Building: the Resistance

The resistance to building is building.  There’s now a national alliance, Community Voice on Planning.  Here’s what’s currently centre-screen on their home page:

“Please don’t forget our DAY OF ACTION on 12 APRIL.  The theme is ‘Listen to the People’s Voice on Planning’

This is a sample of some of the Events that we know of so far:

·        Rural Oxfordshire Action Rally (ROAR) is calling all action groups, parish councils and residents to join them as they present a united front opposed to the senseless concreting over of green fields surrounding our towns, villages and hamlets in the name of economic progress.  They held a rally in Witney on Saturday 24 January.  Their next rally will be in Wantage and is hosted by the Wantage and Grove Campaign Group.  It will take place on our day of Action 12 April.  So if you are in the neighbourhood please join them at 11am.

·        Save the Countryside has moved its annual walk from May to the shared date of 12th April.  They are organising a 2 hour walk with refreshments around the perimeter of the green belt land area proposed for an estate of 4800 houses on the NW of Cheltenham.

·        East Devon Alliance are holding a double funeral for Death of Democracy and Death of the Countryside with 2 coffins, speeches on national (NPPF) issues, District Council and Litany of contentious developments across the district, to be held in park outside District Council Offices at 3pm on Sunday 12 April.  Groups with placards from across the district, petition etc.”

How revealing that all three examples are in Wessex, truly the front line in saving England from the octopus.  A look through the list of CoVoP’s member organisations reveals many more gatherings of besieged and desperate local folk who can’t understand why localism doesn’t mean that locals get to decide.

Pressure groups are better than nothing, of course.  But who are they lobbying?  And why do they expect to be listened to?  Are they corporate donors to party funds?  Are they on the Minister’s Christmas card list?

Is it not all a waste of time, without a willingness to unseat the politicians responsible for the problem?  Nothing will change in Wessex until all of the London parties are destroyed at the polls.  We wish our countryside campaigners the very best of luck; we’re also ready to welcome them as members when, as sure as bricks follow corn, they lose the battle.

The Plantation of Wessex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Receiving The Water Bill

DEFRA – to some cynics the Department for Eliminating Farming and Rural Activity – is piloting a Bill through the Westminster Parliament to change how the water and sewerage industry is regulated.

It tells us that “privatisation of the water industry has been successful in attracting over £116 billion of investment… Without this investment, water companies would need to collect all of the money needed to upgrade the infrastructure from their customers, which would make bills around a third higher than they currently are.  Water companies would also have to collect money from customers in the year that they spend it on a ‘pay as you go’ basis, which would make bills more volatile from year to year.  The Government places a high priority on ensuring that the water sector continues to remain attractive to investors…  We need to encourage greater innovation and efficiencies alongside this investment, and to deliver it without undermining the reputation for stable regulation which attracts investors to the sector.”

What utter rubbish!  What economic illiteracy!  Ever wondered how Victorian councils funded all those mighty civil engineering works?  You know the ones – the reservoirs, the aqueducts and the pipelines – that bring water from the hills to the cities, and which now grease the sovereign wealth funds of assorted dictatorships.  They didn’t do it by putting the whole cost onto one year’s rates bill.  They did it through access to capital markets, just as the water companies do now.  They issued bonds secured on the rates for however many years ahead were needed to pay off the debt.  After that, the profits were their own, though some deliberately didn’t think in terms of maximising profits: cheap, clean water was deemed its own justification.  That was in the days when pluralism ruled, the days before totalitarian liberalism intervened to order that every alternative to naked market forces must be shut down.  Except for those clothed in a highly lucrative and stable regulatory regime.

So today it seems the key question is no longer what needs to be done to maximise community benefit.  The key question is how investors can be attracted by having the scent of helpless consumers’ money waved before their nostrils by a succession of tarts posing as governments.  Attracted indeed to take part in what has been aptly termed ‘the tollbooth economy’, one in which the essentials of life are parcelled out among private monopolies.  It’s one where investors are no longer willing to lend to public authorities for a fixed return if instead they can have their own direct slice of the action, and have the poodle politicians to deliver it to them.

