An Empty Space?

The second issue of Wessex Citizen, edited by Keith Southwell and Rick Heyse, is now online.  Many thanks to all who contributed.  Earlier this month we mentioned the current – seventy-second – issue of MK’s equivalent, Cornish Nation, which this time gave us a brief mention.  Joanie Willett, reporting back on the General Assembly of the European Free Alliance recently held in Corsica, wrote:

“One of the Parties that MK members became acquainted with was Yorkshire First.  We have much that we can learn from each other, and it would be a really interesting exercise to have some sort of group meeting or conference of all the regionalist parties in mainland UK, including the North East Party and the Wessex Regionalists, to see how we can combine our voices in our campaigns for better, stronger, and more people-led devolution in the UK.”

That might be so, and the WR Council has resolved to make enquiries, though as we’ve noted, it’s been done before.  More than once.  Perhaps every generation has to give it a try and there’s certainly no shame in emulating success.  WR is different though, mainly because of how far official recognition of our regional identity lags behind.

Cornwall is not just home to a distinct nation.  It’s also (apart from the Isles of Scilly, who have their own council) a single unit of local government.  The complaint isn’t that Cornwall is unrecognised; it’s that it’s not recognised enough, or in the right way.  Cornwall Council has broadly the same powers as a London borough, even though Cornwall’s geographical isolation would allow it to do far more for itself, without treading on any of its neighbours’ toes.  It’s treated as an English county when it’s actually something more that just happens to be the same size as an English county.  The motto ‘One and All’ sums it up.  The argument that ‘there’s no such place as Cornwall’ isn’t heard though, because it’s not conceivable.

Up north, the North East Party and Yorkshire First both operate within the boundaries of their respective Prescott zones, boundaries still widely recognised by the public and voluntary sectors and used for everything from Euro-elections to the English Heritage handbook.  This is part of the legacy of the Blairite ‘big push’ for top-down regionalisation that has never fully gone away.

(Interestingly, the National Trust used also to be loyal to Prescottism but this year’s handbook departs from it.  Apart from South Humberside, now placed with the rest of Lincolnshire, the basic Prescott geography is respected everywhere except the South West and South East, where the Trust has introduced five new groupings of its own invention, plus a separate Cornwall.  If the NT now has so much property in Wessex that its presentation needs to be this fragmented, maybe Wessex needs a National Trust all of its own?)

There is, of course, another definition of Yorkshire, the Yorkshire of the ridings rather than the one of a map drawn in London, but any attempt to restore this is fraught with difficulties.  The biggest risk, revealed in the work of the Banham Commission in the 1990s, is of tokenistic proposals emerging to appease sentiment rather than to accommodate it, new ridings with old names but the wrong boundaries, which make things worse rather than better.

Until this year, a different approach was evidenced by the Northern Party, voice of the historic North of England – Northumbria – with a united claim to all three northern Prescott zones.  South Humberside apart though, this was still a claim that worked with rather than against the Prescott geography.

Wessex is different because faced with that geography our response is that we wouldn’t have started from here.  We devoted most of The Case for Wessex to explaining why Wessex is, to quote Thomas Hardy, a ‘practical provincial definition’.  Much more so than a South West that runs from the Scillies to the Cotswolds and a South East that wraps round two-thirds of London and whose extremities can only communicate with each other by passing through a national capital that forms a separate region.

If Wessex is a practical province, and not just a romantic image of myth and legend that doesn’t even merit its own official tourist board, why isn’t it shown more on maps?  We must note that briefly and for specific purposes it does come into being, as with the Army’s Wessex Brigade or the short-lived Wessex Trains franchise.  The London regime always realises its mistake and pulls back from taking things further.  Then busily covers up the evidence while encouraging others to do likewise.

Alternatively, it hides behind forms of official recognition that don’t require Wessex to be defined.  Like recognising St Ealdhelm as our patron saint or the Wyvern as our flag (and even allowing it to be flown from public buildings, something several county and unitary councils are doing today).  Another example would be awarding our earldom to the Queen’s youngest son.  The re-use of the title for Prince Edward in 1999 launched a tsunami of sneering from the London press, ranging from massive pride in not knowing where Wessex is to asking whether the brand isn’t damaged for eternity, given that Wessex Water was once owned by Enron.  When in 2011 Prince William became Duke of Cambridge, the reaction was more like ‘how nice’.  The Wessexes are one way of acknowledging that Wessex exists but, like the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, they can be a convenient device when needed for ensuring loyalty to the London regime among the grovelling classes.  Their full potential for obstructing self-government has yet to be tested.

Yet another trick is to use ‘Wessex’ as the name for something smaller than Wessex, like Wessex Water, or the Wessex Regional Health Authority.  Another still is to associate aspects of Wessexness, like cider or the dialect, with a vague area that won’t match county boundaries, but simply not to notice how these things form bundles that add up to an identity.  There are lots of words for folk from Wessex – Wessaxon, Wessexer, Wessexian, or – best of all – Wurzel, but probably none that would be acknowledged outside Wessex because if you don’t look and listen you won’t find.

In all these respects, Wessex is less comparable with other movements for autonomy within the UK and more with mainland movements in the likes of Alsace, Brittany, Moravia or Scania.  These are likewise places that exist in the heart but have been truncated, partitioned or even obliterated for purposes of governance, by centralist states jealous of any rival for the people’s affections.

Some regions have their capital city at their centre.  The central geographical feature of Wessex is the empty expanse of Salisbury Plain.  (Our big cities are round the edge, places of exchange with a wider world.)  That sense of a hollow centre is often how it feels politically.  We’re told that we’re campaigning for a region that most of its residents don’t recognise.  Yet that’s a throw-away line; it just avoids the need for any further thinking.  Thinking about how and why the London regime controls the space within which a Wessex identity could flourish, and controls it with the deliberate intention of ensuring that it doesn’t.  Thinking about the ruling class of Wessex, MPs and councillors sitting for the London parties, media hacks, academics, in many cases with anything but the good of Wessex as their motivation.  Thinking too about the opportunities we now have to build a radical Wessex movement from the bottom up.

