Squirming for Europe

“To contribute to the creation of a sustainable and equitable global economy in which the health, security and liberty of all is paramount, regardless of race or creed.”

Aims of the Party: Charter of the Wessex Regionalists, 2001

The Chalice and the Blade is a book by Riane Eisler that sets out what could be described as the feminist theory of European prehistory.  The name comes from contrasting the inclusive, feminine chalice or cauldron of plenty with the divisive, masculine blade of hate-and-run.  Unfortunately, it can also become a metaphor for modern Europe’s inability to respond coherently when control of its borders and internal peace are challenged by aggressive young men.

Events in Cologne and over a dozen other central and northern European cities on New Year’s Eve have acquired the label of ‘the European Groping Jihad’ and left the Left reduced to nothing but hope.  Deborah Orr’s piece in The Guardian (a London newspaper) is a good example.  Orr’s Law is that “trying to ignore or suppress politically unwelcome news is always a bad idea”.  As if we hadn’t noticed that Orr’s Law turns on its head the actual experience of the last few decades.  The shoddy thinking of those decades is claiming the first of many victims and there’s a panic abroad in politics.  But if you want perestroika, it has to come with glasnost.  Instead, restrictions on free speech are being increased in a desperate bid to stave off the reset and reality-check.

The roots of this lie with neo-Marxist intellectuals’ hierarchy of victimhood, in which campaigns deemed less significant at this stage of the struggle are subjugated to structurally more important ones.  Feminism to anti-imperialism, for example.  It’s a strange world, one where the historic role of the Islamic State in challenging US global hegemony requires the sufferings of Yazidi slave-girls to be pitilessly ignored.

At a more practical level is the framing of solutions to problems.  Orr’s language is particularly revealing: “we have to salvage nuance”.  The reality isn’t that we’re in danger of losing a sense of nuance, a word that these days can mean just sitting painfully on the fence.  It’s that we lost it long ago, in a pseuds’ soup of cultural relativism where all humans are equal but the standards expected of them are not and no-one can see what they are.  Inclusivity is welcomed but the terms of inclusion are left deliberately vague so as to create livelihoods for the ‘project class’ who define and redefine them daily.  Nuancing and renuancing.  Just don’t remind them of what they said earlier.

From over-population to over-consumption to over-development to over-centralisation, even to over-topping of flood defences, the will to seek a solution to a problem is frighteningly greater than the will to foresee it and then holistically prevent it arising in the first place.  It’s a kind of anti-Nietzschean Will-to-Discuss.  That’s because the survival of the project class depends on there being really intractable social (or it could be environmental) problems with which to grapple, preferably with the aid of money diverted from a ‘less worthy’ cause. 

More complex and costly solutions – such as re-locating refugees to Europe – are always preferable to simpler ones – like helping them where they already are.  Complex solutions offer the prospect of future problems.  Solve the problem now and your job prospects become the problem instead.  The food in the cauldron bubbles away but to eat one day one must divide it.  Cold logic is the action of the blade, the drawing of distinctions and the making of decisions that enable life to be parcelled out in manageable ways.  It runs contrary to the chalice-inclined thinking that all opposites can be reconciled, that all sacred cows may safely graze together.  As Orr’s article shows, the result of that has proved quite shocking.  This isn’t to say that opposites can never be reconciled but it does take more work than has been assumed and the results may be especially fragile.  And costs may be disproportionate, especially when compared with other options.

This matters not to the project class.  Not all migrants are savages.  Not all are saints.  Still, there can be no middle ground, only nuanced walking on eggshells.  One question raised by the groping jihad is just how much criminality Europe should be expected to accommodate as collateral damage from meeting those humanitarian obligations that African and Asian countries have so successfully evaded.  For the project class, the answer is ready-made: it isn’t that ignorance of the law is no excuse, not even if you plead the need for a ‘cultural sensitivity’ that won’t be returned.  No, it’s taxpayer-funded classes on how to behave towards European women.  Magic wand time.  More problems welcomed, more taxing of those who didn’t create the problem, who won’t gain from the solution anything they didn’t already have, and might, but might not, get back the peaceful society they once had and have since lost.  More jobs all round for the project class though.

The groping jihad was news this month, but not straightaway.  National media picked up the story about five days late, once it was all over social media and could no longer be ignored.  Then news emerged that a story about similar attacks in Sweden last summer had been closed down in case it ‘played into the hands of the far Right’.

This is all very characteristic of a European elite that considers itself invincible and so fails to ask whether telling the truth or trying unsuccessfully to suppress it will do more to ‘play into the hands of the far Right’.  Covering-up actually upgrades one own-goal into two: the far Right are able to claim that they were correct all along, not only in their views about migrants but also in their views about the lying Centre-Left establishment.

Inept handling of the migrant crisis has given a huge boost to the far Right.  There are only two circumstances in which Right-wing governments come to power.  One is the installation of an unpopular regime by force.  The other is the installation of a popular regime by consent.  This is often described as ‘populism’, as opposed to democracy.  Democracy is when your side wins.  Populism is when the other side wins, and so is clearly wrong.  (Not all populism is of the Right, however – Spain’s Podemos is a populist party but one of the Left.)  If far-Right populism makes inroads into European electoral politics it will not be because the State has applied inadequate constitutional repression to its parties or personal harassment to its leaders.  It will not be because of insufficient censorship of social media comments.  It will not be because politicians of the Left have rashly tried debating with the Right and found themselves intellectually ill-equipped to do so.  It will be because the Left has treated keeping ‘the cause’ on track as so much more important than truth and justice.  It will be because its voters feel betrayed and marginalised by disruptive, revolutionary priorities they do not share.  The Right is the fault of the Left.  Embarrassing, but true: a reactionary is one who reacts against excesses.  Treat the majority as irrelevant to the project and you’ll be the one to end up irrelevant.

Events in Cologne and elsewhere bring forward a question that was bound to have to be asked one day: how can a supposedly progressive Left sleep at night if it openly endorses those who pursue a radically anti-progressive agenda?  How did the principled defence of racial minorities (hardware) mission-creep into the privileged defence of religious minorities (software)?  What business do anti-racism campaigners have working with pro-sharia supremacist groups?  Who is tail, who is dog, and which is wagging which?  If the Left now finds the far Right heading towards the autobahn of power then it has no-one but itself to blame.  If the Left won’t end its cultural relativism, if it won’t assert and defend the framework of enlightenment values in Europe, unconditionally, then watch what happens when a State paralysed by the predictable fails to defend those who pay its taxes.

From a historical perspective, it’s possible to see the current mismanagement of migration as one of those turning points that no-one would like to admit they’d seen coming.  Like the Reformation, the French Revolution, or the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The collapse of the EU is now a real possibility.  So too is the empowerment of parties of the Right that are equally fanatical in defending national sovereignty and in denying regional recognition and autonomy.  All it takes is an arrogant establishment convinced that ideology will prevail over reality.  Wir schaffen das.

The German copyright on Mein Kampf expired last month, meaning that the owners of the text, the Bavarian Government, can no longer block its republication.  Sometimes you might almost believe in history by numbers.

