“Will the Tamar Bridge be sold?” That was the question posed by the Western Morning News earlier this month. And not just the bridge. Torquay’s Torre Abbey was mentioned too, though in both cases the relevant local councils denied any sale plans.
Gordon Brown’s announcement that he plans to sell off our public assets was, the paper told us, treated with derision by the councils. It went on to note that “while not able to directly force local authorities to sell their assets, fears have been voiced that the Government could slash the annual grant awarded to each council”, leaving them little option but to sell. While the report described such a move as “sinister”, the editorial went on to back the strategy. Well, it would. We’re talking about the Northcliffe press here, owners of the Daily Mail (the paper that backed the Blackshirts).
Sinister indeed. Which is why local communities in Wessex may well ask what the Government thinks it’s doing targeting local public services for cutbacks now that it’s spent all its money on bailing out the City of London. The real culprits in all of this are laughing literally all the way to the bank. Whether the public sector is a willing seller or an unwilling one, the deal only works if there’s a willing buyer. And there’s no shortage of them apparently. Financial institutions are always awash with money to buy whatever government offers for sale at knockdown prices. So where’s the banking crisis?
Or the budget crisis? There’s always money to fight needless wars, even if doled out so grudgingly that soldiers’ lives are even more needlessly put at risk. And Labour and the Tories are agreed that overseas aid should be protected – and increased. Not to put too fine a point on it, public services in this country are being cut so that those in other countries can be expanded. At our involuntary expense. King Alfred the Great famously sent alms to India in fulfilment of a vow taken when besieging the Danes in London. India today has no need of alms, having nuclear weapons, a space programme and even a foreign aid budget of its own. Yet need or no, it is one of the beneficiaries of our largesse.
Asset sales don’t make sense if you end up renting the asset back for ever and a day. They aren’t about keeping taxes down. They’re about keeping democracy down. Labour claims to be the party of modernisation, the party that refuses to let the present be controlled by the past. It would be truer to see it as the party that lets the present be controlled by the future, as debt slavery constrains the options of generations yet unborn.
For the Conservatives no less than for Labour, the idea of local authorities that own next to nothing is an attractive one. It’s their people who will benefit from the consultants’ reports, the legal fees, the management buy-outs. The issue for regionalists and other decentralists is that local assets, once sold, cannot be guaranteed to remain locally controlled. Bus services run from the Town Hall are answerable to the electorate of the town. Bus services run from a head office in Northumbria or Scotland are answerable to shareholders who may never have even heard of the place being served. The case for local or regional public ownership of the so-called ‘natural monopolies’ is partly about preventing the abuse of a dominant economic position for private profit. But these days it also forms a powerful component of opposition to globalisation, a strong pair of hands resisting the magnet of corporate concentration. No wonder the WTO makes privatisation its primary goal.
Councils that are nothing but bundles of contracts can’t see the point of vital democracy. No-one needs to hear the views of councillors any more because if they’re not in the small print already they can’t be made to count. (Poor service has to be tolerated until the contract is renewed.) If it’s not about debate but only about deals, the councillors are redundant. Step forward elected mayors to do the powerbroker thing, to talk tough with big business and big government. Elected mayors are not a sign of strong local democracy but the very opposite. They are what happens when a community signs its civic life away for a fistful of empty promises.
Happy King Alfred’s Day.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Organising Murder
"War is organised murder, and nothing else."
Harry Patch
And so the extraordinary life of Harry Patch, the last Tommy of the First World War, has ended at his home in Wells. His years as a centenarian were spent as an eloquent spokesman for the Lost Generation of 1914-18, imparting what he could of experiences beyond the comprehension of his listeners. There were no illusions: the war was "a family row", Remembrance Day "just show business".
The terrible irony is that as Patch’s past is laid to rest, so lives are still being lost in wars of choice. As the coffins pass through Wiltshire’s streets, Brown, Cameron & Co. conspire to whip up war fever, like music hall acts applauding ‘the soldiers of the Queen’. There is talk of ‘a 30-year haul’ in Afghanistan, in this, the 30th anniversary year of the Soviet invasion. The more soldiers die or are wounded, the greater the emotional investment at stake, the lesser the chance of a rational answer to the question, why?
The argument that blowing other countries apart protects us from terrorism is too silly for comment. And while the main party leaders drag us back to the days of Empire, when the Union flag was earning its nickname of ‘the Butcher’s Apron’, they might consider the record of all who have messed with Afghanistan before. The British lost the First Afghan War. They withdrew after the Second. And the Third, tactically a British victory, was strategically a lasting win for the Afghans. The Soviet Union too left humiliated, its whole empire imploding. Not the most encouraging set of precedents. On the first occasion, in 1842, Britain's expeditionary force was all but wiped out. Supposing himself the sole survivor, Dr William Brydon finally made it back to the gates of Jalalabad, he and his horse exhausted. The scene is depicted in Lady Butler’s great canvas, The Remnants of an Army, which hangs in the regimental museum of the Somersets at Taunton Castle.
