could be rationally defended would the State just do nothing.”  The small, community-benefit State we envisage for Wessex is one that ought to do much more than nothing if it is to have a better chance of lifting the yoke from our necks than the blind pursuit of post-Thatcherite sell-out we endure today.

Themes, Memes & Ideology

“Not just the mere organization of a new party is becoming increasingly difficult – so is the expression of a new political idea or doctrine. Ideas no longer exist except through the media of information. When these are in the hands of the existing parties, no truly revolutionary or new doctrine has any chance to express itself, i.e., to exist. Yet innovation was one of the principal characteristics of democracy. Now, because nobody wants it any longer, it tends to disappear.”
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1973)

Regular readers will know that this blog has certain regular themes. Most fundamental is the localist and regionalist conception of democracy, coupled with a constant critique of the London-chauvinist, egocentric and militaristic thinking denying us the happier world we should all be enjoying.

A second group of themes links Peak Oil, food supply, population, sustainable transport and the long-term agrarian perspective. We aim to take a realistic view, rejecting both the head-in-the-sand, business-as-usual approach and the hopeful hippy idea that if we leave well alone it will all work itself out in the end without anyone getting hurt.

Last, but by no means least, is the theme of unjust possession, especially of money and land. Along with this, we oppose the Thatcherite cult of private property as an end in itself, and her abandonment of any attempt to define the common good by civic means. We envision economic life as a co-operative, not competitive or exploitative endeavour, and one in which quality and local distinctiveness are both highly cherished.

These are themes that have emerged in our discussions about the future of Wessex. There may be others we haven’t thought of. Maybe we put too much emphasis on some of the themes we already have. We are always open to feedback. We aim to provide quality in terms of the range and depth of posts here, and also their tone. Occasionally, a more strident note will be sounded, on juxtaposing the urgency of the problems, the simplicity of the solutions and the sheer lack of imagination that prevents them meeting up.

The themes above are all ones we view as vital to any self-governing Wessex worth having, one which is aware of the issues and knows where it’s going. But they’re not what defines the Wessex project, since they’re all about analysis and direction, in the abstract, not a fleshing-out of the new structures through which a fresh approach can be delivered. We believe in Wessex as one part of a more streamlined and sustainable system of government than the UK as presently constituted. Devolution has unleashed the potential of Scotland and Wales, long suppressed by the London regime. We are eager to join the achievers.

Wessex itself is more ‘meme’ than ‘theme’. It’s an idea with something for everyone, whether you love dialect, make T-shirts and car stickers, market holidays here, or are just impatient for the future to arrive. We are passionate about the Wessex dimension to our policies. That can mean building a Wessex-oriented transport system in place of one driven by London’s priorities. It can mean taking control of our seabed to harness the energy potential of tides, waves and wind for our benefit. It can mean feeding ourselves, not housing London’s overspill. Getting the meme ‘out there’, getting folk to ‘think Wessex, and why not?’ is something worth being passionate about. It’s the only way to make it stick and grow, so that Labour can’t go around re-inventing regionalism every 20 years as a convenient diversion, and as if it had no back story. The best guide to the memes and sub-memes we need to propagate is Celtic nationalism. We don’t have to become nationalists, or acquire uncritically, to learn from what works elsewhere.

A number of posts have explored our political philosophy, that is to say, what informs what we think ought to happen. We also need to become aware once again of the need for ideology, of the need to be on our guard against what must NOT happen, of what threatens those things we hold dear and against which we must not be afraid to speak out. An example given recently is the financial decapitation that has repeatedly robbed Wessex of an independent regional banking sector.

Although we are told that we live in a post-ideological world, that is just another way of saying that we live inside the ideology that won. Which is why any other way of looking at the world, any assertion of other values, gets dismissed as unreality. The political value of history is that it tells us that there are other ways. They’re history because, applied as a whole, they failed. But elements of them, proclaimed and applied under new conditions, can still represent a more promising future to go back to than persisting with a status quo whose own success is now seriously called into question. Pushing against the weight of that status quo is what ideology is for.

Banking on Stability

Stuckey is an important name in Wessex history. Douglas Stuckey, long the Chairman of Common Wealth, is a valued member of the WR Party Council. Outside politics, he is better known as the author of books and articles on Wessex history. Among these is Wessex Rising!, which charts the Monmouth Rebellion and the coming of William of Orange, the king in whose reign the Bank of England was established.

In the 19th century, Stuckeys’ was a household word across much of central Wessex. Stuckeys’ Bank, founded in about 1770 with its headquarters in Langport, was the second largest issuer of English banknotes after the Bank of England. Farmers offered one of the latter’s notes as payment were known to eye it disparagingly and then insist, “Gi’e oi Stuckeys’”. In 1796, because of the threat of French invasion, there was a run on the banks in Somerset. Except for Stuckeys’. The saying among the farmers was that they trusted Stuckeys’ Bank as much as their old sock for keeping their money in. While the Bank of England is popularly 'the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street', Stuckeys' Bank became 'the old lady from the west with a long stocking'.  Stuckeys’ disappeared from the Wessex scene after 1909 when it merged with a Lancashire bank that eventually became part of NatWest (and so today is 83% State-owned via the RBS Group). The name survives only in the Bath Stuckeys branch of NatWest.

