A Tale of Two Cities

Bristol City Council is still weathering the storm it brought down upon itself for not marking St George’s Day this year, having argued that the city is ‘too multicultural’ for such an event.  Lack of interest might have been a plausible excuse, but not that all cultures are valued except one.

Others do things differently.  Professor John Denham is Director of Winchester University’s Centre for English Identity and Politics.  Interviewed by Wessex Society for its magazine The Wessex Chronicle, he recalled the situation in Southampton during his time as a Labour MP there:

“I helped organise St George’s Day in Southampton and Southampton’s a very diverse city – so how do you have a St George’s Day which can involve everybody and yet is still an English festival?  The story we tell is that Southampton is a great English city, that’s been there throughout English history, and it’s always been made up of all the people who’ve lived there, which because it’s a port city has always been people from all over the world.  People can understand that you can be both English and very diverse, through your history and everybody that’s come together to make the city.  A couple of years ago I was working on this with a young Sikh woman councillor, born in Southampton, and we discovered that we both had had relatives in the British forces serving in the Far East during the Second World War.  That’s an example of how family and local histories can be inter-twined as part of a common story.”

The difference then is that Southampton projects the primacy of territory, locally and nationally – loyalty to place rather than to race – whereas Bristol appears scared of any continuity with its foundational past.  Curiously, when it comes to Wessex and the marking of St Ealdhelm’s Day, the roles are reversed.  Bristol is happy to fly the Wyvern outside the Council House (or ‘City Hall’, for the Anti-Mayor and his fellow deniers of distinctiveness); Southampton still sits in stony silence, unmoved by calls to fly.  Perhaps this will be the year Southampton sees sense?

Devo Min

There are quite a few bright spots for Wessex folk to cheer about in today’s budget – and not just a freeze on cider duty – but look beyond the headlines.  It’s good to see money for children’s A&E in Southampton, but isn’t the rest of the NHS on life support?  A “more resilient train line in the South West” (in other words, dealing with Dawlish) is backed, though this actually only extends to a feasibility study that’s currently stalled.  We mustn’t forget the “£20 million to help young families onto the housing ladder in the South West”, funded from the 3% stamp duty surcharge on additional properties.  Osborne says that’s a reward for good behaviour – “proof that when the South West votes blue, their voice is heard loud in Westminster” – but if we controlled our own resources and made our own decisions the cynical bribes wouldn’t be necessary.  With MPs in the South West still being urged to rebel over HS2, it seems they could do with more than a little regionalist help in turning up the volume.

We’ll be studying the financial detail before commenting further on those aspects that naturally fall within the Chancellor’s brief.  Meanwhile, we can comment at once on those that don’t but are there anyway.  ‘Devolution’, so called, can’t be taken seriously so long as it’s viewed as part of some national productivity campaign, no more than a footnote in the Government’s spending plans.  Constitutional change should be about democratic renewal, not the further empowerment of unaccountable business interests.  Are we happy too with the theft of our publicly funded schools in their entirety?  Theft it is, to nationalise the powers of a tier of government closer to the people, without its consent.  Where’s the referendum on that?

That’s why the devolution deals announced today are so pitiful.  If the local councils agree, there’ll be a Mayor for ‘Avon, Mk. II’, on top of the one Bristol already has, and despite the one Bath has just rejected.  Other parts of Wessex are still trying to line up their bids for more of the same.  In East Anglia, councils willing, there’ll be a Mayor too, heading the first region-wide elected administration in East Anglian history.  Like it or not, there won’t be a Mayor of Wessex.  Which is just as well.  We demand the open, transparent debate of a legislative assembly, like Wales or Scotland, not a behind-the-scenes fixer placed beyond accountability for a full four-year term.  The whole mayoral obsession is part of a failure to understand that London’s dominance over England is about the inter-regional distribution of political power, not the fact that it has a Boris and we don’t.

