Stacking Up

Libraries news tends to be bad news.  Closures mainly, accompanied by the snarling of those who think that in the Internet age all books should be burned, as useless relics of a barbarous past.  Little thought is given to the social role of libraries as places to meet and share, especially for the elderly and vulnerable, or their educational role in actively promoting literacy.

Some good news comes from the LibrariesWest consortium, which links Somerset and the four unitary authorities in what used to be Avon.  The public library services of Dorset and Poole will be joining the consortium in June.  As a result, users will be able to access over 150 libraries ‘coast to coast’, from the Bristol Channel to the English Channel, using a single library card.  Items can be reserved, borrowed, renewed and returned at any LibrariesWest library regardless of where borrowed from.  LibrariesWest is also introducing a shared computer system to manage loans and stock, offering online searches of a unified catalogue of 2.5 million items.

The London regime’s expectation is that councils will increasingly work together to reduce costs, including through pooling their buying power.  Financial pressures and technical changes mean that it’s happening across a wide range of services, from police and fire to archives and museums to smaller councils pooling back-office functions like audit, payroll, procurement and IT.

Costs could be reduced and effectiveness improved much more rapidly, and with much less pain, if Wessex had an elected assembly to co-ordinate all these ad hoc efforts.  For example, the Welsh Government’s National Procurement Service has led the commissioning of a single library management system for all 22 public library authorities in Wales.  This is but one of its many initiatives, designed to empower local economies as well as cut costs across the whole public sector.  An assembly in Wessex would have its own ‘invest-to-save’ budget to spend on driving forward regional priorities, which could be very different from those that London thinks best for us.  Wessex needs to be free of interference from Whitehall departments that, by imposing ideological solutions through institutional silos, only gets in the way of sensible answers to challenging questions.

Wessexit

Of all the reasons for remaining in the EU the most compelling arises from quietly contemplating the alternative.  Being marooned on a small island run by Gove, Johnson and IDS is a chilling prospect.  It also smacks of betrayal of those elsewhere working for a better Europe.  The Danes in particular fear isolation without their sceptical British friends.  What needs testing – and testing hard – this month and next is the idea that Brexit would unleash a decentralist wave upon whose crest regionalists as much as eurosceptics will surf smoothly to success.

That was the idea dismissed this week in a front-page report in the Western Boring Views.  Mark Berrisford-Smith, head of economics for HSBC UK Commercial Banking, told regional business leaders in Plymouth that negotiations over Brexit, and associated economic uncertainties, could pre-occupy Government for years, delaying other decisions, with the decentralisation agenda being one item moved to the back burner.

Of course, ministers could clear their desks of unnecessary distractions by pressing ahead with that agenda right now, but that sort of trust has never existed between central and local government and no amount of crisis will create it.  Our diagnosis is that the sickness goes to the heart of the relationship.  Earning central government’s trust should be no part of local government’s job; central government should exist solely as the obedient servant of the localities that elect it and if it fails them it should expect to be abolished forthwith.  Wessexit.

So let’s not get too excited by the idea of devolution, Osborne-style.  It’s not what we’ve campaigned for all these years.  The Municipal Journal last week allowed Cllr George Nobbs, Leader of Norfolk County Council a page to share his frustration.  Beneath a photo of the East Anglian flag and the headline ‘Killing off devolution’, he wrote:

“There is no more enthusiastic proponent of regional devolution than myself.  I have supported the idea of moving powers from Whitehall to East Anglia all my adult life.  When on Budget day the Chancellor announced a draft deal for East Anglia I nailed my colours to the mast in the most literal way, flying the flag of East Anglia from Norfolk County Hall.  However, remarkably, the institutional arrogance of central government seems set to give us a deal that cannot be sold locally.  As it stands not one of the three counties that make up the ‘Eastern Powerhouse’ look likely to be able to sell the current deal to members or residents…

The current ‘devolution deal’ was the result of a knee-jerk reaction to the Scottish referendum result and bears no resemblance to any other form of devolution in the UK, other than the insistence on the office of a London-style mayor for rural England…

The office of elected mayor is fine for London but universally opposed in shire county England.  Senior government ministers have said time and time again that in the past devolution has failed because it was top-down.  They had learned, they said.  This would be bottom-up.  We could design our own deal.  We would be in the driving seat, they said.  When we urged them to consider any alternative to an elected mayor (because we couldn’t sell it to our citizens) they said it was non-negotiable.  ‘No mayor no deal’ was the answer.  They were not even prepared to consider changing the one word mayor for another title.”

First it was Prescott, now it’s Osborne.  You can have any colour of devolution you want as long as it’s black.  So black you can’t see what’s going on.  The mayoral model is non-negotiable because it’s part of a London-party consensus that values opaqueness above all.  The democratic model, taking decisions openly, in full view of the press and public, and transparently, subject to the forensic examination of political debate in council chamber or legislative assembly, is judged not fit for purpose.  End all the politics, we’re told.  Actions, not words.  But efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things, and without continual accountability it’s very easy both to do things wrong and to do the wrong things.

Next month, we’re told, we need to reject the unaccountable Brussels bureaucracy in favour of, well, what?  How is accountability unfolding here?  We need to put our own, British values first, apparently.  Values like privatising our schools and our NHS, transforming them into profit centres far beyond any hope of democratic redress.

We’ve been told many times that the dissolution of English political unity would be too high a price to pay for the benefits regionalism brings, even if the regions reflect deep-rooted identities like Wessex and East Anglia.  Yet the displacement of our historic shires by ‘Greater Lincolnshire’, ‘North Midlands’, ‘Tees Valley’ and other mayored innovations isn’t viewed as a problem.  (Nor is it viewed as part of the ‘euro-plot’, as would any attempt to give England the regional governments now standard across all large west European countries.)  As Ben Page, Chief Executive of Ipsos MORI, also writing in the Municipal Journal, noted, “The new rash of elected mayors for improbable geographies face some real challenges in getting noticed in any way at all.”   That’s just it though.  They’re not there to be noticed.  A revolution in how England is governed is now underway as secret deals are lined up for sign-off.  Personality mayors and commissioners for made-up areas will preside as local services are handed wholesale to global financial interests.

