An Empty Space?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy St Ealdhelm’s Day

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?

Pass It On

Nowadays, the Conservatives have a tree as their emblem, symbolic of the countless trees to be felled thanks to them and their allies (Labour, FibDem, even Green) as the urbanisation of England rolls onwards.  The emblem used to be a flaming torch, the same symbol that used to warn motorists of a school ahead, before two running children took its place.  In both cases – conservatism and education – the implication was that the purpose of the exercise wasn't to fawn over spectacle and novelty but to pass on accumulated wisdom.

Traditions, if they’re to be of any use, do need to be challenged though.  Their deepest value lies not in constraining innovation but in acting as a reminder that the present state of things has an origin and can therefore be replaced by something different, perhaps something more in keeping with those origins.  It can mean one tradition, long repressed, triumphing over another that has ceased to have anything relevant to say.

The unfolding of Corbynism is an example of that.  The traditional politics of the Left has been taboo for a generation, because that which is taboo is crucial to understanding.  The Left understands this, of course.  It’s why the Left in the UK has a far more horrific record of seeking to restrict freedom of speech than the Right.  The Left uses the negative might of the State to silence its critics; the Right just relies on the fact that most of the money and the media are on-side, able to drown critics in positive argument.

So what are we to make of the trip down memory lane?  Nationalisation back on the agenda?  Military top brass muttering about mutiny?  The flares and the platform shoes should be along any time now.  The key is indeed memory.  The victors of 1979 have been able to dominate the narrative ever since.  Hyper-inflation.  Strikes.  The Winter of Discontent.  You don’t want to go back there, son.  Believe me, I was there.  (Or at least, I’ve read what the tabloids said about it, then and since.)

The controllers of that narrative are ageing and departing.  There’s another narrative that’s been sidelined, for 36 years, and won’t be repressed any more.  The ‘socialist nightmare’ wasn’t characterised by the appalling extremes of wealth and poverty now read as the unavoidable fallout of a motivated society.  Young folk were the future to be valued, not burdened.  Most students lived on grants, not loans, and university tuition fees didn’t exist for them.  Those who weren’t able to buy their own homes didn’t need to, nor were they at the mercy of unscrupulous private landlords: council housing was an option for all, not just the poorest of the poor.  Education and housing were run by elected local councils, not unaccountable academy chains and housing associations.  Some nationalised industries – such as electricity – were commercially very successful.  They couldn’t have been sold if they weren’t.  Others could have been more successful, given sustained investment, but they spent the majority of their existence under governments at best sceptical about that existence and so it was investment they never got.

If Corbynism is to fly, it will be due to the historians as much as to the politicians.  The vilification of the post-war consensus that began to grow in the 1970s thanks to Milton Friedman and Keith Joseph will have to be replaced by a far more balanced assessment.  And we do mean balanced, because in many ways Labour got it wrong.  Badly wrong.  Why were the nationalised industries placed beyond effective Parliamentary scrutiny?  Where was the workplace democracy?  Where was the accountability to local communities?  Who set the accountancy rules and why?  The Forest of Dean coalfield was burdened with its share of a national budget for research into firedamp, a problem that for geological reasons that coalfield never experienced.  John Osmond’s The Centralist Enemy paints a painful picture of the price paid for uniformity when the gas industry moved from a regional to a national basis of organisation.

Can Corbyn simply put back the clock, now that devolution has created an alternative focus for accountability?  Can the nations and regions of Britain not be trusted to run their own power and water grids, trains, buses, and all the rest?  If the answer is yes, and it surely is, then nationalisation needs regionalisation, as much for Wessex as for Scotland or Wales.  Labour shows no signs of developing the imagination needed to move beyond tokenistic, compass-point regionalism, because Labour has always viewed devolution as something to fear, never to champion.

Today, when the Conservatives used the power of the British State to guarantee an investment by the Chinese State in the Wessex electricity industry, with the French State as its operational partner, private enterprise was conspicuous by its absence.  That requires some explanation.  There’s a new consensus emerging out of panic.  The UK has under-invested in infrastructure for decades, preferring to draw the dividends rather than plough back the profits.  It has a lot of catching up to do, which is why Corbyn won’t find it impossible to find business backers.

For the most critical Leftists, Labour is simply that tool of capitalism let into power whenever something needs doing that’s vital to economic success but not profitable enough for the private sector to justify getting its hands dirty.  Taxation – which doesn’t touch the super-rich – can pay for it all instead.  Our predecessors in Common Wealth were arguing, even as Attlee was legislating, that nationalisation, on its own, is not socialism.  It did provide a lot of generals with good jobs though, which probably took their minds off fomenting a coup.

