Choosing to be Beggars

Last week, an environmental coalition – Butterfly Conservation, the League Against Cruel Sports, the Mammal Society, the Ramblers, the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts – held a ‘Rally for Nature’ at the Palace of Westminster.  Why?  To lobby MPs ahead of the next election, reminding them of how important nature is.

MPs need reminding.  Because across Wessex, wildlife is under siege.  In Alton, for example, there’s currently a campaign to save its wildflower meadows from housebuilders.  This area is a beautiful example of Hampshire countryside and a haven for butterflies.  Spearheading development at Alton is the Homes & Communities Agency, a central government quango.  Yes, it’s our own taxes that are paying for our destruction.

Any campaign against imposed development has our support.  Wessex is, for us, a community of communities, every one of which must be truly free to decide its own future, without interference from those in London who think they know best. 

But how effective are these isolated actions?  The rallies.  The petitions.  The implorings?  Not very.  Look at Winchester.  At Twyford Down, the Department of Transport carved the M3 through one of the most heavily ‘protected’ landscapes in England.  Nearby, the battle for Barton Farm was lost, due to the winning combination of Winchester College as landowner, a dogged developer, and a government that spectacularly failed to deliver on localism.

The system can be beaten.  Occasionally, a developer goes away empty-handed.  But such cases are all too rare.  They serve mainly as ammunition for those who claim that the system works and that it can be beaten, with reasoned argument, and that therefore there’s no cause to change it.  Most folk don’t engage with the system until it impinges on them, and so they fail to see the bigger picture, the campaigners in neighbouring shires facing the same developers, the same arguments, the same strategies aimed at defeating them.  They place their faith in non-party pressure groups like County Wildlife Trusts or the Campaign to Protect Rural England.  More hardened campaigners refer to them as the ‘fluffies’, those who are simply too nice to win.

They really are their own worst enemies.  They lose because even when they do think politically they do not act politically.  Development is being imposed on Wessex by a Tory/FibDem coalition.  So what does Wessex do?  It votes Tory or FibDem.  Alton has a Tory MP (with 57% of the vote).  Its district council, East Hampshire, is 100% Tory/FibDem.  Hampshire County Council is 79% Tory/FibDem.  You get the lies you voted for.  These are folk from whom you cannot expect anything better.  And you chose them to represent your views.  Do they not represent your views?  Then why do you keep voting for them?

How do they get away with it?  ALL London-party politicians play pass-the-parcel.  MPs will insist that planning decisions are for local councils to make and nothing to do with them.  But councillors will point out that as decisions can be overturned by Whitehall they are never truly masters in their own house.  Some of them undoubtedly enjoy putting the blame on the faceless mandarins, knowing that voting loyalties are too tribal for this to make any difference at all come polling day.

Because who would you vote for if the Tories and FibDems disgust you?  The argument goes that there’s only one realistic alternative – the Labour bogeyman – and that ‘socialist’ Labour would be so much worse.  That’s widely believed because it happens to be widely true.  (Except for the socialism, transformed long ago into the petty spitefulness of political correctness, which, being obsessed with individual reward and punishment, is everything but social.)  Labour are the party of Big Growth.  But no more so than the other London parties.  Labour are worse because, as an urban party, they aren’t shy about destroying the countryside.  For them, protecting countryside is the hobby of the well-heeled who want to keep house prices up.

Maybe, but the butterflies have committed no crime.  Those who defend them may well be sincere in believing that a better England is not the overcrowded concrete jungle it’s becoming.  The problem for the Tories and FibDems is that the outrage is bound to grow as ever-more-sensitive sites reach the top of the ‘to build on’ list.  That’s when a belief in the free market reaches revulsion point.  Labour meanwhile, accustomed to State intervention as a means to facilitate growth, not to reverse it, are left hopelessly unable to respond to that opportunity.  Grand analysis gives way to marginal differences.  Should we build more flats in villages?  Or convert old Dutch barns in the middle of nowhere?  Would using floodplains for housing be fine if we just raised defences?  What’s the cleverest way to undermine support for the Green Belt?

No wonder UKIP are rejoicing.  UKIP can expect to pick up votes from three sources.  There are the true believers, those who think that to be really cynical is to be really cool.  Then there are the protest votes, finding a home, any home, that gives vent to their anger and frustration.  Finally, there are those who are easily fooled into thinking that UKIP is them.  Those who believe, for example, that UKIP is an anti-immigration party when it has made clear that it’s nothing of the kind.  It’s pro-immigration, but on the UK’s own terms.