Do the public care?  According to Ben Page’s data they do.  Around half (49%) support the principle of decentralising local decision-making powers, with only 17% opposed.  There are two main worries that are shared by 58% of those who don’t support devolution.

One is the spectre of ‘postcode lottery’ – the fear that services would start to vary between areas to an unacceptable degree (though it’s surprisingly acceptable for the Irish or the French to have different standards).  Keeping the number of English regions well below double figures is one way to minimise this fear: the present hotch-potch of ‘improbable geographies’ is going to have to be sorted out sooner or later and the sooner the better.  Another way is to make devolution real, so that regional politicians cannot blame Whitehall if they fail to match the standards of the best.

The second worry is that politicians in the provinces aren’t up to the job and so can’t be trusted with real power.  That’s hardly surprising: real talent isn’t going to be attracted to run an ever-shrinking range of services subject to ever more intrusive interference from ministers and their civil servants anxious about poor performance.  Breaking that vicious circle is easy.  Tolerate responsibility through the ballot box, open up the opportunities and the talent will come.  Or, to be more accurate, it will stay exactly where it is and not be lured to London.

If being locked indoors with the Tories is the best reason for opposing Brexit then a good second is that the debate has been framed in terms of sovereignty instead of subsidiarity and on those terms Brexit poses an unacceptable risk.  That risk is that sovereignty regained will be sovereignty hoarded.  All Europe needs a debate on what can be done closer to the people than it is today.  Even if that means identifying things that are done too close to be done well – because there are some activities that can now only be effective on a scale beyond that of the classical nation-state.

It needs to be a European debate, not a British or English one, because only in the idea of a Europe of a Hundred Flags can small nations and historic regions achieve the recognition the nation-states are determined to deny us.  We hear a lot about how the EU is a malignant conspiracy to destroy those nation-states and their historic identities long-forged in good old-fashioned lethal conflict.  Michael Gove looks forward to ‘patriotic renewal’, while Jacques Attali fears another Franco-German war before the century is out.  Meanwhile, the British State for which we’re supposed to boldly patrify shows how much it really cares about our identity, turning our ancient shires, the roots of our democracy, into clone-zones of the metropolis and topping each with its own little Caesar.

Izzy, Whizzy, Let’s Get Bizzy

Or maybe 'Ozzy, Wheezy'.  What is the sound of one hand clapping?  George Osborne ought to know, following his announcement this week that business rates will be ‘devolved’ to local councils, along with the one-directional power to lower them.  Osborne’s understanding of devolution is that it’s that degree of autonomy that allows others to take the same decisions as the London regime would take anyway, given the opportunity.  And nothing more.  Devolution in an era of spending cuts is in effect an invitation to self-mutilation if associated radical changes are all ruled out.  Labour, of course, are happy to do what it takes to preserve their hereditary power.  And will surely agree that local government shouldn’t be allowed to have policies that central government disagrees with.

Osborne described the move as “the biggest transfer of power to our local government in living memory".  So it is, for those whose memory extends no further back than 1990, when the Thatcher government, as part of its poll tax legislation, nationalised business rates, before which they had been set locally for centuries.  For Thatcher, this counter-revolution against democracy was entirely justified, to prevent representatives elected locally raising the money locally to do locally what they’d been elected to do.  To say that hard-Left Labour councils weren’t as democratic as they claimed to be was a fair point, but one that could easily have been corrected by moving to proportional representation.  Now that would have been a radical change.  One that would have permanently denied the Tories a majority at Westminster level too.

Not that the Tories have ever been that keen on local democracy, given that collective decision-making is prima facie socialist.  But just fine if it involves awarding public sector contracts to national or global business chains with no long-term commitment to the area.  When council services do fail, the answer should be to let elections sort things out, as we do when promises made nationally are broken.  Not for the Tories, who’d rather undermine, then seize and privatise.  Very localist that.  With that kind of encouragement, don’t be at all surprised if the calibre of local councillors isn’t what it was.

There’s a theme developing.  Labour offered ‘regionalism’ that was nothing of the sort.  The Tories offered ‘localism’ that was nothing of the sort.  And now we have ‘devolution’.  Which is…?  Well, usually understood as involving directly elected national or regional assemblies, able to take over whole swaths of Whitehall power, leaving most of Osborne’s Cabinet colleagues redundant.  Not the creation of a condition of national amnesia in which the return of recently stolen powers, with strings attached, can be hailed as ground-breaking generosity.  That’s quite some conjuring trick and the sad fact is that so many supposedly intelligent and well-read folk will fall for it.  The proof of that is that they continue to vote for the London parties that all offer only marginally different versions of the same sleight of hand.

The law of the political jungle being to define or be defined, it’s only natural that the London regime should wish to colonise the language of its enemies.  Words like ‘regionalism’ and ‘localism’ can be chewed up and spat out, but only if we deferentially accept the regime’s right to define them for us.

When John Prescott made a mess of regionalism, there were those urging us to find new conceptual ground, untainted by failure.  ‘Provincialism’, perhaps, or maybe ‘areaism’.  It’s an easy thing to do and the wrong thing.  Those who retreat in the face of adversity show only their unfitness for public office.  Those who see only a debate about the internal administrative nomenclature of England don’t see that the Europe of regions is about bigger issues in an unstable world.  (‘Provincialism’ doesn’t work in that context, where provinces are the county-sized units into which Belgian, Italian and Spanish regions are sub-divided.)  Those who think that a little local set-back in the North East referendum of 2004 marks the end of the road don’t see the historical timescale over which devolutionary issues unfold, and have always unfolded.  Generations come and go but the battle over power’s location continues.

So when Osborne attempts to present his nannying of local democracy as a ‘devolution revolution’ we don’t just have the right to say ‘hands off a word that means much more than you can imagine’.  We have the duty to do so too.  The current issue of Plaid Cymru’s magazine, The Welsh Nation, describes Welsh political life today as ‘post-nationalist’.  Did we miss something?  Enough of this nonsense!  Let’s not vote for parties who don’t know what they stand for and therefore can’t be trusted to stick to it.  Let’s leave the conjuring tricks to the Blairites and supplant a dishonest past that’s over-run its allotted hour.

