Crown Jewels for Sale

One of the contentious issues between Westminster and Holyrood of late has been the future of the Crown Estate in Scotland.  UK-wide, the portfolio of property and other investments brings in £285m a year to HM Treasury and pays for HM herself and any hangers-on who, unlike the Duke of Cornwall, aren’t funded from other public assets.  Control of the Crown Estate is vital to a government like that of Nicola Sturgeon that wants to tap the potential of offshore renewables, because it’s the Crown Estate that owns most of the seabed and takes the rents from the use of it.

If the Crown Estate has now become something of a devolutionary football, there’s a clear way out for a Treasury that doesn’t want to see its share of the cash cut.  That’s to sell anything territorial and re-invest the cash somewhere safer, like London.  If the money’s left your area, it’s no longer your government’s to demand.  That’s a principle that can be applied in anticipation of any similar devolution of power to the English regions.  Sure enough, the Crown Estate Commissioners have started to sell off the rural portfolio, turfing out the tenants without a second thought.

The 4,700-acre Bryanston Estate in north Dorset has just been offloaded to Viscount Rothermere, non-dom owner of Blackshirt-backing rag the Daily Mail.  Private Eye reported last month that its 14 farms class it as a “working” country estate, meaning it can be passed on entirely tax-free.  No wonder “working” estates are going for record prices, in this case a rumoured £65m.  Meanwhile, ownership of the Portman Hunt Kennels will add an open door into rural high society.

The Crown Estate Commissioners manage that part of Crown property held for investment purposes but much more is held for operational purposes by Government departments.  And they’re under constant pressure to sell.  The last administration made a number of attempts to sell the Forestry Commission but failed to take public opinion with it.  The present administration may feel it’s safe to ignore that now.

Last month it was the Ministry of Defence’s turn in the spotlight.  There’s talk of selling surplus land for housing, especially in the south-east of England where housing demand outstrips supply.  (Because successive governments have put money into developing London’s economy at the expense of everyone else’s.)  There’s nothing new about releasing land for housing though.  The MoD has huge holdings around Aldershot that have been picked at for years.  According to the MoD, work continues to scope opportunities to significantly reduce its estate by up to 30% over the next 10-15 years, which would seem to signal some major facility closures.

Will a series of sales at the margin be ambitious enough for Osborne and his chums?  It’s unlikely.  His ‘Productivity Plan’ envisages Government property being put on a commercial basis, handed to one or more new bodies that will charge departments the market rate for it.  But if you’re going to ‘go commercial’, why not ‘go private’?  HMRC have already sold their offices, to a company based in a tax haven.  (You couldn’t make this up.)  Osborne’s plan recalls the former Property Services Agency – which even earlier was the Office of Works – that used to do facilities management for central government.  Since the PSA’s break-up and privatisation, many government departments have taken back management of their own property, presumably at higher cost than when the PSA provided an integrated service.  Such is the price of ideology.

Generations of governments have promoted owner-occupation – first of farms, then of homes – because it’s paid for by loans that enrich the financial services industry, based in the City of London.  Now Government is volunteering to return itself to tenancy because rental income benefits, well, well, the financial services industry.  Find the pattern, spot the inconsistency, then follow the trail and you’ll discover who really rules Britain.  Paid-for freeholds are dead property – nobody else can make money out of them and that’s why they’re under attack.  And the best time to offload them is at the start of the economic cycle, so that private owners can maximise the uplift in value in a rising market.

Sale-and-leaseback comes at a cost in terms of lost flexibility – it was one of the reasons given for the collapse of the Woolworths Group, which had tied itself into a deal with its new landlord that looked good enough at the time.  And how do you – or rather, how do highly paid consultants – value some of the land uses the Government operates, for which there is no market equivalent?  Military activity might look like one of those but in fact not all MoD land is freehold.  Three-quarters of the Dartmoor Training Area, much used by the Royal Marines, is held under licence from Devon’s largest landowner, the Duchy of Cornwall.  Salisbury Plain Training Area – one-ninth of Wiltshire and as big as the Isle of Wight – is mostly MoD freehold but for how much longer?  What might Arab or Chinese investors offer for it?

The ground is shifting beneath our feet.  Not literally, but certainly in the sense that Wessex is changing hands.  With cash-strapped local authorities selling off smallholdings and other property, more and more of Wessex is being turned into opportunities for new money made in London to sink itself into the countryside and settle-in to a post-democratic new feudalism.

Osborne’s challenge to the public is to ‘re-imagine the State’, although only imaginings in a downward direction will be accepted.  Nothing new here though; it’s part of a process of progressive plunder that’s gone on regardless of party colour for the past 36 years.  It comes down to whether there’s nothing left but the coercive core – armed forces, police and judiciary – or whether anything more attractive is added, and why.  Note well that a smaller State does NOT imply lower public spending, just the routing of more of it through the plunderers’ hands in the form of one subsidy or another, from agriculture to housing to railways.  Taxes certainly won’t fall if governments sell off productive assets that provide an alternative revenue stream.

