In Chinese astrology, 2012 is the Year of the Dragon, 2013 the Year of the Snake. A wyvern is something in between, so as we look back over last year’s achievements, we should also be looking forward to what still needs to be done.
It’s in the nature of the status quo to be triumphalist, to insist that what is must be. That there is no alternative. History warns us not to be so certain. Not even about a centralised Britain contemptuous of local and regional autonomy. And thus the work goes on.
Monday, December 31, 2012
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Five Winning Ways
“We need to be the change we wish to see in the world.”
attributed to Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)
Radical parties write their own rules. That is how they eventually succeed. The tide of history will always flow with those who have the greatest, least compromising passion on their side. And the fewest doubts. So the way to make Wessex live is to live it yourself.
For example, by including Wessex as part of your own address and in addressing letters to others. And by challenging others to do the same. Those loyal to traditional county identities have been doing this ever since 1974. And bringing up their children to recognise proper geography rather than the imposed administrative areas. It’s why, when we refer to the ‘South West’ and ‘South East’ zones, we put them in quotes; we aren’t going to do obeisance to the London regime’s map of England.
Individuals and businesses can ‘go Wessex’ by flying the flag and by buying and selling merchandise based on the design. It’s impossible to visit Cornwall or Wales and not be struck by the contrast with Wessex. Why is our tourist industry not pushing OUR identity? Why is it allowing opportunities to drain away? When will it start pressing for ‘Welcome to Wessex’ signs on the motorways and trunk roads that cross our boundaries?
We want a self-governing Wessex region. And we do not need anyone’s permission to act accordingly. Clear thinking on this subject may be a helpful exercise for more troubled times when the London regime is less tolerant of opposition, when Wessex will need appropriate role models.
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
Alice Walker (1944-)
We need to actually exercise the political power we have, because that's the only way to obtain more of that power. By exercising it now. By calling others to account and doing it tenaciously. By not taking a sneer for an answer. By challenging. Everything. All the time.
Democracy is only corrupted when folk abrogate or irretrievably delegate their political responsibilities. Economic democracy – freedom from, not just freedom to – remains a viable and urgent political choice, if only the majority will take responsibility for their future. The status quo has a huge hold, because it’s issued all kinds of technocratic promises, and folk are wary of fighting it for fear that they won’t get what was promised, be it their pensions, their health care, or whatever. It’s only when they realise that the promises aren’t going to be kept that they will be free psychologically to challenge the status quo and replace it.
It’s easy not to respond to public consultation exercises, on the grounds that, for example, ‘the council won’t listen to us’. If that’s true, we need to push harder, not walk away. Someone, somewhere along the line, will read the comment and start to think. So it pays to make it an incisive and provocative one.
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
We haven’t inherited Wessex fully realised; it’s a reality we’re having to build. We should no longer need to justify the existence of Wessex. So our task is to draw attention to the fact that Wessex exists, to the consequences of London’s mismanagement, and to the potential that self-government offers for a better life.
We have a long radical tradition in Wessex that doesn’t always feature in traditional historical narratives focused on London’s priorities. It’s an underground stream waiting to be brought to the surface. There’s discontent out there, but it needs to go beyond mere grumbling. It needs organisation. And a comprehensive approach to online activism.
“Greatness consists in deciding only what is necessary for the welfare of the country, and making straight for the goal… In the belief that you are NOT great, but small and weak, and expecting no help to reach you from any quarter, you will in the end surmount all hindrances.”
Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938)
We’re a political party because nothing else works. Nothing succeeds like secession. Not necessarily secession from the Anglo-Norman State, but certainly secession from its habitual modes of thought.
Time spent lobbying Liebour, the Limp Dims or any other product of the Anglo-Norman State is time wasted. We’ve spent days at Portcullis House in Westminster, and elsewhere, in discussions with Alan Whitehead, Andrew George and other leading politicians who are part of the top-down approach. Explaining the facts to an establishment that refuses to comprehend. We can use such time more productively.
“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
Horace Mann (1796-1859)
But better still, stay around to enjoy it!
attributed to Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)
Radical parties write their own rules. That is how they eventually succeed. The tide of history will always flow with those who have the greatest, least compromising passion on their side. And the fewest doubts. So the way to make Wessex live is to live it yourself.
For example, by including Wessex as part of your own address and in addressing letters to others. And by challenging others to do the same. Those loyal to traditional county identities have been doing this ever since 1974. And bringing up their children to recognise proper geography rather than the imposed administrative areas. It’s why, when we refer to the ‘South West’ and ‘South East’ zones, we put them in quotes; we aren’t going to do obeisance to the London regime’s map of England.
Individuals and businesses can ‘go Wessex’ by flying the flag and by buying and selling merchandise based on the design. It’s impossible to visit Cornwall or Wales and not be struck by the contrast with Wessex. Why is our tourist industry not pushing OUR identity? Why is it allowing opportunities to drain away? When will it start pressing for ‘Welcome to Wessex’ signs on the motorways and trunk roads that cross our boundaries?
We want a self-governing Wessex region. And we do not need anyone’s permission to act accordingly. Clear thinking on this subject may be a helpful exercise for more troubled times when the London regime is less tolerant of opposition, when Wessex will need appropriate role models.
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
Alice Walker (1944-)
We need to actually exercise the political power we have, because that's the only way to obtain more of that power. By exercising it now. By calling others to account and doing it tenaciously. By not taking a sneer for an answer. By challenging. Everything. All the time.
Democracy is only corrupted when folk abrogate or irretrievably delegate their political responsibilities. Economic democracy – freedom from, not just freedom to – remains a viable and urgent political choice, if only the majority will take responsibility for their future. The status quo has a huge hold, because it’s issued all kinds of technocratic promises, and folk are wary of fighting it for fear that they won’t get what was promised, be it their pensions, their health care, or whatever. It’s only when they realise that the promises aren’t going to be kept that they will be free psychologically to challenge the status quo and replace it.
It’s easy not to respond to public consultation exercises, on the grounds that, for example, ‘the council won’t listen to us’. If that’s true, we need to push harder, not walk away. Someone, somewhere along the line, will read the comment and start to think. So it pays to make it an incisive and provocative one.
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
We haven’t inherited Wessex fully realised; it’s a reality we’re having to build. We should no longer need to justify the existence of Wessex. So our task is to draw attention to the fact that Wessex exists, to the consequences of London’s mismanagement, and to the potential that self-government offers for a better life.
We have a long radical tradition in Wessex that doesn’t always feature in traditional historical narratives focused on London’s priorities. It’s an underground stream waiting to be brought to the surface. There’s discontent out there, but it needs to go beyond mere grumbling. It needs organisation. And a comprehensive approach to online activism.
“Greatness consists in deciding only what is necessary for the welfare of the country, and making straight for the goal… In the belief that you are NOT great, but small and weak, and expecting no help to reach you from any quarter, you will in the end surmount all hindrances.”
Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938)
We’re a political party because nothing else works. Nothing succeeds like secession. Not necessarily secession from the Anglo-Norman State, but certainly secession from its habitual modes of thought.
Time spent lobbying Liebour, the Limp Dims or any other product of the Anglo-Norman State is time wasted. We’ve spent days at Portcullis House in Westminster, and elsewhere, in discussions with Alan Whitehead, Andrew George and other leading politicians who are part of the top-down approach. Explaining the facts to an establishment that refuses to comprehend. We can use such time more productively.
“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
Horace Mann (1796-1859)
But better still, stay around to enjoy it!
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
English Is Not Enough
“What we think of when we talk of English traits really narrows itself to a small district. It excludes Ireland and Scotland and Wales, and reduces itself at last to London, that is, to those who come and go thither.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Identity today is in flux: so the Census results tell us. There are many currents but a key event, especially for political radicals, was the launch of the unprovoked attack on Iraq in 2003, backed by almost the whole of the London political establishment. So thorough was that backing that it is difficult to find an appropriate reaction short of repudiating the British State itself.
It’s easier for those on the Celtic periphery to do this, slipping easily into an alternative identity removed both in distance and in scale from the London regime. It’s not so easy to do here, where the difference between England and Britain has historically been seriously blurred. England is 81% of Britain by population and its capital is also Britain’s capital. But one seriously big consequence of devolution is undoubtedly that more folk today identify as primarily English, rather than primarily British, than would have done 20 years ago. And they are prepared to organise as such. These facts have spawned a growing stream of pseudo-academic mush from a self-referential British Left anxious for an ideologically sound response that doesn’t rock the unionist boat.
The challenge facing a distinct English identity is the extent to which it has for a very long time been a dormant one. Tom Nairn, a Scot, wrote in The Break-up of Britain that the price of the Union has been a “peculiar repression and truncation of Englishness”. Anyone looking for an English identity today will find some odd, and often disagreeable, role models. Billy Bragg has done his best to present a radical view of England – and been pilloried for his pains by a labour movement that will happily march behind its trade union banners but views national flags with some unease. So the fringe has it. Dr Frank Hansford-Miller, who founded the English National Party in 1974, used to dress up as a Beefeater, in the belief that this was the English national costume. It didn’t do his cause a lot of good. Today’s English nationalists are as likely to dress in chain mail and pretend to be crusaders, especially if they dislike their neighbours from Asia.
Insisting that the only England is the far Right England does nobody any good. The far Right will find plenty who reject Englishness itself as tainted, for the same reasons that they also reject Britishness. And it can hardly be to England’s benefit to have to choose between a far Right vision and a total vacuum.
It certainly is to the benefit of the UK establishment to foster the idea that there is no third option. That way, the far Right bogeyman can be recruited in support of the status quo. England needs the Celts. They must understand that they have a responsibility not to be selfish but to stay in an abusive relationship for the sake of the English. Separatism would abandon England to be ruled by skinheads with swastika tattoos on their foreheads. Only the eggshell-thin veneer of Britishness protects the English from themselves and the havoc they would unleash... It’s ridiculous. It’s manipulative. It serves well the electoral interests of the Labour Party. And it’s not less real for being untrue.
So it’s important to those in power to suppress the creation of any third option. Regionalism can be spiked by insisting that the Prescott zones were it, that no more imaginative solution is open for discussion. Those who accept that as true are pushed back upon either the far Right unitary England or the status quo, lacking, as they do, the confidence to assert that actually there are several different paths down which England could travel and that it isn’t a betrayal of it to say so. A federal England, for example, isn’t any less English than a unitary one. It is MORE English, to the extent that it allows expression for regional and local identities too, which are necessarily part of any inclusive picture.
English nationalism’s greatest fear, stemming from the Prescott zones experiment, is that England will disappear completely. That it won’t be possible to be English at all. That division and disunity will accelerate to the point where Englishness becomes a crime. Yet there’s no problem with division and disunity at the international scale, or with denouncing a European identity, because those are deep-rooted attitudes that go back to the origins of our modern State. English nationalism still dances to a Tudor tune. Beefeaters, remember?
Disappearance does seem an unlikely scenario, though one easily exploited, both by those who might want such an outcome and those who don’t. What puts regionalists off nationalists is the degree of over-reaction this engenders. England becomes an embattled identity and a greedy one, one that wants it all. Any identity that doesn’t subordinate the particular to the national is railed against as an enemy within. Any recognition of legitimate claims – that Kernow and Gwent aren’t English or that it’s time to be friends with the Germans – is feared as a crumbling of the defences that will bring the whole citadel crashing down.
We aren’t opposed to an English Parliament that minds its own business and never interferes in the internal affairs of Wessex. We don’t campaign for one, because it would do nothing to advance our own cause. But we don’t campaign against one either so long as its powers aren’t envisaged as inhibiting the self-government of Wessex, now or at any time in the future. An English Parliament that practised subsidiarity might find itself with little or nothing to do, but that wouldn’t be bad news. We do agree that there’s injustice at large when you cannot write ‘English’ as your nationality on official forms. We do believe you should always have that right. What we don’t believe is that being part of the same nation as us gives those in London the right to dictate to regions that are more than capable of making our own decisions. Let the English identity flourish, because a secure identity is also a generous identity, able to view England as a community of communities. We aren’t afraid of it. It’s a pity if it feels the need to be afraid of us.
English nationalism’s second great driver, besides fear of non-existence, is a fear of unfairness. The classic oppressor-as-victim. If Celts can feel oppressed, so can the English. It doesn’t work, because the English are the majority in the UK by 4:1. It’s true that the English are oppressed, but it’s the English, or some of them, who are doing the oppressing. An English Parliament, without a commitment to subsidiarity, will only go on doing it.
Unfairness implies disadvantage. And the regions of England would be no less disadvantaged without regionalism than England would be with no recognition of its own status. Is the denial of status unique? Far from it. While much depends on what is a nation, there are several traditional national entities in Europe that are divided into regions and have no parliament of their own. For England, you could also read Occitania, Prussia, the Mezzogiorno, Aragon or Castille, all areas of Europe with either their own language or a history of powerful monarchical independence. And there are ways to recognise such entities without denying regional autonomy.
So are Scotland and Wales not disadvantaged, having no regional assemblies? Why is England singled out for special ill-treatment? Territorial government is underpinned by geography. Ignore geography and you ignore the possibility of any sensible arrangement of anything. Scotland and Wales are a fraction of the size of England, so any sub-divisions there count as local government units. An England without regions is, and would continue to be, badly governed because it suffers from diseconomies of scale.