All Washed Up

Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, told BBC Radio 4 listeners today that the service could do with new surveillance powers to tackle the terrorist threat.  That’s hardly surprising, according to the cynical view that you never let a good crisis go to waste.  If necessary, you create one.  We face a toxic combination.  On the one hand, the consequences of an aggressively interventionist foreign policy pursued for the benefit of US interests, not ours.  On the other, disaffected youth of south Asian heritage liable to identify strongly with at least some of the victims of that policy.  The Government is working on plans for ‘Extremism Disruption Orders’, to target not so much terrorists as anyone who exercises their supposed right of free speech in ways that this Government – or any of its successors – decides it doesn’t like.

We won’t let counter-terrorism measures interfere with our lifestyle.  Of course not: that would be letting the terrorists win.  Even though that’s precisely what’s happening, as the threats continue to proliferate and so too does the apparatus supposedly designed to contain them.  If we can feel that, on the outside of government, what’s the atmosphere like on the inside?

The Swiss Army has carried out two exercises in recent years related to migration and its consequences.  The first dealt with a stream of migrants that was out of control.  The second took things a step further.  It assumed a breakdown of public order in France, the fragmentation of authority into local fiefdoms and a consequent need to resist looting expeditions onto Swiss territory.

Why France?  France has a large population of North African and Middle Eastern extraction.  Religion is deemed irrelevant.  France’s secularism has moved on from being a policy to being a blindfold, so it doesn’t collect census information on religion.  For a true picture, consider that France’s top Mahometan official recently offered to take over the country’s redundant Catholic churches to meet a demand for 5,000 new mosques.  The problem facing the security services is not the proportion of his followers who may be terrorists.  That proportion may well be unchanged, year on year.  It’s that as the absolute number behind that proportion increases, so the strain on the security services also increases.  It’s a statistical certainty that militants with potential or actual Jihadi sympathies are entering Europe every day.  The security services now have far more potential Jihadis on French soil than they’re resourced to keep under surveillance.  Managing that risk is, well, risky.  It’s not polite to mention it, but it’s there nevertheless.  A spectacular 9/11-style attack on France is now regarded by some experts as inevitable.

Government-by-advertising is starting to fail.  The idea that well-placed words and pictures can get us out of the domain of reflection and into that of sentiment has worked in every previous crisis, but…  An increasing number of people are now questioning whether their ruling elites are taking care of their best interests, and whether the taxes they collect are legitimate.  Psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe described the legacy of the failed 2009 Copenhagen summit on climate change as the realisation that our "leaders are not looking after us... we are not cared for at the level of our very survival".  No, you guessed right there and don't sound so shocked.  So do we want a State that from Brussels downwards regulates everything but the fundamentals, neglecting the real issues of movement and resources and ideology that underpin our security?  A lot is written about the accumulating critical mass of terrorists in Europe but much less about the accumulating critical mass of ordinary folk who are asking such questions.  Once it forms, things could get perhaps too interesting.

Military exercises cost money.  Even if your priority is to spend the budget rather than ensure it’s spent well – and that’s an insider criticism of the Swiss military – you’ll still pick exercises that usefully focus minds over ones that don’t.  So if the Swiss think a scenario in which France falls to pieces is worth considering, so should we.  (It’s an off-the-shelf scenario, by the way, which anyone can read in Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age.)  In which case, while we’ve been pondering the fate of boat people with names like Yusuf or Maryam, we may be failing to spot the longer-term possibility.  Which is that communities on the south coast of Wessex should get ready for boat people with names like Joseph and Marie.

Valuing Europe

As tens of thousands flock in renewed hope to join the Labour Party, much of the last Shadow Cabinet has walked off in disgust at the thought of actually having to believe in something.  Yes, British politics is about to get much more interesting.  Jeremy Corbyn though is no friend of Wessex.  So long as his party remains implacably opposed to proportional representation it continues to block the road to real reform.  Democracy is still defined as an election that Labour wins.  And there will be no more devolution.  Corbyn’s primary loyalty is to the tribal organisation that is Labour, even though Labour, a 19th century, British nationalist relic, is wholly unsuited to 21st century challenges.

A sign of the times is Corbyn’s suggestion that segregated, women-only train carriages might be re-introduced, to assure the safety and comfort of female passengers.  No-one dares call to account the men who make the female passengers unsafe and uncomfortable.  Europe, nasty old colonial Europe, has lost the will to set moral boundaries against wrong-doers and to challenge any crossing of them; in these besieged circumstances its only other possible response is to retreat from its aspiration of inclusiveness into the formation of physical barriers, safe spaces, gated communities, panic rooms, to roll out the barbed wire along its borders again.  Labour’s next idea for the protection of women will doubtless be compulsory headscarves for them all.

Corbyn’s first act as leader was to attend a rally in support of refugees.  Should that be “refugees”?  Quite possibly.  Some are undoubtedly genuine – at least in intention if not necessarily in definition – while others can be matched to those Bangladeshi and Pakistani passports found flung over hedges in Serbia.  The whole country-shopping world wants to be Syrian now because to be Syrian is the stated path to becoming European.  The Germans this week started unpicking the Schengen Agreement, having belatedly realised that they’ve bitten off far more than they can chew.  Frau Merkel’s Bavarian allies, with their own regional parliament and politics – a kind of German Scotland – are among those now breaking ranks.

Fortunately, Jean-Claude Juncker has a cunning plan.  To set quotas and spread the migrants around.  Easier said than done, because the capacity to take in more people is not uniform.

David Cameron has offered to take 20,000.  If the current patterns of refugee allocation continue, just under half will end up living in the north of England.  That’s because the UK’s failure to achieve balanced regional development means it’s cheaper to house them up there.  Since 2012, when the contract for managing the distribution of asylum-seekers was handed to Serco, the number of asylum-seekers in the north-west has risen by 50% but fallen by 20% in London.  Cameron’s Witney constituency has contained not a single refugee since 2008.  Do as I say, not as I do?

Natalie Bennett, Leader of the Green Party has put in a much higher bid than Cameron’s, for 240,000 refugees, based on 2 million Europe-wide and the UK’s proportion of total EU population (12%).  That’s a city the size of Plymouth or Southampton.  It’s roughly 100,000 families, or at 12 houses to the acre, 8,333 acres of farmland, the equivalent of concreting over 2 or 3 whole parishes.  And this is the Green Party?  It’s just so very easy to sign away the environment of others without asking.  Do those calling for more migrants to be accepted think the cities will take them all?  That there will be no consequences for the fields they can see out of the window, fields already under pressure from London overspill as the pampered capital boils over?  Not even Lancashire is infinite.  Germany has a shrinking population.  Its rate of natural increase – the excess of births over deaths – is negative, at -2.87 per 1,000 population.  The UK’s is positive, at 3.01 per 1,000.  That’s why Cameron’s numbers make some degree of sense and his critics’ make none.

Juncker’s agenda has two parts.  The first deals with quotas, on which EU leaders yesterday agreed to disagree.  The second redefines ‘refugee’ to include not only those fleeing war or persecution but those fleeing poverty too.  Now, it should be clear from their mobile phones and credit cards, not to mention the means to pay the smugglers’ fare, that today’s migrants are not as poor as they used to be.  Developing countries have developed beyond the point where such journeys were simply impossible and into new circumstances where they’re now the epitome of ambition.