X for Xylas

The WR Council met at Wokingham earlier this month.  A raft of new policies was agreed, about which readers may expect to hear over the coming weeks.  WR President Colin Bex reported on the election campaign in Witney and it was noted that page views on this blog almost reached 3,000 during April, double the number achieved during the Eastleigh by-election and roughly 20 times the figure for the 2010 campaign.  Regrettably, our core website has been down for some time following a catastrophic failure of the platform that hosted it, Zyweb.  A replacement is being sought and in the meantime we can still be contacted via email, wessexinfo@aol.com and at our Facebook page.

Looking ahead, one of the key decisions we took was to endorse Nick Xylas as a WR candidate in next year’s elections to Bristol City Council.  Nick is a freelance writer and publisher who was raised in Patchway and currently lives in the Eastville ward, which he plans to contest on our behalf.  In between, he lived for six years in the USA with his American wife and so can speak authoritatively on the differences between there and here that we would do well to cherish.  His current publishing venture – Parthenia Comics – is a range of comics aimed at adult literacy and ESOL learners.   Previous jobs include 15 years in the civil service and three years in US state government.

Wessex has been one of Nick’s interests since childhood: both the ancient kingdom and what a contemporary revival will look like.  Throughout his adult life, Nick has demonstrated a commitment to public service and social justice.  Half-Greek, half-Wessaxon, Nick is also well-placed to represent the cultural diversity of Bristol’s inner suburbs.  We’ll endeavour to report further on the campaign as it develops.  If you can help with highlighting neglected local issues or in any other way then do get in touch.

The Founding Fixers

Avon Local History & Archæology – ALHA – does exactly what it says on the tin.  It’s an organisation for local history and archæology in the Avon area, serving some 80 affiliated societies, with a collective membership of about 10,000.  Founded in 1976, it has outlived Avon County Council, recognising the economic and social – and therefore historical – unity of the area, not so much separate from as special within the grand historic counties of Gloucestershire and Somerset.  In 2011 ALHA launched its annual Joseph Bettey Lecture, named after the Bristol academic responsible for Wessex from AD 1000, Rural Life in Wessex 1500-1900, The Landscape of Wessex and other books that present our history from the inside looking out, not the outside looking in.

ALHA also holds an annual spring conference, with this year’s entitled ‘The rocky road to democracy and freedom: from king John to mayor George’.  In the wake of Magna Carta, Bristol’s first mayor may have been the one chosen in 1216, another concession made by ‘Bad King John’.  The first directly elected one followed in 2012, the renowned, red-trousered Wintonian, George Ferguson.  London’s first mayor was in 1189, the first directly elected one in 2000, yet more evidence of how Bristol tends to mimic London’s every move.  Professor Murray Stewart’s closing talk at the conference, ‘The elected mayor: democrat or autocrat?’ provoked vigorous audience reaction.  As well it might, because one of the reasons for having an elected mayor was identified as “more direct communication with central government”.

So it seems that having an elected mayor as the key to city devolution is less about restoring civic confidence, more about training better beggars.  It isn’t about giving local folk the power collectively to shape their own lives; it’s overwhelmingly about putting in place a network of local fixers who can be summoned to Whitehall for instructions whenever any smoothing needs to be done.

Keep that point in mind, because there’s a familiar theme behind every local government reorganisation.  At the time of the ‘big bang’ reforms of 1974, official explanations referred the reader to the problems: the previous local local authorities were “too small” and there were “too many of them”.  Size can be a problem: there’s a relationship between it and functional competence and that’s what underlies the idea of subsidiarity.  Being over-numerous though is not a problem for local authorities or the communities they individually serve.  It’s not a problem they have any reason to recognise, let alone worry about.  It’s only a problem for outsiders, more especially for those who have to deal with them all.  The drive for fewer and fewer councils is about improving the London regime’s range of effective control.

Every reduction in the number of councils is accompanied by a reduction in the number of councillors.  Replacing committee government by cabinet government has concentrated power even further and left the remaining councillors with little to decide, and therefore little reason to stand.  Progressively replacing elections by thirds with whole council elections is already cutting by two-thirds the number of opportunities for democratic involvement by voters.

The ultimate aim is surely to have directly elected mayors everywhere, covering huge areas – though certainly short of regions, which pose an actual threat to centralism.  A gaggle of municipal Caesars voted into dictatorial power for four years, with no means of popular redress in the interim.  The result is ‘stable government’.  But it’s not what could be described as bottom-up vital democracy.

Do not imagine that what has begun in the big cities will not touch the shires.  The current Cities & Local Government Devolution Bill allows for mayors for combined authorities that include all (or just part) of a county council area.  A quarter of Ireland’s county councils have chosen to style their chairman ‘mayor’.  Although these county mayors are not executive mayors, they set a precedent that may, one day, produce an elected Mayor of Devon or Hampshire or Somerset.  Not very long ago, a Mayor of the North East – Greater Tyneside but with a vast rural hinterland – was perhaps the most preposterous idea in politics; now it’s a real possibility.

This is a measure of how unconservative the Conservatives can be in re-shaping the meaning of words.  It’s also a measure of London’s ability to get areas that are nothing like London to imitate its thoughts and actions, whereas doing things differently is actually what’s needed to give them an advantage over it.  The onward march of the mayors is but one example of this.  Tony Blair’s devolution of power to London was designed to evoke as few memories as possible of the old Greater London Council during Ken Livingstone’s term as its last Leader.  So the GLC became the GLA, the Leader became the Mayor, and London Transport became Transport for London.  Since then, we’ve seen Transport for Greater Manchester, Transport for New South Wales, Transport for Edinburgh, Transport for Ireland and, most recently, Transport for the North, which the Government now proposes to put on a statutory footing.  The first step to a northern regional government?  There’s unlikely to be a Transport for Wessex: the chronic under-funding of our region demonstrates the London view that if we think we have transport problems we must be imagining them.