Wessex has ten main water suppliers, which are, from the Tamar eastwards, as follows:

·        South West Water (based in Exeter) – once publicly owned, now part of Pennon Group plc

·        Wessex Water (Bath) – once publicly owned, now part of the Malaysian group YTL

·        Bristol Water (Bristol) – always privately owned, currently owned by Capstone Infrastructure (a Canadian investment trust), the Catalan group Agbar (itself partly French-owned) and the Japanese group Itochu

·        Severn Trent Water (Coventry) – once publicly owned, now a public limited company

·        Thames Water (Reading) – once publicly owned, now owned by the Australian-based consortium Kemble Water (some of the shares in which are owned by the governments of Abu Dhabi and China)

·        Sembcorp Bournemouth Water (Bournemouth) – always privately owned, currently part of the Singaporean group Sembcorp

·        Cholderton & District Water (Cholderton) – always privately owned by the Stephens family as part of the Cholderton Estate

·        Southern Water (Worthing) – once publicly owned, now owned by the investor and pension fund consortium Greensands Investments

·        Portsmouth Water (Havant) – always privately owned, now a private limited company

·        South East Water (Snodland) – always privately owned, currently owned by Australian and Canadian investment funds

Why is there more private ownership than there ever used to be, and why is water now such an attractive and secure investment, especially for foreign investors?  Because we have a gutless State that expects our loyalty yet will not exercise its duty to provide and protect the framework of community life.  Its duty now is to the owners of capital and no-one else.  Concerns about financial engineering at the heart of the water industry go unheeded.

This should come as no surprise, given that the British State is irrevocably captured by the City of London.  Every aspect of potential policy is judged by whether or not the City benefits.  The City’s trade is no longer in facts but in fictions.  Without laws and the power of force to compel obedience to them, its wealth, and therefore the standing of the whole British economy, is as fleeting as the blips on its computer screens.  One reason why we as a party support deep cuts in the military budget is because we fear that the military today have no real role in the defence of the realm but exist mainly to enforce the City’s writ at home and abroad.  Third World regimes that seek to repossess their common wealth for the benefit of their own folk will not be tolerated.  (Think Suez.  Think Mossadegh.)  It can’t be allowed, not least because that sort of thing might even encourage us to do the same.

There are some superficially good bits to the Water Bill that will increase the supply to Wessex with minimal effort.  It will make it easier for those with private water supplies – farmers and industrialists – to feed the surplus into the public supply.  It will also make it easier for water companies to trade bulk supplies across their boundaries.  Not exactly a national water grid – which isn’t really practical – but a poor man’s version perhaps.  It’s not the solution because it’s not addressing the real problem.  We’ve noted before that Wessex is running out of water, for domestic and for industrial consumption.  The chalklands are being sucked dry and that’s because nothing must stand in the way of London overspill housing.  That’s the real problem we aren’t allowed to mention.

These measures at the margins aren’t going to transform the industry because they won’t alter the fact that the distribution network is a natural monopoly.  No competitor is going to lay a whole new set of water mains.  As with electricity, gas, telecommunications and railways, somebody owns and operates the network while being forced by the regulator to allow others access to it for a fee.  Those others can be little more than trading and billing operations, with a foreign call centre attached.  They don’t actually get their hands dirty at all.

So if there’s no real competition in the provision of real services, what’s the benefit to the consumer?  There isn’t one: it’s a tollbooth economy.  Indeed, in the water industry there is what is called the ‘special merger regime’, which means that even if a merger offers clear cost advantages to the consumer it might still not be allowed, if the number of companies would fall below that needed for comparison purposes if the regulator is to have any idea of what is really going on.

Public provision would be cheaper, if only the democratic sector would allow itself to have access to capital.  To do that requires a model of State action that is now all but illegal under international law.  The laws are made by the glove puppets of private capital, with or without public consent.  In politics, you can have any colour, it seems, as long as it’s blue.  The ongoing theft of public assets is legal; the repossession of private ones therefore requires first a revolution of the mind.