And so it goes: Third World immigrants might work for less than eastern Europeans.  Don’t mention the argument that filling a glut of vacancies by stripping developing countries of their most skilled workers is far from fraternal.  Or ask what it is that made those countries so relatively unattractive.  Above all, keep folk well-confused and focused on immigration – THEM – instead of on population, which is them AND us.  UKIP is yet another economically libertarian party, whose main gripe is that the EU, unlike little Britain, might just conceivably stand up for sovereignty and tell the globalists and the growth junkies where to go.

A vote for UKIP is not good, but neither is it bad.  In the long view, anything that breaks up the hereditary, class-based tribalism of British politics has to be a positive development.  The more fragmented the vote becomes, the less credible it will be to continue with first-past-the-post or with a media focus on just the ‘top three’.  Those who have left the Tories behind will have shown that it’s possible to move on.  And beyond UKIP, or maybe the Greens (enthusiasts for ‘green growth’, so hardly sound), lies what?  Territorial parties like ours have a vital role to play in the 21st century.  The long-term limitation of UKIP is that it isn’t actually interested in the territory of the UK, in the way that, for example, the nationalist parties are interested in the territory of Scotland, Wales or Cornwall.  For UKIP, the UK is just Airstrip One.  Any hint to the contrary in its 2010 manifesto need not be taken seriously, since its own leader condemned it as ‘drivel’.

Essentially, the smaller the territorial focus of politics, the better the chances of defeating Big Growth, because the closer the connection between those who make decisions and those who live with the consequences.  That might suggest localism rather than regionalism, let alone europeanism, but there’s no contradiction so long as subsidiarity is observed.  Wider solidarity can avoid one area being set against another for a third party’s benefit.  Regions, properly designed from below (not the Prescott zones imposed from above) can be a shield for local democracy, not its negation.

We want a self-governing Wessex because we want a completely different kind of politics, taking for granted changes like proportional representation to break the hold of the old parties here.  Instead of admiring Switzerland, with its self-governing cantons, citizen initiatives and binding referenda, why not imitate it?  What are we waiting for?  Why would we rather choose to be beggars before the lords and members of a despotic and self-obsessed Parliament, the guardians of an English democratic tradition that objective observers might judge to be no better than tyranny?  We should talk politics with our neighbours, because they are part of our ability to change whatever we choose, not with our MPs, who exist only to abuse the power we lend them.

In 1992, we issued a pamphlet entitled Your Region Needs You!  Its ever-more-relevant conclusion is as follows:

“Wessex is for its people West-Saxon or not, native or settler who cherish it for what it could be and should be.  But what of its future without regionalisation?  The answer is disaster! – The remedy in your hands…?”

Our Silent, Supine Cities

It’s been a good week’s viewing for fans of Wessex history.  On Monday the BBC ran a repeat of Michael Wood’s portrait of Alfred the Great, warming up for Neil Oliver on Tuesday, who wove a documentary about the king’s bones and their present whereabouts.  If it was supposed to be an exclusive, it didn’t work.  The press ran the story over the weekend, so it was no longer a surprise to learn that a single surviving bone excavated at Winchester’s Hyde Abbey is either Alfred’s or his son’s.  At most one bone of William the Bastard is thought to survive, in Caen, so it’s disappointing to think that Alfred has only a 50:50 chance of matching that.

There’s a slight possibility that other, scattered bones still lie beneath the site of Hyde Abbey but who will fund another excavation?  Wintonians down the centuries have had something of a love-hate relationship with their heritage, as the mixed fortunes of Hyde demonstrate.

From time to time, the city inspires a generation to really care about its past, present and future, and then slips back into its philistine ways.  We received news this month that the local civic society, the Winchester Residents’ Association, has wound up after 40 years.  Two of its stalwarts, Chris Webb and the late Alan Weeks, will be familiar to WR members as defenders not only of the city’s identity but of that of the wider Wessex region.  We can see in the demise of the Residents’ Association a metaphor for what is happening right across Wessex as a caring generation finds that there is no-one else to whom it can hand on the torch.  Thatcherism has bred a fractured and dis-spirited nation, of utilitarians contemptuous of the joy of learning and of cynics unable to believe that voting or campaigning can prevail against them.

An obituary for Alan Weeks in the Hampshire Chronicle in 2010 commented that his indefatigable campaigning had been based on a strong sense of right and wrong:  “He had a very simple view that people in Winchester must understand how important Winchester is.  He could not understand people who didn’t.”

There is no doubt that Winchester is special.  Nor is there any doubt that the threats to what makes it special have come thick and fast – motorways, urban sprawl, central area redevelopment – and while campaigners can point to some marvellous victories there have also been crushing defeats.  The water meadows at St Cross were saved from the road builders but Twyford Down was not.  It stands as a scar upon the Wessex landscape that will easily outlive humanity.  Housebuilders have deep pockets, deep enough to hire the best lawyers to take on even the London regime and over-turn its decisions if they go the ‘wrong’ way.  Barton Farm, so long the subject of citizens’ protests, is set to become a carpet of yuppy-box homes for those hurrying for the early train and another day doing despicable things in the City.  (Why do Londoners want to live in Wessex towns and cities?  Is it for any other reason than that they’ve made such an almighty mess of their own?)