It’s easy for critics to present the Wessex Regionalists as rather like one of those bands that were big in the 80s and are still trying to make a comeback, playing the occasional gig in obscure places like Witney.  The fact is that the raising of the election deposit in 1985 – it was more than trebled – was a huge blow that stopped us in our tracks.  We had until then been ramping up the number of candidates at each election.  Instead, we were kept out of electioneering for over a decade, times when it looked as if we might not survive.  The Tories claimed that raising the deposit was necessary to deter ‘frivolous’ candidates.  It didn’t.  All it did was deter serious candidates without the Tories’ access to loads of money.

And it shows how worried they were, as well they ought to be.  Devolution for peripheral areas is one thing; devolution for the area that encapsulates the deepest memories of statehood is an existential challenge the UK is ill-equipped to weather.  So if the current set-up is designed to deny us our identity, culturally and politically, then we should feel honoured rather than surprised.  Let’s get on with re-awakening it for ourselves.  That means, above all, not trying to influence those who have power but rather to do everything in our power to sweep them aside.

Happy St Ealdhelm’s Day

History is Sunk

“My Lords, a nation gets awarded the character that it deserves.  By neglecting to promote some aspect of this character, that aspect becomes increasingly insignificant within the image which other nations regard as our worth.  And this might also hold true for the way future generations of our own nation come to regard what we ourselves were worth…

There is a danger if the arena for artistic performance is permitted to become too centralised, with the regions required to focus upon what is going on within the capital city to discover the potential of their own individualistic excellence.  The situation will become healthier if we can revive the notion of there being a thriving local culture within each region, proud of its own traditions, and of its aesthetic potential.

Government should therefore assume the responsibility to promote the re-emergence of the English regions, so that they are encouraged to create their own local artistic excellence in distinction from one another, and in competition with one another to draw the maximum number of tourists to come and be entertained in the significant regional manner.  But this should involve the creation of regional assemblies, whose main purpose will be to tailor the quality of life within that territory, so that its true individualism can be perceived for what it best might become…

Then finally there is the question of improved display: a display at sites of easy access for the region as a whole.  It should not be necessary for an aspirant artist to visit the capital city to discover the inspiration for his native art.  The finest collections should be on his very doorstep.  And the regional assemblies should be in a position to allot funds to transform existing museums so that they can fulfil this required function – funds which should also be used to put on arts festivals where the special character of the region can be publicly proclaimed.

The artistic potential of the nation is thus indirectly linked to the Government’s ability to enable the English regions to re-emerge in a spirit of their most colourful individualism.  So the most significant step which government could take today, in the encouragement of the arts, will be in the creation of our regional assemblies; and I urge that this step should be taken without delay.”

Alexander Thynn, Marquess of Bath, addressing the House of Lords, 18th March 1998

Not a lot to ask, you might think.  After all, the provincial cities of Germany and Italy are cultural powerhouses, attracting tourists in their millions.  In contrast to France or Spain, theirs is the legacy of not being unified politically until late in the 19th century and so continuing to benefit from particularistic patronage.  In England, sadly, few listened to our founder’s words, and today the curtain is coming down on culture in the provinces.

Nowhere more so than in Northumbria.  Last month, we drew attention to a spate of museum closures in Lancashire, contrasted with continued spending on a vacuous vanity project designed to really ‘put London on the map’.  Lancashire is not alone.  Across the Pennines, Bradford’s National Media Museum is facing the asset-stripping of its photographic collection, to be removed to London.  Cumbrian Melvyn Bragg has spoken out on radio against the closure of small museums.  In Co Durham, closures planned, threatened or implemented include the Durham Light Infantry Museum at Durham, the Monkwearmouth Station Museum at Sunderland and Bede’s World at Jarrow.  The last of these was an ambitious project to regenerate the town through tourism.  A new museum was built to re-interpret the Golden Age of Northumbria for today, complete with a reconstructed Anglo-Saxon settlement in the grounds.  Whatever that blighted area has been promised to make up for jobs lost in heavy industry – whether it was to be call centres, hi-tech manufacturing, retailing or tourism – has been promptly ripped from beneath its feet.  It’s now being robbed of the means to understand itself.  ‘History’ will be owned by the victors of one inter-regional power struggle, making another that much less likely to succeed.

Identity is inseparable from continuity: a place without a past lacks the materials from which to build its own future with confidence.  According to Historic England, 64% of folk in England value their local heritage.  Breaking this average down by Prescott zone, we find the figure rises to 71% in the North East, 69% in the South West and 68% in both London and the South East.  Four of the five below-average zones are where the Danelaw used to be.  Coincidence?  Maybe, but the fact is that where Alfred was acknowledged as overlord there was continuity of government and a physical survival of heritage on a scale that wasn’t true of Viking-devastated areas.  You value more where there’s more to value.

Wessex hasn’t been exempt from closures.  Bristol’s award-winning Empire & Commonwealth Museum, housed in Brunel’s original terminus at Temple Meads, was closed in 2008.  This was done with the specific intention of re-locating the collection to London, where, of course, ‘more people can see it’.  The logic is unassailable, at least for those too lazy to get a train to Bristol and walk a hundred yards.  Fortunately, the deal fell through.  Most of the collection was donated to the city of Bristol.  But the museum never re-opened.

Wessex hasn’t been exempt from closures.  Scotland and Wales have a choice.  Their national museums and galleries are devolved matters and they have devolved administrations to defend them.  We suffer from the affliction that is England, not the England of us all that values all, but the one-size-fits-all England that in practice means London.  All the key decisions are taken in London by those who live, work and play in London, who can grasp no other perspective and who feel deeply offended by the idea that one can even exist.  And, as Simon Jenkins pointed out last week, BIG projects are protected while it’s the little folk who suffer.