It’s worth pondering just how vast a country England is. So too are the quantities of energy and other resources expended in governing it, and which won’t be around for ever. It’s worth pondering, because it’s difficult for those who live within commuting distance of the capital to understand what it’s like to live on the periphery. Often you’ll get the ‘write-off the regions and invest in London’s success’ line of reasoning from Tory think-tanks, who also fail to understand how the English periphery’s economic weakness is directly related to its political invisibility.
What English nationalists routinely propose as their ‘alternative’ to regionalism is to build high-speed rail lines to Newcastle and Penzance so that those coming cap in hand to London can do so all the quicker. The London view of England is that it’s better by far that those on the periphery should spend their unimportant, provincial lives on trains than that London should surrender any part of its monopoly of power. Centralism has determined nothing less than the very shape of England (and who gets to call themselves English). Lothian, now Scottish, was once part of Northumbria. It was abandoned by the united English realm, quite possibly because a king based in Wessex couldn’t hope to get an army there quickly enough to defend it in the event of invasion.
English nationalism’s third great driver is a belief in the responsibility of the sovereign centre to inspect and correct the localities, a tradition which regionalism would decisively break. The fear is not just that England is being mapped out of existence, not just that it’s being discriminated against by a Celt-loving Labour Party, but that without institutions to impose a uniform culture and a sense of subservience to the centre, all hell would break loose. You’d have different areas doing whatever they want, and that would never do. These things have to be carefully doled out, by royal charter, by private legislation, by ministerial fiat. You can’t just do it.
Why does the leading English identity only grudgingly concede a pinch of autonomy to counties and cities, while bringing down a metaphorical mace upon the heads of those who would restore England to its regional roots? We are all conquered. The Celts know they lost. The English lost too but have been taught to identify with their conquerors to the point where they think they won. They won at Hastings and have gone on winning ever since. If we want an end to Norman rule by 2066, regional government has to play a pivotal part.
It’s fashionable to sneer at the idea of the Norman Yoke, dismiss it as a 17th century fable and carry on the issuing of orders from London as if that’s simply an inevitable fact of nature. It’s not inevitable and it’s not natural either. Scholars like Jim Bulpitt have written about the centuries-old relationship between ‘Court’ and ‘Country’, between ‘high politics’ and ‘low politics’. What we’ve seen with devolution is a partial re-instatement of ‘middle politics’ that needs to go much further.
Our aim is, so far as Wessex is concerned, to lead that process of going further. Professor Jonathan Bradbury has written that the Blair government’s introduction of devolution succeeded “precisely because of its focus on local origination in each territory. From a central Whig perspective this produced adhockery and incoherence; from a Bulpittian perspective on territorial management it was a lesson in peripheralising the problems and legitimation of reform in each territory to local actors, thereby freeing the centre from the difficulties of imposing solutions but also arriving at workable answers.”
In other words, you cannot make ‘English regionalism’ work by drawing a map in London and expecting the locals to conform. The demand has to come from below and for that reason every region should be recognisably different. We don’t work any more closely than we need to with regionalists in other parts of England because that would be an undermining of the very ethos of regionalism. A tidy solution is the thing we rightly fear most, because it is the thing that leaves regions most susceptible to continuing central co-ordination and control.
Going further means having a thorough understanding of our place within England. The language of nationalism isn’t helpful to this. Is Wessex a nation in its own right? No, it isn’t. It’s a good theme for pub chats, but let’s be honest about it here. We can claim to be Saxons and not Angles/Engles, but so can Essaxons and Sussaxons. We can claim to have had our own kings. So did Rheged. Why should it matter? A region and a nation are both areas that assert their right to self-government and in both cases the only limit is the will to succeed. The word used tells us very little. Northern Ireland – a province that certainly didn’t set out to be a nation – has enjoyed more self-government for longer than any of the nations still enclosed within the UK.
When English nationalists come to investigate regionalism they always do so with an agenda. Does it represent a good idea for ‘England as a whole’? Or should it be suppressed as a threat to ‘England as a whole’? (That is to say, to the Anglo-Norman State.) Two can play at this game. Is England a good idea for Wessex? We have the right to reserve judgement, because Wessex created the unified English kingdom, for reasons that made sense at the time. It was our idea. As Britain is Greater England, so England is Greater Wessex. In a sense, Wessex owns England. And could dissolve it should it so choose, back to the mere geographical expression it was in the days of Bede.
Not that we advocate that. But it’s just worth remembering every time you’re told that ‘it’s for an English Parliament to decide whether England should have regions or not’. It isn’t. We aren’t dictated to by Mercians or Northumbrians who don’t know their history and so hide behind the Norman/Tudor version of it. You can imagine the reaction if England’s right to exist was judged by its relevance to ‘Europe as a whole’, but that’s somehow ‘different’, in a deeply irrational way.
The relationship between England and Wessex clearly matters more to some than to others. It matters to those nationalists, Celtic as well as English, who insist on dividing the world into silos of sovereignty. It matters much less to regionalists with a more flexible and accommodating approach to political geography. It matters least of all to those who realise that Wessex is real to the extent that folk talk about Wessex and not about something else, even if that something else is England. So maybe enough has been said on the subject. To make Wessex, we need to talk about Wessex and nothing more. England and Wessex are in no way identities in conflict. There is room for both. But to be English is not enough. We assert the right to be Wessaxon too.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Identity today is in flux: so the Census results tell us. There are many currents but a key event, especially for political radicals, was the launch of the unprovoked attack on Iraq in 2003, backed by almost the whole of the London political establishment. So thorough was that backing that it is difficult to find an appropriate reaction short of repudiating the British State itself.
It’s easier for those on the Celtic periphery to do this, slipping easily into an alternative identity removed both in distance and in scale from the London regime. It’s not so easy to do here, where the difference between England and Britain has historically been seriously blurred. England is 81% of Britain by population and its capital is also Britain’s capital. But one seriously big consequence of devolution is undoubtedly that more folk today identify as primarily English, rather than primarily British, than would have done 20 years ago. And they are prepared to organise as such. These facts have spawned a growing stream of pseudo-academic mush from a self-referential British Left anxious for an ideologically sound response that doesn’t rock the unionist boat.
The challenge facing a distinct English identity is the extent to which it has for a very long time been a dormant one. Tom Nairn, a Scot, wrote in The Break-up of Britain that the price of the Union has been a “peculiar repression and truncation of Englishness”. Anyone looking for an English identity today will find some odd, and often disagreeable, role models. Billy Bragg has done his best to present a radical view of England – and been pilloried for his pains by a labour movement that will happily march behind its trade union banners but views national flags with some unease. So the fringe has it. Dr Frank Hansford-Miller, who founded the English National Party in 1974, used to dress up as a Beefeater, in the belief that this was the English national costume. It didn’t do his cause a lot of good. Today’s English nationalists are as likely to dress in chain mail and pretend to be crusaders, especially if they dislike their neighbours from Asia.