If concerned residents no longer gather in their associations to express their faith in democracy, is it because local politicians have at last got the message and mended their ways?  Have the associations rendered themselves unnecessary?  Absolutely not.  Most historic cities of Winchester’s scale and vulnerability – Bath, Cambridge, Durham, Oxford, York – are protected (at least in theory) by Green Belt.  Not Winchester.  Residents still fear that the green backdrop to the city will disappear beneath housing within their lifetimes.  The city and county councils have their orders from London to build, build, build and the carrots and sticks are such that the orders must be obeyed.  Local opinion is to be fobbed off, not followed.

Local politics is the usual Tory/LibDem contest that is no real contest at all.  (The two parties are evenly matched on the current city council.)  Labour won the Parliamentary seat once, in 1945, to universal surprise (though having Eastleigh’s industrial workers helped in those days), losing it again five years later.  Wintonians have had three opportunities to elect a Wessex Regionalist MP and taken none.  Decades of conditioning have persuaded many that they are part of a London-leaning ‘South East’ rather than of Wessex.  Occasionally, conversations will start up in the city’s pubs about how Wessex could do with Home Rule.  Great idea.  Who’s going to organise it?  Oh, someone else.  Someone less busy.

And in the absence of Home Rule, Winchester is slowly ground away, made uniform with every other dormitory town within reasonable distance of London Waterloo.  Its fields are replaced by houses; its historic buildings are replaced by flats; its identity, instead of being cherished, is subverted for profit.

Winchester’s bus station, a city landmark for generations, is due to close to make way for the retail-led Silver Hill redevelopment.  The developers promised a replacement.  Now the economics suggests that it will be deleted from the scheme in order to preserve the latter’s viability.  We can see in Salisbury how that works.  Salisbury’s bus station closed this month, the buses were evicted and passengers now queue at bus shelters set up in the mediæval streets.  On pavements too narrow for the flow of pedestrians to pass comfortably behind them.

The fate of the bus stations is a sign of the times.  Privatisation of profits, including those from redevelopment.  Socialisation of losses, and of the expense involved in providing somewhere for the buses to park.  Andover and Bournemouth are determined to build new bus stations.  Clearly, there are still some who care, but how to motivate the rest?

The decline of collective responsibility happens because we accept a model of economics and politics that decrees that the community doesn’t matter.  That there is no such thing as society.  That government must help everyone to achieve their ambitions for their own lives, not those of others.  That government, be it in the form of bigger unitary councils, elected mayors, or straightforward regulatory capture through ‘partnerships’, exists to oil the wheels of commerce and certainly not to provide the context for civic virtue.  It’s tragic that Salisbury, Winchester and so many other places in Wessex are being ruined, often irreparably, but by our inaction we signal that it’s our choice.  And who in our individualistic, inward-looking world will dare argue against that?

If Enough Is Never Enough

“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best.”
Otto von Bismarck, 1867

Bismarck’s most famous quote is characteristically double-edged. Understood passively, it implies working within the constraints of the world as we find it. But to what end? Understood assertively, it implies redefining those limits, steadily moving the goalposts onto new territory. So that what was previously impossible becomes possible. And what was previously possible – for others – ceases to be so.

We live, increasingly, under a system of totalitarian liberalism, where democratic choices are assumed to be limited to superficialities, to whether Leader A appears to have more charisma than Leader B. Because nothing striking separates them on policy. The London parties fight for control of the centre ground when what is actually required is to roll up the centre ground and re-locate it. Lenin did that in 1917, not just for Russia but for the world. Thatcher did it in 1979. The scale of the challenges we face today demands no less a transformation. Do it now and we at least have some chance of avoiding the suffering they both relished imposing.

Last week’s news was dominated by population growth. We ought to be alarmed that human numbers are exploding but the BBC – what a vile organisation that’s become – was shamelessly biased in its coverage. Those for whom growth is an opportunity rather than a problem received significantly more prime airtime for their views. Once again we were assured that growth is good, that it will pay for our pensions and our long-term care. How thick do they think we are if they believe we won’t spot the flaws in their population Ponzi scheme?

With impeccable timing, last week also saw the publication of the latest issue of Population Matters Magazine, a periodical put out by the pressure group Population Matters. It certainly does matter, especially on the frontline of the battle against growth, here in Wessex. Norman Pasley writes of his own experience in Hampshire:

“Last year I remember a flurry of letters in the Hampshire Chronicle – mostly generated by members of the Winchester Population Matters local group – about the population pressure on Winchester’s primary school places and classrooms, and the controversy about taking cherished green spaces for more housing. 

