The Forestry Commission is a big player in Wessex. Within our borders we have two of the great royal hunting forests, the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire and the New Forest in Hampshire, both still regulated by their mediæval Verderers’ Courts. Treasured parts of our heritage. Except that for Cameron, Clegg & Co they are just treasure. The Coalition aims to sell off much of the forestry estate in England and won’t rule out selling everything.
Locals are incensed. In the Forest of Dean a mass protest is underway, organised by HOOF – Hands Off Our Forest – which the local Tory MP, Mark Harper is pointedly snubbing. His chances of retaining his seat may now be receding faster than you can say 'timber'.
A thousand years of tradition are there to be sneered at by today’s Tories, whose promises that there’s nothing to worry about are worth precisely nothing. When the Thatcher/Major regime sold off some parts of the forestry estate, almost all of it went without any binding commitment on public access.
This time will be different, of course. The ‘Pig Society’ is all about local control. That’s if locals are willing to buy what they already own, and there are plenty of Guardian-reading muppets now running around trying to raise the money to do just that, with the wretched Woodland Trust playing the pied piper. There is a case for community ownership of forest land, but ownership by the Crown in trust for the community is not incompatible with local control, in place of centralised direction. The problem lies with breach of that trust, when politicians treat common property as a piggybank to be smashed when they run short of cash to fund a vicious foreign policy and the never-ending bankers’ banquet.
State forestry is not part of some dependency culture sprung up in the wake of an over-generous welfarism. In Wessex as in the rest of Europe it is the product of centuries of evolution. Today the forests are managed for leisure as well as commercial timber production. In the past they grew oaks for the Navy and before that housed game for the king. But ultimately, where there is no proof of purchase, they are land owned by the Crown in default of any private owner, a public resource, not simply a commercial asset.
The public estate in Wessex remains considerable, despite recent sell-offs. In 2001, Kevin Cahill published Who Owns Britain. Although errors of fact and a dubious political agenda run right through that book, it has no rival as a guide to the modern pattern of landownership in Great Britain and Ireland. Using its figures, we can work out that the Crown Estate Commissioners own 57,556 acres of land in Wessex, plus most of the foreshore and the seabed, the Duchy of Cornwall 89,380 acres, the Ministry of Defence owns or leases 153,879 acres, the Forestry Commission 131,985 acres, local authorities at least 49,239 acres. The total comes to 7% of the land area of Wessex, the equivalent of Berkshire or Oxfordshire but still far below the figures for some countries, including the supposedly 'free enterprise' USA, where the public domain covers an area larger than India. Little of our public estate is managed by those accountable locally. The main exception has been the smallholdings owned by county councils but they have been busy cashing those in. Bristol City Council is doing its best to catch up with the counties, recently publishing plans to sell off some of the city’s parks.
Land reform is off even the Labour Party’s agenda, along with all kinds of public ownership. One more reason not to vote for a party that has no idea why it exists. The result is that the land is managed not in accordance with any democratic vision but often single-mindedly for profit, with any benefits for wildlife or the landscape or the community squeezed out at needless expense by specific public subsidies instead of happening because they’re the things that ought to be happening. Psychologically, the need for public land is overwhelming. No-one, out in the country for the day, should be made to feel like a feudal vassal, welcome only as a source of revenue and deference.
In 1925, C.S. Orwin and W.R. Peel published The Tenure of Agricultural Land. They presented the case for nationalising rural land, upon the basis of a scheme which they worked out to be as decentralised as possible. “Anything”, they said, “in the nature of ‘management from Whitehall’ would be fatal”. They proposed to organise most matters on a county basis, sub-divided into districts of approximately 30,000 acres each, supplemented by a county forestry team. The figure is necessarily an average, as the need for management varies with the intensity of the agriculture in each county. But it is worth noting that in Wessex 20-30,000 acres is about the average size of a hundred, the Anglo-Saxon sub-division of a shire, and so represents some natural wisdom about the scale of economic organisation in the countryside. Other reformers have sought to take things further still, Thomas Spence’s scheme of 1775 being for inalienable parochial ownership of all land in each parish.