Selling assets to pay debts is false economics if the economy itself depends on the existence of debt as its driving force.  Banks will force governments into debt over and over again, so long as governments fail to govern.  It’s when there are no more assets to sell that the full force of austerity comes to be applied.  New Labour, the bankers’ friend, was taken for a merry old ride over privatisation, with John Prescott quoting Aneurin Bevan – ‘the language of priorities is the religion of socialism’ – to justify the sale of municipal enterprises.  Selling productive assets to finance non-productive expenditure is more accurately the language of the madhouse.

What isn’t often appreciated is that to shrink the British State is to shrink Britishness itself.  As fewer folk have a stake in it, so it becomes less worth defending.  The contrast with Scotland and Wales is striking.  There the democratic sector has been defended, innovative ways round EU rules have been found and some privatisations have even been reversed.  While Scotland and Wales have a will to survive against the forces of globalised plunder, the UK – and therefore England – has only a death-wish, a will to liquidate itself and disperse the proceeds to the super-rich.

An example of this is the desire to pull down the BBC, ‘because the BBC is doing too much’.  (Rupert Murdoch’s empire, naturally, isn’t, though it could hardly do a worse job of airing the views of parties critical of the BBC’s vision of Britain.)  The BBC reduces opportunities for the private sector, which is obviously a Bad Thing.  Except that it isn’t.  In a democracy, there should be no presumption that the job of Government is to create private money-making opportunities out of public services.  That’s the issue that goes to the heart of the demolition job.  It’s not about efficiency or inefficiency, because no investor will buy an asset and no entrepreneur will offer to take over a public service unless the deal is structured in such a way as to make money for them.  They call the shots.  We end up paying.  And by the time we figure out that we didn’t get what we were promised it’s too late to go back.

It’s not about efficiency.  It’s about democracy.  That’s where the Left has let us all down.  It has failed to defend public ownership and operation on democratic grounds, because too much of its thinking is managerialist and so fundamentally hostile to any real democracy, political or economic.  Radical politics is democratic politics and it’s up to radicals to make the case for more democracy, not less.  Freedom to do your own thing is laudable; making off with the common wealth is not.  We all need to be clear about the difference.

The Plantation of Wessex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fighting On The Beaches

Sussex isn’t Wessex.  We don’t claim it and the Saxon chronicles, read attentively, back up us on that.  Nevertheless, it’s fascinating to glance east at present.

At Balcombe, environmental protestors are making life difficult for Cuadrilla, the firm that wants to frack for oil and gas.  It’s been well described as ‘extreme energy’, a last desperate squeezing of the fossil fuel fruit that defers by a few years the real reckoning we need to undertake.  And all the while adding to climate change.  Cuadrilla’s response?  That they have complied with all relevant laws and regulations.  Which says a lot for the competence of our law-makers.  One of the exceptions is Caroline Lucas of the Green Party, who got dragged away by police yesterday.  Balcombe’s actual MP is Francis Maude, a Conservative, Paymaster-General and Minister for the Cabinet Office.  Now, watching him get arrested would be real fun.  Watching him lose his seat would be better still.

At Newhaven, there’s a different issue.  The French, who own the West Beach, have sealed off public access and the locals want it back.  It’s a story with all the right ingredients.  (And the online comments are a hoot.)

Start with a populace who’ve woken up to the fact that if you want to protect your community’s rights, don’t allow them to be sold off.  Private corporations have no loyalty to place.  If you want to defend your heritage, keep it public.  Yes, Maggie, that means the STATE has to own it because no-one else can be trusted to do the job.  There shouldn’t need to be a debate about this, only about how locally the responsibility should rest.  If you put the government’s assets up for sale they’ll be bought by someone else’s government.  The French.  The Germans.  The Arabs.  The Chinese.  Do we own any of their assets?  Do they look that daft?  And it’s not only the governments.  Private companies from across the world now own huge swaths of what used to be our public sector.  The money raised from those sales?  Oh, we had SUCH a big party up in London.

Then there’s attitudes towards the French.  Always good for a WW2 joke at their expense.  Nothing like resting on our laurels to remind others of events before most of their parents were born.  The fact is, they DO own a lot of southern England now.  And in Newhaven’s case, who exactly are these French owners?  The Département of Seine Maritime, in Normandy.  Imagine East Sussex County Council owning the port of Dieppe.  It’s like that, only in reverse.

It’s well known that the Queen owns the foreshore here, all of it, so the froggies are clearly in the wrong.  You’d think so, reading the outpourings of patriotic internet bores.  But it ain’t necessarily so.  The Crown Estate Commissioners are responsible for only 55% of the foreshore around the UK, about 320,000 acres.  In Cornwall and Lancashire, the respective royal duchies stand in for the Crown.  In Orkney and Shetland, Norse udal law suggests that the foreshore rights go with the land, not the sea, so adjoining landowners usually have the sounder claim.  And elsewhere?  We’ll come to that.  The Crown certainly owns the seabed below mean low water mark, about 23.8 million acres.  Or does it?  Not all, especially where estuaries are concerned.  The Port of London Authority owns part of the tidal Thames river-bed.  Several river-beds in Devon belong to the Duchy of Cornwall, while the Beaulieu River in Hampshire is part of the Beaulieu Estate.  And a large slice of the Severn Estuary forms something called the Beaufort Royalty, owned by the Duke of Beaufort through his property company, Swangrove Estates Ltd, to which are paid the dues for sand dredged from the bed.  Never heard of the Beaufort Royalty?  Unless you need to know, you probably won’t.  Maybe with tidal energy now on the agenda, you’ll be hearing more.