Insisting that the only England is the far Right England does nobody any good. The far Right will find plenty who reject Englishness itself as tainted, for the same reasons that they also reject Britishness. And it can hardly be to England’s benefit to have to choose between a far Right vision and a total vacuum.
It certainly is to the benefit of the UK establishment to foster the idea that there is no third option. That way, the far Right bogeyman can be recruited in support of the status quo. England needs the Celts. They must understand that they have a responsibility not to be selfish but to stay in an abusive relationship for the sake of the English. Separatism would abandon England to be ruled by skinheads with swastika tattoos on their foreheads. Only the eggshell-thin veneer of Britishness protects the English from themselves and the havoc they would unleash... It’s ridiculous. It’s manipulative. It serves well the electoral interests of the Labour Party. And it’s not less real for being untrue.
So it’s important to those in power to suppress the creation of any third option. Regionalism can be spiked by insisting that the Prescott zones were it, that no more imaginative solution is open for discussion. Those who accept that as true are pushed back upon either the far Right unitary England or the status quo, lacking, as they do, the confidence to assert that actually there are several different paths down which England could travel and that it isn’t a betrayal of it to say so. A federal England, for example, isn’t any less English than a unitary one. It is MORE English, to the extent that it allows expression for regional and local identities too, which are necessarily part of any inclusive picture.
English nationalism’s greatest fear, stemming from the Prescott zones experiment, is that England will disappear completely. That it won’t be possible to be English at all. That division and disunity will accelerate to the point where Englishness becomes a crime. Yet there’s no problem with division and disunity at the international scale, or with denouncing a European identity, because those are deep-rooted attitudes that go back to the origins of our modern State. English nationalism still dances to a Tudor tune. Beefeaters, remember?
Disappearance does seem an unlikely scenario, though one easily exploited, both by those who might want such an outcome and those who don’t. What puts regionalists off nationalists is the degree of over-reaction this engenders. England becomes an embattled identity and a greedy one, one that wants it all. Any identity that doesn’t subordinate the particular to the national is railed against as an enemy within. Any recognition of legitimate claims – that Kernow and Gwent aren’t English or that it’s time to be friends with the Germans – is feared as a crumbling of the defences that will bring the whole citadel crashing down.
We aren’t opposed to an English Parliament that minds its own business and never interferes in the internal affairs of Wessex. We don’t campaign for one, because it would do nothing to advance our own cause. But we don’t campaign against one either so long as its powers aren’t envisaged as inhibiting the self-government of Wessex, now or at any time in the future. An English Parliament that practised subsidiarity might find itself with little or nothing to do, but that wouldn’t be bad news. We do agree that there’s injustice at large when you cannot write ‘English’ as your nationality on official forms. We do believe you should always have that right. What we don’t believe is that being part of the same nation as us gives those in London the right to dictate to regions that are more than capable of making our own decisions. Let the English identity flourish, because a secure identity is also a generous identity, able to view England as a community of communities. We aren’t afraid of it. It’s a pity if it feels the need to be afraid of us.
English nationalism’s second great driver, besides fear of non-existence, is a fear of unfairness. The classic oppressor-as-victim. If Celts can feel oppressed, so can the English. It doesn’t work, because the English are the majority in the UK by 4:1. It’s true that the English are oppressed, but it’s the English, or some of them, who are doing the oppressing. An English Parliament, without a commitment to subsidiarity, will only go on doing it.
Unfairness implies disadvantage. And the regions of England would be no less disadvantaged without regionalism than England would be with no recognition of its own status. Is the denial of status unique? Far from it. While much depends on what is a nation, there are several traditional national entities in Europe that are divided into regions and have no parliament of their own. For England, you could also read Occitania, Prussia, the Mezzogiorno, Aragon or Castille, all areas of Europe with either their own language or a history of powerful monarchical independence. And there are ways to recognise such entities without denying regional autonomy.
So are Scotland and Wales not disadvantaged, having no regional assemblies? Why is England singled out for special ill-treatment? Territorial government is underpinned by geography. Ignore geography and you ignore the possibility of any sensible arrangement of anything. Scotland and Wales are a fraction of the size of England, so any sub-divisions there count as local government units. An England without regions is, and would continue to be, badly governed because it suffers from diseconomies of scale.
It’s worth pondering just how vast a country England is. So too are the quantities of energy and other resources expended in governing it, and which won’t be around for ever. It’s worth pondering, because it’s difficult for those who live within commuting distance of the capital to understand what it’s like to live on the periphery. Often you’ll get the ‘write-off the regions and invest in London’s success’ line of reasoning from Tory think-tanks, who also fail to understand how the English periphery’s economic weakness is directly related to its political invisibility.
What English nationalists routinely propose as their ‘alternative’ to regionalism is to build high-speed rail lines to Newcastle and Penzance so that those coming cap in hand to London can do so all the quicker. The London view of England is that it’s better by far that those on the periphery should spend their unimportant, provincial lives on trains than that London should surrender any part of its monopoly of power. Centralism has determined nothing less than the very shape of England (and who gets to call themselves English). Lothian, now Scottish, was once part of Northumbria. It was abandoned by the united English realm, quite possibly because a king based in Wessex couldn’t hope to get an army there quickly enough to defend it in the event of invasion.
English nationalism’s third great driver is a belief in the responsibility of the sovereign centre to inspect and correct the localities, a tradition which regionalism would decisively break. The fear is not just that England is being mapped out of existence, not just that it’s being discriminated against by a Celt-loving Labour Party, but that without institutions to impose a uniform culture and a sense of subservience to the centre, all hell would break loose. You’d have different areas doing whatever they want, and that would never do. These things have to be carefully doled out, by royal charter, by private legislation, by ministerial fiat. You can’t just do it.
Why does the leading English identity only grudgingly concede a pinch of autonomy to counties and cities, while bringing down a metaphorical mace upon the heads of those who would restore England to its regional roots? We are all conquered. The Celts know they lost. The English lost too but have been taught to identify with their conquerors to the point where they think they won. They won at Hastings and have gone on winning ever since. If we want an end to Norman rule by 2066, regional government has to play a pivotal part.
It’s fashionable to sneer at the idea of the Norman Yoke, dismiss it as a 17th century fable and carry on the issuing of orders from London as if that’s simply an inevitable fact of nature. It’s not inevitable and it’s not natural either. Scholars like Jim Bulpitt have written about the centuries-old relationship between ‘Court’ and ‘Country’, between ‘high politics’ and ‘low politics’. What we’ve seen with devolution is a partial re-instatement of ‘middle politics’ that needs to go much further.