Nevertheless, relative poverty continues to drive that ambition and Juncker, in pandering to it, has invited almost the whole world to come to Europe.  In doing so, he may have destroyed the EU itself, because a desire for national suicide is not as widely shared as his policy would suggest.  Opening the doors of the European house and fining those countries that keep the doors to their own rooms closed allows the EU to be portrayed not as defending Europe but as orchestrating its destruction.  In the absence of an alternative Europe, one proud of Europe’s achievements and determined, for the sake of the whole world, to preserve them at all costs, the chief beneficiaries of this stance will be the parties of the nationalist Right, opposed equally to the EU and to regionalism.

Instead of naming and shaming the Gulf states whose actions and inactions contribute most to shaping the crisis, the Brussels-Berlin axis is pointing the finger at EU countries defying a European line that hasn’t actually been fully agreed   It’s become an issue of reputation management, as befits a regime of PR men.  What will the world think of Europe if supranational order cannot be substituted for a diversity of national opinions?  Europe’s reputation must be defended, even as Europe itself is not.  No sacrifice by Europe is too great to secure favourable headlines elsewhere in the world.

It’s alright though, because Europe will be destroyed in the name of ‘common European values’.  The chutzpah is certainly admirable.  If countries have to be fined for failing to adhere to these common values, how common were these values in the first place?  What price respect for subsidiarity and national democracy?  Defining common values is always fraught with difficulty, because if they’re common then they cannot just be imposed.  To define European values is to define their counterpart, un-European values, and we’re then into some very familiar McCarthyite territory.  It’s one reason why we won’t define ‘Wessex values’.  We’ll define Wessex Regionalist values – and we have done – and we’ll advocate them, but what’s our choice won’t be everybody’s. 

If we were to seek out Europe’s values today we might find a fusion of classical and Judaeo-Christian ideas, tested and modified through centuries of conflict: religious and civil wars, the struggle against totalitarianism, the ever-changing challenging of perceptions and prejudices.  The result isn’t fixed by any means and there are threads within European thought that if developed further will take us in very different directions.

So whose ‘common European values’ are we talking about here?  Who are they designed to exclude?  In the event of conflict, do the elites plan to side with the natives against the migrants, or the migrants against the natives?  Every elite needs a thug class to implement its orders, one whose roots in society don’t go too deep.  Will assimilation give way to a forced ‘meeting in the middle’, producing a culturally embarrassed Europe in which fear masquerades as tolerance and guilt as inaction?  Or will the natives wise up to the fact that it’s only they who are being asked to forgo their identity out of politeness to their guests?  It may read like a scene from Michel Houellebecq’s Submission but Saudi Arabia has reportedly offered to fund 200 new mosques across Germany to meet the spiritual needs of migrants.  If these are permanent buildings, ‘migrants’ may be the wrong word and ‘colonists’ the right one.

Those elites certainly have a problem.  Gordon Brown’s attempts to define ‘Britishness’ were a joke.  No real, living culture needs a public debate on what it is and isn’t.  It has better things to do.  ‘What does it mean to be English?’ is another angst-ridden query.  If Englishness is that invisible then it’s probably dead.  Chauvinistic answers won’t fool anyone for long.  To be English is, uniquely, to value freedom above all.  Really?  More than the Scots did in the Declaration of Arbroath?  More than the French in ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’?  More than the Germans in ‘Mit Gott für Freiheit und Vaterland’?  Language barriers often blind us to the essential unity of Western thought.  They also blind us to the fact that there are other world traditions for which liberty has no value, for which liberty, far from being hard-fought-for, is hard-fought-against.

To have no sense of your own values – and of how untypical they really are in the global context – is to assume that everyone is equally nice, no matter what they believe, think or represent.  For the drinker, everyone is welcome to drink; for the person with no culture, or one sunk in a cultural coma, everyone is welcome, with no pressure to fit in.  If you no longer have values, you have no grounds to reject anyone else.  Not even if your society is living at its environmental limits, its quality of life about to tip into the abyss because the safeguards of its culture have been systematically disregarded.

If you stand for nothing, then you fall for everything.  It isn’t the classless society that lies at the end of all differentiation and of every history: only the culture-less society will achieve that.  Common European values are easy enough to define when all they amount to is a vacuum.  And nature, as we used to know, abhors one of those.  Perhaps Europe’s values are best left unspoken, but nonetheless fervently held.

That Sinking Feeling

In the late 1940s, large numbers of people were forced out of the lands where they and their ancestors had lived for generations, since at least the time of the Crusades.  Their ancestral homes were handed over to immigrants from other parts of the world, who brought their own history with them.  The displaced lived in refugee camps in neighbouring territory, where they were made welcome by those who spoke their language and shared their culture.  Eventually, a concrete wall was built to separate them from friends and family left behind.

Despite all this, they never lobbed missiles into Czechoslovakia or blew themselves up on public transport in Gdansk.  These are not the Palestinians.  They’re the Germans, expelled from East and West Prussia, eastern Pomerania, eastern Brandenburg, Silesia and the Sudetenland.  Many of them were resettled in Lower Saxony.  The total number comes to over 12 million people, equal to 16% of Germany’s 1938 population.  When Chancellor Merkel offers sanctuary to 800,000 Syrians, a 1% addition to the population, we can only assume that the Germans still have the means to organise these things better than most.

Has Angela set an example for the rest of Europe to follow?  Or acted irresponsibly, energising a magnet that draws thousands uninvited across the sovereign territories of others who now have to play along?  To be a euro-cynic one only has to see things from a Brussels perspective, that the Syrians can be the first true European citizens, spread around every Member State, a constant reminder of a common European problem with a common European solution.  Too important a transformational prize ever to be allowed to return to their homeland or encouraged to dislodge those destroying it.  On account of a huge range of internal political anxieties, this is one area of policy where EU unanimity is unlikely to be achievable.

Germany has waived the limits on its legal responsibility to Syrians under the Dublin Convention, but what is Europe’s moral responsibility overall?  How many refugees should it take?  The answer could well be far fewer than it is taking.  Europeans played a relatively minor role in causing the refugee crisis.  One view is that it’s all the fault of an inhumane US foreign policy: a bunch of kids with sticks poking the beehive.  In which case, how many Syrian refugees have the Americans taken in?  About 1,500.

Alternatively, it’s attributable to the rise of Salafism in its most militant form, promoted and funded from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.  Have they opened their doors to the refugees?  They have not.  Yet Makkah and Madinah both host gigantic mosques that could be converted into refugee camps for Syrian Christians.  Why not?  The Saudis would, of course, have to completely re-write their law code so that immigrants feel under no pressure to assimilate.  The ban on church-building would have to go for a start.  Do the Saudis have none of the basic human compassion expected to flow so freely from the ever-malleable Europeans?  How many refugees have the Saudis taken?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is nil.  The Saudis aren’t signatories to the UN refugee convention, though there are plenty of Syrians present in the country without being recognised as refugees.  The Saudi relationship with ISIS is complicated, because officially the two sides are sworn enemies, so the Saudis are wary of who they let in.  Not forgetting the pro-Assad fighters in disguise either.  In any case, the Saudis are too busy bombing the Yemenis and guess who sold them the weaponry with which to do that.  The flag over ‘our’ Parliament was lowered to half-mast when the bloodthirsty brother and predecessor of the present king died in January.  ‘Our’ Prime Minister almost immediately dashed off to Riyadh to kiss the hand of the new ruler, just in time for the first beheadings of the new reign.  Defence of the regime is considered a vital British interest.  Right.