It might be argued that, in times of austerity, culture should take a back seat.  We don’t need to argue back that austerity is a posh word for corporate bailouts and tax evasion on an unimaginable scale.  Even if austerity had a credible justification, it would still be unfair that we’re not exempt from it but London is.  Loss-making museums in the provinces are being shut.  Throwing them a lifeline would be subsidising failure, we’re told.  Yet as taxpayers we all pay to keep London’s ‘national’ museums and galleries free to visit.  Even though there are national museums in Wessex that are not.  (For example, both the National Army Museum and the RAF Museum in London are free, but not Portsmouth’s National Museum of the Royal Navy.  How fair is that?)  Free admission to London’s attractions is somehow considered a service to the whole nation.  We’re even treated to patronising half-truths: “Arts Council funding for museums is lower per capita in London and the South East than in any other part of the country.”  We should hope so, given the millions London’s national museums receive as direct funding that bypasses the Arts Council pot.  How can there ever be a level playing field when money for London’s pets is top-sliced and the rest are left to fight over the crumbs?

Shouldn’t we expect this?  Isn’t being kicked and punched by the London regime part of being English?  Mustn’t grumble, must we?  Up north, regionalisation has been an on-off issue for over a century.  That’s a century in which to organise a political party to achieve real, lasting change.  A century of votes cast instead for the monkey with the red rosette.  And we’ve been as bad, even if our monkey’s rosette is blue, or sometimes yellow.  He or she is still more interested in a career in a London-obsessed system than in defying convention on our behalf.

Recent media coverage has been sure to present the museums story as one aspect of a north-south divide.  That’s a convenient narrative that can be played around with, baiting northerners about deprivation in pockets of inner London being just as bad.  It’s a narrative that actually helps to obscure something much deeper – the London-rest divide that no amount of ‘benign’ centralism or ‘socialist’ redistribution will touch.

It’s inevitable then.  Let’s move on to the ‘real’ issues instead.  No, it isn’t inevitable.  When Northumbria and Wessex strode the stage, London was on the periphery of events: Frank Musgrove’s The North of England: A History identifies no fewer than four eras of northern pre-eminence.  History reminds us that there are alternatives.  That’s why the teaching of history is being so heavily discouraged.

Richard Carter, Leader of Yorkshire First, commented on the museum closures as follows: "We are not against a strong capital, but this has to change, for the good of the country and for London too."  We’d go further.  The capital’s strength is both the cause and the effect of our weakness as it recirculates across the generations.  If London disappeared into a vast sink-hole tomorrow, Boris and all, we’d get by well enough without it.  There comes a point when patience with pretty promises from on high should no longer be judged a virtue.

Gearing Up

Surveyor is the magazine for highways and transport professionals.  This month’s issue is headlined ‘Return of the Regions’ and opens to reveal an editorial by Dominic Browne, and more besides.  The editorial starts as follows:

“In January of this year the Department for Transport (DfT) launched a small (by government standards) pilot competition for local authorities to find ‘total transport’ solutions in rural and isolated communities.

To some this may have seemed fairly innocuous; a scrambled attempt to cover ground in local services left barren by revenue cuts.  Yet the guidance for bidders contained a line that appeared to herald something more than spin, smoke and mirrors; something that looked like an honest appeal.

‘Service integration has not been attempted on any scale up to now, so the essential first step is for local authorities to work out how to go about it.’

Events this month, where we have seen the wheel of public reform turn once more, recalled this line.

When the coalition government first came into power, the word regional was banned.  Localism was the new watchword.  This month saw the concept of regionalism bloom again.  Across the North and the Midlands two major bodies built of local authorities are ready to take on statutory powers for regional transport planning.  While in the West Country, Surveyor has been told there is an ‘aspiration for more formalised regional control of transport’.

Further south, we see major sub-regional groups developing.  In the East Midlands we have the two great communities of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire planning a joint combined authority and in ‘England’s Economic Heartland’ of Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, we have an integrated total transport plan blossoming that, in its conception, actually pre-dates the DfT’s competition.

Some of this goes back to traditional English regionalism.  The North, and to a lesser extent the Midlands, have always been comfortable seeing themselves as individual cultural entities, while some even still see Cornwall, another beneficiary of recent devolution, as a country in itself.  In the south, where demarcation is more of an economic issue, sub-regional transport planning may be more practical.  The capital of course, effectively a region in itself, already has the might of Transport for London working for it…”

Poor old South.  The devil’s in the demarcation, isn’t it?  Boundaries may be fuzzy but we know where the North and the Midlands are.  We might even be able to point out East Anglia, another traditional entity but now one sadly subsumed into the ‘East of England’ Prescott zone, where it rubs shoulders with north London.  But the South?  And the West?  Here it gets confused.

In 1919 Professor C.B. Fawcett published a famous, not to say infamous, work entitled Provinces of England: A Study of Some Geographical Aspects of Devolution.  It included a map of 12 provinces, defined by physical features and ignoring county boundaries.  The only nod to history was the re-use of certain names as labels of convenience.  Cornwall and Devon were combined as the ‘Devon Province’.  The ‘Wessex Province’ comprised no more than the Solent basin.  In between was an area stretching from the Wye valley to the English Channel, grouped as the ‘Bristol Province’.  Fawcett explained its name as follows:

“Round Bristol the popular regional name has been ‘West of England’ or ‘West Country’.  But our Bristol Province has no better claim to the name ‘West of England’ than the West Midland Province has, and a less claim than could be made on behalf of Devon; while the term ‘West Country’ has different local meanings from north to south of England – in Durham and Northumberland it refers to Cumberland and Westmorland.”

Generations of the more materialist regionalists have praised the prof for his objectivity and lack of sentiment.  Most fail to comment on the fact that in 1942 Fawcett revised his map, now with 11 provinces, several minor and some major boundary changes, plus a couple of name changes while he was about it.  Surely unassailable objective reality ought not to be that malleable?

Cultural geography is about people and the place they call home.  It picks up where physical geography leaves off and it’s what’s rightly central to any discussion about English regionalism from below.  It’s because that voice from below is so often suppressed that we have this difficulty with demarcation down south.  It’s why we’re assured that it’s absolutely all about economics, and the functional parameters of accommodating and responding to growth, and not at all about culture.