Land with no other owner belongs by default to the Crown.  That is how the royal forests originated, as well as the ownership of upland commons like Dartmoor (granted away in 1337 to the Duchy of Cornwall and still owned by it today).  The Crown is assumed to own the seabed and things that come out of the sea, like whales and wreckage, and, except in Orkney and Shetland, the foreshore is treated as an ‘incident of the sea’ rather than an ‘incident of the land’.  That doesn’t mean that the Crown cannot part with its rights, and along half the coastline it has done just that.  In seaside resorts the beach often belongs to the council, ensuring that at least some of the money from the deckchairs and the ice creams stays local.

That still leaves a lot of the one-half in private ownership and even the other half can be exploited for profit, since the Crown Estate Commissioners have a money-raising job to do for central government.  Should they?  Or should all beaches be locally owned, turned over to the parish council to manage, in partnership with a wider authority if necessary?  Should the seabed off our coasts be plundered for London’s benefit, or conserved for ours?  These are the sort of questions we’d love to see a Wessex Witan debating in respect of our two coasts and the narrow seas we share with Wales, Brittany and Normandy.  Scotland’s recent experience of sweeping land reforms has shown that it will take a fresh constitutional settlement to inspire the fresh thinking needed.

Times of Tension

It was good to hear Nick Clegg last week distancing himself from the PM. We’re all Thatcherites now, claimed Cameron. Oh no, we’re not, insisted Clegg. Any reminder that the man is Deputy Prime Minister and not Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party is very welcome.

So too was another breaking of ranks last week, when agriculture minister David Heath drew attention to the looming disaster that is food security, or rather the UK’s lack of it. Heath, the LibDem MP for Somerton & Frome, may have been voicing his own views. Or those agreed by his party’s leadership. Certainly not the views of his Coalition partners, notably Osborne and Pickles, who remain desperate to destroy as much farmland as possible in the search for that strangely elusive growth they keep telling us that we need. Meanwhile, those who look ahead are buying farmland and laying the foundations for the new feudalism. The more land in others’ hands that is lost to development, the higher their own profits will in due course be.

Missing from Heath’s statement was any acknowledgement of the fact that WR have been making an issue of food security for years, while all the London parties have had their heads well into the sand. Just read this blog. Maybe Heath does. If so, he’ll know it won’t be the first time we’ve been proved right. We were right about the need to fundamentally restructure the financial sector. We were right about declining public enthusiasm for elected mayors and the whole ‘cities first’ agenda. We were right that localism, Coalition-style, would be a con. We were right about the resurgence of interest in public ownership and industrial planning. So what else are we right about? Peak oil? The need to rebuild the rural rail network (making substantial progress in Scotland and Wales but little in Wessex)? The need to stabilise our population and move towards a truly sustainable society?

It won’t give us any satisfaction to say we told you so. (Welcoming you to membership of WR would be far more constructive.) We do sense that change is coming. Not all of it positive by any means. Earlier this month we received news that West Dorset District Council, under pressure to meet London’s demands for ever more housing, has proposed 1,000 homes on land south-east of Dorchester at Winterborne Came. There is concern that the countryside setting for the homes of two Wessex literary giants – William Barnes and Thomas Hardy – will be destroyed by the development. The lies of London party politicians – that any number of houses can always be accommodated without harming our heritage – just go on getting bigger. But it’s what local folk should expect. So long as they go on voting for this, then this, of course, is what they will get. They will get something different when Wessex Regionalist councillors and MPs are elected to give London diktat its marching orders.

The fact that localism is failing to deliver on its promise of parish democracy will continue to pit Coalition councillors against Coalition ministers until the day they too realise that those in power in London truly don’t care what the yokels think. We who live here are an irrelevance, an irritation, an impediment to their careers. Yet we have it in our hands to destroy those careers by refusing to return these folk to Parliament. We won’t take that step, yet, because we are an essentially deferential society. We really do seem to believe that the big man in London must know what’s best for us. The vicious circle of deference and defeat will continue to repeat down the generations unless we say ‘no’. And follow through on that ‘no’ by building the regionalist alternative.

All At Sea

Cornwall is bigger than Wessex. Yes or no? It depends on definitions. Land area is one thing, but there are some rights of sovereignty that extend out to the 200-mile limit of the Continental Shelf. And it’s not just sovereign states who have clearly demarcated areas of seabed to their name. So do the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. So would Cornwall and Wessex if they too had devolution. Our area takes in half the width of the Bristol Channel, from Marsland Mouth upwards, and half the width of the English Channel, from Plymouth to Portsmouth. Cornwall is everything to the west and so, it’s true, is bigger than Wessex. With marine resources that dwarf its land area.