Labour’s Yvette Cooper argued this week for a clear distinction at all times between refugees and economic migrants.  In the interests of population stability this surely has to involve something along the lines of ‘one in, one out’, which would mean identifying and deporting all those illegally living and working in the UK, below the radar.  In short, zero tolerance of those to whom Labour turned a blind eye not so long ago, so don’t expect it to become that party’s policy.  Cooper’s words are hollow because no-one believes that the distinction she makes will be respected and enforced.  The legacy of past policies has made the suffering of genuine refugees far worse than it could have been.

Cooper’s other repetitive soundbite is the Kindertransport of 1938 to 1940.  It’s a false and distracting analogy for four reasons.  One is that even had the UK embraced the whole of European Jewry, that was a figure ascertainable and not overwhelming for a country that still had a global empire.  Today, according to the International Organization for Migration, there are at least 50 million irregular migrants in the world, over one-fifth of all international migrants.  If migration to Europe occurs on that sort of scale, then Europe will notice the difference.

The second reason is that the flow of refugees is contaminated with economic migrants.  ‘Contaminated’ is a term used here not for effect but for accuracy, because blurring the truly desperate and those just trying their luck will provoke an ugly outbreak of empathy fatigue.  Libya’s boat people include Gambians, Senegalese, Malians, Ivorians, Nigerians, Ethiopians, Eritreans and Somalis.  Afghans and Pakistanis as well as Syrians were camped out in Budapest.  No doubt people-traffickers tell their customers that Europeans are a pushover.  If the people-traffickers are proved right, the flood will have no end.

The third reason is that refugees coming to Europe through already safe countries are not in danger, and so not entitled to come (not even small boys drowning off Turkey).  Escaping from danger doesn’t open up an unrestricted choice of where to live next that isn’t available to others who play fair.  Arguments that ‘this is about human beings’ aren’t designed to save life but to subvert lawful authority.  Hungary’s Viktor Orbán may be seen as applying the political equivalent of ‘work-to-rule’ but this is about more than being a stickler for the regulations.  The regulations are there for a purpose.  If you don’t like the purpose, change the regulations.  Meanwhile, they are there to be enforced.

The fourth reason is that Jews aren’t in open war against European values.  Whatever one may think of their cultural and economic influence, they aren’t waging violent jihad against Europe, as a rather dangerous number of Mahometans clearly are.  The fact that many migrants are apparently fleeing from this violence doesn’t of itself dispel mistrust.  What are the implications of so many being young men of military age, apparently more interested in coming to Europe than in staying behind to defend their beloved homeland against somewhat harder targets than the Hungarian police?  Do they perhaps, so the argument runs, care less about their homeland than about stamping the will of Allah upon the world?  Chants of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ outside Keleti station certainly aren’t the way to win friends and influence people.  When Orbán tells the world that he doesn’t want to see Europe’s cultural and religious character transformed beyond recognition he knows what can happen in such circumstances.  For over 150 years, almost the entire Carpathian Basin suffered a brutal occupation by the Ottoman Empire before the tide began to turn at the gates of Vienna on 11th September, 1683.  The attitude of ‘Old Europe’ to co-existence with Mahometanism is one based on hope.  The attitude of ‘New Europe’ is one based on experience, optimism being too great a risk to take.

Can Europe be the same with different people in it?  It’s the question posed recently by Christopher Caldwell.  In one sense it’s a misunderstanding, because the people who make up Europe are forever changing as births and deaths occur.  Demographic trends do matter though.  If Europe’s deaths continue to exceed births, as in many countries they currently do, then the future will be formed by substitution, not inheritance.  For the far Right, Europe’s woes are caused by the traitors who let the immigrants in.  On deeper analysis, they’re the result not so much of what immigrants or anyone else has done as of what natives have not done.  ‘They’re taking our jobs!’  (So why aren’t you taking them?)  ‘They’re taking our homes!’  (So why aren’t you taking them?)  ‘They’re replacing our whole population!’  (So why aren’t you replacing it?)  The solution to the demographic winter isn’t a European armed resistance; it’s ‘make love, not war’.

And so the questions continue.  Was it the fault of the Left?  Of feminism, encouraging women to have careers instead of babies?  Of environmentalism, encouraging Europeans to sacrifice themselves for the planet while others multiply like there’s no tomorrow?  Of anarchism, desiring society’s downfall in favour of something a bit more edgy, and potentially much, much worse?  Was it the fault of the Right?  Of consumerism, valuing stuff and experiences over children?  Of individualism, believing that personal choices do not have social, selective, evolutionary consequences for others?  Of economic liberalism, treating humanity as one enormous labour pool that does not come with other, sometimes very illiberal values attached?

In 1973, the French writer Jean Raspail published a controversial apocalyptic novel apparently set in the early 21st century.  Since translated into English as The Camp of the Saints, it records the arrival in the Mediterranean of a vast fleet carrying Third World migrants (hostile or desperate, according to viewpoint), a crisis which finds Europe lacking any concerted idea of how to respond.  The book explores the quandary: What will a liberal society do, or not do, to protect its way of life when confronted with the consequences of its ideals?  Will it allow itself meekly to be infiltrated, overwhelmed and ultimately trampled underfoot because of hyper-liberal trust in the good intentions of others?  In the south of France, an old professor finds his historic home invaded by a hippy, who expounds his hopes that the migrants will trash the place and go on to end European civilisation.  Won’t this mean, asks the professor, that you lose your own identity?  That’s exactly what I want, replies the hippy, before the professor, bored with the conversation and preferring to spend his remaining hours more pleasingly, reaches for a shotgun and kills him.

Europe has plenty of hippies, for whom boundaries do not define home and responsibility, for whom boundaries are no more than the foul scars of history.  Migration is ‘inevitable’, because it’s always happened.  True, it has, but so too has racism.  We have laws to manage migration’s impacts, just as we have hate speech laws and anti-discrimination laws to manage the strife sometimes emerging in response to migration that isn’t welcome.  If the first set of laws are no longer respected, the second set will be the next to go in reaction.  ‘Inevitability’ is a powder keg, more an attempt to frame political debate than a serious objective commentary.

Weston-super-Mare’s derelict lido, once Europe’s largest open-air pool, is currently home to ‘Dismaland’, an exhibition of contemporary art curated by Banksy.  In one of the more overtly political of the themed areas is an image of a butterfly, captioned ‘Migration is Beautiful’.

Is it beautiful to flee for your life, your male relatives beheaded, your female relatives enslaved, your people’s contribution to world culture burnt or blown to dust?  Europe’s jesters perennially miss the point: migration, external or internal, is always a means to an end.  Safety.  Prosperity.  Education.  Retirement.  Re-joining family.  Leaving family, to marry.  The sense of power your followers give you as you ride at the head of a conquering army.  Viewed from the other side there are other ends.  Filling rubbish jobs.  Filling skilled jobs for which we can’t be bothered to train.  Assuaging post-imperial guilt.  Self-loathing.  Getting more interesting sports players, clothes, music and restaurants.  Who is it we really care about?