So the answer is?  Solidarity.  Among decentralists.  It isn’t to fight private centralism with public centralism on the Soviet or Labour model.  It isn’t to sneer at nationalists in Scotland or Catalonia for not seeing the ‘big picture’ and to predict their imminent demise at the hands of global finance.  It’s to recognise how they fit into the big picture, like every other bit of the jigsaw of resistance.  It’s to support local and regional initiatives wherever they may be, and never to lift a finger in defence of the property claims of private corporations.  (They’ve had their chance and they’ve abused it shamelessly.)  It’s to demand not the dissolution of the EU for the benefit of the liberal imperialist nation-states but its transformation into a true Europe of the regions, where subsidiarity really does what it says on the tin.  There’s no shortage of solutions, and never has been, only a shortage of mainstream politicians willing to argue for them.

Scotland and Wales, along with the Crown Dependencies, are part of the seedbank of alternative economic models.  Some better than others, no doubt, but all different from the One Solution imposed throughout the English regions whether we like it or not.

Welsh Water, though initially privatised along with the rest, is now owned by a not-for-profit company.  Scottish Water has never been privatised, despite Gordon Brown’s attempts to put it on the sales list to fund his spending habit.  Scotland’s independence White Paper issues a call for Royal Mail in Scotland to be returned to public ownership.  Scotland’s canals have never left, while those in England & Wales now have.  The Coalition plans to privatise English Heritage, judging conservation to be no part of the core functions of government.  Alex Salmond and his colleagues could hardly be clearer that they won’t be following suit: “This Government does not measure the worth of culture and heritage solely in money – we value culture and heritage precisely because they embody our heart and soul, and our essence."  It’s a different world.  Everything in England that ought to be cherished is regarded instead as a resource to be exploited, preferably by foreign capital; England itself is viewed as nothing more than a base for economic and military aggression.

Why the difference?  It comes down to the fact that in the Celtic fringe the home State and the community are viewed as complementary, not as sworn enemies.  In Scotland’s governance, the contribution of civil society is welcomed as that of a critical friend.  In England’s governance, the contribution of civil society is welcomed as that of an abused domestic servant, carrying the burden of ‘the Big Society’ while the toffs trouser the cash that is meant to pay for the services our government used to provide.

The problem is that it isn’t ‘our’ government and never has been.  The mixed economy and the welfare state were a fleeting illusion in England because England isn’t English.  England is Norman.  Scotland’s constitutional bedrock is the sovereignty of the people.  England’s is that the Crown in Parliament can do no wrong.  It can be held to account only in accordance with concessions it has chosen to make.  Magna Carta doesn’t apply in Scotland because it was never needed there.  It is applauded in England only because the English are the most conquered subjects of all.

Hope lies in the regions, not in London.  The political and economic elites that govern the UK from London are completely interchangeable through the revolving door of jobs and directorships.  That system cannot be taken over.  Labour tried, and failed so miserably that it was Labour that was captured instead.  Increasingly, those in Scotland and Wales now recognise that.  We need to follow them into making our own decisions.  To be English, rather than simply Anglo-Norman, is not to dream of occupying the citadels of power but to deny them the legitimacy they crave.  It is to build the regional alternative, to link up with the technicians and the administrators, with those who are sick of the bankers and the lawyers, with all those who can envisage a better way.

Before nationalisation, the electricity industry included companies with some rather interesting names: the Cornwall Electric Power Company, the East Anglian Electric Supply Company and the Wessex Electricity Company.  In water, there was the Wessex Water Board, later subsumed into the Wessex Water Authority.  In telecommunications, Post Office Telephones had a South-Western Region that stretched as far east as Southampton.  In radio and television, the BBC’s West Region once did the same.  And we once had Wessex Trains.  Wessex has had so many opportunities to get it right, to form a joined-up, self-reliant region within a free England and a co-operative Europe at peace with itself and the world.  So many opportunities.  And every one of them thrown away to take up again the London yoke.  The message needs to be hammered home again and again: if you can’t join them (and you can’t, without betraying all around you), then beat them.