As we move over the course of this century ever closer to conditions of ecological emergency, so we face a choice. We can allow our land to be bought and sold, fenced off and exploited for private gain, often by those with no roots in our communities and no intention of putting down any. Or we can insist that the ‘common treasury for all’ is respected as such, managed and used accordingly.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Identity Theft
John Penrose is a Conservative MP, for Weston-super-Mare. He is also the Coalition’s Minister for Tourism and Heritage. Conservation. Heritage. Two good grounds, surely, for thinking that here is a man who understands the value of long tradition and historic continuity? No. Not in the least.
Mr Penrose supports the gerrymandering Bill that seeks to make all constituencies – except three in the north of Scotland – fit into a statistical straitjacket that allows no more than 5% variation in the number of electors. You and we both know that this means that constituencies will no longer fit within county boundaries. There will be at least one that crosses the Anglo-Cornish border and at least a third of the Isle of Wight will need to share an MP with the Hampshire mainland. Mr Penrose, a man with a Cornish surname, might be expected to take an interest in such matters. We might at least expect him not to stick his head in the Weston mud over them. So here’s a quote from the man:
“I think it’s important to stress that, until the Boundary Commissions have done their work, the problems you’re worried about may not turn out to be nearly as bad as what you’re foreseeing.”
You don’t believe us then? Read Lewis Baston’s report in December (together with its follow-up report this month) for the think-tank Democratic Audit. He recently warned that ministers would "repent in leisure" their decision to combine the equalisation measures with the referendum on AV voting, in a single Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. Democratic Audit calculate that all but nine counties in England would be forced to share a seat with a neighbour under the 5% rule, while none would have to do so if the margin were increased to 10%.
We no more than Mebyon Kernow want a situation where rival campaigners for autonomy are fighting for each other’s votes on opposite sides of the Tamar. Yet we are fast approaching a situation where our right to contest seats in Wessex, the whole of Wessex and nothing but Wessex is taken away. Time to stop this travesty is running out. We look to Their Lordships’ House to deliver the lesson in constitutional history that the Commons appear all too lazy to learn for themselves.
Mr Penrose supports the gerrymandering Bill that seeks to make all constituencies – except three in the north of Scotland – fit into a statistical straitjacket that allows no more than 5% variation in the number of electors. You and we both know that this means that constituencies will no longer fit within county boundaries. There will be at least one that crosses the Anglo-Cornish border and at least a third of the Isle of Wight will need to share an MP with the Hampshire mainland. Mr Penrose, a man with a Cornish surname, might be expected to take an interest in such matters. We might at least expect him not to stick his head in the Weston mud over them. So here’s a quote from the man:
“I think it’s important to stress that, until the Boundary Commissions have done their work, the problems you’re worried about may not turn out to be nearly as bad as what you’re foreseeing.”
You don’t believe us then? Read Lewis Baston’s report in December (together with its follow-up report this month) for the think-tank Democratic Audit. He recently warned that ministers would "repent in leisure" their decision to combine the equalisation measures with the referendum on AV voting, in a single Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. Democratic Audit calculate that all but nine counties in England would be forced to share a seat with a neighbour under the 5% rule, while none would have to do so if the margin were increased to 10%.
We no more than Mebyon Kernow want a situation where rival campaigners for autonomy are fighting for each other’s votes on opposite sides of the Tamar. Yet we are fast approaching a situation where our right to contest seats in Wessex, the whole of Wessex and nothing but Wessex is taken away. Time to stop this travesty is running out. We look to Their Lordships’ House to deliver the lesson in constitutional history that the Commons appear all too lazy to learn for themselves.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Remaking Politics
“I do not believe in struggling to take power, but to build it.”
Hugo Blanco
Growth is what everyone wants. Apparently. So we can pay the banks the interest on the money they created out of nothing.
We could join in too and become a pro-growth party. Just like the other 'choices' on offer. All hurtling towards the cliff’s edge at breakneck speed.
Or maybe not. A sick consensus may be a consensus but it is none the less sick for that. And it is our job to change it.
That won’t be easy. Our economy is so hard-wired for growth that failure to grow results in unemployment, political repression, war and other harmful consequences. We need to organise ourselves better so that growth isn’t the only road to prosperity and well-being because, ultimately, in a finite world, we cannot go on that way.