Seabed sovereignty means that geopolitics doesn’t stop at the shoreline; Britain is not an island in these terms but shares borders with France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and certain Nordic countries, as well as Ireland. Wessex has a boundary with Brittany and Normandy (and the Channel Islands) that is longer than its boundary with the rest of England. Since those regions are also keen to develop the economic potential of their seas, there ought to be huge opportunities for hi-tech industries in Wessex to seek business there.  For their part, Cornwall and Plymouth Councils are already pushing.

Within these areas at sea, all kinds of things happen. There are large islands – Lundy, Steep Holm, Brownsea, Wight – and many smaller rocks. There are cables and pipelines in the seabed, dredging and drilling, fishing, sealife, recreation, navigation, naval exercises and, increasingly, installations to capture energy. The most optimistic estimates tell us that tidal, wave and offshore wind resources around the British Isles are sufficient to meet all our electricity needs by the end of the century (provided we use the power wisely).

To help such activities co-exist without conflict, the Marine & Coastal Access Act 2009 set up a streamlined system for planning and licensing the use of the marine environment – from below the seabed, on the seabed and up through the water column to the surface. In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland this system is part of the devolved administration’s remit. The Scottish Government has been vigorous in applying it to develop a renewables industry to take the place of North Sea oil. England has the Marine Management Organisation, based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, its plan-making work moving slowly round the coast, priority area by priority area, with parts of Wessex maybe another nine years away yet. As for the consents regime, it can take up to four years to process a Harbour Revision Order.

Things are rather different in Wales. There the Welsh Government is sorting out its environmental powers, with many soon to be vested in a single new natural resources body, and forging ahead. Those concerned with our own marine environment may need to deal with as many as five different bodies. We have the Marine Management Organisation (Newcastle), Natural England (Sheffield), the Environment Agency (Bristol), the Devon & Severn Inshore Fisheries & Conservation Authority (Brixham), and the Southern Inshore Fisheries & Conservation Authority (Poole). The next step after unifying these on a regional basis would be to devolve the Crown Estate Commissioners, the body that rents out the seabed and pockets the money for the London regime. It’s a priority for the Scottish Government. It would make sense in Wales too. And Wessex. If simply being English didn’t disqualify us, in the eyes of the decision-makers, from doing things so sensibly.

Just why so many English folk think that effective, efficient government is such a dreadful idea is something we’ll need to explore in future posts. The roots of an explanation lie in the centuries when absolute monarchs ruled the world, hanging, beheading and burning all who queried the views held by those at the top. But in 2012?

All the arguments against regions in England are deeply, deeply irrational. Regionalism is ‘un-English’? More like un-Norman. (How can Wessex be un-English?) Regionalism plays into the hands of Brussels? So we do without good government because the continentals have it? (The EU is a club of nation-states, with no enduring interest in promoting regions.) Regionalism will mean more bureaucracy? Scotland and Wales show the opposite: the reorganisation of environmental work in Wales is expected to deliver benefits worth £158 million over the next 10 years. (Regional administration in England already exists in many fields – it’s a fact of geography – but devolution leads to even more streamlined, cheaper, faster and better decision-making.)

The experience of our marine environment ought to be a warning. Never grumble about the incompetence of the London regime if you’re unwilling to work to replace it with a now proven alternative.

Happy King Alfred’s Day.

Rights & Wrongs

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise.”
Voltaire

The London regime has invited comments on a UK Bill of Rights. But where do ‘rights’ actually come from? The official line is that they’re concessions made by government towards the governed. Politics is defined by the struggle of the latter to defend and, where possible, extend them. Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, the Bill of Rights, the Great Reform Act. Our island story places these historic documents on their pedestals not just to remind us to be grateful for what we have received but to distract attention from what we are still denied. A real self-governing community would have whatever rights it desired: the very word would probably lose all meaning.

Today, any discussion about rights has been crippled by three decades of political correctness on the one side and totalitarian liberalism on the other. Neither is helpful to an understanding of the full range of rights that can exist and can be championed politically. In fact, there is a third point of view that has been systematically marginalised.

There are broadly three kinds of rights – individual (human) rights, property rights, and community rights (constitutional rights retained in common). For the real enthusiast, human rights are something we ‘discovered’ in the 17th or 18th century, just as if they were Newton’s laws of motion. Free speech comes closest to being an objective right, since in Popperian terms the progress of knowledge is impossible if the status quo cannot be criticised. Elsewhere, there is little acceptance of the fact that rights are both asserted and resisted and that the balance of argument can fall on either side. Some ‘rights’ claimed, it is right to deny.

Individual (human) rights are those we are born with. Property rights are those that belong to property owners, who are only rarely born with their property entitlements. Yet international human rights make no distinction. The right to private property (and not just personal property) is defended as fanatically as the right to life, if not more so. Public property is not protected at all and can be, and often is, stolen to order through forced sales or legal redefinition. We have gone from Proudhon’s ‘property is theft’ to today’s ‘private property is sacred, even when (or especially when) it is held illegitimately, whereas public property, democratically managed, is to be regarded as a barbarous relic’.