The prospects of an oil pipeline from central Asia to the coast? Now that’s more like it. A far more convincing explanation of why lives are being laid down for ‘freedom’. Such is the curse geology has laid throughout the Mahometan lands. And as the oil runs out, so instability will worsen. Still more lives will be lost or shattered until we embrace the principle of economic subsidiarity: that nothing should be produced further away from the user than is absolutely necessary. The key to peace does not lie in a global economy micro-managed by totalitarian liberals but in living within environmental limits, regionally and locally. We can have prosperity without growth. But we cannot have growth without conflict.
Meanwhile Brown, Cameron and the rest of them responsible for organising murder in the 21st century must stand trial for their crimes.
Harry Patch
And so the extraordinary life of Harry Patch, the last Tommy of the First World War, has ended at his home in Wells. His years as a centenarian were spent as an eloquent spokesman for the Lost Generation of 1914-18, imparting what he could of experiences beyond the comprehension of his listeners. There were no illusions: the war was "a family row", Remembrance Day "just show business".
The terrible irony is that as Patch’s past is laid to rest, so lives are still being lost in wars of choice. As the coffins pass through Wiltshire’s streets, Brown, Cameron & Co. conspire to whip up war fever, like music hall acts applauding ‘the soldiers of the Queen’. There is talk of ‘a 30-year haul’ in Afghanistan, in this, the 30th anniversary year of the Soviet invasion. The more soldiers die or are wounded, the greater the emotional investment at stake, the lesser the chance of a rational answer to the question, why?
The argument that blowing other countries apart protects us from terrorism is too silly for comment. And while the main party leaders drag us back to the days of Empire, when the Union flag was earning its nickname of ‘the Butcher’s Apron’, they might consider the record of all who have messed with Afghanistan before. The British lost the First Afghan War. They withdrew after the Second. And the Third, tactically a British victory, was strategically a lasting win for the Afghans. The Soviet Union too left humiliated, its whole empire imploding. Not the most encouraging set of precedents. On the first occasion, in 1842, Britain's expeditionary force was all but wiped out. Supposing himself the sole survivor, Dr William Brydon finally made it back to the gates of Jalalabad, he and his horse exhausted. The scene is depicted in Lady Butler’s great canvas, The Remnants of an Army, which hangs in the regimental museum of the Somersets at Taunton Castle.
The prospects of an oil pipeline from central Asia to the coast? Now that’s more like it. A far more convincing explanation of why lives are being laid down for ‘freedom’. Such is the curse geology has laid throughout the Mahometan lands. And as the oil runs out, so instability will worsen. Still more lives will be lost or shattered until we embrace the principle of economic subsidiarity: that nothing should be produced further away from the user than is absolutely necessary. The key to peace does not lie in a global economy micro-managed by totalitarian liberals but in living within environmental limits, regionally and locally. We can have prosperity without growth. But we cannot have growth without conflict.
Meanwhile Brown, Cameron and the rest of them responsible for organising murder in the 21st century must stand trial for their crimes.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Danger: Electricity
It might seem churlish to complain that Gordon Brown has committed the necessary millions to electrify the Great Western main line from Bristol to London. After all, enough money has been spent on other parts of England, and beyond. But complain we do.
Our demand, for the past 30 years, has been for a Wessex-oriented transport system to link our principal cities without having to depend largely on routes directed towards London. An electrified Great Western is certainly not that. A glance at the Government’s map shows that electric trains will run from Paddington to Bristol and on to Swansea (amazing what a Welsh Assembly can achieve), with short stubs branching off to Newbury and to Oxford (how nice for the commuters and the dons). Trains from Plymouth to Bristol and Reading will remain diesel-hauled (but as the locals aren’t bankers and don’t as a rule vote Labour, no-one is going to care). Well, we do care. We care that our money is going into a scheme that is all about sucking the life out of ‘the provinces’ even faster. Why, in a sane, regionalised economy, would anyone want to go to London, the great casino that oversees our so-called wealth? If investment in spine rail routes is needed, why not Plymouth to Paddington or Exeter to Waterloo? Instead of which, an environmentally devastating dualling of the A303 trunk road is now made all the more likely so that Cornwall may compete with Wales.
Electrification too carries an environmental cost, green though its credentials can indeed be if the right renewable sources provide the power. Brunel’s railway is a masterpiece of design, so much so that the UK Government placed it on the tentative list of nominations to UNESCO for World Heritage status. Electrification will change the experiences that are Maidenhead Bridge, Sonning Cutting and Box Tunnel. Unavoidable change can be an opportunity for panache complementing Brunel’s own, and where this is so there need be no net loss. But British electrification schemes are not going to win design awards. In Sweden the supports for the overhead wires have been coloured green, so they blend in; ours are exposed, grey metal. Works of art they are not. So when the accountants’ butchery is complete, we may ask, what will be left of the line to meet UNESCO’s tests of 'authenticity' and 'integrity'? Wessex tourism will lose out on yet another huge potential resource.