We are grateful to the Optimum Population Trust for drawing our attention to the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE). Some radical policy recommendations from that source can be viewed here.
The CASSE don’t yet have anything to say about devolution for Wessex but it certainly looks like the sort of agenda with which we could engage. Politics needs to be remade, comprehensively, to face the challenges of the 21st century in a non-domineering way. Our movement, for being ourselves in our own space, enjoying life within our reasonable means, is part of that building of power in place of fear.
Hugo Blanco
Growth is what everyone wants. Apparently. So we can pay the banks the interest on the money they created out of nothing.
We could join in too and become a pro-growth party. Just like the other 'choices' on offer. All hurtling towards the cliff’s edge at breakneck speed.
Or maybe not. A sick consensus may be a consensus but it is none the less sick for that. And it is our job to change it.
That won’t be easy. Our economy is so hard-wired for growth that failure to grow results in unemployment, political repression, war and other harmful consequences. We need to organise ourselves better so that growth isn’t the only road to prosperity and well-being because, ultimately, in a finite world, we cannot go on that way.
We are grateful to the Optimum Population Trust for drawing our attention to the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE). Some radical policy recommendations from that source can be viewed here.
The CASSE don’t yet have anything to say about devolution for Wessex but it certainly looks like the sort of agenda with which we could engage. Politics needs to be remade, comprehensively, to face the challenges of the 21st century in a non-domineering way. Our movement, for being ourselves in our own space, enjoying life within our reasonable means, is part of that building of power in place of fear.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Fixing and Faking
“What is happening to Stonehenge does not reflect the increasing accord that is supposed to come from progress and rationality.”Christopher Chippindale, Stonehenge Complete, 1985
Last month, £10 million of lottery money was awarded for the building of new visitor facilities for Stonehenge, to be sited a mile and half west at Airman’s Corner, with a transit system to a drop-off point near the stones, enabling the current car park to be removed. “We want to get rid of the traffic and modern clutter,” said an English Heritage spokesman. “At the moment we are not doing it justice.” EH still has to find a third of the £27.5 million total cost of the project, which received planning permission in June despite high-level criticism of how it will integrate into the landscape.
Marcus Binney, architecture correspondent of The Times (a London newspaper), produced a thundering response to the EH plan to “turn Stonehenge into a toy-town with visitors approaching in dinky electric vehicles”. “Will the Heritage Lottery never learn?” he wrote. “While Britain’s heritage crumbles it fiddlefaddles with daft and hideously expensive interpretation and exhibition centres, doing increasingly more harm than good with its politically correct schemes which have no place in an era when money should be concentrated on essentials and emergencies”, on “front-line rescue of natural and man-made heritage, and not on frills and embellishments.”
Quite so. Once it’s gone, it’s gone and no amount of replicas and substitutes will make up for that. The Ministry’s management of Stonehenge has never inspired confidence. After the stones were gifted to the nation an archæological dig was carried out in the 1920’s. It was carried out so incompetently that it amounted to the destruction of one half of the site while recovering hardly any useful data. Conservation interests have battled ever since for attention against the insatiable demands of the tourist industry. When the Antrobus family owned the stones, access was eventually controlled for the first time with fencing and a gate, but as much for the site’s protection as for private profit. Under public ownership, ostensibly in the public interest, the locusts must go where they will. Numbers are now so huge – three times what they were 50 years ago – that since 1978 the stones themselves have been roped off and the trippers have to traipse past and gawp from a distance. The average visitor spends just 20 minutes at the site. Official reports have seriously attempted to argue that a loss of real archæology can be offset against new access arrangements to produce a net positive outcome for the nation’s cultural heritage. Or at least for the EH bank balance. This is the organisation, remember, whose past chairman suggested letting out the catering to McDonalds.