Is Cornwall part of the ‘West Country’?  For a Cornishman, the west starts at Truro and carries on to the Isles of Scilly.  Cornwall has the Cornish Riviera.  Devon has the English Riviera.  You might think the penny of national separation would have dropped by now.  So if England’s West Country extends no further west than the Tamar, how far east does it go?  According to a recent study of regional accents by YouGov, no further than Somerset.  Not even as far as Brisawl, me lover.

The ‘West Country’ is a slippery term because it’s defined by those living to the east of it.  It’s what’s down west from London and as London’s sphere of influence grows so the West Country shrinks.  Between the wars it was still possible to describe Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset as the ‘Middle West’ (the reference is from Lovely Britain, edited by Mais and Stephenson), somewhere too far west to be the Home Counties and not west enough to be the real West Country.

Wessex today is split west-east – between the ‘South West’ and ‘South East’ Prescott zones – but another line would be north-west / south-east.  Even in the days of our independence we had Wessex west of Selwood and Wessex east of Selwood, the diocese of Sherborne and the diocese of Winchester.  As with the Highland / Lowland line in Scotland, our geography has shaped our history, creating divisions for others to exploit if they will.  Whereas a self-governing region could work to strengthen the lines of communication that bind us together, the priorities of the London regime for centuries have been to follow the lines of least resistance, the tentacles that reach into deepest Wessex.  There’s the Bath Road, the Kennet & Avon Canal, the Great Western Railway and the M4 going to the west; the Portsmouth Road, the London & South Western Railway and the M3 going to the south.  Or so it’s presented.  The reality is that of travel in the opposite direction, for these are not primarily the bonds of a resilient and self-confident region.  They’re the great veins along which our region’s tribute flows up to London, never to be seen again.

The demarcation problem in ‘the South’ is insoluble so long as London is allowed to dominate.  The North and the Midlands aspire to break free of London and they have the distance and the spirit to make it so whenever they choose.  As Surveyor’s editorial notes, the South may be tending to see its future solely in terms of sub-regions, satellites submissive to the will of the Great Wen, not defined, as others are, in resistance to it.  So long as that’s the case then it deserves the environmental and social catastrophe that’s heading towards it as London overspill eyes its fields.

It doesn’t have to be that way though.  Wessex has a flag, Wessex has a patron saint, Wessex has its own, much abused dialect.  We have as much right as any Mercian or Northumbrian to govern ourselves.  In so far as we’re on London’s doorstep, our culture in the front line facing the steamroller, we have a stronger and more urgent case than they do.

Our first priority, naturally, is to jettison the idea of the ‘West Country’, a concept far too flexible for its own good.  Wessex is an alternative name that retains the idea of being placed geographically to the west of London.  It does so without the notions of ineradicable inferiority, mental dumbness and infinite recession into peninsular twilight that have characterised a view of the ‘West Country’ handed down from above.  One busy lopping off our eastern shires one by one.

Time to stand, men of the west.  And then push back.

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.

Zombie Zones

Last Saturday, a ‘Northern Citizens’ Convention’ was held in the West Riding town of Huddersfield.  Those attending shared a determination that the new politics now saturating Scotland should not stop at the border.  Our Northumbrian friends have good reason to see themselves as having more in common – politically, economically and culturally – with Scotland than with London and the Home Counties.

Sadly, it only ever lasts an instant before the urge to align with Labour thinking rears up and real regionalism is silenced again.  One of the tweets that emerged afterwards proclaimed that "'English Parliament would be a disaster for the North (and south-west, Midlands...’ Need an England of the (9) regions”.  Yes, we’ve seen that figure before.  It’s the number of the Prescott beast, the number of the Government Office zones, originally set up by William Waldegrave in 1994 and since imposed on a cross-party basis as the authentic regions of England.

It is, of course, hugely disappointing to see these lumbering zombies rise from their graves, because a re-run of the Prescott experiment in identity-imposition will only have the same outcome as before.  If the Northumbrians wish to carve themselves up into two, three or even four regions, that’s their debate.  We most certainly are not happy being labelled as ‘Sou’westers’ and ‘Sou’easters’.

Nor, of course, are the Cornish.  John Hart, Leader of Devon County Council, appealed to them this month to join with Devon and Somerset in a new regional set-up with proper clout, Cornwall being, familiarly, ‘too small’ to go it alone.  It’s the London-centric imagination-failure of these folk not to grasp that Cornwall is larger than many independent states and if it needs clout its natural associates are Brittany, Wales and Ireland, not Devon, Somerset and Dorset.  Meanwhile, it doesn’t take much imagination to see that a three- or four-county ‘Westcountry’ region is, following exactly the fate of the ambulance service, just a stepping-stone to the seven-county ‘South West’ of the Waldegrave / Prescott nightmare.

Hart’s intervention echoed rumblings earlier in the year about rail franchising, with a Devonwall unit now being promoted in that context too, for implementation once the current franchises expire in 2019.  Border-blurring is also back on the agenda, with parts of Wessex likely to be forced to share an MP with Bude under re-drawn constituency boundaries.  Cornwall, having returned a full set of Tory MPs for the first time in the history of universal suffrage, has politely indicated that it would like to be given one hell of a beating.  Cameron & Co are only too happy to oblige.

The Tories are naturally loathsome, but only for what they are.  Labour are much worse because they pretend to be something different.  Both parties blow hot and cold on regionalism, while agreeing that the only regions that can ever exist are the bloodless shapes first drawn for civil defence purposes in 1938 (and with some striking resemblances to the districts of Cromwell's military dictatorship of 1655).  Indistinguishable as they are, neither party is worth anything but our deepest contempt.  We shall continue to work, with genuine allies across the Disunited Kingdom and abroad, for their eradication from our political life.  There is a third way, and together we are it.  It's small right now, but it's the only way that offers a well-considered future for our communities.