Against this dismal backdrop, the Cornish experience is all the more remarkable.  Devolution of power to Cornwall is finally happening, so one cheer for that.  It’s inadequate and it’s undemocratic, so only the one cheer.  What’s to be devolved will allow better integration of public services and therefore produce better outcomes for less money.  It’s the case for devolution in a nutshell.  But what’s to be devolved will not allow Cornwall to decide its own future.  The crucial powers over housing and planning needed to halt the destruction of Cornwall’s communities and environment remain in Greg Clark’s hands, demonstrating that devolution is not defined by what’s devolved but by what’s retained.  Governments, aloof from it all, keep the important powers; councils take unpopular decisions they couldn’t shape but will be blamed for anyway.  Inadequacy is compounded by a lack of democracy; key powers are to be handed not to Cornwall County Council but to quangos like the Local Enterprise Partnership, to those who have never fought an election, let alone done so successfully, yet are still allowed to set local priorities because they’re rich.  It’s like the 20th century never happened.

What’s most remarkable about Cornwall however is that local institutions that already exist are being entrusted with anything at all.  Cornwall is the first rural county to make such gains, just as it was the first royal duchy back in 1337: forms of precedence that all help to build a case for more powers to follow.  It’s also the first area not to be forced down the mayoral route considered de rigueur for the conurbations, where a single directly elected focus is currently lacking.  (The Government was recently defeated in the Lords on this point, but that’s far from being the end of the parliamentary debate.)  It has to be said that if the conurbations lack an elected focus it is the Tories that the Tories have to blame for that because it was they who abolished the relevant county councils in 1986 and 1996.  Without putting in place a regional replacement worthy of the name.

Who has current responsibility for devolution?  The Ministry of Justice used to be the Department for Constitutional Affairs but constitutional affairs are now firmly the province of HM Treasury.  This became clear this month from the launch of a paper setting out the Government’s ‘productivity plan’, Fixing the foundations.  It contains some interesting facts, such as that London accounts for 28% of the UK’s GDP, while New York contributes 7% of the USA’s and Berlin just 5% of Germany’s.  The comment that ought to follow is that both those countries have federal systems of government that prevent the over-concentration of economic activity by preventing the over-concentration of political activity.  The printers seem to have missed that bit out.  An unfortunate omission.

There’s a section devoted to Mr Osborne’s fixation on elected mayors.  It quotes research showing that cities with fragmented governance perform badly.  It doesn’t point out that one reason why governance is so fragmented is that the London regime has taken power after power away from local councils because they can’t be trusted to toe the party line.  Returning a few with strings attached doesn’t address this key issue.  Moreover, so long as devolution is to business-dominated quangos rather than to those untrustworthy councils, joined-up governance will remain elusive.

So too, it seems, will consistency.  Fragmentation wasn’t judged a problem when the Tories abolished those county councils.  They talk too of a Northern Powerhouse, yet power is something that will not be exercised at the northern level: the Northern Powerhouse will be directed from the Chancellor’s office and delivered across a fragmented region by locally elected metro-mayors acting as his district commissioners.  How long is the north of England going to put up with this colonial-style regime?  It’s a vital question because the future of regionalism in England hinges on the willingness of northerners to lead the revolt against London divide-and-rule.  We’d love the revolt to start in Wessex but we face different issues – regions are different and that’s why we need to empower them all – and so we must watch and wait for our own moment of opportunity.

It cannot come too soon.  The Treasury’s paper bemoans the fact that England has as many as 353 councils, with 18,000 councillors, all able to put a democratic spanner in the works.  (It doesn’t point out that France has 37,000 councils, linked in a labyrinth of joint authorities, yet still manages to survive in the modern world.)  The tone is unmistakeably that economic survival depends on rooting out democracy.  Investors won’t come here if they have to persuade – in public – some irritating people who just don’t understand how corporate deals are done.  Without effective scrutiny, before decisions are taken, the whole thing is unavoidably suspect, but so what?  Greed is good, right?

Previous generations strove to bring the key economic levers under democratic control, to make business accountable.  Today’s is rushing headlong in the opposite direction, making democracy more businesslike, not in the laudable sense of efficient operation but in the altogether more unpalatable sense of making it less democratic.  If it starts with local government, it will not end there.  Why have MPs if we can have an elected Prime Minister, beyond criticism’s reach for a fixed five-year term?  (Mr Cameron referred this weekend to having to take “my Parliament with me” over Syria, as clear a case of lèse-majesté as can be imagined.)  Why have 200 separate states when we can have a single world president applying a single corporately written law?  Powerful institutions are what safeguard democracy, by being persistently awkward; powerful individuals are what undermine it, by attacking them as vested interests obstructing change.

The irony is that elected mayors, pushed again and again as an extension to and modernisation of our democratic traditions, are now being imposed on cities like Manchester that have already rejected them in referenda.  Bristol, meanwhile, is the only city to have voted to have an elected mayor under new legislation that prevents it voting to change its mind in the future.  The arguments for and against having elected mayors are essentially academic – and irrelevant – so long as the London regime is determined that we shall have them at all costs.

Onwards and Upwards

Defying expectations, David Cameron, far from being locked out of Downing Street, now has the full bunch of keys (with just 37% of the vote), at least until his slim Commons majority is whittled away over the next five years.  He has promised a land of hope and glory, a Britain greater still and greater, one nation, with further devolution to some of the smaller nations the ‘nation’ paradoxically contains.  ‘Fairness’ for England even.  But the self-governing devolved assemblies that are good enough for others will not do for the English.  We can look forward only to more unwanted metro mayors, city ‘deals’ and a continuing denial of regional realities.  If things are done for the regions they will be done to the regions, not by them.

Witney might seem unpromising territory for WR.  Oxfordshire is a border shire which, despite the defining role of Burford, Dorchester-on-Thames and Oxford in Wessex history and culture, can sometimes seem unsure of its place.  Yet we do have growing support there and a good candidate can make a lasting positive impression.