Stonehenge is pivotal in more ways than the purely geographical. It marks the point where all the escalating agendas of destructive transformation in Wessex converge. The road lobby is one of the most persistent arguers, demanding the dualling of the A303, its diversion or undergrounding, all so that Londoners are not held up by bottlenecks in their mad dash down to the weekend cottage in Cornwall. It finds a ready ally in EH, incensed by the fact that drivers can get a great view of the stones without paying a penny. That, rather than air pollution, is what the talk of removing the roads on Stonehenge Down is really about. Having been there for generations they are arguably part of the history EH was supposedly set up to defend. To remove them is as unhistorical as the ‘restorations’ of ancient Athens and Rome that erased mediæval structures whose story seemingly got in the way of the official line. Our Ministry of Works did much the same in the 60’s with its heavy-handed stripping back of the friary sites in Gloucester to their bland mediæval skeletons.
That is the problem with interpretation. It tells us far more about ourselves – our own pre-occupations and prejudices – than it ever can about the past. Archæology can only rarely hint at the sounds and the organic colours of prehistoric life. Those of Amerindian cultures often get pressed into service to fill the sensory gap. Handled with care, that can be an imaginative improvisation but otherwise it can subvert the reality that we simply don’t know. Professional interpretation can be very dismissive of the wishful thinking displayed by New Age pagans when it comes to re-creating the past. Rightly so, where devoid of reasonable foundation. But its own efforts are not necessarily categorically different. The ideological pressure to make the Stonehenge experience the multi-media ‘Stonehenge Experience’ becomes overpowering.
EH is a badly designed organisation. Its role as touristic showman inevitably compromises its other role as independent adviser on heritage priorities. The Coalition’s plans to streamline the quangos, throwing still more responsibilities into the mix, will only add to the muddle. EH’s presentation of properties in Cornwall has been condemned for its cultural insensitivity on another nation’s territory. Scotland and Wales have their own heritage bodies and we look forward to Wessex too taking control of its own past. A Wessex equivalent of EH will need to take property management out of the hands of policy makers and fund distributors so that there is a level playing field for all.
It’s tempting to suggest offering the lot to the National Trust, but Mrs Thatcher tried that one early on in the 80’s, a time when several local councils were also having a clear-out in the Trust’s direction. The Trust realised soon enough what was afoot, looked the nation’s gift horse in the mouth, found it didn’t come with an endowment for maintenance in perpetuity and rightly turned it down. EH was Mrs T’s Plan B. The Trust used to be a heritage-conscious organisation but we honestly can’t say it is now, not since earlier this year when it abolished its Wessex region. In favour of a ‘South West’ one, aligned exactly with the Prescott zone of the same name. Independent of the Government? You must be joking. The control freaks have got inside and the Trust is doomed to become a satellite of Whitehall, dutifully rolling out whatever deracinating initiative comes with the money. A complete overhaul of the heritage sector is now needed to place our past back at the heart of the community and prevent it becoming increasingly the plaything of the London-centred chattering classes.
Changing structures will not change the future of Stonehenge without wider changes in our society. The frazzled language we use to describe it is degenerating fast, with must-see exciting world-class iconic heritage separating us further and further from any real understanding of what is before us. It cries out for a little boy to point to the nakedness of it all, that Stonehenge is a clever arrangement of rocks in a field, about which we know next to nothing, and that our attempts at greater knowledge are often counter-productive. If tourists are disappointed, then it was wrong to have promised them a prehistoric Disneyland.
Management of the site is becoming ever more complex because of the ever-increasing demands placed upon it. (Regulatory power always expands in proportion to the ecologically destabilising effects of economic and population growth, especially in high-density situations like cities and tourist hotspots.) When, in the early 1950’s, visitor numbers were one-seventh of what they are today, the grass wore away each summer but recovered in the off-season. Not any more. A sane policy has to put a stop to the philosophy that maximising the number of ‘quality visitor experiences’ is the name of the game and the devil take the hindmost. If EH is serious about wanting to protect Stonehenge, why does it market it so aggressively, while other properties with greater capacity to absorb visitors are neglected? As with growth generally and the pressures it places on all our resources, putting up the ‘Full’ sign would not be a bad move. Living within environmental limits means saying no sometimes. And really meaning it.
Last month, £10 million of lottery money was awarded for the building of new visitor facilities for Stonehenge, to be sited a mile and half west at Airman’s Corner, with a transit system to a drop-off point near the stones, enabling the current car park to be removed. “We want to get rid of the traffic and modern clutter,” said an English Heritage spokesman. “At the moment we are not doing it justice.” EH still has to find a third of the £27.5 million total cost of the project, which received planning permission in June despite high-level criticism of how it will integrate into the landscape.