Only the Desperate

Today in 1320 the Scottish nobility issued the Declaration of Arbroath, with its ringing line about fighting not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

And the contemporary response is Frenchgate.  Nicola Sturgeon says she didn’t say it.  The French Ambassador says she didn’t hear it.  The French Consul-General says he didn’t report it.  And the irony is that if Sturgeon had said that Ed Miliband isn’t prime ministerial material, no-one, except possibly Miliband himself, would have any reason to disagree.

Miliband – the same goes for Cameron, his equal in competence – is one of the last generation of old-style Westminster politicians, unable to understand why the political world no longer revolves around them.  They push the buttons and pull the levers that used to deliver power, only to find that the wires have been cut.

The Big Two keep trying to convince us that this election is about which of them we’d prefer as PM.  It isn’t.  It’s not about them at all.  You can’t tell the difference, so it really doesn’t matter.  Either of them would be equally good or equally bad at heading up the next administration.  The important question is what kind of administration they will lead.  If you want the Blue Tories, vote Cameron.  If you want the Red Tories, vote Miliband.  If you want something else, vote for something else and see it in coalition, applying pressure where it hurts.  Never before have the smaller parties had logic so firmly on their side.  It’s so frighteningly true that a grand coalition of the Blues and the Reds still looks a definite possibility as the way to head off irreversible change for the better.  Proportional representation.  Real localism.  And real regionalism.

Sturgeon said that last week’s televised debate between seven of the party leaders illustrated that "two-party politics at Westminster is over".  A ripple of surprise ran through the commentariat that interesting things are being said outside the rigidly controlled London circle.  England wants to vote SNP/Plaid in its millions, and it can’t.  It’s so frustrating, isn’t it?  And all because the media have been so obsessed with Farage and his twilight band of empire-loyalists that they failed to spot where the future really lies, in a Europe not looking back to the 19th century but forward to the 21st.  Plaid Cymru have put out a splendid little poster bearing the slogan ‘Don’t vote Labour for your fathers’ sake; vote Plaid for your children’s’.

We would have liked to be there in Salford.  Our invitation was presumably lost in the post.  (So too was Mebyon Kernow’s; they haven’t even been invited to the BBC South West regional debate in Plymouth, despite fighting every seat in Cornwall.)  The Twittersphere may have been too busy swooning over Leanne Wood’s Welsh accent to notice her policies but Wessex has a lovely accent too, and lovely policies to match.  Next time, will the regionalists will be joining the nationalists on stage?  That depends on how fast the decentralist trend now accelerates.

Last week saw the launch of the Northern Party, a pan-Northumbrian movement that has grown out of the relaunched Campaign for the North.  Its claimed territory overlaps with those of Yorkshire First and the North East Party.  Is that good or bad?  Lack of agreement on areas and boundaries is surely bad if it slows down the debate, but not if it brings it to the fore.  If regionalists up north can afford the luxury of disagreement then they must be making very good progress indeed.  And, for this election at least, there will be no clashing candidacies.

The Northern Party’s top team includes Harold Elletson, former Conservative MP for Blackpool North.  Its registered Leader is Michael Dawson, nephew of Hilton Dawson, the former Labour MP for Lancaster & Wyre who leads the North East Party.  Yorkshire First is led by Richard Carter, ex-Labour, and its candidates at this election include a former FibDem MEP.  Across the political spectrum then, devolutionary aspirations are being unlocked.  Those who have devoted their political lives to the unresponsive London parties are emerging, blinking, into the light.  We watch, fascinated and vindicated, as northerners cast off time-wasting pressure groups buzzing around the London leaderships and make a bid for actual, unfettered control of what goes on in their areas.  If that’s a universal trend, we can look forward to a few defections in Wessex too.

What the desperate London parties simply cannot grasp is the extent to which their rule is increasingly hated as London takes more and more and gives less and less.  What we loathe above all is the way we’re expected to feel grateful that London thrives on our taxes, yet treats us as ignorant peasants who need to be told what to think, even about ourselves.  There are some real shocks to the system coming up.  The 7th of May marks the day they start, not end.

Here We Go Again

The regions are being rebuilt, even under the Coalition.  Last week a consultation began on the formation of a ‘combined authority’ for Durham, Northumberland and Tyne & Wear.  It will take over transport, economic development and regeneration powers from the seven member councils.  It’s almost the regional assembly all over again, and will be if the five unitary councils in the Tees Valley join later.  Similar combined authorities are being set up in other metropolitan areas, though none on this scale.

Within Wessex, councils in Devon and Somerset have pooled their economic development role and share a fire & rescue service.  There are rumours of forthcoming mergers in other departments too.  Sometimes this sort of co-operation can move us in the right direction, as in fire control services, which are now co-ordinated across most of southern and central Wessex, defying London’s divide-and-rule obsession with the ‘South West’ and the ‘South East’.  Such developments are essential to improve our region’s resilience in large-scale emergencies.  What is of great concern to us is when co-operation stops short of the Wessex level because London insists on a different agenda.

This seems to be the case with the ‘combined authorities’, all of which are part of a drive to create a ‘city-region’ scale of governance rather than a truly regional one.  Cities matter a lot to this government, as they did to the last.  The belief is that concentrating decisions and resources in cities, at the expense of the countryside, will produce some sort of economic miracle that will benefit everybody.  So we all need to doff our caps to those creative, entrepreneurial, interconnecting urbanites without whom we would be nothing.  Sounds familiar?  Yes, it’s the London view of the world turned into a general theory of economics.

Underpinned in policy terms by ‘city deals’.  Despite the faint echo of Roosevelt’s New Deal (which was much more wide-ranging), the real inspiration for the term is the Thatcherite obsession with contracts, with shaking hands on a mutually beneficial transaction.  The problem is that this isn’t a contract between equals.  What city deals are about is our cities signing-up to support for government policy, however distasteful, in return for getting back some of the money the London regime has taken from them in tax.