At Witney, our candidate (2nd from left) almost doubled his previous vote there, finishing 7th of 12 candidates.  It was our best result since 2001.  Colin’s campaign attracted widespread and sincere interest, even from those who ended up placing their cross elsewhere.  One emailer to Colin and his team confessed that, “I just wanted to write and say how touched I am by your passion to make this world a better place.  And that is so appreciated.  You are beautiful human beings.”  It is a particular pleasure to record the assistance of the McLoone family, who volunteered as WR counting agents for the long night at the leisure centre, awaiting a declaration that came just before 6.

By then the wider picture had been largely coloured in.  Above all there was the unmistakeable roar of the Scottish lion.  The fact that Ed Miliband could not do the juggling act of simultaneously keeping on board both the Scots and middle England shows how far rigid, class-based politics is no longer fit for purpose and has to be superseded.  Don’t expect fully synchronised universal trends.  The Scots will perhaps want to ask why Plaid Cymru and the Greens failed to increase their representation at Westminster, despite a good showing in the leaders’ debates.  In the north of Ireland, nationalism actually lost a seat.

This was Nicola Sturgeon’s night as much as it was David Cameron’s.  Two Scots with very different visions for Scotland and for the rest of us.  Never mind who got the power this time: it's the direction of travel that matters.  The Unionist debacle north of the border will change the Unionist parties, leaving them much less Scottish, while increasing Scots’ sense of being let down by others.  Not even the strongest devolved government in the world will alter that very much.  Salmond is the new Parnell, and the nationalist tide is still rising.  Trident replacement will propel it higher.  If Cameron believes that Scotland can be fixed he is likely to be disappointed.  Labour will now have to decide whether to go back to Blairism; having dipped their toe into socialist waters and got it shockingly wet, they won’t be offering a real alternative ever again, and so will remain damned in the eyes of the Scottish electorate.  Anti-austerity won a landslide; austerity-lite flopped, and deservedly so.

UKIP’s results have generated a new enthusiasm on the Right for proportional representation, once the lonely preserve of a minority on the Left.  (It would, among other things, make the SNP’s triumph a lot less triumphal.)  The UK’s relationship with the EU will move centre-stage, at least for a short while, during which time our relationship with the UK will be conveniently elbowed off the agenda.  Mistrust of the Conservatives, given their abuse of the word ‘localism’, especially over planning issues, is almost tangible in Cameron’s constituency and throughout Wessex.   

Anyone who expected this election to resolve the key constitutional issues – who gets to decide what, and what qualifies as real democracy – should now be plainly aware that interesting times are only going to get more interesting.  We shall be looking to position ourselves to benefit from the debates unfolding over the next five years, meanwhile looking into the possibility of entering the fray at local government level.  We urge supporters of a regional Wessex, wherever they live, to join us in making sure that the wyvern’s roar is heard loud and clear too.

Losing Direction

Last week, plans were announced for a Bucks / Oxon / Northants combined authority, a move that raises important questions of local and regional identity.  We’re assured that this is just a practical measure of co-operation that won’t affect day-to-day services but these things have a habit of acquiring their own momentum.

The case for a combined authority is that it might unlock billions of pounds of public spending.  It can make the case for new infrastructure, such as an Oxford-Cambridge expressway or completion of the East-West Rail Link.  But can’t the councils already do that?  For better or for worse, it could open up for development those relatively sparsely-populated areas that form Oxfordshire’s historic boundaries with its eastern and northern neighbours.  These are areas that have remained undeveloped because they’ve been on the edge, although the edge may be where they’re comfortable being.

One danger of the realignment is that past investment in infrastructure will be under-valued, with Oxford’s strategic position in the Upper Thames Valley ignored.  With its M4, M40 and A34 links and its close connections with Swindon, Newbury and Reading, Oxford sits far more naturally within a Wessex region looking west to Bristol and south to the Solent.  For starters, consider where the Environment Agency, the BBC or the NHS ambulance service place it.  Whatever happened to joined-up government?

There’s no doubt that combined authorities are in favour with Whitehall right now – and on a cross-party basis – but that ought to set alarm bells ringing.  Not being directly elected, their mandate is at one remove from voters.  And if what they do is ‘unlock’ money from Whitehall, how did the money come to be locked up in the first place?

It’s our money, paid in taxes to London.  We shouldn’t need begging-bowl consortia of councils to make the case for having it drip-fed back to us.  A proper, directly elected regional assembly – such as the one Wessex Regionalists demand, and Wessex is 8 million strong – would keep our region’s taxes as of right and spend them on the priorities that matter to us, not the ones handed down from Whitehall.

Too remote?  Not as remote as Whitehall, while the ‘headroom’ above county councils would ensure their continued existence as local bodies directly accountable for their decisions.  Something that ad hoc groupings cannot.  Refusing to think on a truly regional basis is a fault that will come back to bite local government badly.

Seeing the Light

Here’s a story from the North Somerset Times, a story with outlines applicable throughout Wessex, and maybe across other regions too:

“A long-standing member of North Somerset’s Conservative party has resigned from the organisation which he believes ‘has no interest’ in the area’s issues.

Arthur Terry, who is the representative for Portishead’s East Ward on North Somerset Council, has left the party and will continue his work for residents as an independent councillor.

Cllr Terry has been a Tory party member since 1981 and was elected to Woodspring Council [as North Somerset Council was then known] in 1984.

He cites issues including police funding and new housing figure demands as reasons for leaving the Conservatives.

He said: ‘Over the years it has become increasingly clear to me that the national political parties of all persuasions have no interest in this area.

‘This is demonstrated by their repeated failure to address the serious inequities in the distribution of the revenue support grant to our local authorities and it would appear the consistent failure of our local Members of Parliament to influence this.

‘Clearly as a lone voice I can do little to influence these issues, but I can be honest and no longer represent a party that has no interest in the views and concerns of ordinary members.’

Comment is barely necessary.  Centralist diktat steamrollers on, oblivious to promises of localism.  Unfair funding arrangements continue.  Protests to those at the top of the London-based parties go unheeded.  Experienced local councillors draw their own conclusions, and so we see the centuries of deference to London dominance slowly start to wither and die at the root.