As regionalists, we’re especially sceptical that nationalisation of anything produces results that benefit the regions.  However attractive it could be to put British Rail back together – and it’s a mightily popular policy, even among Tory voters – priorities set in London will be London’s priorities.  More high-speed lines, not re-opening the Somerset & Dorset or any other Wessex-focused priority.  Service patterns designed around the age-old competition between Paddington and Waterloo, not the unified pattern that Wessex Trains was pioneering before its untimely demise.  Integrated transport remains a wonderful idea but it won’t be delivered without a regional dimension that links the national – and now European – rail network to local travel needs.

Nationalisation may not be socialism but it’s very much anti-globalisation.  Naomi Klein, in This Changes Everything, notes how it was used worldwide from the 1950s onwards to take wealth away from banks and multi-nationals and use it for the benefit of the oppressed.  Mosaddegh and Allende were overthrown because of it; Nasser and Perón fared better.  For decentralists, local and regional control matters more than picking ideological favourites: a region might run its own services, devolve them to local government, or let them be run by private enterprise or by co-operatives or guilds.  What we all oppose is the totalitarian liberalism that defines the global free market as the only permissible solution and seeks to impose the financial and legal fetters that will keep it that way.

It was the very best of timing that saw Jeremy Corbyn elected Labour’s leader just as the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain loomed.  It handed him the opportunity to not sing the national anthem.  Disgraceful.  How disrespectful to those who served King and Country in the nation’s darkest days.  Or so it goes.  The best response came from an RAF veteran who said he didn’t mind politicians not singing the national anthem but he did mind them selling guns to tyrants.

It’s that official narrative again.  The one that says the post-war economic and social consensus never really worked.  It has an equally evil twin, the one that asserts that the war was fought for what we know as the establishment, the royal family, the top brass, the ones who wrote King’s Regulations.  It asserts that the ordinary soldier, sailor or airman was always as true blue as Churchill.  The awkward fact is that they were the ones who voted him out, just as ever since the Levellers the rank-and-file have been notoriously the ones you need to watch.  In the debates of the Cairo Forces Parliament in 1944, Labour had to face criticism from others on the Left, ranging from the Communists to Common Wealth, for whom Labour’s programme was timid and unappealing.  Hidden history again, that needs to be recovered.

Well done that man for not singing an anthem whose sentiments he doesn’t endorse.  Wessex has not one but two regional anthems he might like to sing instead.  One is the Wessex Anthem itself, ‘The Very Neame o’ Wessex’, commissioned by Wessex Society, with words by Dorset dialect poet Devina Symes set to music by Gloucestershire composer Hayley Savage.  With its references to the vision of King Alfred and St Ealdhelm it looks to a historical and cultural understanding of Wessex.  There’s another anthem, ‘The Wessex Flag’, perhaps more stirring, with words by our very own Jim Gunter, set to the well-known tune of ‘The Red Flag’.  May it one day exceed it in fame.  Pass it on.

“Our ancient flag is deepest red

It fell to ground o’er Hastings’ dead

Now it’s time to shed our yoke

And proudly stand as Wessex folk

Let’s raise our scarlet standard high

Within its shade we’ll live and die

We’ll all rise up and never tire

We’ll keep the Wyvern breathing fire”

Welcome to the Party

On this day last year we were delighted to mention Wessex Society’s success in persuading a third of the county and unitary councils in Wessex to fly the Wyvern for St Ealdhelm’s Day.  (The picture below was taken at Somerset County Hall in Taunton.)  This year, many councils are doing the same, with Bath & North East Somerset and Portsmouth City reported to be joining the list.  

Inexplicably, there is one loss.  South Gloucestershire will not be repeating last year's display of regional consciousness.  The reason advanced is that the council has changed hands from ‘No Overall Control’ to Conservative, and the ruling Conservative group doesn't want to fly the flag.  Very odd, considering that it was a Conservative minister, Eric Pickles, who relaxed the rules on flying the Wyvern and went on to declare 25th May as Wessex Day.  No doubt there are still some years of such confusion ahead of us as the London parties grapple with the fact of Wessex identity, stop regarding it as some sort of crime, and join in the celebration of our patron saint’s day.  The protestations that ‘WESSEX DOESN’T EXIST!’ will continue, but nowadays are too shrill even to be worth refuting.  One way or another, today's culture is always the foundation of tomorrow's constitution.  It's the pace of change that's uncertain.

Wessex itself is not a party-political idea.  It’s for everyone to make of it what they will.  We welcome the growth of other organisations, such as Wessex Society, with the means to reach out to and engage with a much larger audience than we can expect to attract.  The stronger and more varied the suite of Wessex organisations becomes, the stronger Wessex will be.  But let’s not run before we can walk.  The organisations we have need to be nurtured: putting down roots comes before sending out shoots.  So dissipating our energy wouldn’t be clever.