Our aim is, so far as Wessex is concerned, to lead that process of going further. Professor Jonathan Bradbury has written that the Blair government’s introduction of devolution succeeded “precisely because of its focus on local origination in each territory. From a central Whig perspective this produced adhockery and incoherence; from a Bulpittian perspective on territorial management it was a lesson in peripheralising the problems and legitimation of reform in each territory to local actors, thereby freeing the centre from the difficulties of imposing solutions but also arriving at workable answers.”
In other words, you cannot make ‘English regionalism’ work by drawing a map in London and expecting the locals to conform. The demand has to come from below and for that reason every region should be recognisably different. We don’t work any more closely than we need to with regionalists in other parts of England because that would be an undermining of the very ethos of regionalism. A tidy solution is the thing we rightly fear most, because it is the thing that leaves regions most susceptible to continuing central co-ordination and control.
Going further means having a thorough understanding of our place within England. The language of nationalism isn’t helpful to this. Is Wessex a nation in its own right? No, it isn’t. It’s a good theme for pub chats, but let’s be honest about it here. We can claim to be Saxons and not Angles/Engles, but so can Essaxons and Sussaxons. We can claim to have had our own kings. So did Rheged. Why should it matter? A region and a nation are both areas that assert their right to self-government and in both cases the only limit is the will to succeed. The word used tells us very little. Northern Ireland – a province that certainly didn’t set out to be a nation – has enjoyed more self-government for longer than any of the nations still enclosed within the UK.
When English nationalists come to investigate regionalism they always do so with an agenda. Does it represent a good idea for ‘England as a whole’? Or should it be suppressed as a threat to ‘England as a whole’? (That is to say, to the Anglo-Norman State.) Two can play at this game. Is England a good idea for Wessex? We have the right to reserve judgement, because Wessex created the unified English kingdom, for reasons that made sense at the time. It was our idea. As Britain is Greater England, so England is Greater Wessex. In a sense, Wessex owns England. And could dissolve it should it so choose, back to the mere geographical expression it was in the days of Bede.
Not that we advocate that. But it’s just worth remembering every time you’re told that ‘it’s for an English Parliament to decide whether England should have regions or not’. It isn’t. We aren’t dictated to by Mercians or Northumbrians who don’t know their history and so hide behind the Norman/Tudor version of it. You can imagine the reaction if England’s right to exist was judged by its relevance to ‘Europe as a whole’, but that’s somehow ‘different’, in a deeply irrational way.
The relationship between England and Wessex clearly matters more to some than to others. It matters to those nationalists, Celtic as well as English, who insist on dividing the world into silos of sovereignty. It matters much less to regionalists with a more flexible and accommodating approach to political geography. It matters least of all to those who realise that Wessex is real to the extent that folk talk about Wessex and not about something else, even if that something else is England. So maybe enough has been said on the subject. To make Wessex, we need to talk about Wessex and nothing more. England and Wessex are in no way identities in conflict. There is room for both. But to be English is not enough. We assert the right to be Wessaxon too.
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Working for Wessex
Frank Field is the Labour MP for Birkenhead, in Cheshire. Though Labour is his label, he is no mere mouthpiece. The unique depth of his knowledge of matters relating to welfare reform is widely respected across party lines. So when he joined the panel for BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions? on Friday night, interesting things were bound to happen.
He told a story about alienated youth in Birkenhead. Approached by some of his out-of-work constituents, he discovered that after more than a decade of taxpayer-funded schooling they still could not read or write. They wanted to work, but not for less than £300 a week. This he questioned, pointing out their lack of qualifications for such employment. And was asked in reply, “So you’d make us take immigrant jobs, would you?”
Field’s anecdote is troubling not so much in terms of its content as in terms of the political system’s failure to grapple with the issues it raises. Can we not organise things better than this? Must we see our countryside disappear beneath urban sprawl because we’d rather import others to do the jobs haughty youngsters disdain to do than challenge them a bit more forcefully?
Of course we can do better. If we are prepared to confront the Left’s dogma that no distinction can ever be drawn between the deserving and the undeserving poor, that the poor are always and everywhere ‘victims’ of ‘the system’. An older Left would have changed the system; today’s just theorises about it and has no practical solutions to offer. It must be right to distinguish the deserving and the undeserving poor, just as it’s right to distinguish the deserving and the undeserving rich. There are three ways to tackle the latter problem. One is smarter taxation, that targets inherited wealth and unearned income, and tackles evasion and avoidance alike. Another is smarter regulation, that roots out unscrupulous behaviour that harms the environment and society. And the third is smarter public spending, that cuts out things that are of no benefit to us but line the pockets of the contractors who organise them. The defence and foreign aid budgets for a start would raise £45 billion.
But the real big spender is welfare. Excluding State pensions but including child benefit, this amounts to £97 billion a year. (Then add £30 billion for personal tax credits, which are welfare in all but name.) Can we honestly say that every penny is well spent? No? Then what are we to do about that?
As ever, the problem is one of over-centralisation. Once, welfare was organised at parish level. Later it was organised at borough or county level. Only in 1948 was it taken over by the central State. Centralisation has both plus and minus points. An undeniable plus is that the burden of welfare is spread evenly. Centralisation made sense to the generation that had been through the Great Depression. Communities suffering over 50% unemployment had to fund welfare by taxing those few still in work, depressing the local economy even further. But centralisation also means bureaucratisation. Rules and entitlements take the place of discretion and incentives. The system costs more to administer and its unconditional nature means that idle labour, a community’s prime asset, goes to waste.
Suppose parishes were put in charge. To avoid the pitfalls of the Poor Law, the money could still be raised centrally, or perhaps regionally, and allocated annually, on a per capita basis, as a block grant to each parish or town council. In larger urban areas without parishes, ward committees of the borough or city council could take on the same role. The key point is that there should be interaction at a human level between the poor and the politicians, so that each side understands the constraints faced by the other. If we divide £127 billion by the UK population (63,182,000) then a parish with 500 inhabitants would have £1 million to spend each year as it saw fit.
The money could be used to provide unemployed residents with a life of luxury. Or it could be made conditional on them doing something. It could pay for training or apprenticeships, or remedial education. It could pay for work on environmental projects. No-one knows the local area better than its parish councillors. What needs doing? Drainage clearance? Path mending? Hedge laying? Tree planting? Repair of derelict buildings? Let us look beyond artificial limits. Should only public assets be included? We don’t want local businesses using the system to get free labour but what if the cost were to be entered as a land charge against their premises, to be recovered if and when the premises are sold? Can district or county councils provide plant and materials to enable work to be carried out that would entail a long wait were it to be done on a more professional basis? What about projects of more than local importance, such as clearing old trackbeds for the re-opening of rural railways? Site preparation works for new housing or community buildings?
Local control of funds would turn the problem of unemployment into a limitless opportunity. Decision-making would move from bureaucrats with no motive to look outside the box to community leaders with good cause to ask searching questions and demand credible answers. One other consequence would be a different kind of parish councillor: real power would attract the most highly motivated individuals to stand for election rather than stand back.