We are emphatically a pro-rail party, and for many sound reasons. Peak oil is the one that looms ever larger but there are other environmental and social gains along the way. Using rail investment to increase, rather than decrease our dependency on London is entirely the wrong priority. It won’t do for politicians to say that they’re ‘investing in success’ when they use public money to bolster a competitive advantage that London has built largely from previous injections of public money and the presence of the government of a unitary state and global empire. Getting a faster train to Paddington cannot be more important than getting one at all to Portishead. The list of Wessex towns now without stations is ridiculously long: Abingdon, Bideford, Blandford Forum, Bridport, Cheddar, Cirencester, Devizes, Dursley, Glastonbury, Gosport, Ilfracombe, Lyme Regis, Marlborough, Midsomer Norton/Radstock, Ringwood, Shepton Mallet, Sidmouth, Tavistock, Tiverton, Wantage, Wells and Wimborne are just a few. And then there are metro systems to be built for the Bristol and south Hampshire conurbations. Better rail connections for those who have them are bitter rail connections for those who don’t. The Government’s view – that it’s for local and regional interests to raise their own funding if they wish to supplement national priorities – should lead us to ask why national priorities are so heavily distorted in the first place and what we must do to alter them.
Technology is developing fast. The Parry People Mover is an electric rail vehicle using flywheel energy storage, recharging at stations, with no need for a continuous overhead or third-rail supply. Let’s concentrate for the foreseeable future on the basics, rigorously safeguarding abandoned trackbed and buildings. From there we can move forward to re-open those iconic lines like the Somerset & Dorset forming part of a sustainable transport system for the whole of Wessex, not just the favoured parts. The Scottish Parliament is busy re-opening 35 miles of the Waverley line south of Edinburgh, so let no-one tell you it’s a nice idea but it’ll never happen. It’ll happen alright, just as soon as Wessex has a Parliament too.
Our demand, for the past 30 years, has been for a Wessex-oriented transport system to link our principal cities without having to depend largely on routes directed towards London. An electrified Great Western is certainly not that. A glance at the Government’s map shows that electric trains will run from Paddington to Bristol and on to Swansea (amazing what a Welsh Assembly can achieve), with short stubs branching off to Newbury and to Oxford (how nice for the commuters and the dons). Trains from Plymouth to Bristol and Reading will remain diesel-hauled (but as the locals aren’t bankers and don’t as a rule vote Labour, no-one is going to care). Well, we do care. We care that our money is going into a scheme that is all about sucking the life out of ‘the provinces’ even faster. Why, in a sane, regionalised economy, would anyone want to go to London, the great casino that oversees our so-called wealth? If investment in spine rail routes is needed, why not Plymouth to Paddington or Exeter to Waterloo? Instead of which, an environmentally devastating dualling of the A303 trunk road is now made all the more likely so that Cornwall may compete with Wales.
Electrification too carries an environmental cost, green though its credentials can indeed be if the right renewable sources provide the power. Brunel’s railway is a masterpiece of design, so much so that the UK Government placed it on the tentative list of nominations to UNESCO for World Heritage status. Electrification will change the experiences that are Maidenhead Bridge, Sonning Cutting and Box Tunnel. Unavoidable change can be an opportunity for panache complementing Brunel’s own, and where this is so there need be no net loss. But British electrification schemes are not going to win design awards. In Sweden the supports for the overhead wires have been coloured green, so they blend in; ours are exposed, grey metal. Works of art they are not. So when the accountants’ butchery is complete, we may ask, what will be left of the line to meet UNESCO’s tests of 'authenticity' and 'integrity'? Wessex tourism will lose out on yet another huge potential resource.
We are emphatically a pro-rail party, and for many sound reasons. Peak oil is the one that looms ever larger but there are other environmental and social gains along the way. Using rail investment to increase, rather than decrease our dependency on London is entirely the wrong priority. It won’t do for politicians to say that they’re ‘investing in success’ when they use public money to bolster a competitive advantage that London has built largely from previous injections of public money and the presence of the government of a unitary state and global empire. Getting a faster train to Paddington cannot be more important than getting one at all to Portishead. The list of Wessex towns now without stations is ridiculously long: Abingdon, Bideford, Blandford Forum, Bridport, Cheddar, Cirencester, Devizes, Dursley, Glastonbury, Gosport, Ilfracombe, Lyme Regis, Marlborough, Midsomer Norton/Radstock, Ringwood, Shepton Mallet, Sidmouth, Tavistock, Tiverton, Wantage, Wells and Wimborne are just a few. And then there are metro systems to be built for the Bristol and south Hampshire conurbations. Better rail connections for those who have them are bitter rail connections for those who don’t. The Government’s view – that it’s for local and regional interests to raise their own funding if they wish to supplement national priorities – should lead us to ask why national priorities are so heavily distorted in the first place and what we must do to alter them.