This is especially so in the political field, where there’s huge potential for a territorial party to tap into the frustration that exists with the London parties, and the admiration that exists for the SNP’s onward-rolling bandwagon.  Let everyone who cares for Wessex speak up for Wessex and do it NOW.

Let’s do it though in ways that are complementary and not divisive.  The establishment would love us to fall out over something.  It could be our name, or how we define Wessex, or any other faultline of convenience that’s open to exploitation if we allow it to be, but the fact is that changing political reality is about sustained hard work and nothing else.  Magic bullets don’t exist.  Things will move faster if we stick together: the greatest risk at times like this is for the impatient to split off, burn brightly for a season and then sink without trace.  People’s Front of Wessex versus Wessaxon People’s Front?

Quite unnecessary, of course.  WR is a broad church, and open to influence from within.  Scotland and Wales have learnt from the tragedy of Ireland that the room for diverse oppositional politics in a time of revolutionary change is not unlimited.  We’re aware of at least five groups – or possibly lone individuals – claiming to speak for Mercia, which is one reason why any formal alliance of English regionalists isn’t practical, because who do you recognise or not recognise as a legitimate ally?

WR has emerged stronger from the 2015 election, especially in terms of social media interest.  This blog attracted some 3,000 visits last month, twice the figure seen during the Eastleigh by-election in 2013.  However, one of the features of social media is the absence of any financial or organisational commitment.  It costs nothing to like on Facebook or follow on Twitter.  That’s why our cyber membership is growing a lot faster than the actual membership by which we are, unfairly, judged.  This is not a sustainable model in the long-term: it’s the actual membership whose subscriptions pay for the website that serves as the hub of our media operations. 

Real-world politics – standing in elections as committed challengers to the status quo – costs real money, for deposits (£500 a go for Parliament), for leaflets (expect 50,000 of them in a Westminster contest) and for all the expenses of canvassing and travel to media locations.  Being a Wessex Regionalist is free.  Being a member of the Wessex Regionalists is not, and for good reason.  That’s why wishing for a free Wessex is nowhere near as effective as applying for membership today.  It can be a great party, but bring a bottle.

Review of 2014

Every year when we submit our accounts to the Electoral Commission we are also required to provide a ‘Review of Political Activities’ covering the year just gone.

The 2014 Review has recently been forwarded to the Commission and here is what it says:

“Coming between elections – Eastleigh in 2013 and the General Election in 2015 – it might be thought that 2014 would be a quiet year.  Far from it.

Scotland’s referendum on independence provided the pivot.  Our President, Colin Bex, spent a few days in Edinburgh before, during and after the poll and made many new media and political contacts there.  The Party participated as fully as we were allowed in the media reaction to the result and the subsequent debate on an English dimension to devolution.  This included multiple television and radio interviews for the President and the Secretary-General.  The debate has since been narrowed down and moved on.  The London parties would rather discuss English-votes-for-English-laws (devolution from the centre to the centre) and city-regions and metro-mayors (shuffling the local pack of powers, not the constitutional dynamiting of Whitehall that is actually required).  We continue to be active in promoting the real alternative.

Popular and media interest has continued to grow, as charted by support on Facebook and Twitter and visits to our website and blog.  Throughout the year, the President and Secretary-General made use of online petition sites such as Avaaz, 38 Degrees and Change.org to lobby for Wessex and in supporting related causes to publicise the Wessex dimension.

In addition, Colin has joined marches and has participated in demonstrations on a number of high profile issues local, European and global, including against the TTIP and climate change.  He also continues to contribute to the debate about the real nature of economics and money, and the need for radical reform, as the establishment worldwide entrenches austerity in shameless collusion with those responsible for the chaos that produced it.

Upon invitation of the CAMRA and the Leader of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, Wessex son Alan 'Howling Laud' Hope, Colin has been special guest at several promotions of a number of new 'CoALEition' Ales produced in microbreweries across the region.  One brew, Hope and Glory (motto ‘Insanity prevents austerity’) has been served in the House of Commons bar.  These events resulted in coverage for us in 11 different newspaper and magazine articles in Somerset, Hampshire and Surrey, and we were featured in 6 of the photos used by these publications.

In November, Colin attended the Annual Conference of Mebyon Kernow – The Party for Cornwall at Truro once again, and links with other regionalists have been cultivated, in England and across a turbulent Europe.