A vision of empowered parishes shouldn’t stop at welfare-to-work. Parish councils should be the housing management authorities for their areas, responsible for allocating all social housing as it falls vacant. Village after village is being scarred by little developments of new ‘affordable’ housing, even where the village has plenty of social housing already. The problem is that existing housing is allocated at district level on the basis of assessed need, meaning that villagers cannot be housed because what housing there is gets given to townies in distress. So more housing, this time with local occupancy conditions attached, gets built to overcome that problem. It’s about time towns were made to solve their own housing issues within their own boundaries and only look to villages for help if the villages have spare room.
And then there’s local justice, which is in a sorry state. The continuing role of JPs is under pressure. At one end of the spectrum, fewer cases are coming to court as police get to issue on-the-spot fines (contrary to the spirit of the 1689 Bill of Rights, which requires any punishment to be imposed by a court). At the other, district judges (what used to be called stipendiary magistrates) are muscling in on the more complex cases. Magistrates’ courts are being closed, benches amalgamated. Local justice is becoming less and less local, with savings for the public purse being made at the cost of increasing inconvenience for defendants and witnesses who have to find their way to distant venues.
So why not establish parish or ward courts, made up of the local councillors, to deal with all those petty civil and criminal issues that touch upon the smooth functioning of the neighbourhood? Breach of the peace, vandalism, noise and public health, problem family matters, truancy, empty properties, non-payment of rent, eviction notices, planning enforcement. Lawyers would hate it. They’d protest about the potential for victimisation, inconsistent standards, the need to separate the executive from the judiciary. But against this must be argued the gain to the community in terms of the resurrection of responsibility and the sheer economy in speed and cost for all involved. We have a top-heavy society, weighed down with process, and we need to think radically about how best to simplify it.
Don’t expect the Coalition to do any of that, despite their penchant for tinkering at the margins of welfare policy. Don’t expect them to turn the political pyramid the right way up. Last month, the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles castigated parish councils for a 3% rise in their spending plans. Why? That’s precisely what’s needed, matched by a much, much more than 3% reduction in the spending plans of Pickles’ own bloated, London-obsessed government. Parishes across Wessex should be demanding: ‘give us our money back and we’ll do an incomparably better job than you’.
He told a story about alienated youth in Birkenhead. Approached by some of his out-of-work constituents, he discovered that after more than a decade of taxpayer-funded schooling they still could not read or write. They wanted to work, but not for less than £300 a week. This he questioned, pointing out their lack of qualifications for such employment. And was asked in reply, “So you’d make us take immigrant jobs, would you?”
Field’s anecdote is troubling not so much in terms of its content as in terms of the political system’s failure to grapple with the issues it raises. Can we not organise things better than this? Must we see our countryside disappear beneath urban sprawl because we’d rather import others to do the jobs haughty youngsters disdain to do than challenge them a bit more forcefully?
Of course we can do better. If we are prepared to confront the Left’s dogma that no distinction can ever be drawn between the deserving and the undeserving poor, that the poor are always and everywhere ‘victims’ of ‘the system’. An older Left would have changed the system; today’s just theorises about it and has no practical solutions to offer. It must be right to distinguish the deserving and the undeserving poor, just as it’s right to distinguish the deserving and the undeserving rich. There are three ways to tackle the latter problem. One is smarter taxation, that targets inherited wealth and unearned income, and tackles evasion and avoidance alike. Another is smarter regulation, that roots out unscrupulous behaviour that harms the environment and society. And the third is smarter public spending, that cuts out things that are of no benefit to us but line the pockets of the contractors who organise them. The defence and foreign aid budgets for a start would raise £45 billion.
But the real big spender is welfare. Excluding State pensions but including child benefit, this amounts to £97 billion a year. (Then add £30 billion for personal tax credits, which are welfare in all but name.) Can we honestly say that every penny is well spent? No? Then what are we to do about that?
As ever, the problem is one of over-centralisation. Once, welfare was organised at parish level. Later it was organised at borough or county level. Only in 1948 was it taken over by the central State. Centralisation has both plus and minus points. An undeniable plus is that the burden of welfare is spread evenly. Centralisation made sense to the generation that had been through the Great Depression. Communities suffering over 50% unemployment had to fund welfare by taxing those few still in work, depressing the local economy even further. But centralisation also means bureaucratisation. Rules and entitlements take the place of discretion and incentives. The system costs more to administer and its unconditional nature means that idle labour, a community’s prime asset, goes to waste.
Suppose parishes were put in charge. To avoid the pitfalls of the Poor Law, the money could still be raised centrally, or perhaps regionally, and allocated annually, on a per capita basis, as a block grant to each parish or town council. In larger urban areas without parishes, ward committees of the borough or city council could take on the same role. The key point is that there should be interaction at a human level between the poor and the politicians, so that each side understands the constraints faced by the other. If we divide £127 billion by the UK population (63,182,000) then a parish with 500 inhabitants would have £1 million to spend each year as it saw fit.
The money could be used to provide unemployed residents with a life of luxury. Or it could be made conditional on them doing something. It could pay for training or apprenticeships, or remedial education. It could pay for work on environmental projects. No-one knows the local area better than its parish councillors. What needs doing? Drainage clearance? Path mending? Hedge laying? Tree planting? Repair of derelict buildings? Let us look beyond artificial limits. Should only public assets be included? We don’t want local businesses using the system to get free labour but what if the cost were to be entered as a land charge against their premises, to be recovered if and when the premises are sold? Can district or county councils provide plant and materials to enable work to be carried out that would entail a long wait were it to be done on a more professional basis? What about projects of more than local importance, such as clearing old trackbeds for the re-opening of rural railways? Site preparation works for new housing or community buildings?
Local control of funds would turn the problem of unemployment into a limitless opportunity. Decision-making would move from bureaucrats with no motive to look outside the box to community leaders with good cause to ask searching questions and demand credible answers. One other consequence would be a different kind of parish councillor: real power would attract the most highly motivated individuals to stand for election rather than stand back.
A vision of empowered parishes shouldn’t stop at welfare-to-work. Parish councils should be the housing management authorities for their areas, responsible for allocating all social housing as it falls vacant. Village after village is being scarred by little developments of new ‘affordable’ housing, even where the village has plenty of social housing already. The problem is that existing housing is allocated at district level on the basis of assessed need, meaning that villagers cannot be housed because what housing there is gets given to townies in distress. So more housing, this time with local occupancy conditions attached, gets built to overcome that problem. It’s about time towns were made to solve their own housing issues within their own boundaries and only look to villages for help if the villages have spare room.