Technology is developing fast. The Parry People Mover is an electric rail vehicle using flywheel energy storage, recharging at stations, with no need for a continuous overhead or third-rail supply. Let’s concentrate for the foreseeable future on the basics, rigorously safeguarding abandoned trackbed and buildings. From there we can move forward to re-open those iconic lines like the Somerset & Dorset forming part of a sustainable transport system for the whole of Wessex, not just the favoured parts. The Scottish Parliament is busy re-opening 35 miles of the Waverley line south of Edinburgh, so let no-one tell you it’s a nice idea but it’ll never happen. It’ll happen alright, just as soon as Wessex has a Parliament too.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
The Axeman Cometh
Political discourse in the Disunited Kingdom is now turning to public spending cuts. Brown continues to tell us that capital investment is his priority, as if new schools, hospitals and the rest are of any lasting use without the right professionals to staff them. Cameron promises us ‘an age of austerity’, relieved only by tax cuts for his chums. Given New Labour’s mismanagement of the economy, there are, it seems, now plenty of turkeys willing to vote for a Cameronian Christmas Carol.
Our view is that the ideology of public versus private is less important than what the money is spent on and whether that raises or lowers our quality of life here in Wessex. The priorities of a Wessex Parliament could be – and should be – very different from Westminster’s. There is a plethora of politically correct initiatives we’d never miss if the axe fell on them, including the literally tens of billions of pounds of spending on foreign intervention, military and civil. The ever-imperial Tories have no plans to scale back on that, missing no opportunity to impose their culture of nastiness upon the world’s most vulnerable folk like some anti-social disease.
Some matters will, as ever, be glossed over in the spending review. English nationalists will once again wave the skeleton of the Barnett formula in a bid to scare us, though nothing will change. (Add in the figures the formula excludes and it looks much more likely that Scotland subsidises England, not the other way round.) No-one outside the Wessex Regionalists will take apart the figures for England itself to show how London benefits at our expense. In 2007/08, budgeted ‘identifiable public expenditure’ on London was 117% of the UK average; in the ‘South West’ zone, it was 89% and in the ‘South East’ a mere 84%. London received much more per head than any other part of England, more than Wales and almost as much as Scotland. When English nationalists tell us the Celts get a better deal than the English, a lot hinges on which English you mean.
One of the areas rumoured to be up for the chop could be free admission to museums and galleries. To be accurate, ‘national’ museums and galleries, almost all of which are in London, with a few now also to be found in Northumbria. Wessex has the Science Museum store at Wroughton, near Swindon. And what else? Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard is, on the face of it, a national museum. HMS Victory is still officially part of the Royal Navy. Yet admission charges apply. If free museum entry is a good idea – arguably so – then ‘our’ Government should pay for all ‘our’ museums to open free, not those it chooses, overwhelmingly in London. And it if can’t do that, then let the Greater London Authority meet the deficit there, not the long-suffering folk of Wessex.
Just why do we subsidise London, in so many ways, like serfs watching their crops trundle off to their feudal superior’s castle? And what do we get back? Wessex needs its own Parliament, in control of its own money, making its own decisions. With most, if not all, ‘MWPs’ living within commuting distance of the Parliament building – wherever located in our region – we could then at the very least curb the excesses of flipped second homes, to the relief of the Wessex taxpayer. Geography dictates that that is something no British or English Parliament can ever achieve: Britain and England alike are impractically big to govern from a single point purportedly convenient to all. So instead of Westminster and Whitehall deciding where the cuts should fall, how about them now placing their own fat necks upon the block?
Our view is that the ideology of public versus private is less important than what the money is spent on and whether that raises or lowers our quality of life here in Wessex. The priorities of a Wessex Parliament could be – and should be – very different from Westminster’s. There is a plethora of politically correct initiatives we’d never miss if the axe fell on them, including the literally tens of billions of pounds of spending on foreign intervention, military and civil. The ever-imperial Tories have no plans to scale back on that, missing no opportunity to impose their culture of nastiness upon the world’s most vulnerable folk like some anti-social disease.
Some matters will, as ever, be glossed over in the spending review. English nationalists will once again wave the skeleton of the Barnett formula in a bid to scare us, though nothing will change. (Add in the figures the formula excludes and it looks much more likely that Scotland subsidises England, not the other way round.) No-one outside the Wessex Regionalists will take apart the figures for England itself to show how London benefits at our expense. In 2007/08, budgeted ‘identifiable public expenditure’ on London was 117% of the UK average; in the ‘South West’ zone, it was 89% and in the ‘South East’ a mere 84%. London received much more per head than any other part of England, more than Wales and almost as much as Scotland. When English nationalists tell us the Celts get a better deal than the English, a lot hinges on which English you mean.
One of the areas rumoured to be up for the chop could be free admission to museums and galleries. To be accurate, ‘national’ museums and galleries, almost all of which are in London, with a few now also to be found in Northumbria. Wessex has the Science Museum store at Wroughton, near Swindon. And what else? Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard is, on the face of it, a national museum. HMS Victory is still officially part of the Royal Navy. Yet admission charges apply. If free museum entry is a good idea – arguably so – then ‘our’ Government should pay for all ‘our’ museums to open free, not those it chooses, overwhelmingly in London. And it if can’t do that, then let the Greater London Authority meet the deficit there, not the long-suffering folk of Wessex.