That was not the last attempt by Wessex to develop its own financial institutions. There was the Wessex Trustee Savings Bank, founded in 1930, merged away in 1975 and now part of the 41% State-owned Lloyds Banking Group.

Then there was the Bournemouth-based Wessex Building Society, launched in 1949, which merged in 1989 with London’s Portman Building Society to form the Portman Wessex. When this passed to the Regency & West of England Building Society the following year, the combined group adopted the Portman name. ‘Wessex’ had disappeared but the distribution of branches continued to be heavily concentrated in the far south of England and the head office continued to be located in Bournemouth. The Portman in turn merged with the Nationwide in 2007. And the Nationwide, as the name suggests, is anything but regional (though physically based in Swindon). It was a messy takeover that still rankles: members vote; they all get their windfalls; but there can be no second thoughts. What’s been done can never then be undone.

It’s a continuing struggle. Wessex doesn’t have the distinctive financial institutions of Scotland, with its own banknotes and historic names. Even Northumbria, with the Co-operative Bank, the Yorkshire Bank and many of the surviving building societies, can claim much more. We seem to be easy prey for London institutions, a place to send the back office functions while the decision-making is kept well out of our hands.

There is another way, still. In the wake of widespread disgust with the banks and building societies, credit unions are becoming a popular place to deposit savings and take out loans. Credit unions are self-limiting in that members must have some connection in common. This is usually a locality but it can be membership of an organisation. Plaid Cymru has a credit union for its members; perhaps we can look forward eventually to a Wessex Regionalist credit union? LETS schemes, and local currencies like the ‘Totnes Pound’, are easy to dismiss as a hippy gimmick but they surely also have their place in a more sustainable financial ecology.

We’d like to see more innovation from the centre too. Instead of the London regime being obsessed with preserving at any price the financial value of the zombie banks it owns, why not be bold and redefine them in terms of value to the customer? Break them up into regional banks. Mutualise or re-mutualise them. Tell the investment bankers to clear off, that they won’t be allowed to buy into them. Ever. We’re not holding our breath, because the regime has been backed into a corner where its interest as regulator and its interest as investor are diametrically opposed. One day, one of the two will have to give. The long-term public interest lies in destroying our money, not what passes for our democracy, because it’s far easier to replace. But who cares about the public interest?

What can we do? Look for opportunities locally (but in a joined-up, regional way). The antidote to the mass consumer society is the local producer society, meeting our own needs from our own resources. As the saying goes, if you want to see change, keep it in your pocket. Our money needs to go into our communities. We need to drain it from the banks and watch them die like fish out of water. It can be done. But it requires discipline and a firm ideological commitment to what will deliver sustainable long-term prosperity. We must never again give in to the blind temptations of short-term sell-out, as happened over and over again with banks, building societies, buses, trains, electricity and water. No-one must own Wessex but those who live here. No-one must benefit unfairly from using our land, our money, our politics, our society, or our lives.  What it comes down to is that good business decisions have to consider the consequences for all those they affect.  If our economic system as constituted can't or won't do that, then we need a new one.

That kind of thing doesn’t go down well. It gets called ‘financial terrorism’ and the like. And that’s not surprising. The stage is being set for the arrival of full-blown totalitarian liberalism. Maggie’s mate Pinochet did it with guns. Our current leaders will be doing it with laws. Greece and Italy already have their non-elected rulers in place. The idea is that freedom doesn’t mean doing what you like. It means living out your life in accordance with a rather crazy economics textbook. Individuals, governments, and even private businesses have all to abide by ‘the rules’. So bank customers must act ‘responsibly’ and not bring down the financial system in anger. Governments must submit to international laws of contract and not abrogate odious debts imposed upon their taxpayers under duress. We all have to take seriously the idea that banks create value in the form of financial ‘products’, which is a fancy name for fairy dust.

The clearest example of the new thinking came last month from Andrew Bailey, formerly Chief Cashier of the Bank of England and soon to be Deputy Chief Executive at the new bank regulator, the Prudential Regulation Authority. He proposes that free personal banking be banned on the grounds that it ‘distorts the market’. A market used to be the coming together of a willing buyer and a willing seller on mutually advantageous terms. Not any more. What buyer and seller think is now irrelevant. What matters is what the textbook says. And according to the textbook the purpose of markets is to ensure that wealth flows from the poorer to the richer by denying the former the means to say no.

Free personal banking doesn’t distort anything. Bailey’s excuses have been comprehensively trashed by the commentators. Banks make their profit out of charges for extras and, most of all, from lending our money out at interest, many times over (fractional reserve banking). The problem for banks is that interest rates are at an all-time low. They’re scared, because they’re not making enough money from our money. But the first to re-introduce bank charges will be the first to go bust as customers desert in droves. No-one dares do it. So the regulator steps up to ‘save the system’. Regulation, far from protecting us from the banks, therefore turns out to be the means of protecting the banks from us. Better check for space under that mattress now.  And darn that old sock.