Marcus Binney, architecture correspondent of The Times (a London newspaper), produced a thundering response to the EH plan to “turn Stonehenge into a toy-town with visitors approaching in dinky electric vehicles”. “Will the Heritage Lottery never learn?” he wrote. “While Britain’s heritage crumbles it fiddlefaddles with daft and hideously expensive interpretation and exhibition centres, doing increasingly more harm than good with its politically correct schemes which have no place in an era when money should be concentrated on essentials and emergencies”, on “front-line rescue of natural and man-made heritage, and not on frills and embellishments.”
Quite so. Once it’s gone, it’s gone and no amount of replicas and substitutes will make up for that. The Ministry’s management of Stonehenge has never inspired confidence. After the stones were gifted to the nation an archæological dig was carried out in the 1920’s. It was carried out so incompetently that it amounted to the destruction of one half of the site while recovering hardly any useful data. Conservation interests have battled ever since for attention against the insatiable demands of the tourist industry. When the Antrobus family owned the stones, access was eventually controlled for the first time with fencing and a gate, but as much for the site’s protection as for private profit. Under public ownership, ostensibly in the public interest, the locusts must go where they will. Numbers are now so huge – three times what they were 50 years ago – that since 1978 the stones themselves have been roped off and the trippers have to traipse past and gawp from a distance. The average visitor spends just 20 minutes at the site. Official reports have seriously attempted to argue that a loss of real archæology can be offset against new access arrangements to produce a net positive outcome for the nation’s cultural heritage. Or at least for the EH bank balance. This is the organisation, remember, whose past chairman suggested letting out the catering to McDonalds.
Stonehenge is pivotal in more ways than the purely geographical. It marks the point where all the escalating agendas of destructive transformation in Wessex converge. The road lobby is one of the most persistent arguers, demanding the dualling of the A303, its diversion or undergrounding, all so that Londoners are not held up by bottlenecks in their mad dash down to the weekend cottage in Cornwall. It finds a ready ally in EH, incensed by the fact that drivers can get a great view of the stones without paying a penny. That, rather than air pollution, is what the talk of removing the roads on Stonehenge Down is really about. Having been there for generations they are arguably part of the history EH was supposedly set up to defend. To remove them is as unhistorical as the ‘restorations’ of ancient Athens and Rome that erased mediæval structures whose story seemingly got in the way of the official line. Our Ministry of Works did much the same in the 60’s with its heavy-handed stripping back of the friary sites in Gloucester to their bland mediæval skeletons.
That is the problem with interpretation. It tells us far more about ourselves – our own pre-occupations and prejudices – than it ever can about the past. Archæology can only rarely hint at the sounds and the organic colours of prehistoric life. Those of Amerindian cultures often get pressed into service to fill the sensory gap. Handled with care, that can be an imaginative improvisation but otherwise it can subvert the reality that we simply don’t know. Professional interpretation can be very dismissive of the wishful thinking displayed by New Age pagans when it comes to re-creating the past. Rightly so, where devoid of reasonable foundation. But its own efforts are not necessarily categorically different. The ideological pressure to make the Stonehenge experience the multi-media ‘Stonehenge Experience’ becomes overpowering.
EH is a badly designed organisation. Its role as touristic showman inevitably compromises its other role as independent adviser on heritage priorities. The Coalition’s plans to streamline the quangos, throwing still more responsibilities into the mix, will only add to the muddle. EH’s presentation of properties in Cornwall has been condemned for its cultural insensitivity on another nation’s territory. Scotland and Wales have their own heritage bodies and we look forward to Wessex too taking control of its own past. A Wessex equivalent of EH will need to take property management out of the hands of policy makers and fund distributors so that there is a level playing field for all.