And then there’s local justice, which is in a sorry state. The continuing role of JPs is under pressure. At one end of the spectrum, fewer cases are coming to court as police get to issue on-the-spot fines (contrary to the spirit of the 1689 Bill of Rights, which requires any punishment to be imposed by a court). At the other, district judges (what used to be called stipendiary magistrates) are muscling in on the more complex cases. Magistrates’ courts are being closed, benches amalgamated. Local justice is becoming less and less local, with savings for the public purse being made at the cost of increasing inconvenience for defendants and witnesses who have to find their way to distant venues.
So why not establish parish or ward courts, made up of the local councillors, to deal with all those petty civil and criminal issues that touch upon the smooth functioning of the neighbourhood? Breach of the peace, vandalism, noise and public health, problem family matters, truancy, empty properties, non-payment of rent, eviction notices, planning enforcement. Lawyers would hate it. They’d protest about the potential for victimisation, inconsistent standards, the need to separate the executive from the judiciary. But against this must be argued the gain to the community in terms of the resurrection of responsibility and the sheer economy in speed and cost for all involved. We have a top-heavy society, weighed down with process, and we need to think radically about how best to simplify it.
Don’t expect the Coalition to do any of that, despite their penchant for tinkering at the margins of welfare policy. Don’t expect them to turn the political pyramid the right way up. Last month, the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles castigated parish councils for a 3% rise in their spending plans. Why? That’s precisely what’s needed, matched by a much, much more than 3% reduction in the spending plans of Pickles’ own bloated, London-obsessed government. Parishes across Wessex should be demanding: ‘give us our money back and we’ll do an incomparably better job than you’.
Friday, December 21, 2012
Understanding New Labour
The Labour Party can be puzzling. It’s fanatical about change, indifferent to whether the result is an improvement. It applies, or attempts to apply, ill-considered policies, whose failure is then enjoyed as a ‘learning experience’ rather than acknowledged as proof of incompetence. It revels in ‘growth’, deaf to those who point out the damage, environmental and psychological, that inescapably results. Its key value today is market meritocracy – an equal chance to become more unequal – and not securing the common good. Above all, it glories in violence and repression.
The conventional narrative is that after its fourth election defeat in a row, in 1992, Labour was ripe for takeover by an unscrupulous gang of free marketeers, led by Tony Blair, with Peter Mandelson as chief fixer. The essence of New Labour is, supposedly, that means change, ends don’t. What actually happened was the triumph of a belief that ‘socialism’ can be advanced within an individualist, capitalist society simply by redefining what socialism is, even to extent of excluding what was once considered its most fundamental characteristic, the democratisation of economic life. The re-writing of Clause IV in 1995 allowed Labour to join the Thatcherite bandwagon, partying on the proceeds of privatisation and leaving in its wake a fast-collapsing society owned by others whose loyalty can only be bought by the application of money that doesn’t exist.
It’s a partial explanation but it’s incomplete. Labour was ripe for takeover only because of the moral implosion of its leadership cadre, an implosion brought on by impatience and personal ambition. And the roots of that lie in the student politics of the 1960s. That generation tasted power for the first time in the early 80s, in Livingstone’s London, in Blunkett’s Sheffield and in Hatton’s Liverpool. Thatcher outwitted them all and by the mid-90s, with the Soviet bloc in ruins, the ageing hippies were ready to do the Faustian deal that would return Labour to power nationally and fulfil their craving for high office. Policy, instead of being their guiding star, became whatever the focus groups said it was. The contrast with the more successful of the nationalist parties is instructive. After some wobbly moments in the 80s, they continued to focus on their primary purpose and eventually saw their fortunes rise.
Labour, on the other hand, is now damaged beyond repair. No-one, least of all the leadership, knows what the party stands for. Or at least they won’t say it in public. It shares this lack of explicit direction with parties of the Left right across the developed western world. The one place where the reasons shine through is Germany, where the student politics of the West now mingles with surviving habits of thought from the formerly Soviet East. It shows up in different attitudes to jihadism, with east Germans taking a more rigorous line against fascism in any form, and west Germans being more relativist and self-critical. This can plausibly be put down to the first being Marxist-Leninist and the second being Maoist. Our Left in the West is ‘auto-aggressive’, as the relevant term in German translates, or self-loathing, as we might say in better English. It has ceased to care about the structure of society, about the distribution of wealth or power, and wants principally to re-make the individual. Through embracing consumerism and globalisation it has sought to dissolve community solidarity. Through dumbing-down, deconstructionism and post-modernism it has sought to paralyse the intellect. Through an agenda of fear shrugged off as respect it has sought to place its own values and priorities beyond criticism. Welcome to the Cultural Revolution.
The conventional narrative is that after its fourth election defeat in a row, in 1992, Labour was ripe for takeover by an unscrupulous gang of free marketeers, led by Tony Blair, with Peter Mandelson as chief fixer. The essence of New Labour is, supposedly, that means change, ends don’t. What actually happened was the triumph of a belief that ‘socialism’ can be advanced within an individualist, capitalist society simply by redefining what socialism is, even to extent of excluding what was once considered its most fundamental characteristic, the democratisation of economic life. The re-writing of Clause IV in 1995 allowed Labour to join the Thatcherite bandwagon, partying on the proceeds of privatisation and leaving in its wake a fast-collapsing society owned by others whose loyalty can only be bought by the application of money that doesn’t exist.
It’s a partial explanation but it’s incomplete. Labour was ripe for takeover only because of the moral implosion of its leadership cadre, an implosion brought on by impatience and personal ambition. And the roots of that lie in the student politics of the 1960s. That generation tasted power for the first time in the early 80s, in Livingstone’s London, in Blunkett’s Sheffield and in Hatton’s Liverpool. Thatcher outwitted them all and by the mid-90s, with the Soviet bloc in ruins, the ageing hippies were ready to do the Faustian deal that would return Labour to power nationally and fulfil their craving for high office. Policy, instead of being their guiding star, became whatever the focus groups said it was. The contrast with the more successful of the nationalist parties is instructive. After some wobbly moments in the 80s, they continued to focus on their primary purpose and eventually saw their fortunes rise.
Labour, on the other hand, is now damaged beyond repair. No-one, least of all the leadership, knows what the party stands for. Or at least they won’t say it in public. It shares this lack of explicit direction with parties of the Left right across the developed western world. The one place where the reasons shine through is Germany, where the student politics of the West now mingles with surviving habits of thought from the formerly Soviet East. It shows up in different attitudes to jihadism, with east Germans taking a more rigorous line against fascism in any form, and west Germans being more relativist and self-critical. This can plausibly be put down to the first being Marxist-Leninist and the second being Maoist. Our Left in the West is ‘auto-aggressive’, as the relevant term in German translates, or self-loathing, as we might say in better English. It has ceased to care about the structure of society, about the distribution of wealth or power, and wants principally to re-make the individual. Through embracing consumerism and globalisation it has sought to dissolve community solidarity. Through dumbing-down, deconstructionism and post-modernism it has sought to paralyse the intellect. Through an agenda of fear shrugged off as respect it has sought to place its own values and priorities beyond criticism. Welcome to the Cultural Revolution.