We Are Not London

We know where London is, but is the rest of England also London?  It seems that the London regime would like to make it so.

Manchester has a proud history and a distinctive identity.  Or used to.  Yet Greater Manchester Transport has become ‘Transport for Greater Manchester’, because that’s the word-order they now use in London.  And yesterday, George Osborne announced a Boris for Greater Manchester, just two years after the city voted down the idea of a directly elected mayor.  The new man or woman will take control of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, whose members have surrendered their democratic rights in return for a promise that a few more crumbs will be devolved to the area.

Apart from Bristol, all the big cities ordered to vote on having an elected mayor rejected the idea, but Osborne is determined to roll it out regardless, with Leeds next in his sights.  Osborne’s job, of course, is to run the Treasury so the fact that he’s now become the expert on local government structures shows how deep purely financial interests now reach into the dark heart of policy-making.  Or maybe the minister actually responsible, Yorkshireman Eric Pickles, knows better than to court controversy on the wrong side of the Pennines.

The Mayor will take over some or all of the role of Police & Crime Commissioner for Greater Manchester.  Perhaps the thinking is that with more to do, he or she might even motivate voters to turn out, something they won’t do for the PCCs.  In last week’s PCC by-election in South Yorkshire, turnout was 15%.  In the first round of PCC elections in 2012, one ballot box in Newport famously contained not a single paper.  Why can’t we just dissolve the people and elect a new one?  Where’s the point in offering them anything when they’re clearly not interested?  Oh, but they are if they’re Scottish.  Scotland’s independence referendum, with an 84.5% turnout, shows that the fault doesn’t lie with the voters.  It lies with those who keep asking the wrong questions, creating new posts that no-one outside the London-based think-tanks ever asked for, disrupting local arrangements that were well understood.  Come along now children, we’re going to the polls today.  Shan’t.  But you know it’s your civic duty to sign away your power with the mark of an illiterate.  Not going to.

Well, good for them.  We’ve always had a sense of solidarity with those up north who have their whole world regularly turned upside down by the social vivisectionists in London.  Their governance, their economy, their identity, all are things to be experimented with until the region conforms to London expectations.  (Serve them right, you may well say, for voting for London parties instead of for their own and you’d be correct that they have less and less excuse now.)  So they’ll be getting a Mayor of Greater Manchester and a Mayor of West Yorkshire.  But if all of the recently established Combined Authorities for the conurbations are now to be turned into mayoralties, what of Tyneside / Wearside?  That’s one area where things are different.

There’s still plenty of talk of creating an Integrated Transport Authority for Greater Bristol – a new Avon County Council in all but name – and the idea is unlikely to go away any time soon.  The same thinking resurfaces at times like this in South Hampshire.  The fact is that it’s yesterday’s solution.  Tyne & Wear had an Integrated Transport Authority until this year, when it was abolished in favour of the North East Combined Authority, a wider body taking in the surrounding counties.  If you want better transport, it has to be better for everyone, not just the cities.  It has to be about developing a transport network, and for that you need a regional perspective.  The North East Combined Authority is a step in that direction, being not much smaller in area than the regional assembly that voters rejected in 2004, though it lacks direct elections or significant new powers.

So when Osborne completes his roll-out, will there be a Mayor of the North East?  Where does the nonsense end?  Ed Miliband, not wishing to be outflanked, is promising powers to arbitrary groupings of shires, to be known as ‘county regions’.  Will they be getting mayors too?  The Mayor of Cornwall & Isles of Scilly?  The Mayor of Heart of the South West?  With Manchester Londonised, and Leeds next, is English local government all doomed to find transparent, deliberative democracy phased out in favour of an elective dictatorship of personality politicians forming a scrum round the Treasury’s big ball of money?  Rugby is perhaps the wrong analogy.  This isn’t Rugby.  This is Eton.  (Or maybe St Paul’s.)

David Cameron has bought-in to the current fad for empowering England’s big cities because it enables any more radical action to be kicked into the long grass.  Shame on Ed Miliband for not seeing this.  It’s a fad however that deserves to be comprehensively deconstructed:

1.                  Cameron is not to be trusted on decentralisation.  He promised ‘localism’: an end to Whitehall interference in local decision-making.  Instead he has allowed Whitehall to obtain new powers to interfere, while making none of the really big changes that are needed.  Whole Whitehall departments such as Communities and Education have no other significant function but to interfere in local decision-making.  They wouldn’t be missed.  So why the delay in scrapping them?

2.                  The ‘cities first’ agenda isn't about fairness.  It degrades the importance of the lives lived by those of us who are not in the big cities.  If cities are trusted to make their own decisions, why hold back the countryside and small towns?  Have they nothing to contribute?  Why do they need to be micro-managed from London if others don’t?

3.                  It will be nice for some to get more powers, but aren’t these the same powers – or some of them – that have been taken away from local government over the past 70 years, by Labour efficiency men and Tory ideologues?  Don’t the strings attached make any concessions meaningless?

4.                  The idea of cities as drivers of economic growth is flavour of the month.  But other economic geographies are available – like the South Coast Metropole or the M4 Corridor.  These are geographies that transcend local government boundaries but fit naturally within the boundaries of a Wessex region.  Should radicals even be welcoming the idea of economic growth anyway?  Can we be sure that it’s not just a euphemism for environmental, cultural and social devastation, here or abroad?  Who benefits, besides the bankers?

5.                  City-regions, whatever their boundaries or powers, are just a different kind of local government.  They're a distraction from the business of real regionalists, which is to devolve power to the nations and regions of Britain.  Cities won’t have assemblies with law-making powers and exclusive control of the NHS, education policy, regional railways or the environment.  Cities deserve more power, but so do we all.  Regional devolution is the bold, substantial way to deliver that.

6.                  Applying extreme surgery to local government in order to replicate the ‘London effect’ is missing the point.  London is more successful and other cities less so not because it has an elected mayor but because London houses the UK Government and benefits from its largesse.  A Boris for every big city is no more than constitutional facadism if that regional concentration of power and resources is not addressed.  A Boris first, then we might think about devolution, is the kind of insulting, controlling behaviour that proves London is not serious about sharing.