In broader terms than just party politics, 2014 was a great year for Wessex.  Following the removal in 2012 of legal constraints on flying the Wessex Wyvern, the region’s cultural association, Wessex Society, persuaded a third of the county and unitary councils in Wessex to fly the flag for St Ealdhelm’s Day (25th May).  It was also unfurled by our Secretary-General, David Robins, for BBC West during their discussion programme on devolution that aired on 5th November.  Our appeal to the mainstream was boosted when historian Tom Holland coined the term ‘progressive heptarchism’.  This describes the imaginative approach we take to regional names and areas, in contrast to the bureaucratic compass-points still favoured by the London parties.”

The Party’s Annual General Assembly is being held today in Weston-super-Mare.  Key decisions are expected to be taken on our participation in the General Election, which could see unprecedented interest in parties such as ours offering a radical decentralist alternative to the self-obsessed Westminster charade.

The Spirit of ‘15

Last year’s commemorations of the First World War were a good excuse to re-open old wounds and close our eyes to modern Europe.  Now consider that 2015 marks the 200th anniversary of Waterloo and the 600th anniversary of Agincourt.  In 2014 the French were our glorious allies against the Hun.  This year, it will be their turn to feel the cold shoulder, if not exactly the cold steel.  Better still, we shall be marking the 750th anniversary of Simon de Montfort’s first Parliament and the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta.  That will be a splendid opportunity to overlook historical niceties.  Like the European context in which the first English Parliament arose.  Or the inconvenient fact that while the English (in 1215) and the Irish (in 1216) each had a Magna Carta to defend their threatened liberties the Scots never did (they still manage well enough without one).

London’s Lefties will be all frothing uncontrollably about the need for the modern UK to have a written constitution.  There will be conferences and seminars, websites and book launches.  No-one will ask whether ‘modern UK’ isn’t a bit of an oxymoron, or why for 800 years we’ve obsessed over keeping our rulers in check instead of challenging their assumed right to rule.

This time in 2013 we predicted that that would be the Year of the Wyvern.  We were a year out.  In 2014, the Wyvern made its mark, with local councils endorsing the flag, flying it proudly for St Ealdhelm’s Day, and our Secretary-General unfurling it for the BBC as part of their debate on devolution.  So what of 2015?

If last year remembered the start of the First World War, this will recall the end of the Second (as well as the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain and the 50th anniversary of Churchill’s death).  It sounds like an opportunity for Labour to put Blairism behind it and rediscover the spirit of ’45.  Last month saw the death of John Freeman, the last man alive to serve as a minister in Attlee’s government.  That was the death not just of a man but of the memory of an idea.  There is no way that Labour can rediscover its past, because its front bench is corrupted beyond redemption by the Blair and Brown years.  Labour in 1945 offered a different world.  Labour in 2015 will struggle even to cobble together a markedly different vision.  When it’s seriously suggested that they might prefer a coalition with the Tories to working with nationalists you know the game’s well and truly up for them.

Common Wealth, the wartime socialist party to which we owe much of our thinking, was sceptical even at the time that Labour would deliver.  John Freeman resigned as a minister in 1951 over the introduction of NHS prescription charges.  Under Blair and Brown, Labour went on to set the NHS up for privatisation.  When David Cameron promised that ‘the NHS will be safe in my hands’, it was a claim he needed to make, even if he didn’t believe it and few believed him.  But is the NHS safe in Ed Miliband’s hands?  In Labour’s case it might be thought that past actions speak louder than present words.  Voters in at least one Wessex constituency this May can expect to have an alternative they can rely on.

Just Watch It

Media interest continues, BBC Bristol and BBC Wiltshire both seeking interviews this week.  David Garmston from BBC Points West went to Longleat to record an interview with our veteran founder, Lord Bath for Sunday Politics West.  It took up 3 minutes, 42 seconds of a 1 hour, 10 minute programme filled mainly with much less interesting stuff.  (Catch it on iPlayer, at 50:32 in.)

Yesterday saw filming for another BBC programme, More Power to the West?, again fronted by David Garmston, for broadcast on Guy Fawkes Night.  Oddly, according to the BBC website, this programme and its equivalent for BBC South West (Cornwall and Devon) are both 40 minutes long.  The BBC South equivalent is 10 minutes long.  Is the attention span of eastern Wessex really that much shorter than western Wessex?

The format yesterday was a four-person panel – Parliamentarians from the three main London parties plus George Ferguson, Independent Mayor of Bristol – with an audience mostly made up of local politicians, businessfolk and experts of one kind or another.  The audience proved to be a lot more lively than the panel.  The three main parties all agree that decentralisation is good, which begs the question why none of them do a thing about it when in power (other than to do the opposite while pretending they’re not).  No wonder they’re now so widely despised.