Folk have indeed moved throughout history, but reasons vary enormously.  To say that you’re for or against migration, regardless of origin and motive, regardless of receiving capacity, regardless of the potential for things to develop badly, is to lump all those reasons together.  That single reason can mean either swamping the boat of your own society or ignoring the genuine plight of those whose own countries have become uninhabitable for them.  So let’s do something really unfashionable.  Let’s not be afraid to draw distinctions, and ensure they’re firmly upheld.  (If we say we’re full, then we do have the right to defend ourselves against those who disagree, otherwise defence has no point.)  Let’s also ask if we can do more as a world to make migration an informed choice, with respect on both sides, and not a terrifying necessity that neither side would wish was happening.

Northern Lights?

One of the most intractable problems in British politics is voters’ perception that they should be enjoying a Scandinavian standard of public services while only paying American levels of tax.  No wonder governments get into debt as they struggle to balance the books.

The solution, of course, is to decentralise so that what voters get is a better match for what they’re prepared to fund.  Within Scandinavia itself though, decentralisation has not, so far, been as great a favourite with the major parties as it might.  At the heart of Scandi social democracy is the idea that everyone is equal.  And, therefore, the non sequitur follows that everything must be the same.  As in Jacobin France, all political templates are equal, but some are definitely more equal than others.

Sweden makes an interesting case study.  OECD statistics show that, in 2010, public spending was 34.8% of GDP in the UK and 45.5% in Sweden.  In the UK, locally raised taxes amounted to 1.7% of GDP and nationally raised taxes to 26.2%, while in Sweden the local figure was 16.1% and the national figure 23.7%.  (The balance is accounted for by social security funds like National Insurance.)  The lesson seems to be that if folk know that the money they pay to keep society from falling apart is raised and spent where they can see it being raised and spent then they’ll be more supportive of the idea.  Even in the USA, where public spending was only 24.8% of GDP, the local figure was 3.9%, more than double the figure in the UK.

In Sweden’s case the results of local spending are immediately evident to the visitor in a very well-kept environment.  There's a county-based public transport system (Swedish counties being of regional scale), delivered by private contractors but to the county’s specification and livery.  Besides buses, this can include regional railways, trams and ferries, with timed tickets interchangeable between modes.  Look out for the bus shelters changing to a different design and the buses turning a different colour and you’ll know you’ve crossed the county boundary.  In such small, symbolic ways, local identity is made manifest even in a globalised economy.

Nonetheless, there is something rotten in the state of Sweden.  The long shadow of half-a-century of social democratic rule has left it as perhaps the most totalitarian society in western Europe.  Stories abound of children seized by social services for parents’ minor infractions of the rules of political correctness.  Governments of the Left were still practising eugenics and forced sterilisation in the 1970s; in 1932 the Swedish State Institute of Race Biology at Uppsala was publishing studies of the Sami to proclaim how inferior they were and promote their sterilisation.

The Sami have had a hard time all round.  Centuries of persecution for being different, then patronising policies to ensure that ‘the Lapps will remain Lapps’, depriving them of the technological means to function politically in the modern world.  And at last some limited recognition with the creation in 1993 of Sweden’s Sami Parliament, a consultative body which also has equivalents in Norway and Finland, and then in 2000 official minority status for their language.

The Sami remain as a distinct people because of their relationship to the land and to the nomadic occupations it provides.  At this point, Sweden’s accommodating approach hits the rocks.  Folklore and costumes are fine – accurate or inaccurate – and good for tourism, but natural resources are the common property of all Swedes.  Development policies have introduced roads, railways, hydro-electric schemes and managed forestry that have all played havoc with reindeer herding.  The alternatives of fishing and hunting have been curtailed by the Swedish State’s confiscation of Sami land rights.  Demands that indigenous people provide proof of title to support their claims to State property turn reality on its head: the truth is that indigenous people belong to the land, not the other way round, but either way they’re a unit.

There’s talk of expanding the Sami Parliament’s role to include land management but for radicals it’s not enough to be allowed to manage a heritage they’re not allowed to own.  For some Sami, a Swedish identity – or a Norwegian, Finnish or Russian one – is something to cling to, a second string to the bow.  For others, the battle to preserve the Sami language in the face of past attempts to suppress it remains a painful memory, ‘the Sami sore’, and for those who regard that history as reason enough to mistrust Stockholm nothing less than a separate Sameland will do.

The treatment of the Sami shows how repressive the parties of the Left can be when everything lines up for them.  Unbroken rule for 40 years.  Under a doctrine of national unity – folkhemmet (‘the people’s home’) – that embodied a real enough sense of community but allowed for no differentiation.  And all set in a country that used to be one of the most aggressive on earth.  Sweden’s glory days ended in the early 18th century when the cost of an all-conquering army could no longer be sustained.  In the previous century it dominated the Baltic and northern Germany and even had a colony in North America: New Sweden, today’s Delaware and Pennsylvania.  For all the protests about laid-back Swedes, such a legacy is bound to linger.

Psychologically, there’s probably nowhere else in Europe that provides such an instructive parallel to the UK, as the UK continues its own transition into post-imperial self-justification.  Last at war in 1814, and so never forced fundamentally to modernise its self-image, Sweden also shares with the UK a tendency to refer to the heartland of Europe as ‘the continent’, something from which both consider themselves detached.

The similarity shows too in the absence of a regional dimension to Sweden’s constitution, though as in the UK there have been moves to regionalise, badly, ignoring readily available historical precedents.  Sweden has been attempting to negotiate the merger of its 21 counties into 6 or 9 regions, following the pattern of a similar centralisation implemented in Denmark in 2007.  Since 1999 three Swedish counties have been designated as regions on a trial basis, with additional powers devolved to them.  Since it’s only a trial, they’re assured of nothing.

Nationalists and regionalists should note that bureaucracies under pressure always centralise, even if letting go would produce better outcomes.  (In Denmark, the county councils raised their own taxes; the regions that have replaced them do not, being largely funded centrally.)  It’s a process that can be seen at work in Scotland and Wales at present and in the creation of unitary counties and metro mayors; it’s also a process we need to denounce where it runs unreasonably against the grain of the decentralisation we seek.

Some of Sweden’s counties can be fiercely independent in spirit.  Dalarna is famous for its small, painted wooden horses that have become a national symbol, but that fact only shows how effortlessly Sweden has dealt with local identity – by nationalising it, absorbing it and disarming it.  What’s Dalarna’s is everybody’s.  Only in the southern tip of Sweden has an identity of regional scale resulted in a questioning of Swedishness itself.

The region of Scania or Skåneland – the three counties of Blekinge, Halland and Skåne (along with the Danish island of Bornholm) – was historically as separate as Scotland.  (It’s also where the Old English poem Beowulf is thought to be set and where the Normans originated.)  Sweden’s royal arms – three gold crowns on a blue shield – are thought to represent the three kingdoms ruled over by King Magnus Eriksson, who died in 1364.  That is to say, Norway, Sweden and Scania.  For most of its recorded history down to 1658, Scania was one of the three provinces of Denmark, though always protective of its autonomy.  Its landscape and architecture remain much more Danish than Swedish.