The cities agenda is intimately linked to the roll-out of elected mayors.  And that's very much about taking decisions out of the public glare of the council chamber and into closed rooms where Big Business and Big Government can do deals with the lone, bullyable individual in whom all power is vested.  This isn't about opening up democracy; it's all about shutting it down.

And it doesn’t matter which party is in power.  A ruling-class consensus emerged sometime in the 1990s that English local government was to be changed over to an American / continental model, something that had been discussed on the fringes of power since at least the 1970s.  Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, on the other hand, have no elected mayors, but devolution there provides an alternative focus for strategic decision-making that arguably makes them unnecessary.

The collegiate style that has served England well for centuries is an anomaly.  But how to get rid of it?  Blair tried the fanfare approach.  Choose how to be governed, by demanding a referendum!  Few found the offer appealing.  Cameron / Clegg applied more pressure.  Compulsory referenda, with the previous right to undo the decision withdrawn.  Bristol apart, it still didn’t work.  So Osborne is sent in to twist the arms of civic leaders until they say that yes, in the name of our unconsulted electorates, we volunteer to give you everything if you’ll give us just a little.

There may or may not be a good case for elected mayors but there probably isn’t.  The fact that only calling in the heavies produces results suggests that the case is not one normally found compelling.  The fact that other countries do things their way isn’t a convincing argument in itself for following suit.  If it were, then any comparison with American or continental practice would reveal the existence of state or regional governments.  And where are they in the Coalition’s harmonisation scheme?  The case for following foreign practice in that respect is much, much stronger than the case for elected mayors.  Not least because it would be a fundamental shift in the location of power, rather than a reshuffling of an existing pack to reduce transparency and increase the scope for keeping local government on a tight leash.

Analysis of what’s going on is, sadly, far too easy.  Our politics is built upon the idea that power and money reside in London and that our best chance of seeing those things used for our benefit is to bow deeply and tug our forelocks hard. 

The London regime has no power but that which our votes give it.  The London regime has no money but that which our taxes give it.  (Even its stupendous debts would be impossible to run up without a reasonable expectation of them being honoured at some point.)  While we have no quarrel with the ordinary folk of London, a new politics, a politics of regional renaissance, must work ceaselessly to deny it both these things.  Because we too, in all of the regions, have a voice to be heard and a vision of a better life to be lived.

Leccy Goes Local

Until 1948, the electricity supply in Bristol, as in many towns, was run as a council department, with its own power stations at Temple Back, Avonbank and Portishead.  In that year it was effectively confiscated by the London regime, without payment of full compensation, only to be sold on in 1990 as part of South Western Electricity, which is now owned by the French Government.

Now it emerges that Bristol is one of a group of cities looking to re-enter the energy market, working alongside the Bristol-based Ovo Energy, one of the smaller suppliers offering an alternative to the Big Six.  This is precisely what is needed in a world where so many alternatives to shameless profiteering have been closed off by the totalitarian liberals who dominate all three main London parties.

Does it go far enough?  Not yet.  Locally-managed power can be a real boost to more sustainable cities, integrated with urban heat networks, micro-renewables, smart metering and energy-from-waste.  And certainly not forgetting everything that needs doing to reduce demand through improved energy saving.  City and borough councils are as well placed today as in the 19th century to organise a more efficient energy distribution system.  The reason they got involved in securing local monopolies – in electricity, gas, trams, water, and even telephones – was because all these things involve digging up the streets; a little co-ordination avoids a great deal of inconvenience.  As we move inevitably towards an energy-poor economy, a well thought out strategy for making the most of what we have will make the difference between those cities that have a future and those that don’t.

Lesser Lands?: A Postscript

“Universal peace will be impossible, so long as the present centralised states exist.  We must desire their destruction in order that, on the ruins of these forced unions organised from above by right of authority and conquest, there may arise free unions organised from below by the free federations of localities into provinces, of provinces into nations, and of nations into the United States of Europe.”

Mikhail Bakunin: address to the Congress for Peace and Freedom, Geneva, 1867

As previously discussed, we reject the idea that our shires are in any way expendable in the regional interest.  The English shires are the building blocks of the English regions, just as they are themselves composed of towns and parishes whose autonomy deserves to be respected and cherished.

From time to time, we find ourselves arguing against those who demand that shire boundaries be disregarded in pursuit of more ‘sensible’ regional areas.  We’re told that we’re over-ambitious to include as Wessex the east of Berkshire or the north of Gloucestershire.  Such reasoning ignores the associations of the word ‘shire’, with ‘share’ and ‘shear’, denoting a portioning of something larger.  A shire cannot have divided loyalties; it cannot be partly in one region and partly in another yet retain its unity, otherwise what is it a shire of?

This is not to say that shire boundaries cannot, and therefore do not, change.  History shows that they do.  Real subsidiarity must allow for whole shires to change region or nation, and equally for their constituent towns and parishes to change shire, if that is the local will.  (Among other things, this argues for the return of Berwick-upon-Tweed to Scotland, it being the original county town of Berwickshire and quite attracted right now by the thought of restored rule from Edinburgh.)

Those who today view themselves as living in occupied north Berkshire, or who reject their supposed legislative transformation from Hampshire hogs to Dorset dogs, may take comfort in the restoration of the Cornish border that occurred on 1st April 1966.  Professor W.G. Hoskins, in Devon, his monumental history of his home county, set out the story down to 1954:

“The western boundary of Devon has a curious history.  If we begin at its southern end, we follow the Tamar for half its length, to a point just north-east of Launceston.  Here a great tongue of Devon, two or three miles wide and seven miles long, thrusts deep into Cornwall; but three miles farther upstream the river becomes the boundary again and continues (except for negligible breaks) to within a few yards of its source near the north coast.  From this point a direct four-mile line down a steep, wooded combe brings one westwards to the Atlantic coast at Marsland Mouth.