Just why do we subsidise London, in so many ways, like serfs watching their crops trundle off to their feudal superior’s castle? And what do we get back? Wessex needs its own Parliament, in control of its own money, making its own decisions. With most, if not all, ‘MWPs’ living within commuting distance of the Parliament building – wherever located in our region – we could then at the very least curb the excesses of flipped second homes, to the relief of the Wessex taxpayer. Geography dictates that that is something no British or English Parliament can ever achieve: Britain and England alike are impractically big to govern from a single point purportedly convenient to all. So instead of Westminster and Whitehall deciding where the cuts should fall, how about them now placing their own fat necks upon the block?
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Cornwall Points the Way
Among all the commentary from the London media about the results from the 4 June elections, it is possible that a few facts about Cornwall may have escaped widespread notice.
In the Euro election, Mebyon Kernow – the Party for Cornwall took 7% of the vote across the Cornwall counting area. In many parts of mid and west Cornwall its share was reported to have been over 10%. MK came fifth in Cornwall, beating the now despised Labour Party into an ignominious sixth place.
Polling day also saw three MK candidates elected to the new Cornwall Council unitary authority. MK had no representation on the old County Council but did have nine district councillors, all of whom lost their seats through the reorganisation. Dr Loveday Jenkin, previously the portfolio holder for Leisure, Arts & Culture on Kerrier District Council, failed to get onto the new authority after her home parish of Crowan was split in two by the Boundary Committee charged with drawing up the new electoral divisions. The three successful MK candidates include Party Leader Dick Cole, formerly a Cornwall County Council employee, who gave up his job, taking a big cut in income, in order to be allowed to stand. The electors of St Enoder rewarded him with 78% of the vote, the biggest mandate of any of the 123 Cornwall Council members. The Labour Party, after 12 years of contempt for Cornish aspirations to self-government, failed to win a single seat. The last few decent human beings left in that party must now surely be starting to look for a new political home.
The Euro results were also disappointing for the English Democrats, who do not recognise Cornwall as a nation. They came tenth in Cornwall, with only one-sixth of the MK vote. Across the ‘South West’ zone as a whole they did rather better, polling 1.6% of the total, compared with 1.0% for MK, but with ten times the population to which to appeal the margin should have been much greater. In fact the EngDems in the ‘South West’ did poorly in comparison with England generally. After London, this was their worst result in terms of share of the vote. Which suggests that Wessex folk are wary of a party that wants to impose a ‘one-size-fits-all’ English Parliament upon us.
The lessons for Wessex run wide and deep.
The first is in minding our own business. Cornish nationalism is now an established fact, the cultural posturing having broken through at last into real political clout. A firm line should now be drawn under those delusional claims that Cornwall ‘will want to come in with us’, that ‘it’s not viable’, ‘it doesn’t fit a rational pattern of English regions’, or that ‘the Cornish thing is purely cultural; if we promise to support the language, they’ll be happy to be part of Wessex’. Cornwall has never been an integral part of Wessex, having always maintained its distinctive character and it’s not just flogging a dead horse to suggest otherwise. The Cornish are our neighbours and can be our friends and our allies. Wessex has enough enemies without adding Cornwall to the list.
The second is a lesson in patience. MK was founded in 1951. It has journeyed over rocky roads to reach its present position. In the 1980’s, its General Secretary defected to the Social Democrats (though came back again, empty-handed) and a hardline Marxist cabal made it unelectable. It isn’t unelectable now. The Wessex Regionalists are relative newcomers, constituted as a party in 1981. But we can be confident that the tide of history will be turning our way too before very long.
The third lesson is that challenging the consensus works. MK is not middle-of-the-road. It describes itself as a modern and progressive political party, a party of principle, campaigning for a better deal for Cornwall and a fairer, more equitable world. After 30 years of Thatcherism, ceaseless centralisation of power within England and across Europe, unregulated free markets gone mad and a culture of greed and growth engrained everywhere, it’s time for alternative politics to make its move.
Finally, MK is succeeding because others before it have failed. A wide-ranging cultural movement has rekindled the flame of Cornish identity, yet as confidence in that identity has grown, so real control by the Cornish over Cornwall has continued to diminish. Government initiatives to help its economy are not even run from within Cornwall. Non-party action has failed to dent the Whitehall armour: a 50,000-signature petition in favour of a Cornish assembly was simply dismissed for nonconformity with the New Labour project. It is likely that Wessex will have to go through a similar process of maturation, realising that the cultural groundwork may make us angry about what is happening but it will not on its own enable us to get even. Faith in the goodwill of the London-based parties needs to wear away completely before folk turn to the only conclusion valid in the long-term. That only we, ourselves, can right the wrongs that afflict our region. The Wessex Regionalist Party is here to welcome each and every one as they reach that resolution.