We reject these dogmas because our policies run directly counter to them. Limits should be placed on how much of Wessex any one person may own. Those not resident in Wessex should have no right to own our land at all. And it is OUR land, because title to it is granted by the community and can be withdrawn by the community. Land ownership in Wessex is a privilege, not a right, to be used or else forfeited. We reject submission to universal human rights, not because we do not see value in the bundle overall, but because lurking within it are rules that constrain us from pursuing policies that are both reasonable and necessary in a just society. Universal human rights are compatible with democratic decentralism only where they reflect a genuine consensus.

Mention of collective, community rights usually brings out all the screaming banshees of liberalism to denounce them as the justification of tyranny. Really? It’s quite simple. Your village is agreed 99% to 1% that the field over there should not be developed for housing. But its owners have property rights. Planning won’t save you – it’s a stitch-up that always favours the growth junkies. You have to win, and keep winning, every time. They only have to get lucky once. So the field gets built on. Democracy?

Liberals despise democracy because it curbs their rights, especially their right to exploit environmental property for private gain. We have a wider vision, one that values the community’s right to defend itself against imposed change. Would you like to be able to know who your new neighbours are and veto them if they’re unsuitable? Why should that right be limited to those rich enough to buy the houses either side of them? Should newcomers automatically get the right to vote, before they know anything about the community they set out to transform, permanently, for the worse, before they move on to their next victim?

We have always said that Wessex is for those who care about its future, whether native or settler, but we’ve also striven to devise means to prevent its ruination by those who would turn it into a copy of the urbanised and industrialised regions they left behind. We’ve considered a tax on newcomers – but that discriminates more against the poor than against the rich. We’ve considered withholding the right to stand for election from those who’ve lived here less than, say, five years – but that discriminates against what may be much-needed ability. Withholding the right to vote for a number of years may well strike the right balance, giving time for newcomers to actually understand and appreciate the community they wish to change.

All the above is grist to the mill. Our first task, however, is to roll back the frontiers of the mental terrorism that for 30 years has told us all that our only right worth having is the right to show how little we care about anything that cannot be expressed in selfish terms. Public service is not dead – but the modes of thinking that underpin it are certainly on life-support. We now need to operate before it’s too late.

Cradle of the Crown

“Whereas the liberties of England, its laws, statutes, system of justice and administration, had their beginnings in the Kingdom of Wessex;
Whereas that Kingdom in its heyday was at once the cradle of the English language and culture, and the bastion of freedom against the marauding Danes and Norsemen;
Whereas the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty is directly descended through the female line from the House of Cerdic, by far the longest-ruling of all the Royal dynasties among Her forebears;
Whereas the people of Wessex have always shown unparalleled allegiance to the Crown;
Whereas the loyalty and affection of the people of Wessex towards their homeland have never totally disappeared despite a thousand years of remote and centralised rule;
Be it therefore enacted by the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, as follows:”
Preamble to The Statute of Wessex, our constitutional policy statement from 1982

Some of us are monarchists. Some of us are republicans. We at least agree that we would not now publish anything dripping with the deferential sentiments we expressed 30 years ago. It’s not just that the Monarchy has done nothing to earn our loyalty. It has given our region’s name to an Earl and Countess who still seem unsure whether that was just a joke that got out of hand. The disconnect remains between ceremonial roles that act as no more than a distraction from real political issues and those issues themselves. More of that later. There has been more substantial change too. We would today place less emphasis on the constitutional role of the Monarchy because the kind of Ruskinian, High Tory benevolent paternalism that used to infuse Conservative politics in particular – but was by no means confined there – has now all but expired.

Its apogee was the ‘royal socialism’ of the Attlee Labour government, which deftly converted surplus military servants of the Crown into its civil servants, creating swaths of bureaucracy in which senior officers could discover a new but familiar role. St Edward’s Crown became in due course the universal logo of everything from the Forestry Commission to the National Blood Transfusion Service. The question of how the smaller nations could be reconciled with this soon arose. One of the great debates of the 1950s in Scotland was whether pillar boxes should bear the English or the Scottish crown and whether the royal cypher there should be E II R or just E R. The same decade saw the Welsh flag officially recognised and Cardiff declared the capital of Wales. It saw too the foundation of Mebyon Kernow, advocates of another nation not wishing to be sidelined. The day before, 5th January 1951, historian W. Stuart Best read a paper to the Dorset Natural History & Archæological Society entitled Relations between Wessex and Cornwall in Early Days. With the wartime exploits of the 43rd (Wessex) Division still strong in the memory and post-war conscripts organised under the Wessex Brigade, with the wyvern as its cap badge, it could have been a fertile time for regionalism but regionalism, remember, is tainted with democracy. No post-war government has wanted very much to do with that. Not when it can hide behind the skirts of the royal prerogative.