It’s tempting to suggest offering the lot to the National Trust, but Mrs Thatcher tried that one early on in the 80’s, a time when several local councils were also having a clear-out in the Trust’s direction. The Trust realised soon enough what was afoot, looked the nation’s gift horse in the mouth, found it didn’t come with an endowment for maintenance in perpetuity and rightly turned it down. EH was Mrs T’s Plan B. The Trust used to be a heritage-conscious organisation but we honestly can’t say it is now, not since earlier this year when it abolished its Wessex region. In favour of a ‘South West’ one, aligned exactly with the Prescott zone of the same name. Independent of the Government? You must be joking. The control freaks have got inside and the Trust is doomed to become a satellite of Whitehall, dutifully rolling out whatever deracinating initiative comes with the money. A complete overhaul of the heritage sector is now needed to place our past back at the heart of the community and prevent it becoming increasingly the plaything of the London-centred chattering classes.
Changing structures will not change the future of Stonehenge without wider changes in our society. The frazzled language we use to describe it is degenerating fast, with must-see exciting world-class iconic heritage separating us further and further from any real understanding of what is before us. It cries out for a little boy to point to the nakedness of it all, that Stonehenge is a clever arrangement of rocks in a field, about which we know next to nothing, and that our attempts at greater knowledge are often counter-productive. If tourists are disappointed, then it was wrong to have promised them a prehistoric Disneyland.
Management of the site is becoming ever more complex because of the ever-increasing demands placed upon it. (Regulatory power always expands in proportion to the ecologically destabilising effects of economic and population growth, especially in high-density situations like cities and tourist hotspots.) When, in the early 1950’s, visitor numbers were one-seventh of what they are today, the grass wore away each summer but recovered in the off-season. Not any more. A sane policy has to put a stop to the philosophy that maximising the number of ‘quality visitor experiences’ is the name of the game and the devil take the hindmost. If EH is serious about wanting to protect Stonehenge, why does it market it so aggressively, while other properties with greater capacity to absorb visitors are neglected? As with growth generally and the pressures it places on all our resources, putting up the ‘Full’ sign would not be a bad move. Living within environmental limits means saying no sometimes. And really meaning it.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Six Months
That’s all it took. All it took for the Coalition’s true programme to be made manifest. It talks the talk about decentralisation and localism but does it walk the walk?
We await with interest the so-called Decentralisation & Localism Bill. We shall withhold judgment until we can read it, but recent pronouncements on housing and education suggest that Downing Street’s dictionary differs from our own.
Take the much-vaunted return of planning powers to local councils. Scared of being told off for not concreting over our farmland fast enough, the Coalition wants to bribe councils to allow house-building by paying them a ‘New Homes Bonus’, contrary to the principle that planning permission is not for sale. Across England, the bribes will cost the Treasury almost £1 billion. Now, let’s be clear about this. Decentralisation, in the planning sphere, means they take our money off us, in the form of taxes, and won’t let us have it back unless we dance to their tune. Even the usually dense Western Boring Views, in its editorial of 13 November, could see through this one, doubting there would be many takers and opining that controls on second homes need to be looked at too. What, put people before property? Is that the rumble of the tumbril we hear in Derriford?
Housing is as nothing compared to what is happening in education, where Michael Gove is looking to dictate every last detail of what happens in schools. Can anyone tell us what his department is actually for? Schools are run by professional people. Answerable to governors, who include parents. And supported by the children’s services departments of elected local councils. Gove’s department spends £60 billion a year, apparently on doing other people’s jobs for them. It doesn’t even appear to know, or care, who else does what. A now infamous letter inviting schools to apply for ‘academy’ status went out to head teachers, even though it is the governing body and not the head teacher which is responsible for the status of the school.
So mistrusting are Gove and his chums that at one point they seriously intended to take over the entire schools budget and allocate it centrally from Whitehall, direct to schools, cutting out communities completely. The latest report is that Gove & Co have caved in, but we expect this one to make a comeback. Their current plan is to seek to make directly-funded ‘academies’ the norm and so achieve their aim by stealth. Setting up the quango to run such a system – the Education Funding Agency – remains a White Paper commitment. Local authorities as a group have bargaining power with Whitehall that 24,000 individual head teachers can only dream of. And Wessex, if it had the autonomy now enjoyed by Scotland and Wales, could simply tell Whitehall to shut up and go home.