As with the North East referendum in 2004, what’s currently on offer may end up rejected locally as too little to bother with for the democratic and financial costs attached.  We’ve maintained a bold alternative that’s been rejected by all the London parties, essentially for the mortal sin of being ambitious in what we propose for Wessex.  All we need say in response is, where’s your vision then?  End the excuses, start rolling out REAL regional devolution, and do it now.

Ringing the Changes

A couple of weeks ago – before computer problems kept us from posting to you – Bournemouth found itself in the national news. It’s to become the first part of the UK to require landline users to phone the whole number, including the area code, for local calls, even to next door neighbours.

Why? Not because there are too many folk needing to be connected but because the proliferation of phone companies has led to increased pressure on the supply of numbers.

Changes like these must lead one to question whether competition always makes things better for the customer. Remember when, under a monopoly supplier, directory enquiries were free, because giving out numbers meant more calls would inevitably follow?

How much simpler life would be with just the one phone company to consider. It could even be locally owned and controlled, as the Portsmouth Corporation Telephone Department was until 1913. Hull’s was until 1999 and is still independent of BT. Trunk lines are an unavoidable add-on but the GPO Telephones had a regional structure until privatisation. There was even a South-Western region that extended to Southampton. Wessex Telecom calling?

Urban Harvesting

Much has already been written about the unrest that has struck Banbury, Bristol, Gloucester, Oxford, Reading, Southampton and other places since the weekend. Over a long, hot summer, many more words will appear, whether or not the events themselves recur. After the political debate, the weighty inquiry will ponder and pontificate. Recommendations will be insubstantial and – where not ignored altogether – will be incompetently implemented. British government, doing what it does best.

At the end of the story, nothing will have altered. When the IRA blew up the Baltic Exchange in the City of London in 1992, and Bishopsgate the following year, that altered everything. The chaps with the cash told Major to get it sorted and attitudes to Irish affairs saw their greatest transformation in 800 years. Money talks. Emptying JD Sports and Foot Locker can’t compete with that.

If the changes likely are all cosmetic, what brands of make-up exactly are we discussing? Two, mainly. The debate that has been sparked will be dominated by the stale shibboleths of Left and Right, united by a fanatical desire to exclude anyone different from having a say.

The Right starts with the advantage of being in office, albeit not necessarily in power. Its short-term focus will be the exemplary punishment of wrongdoing, an exercise that will sadly disappoint its supporters. Offenders will not be roasted alive on spits. Few will even be sent to prison, unless other criminals are released early to make room and keep within budget. Sentences that go beyond the norm will be challenged by the defence as irrational. Looters will laugh, last, longest and loudest.

The long-term focus of the Right will remain exactly the same as now. On more looting of its own. The looters on the streets have learned their callous inhumanity from 30 years of loadsamoney liberalism. Free enterprise? The enterprise has been audacious, certainly, and the goods free, to be sure. That no money changed hands is a detail that will detain only those who fail to hail the dawn of a new business model, the next ratcheting-up of the Hayekian dialectic, more efficient, less altruistic, with 50% fewer parties to the transaction.

At the time of writing, the riots are confined to England. The Celtic nations, small enough to acknowledge the human scale, where a sense of community endures and the Right has been largely rejected, have escaped. So too has the continent, where the social democratic model survives in still better shape. There has been an Arab Spring, but no sign yet of a European Summer.

The Left comes to the debate with a confession it will not make. That having held power for 13 of the past 14 years, the events it condemns are largely of its own making. It has created a human zoo, an act for which it must not be allowed to avoid responsibility. Four decades of hippy thinking – that time and resources are infinite and that there are no right answers – have fostered a culture of excusing and celebrating what must nowadays always be termed ‘deferred success’. An older, blunter Left would have called a failure a failure and learned its lesson. The newer, parasitical Left dares not solve problems or it would be out of its well-paid job. Institutional empathy has to take the place of solutions, because success would be the new failure. At least the greying student revolutionaries who now run the show are having to think for once before deciding who their heroes are.