In April this year, Jonathon Porritt gave a talk to 225 people in Winchester. Also in April I gave a talk to 120 members of U3A in Fareham called, ‘As we journey to 2050, do we need to look after the planet?’ The audience were on-side, the hour went well, and they asked lots of questions. Only 30 people took my hand-out (it seems you can’t inspire everyone!).” 

So concerned folk puzzle over what, if anything, they can do. Elect dozens of Wessex Regionalist MPs and thousands of Wessex Regionalist councillors. Every one of them unafraid to defy Westminster’s anti-Wessex laws because they understand the fundamental illegitimacy of top-down rule. That much ought to be obvious. But all the while the puzzling continues, so does the destruction. It rolls on because totalitarian liberalism insists that the locusts must go where they will. Green Belt is invaded. Villages double and triple in size. Roads slash the countryside. So much beauty. So much history. So much food security in an uncertain future. Lost, for what?

A false promise of prosperity from perpetual motion, fuelled by a system of debt-driven finance that inexorably ratchets up the damage. Blessed are the accountants, for they shall devour the earth.

A different approach isn’t difficult to define. Moving to a steady-state economy, tackling unemployment through shorter working hours, not through ever higher levels of socially useless activity that piles on more stress. Measuring success other than in monetary, GDP terms. Anti-globalisation and defence of the common wealth. A community-benefit State that does not shrink from ruthless punishment of those companies that put profit before people and place. Repudiation or rescheduling of debt wherever it is doing more harm than good. The inspirational books have all been written. Their prescriptions are well-known. Political debate manipulates them where it can and ignores them where it can’t.

Labour in 1997 and the Coalition in 2010 both came to power promising to rein-in the insaner plans for housebuilding that we have witnessed. Prescott promised to replace ‘predict-and-provide’ with ‘plan-monitor-and-manage’ but in no time he was back to ‘think of a number and double it’. Pickles promised localism, but then admitted that the only discretion devolved was how to accommodate growth, not whether to do so. (A case of ‘you pick the beauty spots to destroy, so we don’t have to shoulder the blame’.) We know, of course, that by 20th century standards housebuilding is currently at a rather low level (hurrah!), but the damage it does is cumulative and in the past there was at least an understandable reason: slum clearance and post-Blitz rehousing. Today we do have a choice but are failing to exercise it openly. It is being made for us by those who think they know best. No wonder there is such widespread despair at the failure of the London parties to articulate real local concerns honestly and consistently.

Breaking the pro-growth consensus requires a whole new level of campaigning. We are engaged with the intellectual debate, the ‘metapolitics’ that defines the centre ground. And, being a political party, we are engaged with the more rough-and-tumble world of demonstrations and elections. We need both, to sharpen the weapons of argument and to use them, to stand in the vanguard of a movement for change in Wessex.

Against us are ranged two camps. There are the boneheads who think that an ever-expanding population inhabiting a finite environment is an opportunity for innovation (if they’re LibDems), for profit (if they’re Tories) and for repression (if they’re Labourites), not a problem that an ecologically aware and freedom-loving society ought to confront before it reaches catastrophic proportions. And then there are the airheads who won’t even discuss the issue because it’s too difficult for them to cope with. The mentally cauterised who imagine that there has to be some racist sub-text behind population concerns (so how DO you raise them?) or that to complain about the loss of all that we value is only subjective after all, while their own selection of values has to be objective truth because they learnt it in first year sociology.

Simon Ross, writing in Population Matters Magazine, put it thus:

“Developmental and environmental groups, particularly, seem determined to ignore the ‘elephant in the room’… The Campaign to Protect Rural England’s charter to ‘save our countryside’ from development carefully avoids addressing England’s high population density and population growth. Such groups are one focus for our lobbying but we may have to wait some time for a change of heart.” 

It’s a nuanced assessment, but it ignores the gaping chasm of reality. Time is something we just don’t have.

Winners & Losers

Writers on Bristol, from the Rev. George Heath in the 18th century to Bryan Little in the 20th, have seen in it ‘the London of the West’, a city that would dearly love to outshine its larger rival but is not above copying its every move. So ‘a Boris for Bristol’ stands firmly in that tradition. This week Bristol got, not a Boris, nor a Ken, but a George. Its first executive Mayor is an Independent (and former Liberal councillor), George Ferguson, a flamboyant local architect with a real love for his city, a man who can at the very least be trusted not to use it as a mere stepping-stone to a safe Westminster seat.