In the late 1980s, Town & Country Planning, the magazine of the Town & Country Planning Association, ran the headline ‘Regionalism: creeping up the agenda again after all these years’ to accompany a piece by Dr Michael Hebbert. A sketched illustration filled the front page: a sketch of a putative Cornwall-Wessex border post. On the Cornish side, a bearded border guard with a peaked cap on his head and a rifle slung over his shoulder stands beneath a fluttering flag of St Piran. On the other side, eastbound travellers are welcomed by a sign bearing the wyvern and the words ‘H.M. Government of Wessex’. Someone had great fun drawing that.

The problem for all those who wish to see meaningful regions in England is what lies either side of these episodes. The 1950s did not lead to a self-governing Wessex region in the 1960s. Nor did the 1980s bring forth anything relevant in the late 1990s. The romantic idealism of the lean Conservative years is always translated by a returning Labour government into an obese caricature, a regionalism heavy on bureaucracy, desperately thin on real democracy, and based on compass-point boundaries that seem deliberately drawn to thwart the emergence of any credible regional identity. They keep on doing it because their intellectual tradition lacks the moral imagination to be capable of anything else. Regionalism is creeping up again in Miliband’s New New Labour and from its past failures that party has learned precisely nothing.

Those who have heard Tony Benn speak will know how much he values the idea of Parliament as scrutineer of the executive. For Benn, as for so much of the fossilised Labour brain, politics is stuck in the 1640s. The great divide is between the Crown and its Ministers and the critical voice of a free Commons. We are all still Cavaliers and Roundheads, in varying proportions. Well, not all of us. Some of us have enough of the spirit of the Clubmen to question why it should matter so much who controls the destiny of the centralised state. And why we need it anyway.

One reason why republicanism has a strictly limited following in Britain is the Cromwellian legacy. Yes, Cromwell gave Britain its first written constitution – the Instrument of Government – and its second – the Humble Petition and Advice – but it was not a Britain we would enjoy living in. Many of the ideas that ultimately came to be associated with the London regime in its most centralised form were first trialled in that era. It was Britain’s first unitary state – the Scottish and Irish Parliaments were abolished for its duration. Local government had first come under the control of committees of MPs and ultimately Major-Generals were appointed to oversee regions remarkably reminiscent of the Prescott zones. Cromwell was no Leveller and he knew who his paymasters were. The City of London’s finest were among those who benefited from the sale of Church, Crown and Duchy lands.

If Cromwell’s legacy was to provoke the reaction that sped the Restoration, it has also defined subsequent nostalgia for a kingless society. Mainstream republican discourse in Britain always imagines the substitution of an elected British figurehead for the hereditary one. And nothing more besides. Any other reforms that are taken for granted to be part of the package – because they provide the real justification for change – turn out upon examination to have no necessary connection to the monarchy/republic issue, while others that can reasonably be said to be intimately connected are ignored. It’s the usual tale, told by a whiny Islington idiot with a one-dimensional view of our history.

The United Kingdom is assumed to morph effortlessly into the United Republic of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The issues of nationhood that a monarchy can to some extent dampen down are assumed to be unimportant, as indeed they are when viewed from London. No doubt the national question seemed equally irrelevant when viewed from Vienna in 1918. The Republic will inherit the centralising work of the Monarchy intact. Dream on.

There are places where the transition from monarchy to republic has indeed maintained central control, and increased it, France being the textbook example. The terrors of transition may even have provoked that increase, in order to maintain a vice-like grip on provincial forces of reaction. The absurd mechanicalism of the French Republic however, as Jonathan Meades has perceptively pointed out, is a cult rather than a coherent philosophy, a Parisian salon conspiracy imposed upon a country still reluctant to join in. British republicanism would be much the same, if – and it’s a big IF – it actually had a republican conception of Britain as a place. Getting rid of the monarchy in order to strengthen a sense of Britishness is a delusion that fools no-one but those who cling to it.

What British republicanism is actually about is a sense of entitlement concealing an otherwise naked lust for power. Those who are not born into privilege should have an equal right to take the top job, to be Mr or Ms Britain PLC, to travel the globe, to shake hands with the natives, and to review the military might of Bloody Britannia. And for an elected head of state there might even be a lucrative lecture tour added on.

Just why is it that we have a head of state? So many presidential systems unthinkingly displace the monarch’s person while retaining the role. The President does all the things a monarch would do, even down to inviting a leading politician to form a government. Does the politician kneel and kiss the President’s hands too? The Swiss manage well enough without a head of state. Their federal cabinet members take it in turns to be President for one year. And when a foreign dignitary lands on Swiss soil, all seven of them line up to say hello. Collegiate government is the real alternative to the system of l’Etat, c’est moi or führerprinzip that generally prevails in monarchies and republics alike. We don’t need elected leaders if we can learn to live without leaders at all.