In the Euro election, Mebyon Kernow – the Party for Cornwall took 7% of the vote across the Cornwall counting area. In many parts of mid and west Cornwall its share was reported to have been over 10%. MK came fifth in Cornwall, beating the now despised Labour Party into an ignominious sixth place.
Polling day also saw three MK candidates elected to the new Cornwall Council unitary authority. MK had no representation on the old County Council but did have nine district councillors, all of whom lost their seats through the reorganisation. Dr Loveday Jenkin, previously the portfolio holder for Leisure, Arts & Culture on Kerrier District Council, failed to get onto the new authority after her home parish of Crowan was split in two by the Boundary Committee charged with drawing up the new electoral divisions. The three successful MK candidates include Party Leader Dick Cole, formerly a Cornwall County Council employee, who gave up his job, taking a big cut in income, in order to be allowed to stand. The electors of St Enoder rewarded him with 78% of the vote, the biggest mandate of any of the 123 Cornwall Council members. The Labour Party, after 12 years of contempt for Cornish aspirations to self-government, failed to win a single seat. The last few decent human beings left in that party must now surely be starting to look for a new political home.
The Euro results were also disappointing for the English Democrats, who do not recognise Cornwall as a nation. They came tenth in Cornwall, with only one-sixth of the MK vote. Across the ‘South West’ zone as a whole they did rather better, polling 1.6% of the total, compared with 1.0% for MK, but with ten times the population to which to appeal the margin should have been much greater. In fact the EngDems in the ‘South West’ did poorly in comparison with England generally. After London, this was their worst result in terms of share of the vote. Which suggests that Wessex folk are wary of a party that wants to impose a ‘one-size-fits-all’ English Parliament upon us.
The lessons for Wessex run wide and deep.
The first is in minding our own business. Cornish nationalism is now an established fact, the cultural posturing having broken through at last into real political clout. A firm line should now be drawn under those delusional claims that Cornwall ‘will want to come in with us’, that ‘it’s not viable’, ‘it doesn’t fit a rational pattern of English regions’, or that ‘the Cornish thing is purely cultural; if we promise to support the language, they’ll be happy to be part of Wessex’. Cornwall has never been an integral part of Wessex, having always maintained its distinctive character and it’s not just flogging a dead horse to suggest otherwise. The Cornish are our neighbours and can be our friends and our allies. Wessex has enough enemies without adding Cornwall to the list.
The second is a lesson in patience. MK was founded in 1951. It has journeyed over rocky roads to reach its present position. In the 1980’s, its General Secretary defected to the Social Democrats (though came back again, empty-handed) and a hardline Marxist cabal made it unelectable. It isn’t unelectable now. The Wessex Regionalists are relative newcomers, constituted as a party in 1981. But we can be confident that the tide of history will be turning our way too before very long.
The third lesson is that challenging the consensus works. MK is not middle-of-the-road. It describes itself as a modern and progressive political party, a party of principle, campaigning for a better deal for Cornwall and a fairer, more equitable world. After 30 years of Thatcherism, ceaseless centralisation of power within England and across Europe, unregulated free markets gone mad and a culture of greed and growth engrained everywhere, it’s time for alternative politics to make its move.
Finally, MK is succeeding because others before it have failed. A wide-ranging cultural movement has rekindled the flame of Cornish identity, yet as confidence in that identity has grown, so real control by the Cornish over Cornwall has continued to diminish. Government initiatives to help its economy are not even run from within Cornwall. Non-party action has failed to dent the Whitehall armour: a 50,000-signature petition in favour of a Cornish assembly was simply dismissed for nonconformity with the New Labour project. It is likely that Wessex will have to go through a similar process of maturation, realising that the cultural groundwork may make us angry about what is happening but it will not on its own enable us to get even. Faith in the goodwill of the London-based parties needs to wear away completely before folk turn to the only conclusion valid in the long-term. That only we, ourselves, can right the wrongs that afflict our region. The Wessex Regionalist Party is here to welcome each and every one as they reach that resolution.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Hippies in Denial
This time last month (30 May), there was a gathering at Glastonbury Town Hall to discuss the town’s ‘transition’ to a post-oil world. It began with a talk from a leading light in Transition Town Totnes (TTT), the pioneers of transition thinking in the UK. Sadly, amidst all the joyful envisioning of local self-sufficiency, there did seem to be a few basics missing. It was like the 1960’s all over again, a fantasy world where everything is possible. In truth, in the future, everything will not be possible and hard choices will be needed.
We were told to expect millions of ‘climate refugees’ and make plans to welcome them to our communities. It seemed not to have dawned on anyone that, since a post-oil economy will not support more than a fraction of our current population, we should most certainly not be trying to add to it. Among the key characteristics of the future brainstormed in workshops was the hope that this would be a world of ‘happy, smiling people’. From time to time they might well be that, if instructed to be. Just not while they’re busy killing each other for possession of productive land and its outputs.
TTT’s website carries Buckminster Fuller’s famous words, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” That’s partly true. It’s how successful nationalist groups have dismantled the empires from which they have struggled to free themselves. You defeat the enemy by systematically disregarding its authority. But those who make it sound all that simple are in for a shock.