Tonight it was reported that Manchester suffered badly yesterday because its police were simply overwhelmed. Their available strength had been diminished by lending officers to keep the peace on the streets of London. It was last night too that unrest spread in Wessex, where previously only Bristol was featured nationally as the scene of disorder. Now we should be concerned. A chief constable’s top priority should be the protection of the force’s own area, lending to others only when that objective has been secured. Every Wessex officer sent to London is one less to defend those at risk in our own towns and villages. It will be instructive to see data on burglaries in the Cotswolds, the Vale of Pewsey or the New Forest while police from the Thames Valley, Wiltshire and Hampshire forces are elsewhere. When trouble flared in Stokes Croft in Bristol earlier this year, in the notorious ‘Tesco’s riot’, foreign police, from south Wales, were brought over to enforce the law. Police from another Wessex force might have been better received but there’s no prospect of that if they’re busy helping Londoners lance their own festering boils.

The possibility of being shot is actually highest in the countryside, not in inner cities. Rural areas are where the guns are, especially the ones held legally. And they’re needed, given the likely police response time if there is any incident. Events in London will lead to the questioning of many longstanding assumptions. Will Cameron’s goal of privatising everything but the police and army survive, or will they in fact be the first victims of the Big Society, as communities decide that if the protection they have paid for is not around then they need to start making their own arrangements? Farmers have already started, following a 17% increase in the cost of agri-crime in just two years. Livestock rustling has doubled in six months. Thefts of quad bikes are a particular plague in Wessex, as are high value tractor thefts in areas close to motorways. Heating oil has also been targeted since the price rose last year and it isn’t even a luxury yet.

Left and Right share the perspective of Jacobin individualism, one which seeks the elimination or subjugation of all institutions intermediate between the central State and the citizen. Neither can tolerate, or even comprehend, the idea of community responsibility, for good or ill. But we do not have to abandon a thousand years of progress in other fields to see that a system the Saxons knew as frankpledge, in which everyone is accountable for their neighbours’ actions, and for any failure on their own part to bring them to justice, creates a self-policing society.

Early in the 19th century, liability for riot damage was imposed on the hundred in which the damage occurred. The hundred was responsible to the king for keeping the peace, so if it failed in its duty, and the troublemakers could not be traced, it was only fair that everyone had to pay the compensation. In 1886 that responsibility was transferred to the police and so rests today ultimately with Council Tax payers in the county or larger area for which a constabulary is constituted. It’s a much fairer idea than insurance, where the future burden of higher premiums falls on the victim and never touches the perpetrator even indirectly.

You would think so. Except that under Labour a consultation paper in 2003 proposed to abolish altogether the last trace of the collective liability for riot damage. Why? Because insurance was seen as a better way, one that did not divert resources from the police, who should not be punished for not doing their job effectively. Top cops, of course, are now wriggling for the review to be revived, claiming that “in a context of cuts the public will see little sense in a shrinking police fund being diverted to pay for criminal damage”.

The public might conceivably disagree. It is no criticism of the frontline copper to say that, for those at the top, payment by results should work both ways. When so much investment has been made in ‘policing by consent’, for apparently so little return where criminals don’t consent to be policed, chief constables and police authority chairmen cannot just shrug off the results as the unpredictable nature of social complexity.

A lot of that complexity has just undergone a rapid simplification. The world will not be same again. When the dust settles, communities will be demanding that the authorities earn their keep, or the communities will keep their taxes. And maybe build for themselves something that history tells us will work.

Power Power

It was back in the 70’s that we first argued for the revenues from Wessex mineral resources (including Dorset oil) to be re-invested in the development of alternative energy sources, and in long-term regional employment opportunities, with the ultimate aim of achieving basic regional self-sufficiency.

Today the oil is running out but the long-term perspective remains lacking. Government at every level is still talking about building roads to end congestion and expanding airports to underpin the mad project of economic globalisation. (Just why do we burn irreplaceable fuel to fly in food we could produce for ourselves?)