Independents did well too in elections for Police & Crime Commissioner, taking four of the seven posts available in Wessex, a logical response to public fears over a policy whose aim appears to be to politicise the police. The Coalition has some apologising to do over the comedy of errors that these elections became. No proper explanation of the change, let alone a justification of something that emerged half-baked from the think-tanks and was waved into law with no real debate. Inadequate publicity from the candidates, denied their traditional right to a free mailshot. No real choice of visions, with all of them putting forward the same promises of greater efficiency and effectiveness. And almost a media blackout, with far more focus on a US presidential election in which the 51st state doesn’t get to vote than on police elections here in which we do. The BBC suggested that national publicity was poor because London wasn’t taking part, as its policing arrangements differ. Nice of the BBC to admit how poorly it serves most of the country.

Voters had three ways to get their own back. They could elect Independents. Which they did, on an unprecedented scale. They could spoil their ballot papers, using them to tell the powers-that-be what they thought. Which they did, on an unprecedented scale. They could boycott the poll. Which they did, on an unprecedented scale. The reaction from the political establishment, given a no-vote of no confidence, has been furious. All the usual over-the-top froth about ancestors dying to secure the right to vote. What comes to mind is Bertolt Brecht’s quip about the easiest solution being to dissolve the people and elect another. The fact is that voters don’t like being shepherded into the polling booths to play a scripted part they would never have chosen to write. Cameron’s pet project, like Prescott’s made-up regions, crashed and burned because folk were given what was thought to be good for them. They felt insulted by it and excluded from the process of shaping it. It wasn’t the wrong answer. It was the wrong stupid question. And there was no box on the ballot paper allowing anyone to say so.

Direct elections to the (now-abolished) police authorities might plausibly have captured the public mood better, if change was inevitable. At least that way, a variety of viewpoints, representing the wide variety of localities, could have been fed into police decision-making. Much hostility was directed at the idea that one person should hold all the power, one person upon whom decisive pressure could then be piled by those behind the scenes. It’s equally an argument against directly elected mayors and one sign of the growing reaction was Hartlepool’s vote on Thursday to abolish the post there and re-instate the traditional civic Mayor and government by committee. Stuart Drummond – H’Angus the Monkey – therefore goes down in history as not just Hartlepool’s first directly elected Mayor but also its last.

A chapter is closing. We are used to having things described in terms of private sector versus public sector; an alternative terminology might contrast the commercial sector and the democratic sector. For a generation, commercial values have been in the ascendant, seeping in to areas that are literally none of their business. Impatience with the slow, gentle process of consensus-building has seen democratic traditions rubbished and big, finance-friendly bosses installed to bully through ‘necessary’ changes. The credit crunch has forced a rethink, now that we know what’s at stake when power is handed to the representatives of commerce, against whom we are allowed no redress.

Democracy requires genuine choices to be available. Instead, we have three main parties all starry-eyed about ‘choice’, solely as it is defined commercially, in terms of buying and selling. The more choice the commercial sector is allowed to give us, the less choice we have to uphold other values. Planning is one obvious example. Although public consultation is an integral part of the planning process, the right answers cannot be given because only the wrong questions are asked. Where would you like development to go? Never the ‘upstream’ question, would you like development?

Last month, planning permission was granted to CALA Homes to build 2,000 houses at Barton Farm on the edge of Winchester. Barton Farm has been a huge local issue for over a decade, with development bitterly contested through political and judicial channels. In 2000 we took part, parading the Wyvern, in a well-attended march through the city centre to a rally at the Guildhall. Now Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has ruled in favour. He accepts that the scheme will harm the landscape, inconvenience existing residents and increase traffic and congestion on local roads. But none of this can prevail against the greed of housebuilders, whose cause he backs.

Decisions like this demonstrate the deep contempt the London regime has for the good folk of Wessex. Its aim is to obliterate us, culturally and environmentally, as obstacles to ‘progress’. And so long as we continue to vote for its candidates it will go on winning.

Horrific Outbreak of Democracy in Paris

The French Parliament appears to be on the brink of allowing mistakes in regional boundaries to be corrected by a vote in the départements directly concerned. The new law would remove the right of voters in the wider region to veto change – a right that, in effect, keeps folk locked in an administrative marriage to which they never consented.

It may come as a surprise to our readers that any right of referendum already exists in French regional law. We certainly don’t have it in England. As far as the London regime is concerned, we’re thick yokels who couldn’t punch our way out of a wet paper bag. Folk who wouldn’t know a credit default swap from a collateralised debt obligation, let alone be capable of defining our own identity.

So there’s no vote in prospect for Hampshire on whether it’s right for the historic capital city of Wessex to be in a different region from the majority of our shires. Nor in Cornwall on whether it’s right for a Celtic nation to be in an English region at all.