Freedom from council control – alias the council safety net – may turn out to be a case of from frying pan into fire. Like the rest of the ‘Big Society’, what this is really about is dismantling cost-effective but publicly-provided support services in favour of privately-provided ones that cost more but tick the box of moving resources out into the global financial markets. (Rules are being bent to prevent in-house bids.) The books are then balanced by reducing the range and quality of services. One of the benefits of local control over funding is that councillors have been able to speak up for the social and environmental benefits of village schools, protecting them from the professional bean counters. Under centralism, all that will change, as no provision for local top-ups seems likely to be made. We can look forward to savage cuts, with village schools across Wessex going the way of village shops, pubs and post offices.
Maybe not all just yet. Tory voters in marginal seats will be safe for a while. But in due course, with Labour back in the driving seat, won’t its reptilian desire to punish rural England rise to the surface as always? And what is to stop a future Labour government re-organising schools right across England by cutting off funds to those that won’t bend the knee? Centralists gather in power, then they lie and cheat to hold on to it. The more power they gather in, the more desperate they become to prevent the other side sharing in the spoils. Even when, as now, you really can’t tell the difference between them.
If you voted for the Tories, you shouldn’t complain when they set out down this road. If you voted for their glove puppets, what ever were you thinking? And if you still reckon that Labour are going to become reformed characters and start putting communities in charge, well, we’ve certainly heard that one before.
We await with interest the so-called Decentralisation & Localism Bill. We shall withhold judgment until we can read it, but recent pronouncements on housing and education suggest that Downing Street’s dictionary differs from our own.
Take the much-vaunted return of planning powers to local councils. Scared of being told off for not concreting over our farmland fast enough, the Coalition wants to bribe councils to allow house-building by paying them a ‘New Homes Bonus’, contrary to the principle that planning permission is not for sale. Across England, the bribes will cost the Treasury almost £1 billion. Now, let’s be clear about this. Decentralisation, in the planning sphere, means they take our money off us, in the form of taxes, and won’t let us have it back unless we dance to their tune. Even the usually dense Western Boring Views, in its editorial of 13 November, could see through this one, doubting there would be many takers and opining that controls on second homes need to be looked at too. What, put people before property? Is that the rumble of the tumbril we hear in Derriford?
Housing is as nothing compared to what is happening in education, where Michael Gove is looking to dictate every last detail of what happens in schools. Can anyone tell us what his department is actually for? Schools are run by professional people. Answerable to governors, who include parents. And supported by the children’s services departments of elected local councils. Gove’s department spends £60 billion a year, apparently on doing other people’s jobs for them. It doesn’t even appear to know, or care, who else does what. A now infamous letter inviting schools to apply for ‘academy’ status went out to head teachers, even though it is the governing body and not the head teacher which is responsible for the status of the school.
So mistrusting are Gove and his chums that at one point they seriously intended to take over the entire schools budget and allocate it centrally from Whitehall, direct to schools, cutting out communities completely. The latest report is that Gove & Co have caved in, but we expect this one to make a comeback. Their current plan is to seek to make directly-funded ‘academies’ the norm and so achieve their aim by stealth. Setting up the quango to run such a system – the Education Funding Agency – remains a White Paper commitment. Local authorities as a group have bargaining power with Whitehall that 24,000 individual head teachers can only dream of. And Wessex, if it had the autonomy now enjoyed by Scotland and Wales, could simply tell Whitehall to shut up and go home.
Freedom from council control – alias the council safety net – may turn out to be a case of from frying pan into fire. Like the rest of the ‘Big Society’, what this is really about is dismantling cost-effective but publicly-provided support services in favour of privately-provided ones that cost more but tick the box of moving resources out into the global financial markets. (Rules are being bent to prevent in-house bids.) The books are then balanced by reducing the range and quality of services. One of the benefits of local control over funding is that councillors have been able to speak up for the social and environmental benefits of village schools, protecting them from the professional bean counters. Under centralism, all that will change, as no provision for local top-ups seems likely to be made. We can look forward to savage cuts, with village schools across Wessex going the way of village shops, pubs and post offices.
Maybe not all just yet. Tory voters in marginal seats will be safe for a while. But in due course, with Labour back in the driving seat, won’t its reptilian desire to punish rural England rise to the surface as always? And what is to stop a future Labour government re-organising schools right across England by cutting off funds to those that won’t bend the knee? Centralists gather in power, then they lie and cheat to hold on to it. The more power they gather in, the more desperate they become to prevent the other side sharing in the spoils. Even when, as now, you really can’t tell the difference between them.