From the start it was clear that Wessex at last had a chance of a receptive airing, David Robins being invited to contribute to the debate and to unfurl the Wyvern for the cameras.  Leanne Wood, Leader of Plaid Cymru, said it looked like a Welsh dragon.  Cue to point out the number of legs (two legs Wessex, four legs Wales) and that ours is just as ancient.  There’s no doubt that the Wyvern, with its warm, bold colours and sweeping lines, makes excellent television and a lasting impression.

A now recurrent theme is the realisation that Wessex provides a ready-made answer to the question of how to devolve power in our part of England.  An optimist might even say that this is an idea whose time has come.  We don’t need a Labour-style constitutional convention to hold back implementation any longer. 

A realist – aware of the history of the Celtic countries – is more likely to take the view that a trans-generational struggle is just beginning.  The London regime has many centuries of experience in how to prevent necessary change.  Yesterday’s debate was a useful step on the road to change but was memorable mainly for the low aspirations evident among our region’s elected politicians.  Too bruised by the oppressive system they try to work within, they haven’t the room to raise their sights.  In contrast, we don’t want negotiation with our London masters over city deals or combined authorities.  We want their rule out of the region at the point of a pitchfork, never to be allowed back.

The programme airs on BBC1 on 5th November at 10:35 pm.

The Wyvern Flies Again, No Thanks To Labour

News reaches us of a groundbreaking initiative by Wessex Society, the cultural association devoted to promoting our region’s identity.  To mark St Ealdhelm’s Day, which falls today, the Society offered Wyvern flags to all the county and unitary authorities in Wessex to fly outside their offices.

There has been a good take-up from county councils – Dorset, Isle of Wight, Somerset, Wiltshire – and some of the unitary districts – the Borough of Bournemouth, the City & County of Bristol, South Gloucestershire (who have two offices and so requested two flags), and the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead.  Six of our eight shires are therefore included.  Wyvern flags are also flown, or have been flown recently, by the town councils in Wantage and Weston-super-Mare and at Oxford Castle and Winchester University.  Today’s omissions are mainly around the peripheries, where identity could be expected to be weaker, so give them time, but what happened to Hampshire County Council?  Are they trying to tell us that Winchester isn’t in Wessex?  How stupid do they want to look?

We are also told that Eric Pickles’ Department for Communities & Local Government planned to fly the Wyvern again this year outside their London headquarters but discovered, too late, that they had mislaid the flag.  You can just imagine what Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It would make of that.

While the political niche we fill is necessarily a narrow one – at this stage in the development of Wessex consciousness – the success of Wessex Society’s initiative should now silence those who insist that Wessex doesn’t exist at all and that there is no wider sense of identity into which a Wessex political movement can potentially tap.

What the initiative also reveals is where the real threat to Wessex lies.  Positive responses were received from half the county councils but only a quarter of the unitary districts.  Many unitaries are urban and three of them are controlled by Labour.  The overall response rate across Wessex was 33%; the response rate from Labour-run councils was precisely nil.  Nothing from Plymouth or Reading, while Southampton just dithered indefinitely.

Why?  The Labour movement is happy to come to Tolpuddle once a year; the RMT union’s Wessex branch even takes part with a gurt big wyvern on its banner.  Labour in government did nothing to lift the ban on our flag, leaving it to Eric Pickles to restore our freedom to fly.  But that’s history now.  Surely they’ve moved on?  So why the sour-faced refusal to join in the fun today?  Would Labour refuse to fly the Welsh dragon or the Scottish saltire in their respective home territories?

Or has some directive gone out from London that the boundaries of the Prescott zones are never, ever to be questioned, even in the interests of promoting a real regional identity capable of mobilising support for devolution across a significant chunk of the south of England?  Tell us, please, why DOES Labour hate Wessex so much?

Review of 2013

Every year when we submit our accounts to the Electoral Commission we are also required to provide a ‘Review of Political Activities’ covering the year just gone.

The 2013 Review has recently been agreed and here is what it says:

“The Eastleigh by-election in February provided an unplanned but welcome opportunity to raise the Party’s profile.  This was fully taken up, despite the attempts of pro-establishment groups such as 38 Degrees to deny us a legitimate share of the platform.  Our candidate, Colin Bex, canvassed voters, attended hustings and gave interviews, one of the highlights of the campaign being an appearance on BBC2’s Newsnight in which he exchanged jibes with Paddy Ashdown of the FibDems.

The wyvern flag of Wessex appeared in some shots and was given an added, official boost in May when the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, arranged for it to be flown outside his London headquarters to mark St Ealdhelm’s Day.  ‘Today,’ announced his press release, ‘the only way is Wessex’.  We agree, and look forward to these cultural concessions being backed up by solidly political ones.