First Impressions

Colin Bex, WR Prospective Parliamentary Candidate, was out in Witney today testing the ground for a possible challenge to David Cameron. No final decision has been made on the choice of constituency to be fought but the Leader of the Opposition does make a very good target. Voters who've had enough of the Government's voodoo economics will be thinking twice about an alternative out to outdo it in nastiness.

We met at the Angel, a pleasant pub in the Market Square, chatting to locals about their discontents before we got down to the main business of the day. Down on the High Street, with myself waving the Wyvern flag to attract interest, Colin handed leaflets to passers-by and engaged with their reactions.

The idea of Wessex was clearly attractive, especially to older folk who feel robbed of history itself by the Blairite project of 'modern' Britain. Being lumped in for regional purposes with Kent - on the other side of London - was unpopular too. There was some puzzlement over boundaries from those whose idea of Wessex is shaped too sharply by Thomas Hardy but once the local background was explained all doubts were dispelled. Oxfordshire was where Wessex started, where its first capital is recorded and where the Wyvern itself first flew as the battle standard of our kings. The town of Witney owes its existence to the Bishops of Winchester, who built one of their 24 palaces there in the Middle Ages.

Older voters and first-timers alike welcomed the possibility of a WR candidate, whose presence would at the very least widen their choice and at best provide real colour to what was expected to be a generally drab election campaign. David Cameron was seen as pre-occupied with posturing at Prime Minister's Questions and far too busy to be an effective local representative with time for his constituents, their problems or their views. Life-long Labour voters promised 'never again' and grasped at the opportunity to back a fresh alternative. With its Leveller, Chartist and William Morris connections, the Witney constituency has a radical heritage second to none. The WR message of local self-determination and freedom from London diktat met with particularly strong approval from all sides.

Heavy rain after lunch forced a change of plan. The afternoon was spent in Chipping Norton and Burford collecting local information, such as town maps and bus timetables. If Witney is the chosen seat, Colin intends to campaign by public transport, speaking to voters on the move. And in stark contrast to David Cameron's token greenism, there won't be a chauffeur-driven car coming along behind.

Bonfire of the Inanities

Should we have a new archbishop? Not just a new archbishop of Canterbury, but a new archbishopric. Of Winchester.

Wales separated from Canterbury in 1920 and there is a similar demand for a separate Cornish Church today. So why not a separate Wessex Church? It’s not a new idea. Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester from 1129 to 1171, spent years agitating for Winchester to be the seat of a new, westward-facing province with himself at its head. As the North’s population shrinks and the South’s continues to burgeon, Canterbury has more to do and York less, so maybe it really is an idea whose time has (belatedly) come.

But whether you think it a good idea or not, it’s a matter for the Church and not for our Party. The formal separation of Church and State is one of the few great ambitions of 19th century radicalism still unfulfilled. The recent interjections of Rowan Williams – Labour’s appointee to run the State Church – have illustrated precisely why religion and politics need to be kept apart. It is not the case that ‘militant secularists’ would prevent the religious expressing their faith through their politics (though supposed ‘militant secularism’ is about as nonsensical as ‘militant human rights’). The point is that any political debate on moral principles must address them as such and not assume that faith can be used to short-circuit rational argument. Otherwise, liberal democracy is doomed. Saddest of all the reactions to Williams’ words are those that bray that Britain is a Christian country, as if the statistical fact of a Christian majority is basis enough for treating non-Christians as second-class citizens. Individuals have religious convictions; countries do not, unless the State is to be envisaged as an instrument for the oppression of the non-conforming.

Make no mistake. There is plenty of that going on under New Labour. Its fear of freedom is deep-seated, dating way back to the puritanism of the Commonwealth, when a despotic Parliament legislated to make sin a crime. Labour still struggles, unsuccessfully, to discern the difference between morality (‘oughts’, achieved by persuasion) and law (‘musts’, achieved by force).

Labour’s gag laws are numerous, increasing in number, and, to the extent that they create political martyrs, counter-productive. Abusing minorities is bad manners but in that context only violence and the threat of violence can justifiably be criminalised. Incitement to murder is a crime because murder itself is a crime. To criminalise incitement to hatred, of any kind, implies that hatred itself is also a crime. In reality, and everywhere else outside the pages of 1984, thought crimes do not (yet) exist, despite all Labour’s witch-hunting efforts to make windows into men’s souls. With the growth of the Internet, and the concomitant pressure to express more and more of one’s views in permanent electronic form, this may be only a matter of time. In many respects, freedom under Labour is already just a memory.