Transition towns will find that when Tesco want to build in their midst, or there’s a new trunk road coming up the valley, the answer doesn’t lie in digging the allotment. Gandhi won because he was fighting the British. Gandhi versus Hitler or Stalin would have had a very different outcome. The planning system today is owned by the likes of Tesco and the Highways Agency. With every passing day, Labour makes it more so. The Tories’ only cavil is that the supermarkets and the motorways aren’t being built fast enough.
Local action, however twee, is not going to make the difference it needs to make until there is a region-wide reaction against Westminster diktat. A Wessex Parliament will do what local initiatives cannot. It will ensure that the price structures are in place to help local producers compete fairly. It will rebuild the region’s rural railways, renewably-run, to enable communities to exchange goods of the highest quality. It will protect productive land from crazed housebuilders by establishing an optimum population level and sticking to it. It will redefine the housing market to ensure that local people are not squeezed out as a result. It will counter any wider power that fails to place Wessex interests first. In short, it will work for our communities and not against them.
Or… we can go on kidding ourselves that acting locally is enough, that Westminster is full of thoroughly decent chaps and chapesses, that Whitehall too really is on our side, and that if all this isn’t so then there must be some absolutely sound reason for it that we’re just too dense to grasp. More flowers anyone?
We were told to expect millions of ‘climate refugees’ and make plans to welcome them to our communities. It seemed not to have dawned on anyone that, since a post-oil economy will not support more than a fraction of our current population, we should most certainly not be trying to add to it. Among the key characteristics of the future brainstormed in workshops was the hope that this would be a world of ‘happy, smiling people’. From time to time they might well be that, if instructed to be. Just not while they’re busy killing each other for possession of productive land and its outputs.
TTT’s website carries Buckminster Fuller’s famous words, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” That’s partly true. It’s how successful nationalist groups have dismantled the empires from which they have struggled to free themselves. You defeat the enemy by systematically disregarding its authority. But those who make it sound all that simple are in for a shock.
Transition towns will find that when Tesco want to build in their midst, or there’s a new trunk road coming up the valley, the answer doesn’t lie in digging the allotment. Gandhi won because he was fighting the British. Gandhi versus Hitler or Stalin would have had a very different outcome. The planning system today is owned by the likes of Tesco and the Highways Agency. With every passing day, Labour makes it more so. The Tories’ only cavil is that the supermarkets and the motorways aren’t being built fast enough.
Local action, however twee, is not going to make the difference it needs to make until there is a region-wide reaction against Westminster diktat. A Wessex Parliament will do what local initiatives cannot. It will ensure that the price structures are in place to help local producers compete fairly. It will rebuild the region’s rural railways, renewably-run, to enable communities to exchange goods of the highest quality. It will protect productive land from crazed housebuilders by establishing an optimum population level and sticking to it. It will redefine the housing market to ensure that local people are not squeezed out as a result. It will counter any wider power that fails to place Wessex interests first. In short, it will work for our communities and not against them.
Or… we can go on kidding ourselves that acting locally is enough, that Westminster is full of thoroughly decent chaps and chapesses, that Whitehall too really is on our side, and that if all this isn’t so then there must be some absolutely sound reason for it that we’re just too dense to grasp. More flowers anyone?
Monday, June 1, 2009
Note from Abruzzo
Guest contribution by Colin Bex, Wessex Regionalists' London Bureau
Staying near a village in Casoli, some eighty miles south-west of L'Aquila, I awoke at 3.30am on Monday 6 April, but was unaware of any particular reason other than as part of an irritating cycle of broken sleep to which have become accustomed for some time now.
Neighbours say they did feel a tremor at the time, and some English people a few miles away, said their cat jumped in through the window at the time although they also were not aware of anything unusual. This it appears forms part of the quarter of grade II 'seismic' territory which was not affected – this time anyway........!
Well now we know the extent of the death, injury and deracination, in addition to something of the building fabric damaged - reportedly 205 dead, several thousand homeless, 40,000 evacuated - not only failure and collapse of traditional masonry construction in churches and houses, but also of modern reinforced concrete structures including a school, a hospital, a student hostel and a road-bridge.
Buildings in some 84 Abruzze towns and cities are reported as having suffered damage of some kind - much of it to historic buildings of national importance. This gives some idea of the magnitude of this seismic disaster affecting nearly three-quarters of the region.
It seems that timber rather than masonry construction fares well in such circumstances, however, from what I have understood in the regional papers here (Il Tempo, Il Messaggiero and Il Centro), the Richter force of the 'terramoto' was 5.8 and one estimate of its effect is that L' Aquila has moved 15cm.
Incidentally, geologist and seismic specialist Antonio Moretti has been publicly condemned by establishment politicians here for warning on radio that on the evidence, within the next ten years another likely candidate could be Sulmona - a fine city I visited last year high up in the mountains with a splendid statue of Ovid in one of its squares.