The original idea of putting cities centre-stage by means of elected mayors has been largely shot down by the electorate.  It was always going to give rise to questions about the scope of their mandate.  Giving elected mayors powers over hinterlands that have no say in their election was too undemocratic even for the London regime to defend.  City-regions – joint authorities for cities, suburbs and surrounding countryside – are Plan B.  They’ve been discussed among the elite for around 50 years and are now flavour of the month not only with the London regime but with the half-free Welsh Assembly, which wants similar structures for the Swansea and Cardiff/Newport travel-to-work areas.  That way the Assembly can continue to preside over a fragmented, colonial economy instead of tackling the real job of building a genuinely free and integrated one.  Municipal leaders in the English regions have exactly the same priority: keep it so local it hurts.  All because, in their experience, shaped by the capricious acts of the London regime, the regionalist alternative is a leap in the dark.

City-regions give the appearance of decentralisation without the reality.  Their powers are drawn up, not down.  They are small, manageable, and no threat at all to the London regime.  They can even be played off, very aggressively, against the aspirations of small nations and historic regions, contrasting a supposedly sophisticated global-cities-club identity with rooted territorial identities now to be judged passé.  They breed suspicion about the motives of neighbouring cities.  They erode traditional local government without replacing it with anything that has a compelling identity of its own.  They entrench the idea that life is urban-centred and that nothing larger than the travel-to-work area is real until the level of the sovereign UK is reached.  That’s why they’re flavour of the month.  And no-one should be fooled into thinking otherwise.

Anchoring the Future

Popular history has it that the Royal Navy was founded by King Ælfred the Great.  It’s not quite accurate – his father, King Æthelwulf also had a fleet of some sort – but the idea of England’s first sailor-king has maintained its powerful hold on the imagination.  So if naval shipbuilding in England began in Wessex it seems the wheel has come full circle with its ending at Portsmouth.

The phrase ‘end of an era’ is the body blow most feared by communities that depend upon a single sector.  Eras do end though, and Portsmouth’s loss, of 940 jobs, is not the first or the worst to be faced by a shipbuilding community.  In 1991, WR was represented at a meeting of the Campaign for the North, held at the King’s Manor in York, once home to the King’s Council in the North Parts, the Tudor and Stuart monarchs’ equivalent of a Government Office for the North.  CfN’s John Ellis reported that on Wearside some of the most modern shipyards in Europe were in the process of being demolished.  Attempts to rescue them had been frustrated by deliberate government policy: it had already been decided that the industry was to go and enterprise was therefore deemed futile.  It was rumoured that Sunderland was sacrificed to save jobs on Clydeside.  Building ships was what Sunderland did, and had done for over 600 years.  It had a lot in common with Portsmouth – the local papers were printed by the same firm, Portsmouth & Sunderland Newspapers Ltd – though Sunderland focused on civilian ships and Portsmouth built for the Navy.

Portsmouth and Sunderland share something else: a process of transformation driven by faceless organisations not accountable to those most directly affected.  Industries are destroyed, communities abandoned as ‘surplus labour’.  Governments lack the backbone to intervene early and positively in a farsighted way to make painful transitions less so.

Prioritising Clydeside over Portsmouth looks like a highly political move ahead of next year’s referendum, even though the business case is entirely sound.  Downing Street described the closure as being in the ‘national interest’, whatever that is supposed to mean (and it can mean many things).  Had it been Wessex agitating for independence, the calculations might not in fact have been any different but the politics would have had a sharper edge and Portsmouth might well have come away with a better deal already agreed.  Much of the mitigation is due to be signed-off only today.  Despite BAE's strategic review having been public knowledge for nearly two years, the publicity for the 'city deal' still presents its implications as an afterthought, which is what they appear to have been.  The staggered timing could perhaps be described as cruel but it is what local politicians wanted, not wanting Whitehall claiming all the credit for others' work.  That's inevitable in a top-down system.  Of course, it’s still possible that if Scotland does vote ‘Yes’ the priority could change again but Portsmouth shouldn’t hold its breath.

Positive intervention now to help the community of Portsmouth get back on its feet is the least we should expect from the London regime.  A government that did long-term planning would have started years ago.  It hardly comes as a surprise to ministers that naval shipbuilding capacity is going to be cut: they are the ones who place the orders and pay for the clear-out if none are forthcoming.  The whole of the defence contracting business is effectively an arm of government, dependent upon its largesse.

Wessex is massively dependent on the UK defence budget.  And that is not a good place to be.  The military is the largest employer in Wiltshire and has a big presence in Devon, Dorset, Bristol and Hampshire.  Its presence is morally inhibiting, in the sense that a necessary speaking-out against the UK’s aggressive foreign policy can seem disloyal to the military communities in our midst.  It’s financially and politically debilitating, in the sense that we are dependent not only on public sector cash raised UK-wide but on an aspect of expenditure that is likely to continue to shrink as the remains of the British Empire come apart, and even the homeland starts to fragment.

We’ve been here before, with the defence policy changes in 1956/7 that abandoned the role of coastal batteries, in place since Henry VIII, and cut back an aviation industry that had continued to prosper for over a decade after the end of the Second World War.  The result was a wave of mergers, takeovers and restructuring that consolidated that industry to such an extent that only three major groups survived to nationalisation in 1977.  The resulting single group is now BAE Systems, which also runs what’s left of naval shipbuilding.

There’s no doubt that Portsmouth will find a new role – relatively easily, given its location – and equally no doubt that it needs both responsible government support and the freedom from centralist controls to be able to get on with utilising its talents.  Meanwhile, all of Wessex should ponder where the axe will fall next and how prepared we are for the inevitable ending of the era of British world power.