It has been well noted that the targets of Labour’s fear of freedom are always its political opponents, never its political friends. Inciting racial or religious hatred is a crime. Inciting class hatred is not. Lawyers have also been quick to point out how loosely drafted many of the speech crimes are; the result, no doubt intentional, is to further circumscribe debate through self-censorship. It is safer to err on the side of caution than to risk imprisonment for the wrong kind of niceness. Restricting the right to prosecute in such cases to the Attorney-General ensures that only politically motivated prosecutions are launched and that the Labour government is protected from the vengeance of others taking out private actions. The European Convention on Human Rights offers no effective protection for free speech. Article 10 incorporates numerous dubious exceptions, among them the right to ban separatist opinions, inserted to secure the accession of the French Republic, that historic enemy of liberty (and no great friend of equality or fraternity either, despite an admirably secular constitution).

Along with freedom of expression, Labour has targeted freedom of choice. Anti-choice laws do not constrain merely central government and its agencies, legitimate vehicles for public policy. They also constrain the decisions that individuals and private organisations, as well as democratically elected local authorities, may take in hiring staff and managing resources. There can be no justification for such infringements of liberty, for the imposition of one person’s prejudice against prejudice on another no less sentient. Increasingly, the law is being used to discriminate in the very name of opposing discrimination.

The laws are backed up by bureaucracies at all levels, Political Correctness Departments funded by the taxpayer at the expense of cuts to frontline services. We have always been open to immigrants. There can be no disputing the contributions they have frequently made; Isambard Kingdom Brunel is one son of an asylum-seeker who deserves to be mentioned more often whenever immigration is discussed. What is equally true but never mentioned at all is that until the late 20th century immigrants sank or swam by their own efforts. There were no laws to place them beyond criticism, no laws to guarantee their place in the labour market, and no State-funded bodies to provide them with special advantages denied to the common herd.

Because our own freedom-focused tradition is alien to Labour’s fundamental aim of control and coercion, driven by intense self-loathing, Wessex has never voted for a Labour government. Labour, having endorsed the destruction of its old power base in industrial working-class communities, now seeks to build itself a new one. It sees it arising principally through the promotion of mass immigration – way beyond what our environment can accommodate – and through allying itself with the equally puritanical creed of political Islamism.

The results in Northumbria and Mercia are there for all to see: the rise of Labour’s new puppet-masters among immigrant power-brokers, increased political corruption and shameless ballot-rigging, coupled with a growing BNP backlash against the diversion of resources from public services into po-faced parasitism. Sadly for us, the results also include an increasing element of ‘white flight’ as parents who don’t want their children’s education blighted by the School of Babel, or worse to befall them, up sticks and head south and west. If we would save our future food supply from being concreted over, then, until we can regain control of our own lives in Wessex, we must take note of these pressures and publicise them to all who will listen.

No doubt on the far Right there are those who are making longer-term plans. Plans that see Wessex as some ‘national redoubt’ into which a new Alfred will gather what remains of Christianity and the English nation and inspire the reconquest of the Sharialaw. In percentage terms, the South West has the smallest Mahometan population of all the Prescott zones, so it is easy to draw the historical parallels. And a stroll round any of our Somerset coastal towns will reveal as many Mercian accents as native Wessex. Many more will follow; Labour’s plans for the best part of a million new homes in Wessex are not intended to meet our housing needs but the needs of the ‘white flighters’. If we are not to fall prey to others’ visions for us then we must be clear in articulating a vision of our own.

There can only be one law of the land, though infinite scope for voluntary arbitration. The land can be any size but all who inhabit it do so out of choice and are free to leave if its laws displease them (taking their own territory with them if need be). There can be no place for the costly language of ‘community cohesion’: the erosion of majority rights to appease immigrants who have suddenly discovered dissatisfactions they never knew they had. Any who feel alienated from our society must ask themselves whether their alienation is self-inflicted and, if so, the remedy is in their hands, not ours. Finally, if we are to seek an inclusive society, the terms of inclusion must not be so negotiable that we ourselves end up on the outside looking in.

Food is the Future

We’ve nothing against townies. Many of us live in towns. Some exiles even live, in Babylonish captivity, in the very heart of London itself. But as Wessex Regionalists, we all know better than to believe that food grows itself on supermarket shelves.

If only that realisation were universally shared. London, which grows next to nothing itself, is part fed by the farmers of Wessex (in the future, perhaps fuelled by them too). You wouldn’t think so, judging by press coverage of planning matters. According to Richard Morrison in the Times this month, Green Belt is “unused land”, waiting to be built upon. His article adds that Gordon Brown’s three million new homes will only increase urbanisation from 11% to 13% of UK land area. But what if 11% is too much already for one of the most crowded countries in the world? If 2% of land is lost from agriculture every ten years, how long before we run short of food?