The Treaty of Roskilde that transferred it definitively to Sweden in 1658 included all the usual promises about respecting traditional privileges, soon laughed away.  The Scanians’ parliament was illegally abolished and a cultural war was set in motion to Swedify everything from the language to clerical dress.  Yet Scanians still speak differently.  Written down, Danish and Swedish are separate languages, but Sweden is a large country: Danes can understand southern Swedes and vice-versa, while northern Swedes do need the subtitles for Danish films.  Especially since the Øresund Bridge opened in 2000, Malmö has become in effect a suburb of Copenhagen (as viewers of The Bridge will be aware).  A Scanian regionalist party ought to be able to undo a historic injustice and allow the pivotal point of the Baltic to look both ways, to be almost Danish, and not quite as Swedish as others.

It ought to, yes, but what has happened?  The irony is that if Scania has provided one-third of royal Sweden’s identity, and a name and historic logo for some internationally renowned trucks, that’s as far as it goes.  Labels in Stockholm’s Nordic Museum repeatedly fall over the fact of Scania, telling visitors that the custom is this in southern Sweden and that in the rest of the country, or that particular traditions in painting and weaving are unique to the south.  It’s all reminiscent of the days when Scotland was just ‘North Britain’ and Cornwall was part of the ‘West Country’.  There had to be a reckoning.

It came in 1979 with the launch of Skånepartiet, the Scania Party.  Scanian regionalism ranges from grumbling about Stockholm getting everything to demands for full independence.  The party’s populist policies called for the abolition in Scania of Sweden’s State-owned off-licence monopoly, Systembolaget, and the creation of a Scanian commercial television channel.  But Skånepartiet also decided to play the anti-immigration (and especially anti-Islam) card, a calculation that worked well enough in Malmö in the mid-80s.  Then its fortunes took a turn for the worse, its number of elected representatives dwindling until 2006, since when it has had none.

Its place has been taken by the Sweden Democrats, a Swedish version of UKIP or the Front National that emerged first in Scania and has since spread across central Sweden.  Like its French and UK equivalents, the party wants a single, uniform national culture.  It has no time for minorities, however many thousands of years they can claim to have been in the country.  It wants to abolish the Sami Parliament, claiming that the parliament’s existence discriminates against those in Sameland who are not Sami and do not rely on the traditional way of life.  It’s curious how happy far Right parties are to rant about colonists coming in and changing how we live but never recognise themselves in the description.  ‘They’ are immigrants; ‘we’ are ex-pats.

In the 2014 elections, the Sweden Democrats stormed to 12.9%, and 49 seats in the Riksdag.  They’re one of a group of far Right parties now making headway in each of the Nordic countries.  That’s bad news for regionalists; Skånepartiet may be rueing their choice of strategy.  To play the anti-immigrant card when an influx of immigrants into your region is one of its distinctive characteristics may look attractive; once that influx extends nationwide it’s nationwide parties that will pick up the resulting protest vote.  The Swedish Right have also been able to dig deep into the votes of the Swedish Left.  The Left have moved on to new fields of political correctness, leaving their traditional folkhemmet power base behind.  Meanwhile, the tensions resulting from mass immigration are calling into question the very survival of the Scandinavian welfare model.  A party that will defend the legacy of folkhemmet when its creators will not, a party that prioritises Swedes in Sweden, is bound to do well.

Then, this month, two gruesome murders in an IKEA store in Västerås, near Stockholm, carried out by an Eritrean migrant, shocked the nation.  The latest YouGov poll indicates that the Sweden Democrats are now the top political party in Sweden.  Polling at 25.2%, they beat the ruling Social Democrats, on 23.4%.  Watch Sweden closely and you’ll see the tide on the turn.  It won’t be a pretty sight; Game of Thrones fans might care to note that Västerås is pronounced rather like ‘Westeros’.

Useful Idiots?

This week saw a rally at Westminster in support of housebuilding.  There’s no denying the heartache if you’re not adequately housed, but many demanding a cull of our countryside are being duped by those who stand to benefit financially from a yet-more-bricks-and-mortar solution.

There’s no sound case for adding to our housing stock if we can’t properly manage the stock we already have.  Leading politicians who bang the drum over a shortage of affordable homes have done nothing to end Right-to-Buy, which continues to bleed the social rented stock much faster than it can be replenished.  That includes replenished on the basis that housebuilders get to build two market homes for every affordable one, market homes in places they might otherwise not get to build at all.

Do we have sensible lettings policies for the stock we do still have?  No.  Often the townies get priority.  In parts of Cornwall, the landlords, or their nominating authorities, are councils from Birmingham, London and Manchester.  The locals aren’t eligible.  How widespread is that?  Are Wessex retirement zones similarly blighted?  And this is before we start on second homes and holiday lets, long-term empty properties, derelict buildings and under-used floorspace.

Above all, let’s not forget the elephant in the south-east corner, whose wealth distorts everyone’s housing market.  We know all the jibes about nimbyism.  We know we’re meant to feel ashamed that we fight so hard for the Wessex countryside that feeds, powers and waters London, amuses it at the weekend and buries its unending stream of waste.  We know we supposedly lack a sense of ‘social responsibility’ if we refuse to take London’s overspill.  But d'you know what?  We’re not the irresponsible ones.  They’re those who suck the world’s wealth into London and then expect others to solve problems we didn’t create.

In Northumbria there are whole streets, even whole villages, of sound housing that has no takers.  The so-called ‘bedroom tax’ makes the older two-bed terraces unviable for those on benefits.  (Not that Labour cares.)  Will they be abandoned to ‘market forces’, as the population re-locates south?  To join the international migrants who also congregate in the south because that’s where the work is.  Let’s remember that UKIP, as yet another party of free market ideologues, are essentially unconcerned about inter-regional migration.  And what are those international migrants if not a regional problem on a bigger scale?  The Poles would still be in Poland if their economy hadn’t been stuck behind the Iron Curtain for 45 years.

Is it all inevitable, this surrender to the ineffable will of the market?  Wrong question, because this is NOT solely about the market.  It’s also about the corporate capture of the British State and the renunciation of its power to influence events in a win-win direction.  Not just in terms of policy but hard cash too.  The UK is a big enough spender to shape the market.  UK public spending this year is £731 billion.  Is it all spent well?  So that those who want development can get it and those who don’t can breathe a sigh of relief?  No, it isn’t.  And the result is an economic catastrophe for the one and an environmental catastrophe for the other.

We don’t need more housing.  We need more fairness.  We won’t get it from London.  Which is why Wessex so urgently needs to take its sovereignty back.

Bye Bye Beauty

Last week saw the first results published from the 2011 census of England (& Cornwall) & Wales. (We’ll call that ‘ECW’ for short.) The results are interesting both for what they say and what they don’t. There’s a gap of maybe a few million who aren’t included and therefore have to be estimated. It’s an offence not to complete a census form but there have only been 252 prosecutions. Which is a symptom of a government that’s losing control and doesn’t care, or is too scared to enforce the law, or else recognises that the law may not be on its side, given the outsourcing arrangements made for the 2011 census. The statisticians shrug and tell us that a 94% response rate is good enough for most purposes, and was the same last time. It’s said that the only folk who can tell for sure now what the population is are the major supermarkets, who know from grocery sales how many folk are being fed.

London politicians’ reactions to the news that ECW’s population rose by 7.1% in a decade (twice the rate for the previous decade) range from glee to indifference to resignation. The destruction of our environment is either welcome, irrelevant or inevitable. Wessex, of course, has suffered more than some other regions, as London’s overspill continues to spew over our central and eastern shires. Our population has now passed the 8 million mark, to stand at 8,028,500. That comes to 262% of the population of Wales and 98% that of London. So where’s OUR assembly then?