Paradoxically, our vote at Eastleigh – the Thinking Thirty – was much less spectacular than the publicity.  Like all the smaller parties, we were squeezed by a well-oiled UKIP effort to mop up the protest vote.  In the long-term, the publicity gained will matter more, since media interest has been sustained through the course of the year that followed.  This has since borne fruit in the form of several interviews with the BBC, including two local radio stations, focused mainly on the implications for England of the Scottish referendum on independence.

There is a well-founded perception that ‘politics-as-usual’ is no longer an option in Scotland, whatever the outcome of the referendum.  The fact of holding the referendum has changed the nature of Scottish politics.  It has also begun a debate over whether other parts of the UK can also benefit from a tide that is now moving towards radical constitutional change.

For the first time in perhaps a decade, the national debate about England’s future is not just about the merits of an English Parliament.  With London’s wealth and influence continuing to massively outstrip those of the ‘provinces’, a self-governing England that lacks a regional tier is being exposed as an idea offering ‘more of the same’.  We expect the idea of regional assemblies to be revisited and will be doing all we can to prevent Labour once again imposing their ill-considered vision of an ‘Iron Curtain’ between eastern and western Wessex.

Colin Bex has continued to manage our London bureau, attending meetings on our behalf on matters such as the HS2 railway, which we oppose.  He has also raised concerns that London’s Mayor, Boris Johnson, is seeking to pioneer repressive methods, such as the use of water cannon by the Metropolitan Police, that may then be extended to other areas.

Along with the Secretary-General, David Robins, Colin attended the Annual Conference of Mebyon Kernow – The Party for Cornwall, at Truro in November.  It is always good to be able to cheer on those further up the political ladder and learn from their achievements.  We have also continued to develop our online presence, with visits to our blog again breaking records.”

Love the Land, Live the Life

It would make such a great slogan for our Wessex.  It is in fact already taken, as the English-language slogan of the Normandy Tourist Board.

There is such a thing, based not in one of the great cities – Caen or Rouen – but in a much smaller place, Evreux.  It exists despite the fact that officially Normandy doesn’t exist.  Officially, it is two separate regions, Lower Normandy, based in Caen, and Upper Normandy, based in Rouen.

Although there is a long-standing campaign to re-unite the two half-Normandies, there are also deep-rooted Jacobin desires to magnify, not lessen the harm to regional identity.  Both half-Normandies live under the constant threat of reorganisation by a centralist State that regards regional geography as malleable in the interests of its own survival.  There is the recurrent possibility that one will be merged with its Celtic neighbour to the west and the other with the area round the national capital.  Sounds familiar?  Can we learn from Norman regionalist resistance to this?  The WR Secretary-General, David Robins, recently made a brief visit to investigate.

French vehicle registration plates are wonderfully colourful, including besides the actual number an area code for the département and the regional logo.  You can buy stick-on labels for the département and region of your choice.  And, for once in France, choice means choice.  At Carrefour in Ouistreham you can buy stickers with the Lower or Upper Normandy logos.  Or you can be a true Norman patriot and prefer a sticker that displays the ancient ducal banner of two gold leopards on red.

(You can even buy a sticker that has the number 44 – for Loire Atlantique – beneath the Breton ‘gwenn-ha-du’ flag.  Even though, in the eyes of France’s leaders, Loire Atlantique isn’t in Brittany, because they say it isn’t.  In Wessex terms, ‘région Bretagne’, without Loire Atlantique, is like ‘the South West’, without Hampshire, since in both cases the historic capital is excluded.)

That Norman flag gets everywhere.  In Ouistreham it flies over one of the largest hotels, and over the wartime German blockhouse that towers above the port.  Even where you don’t spot the flag, you see not-so-subtle references to it in red-and-gold colour schemes, on buildings, in furnishings and on road signs.

Yes, the road signs.  Tourists are welcome in Normandy and their needs aren’t neglected as they are in Wessex.  The authorities know what they’ve come to see and are pleased to remind them.  Drive along the main roads to and from Caen and you’ll see the signs.  Images from the Bayeux Tapestry or from Norman architecture, done in pastel shades of pink and yellow.  Pointing out Caen – the city of Guillaume le Conquérant, Falaise – the birthplace of Guillaume le Conquérant, Bayeux – the tapestry of Guillaume le Conquérant.