Come On, Wessex!

WR President Colin Bex and Secretary-General David Robins were in Cornwall on Saturday, sitting in on the Annual Conference of Mebyon Kernow.  The venue was what used to be New County Hall, Truro and is now Lys Kernow (‘the Court of Cornwall’).  The building’s directional signage is all bilingual, in English and an expanding language still widely imagined by the imperial media to be as dead as the dodo.  (And there were even genuinely Cornish pasties for lunch.) 

MK, now with four councillors on Cornwall Council, is entitled as a party group to borrow the Council Chamber for meetings.  With Cllr Dr Loveday Jenkin in the chair, and the semicircle opposite filled with rows of Cornish nationalists, the sight provided a real sense of déjà vu, more like sitting in on a session of the future legislative Cornish Assembly.  (The empty seats in the photo are those which in a Council meeting would be occupied by Cabinet members and chief officers.)

The conference decided party policy on a number of matters.  A carefully balanced, scientifically grounded position on badgers and bovine TB was agreed, opposing culling while also being supportive of the farming community as the search continues for a workable vaccine.  The point was made that shot badgers are not being tested to see if they really do have TB (only to confirm that they were humanely killed), also that since TB can be carried by other mammals, such as deer, the culling route ultimately implies eradicating most of our larger wildlife.  The London regime’s policy came across as doing something for the sake of being seen to be doing something, whether it works or not.  And better not to ask questions in case it spoils their script.

Transport is another area where MK’s policy is researched with an impressive thoroughness.  The conference called for a statutory Quality Bus/Rail Partnership under the 2008 Local Transport Act, using a council-owned ‘arms-length’ bus company to return Cornwall’s public transport to local control.  These powers are equally available to Wessex local authorities.  Why are they so timid in using them?  Why do so many assume that FirstGroup, Stagecoach and the like can just get away with whatever they please?

Two themes dominated the proceedings.  One was the failure of the London parties to build a fair society, all of them viewing austerity coupled with tax avoidance as the new normal.  Why, asked MK Leader Cllr Dick Cole, do Conservative and LibDem councillors, ordered to make cuts in local spending, out of all proportion to the cuts being made to central government’s vanity projects, not send the necessary signal to Westminster by resigning from their parties?  Are their political loyalties more important than their duty to the electorate?

The other dominant theme was the accelerating destruction of environmental and cultural heritage through housebuilding, driven by dodgy data that supposedly informs us that there is no alternative.  All three main London parties are part of the scam, which in a Cornish context is exposed in a well-researched polemic, The land’s end?  The great sale of Cornwall by Dr Bernard Deacon.  The author told conference that massive suburbanisation is now destroying the essence of a distinctive Cornwall.

The Cornish are calmly but firmly angry, and they have every right to be so.  So are many in Wessex.  We heard that some of the research now being quoted in Cornwall comes from rural Wiltshire.  The difference is that the Cornish are doing something about it.  There is apparently more grit and determination in the little finger that is Cornwall than in the whole of England.

What is the English response to the great social and environmental crisis of our time?  It is to place a childlike faith in centralism to make things better.  It is to join well-meaning organisations like the CPRE and be always at pains to be moderate and reasonable in writing to Ministers of the Crown.  Why?  Psychopaths don’t respond to reason and moderation.  And what will happen in 2015?  The English electorate will vote one or other of the psychopath parties into power for another five years of legalised tyranny.

Celtic nationalists live under oppression.  They know the enemy well.  The English, in contrast, are not one folk but two part-folks.  There is the arrogant Englishness of the ruling elite, Norman to the core, especially the Labour bits of it (since if you ape your masters’ subtleties, the result will always come out as a clumsy parody).  And then there is the deferential Englishness of those ruled, the ones who won’t question the orders from London because, well, it’s ‘our’ government, isn’t it, so they must know best, right?