The great tongue of land of which we have spoken covers some nineteen square miles and consists of the two large parishes of North Petherwin and Werrington.  These parishes have always been included in the archdeaconry of Cornwall for ecclesiastical purposes, but are still in Devon for all other purposes.  They were already included in Devon in 1086 and as they were entirely owned by the Devonshire monastic house of Tavistock it has been suggested that the abbot saw to it, when the boundary was drawn, that the whole monastic endowment on both sides of the Tamar was conveniently included in the one county.  But until 1066, or shortly afterwards, this large estate had been included in the Cornish hundred of Stratton and was a part of the royal demesne which descended to Gytha, the wife of earl Godwin.  Some time between 1066 and 1068, when Gytha left England for ever, she had transferred the estate to Tavistock abbey.  There is evidence that it was still reckoned to be in Cornwall as late as 1084, but by 1086, when Domesday Book was compiled, the abbey had been deprived of it and it was included under Devon, where it has remained ever since.

It is almost certain that the Tamar had been the original boundary along its whole length, except for the parish of Maker at its mouth, and that the transfer of these nineteen square miles from Cornwall to Devon took place silently when Baldwin de Brionne, sheriff of Devon, held the farm of Harold’s and Gytha’s lands in Devon.  As Werrington (the political name of this territory) was Gytha’s only considerable Cornish estate, it too fell under his administration.  Such an arrangement suited the sheriff of Devon financially, for he paid an inclusive rent for the farm of the Devon lands and should have paid a further rent if Werrington had been officially known to be in Cornwall; and since the Exon Domesday returns were drawn up at Exeter under his supervision he had the opportunity also to set the official seal upon a deliberate fraud of the exchequer.  The estate was therefore described under Devon in the final Domesday return, and as recently as 1929 a Cornish bill to restore the status quo of 1066 was defeated in a committee of the House of Lords.”

Now we know that 37 years later the boundary was restored to its proper place, with the consent of every council affected.  It pays to take the long view.  We act in the belief that England more generally can be the kind of place where local boundaries are determined by what local folk agree upon and are not something to be imposed by self-proclaimed experts in London.  And what goes for local boundaries may also go for regional ones.  If Cornwall can get justice after some 900 years, then so too can Wessex.

Lesser Lands?

Still, after all these years, we get comments to the effect that regionalists don't understand the English love of the shires and therefore the instinctive resistance that is provoked by regionalism.

It’s a straw man argument, based on what may have been said by the Labour Party about phasing out county councils.  We have always been clear that the shires of Wessex are part of our heritage, to be carried forward into our future, and that their identity needs to be not just protected but massively strengthened.  In this, we go beyond what is promised by any of the main London parties, all of whom are content to see traditional identities eroded.  We are particularly proud of our shires in Wessex, which is where the whole idea started.  Shires may have existed here as early as King Ine’s reign (688-726); their names were familiar to Ælfred and as England became a single kingdom during the 10th century they were rolled out across Mercia and Northumbria.  Not at the expense of regional government though, which survived until the Norman Conquest, when it was eliminated as too great a challenge to the tyrannical royal power we still experience in its modern, parliamentary form.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of a local government reorganisation widely believed to have changed the boundaries of many traditional shires, including all but two of those in Wessex.  In fact, a Government statement made at the time and published in The Times – and reiterated since – claimed boldly that this was not the plan:

"The new county boundaries are administrative areas, and will not alter the traditional boundaries of counties, nor is it intended that the loyalties of people living in them will change despite the different names adopted by the new administrative counties.”

That isn’t what happened.  We were robbed.  Everything from the maps on the television news to the names of local newspapers quickly fell into line, and stayed that way.  A number of us were drawn to regionalism precisely because of the outrage we felt.  Others long ago retreated into nostalgia, deciding that arguments about optimum administration under modern conditions of life were not for them.  Others again retreated into paranoia, deciding that Englishness had been singled out for destruction by the Communists or the Eurocrats, despite all the evidence to the contrary.  We have always been the ones to ask more searching questions.

Foremost among those questions is what alternatives were considered.  Could we not have kept the counties and county boroughs as they were, and had some other means of dealing with issues that spill across urban boundaries?  We could, and that is progressively where we’ve all been heading since the 1990s, when cities and larger towns like Bristol, Plymouth, Bournemouth and Reading regained their civic independence.  But if disputes with their neighbours are no longer referred to County Hall, where do they go?  They go to London, or to its regional offices.  They don’t go to the regional assemblies that have often been mooted as part of any rational system of government but have always been rejected.

They have been rejected largely through an unholy alliance between the Town Hall and Whitehall, presenting them as unnecessary interference in local affairs and an undermining of London’s responsibility to rule for the benefit of the whole nation.  (That would be quite funny if it weren’t so sick.)

Municipal leaders who go along with this will find themselves supping with the devil.  In always favouring a weak rather than strong assembly – unelected rather than democratic, advisory rather than executive, legislative or tax-gathering – they fulfil their own prophecies.  An assembly with no actual services to deliver will inevitably try to intervene in those run by others, because that is how it will interpret its co-ordinating brief.  Give it enough to do and it will be delighted to leave local government alone, especially if subsidiarity is enforced by making it dependent financially on the local councils themselves.

By opposing strong regionalism, local leaders hand power instead to London, and via London to global financial elites.  The only question then left for ‘normal’ politics to grapple with is whether that power is exercised via regional offices and agencies at finger’s-length, the repeated Labour solution, or directly by ministers and civil servants in London, the solution currently favoured.

We would never argue that our cities and counties are lesser lands, to be subjugated to the wider will of Wessex.  What we want for them are the kinds of constitutional guarantee that have always been unthinkable under a Westminster Parliament that greedily guards its sovereignty.

In return, we invite them to consider what powers are beyond them, but not beyond the capabilities of a Wessex Witan.  Health, higher education, tourism, transport and the utilities, the regional framework for sustainable agriculture, energy and housing, crisis management, the research and strategic thinking needed to get us through the 21st century.  Scotland and Wales provide some pointers, as do the practices of other European countries that are no strangers to letting folk get on with deciding their own futures.  Regionalism is no big ask.  It just means the London regime getting out of the way.