The Quintarchy

“[The accepted code of behaviour in politics] may be stated as follows: Talk about problems. Never mention a solution. Solutions make people mad as hell... Never excite a minority. Therefore all solutions should be anodyne, even if public affairs need bold and imaginative solutions. Never tell the truth. The people are too weak to accept it, and they will only turn on you if you do.”
Derrick Hearne, The Joy of Freedom (1977)

We’ve tried as hard as we can to avoid discussing regional matters elsewhere in England and our aim generally is to continue to do so. We do get comments to the effect that we should set out the bigger picture into which Wessex fits. Often the comments come from Celtic nationalists, who see nothing wrong in the idea that their nations should steam ahead without waiting for England to make its mind up about its constitutional future. But still think it strange that Wessex should steam ahead of other English regions and not proceed at the pace of the slowest, perhaps even diverting its precious resources into getting them up to speed. We don’t apologise. That’s how it is. We don’t want some English Constitutional Convention to clip our Wyvern’s wings.

Yet the clamour continues, with all the wrong questions being asked. What’s the best way to decentralise power in England? Wrong question, because there’s no letting-go of the wider area’s overbearing demands. So what’s the best way to achieve autonomy for Wessex? Now that’s much more like it. England needs Wessex if it is to become a sane society organised at the human scale, one in which the negative influence of London, politically, economically and culturally, can at last be overcome. The only proper response from Wessex is therefore to assert itself and not be too bothered by the bigger picture, clinging concern for which is simply a sign that others just don’t get it. After all, a greater concern for the sum of the parts than for the parts themselves is precisely the doctrine we oppose.

That all said, the bigger picture is there. We want to see other regions asserting themselves too, because we benefit from the questions that raises about the bigger picture as seen from their perspective. We have worked closely with regionalist movements in the Midlands (Mercia) and the North (Northumbria) and from time to time said encouraging things to those in East Anglia who would join the effort. Which leaves just London and its inextricable hinterland. What would you call it? Londonia? It’s as good a suggestion as any, and trips off the tongue rather better than Greater Greater London. And if that’s the outcome, then there would be five.

Another question we get asked is why we don’t revive the Heptarchy. Winston Churchill remarked in 1954 that it might be a good thing for England to become a heptarchy again “but that is something I must leave to Anthony [Eden] to think over for the future.” Part of the answer to the question is that the Anglo-Saxons themselves abandoned the Heptarchy, linking the three smallest of its kingdoms to the Crown of Wessex. That is why so many historical atlases run the word ‘Wessex’ across to Thanet. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, however, is clear that sharing a king didn’t make Essaxons and Sussaxons into Wessaxons. The territories remained geographically distinct and kept their own laws and customs. It’s a misunderstanding we often battle against but Wessex really does stop at Hampshire.

Whatever lies to the east is certainly not Wessex. Its transport links run overwhelmingly towards London, and from a very different direction than those crossing Wessex heading east and north-east. Buckinghamshire too, has road, rail and canal links to London and relatively little that faces towards Oxfordshire. We don’t argue our boundaries on what made sense a thousand years ago. We argue that the pragmatic definition of Wessex is that region, out of all those sets of boundaries for which there is historical precedent, that also makes sense today, grouping historic shires around an industrial-era geography. Those who would rather insist that we pick up precisely at the point where Earl Harold left off in January 1066, even if we could know such a thing with certainty, have no sense of the broad appeal that is essential for our success.

For the same reason, it is possible that shires will find themselves on a different side of other regional boundaries than history might at first suggest – between East Anglia and Mercia, or Mercia and Northumbria. As we’ve often repeated, history is our inspiration, not our blueprint, and certainly not our straitjacket. We want to take our past with us into the future. That is why we will have no truck with the Prescott zones. But we are a party whose focus is on the future, not the past. We value our past for its ability to energise our future, a task at which the Prescott zones were always bound to fail. Wessex needs Wessex because the alternatives, in a resource-constrained world, are dire. The stakes are too high for arguing over angels on the head of a pin when we’ve a real-world region to build.

Our Friends in the North

For successful autonomist movements, politics is a spiral. There are achievements. There are also setbacks. But campaigners learn from them and when the debate begins again they have already moved it up to a higher level than it occupied before. We can see that process at work in all the Celtic nationalist movements. None is where it wants to be. But all are well beyond where they were 30 years ago.

It’s a course of action that we plan to follow. While we work away for a political breakthrough that may seem as if it will never come, or come too late to save Wessex from its ill-wishers, remember Alfred in Athelney. Remember too the little achievements that are the stuff of which history will one day be written. Take the Wyvern flag. The modern design dates from 1974 but until 1997 no-one, so far as we know, had taken the design off the page and used it to make a real flag. It had its first unfurling in public before Wells Cathedral that year to welcome the Keskerdh Kernow 500 marchers to Somerset’s diocesan co-capital. Over the past decade, it has gone viral, up flag-poles, onto merchandise and websites, and into the Flag Institute’s UK Flag Registry. This year the London regime had to acknowledge these facts and we are now free to fly it. One day it will fly over a Wessex Witan once more and if now is our Athelney, that will be our Ethandun.

So let’s keep moving up the spiral. Meanwhile, let’s also ponder the fate of another region that isn’t spiralling upwards but just going round in ever-decreasing circles. Poor old Northumbria. If England is a nation placed within the British nation, then Northumbria is as close as it gets to a nation placed within the English nation. Geographically, historically, ecclesiastically, linguistically, even gastronomically, it’s a land apart. Objectively, it often shares more with Scotland and Wales than with the ‘soft south’ of lowland England. Scottish radical Hugh MacDiarmid gave one of his poems the lines, ‘The official frontier has whiles been changed; Frae the Mersey to the Humber it sh’ud be’. So where’s its regionalist party been all these years?

It’s a sad story. In 1973 the Kilbrandon Commission on the Constitution reported and the following year Labour came to power with proposals for Scottish and Welsh devolution in its manifesto. Alarm bells began ringing among those who realised the extent to which the northern parts of England might lose out if powerful national assemblies were created. Some Old Labour types dug their heels in and opposed devolution for anyone. Others were more constructive. In 1975 a small group of radicals, led by a Liberal academic, Michael Steed, set up the Committee for Democratic Regional Government in the North of England and launched a magazine, Northern Democrat. Two years later, with money from the Joseph Rowntree Social Service Trust, they re-badged themselves as the Campaign for the North, with an office at Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire and a full-time Director, Paul Temperton.