The breakdown by shire, using the best available approximation to pre-1974 administrative boundaries, is as follows:

Berkshire – 842,700
Devon – 1,133,800
Dorset – 512,900
Gloucestershire (including Bristol) – 1,288,000
Hampshire (including Wight) – 2,129,300
Oxfordshire – 532,900
Somerset – 908,700
Wiltshire – 680,200

West Somerset, much of it protected by the Exmoor National Park, is the only area of Wessex to have lost population (down 1% since 2001), though Hinkley Point C’s construction may well reverse that loss. Some urban areas have grown by 10% or more (the most being 16%, in Swindon), as have rural districts as widely spaced as Mid Devon, North Dorset and West Oxfordshire. While eastern England, from Lincolnshire to Kent, has borne the brunt of the growth, the consequences for our own countryside (and other open land) are clear.

And continuing. Areas with the largest proportions of 0-4 year-olds are concentrated along the motorway corridors, with many coastal areas seemingly abandoned to the growing numbers of retired. We are seeing a polarisation within Wessex based on accessibility to the major inland routes, especially to London, though this is not necessarily the same thing as distance from London. Planned investment in rail electrification could further transform our geography in the decades ahead.

London politicians are keen to claim that our treasured local environments are safe. Because planning will protect them. It’s all lies, because planning does no such thing. Planning just prioritises which treasured environments are to be destroyed now and which will be permitted to survive for another decade or two before the clamour for homes overwhelms them. The roads and the houses go on advancing towards the crack of doom. To escape, we need to confront the problem of growth itself. And no London politician will dare do that.

Hippies in Denial

This time last month (30 May), there was a gathering at Glastonbury Town Hall to discuss the town’s ‘transition’ to a post-oil world. It began with a talk from a leading light in Transition Town Totnes (TTT), the pioneers of transition thinking in the UK. Sadly, amidst all the joyful envisioning of local self-sufficiency, there did seem to be a few basics missing. It was like the 1960’s all over again, a fantasy world where everything is possible. In truth, in the future, everything will not be possible and hard choices will be needed.

We were told to expect millions of ‘climate refugees’ and make plans to welcome them to our communities. It seemed not to have dawned on anyone that, since a post-oil economy will not support more than a fraction of our current population, we should most certainly not be trying to add to it. Among the key characteristics of the future brainstormed in workshops was the hope that this would be a world of ‘happy, smiling people’. From time to time they might well be that, if instructed to be. Just not while they’re busy killing each other for possession of productive land and its outputs.

TTT’s website carries Buckminster Fuller’s famous words, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” That’s partly true. It’s how successful nationalist groups have dismantled the empires from which they have struggled to free themselves. You defeat the enemy by systematically disregarding its authority. But those who make it sound all that simple are in for a shock.

Transition towns will find that when Tesco want to build in their midst, or there’s a new trunk road coming up the valley, the answer doesn’t lie in digging the allotment. Gandhi won because he was fighting the British. Gandhi versus Hitler or Stalin would have had a very different outcome. The planning system today is owned by the likes of Tesco and the Highways Agency. With every passing day, Labour makes it more so. The Tories’ only cavil is that the supermarkets and the motorways aren’t being built fast enough.

Local action, however twee, is not going to make the difference it needs to make until there is a region-wide reaction against Westminster diktat. A Wessex Parliament will do what local initiatives cannot. It will ensure that the price structures are in place to help local producers compete fairly. It will rebuild the region’s rural railways, renewably-run, to enable communities to exchange goods of the highest quality. It will protect productive land from crazed housebuilders by establishing an optimum population level and sticking to it. It will redefine the housing market to ensure that local people are not squeezed out as a result. It will counter any wider power that fails to place Wessex interests first. In short, it will work for our communities and not against them.

Or… we can go on kidding ourselves that acting locally is enough, that Westminster is full of thoroughly decent chaps and chapesses, that Whitehall too really is on our side, and that if all this isn’t so then there must be some absolutely sound reason for it that we’re just too dense to grasp. More flowers anyone?

The People’s Ponzi

We’ve been hearing quite a lot recently about Ponzi schemes, as the financial chickens come home to roost. A Ponzi scheme is an investment scam that promises investors a high rate of return but in fact is paying earlier entrants out of the money collected from later entrants. Eventually, for whatever reason, the scheme will be unable to go on expanding, at which point the game is up.

The United Kingdom has an ageing population, with Wessex, as the centre of the retirement industry, having a particular interest in the matter. Three out of the five ‘most aged’ local authority areas are in Wessex and the statistics reveal something of a ‘retirement belt’ stretching across the south of our region from Exmoor to the Isle of Wight and beyond.

It is generally asserted that immigration is needed to sustain a working age population capable of supporting this mass of greybeards. The problem is, of course, that everyone who survives long enough gets old, and immigrants are no exception. The population equivalent of a Ponzi scheme is the belief that you can deal with the economic consequences of ageing simply by having an ever-expanding population. The reality is that this is simply not sustainable in environmental terms. Once ecological capacity is exhausted, the result is collapse. To maintain the ratio of 15-64 year-olds at its current level, the UK population would need to rise from about 61 million today to 136 million by 2050. Pro rata, the figures for Wessex would see a rise from about 8 million to over 18 million. Bristol, for example, would need to become a city of over a million folk.

The available data suggests an almost totally misplaced concern about ageing, and that concern needs to be refocused elsewhere. The UK spends about 6.2% of GDP on State pensions, rising to 8.5% by 2050. But if the retirement age were to be raised proportionately in line with life expectancy, the rise is only to 7.75%. So a third of the problem simply disappears.

Low population growth actually brings massive economic, social and environmental benefits. Productive work can be aimed at improving the quality of life, instead of building ever more infrastructure and housing. Less money spent on rearing children and on education means more to spend on pensions. In the UK 43% of young folk go into higher education and can be dependents well into their twenties. Young folk are also disproportionately reflected in crime and unemployment statistics. Conversely, many retired folk remain active in developing the social capital of their communities, giving time to voluntary organisations, in effect free labour that might otherwise have to be paid for. In 2007/08 the UK spent £76 billion of public money on support costs for young folk, compared to £71.5 billion supporting the over-65s. Financial assistance is given down the generations – not up – on average until the age of 75.

Smaller families can mean that folk inherit more housing capital: two children each inherit half the parental home, three children only inherit a third. The potential importance of housing equity – which can be freed up to part-fund consumption in retirement – is huge. The value of housing assets in the UK, even after mortgage debt, is considerably larger than all pension funds combined. (How much of this money really exists is, of course, another matter!)

Economist Phil Mullan, author of The Imaginary Time Bomb, has suggested that the obsession with a looming pensions deficit has less to do with demographic fact and more to do with a political agenda to cut back the welfare state. Countries with much older age structures have out-performed those with younger ones, while a report for the Institute of Public Policy Research confirmed that “there is little correlation between ageing and increased health care costs”.