In place of a long-term perspective we have the politics of panic. For some in the debate, nothing else matters. The South West Green Party greatly prefers wind farms to local democracy. Yet there are so many huge questions going unanswered.

Supply-side policy rules. We tackle the drug dealers; we don’t ask why they have so many customers. We talk about a housing crisis because we won’t talk about rocketing and unsustainable population growth. And we look to renewable energy sources to avoid discussing where and why the demand for energy exists.

The Government’s own Energy White Paper in 2003 concluded that the cheapest, cleanest and safest way of addressing energy policy objectives is to use less energy. Yet reckless economic and population growth continues to outstrip the potential of technology to ameliorate the crisis. We think we’re awfully clever if we build three million new homes on ‘surplus’ farmland and ensure that each one has a solar panel on the roof. But you can’t eat solar panels. Nor is nuclear power the answer. Uranium is finite, just like coal, oil and gas.

This is not sustainable development. This is just another competition to re-arrange the deckchairs on the Titanic. Unfortunately, those who are deaf to the facts are those who are running the country.

Radio 4 this morning, in a programme entitled ‘Energising the West’, gushed for half an hour on the renewables revolution now underway in our region. It’s great, of course, that we have such resources of wind, wave, water, wood and waste. But from the metropolitan viewpoint, these are resources to be plundered for the common good, in other words, for their good. So we end up sacrificing Wessex beauty spots to wind farms just to keep the neon blazing in Piccadilly Circus. We shall not receive anything like the value extracted from our resources. And in the end our tarnished heritage will be cast aside, just like the steam age coalfields and land now blighted by radiation.

The Severn Barrage illustrates the thinking. There are ways to harness tidal power that don’t require destruction of a vast wetland area of international importance for wildlife. Friends of the Earth have the details. Yet in September Labour announced a feasibility study of a Severn Barrage – and nothing else. They are determined to suck out the very last watt of power, regardless of the environmental consequences. Because London demands it (and Labour loves prestige projects). Our view is that tidal lagoon and other alternative technologies are serious options with significant environmental and operational advantages. Additionally, because they wouldn’t turn the Bristol Channel into a lake, they would maintain the separation of Wales and Wessex. A barrage would promote social coalescence to the mutual disbenefit of our respective cultures. Nor would these options require either the closure of all ports upstream of a barrage or the fitting of a lock limiting the size of ship acceptable.

If the aim of national energy policy is the exploitation of Wessex for London’s benefit, a regional energy policy has the equally clear objective of self-sufficiency at the regional level. So how do we secure this?

We begin by auditing the resources we are neglecting. We have an east-west motorway, the M4. Should we not be installing photo-voltaics on the south-facing embankments? We produce around 25 kilogrammes of waste per household per week. Why do we landfill so much and not recover the maximum energy from it? Southampton City Council has made a name for itself in energy best practice. So why are all Wessex cities not performing at the same level?

These are questions that a regional government would be well placed to answer with enthusiasm. National government won’t get involved in the detail. Local government is often too limited by its horizons to do the vision thing. Regional government – a Wessex Parliament – would do the necessary marshalling. Is it better to have a few large energy-from-waste plants that can maximise thermal efficiency? Or more local ones, that minimise fuel transport distances and allow heat and power to be distributed through local networks?

The region is the level at which energy issues come together. That’s why we have regional electricity companies, even though, thanks to Thatcher, they’re now owned by the French and the Scots. It’s been sixty years since they were owned by Wessex folk.

Maybe it’s time to bring back the Wessex Electricity Company? Wouldn’t we rather be paying our bills to that than to a company 70% owned by the French State, whose nuclear power stations are arranged along the Normandy coast so that we’re the first victims of any fallout?

As for the Scots, they’re best known for laying claim to Shetland’s oil, which won’t do them much good in the longer term. But the corresponding issue for the 21st century is who owns the energy of the future. You read it here first. They’re Wessex’s renewables!

Britain’s Best Channels?