One fascinating compromise is the idea of a monarchy without a monarch: perpetual vacancy. Hungary has tried this a number of ways, all deriving from its unique idea that sovereignty resides not in the person who wears the crown but in the crown that the person wears, the Holy Crown of St Stephen, which no monarch has worn since 1916. Poland had a slightly similar doctrine and there are lesser parallels in Czech and Spanish practice. In England, the last lawfully crowned king died in 1066. In perpetual vacancy, the cost of having a monarchy is avoided but so is the cost of converting all past legislation to republican language. Courts, for example, can continue to be held in the name of the Crown, as the symbol of the nation. A crown does not have to be headgear: being a circle it can just as well represent unity and equality, like King Arthur’s Round Table. Such thoughts, however, are unnecessary in contemporary circumstances. Britain/England is not likely to become a republic of any kind any time soon. And it would take a royal foot put very badly wrong indeed to change that.

Our policy has evolved step by step. We recognise that there is no barrier to having a federal monarchy: Australia and Canada provide two common-law examples. We also recognise that vesting sovereignty in a sovereign is the precise opposite of our vision of grass-roots democracy. Whatever ceremonial role the Monarchy may play in our future, it cannot be allowed to define our actual political status. We are not subjects, to be accused of ‘treason’ if we dare speak our minds. We are… well, not citizens either. That’s the metropolitan, Roman, Jacobin view, blood forever running in the streets. We are members of society, rural as well as urban. The Monarchy, if it survives, must exist on terms with which we are comfortable. Today, we exist on the Monarchy’s terms and that must change.

Last year, we adopted a policy on regional control of resources. The Crown Estate in Wessex, including revenues from seabed resources such as sites for offshore wind farms, should come under regional control as part of the Wessex common wealth. Many of these assets, especially those on land, could be passed on to even more local control. Revenues generated from our labour or from the use of our environment should not be drawn away for the free benefit of those in London, whether they wear a crown or not. Mainstream republicans don’t mind the money going to London – it’s all the more for Islington to play with – and that is how they have proved themselves irrelevant to our cause. The way forward, we suggest, is not to attack individuals or institutions as such but to follow the money and demand it back.

Embracing All

A frequent objection to decentralisation is that small-scale jurisdictions are prone to takeover by well-organised, highly motivated bands of fanatics. History furnishes examples, from Savonarola in Florence to the Anabaptists in Münster and the Calvinists in Geneva.

The threat is real but centralisation does not remove it. All that it does is magnify its consequences. There are two reasons why the threat is not what it seems.

The first is that small-scale dictatorships are more easily contained by their neighbours and so, unable to expand, they must ultimately implode due to lack of resources to sustain themselves in the face of a hostile world. Professor Leopold Kohr, in his 1957 classic, The Breakdown of Nations, compared the career of Adolf Hitler with that of Huey Long, Governor of Louisiana. Both were demagogues, harnessing popular discontent to accumulate personal power, but the boundaries of Louisiana set a natural limit to Long’s. Hitler as dictator of Bavaria would have been a comic, Chaplinesque figure. Long as U.S. President would not.

The second reason is that liberals wrongly assume that a large-scale jurisdiction will necessarily pursue the policies with which they agree. There is no reason why this should be so, and plenty of examples, especially from the Communist bloc, that prove the point. The larger the state territory, the more difficult it is for dissidents to flee successfully. The smaller it is, and therefore the more numerous its neighbours, the more numerous the options available for those fleeing and the more likely it is that one or more of those neighbours will be receptive to refugees. Decentralists oppose world government not because there are no problems that would benefit from discussion at the global scale but because, short of interstellar flight, there is no means of escape from repressive rulings.

As a matter of fact, small-scale jurisdictions do tend to be less liberal. Some Swiss cantons have quite a reputation for it. Put another way though, they recognise that actions – like those giving rise to social security payments – do have consequences. In a small community, these are clear for all to see but in a larger one are blurred by being shared between many more folk, who individually have little influence over what the policy and the payments should be. In a small jurisdiction the link between population and resources is self-evident and the pressure therefore exists to keep them in balance. Naturally, this requires a limit to the size of economic units as well as political ones: tentacular corporations are incompatible with effective local accountability.

If small communities are more ‘conservative’, should radicals seek to empower them? It’s a question that’s been asked ever since the French Revolution, when Parisians opposed regional autonomy because they saw it as creating bastions of reaction.

If we wish to be consistent and avoid the charge of hypocrisy, then we must answer affirmatively. Radical politics worthy of the name has to move beyond substituting enlightened despotism for the unenlightened kind. We are not living in the 1790s, when a reactionary countryside might starve a revolutionary capital into submission. In 2012, all our communities should be free to make their own decisions, whether we approve of them or not.

And how should they make them? That too is their decision. Just as no country welcomes interference in its constitutional affairs, neither should city, town or village. Nevertheless, we as a party active in such affairs advocate the rebuilding of community on the basis of a living local democracy. This is not, contrary to Westminster thinking, something that can be created by legislation, doled out to the trusted few who meet the prescribed criteria. It does not arise from legal decisions but from ethical ones. It is the result of a shared commitment to inclusive participation in civic life. We have to be careful to distinguish traditions that bond a community together from privileges that drive it apart. We want knowledge of our history to inspire us, but not to the extent that it becomes a dictatorship of the dead.