In short, the way we relieve the ‘burden’ of an ageing population is that we draw upon the money that would otherwise have been spent on the extra housing, schools, hospitals, roads and other infrastructure needed to accommodate population growth. Energy infrastructure is one very significant part of that package. So too are the additional costs of growing a population through immigration, such as translation costs, along with those that stem from inter-communal tension and divided loyalties.

The alternative to population restraint is a planet confronting unsustainable trends, where each new child will likely produce more than 20 tonnes of greenhouse gases every year and where civilisation everywhere is in imminent peril as a result.

If we go on building, we are sure to find ourselves living in a house of cards, miserably waiting for the wind to blow.

Whither Wessex?

"At a number of places in his celebrated Imperialism (1902), J. A. Hobson used southern England as an image of the successful, imperialist side of British capitalism: a countryside of plush ‘parasitism’ drawing tribute from overseas via the City, supporting ‘great tame masses of retainers’ in service and secondary industries, and riddled with ex-imperialist hirelings. ‘The South and South-West of England is richly sprinkled with these men’, he continued, ‘most of them endowed with leisure, men openly contemptuous of democracy, devoted to material luxury, social display, and the shallower arts of intellectual life. The wealthier among them discover political ambitions… Not a few enter our local councils, or take posts in our constabulary or our prisons: everywhere they stand for coercion and for resistance to reform.’"
Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, 1981

Next year, political Wessex hits 40. It was towards the end of 1969 that the then Lord Weymouth first mooted the idea of a Wessex identity for the purposes of tourism promotion. Of course, even then, his ambitions were more extensive than that. So how far has reality today caught up with them?

St Aldhelm’s Cross and even the Wyvern are now to be seen flying from public buildings in Wessex, and the list of towns and cities doing so will doubtless grow. Aldhelm is becoming more widely recognised as the patron saint of Wessex. A Wessex Anthem has been written by a Dorset dialect poet and set to music by a composer from Gloucestershire. Our wonderful dialect is attracting new scholarly interest. We even have our own Earl and Countess, a fact of recognition for which we can almost forgive their meagre efforts to live up to the title. The infrastructure of a community is taking shape.

For many of these feats, except the last two, the credit must go to Wessex Society, which Party members helped to launch in 1999, on the 1100th anniversary of King Alfred’s death. The Society has, quite rightly, taken on a life of its own. The membership today includes a peer, a bishop, an MEP, three MPs and the popular musicians Acker Bilk and Gordon Haskell. While some Society members are also Party members, the vast majority are not. It would be false to assume that to be patriotic about Wessex is to be sympathetic to Home Rule. Yet no regionalist can be unhappy that Wessex is finding pride in itself again.

And not before time. While the letters pages of our region’s papers are dominated by those droning on about Brussels, or the unfairness of Scottish devolution, Wessex is being torn apart. Not by the regulators of straight bananas. Nor by some anti-English conspiracy. But by the money men (and women) of the City of London. Our homes, our farms, our deep-rooted businesses, all are simply opportunities for them, opportunities to place their own pockets above the common good. And who can blame them? If we let our politicians let them then we have only ourselves to blame.

In News from Nowhere (1890), William Morris coined the term ‘cockneyisation’. Morris, a Londoner himself by birth, saw it as the process by which crass commercial values seeped up the Thames valley, consuming all they found, oblivious to charm and beauty. Morris was horrified by what he saw in his own day. What would he make of Basingstoke or Didcot now?

Some have suggested simply abandoning the east of Berkshire to London, much as some Welsh nationalists have toyed with re-defining Wales as the Welsh-speaking parts only. Such counsel leads nowhere. Once every limb has been amputated, where is there left to call home? We insist that nothing is up for surrender. If the Cockneys laugh at the Wessex accent, then it’s time to laugh back and remind them where they’re now living.

Gently, of course. Because we make no distinction between native and settler who alike love Wessex. Take away in-comers and our Party would collapse. There are all too many Wessex natives who have been taught to despise their heritage for us to be choosy.

But if it’s not about race, it’s very much about space. New homes by the hundreds of thousands are planned and we’re entitled to ask searching questions about why our farmland is to be destroyed to make way for them. We’re still awaiting even a half-convincing answer.

Folk are rightly upset about what’s happening. ‘Change’, we’re told. Yes, but what sane person supports change when it’s irrespective of better or worse? What we demand is the restoration of politics, of the right to make choices democratically and to see them implemented, not side-stepped. For that, Wessex needs a party it can call its own.

We know that New Labour has no mandate in Wessex. Wessex has never voted Labour, yet has periodically suffered the consequences of votes cast in Scotland, Wales, London and the big cities in Mercia and Northumbria. Neither the Conservatives nor the Liberal Democrats have any solution to this. Both seek to control the Westminster machine themselves, and letting Labour in from time to time is the price they’re willing to pay. A Wessex Parliament would keep Labour out, for good, unless Wessex voted Labour. A Labour government at Westminster – or equally a Tory or LibDem one – could no more impose its policies on Wessex than it can today on Scotland and Wales. A vote for the Wessex Regionalist Party is no wasted vote. A vote for either of the main opposition parties is a wasted vote because all they can offer is to buy time before Labour is back with a vengeance.

There’s much to dislike about Labour, but not all. Strip away the PC twits and the wolves in sheep’s clothing and there remains a faintly beating radical heart. It was a movement that Wessex could, in the right hands, have endorsed. Looking at the deep blue map of today, it’s hard to imagine that less than a century ago Wessex was a predominantly Liberal region. It was a region with a strong tradition of mutual support, as shown by a thriving network of friendly societies. But it was also a region rightly suspicious of the collectivist instincts of the rising Labour Party. So much so that it has ever since preferred the safety of voting Tory.

Wessex Regionalism is a philosophy that necessarily reflects the political complexion of the region itself. But it’s also one that taps into the unfinished business of old-fashioned liberalism. Not the spiteful, totalitarian kind embraced by Thatcher and Blair but the truly radical programme of constitutional reform and social emancipation cut short by the rise of hard-line socialism. It was no accident that the wartime Common Wealth party had its origins in Wessex, a party advocating vital democracy, common ownership and morality in politics. Nor that WR office-holders over the years have included at least three ex-members of CW’s own Executive Committee.

Dissatisfaction with what the major parties all offer is growing. Extremists are likely to be the beneficiaries if no more attractive alternative is presented. Frustration is turning to anger and anger to rage. The alternating wings of the Laboratory Party have conspired to deprive us wholesale of the control over our lives that we have a right to expect. Decisions that used to be made at the level of individual schools or hospitals are now made in London, either by ministers or, increasingly, by the courts. Decisions on housing and planning that used to be made in town and county halls are now made by quangos stuffed with business interests and reporting to Whitehall-knows-best. Buses, electricity and water – vital services that used to be locally owned and controlled – now belong to the Scots, the French, the Germans and the Spanish. How long before the Russians and the Chinese follow them in?

Common sense dictates the appropriate scale of any service or enterprise. Nothing should be done at a wider level that can be done as well or better at a more local level. Whether it’s a public service or a private enterprise the same rules should apply. While there’s a plausible case for aerospace or pharmaceuticals to be organised on a continental scale, given the high development costs and need to meet U.S. competition, things like buses, electricity or water are tied to their local and regional geography. There’s no case for international empires in these sectors, except to maximise market share. And that’s a case we should have the right to reject.

Politics? Yes please. And the sooner the better.