Proposed restructuring at the BBC could be a fantastic opportunity for the cultural community of Wessex. Alternatively, the opportunity could, as usual, be strangled at birth.

There is no denying that Wessex is poorly served by current arrangements. In contrast to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, there is no dedicated structure ensuring that our regional identity is reflected in BBC output. We are poorly served by national services, which are heavily London-focussed. We are equally poorly served by local services, which are fragmented, lacking the critical mass to develop programmes appropriate to an audience of regional scale. Wessex is partitioned between three BBC ‘regions’ – South, South-West and West – and there is no evidence of any will to co-operate in presenting themes of Wessex-wide importance. On the contrary, we found when launching The Case for Wessex at Wantage in 2003 that news coverage was restricted to BBC South, in whose area Wantage lies. Management decisions based upon the BBC’s territorial demarcation therefore ensured that the majority of Wessex was not informed of matters objectively of equal significance to all three ‘regions’. Highly localised fragmentation within England is accelerating, resulting in a loss of regional perspective, while in the other home nations identity is being consolidated. One only has to compare the continuity of the Welsh region with the break-up of the Western region (which pre-war had a station in Southampton) to see that this is so.

The quality of existing regional programming falls far short of what we could reasonably expect. Our culture – notably our dialect and literature but also history and music – lacks the serious treatment that its equivalents in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland receive. News programming is facile; there is no regional equivalent of Newsnight, able to question local and national politicians searchingly about the neglect of our region’s interests, such as in relation to housing, transport and the environment. It’s no defence to say that the public is largely bored with regional programming: such audience reaction simply proves the point about quality.

Last month, Sir Michael Lyons, Chairman of the BBC Trust told listeners to the Today programme that the BBC should aim to offer distinctiveness and to offer something to every audience. Does that include Wessex? And if not, why not? We are hungry for something of better quality than the purely local can provide, yet which is not submerged in national programming trying to appeal uniformly to an English or British audience. Even national programming appears unbalanced in some respects in favour of other regions. There is, for example, no television or radio soap opera set in Wessex, but a disproportionate number set ‘up north’. Are our lives really that uninteresting?

National coverage of cutbacks has bewailed the planned closure of London’s ‘iconic’ Television Centre. Good riddance to that. It’s just not acceptable that 74% of the BBC’s budget is spent in the capital. The proportion is declining, but nowhere near fast enough. A strategy to reduce property costs must include de-concentrating resources out of London to lower-cost cities. Cost-cutting must not be an excuse for running-down regional production centres; quite the opposite. The BBC must serve the whole of Britain, not just London, and this applies as much to its own organisation as to its output. Bristol, for example, has achieved an enviable reputation for its environmental programmes, one that could and should be developed further.

It’s puzzling that national news coverage relies so heavily on reporters sent out on location from London. Proper use should be made of reporters employed at the regional centres. This would not only be more cost-effective but would provide the opportunity to hear more regional accents. The Wessex accent must be the least well-aired on television; if so, this implies discrimination that ought to be challenged very firmly indeed.

All this assumes, however, that the BBC is actually capable of reforming itself. Viewers annoyed by the incessant self-advertising now filling space between programmes may prefer to regard it as in the final throes of institutional narcissism. Because its senior management is in fact accountable to no-one, any cutbacks now being made will fall on smaller, more creative fry. And that will be the way until accountability is injected.

The BBC is the classic quango, placed at arm’s length as a safeguard of political independence, yet dependent on State funding for its survival. The law says one thing, the money says another. And in between is management, largely left to its own instincts.

Maybe we should start again. A Wessex Broadcasting Corporation could be built to a very different design. Perhaps something like the National Trust, whose governance is a mixture of nomination by expert bodies and election by the membership. If anyone in power had ever seriously wanted an independent BBC, the Board of Governors would have been elected by the licence-payers, a ballot form coming with each licence renewal. The newly elected Board itself could then have set the next year’s licence fee. The challenge now is to get the publicly accountable public broadcaster we should have had all along.