Now imagine something similar on the A34 or the A303 – Winchester, the city of Alfred the Great, Wantage – the birthplace of Alfred the Great, Athelney – the refuge of Alfred the Great.  You have to imagine them because they don’t exist.  We don’t want tourists to come to Wessex, because there’s nothing to see here, right?  Because there’s no such place.  There’s the London commuter belt, and beyond that there’s the deckchairs and donkey rides.  And nothing more.  A Wessex Tourist Board?  Perish the thought.  The next thing we know the locals will be saying they want to cast off the London yoke.  Queue for the Brittany Ferries service at Portsmouth and you can watch the attractions of Normandy unroll slickly on the big TV screen.  What do we offer our visitors queuing on the Ouistreham side?  ‘South West England’.  They’re not even there when they disembark, but in the other ‘region’ next door, ‘The South East’.

So what impressions remain of Normandy?  Devastated after D-Day, Caen today is largely a modern, practical city, with, like many cities of the European mainland, an entirely new tram system, opened in 2002.  Purists will call it an electrically-powered guided bus and it’s due to be replaced with a real light rail system rather shortly.  George Ferguson, Mayor of Bristol, was interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Costing the Earth last week.  He said he'd love to spend billions giving Bristol "a fantastic new tramway system" like the one in its sister city of Bordeaux – the regional capital of Aquitaine – but Bristol doesn't have that sort of money.  And why ever not?  Answer that one George and you could be on your way to becoming the first Wessex Regionalist mayor.

Then there’s Bayeux.  Which has a lot more to offer than just the Tapestry.  No reproduction of that can ever convey the impact of the original.  The final scenes are full of revealing detail, once you get up close to the stitching that shows the two wyvern standards, the first fallen, the second held up defiantly against the imminent victors.  The first is gold, the second is red with a gold underbelly.  And so the registered colours of the Wessex flag too are red and gold, echoing both the Tapestry and the chroniclers’ references to a golden dragon.

We share rather more than you might expect with the old enemy.  Just as Cornwall and Brittany share black and white as their flag colours, so we share red and gold with the Normans, as we share geology, climate, a love of apples and pork, cheese and cream (though our cooking lags a little behind), caution, and a justifiable distrust of the national capital’s intentions.  They invaded us once.  We invaded them many more times in return.

It’s a bit like Scots-and-English at times.  You emphasise the differences or the similarities according to the agenda.  For every unionist who reminds us of Britain’s shared cultural and political heritage there’ll be a nationalist reminder that Scots have a shared cultural and political heritage with France.  It’s one that’s arguably been much more important in defining Scottishness – in terms of distinctive architecture, law, a sense of being European that is still resisted in England, and so on.  In a European context, Wessex, bound by its ferry routes to the mainland, has at least as much reason to make common cause with Bretons and Normans as with Scots or Northumbrians hundreds of miles away, the other side of Mercia.

And Wessex has a lot to learn.  Ouistreham’s high street has a small shop devoted solely to all things Norman.  It sells flags, foods, drinks, books, badges… well, just explore the website.  It’s the sort of thing that might be found in Cardiff or Edinburgh, and these days possibly Truro too, commercially focused but with definitely a nationalist crust to the artisanal loaf.

Despite it all, despite the occasional insistence that Normans are not to be considered as French folk, Norman nationalism is not, yet, mainstream.  It may not need to be.  Reality could in fact run ahead of ideology if budgetary pressures upon France force Normandy’s re-unification.  If the broader-based regionalist campaign to achieve that goal succeeds, to whom does a Norman regional government then look for reciprocal arrangements on our side of the Channel?  Who will speak for Wessex?

If we want to 'think Wessex', we have to be willing to look beyond jingoistic Britain for issues that resonate in the context of an entirely Wessex-centred geography.  Today, while we’re all thinking our brains out about what Scottish independence might mean for us if it comes to pass, let us not forget the much older associations of Europe’s Atlantic and Channel facades that have shaped us too.  ‘Fog in Channel; Continent cut off’ is a misconception that can raise a smile; too often it seems a political fact of life that does us no good at all.

The Flag of the Future

Eric Pickles is a Tory, and a member of the Coalition Government, and so one would think no friend of Wessex.  Yet this weekend, his department flew the Wyvern outside its head office, Eland House in London, to mark St Ealdhelm's Day, the 25th of May.  View the photographic proof.

Pickles' politics apart, he has done good work for all who value our traditional shire and regional identities.  Having begun by flying county flags outside his office, the Communities Secretary has now stepped up a gear by offering regions the chance to have their flags flown too.

And so the flag of Wessex flew at the heart of centralised government, a bright flame of hope for all who wish to see that system consigned to history.  We welcome all cultural initiatives that help to put Wessex on the map, but that Wessex, for us, is not the dead stuff of history.  The best days of Wessex are yet to come, when the Wyvern flies above the first Witan of a free folk to gather in nigh on a thousand years, with a thousand years of misrule to correct.  What then will be its priorities?

Review of 2012

Every year when we submit our accounts to the Electoral Commission we are also required to provide a ‘Review of Political Activities’ covering the year just gone.