With savvy use of the media, CfN’s profile rose and its membership, soon in the hundreds, included leading local politicians, MPs and prospective MPs, mostly from Labour and the Liberals, though Conservatives too saw the case for regional pride and even a measure of regional autonomy. In 1978 CfN published Up North!, sub-titled ‘how to unshackle a forgotten people’, 47 pages of facts, figures and arguments about what it described as “one of the most important regions not only of Britain but of Western Europe… suffering from the over-centralisation of government (and of everything else) in London”.

The London Left press sneered at the ‘special pleading’ (a term used for anything that challenges their self-assumed right to preside over the allocation of the common wealth) but they needn’t have bothered. Labour wasn’t that interested. Most responses to its discussion document, Devolution: the English Dimension, simply agreed there was no demand. Nobody was asked. Well, actually, they had been asked: the Kilbrandon Commission produced a mountain of evidence that the demand was indeed there, and at a level comparable with Scotland and Wales. The politicians just couldn’t be bothered to organise it.

In 1979 everything screeched to a halt. Devolution stalled in Scotland and Wales. No 10 was now Maggie’s den. And, for CfN, the chocolate money ran out too. Paul Temperton’s last task was to give himself the sack. CfN crawled along for years on a voluntary basis but never regained momentum. Cynics claimed the bigwigs had just used it to advance their careers and then let it flounder. When devolution was put back on the agenda by Blair and Prescott, no-one in the Labour establishment cared what CfN thought.

We did. We worked with CfN’s stalwarts throughout the lean 80s and 90s. One past Chairman, exiled to Somerset for work reasons, was WR election agent for the Woodspring seat in 1983. Another printed every issue of The Regionalist magazine at cost, on a home litho press, as well as many WR election leaflets. ‘Printed in Northumbria’ was the ultimate answer to those who accused us of wanting to set one part of the country against another. We’ve no patience with those who’d like WR to be an English inversion of Italy’s Northern League, wanting rid of the backward half of the country. There’s a common interest between those who want regenerated cities in Northumbria and protected countryside in Wessex. It’s the London regime that promotes as ‘the national interest’ NOT the sum of regional interests (as it should be) but the interests of a financial class with no loyalty to anywhere.

When Blair and Prescott set to work, they could have built on CfN’s foundations but chose not to. New Labour, like Frankenstein’s monster, didn’t have recognised antecedents. “No-one cares about the past,” was Blair’s view. So the wheel was re-invented as an act of pure will. Wholly new regions were defined, campaign groups fell into line behind them and Anglican bishops were prevailed upon to chair ‘constitutional conventions’ based on the successful Scottish model. No-one was allowed to point out that Scotland is a historic nation with centuries of relatively recent independence, while the administrative region of The North-East was created – by the Conservatives – out of nothing in 1994. In the end it mattered not a jot what the clerically-headed conventions did. They were just cheerleaders for a policy written in London. There was never any prospect that any of them might write an actual constitution for their pseudo-region. Prescott wasn’t listening to them. The rest of the Labour government wasn’t listening to Prescott. And in the 2004 referendum it became clear that no-one was listening to Labour’s laughable regional policy either.

Every so often, someone will put their head above the parapet and propose a regionalist renaissance up north. We’ve reported once or twice about these disjointed interventions. Last year saw the launch of a campaign group, the Hannah Mitchell Foundation. It sounds like CfN all over again, except that this time it seems to be for socialists only (though no member of the Labour Party is likely to be turned away). And today we learnt that the latest edition of Tribune carries a major article by former Blackpool Conservative MP (and spy) Harold Elletson calling for an elected regional government. It’s remarkable stuff alright. “A new ‘Northumbria’ is exactly what the North now needs,” he writes. “Rather than an English parliament or a reformed House of Lords, what is required is a pan-Northern trans-Pennine region with its own executive and assembly. Coupled with a radical restructuring of our current inflated and inadequate local government system, a Northern Assembly, or a new ‘Council of the North’, would not only re-engage people with the politics but also provide the basis for The North to become one of England’s most successful and prosperous regions.”

Does it deserve a round of applause? Or a slow hand-clap? We’ve heard this sort of thing too often from the pathological liars of the London parties ever to be fooled again. There are usually reckoned to be three levels of devolution – executive, legislative and judicial. But there’s a fourth, which is key to the whole. And that is political devolution, the break-up of the London party machine, so that devolved administrations really are free to set their own agenda. Otherwise, for all the trappings, a parliament or assembly is just a load of puppets on a string.

There are three ways to organise constitutional change. One is the territorial party, which is ideologically committed and treats all compromise with suspicion. Of all the nationalist movements, Ireland’s comes closest to the model but all have aspects of it. Then there is the cross-party consensus-building seen in the case of the Scottish Constitutional Convention, which the SNP boycotted but which paved the way for devolution to be established as Scotland’s settled will. The third approach is for the Labour Party to have an internal discussion and then seek to impose its solution on civil society. That was what happened in Wales, and the reaction was such that the referendum would have been lost but for the hard slog of Plaid Cymru’s workers on the ground.

Northumbria has already lost one referendum and it will lose the next one if it continues to regard devolution as Labour copyright. It’s a land of contrasts alright, culturally and politically. The great monastic sites of its Golden Age – Lindisfarne, Jarrow, Wearmouth, Hartlepool, Whitby, Lastingham – continue to dominate the landscape. Yet the material culture they produced is more likely to be found locked away in the libraries and museums of London (where nationalists, British and English, are content that it stays). Its tradition of protest against national policies that disadvantage the region – from the Pilgrimage of Grace to the Jarrow Crusade – is second to none. It was once among the most significant heavy industrial regions in Europe. Yet today its anger at being marginalised and de-industrialised is dissipated in supporting a vampire party that climbs over its prone form to national power. Northumbria will rise again only when Labour gets a well-deserved stake through the heart.