It’s true that some farmland is indeed unused, and we pay farmers £4 billion a year in subsidies, including subsidies not to farm. That’s an expensive insurance policy but it’s the price of keeping options open for the longer term. Forever is a very long time and getting farmland back once it’s built on is no easy task. In the nature of things, it’s the sites picked for expansion around towns and villages in the river valleys that tend to be on the best and most versatile land.

The question we should be asking is why the money is spent not to grow food rather than spent to grow it. DEFRA figures show that the UK’s overall self-sufficiency in food fell dramatically in the period 1995-2006, from 73.7% to just 58.1%. We now import 70% of the apples eaten in the UK (a majority even during the UK apple season). Over 60% of apple orchards – many in Wessex – have been destroyed in the last 30 years. Between 1995 and 2005 domestic production of cheese (another traditional Wessex product) fell by 7% to just 63% of cheese consumed. The worst case scenario calculates that, at the current rate of contraction in food self-sufficiency, the UK could be importing all its food by 2051.

Radical changes to the CAP have been pushed harder and implemented more incompetently in England than anywhere else in the EU. Even the Government does its best to avoid buying food produced in Britain. Why? Because agricultural ‘reform’ is part of the drive for globalisation, an economic system that cannot last. A sustainable farming policy would be seeking a Wessex self-sufficient in basic nutrition. So what, if others can grow and transport food across the planet for less? They simply won’t be able to once oil prices escalate. Meanwhile, intensive farming is destroying soil fertility worldwide, at a time when global population is increasing by 75 million a year. That’s another Bristol every two days.

Official statistics for Wessex aren’t readily available, but figures for the South West published by Friends of the Earth (FoE) and the NFU make startling reading. The South West is more than usually dependent on agricultural enterprise, with 14% of businesses in this category (6% in England as a whole). Agriculture contributes 1.2% of the South West’s GVA (Gross Value Added), compared to 0.7% in England as a whole. The South West’s agricultural output is three times that of Wales, which has its own rural affairs minister to fight for it. Wessex, as part of England, doesn’t. (In a 2001 report on food and farming, FoE recommended that decision-making on subsidy payments should be devolved to regional level. The recent fiasco over delays in making payments certainly suggests that central government lacks the necessary competence.)

The South West and South East together account for over half the organic land and organic producers in England, with the South West well in the lead. Farmers’ markets were invented in Bath in 1997. A 2002 survey found that food sold at farmers’ markets in the South West was on average 35% cheaper than food of similar quality in supermarkets in the same towns. Meanwhile, in Winchester, it was found that shops reported 30% greater takings on days when there was a farmers’ market. Research by the Institute of Grocery Distribution shows that 70% of people in Britain want to be able to buy local or regional foods, while in a 2005 survey by BMRB over half considered food and drink to be one of the three main factors defining their regional identity. Yet food miles – the average distance from field to plate – have doubled in 20 years.

The closer one gets to London, the more the economics turns real farms into hobby farms and horse paddocks, especially now that the latter are eligible for subsidy. In the South East, 73% of holdings have diversified out of agriculture, substantially the highest figure in England, where the average is 50% and even the South West – the home of agri-tourism – only reaches 45%. Diversification accounts for 46% of South East farm income (double the national average) and nearly 60% of this income is accounted for by buildings let for non-farming use. These are options not available to farmers in parts of Wessex more remote from London.

There is a complacent tendency to write off farming, which shows in the attitude of some local authorities, only too keen to view allotments and smallholdings as assets to be sold rather than as a continuing service to the community. A long-term view is needed if the skills base is to be ready to meet future home demand. A loss of critical mass in any sector is always difficult to regain.

Making the connections is also vital. Attempts to tackle obesity are hampered by the economics of the food industry itself. Adding value to agricultural produce, to enable it to compete, often means producing highly processed foods with much poorer nutritional value than the basic foodstuffs. Then there are the consequences of animal diseases and drug and pesticide residues to consider. We all pay for the higher NHS costs that result from false economies. And the final chapter of the GM story may not be written for generations to come. Confused thinking has become the norm. Why is real food separately labelled as ‘organic’? Surely it’s the artificial food that should bear the truth-telling labels, if not indeed the Wessex Government health warnings?

Wessex Regionalists demand trustworthy, wholesome food from a farm system that promotes regional self-reliance, landscape quality, bio-diversity and good animal and soil husbandry. Fundamental reform of global trade rules, European policies, UK decision-making structures, land economics and the accountability of institutions ranging from schools to supermarkets are all prerequisites. Recognising the barriers to this, we argue for unilateral action wherever practical.

Food is the future. Our future in an increasingly uncertain world. So let’s think carefully about the often-contradictory pressures we place on those whose livelihood it is. And before it’s too late, let’s stop destroying the very land that grows it.