The principles at work here are not limited to the constitutional. A living local democracy, truly empowered, would start to question many things we have always taken for granted. Why do so many Wessex acres belong to doubtless decent chaps who have them only because an ancestor was a crook and flatterer at the court of King Henry VIII? Why do so many other acres belong to financial institutions with no long-term stake in Wessex society? Why are so many of our homes and farms owned by those who made their money in activities of dubious legality in the City of London? To take back the ancient land of Wessex for the folk of Wessex today is the kind of rallying call we need. At the heart of our party’s vision is the idea of ‘the community of Wessex’, resident in most cases upon ‘the territory of Wessex’, an inclusive community that exists for everyone, not just for those who currently make up the moneyed class. And we are growing it, bit by bit.

The Land is Whose?

The Forestry Commission is a big player in Wessex. Within our borders we have two of the great royal hunting forests, the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire and the New Forest in Hampshire, both still regulated by their mediæval Verderers’ Courts. Treasured parts of our heritage. Except that for Cameron, Clegg & Co they are just treasure. The Coalition aims to sell off much of the forestry estate in England and won’t rule out selling everything.

Locals are incensed. In the Forest of Dean a mass protest is underway, organised by HOOF – Hands Off Our Forest – which the local Tory MP, Mark Harper is pointedly snubbing. His chances of retaining his seat may now be receding faster than you can say 'timber'.

A thousand years of tradition are there to be sneered at by today’s Tories, whose promises that there’s nothing to worry about are worth precisely nothing. When the Thatcher/Major regime sold off some parts of the forestry estate, almost all of it went without any binding commitment on public access.

This time will be different, of course. The ‘Pig Society’ is all about local control. That’s if locals are willing to buy what they already own, and there are plenty of Guardian-reading muppets now running around trying to raise the money to do just that, with the wretched Woodland Trust playing the pied piper. There is a case for community ownership of forest land, but ownership by the Crown in trust for the community is not incompatible with local control, in place of centralised direction. The problem lies with breach of that trust, when politicians treat common property as a piggybank to be smashed when they run short of cash to fund a vicious foreign policy and the never-ending bankers’ banquet.

State forestry is not part of some dependency culture sprung up in the wake of an over-generous welfarism. In Wessex as in the rest of Europe it is the product of centuries of evolution. Today the forests are managed for leisure as well as commercial timber production. In the past they grew oaks for the Navy and before that housed game for the king. But ultimately, where there is no proof of purchase, they are land owned by the Crown in default of any private owner, a public resource, not simply a commercial asset.

The public estate in Wessex remains considerable, despite recent sell-offs. In 2001, Kevin Cahill published Who Owns Britain. Although errors of fact and a dubious political agenda run right through that book, it has no rival as a guide to the modern pattern of landownership in Great Britain and Ireland. Using its figures, we can work out that the Crown Estate Commissioners own 57,556 acres of land in Wessex, plus most of the foreshore and the seabed, the Duchy of Cornwall 89,380 acres, the Ministry of Defence owns or leases 153,879 acres, the Forestry Commission 131,985 acres, local authorities at least 49,239 acres. The total comes to 7% of the land area of Wessex, the equivalent of Berkshire or Oxfordshire but still far below the figures for some countries, including the supposedly 'free enterprise' USA, where the public domain covers an area larger than India. Little of our public estate is managed by those accountable locally. The main exception has been the smallholdings owned by county councils but they have been busy cashing those in. Bristol City Council is doing its best to catch up with the counties, recently publishing plans to sell off some of the city’s parks.

Land reform is off even the Labour Party’s agenda, along with all kinds of public ownership. One more reason not to vote for a party that has no idea why it exists. The result is that the land is managed not in accordance with any democratic vision but often single-mindedly for profit, with any benefits for wildlife or the landscape or the community squeezed out at needless expense by specific public subsidies instead of happening because they’re the things that ought to be happening. Psychologically, the need for public land is overwhelming. No-one, out in the country for the day, should be made to feel like a feudal vassal, welcome only as a source of revenue and deference.

In 1925, C.S. Orwin and W.R. Peel published The Tenure of Agricultural Land. They presented the case for nationalising rural land, upon the basis of a scheme which they worked out to be as decentralised as possible. “Anything”, they said, “in the nature of ‘management from Whitehall’ would be fatal”. They proposed to organise most matters on a county basis, sub-divided into districts of approximately 30,000 acres each, supplemented by a county forestry team. The figure is necessarily an average, as the need for management varies with the intensity of the agriculture in each county. But it is worth noting that in Wessex 20-30,000 acres is about the average size of a hundred, the Anglo-Saxon sub-division of a shire, and so represents some natural wisdom about the scale of economic organisation in the countryside. Other reformers have sought to take things further still, Thomas Spence’s scheme of 1775 being for inalienable parochial ownership of all land in each parish.

As we move over the course of this century ever closer to conditions of ecological emergency, so we face a choice. We can allow our land to be bought and sold, fenced off and exploited for private gain, often by those with no roots in our communities and no intention of putting down any. Or we can insist that the ‘common treasury for all’ is respected as such, managed and used accordingly.