Wrong.  Wessex Regionalists are part of a truly revolutionary movement, one that wishes to see the world turned not upside down but the right way up, with sovereignty to the parishes in an England that governs itself on a human scale.  One thing the Celtic countries have to their advantage is a manageable territory that can be understood and loved.  England is a land of 32 million acres, with a population of 57 million.  To drive from one end to the other takes a whole exhausting day.  A human-scale England has to be a regionalised England.  Otherwise it will remain what it has been since 1066, one fully comprehensible and directable only from above by its haughty rulers.

To get to a human-scale England will take much action by many individuals.  There will be those who occupy green fields designated for destruction by democracy-overturning Planning Inspectors, and who suffer the blows of the police and private thugs sent there to uphold developers’ ‘property rights’.  There will be those who scale the offices of hated agencies and corporations to unfurl the Wyvern flag of freedom.  There will be those who stand in elections to oust the Tory, LibDibDib and ‘Labour’ representatives complicit in the destruction of one of the most beautiful and historic lands on the planet, a part of the common treasury of all humanity, born or yet to be born.

Or maybe there will be none of this.  Maybe we will just stand back and spend our time sneering at Celtic neighbours who have got life right.  Maybe we will just go quietly into the twilight.  Being English.  Not wanting to make a fuss lest we appear impolite.

Wallace versus Wonga?

The Anglican Bishop of Portsmouth, speaking on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday, warned of the social consequences of ending naval shipbuilding in the city, including that jobless families could turn to loan sharks as the lenders of last resort.  Cue Labour’s latest, greatest initiative.

And what an odd policy announcement it was: Ed Miliband commits a future Labour government to ban the advertising of payday loans on children’s television.  Socialism in our time!  What will the Daily Mail say?

Since the Thatcherite takeover of Labour in 1994 there have been nearly 20 years of pretend politics, in which the Left and Right of the new consensus argue over minutiae rather than each offering a radically different prospectus.  The Right, as Thatcher’s true heirs, believe the State to have a wholly negative role in domestic politics and wish it rolled back.  The Left, as Little Miss Echo, believe the State to have a wholly negative role in domestic politics and wish it rolled forward.  The New Labour analysis is always that there is a lack of regulation.  Its response is to look around for something to ban.  Always a symptom, never a cause; Labour doesn’t do causes now.

Neither side can grasp the positive potential of the community-benefit State in tackling the roots of a dysfunctional economic system through redistributing the power and the wealth currently hoarded by the London elite.

George Monbiot, writing for The Guardian (a London newspaper) this week, gave a damning account of the corporate takeover of what is supposed to be the public’s power.  Lamenting that the main parties are all complicit, he lists the last remaining bright spots in a darkening universe: the Green Party, Plaid Cymru and a few ageing Labour backbenchers.

The Labour backbenchers are not obvious allies.  They are, as he says, ageing, and, we would add, clearly committed to that brand of socialism that distrusts the masses, especially the masses organised in geographical communities.  They would rather fight centralism with centralism.  The Greens and the Blaid have a rather different outlook.  It’s one that we equally embrace.  So too do Mebyon Kernow, at whose 2013 Conference this weekend we hope to be represented.  So had George dug a little deeper he could have nearly doubled his list of the good guys.

What is remarkable about the list as revised is its decentralist character.  Even the most (relatively) centralist party on this new list, the Green Party of England & Wales, is not organised on the basis of the UK, or even Great Britain.  The movement for communities and against corporations is structured not on the basis of the politics that exists but the politics that is sought.  It recognises that the UK and the Labour Party alike are gutted shells, held together by history but containing nothing of future relevance.  The alternative is taking shape outside.  Miliband’s gimmick of a policy, protecting the poor from temptation instead of tackling those who have made them poor, makes a grand epitaph for a party and a system corrupted beyond redemption.