Thursday, December 20, 2012
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.
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.
Seismic Shift?
“Vote Blue, Go Green.” Remember that? And, of course, “the greenest government ever”? Listen as the peals of maniacal laughter echo down the corridors of power.
Last week DEFRA launched its triennial review of Natural England and the Environment Agency. According to his foreword to the consultation paper, Environment Secretary Owen Paterson sees his job as being “to radically reprioritise Defra so that the Department and its work is focused on growing our economy”. While still, of course, “improving the environment and safeguarding animal and plant health”. The problem with tagging on such reassurances is that they become self-denying prophecies. Any evidence that growth is harming the environment will be either disregarded or downplayed, with much waffle about striking the right ‘balance’.
(Really, you’ve NOTHING to worry about. Oh, your local environment? Well, that didn’t matter all that much, did it? And at least it was destroyed in a good cause, don’t you think?)
It was last week too that DECC, headed by Energy Secretary Ed Davey, assured us that there’s nothing to worry about over fracking. Only the possibility of groundwater pollution and maybe a small earthquake or two. But just in case you’re not convinced, you’re not going to be allowed a say anyway. Central government, not local planning committees, will decide. (Cue more Torygraph readers heading off to UKIP, unaware that their policies are even worse.)
Don’t assume that fracking is a matter local to Lancashire folk; they’re just the first to face the consequences. Its potential extends over much of England, including Wessex. Londoners aren’t likely to be directly affected but they’re already keen to push the idea onto others. You want an economy rebalanced away from financial services? Well, there you are. Dig it. Then watch the profits flow away, just like those that enriched the coal owners a hundred years ago. The London regime will get its royalties, for transmission to the bankers; and we’ll get the pollution. Community benefits package? Who benefited most from Scotland’s oil? Or Dorset’s, for that matter?
It WILL happen though, regardless of the environmental harm, because humans generally lack the ability to plan ahead, trusting to the mystery of ‘markets’ instead. It isn’t in the nature of capitalism to let profitable commodities lie idle in the ground. Nor in the nature of cash-strapped governments to do the decent thing and agree an international default on so-called ‘debts’. And when the last molecule of commercially viable fossil fuel has been extracted from the ground, then what?
We’re told that fracking will buy time, providing us with a cheap (though that’s unlikely), independent source of energy while we work out how to make renewables profitable. Yet all the time the scientific mainstream tells us that we should be cutting greenhouse gas emissions yesterday, not today, let alone tomorrow. Are the likes of George Osborne worried? Not a bit. As William Hague put it, 30 or 40 years ago, half of them won't be here in 30 or 40 years' time. And if they are, they’ll still want to take the world down with them.
We have patiently explained where the root of all evil lies. We can only protect our environment from unnecessary harm if we curb our demand for energy. We can only do that if we end our addiction to economic growth, unrelated to human needs. Which we can only do if our financial system is not built on the idea that interest remains payable even when growth is absent. And that in turn means asserting ecological reality against the illusion-production and inter-generational irresponsibility that is no-holds-barred locust capitalism.
Homo ‘sapiens’ is a stupid creature, competing at financial and legal mind-games instead of taking action to rein-in its excesses. What we can do as individuals to oppose stupidity is to buy as little as possible, and to buy it locally from locally-based and ethical suppliers whom we know and trust. A leaner, more localised economy is in everyone’s long-term interest. Disengagement from national and global economic institutions is a process that needs to make much more rapid progress.
Last week DEFRA launched its triennial review of Natural England and the Environment Agency. According to his foreword to the consultation paper, Environment Secretary Owen Paterson sees his job as being “to radically reprioritise Defra so that the Department and its work is focused on growing our economy”. While still, of course, “improving the environment and safeguarding animal and plant health”. The problem with tagging on such reassurances is that they become self-denying prophecies. Any evidence that growth is harming the environment will be either disregarded or downplayed, with much waffle about striking the right ‘balance’.
(Really, you’ve NOTHING to worry about. Oh, your local environment? Well, that didn’t matter all that much, did it? And at least it was destroyed in a good cause, don’t you think?)
It was last week too that DECC, headed by Energy Secretary Ed Davey, assured us that there’s nothing to worry about over fracking. Only the possibility of groundwater pollution and maybe a small earthquake or two. But just in case you’re not convinced, you’re not going to be allowed a say anyway. Central government, not local planning committees, will decide. (Cue more Torygraph readers heading off to UKIP, unaware that their policies are even worse.)
Don’t assume that fracking is a matter local to Lancashire folk; they’re just the first to face the consequences. Its potential extends over much of England, including Wessex. Londoners aren’t likely to be directly affected but they’re already keen to push the idea onto others. You want an economy rebalanced away from financial services? Well, there you are. Dig it. Then watch the profits flow away, just like those that enriched the coal owners a hundred years ago. The London regime will get its royalties, for transmission to the bankers; and we’ll get the pollution. Community benefits package? Who benefited most from Scotland’s oil? Or Dorset’s, for that matter?
It WILL happen though, regardless of the environmental harm, because humans generally lack the ability to plan ahead, trusting to the mystery of ‘markets’ instead. It isn’t in the nature of capitalism to let profitable commodities lie idle in the ground. Nor in the nature of cash-strapped governments to do the decent thing and agree an international default on so-called ‘debts’. And when the last molecule of commercially viable fossil fuel has been extracted from the ground, then what?
We’re told that fracking will buy time, providing us with a cheap (though that’s unlikely), independent source of energy while we work out how to make renewables profitable. Yet all the time the scientific mainstream tells us that we should be cutting greenhouse gas emissions yesterday, not today, let alone tomorrow. Are the likes of George Osborne worried? Not a bit. As William Hague put it, 30 or 40 years ago, half of them won't be here in 30 or 40 years' time. And if they are, they’ll still want to take the world down with them.
We have patiently explained where the root of all evil lies. We can only protect our environment from unnecessary harm if we curb our demand for energy. We can only do that if we end our addiction to economic growth, unrelated to human needs. Which we can only do if our financial system is not built on the idea that interest remains payable even when growth is absent. And that in turn means asserting ecological reality against the illusion-production and inter-generational irresponsibility that is no-holds-barred locust capitalism.
Homo ‘sapiens’ is a stupid creature, competing at financial and legal mind-games instead of taking action to rein-in its excesses. What we can do as individuals to oppose stupidity is to buy as little as possible, and to buy it locally from locally-based and ethical suppliers whom we know and trust. A leaner, more localised economy is in everyone’s long-term interest. Disengagement from national and global economic institutions is a process that needs to make much more rapid progress.
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