The 2012 Review has recently been forwarded to the Commission and here is what it says:

“Between elections, our principal means of communication with the public are now predominantly online. Our blog continues to play an ever larger role, with the number of posts during 2012 being ten times the number in 2007. Our presence on Facebook continues to be developed and so, from February 2012, does our Twitter presence – @WessexRegion. All of these initiatives are vital to spreading our message in an increasingly digital world. The Internet has also made it easier for us to respond to initiatives by others in the form of online petitions.

We again took the opportunity in 2012 to respond to various official consultations, to the Department for Transport (on rail decentralisation), the Law Commission (on taxis and private hire vehicles) and the Commission on a Bill of Rights (on a UK Bill of Rights). Our response in each case focused on the need for fresh thinking on where decision-making is located in our society, with a preference for the local and the regional.

Our President, Colin Bex, who also manages our London bureau, remained active in the Occupy LSX campaign, providing us with reports from the front lines of the fight against financial tyranny, at St Paul’s Cathedral, at Finsbury Square, and elsewhere in London. He participated in a series of investigative hearings staged by the occupiers, including into the illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the plan to criminalise all residential squatting. Colin testified for WR in both these cases.

We celebrated a key achievement this year when planning rules were relaxed to allow the Wessex Wyvern flag to be flown without the need to apply for advertisement consent. It was an intolerable injustice that any foreign flag, from Afghanistan’s to Zimbabwe’s, could be flown freely in Wessex while our own flag could not. The post entitled ‘When Will Wessex Flag Ban Cease?’ has long been the most popular item on our blog. We are pleased that the London regime has seen sense but we wonder why it took so long. It is good to now see our region’s name in print in legislation and we look forward to this being the first step towards a much more extensive recognition of its existence.”

Eric the Ostrich

The Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, has an assured place in history as the man who oversaw the first regulations to officially recognise the flag of Wessex. Although the Wyvern has a long pedigree, the current design of the flag dates from 1974, meaning that it took just 38 years to go from an idea to recognition in law. Few can match that. East Anglia took about a century. Cornwall and Wales didn’t have it easy either. It’s a point worth quoting whenever we’re accused of making no progress. Well done to the Tories for changing the law in our favour. It certainly makes a mockery of Labour’s claim to be a ‘progressive’ party, which ought to be on our side.

Pickles is a mixed blessing though. He picks and chooses shamelessly when it comes to turning localism on and off. Some things he does get right and long may it continue. We applaud his support for community identity, marked, for example, by the series of county flags that have been flown outside his London headquarters. We applaud too his no-nonsense approach to local government finance. Second-home owners should pay full Council Tax – why ever did they not? Councillors must question more to improve value for money. Cutting real services and causing real pain, in order to blame the Coalition while protecting politically-correct pet projects, is what Labour does. Pickles yesterday challenged everyone to do better, in advice entitled 50 ways to save. It’s blunt, using the language a Yorkshireman prefers, with no hint of the carefully crafted phrases of the civil service. When Pickles tells councils to cut the ‘posh hotels and glitzy award ceremonies’, you can hear Sir Humphrey cringe.

We applaud many of the suggestions, which offer potential for huge savings with no harmful effect on services. That we’d rather see the savings go to maintain and improve those services than line bankers’ pockets is beside the point. Waste is waste.

We particularly applaud the suggestion that councils make money by doing business, for example by using spare capacity at depots to offer MoT tests to the public. Now that councils have a general power of competence there are few legal limits to municipal trading. Pickles has, knowingly or not, opened the way for a new wave of gas-and-water-socialism. In the 19th and 20th centuries, many councils ran profitable businesses in electricity, gas, transport and water and some even managed banking, restaurants and telephones. Specific Parliamentary approval was needed for every venture and many were successfully opposed by private businesses who felt threatened by public enterprise. Today the door is open to local communities to claw back some of that profit for themselves. Well done to the Tories for changing the law in our favour, yet again.

We do query one other suggestion, however, that councils should lapse their subscriptions to regional organisations now that regions are no longer in favour with the London regime. Just because its regional institutions have been abolished doesn’t mean that regional issues have. We think the Prescott geography was wrong but we don’t say that councils should be made to feel guilty if they work together at regional level. If the issues are too big for them to handle individually, or on a local cross-border basis, then regional thinking is inevitable if good government is to be achieved. The only alternative is for Whitehall to interfere in problems that don’t need to be resolved at so exalted a level. The result of Pickles’ irrational hatred of regionalism is bad government. It’s time he pulled his head out of the sand.  Because regional co-operation might very well be the 51st way to make some really significant economies.

Our Friends in the North

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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