Needling Doubts

News reaches us that Occupy Bristol are finally departing from College Green, after weeks of treating PUBLIC open space as somewhere to set up their own Third World shanty town, having first failed to find anywhere more relevant to squat. Surprise, surprise, there are syringes all over the place. It seems that those who wanted to sort out the world couldn’t even sort themselves out.

The Occupy movement have been exposed as a disgraceful disappointment to reformers everywhere, setting back necessary changes by at least a generation, just as the ‘establishment’ planned all along, no doubt with the aid of police insiders. Any fool can be ‘anti’ capitalist, or claim to speak in the place of the millions who actually voted FOR the status quo. It takes brains to articulate a viable alternative and WORK for it consistently. All the ideas needed already exist. We’ve been accumulating them and arguing for them for over 40 years. We’ve even been willing to share them with Occupy folk who will listen.

Are they interested? In building a political party, one of a network of regional movements committed to radical transformation? No. In growing a new, sustainable economy to spearhead transition to a world free from London dominance? No. In rediscovering and revitalising our own unique culture, through living life in a land of which we can all be proud? No. So guess who’s laughing all the way to the bank.

Crooks In Command

The Western Daily Press leads today with a story about an open letter from wildlife groups in Wessex and Cornwall “incredulous” about the Coalition’s “stunning disregard” for the natural environment, citing the Chancellor’s recent description of it as a “ridiculous” barrier to economic growth.

Tony Richardson of the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) responded robustly that “We are keenly aware that more than any other region we trade on the quality of this environment. Far from being a barrier, it is difficult to see how economic recovery can be achieved here without safeguarding the very thing that makes the region attractive to visitors and a good place to do business.” Then he spoilt it all, by continuing, “We are not anti-development but we have to proceed with wisdom – with careful planning, under the requirements of the regulations, development can work for both wildlife and the economy.”

What’s wrong with that? Where do we begin!

First of all, we have NO sympathy for green groups that treat Westminster politicians with any respect whatsoever. We appeal to them to join the Party and work for the eradication of the whole top-down Westminster system that allows Osborne and his kind any say in the first place. Stop the fawning, and start the resistance!

Secondly, why, oh why, do seemingly intelligent folk insist on making their continuing ritual obeisance to Mammon? ‘Of course, we’re not against growth, as such, just…’ No? Well, we certainly are. Living within environmental limits is either meaningless waffle while our planet burns or it implies a cap on development. Now.

A third point is illustrated by another story from the WDP today: a vision from a group of “influential business leaders” calling themselves The Initiative. (Or is it The Matrix? Something like that.) Their blueprint for Bristol in 2050 calls for a population increase of 500,000 and vast urban sprawl that would swallow up Bath and much of the Green Belt. The RSPB simply have no idea of what they’re up against. Folk like The Initiative care about nothing but the destruction of the environment to advance their own private wealth. There are a lot of them about and they aren’t the least bit interested in what the RSPB think.

From the same WDP page comes news that new powers could be devolved to cities like Bristol – but only if they vote for an elected mayor first. Bribery used to be the word for that and we used to have laws against it. We live in an increasingly closed, post-democratic world where “business leaders” are treated like gods, where local democracy is restructured to give them exclusive control of the common wealth and where national democracy, such as it is, lives or dies at the whim of rating agencies whose own competence is pitiful.

One of the silliest questions that can be asked about our policies is, ‘Are you pro-business, or not?’ The answer all depends on what sort of business it is. It’s very important to distinguish between good businesses and the rest. There are businesses playing their part in the transition to a sustainable society, businesses finding new ways to reduce resource use in a world where all that has sustained us in the past will be shrinking. The best businesses are those seeking to make themselves smaller, by doing more with less and expanding leisure time. You could call it economic anti-growth. But ranged against them there’s also the dark side: the businesses who don’t realise that ‘business as usual’ is over. Until they learn that it is, they’ll go on making millions miserable by their contempt for the environment and our quality of life. They may not be criminals as the law stands. But those who make morally crooked choices do not deserve to be excused justice in an appropriate form. We’ll be fighting every inch of the way to ensure they get it.