At the very least it is ironic that this particular seismic event should have struck when the impact of its psychological, emotional and logistical effects were to be most greatly felt – springtime at Easter when religious, atheist and heathen alike expect to be able to sense relief from the rigors of winter and to experience hope from the new cycle of life.
On Good Friday, I attended part of one of the region-wide candle-lit religious processions held in sympathy of which two took place on successive evenings in Lanciano.
The turnout was impressive – probably several thousand people comprising four generations of families from babies to great grand-parents who lined the streets waiting patiently for the pallbearers to pass by. Also, I was deeply saddened to reflect on the passion and immeasurable suffering of the bereaved, so powerfully portrayed at the numerous public funeral gatherings held also in cities, towns and villages throughout Abruzzo on Easter Saturday.
Not surprisingly, at L'Aquila itself it is reported 5,000 people attended the funeral service for the 205 who died.
'Per Sempre Insieme, Dolore in tutto Paese, inno di speranza dalla Via Crucis del Papa' - so ran Il Messaggero's headline: 'For all together, Sadness throughout the country, hymn of hope through the Way of the Cross by the Pope'.
Laid out in seried ranks, flower-bedecked coffins provided copy for the press and the focus for the Requiem in L'Aquila's main square, but it was the substantially pervading silence of this grieving assembly, not the Papa's nor his cardinal's words, which testified more eloquently to the profundity of dismay which bound those present in an exemplary gathering of regional unity.
In my role as co-ordinator for external affairs for the Wessex Regionalists, the incident has been an object-lesson in the emergent power of latent cohesion of a regional people when confronted by the consequences of a natural event within a seismic zone.
Albeit purloined as part of a centralist Republic, how the Abruzzese survivors may be coping with the additional impact from the man-made financial fiasco, requires more research.
Staying near a village in Casoli, some eighty miles south-west of L'Aquila, I awoke at 3.30am on Monday 6 April, but was unaware of any particular reason other than as part of an irritating cycle of broken sleep to which have become accustomed for some time now.
Neighbours say they did feel a tremor at the time, and some English people a few miles away, said their cat jumped in through the window at the time although they also were not aware of anything unusual. This it appears forms part of the quarter of grade II 'seismic' territory which was not affected – this time anyway........!
Well now we know the extent of the death, injury and deracination, in addition to something of the building fabric damaged - reportedly 205 dead, several thousand homeless, 40,000 evacuated - not only failure and collapse of traditional masonry construction in churches and houses, but also of modern reinforced concrete structures including a school, a hospital, a student hostel and a road-bridge.
Buildings in some 84 Abruzze towns and cities are reported as having suffered damage of some kind - much of it to historic buildings of national importance. This gives some idea of the magnitude of this seismic disaster affecting nearly three-quarters of the region.
It seems that timber rather than masonry construction fares well in such circumstances, however, from what I have understood in the regional papers here (Il Tempo, Il Messaggiero and Il Centro), the Richter force of the 'terramoto' was 5.8 and one estimate of its effect is that L' Aquila has moved 15cm.
Incidentally, geologist and seismic specialist Antonio Moretti has been publicly condemned by establishment politicians here for warning on radio that on the evidence, within the next ten years another likely candidate could be Sulmona - a fine city I visited last year high up in the mountains with a splendid statue of Ovid in one of its squares.
At the very least it is ironic that this particular seismic event should have struck when the impact of its psychological, emotional and logistical effects were to be most greatly felt – springtime at Easter when religious, atheist and heathen alike expect to be able to sense relief from the rigors of winter and to experience hope from the new cycle of life.
On Good Friday, I attended part of one of the region-wide candle-lit religious processions held in sympathy of which two took place on successive evenings in Lanciano.
The turnout was impressive – probably several thousand people comprising four generations of families from babies to great grand-parents who lined the streets waiting patiently for the pallbearers to pass by. Also, I was deeply saddened to reflect on the passion and immeasurable suffering of the bereaved, so powerfully portrayed at the numerous public funeral gatherings held also in cities, towns and villages throughout Abruzzo on Easter Saturday.
Not surprisingly, at L'Aquila itself it is reported 5,000 people attended the funeral service for the 205 who died.
'Per Sempre Insieme, Dolore in tutto Paese, inno di speranza dalla Via Crucis del Papa' - so ran Il Messaggero's headline: 'For all together, Sadness throughout the country, hymn of hope through the Way of the Cross by the Pope'.
Laid out in seried ranks, flower-bedecked coffins provided copy for the press and the focus for the Requiem in L'Aquila's main square, but it was the substantially pervading silence of this grieving assembly, not the Papa's nor his cardinal's words, which testified more eloquently to the profundity of dismay which bound those present in an exemplary gathering of regional unity.
In my role as co-ordinator for external affairs for the Wessex Regionalists, the incident has been an object-lesson in the emergent power of latent cohesion of a regional people when confronted by the consequences of a natural event within a seismic zone.
Albeit purloined as part of a centralist Republic, how the Abruzzese survivors may be coping with the additional impact from the man-made financial fiasco, requires more research.
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