If you voted for the Tories, you shouldn’t complain when they set out down this road. If you voted for their glove puppets, what ever were you thinking? And if you still reckon that Labour are going to become reformed characters and start putting communities in charge, well, we’ve certainly heard that one before.
Non Homo Insula Est
No man is an island. The famous words of John Donne, Dean of St Paul’s in London. Written in English, translated here into Latin.
Why Latin? A cloud of celebrities ranging from Joanna Lumley, a native of Kashmir, to Boris Johnson, former MP for Henley-on Thames, has recently been gathered in support of the proposition that Latin should again be taught in schools. Presumably in those areas that still have grammar schools it still is. For what good would be a grammar school that eschewed Latin grammar?
If Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’, complete with its laboured mis-labelling to the locative case, comes to mind most vividly for those who learnt Latin at their alma mater’s knee then a pause for thought is needed. From the traditional date of Rome’s foundation in 753 BC to the end of the western empire in 476 AD is 1,229 years. The post-Roman afterlife of Latin to the present is 1,534 years and it is not an uneventful tale. Textbooks are largely silent about what remained the international language of churchmen, scholars, scientists and diplomats until modern times. We know a 17th century Swedish king as Gustavus Adolphus because news of his actions travelled in Latin. So too did those of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, Columbus and Erasmus, Copernicus and Linnaeus. We know the Chinese sage K’ung-fu-tzu as Confucius and the emperors of India and Russia by the name of a Roman assassinated over two thousand years ago (and who probably spoke Greek when he really wanted to impress). Et tu, Brute? Kai su, teknon!
For a Europe that needed to communicate with itself, Latin long ago became the earliest Esperanto. French eventually displaced it as the language of diplomacy, German as the language of science, and English ultimately as the language of everything, but until nationalism made neutrality a nasty word, Latin reigned supreme. The Kingdom of Hungary, the multi-lingual melting-pot of the Carpathian basin, insisted that Parliamentary debates were conducted in Latin as late as 1847. Some thirty years ago, an attempt was made to use Latin on the floor of the European Parliament but the speaker was ruled out of order. The Parliament has 23 official languages but Latin is not one of them. Those who believe the EU to be more super-state than club of nation-states might reflect on that lack of a language that transcends borders.
No-one knew the value of Latin like King Alfred the Great. His biographer, the Welshman Asser, records that, although Alfred had visited Rome as a child, he did not learn the language until he was nearly 40. His motivation was to partake personally in the revival of learning that he launched after securing the kingdom against further attack. Today, among mainstream English nationalists, it is fashionable to argue the uniqueness of Englishness, to decry any hint of cultural impurity. Not so for Alfred, who looked to Mediterranean civilisation for his model and cultivated links with lands even further afield. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, begun in Alfred’s reign, is written in English, not in Latin. An early case of ‘up yours, Delors’? Far from it. The choice was imposed on Alfred by a dearth of Latin scholars in Wessex. In the terms of the time it was a sign not of cultural strength but of abject cultural weakness.
Wessex has been subject to many influences down the centuries, Celtic and Nordic, Latin and Greek, African and Asian. All lasting impressions deserve study because they aid understanding of who we are. Can our encounter with Latin provide us with pointers to the future, lessons about how we view our place in time and space and thought?
The first conclusion must be that the past is rarely as dead as current fashions dictate. A glance around Europe will identify nations and regions long suppressed and now firmly back in business, their languages spoken and written again, their flags flying from the citadels of the former dominant power. From Ypres to Warsaw, Berlin to Budapest, monuments and cities blasted to rubble have been painstakingly reconstructed just as they were. Catalans are ruled by their Generalitat, a name dredged up from early in the 18th century. Scotland’s Parliament was re-convened in 1999 with words that connected to its last sitting in 1707. On our own patch, those who feared we might never again hear the phrase ‘Bath, in Somerset’ have been proved wrong. For those who claim that nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, it’s worth noting that even Alfred, when he set about his revival of learning, was inspired to re-create the splendours of the later 7th century, when Wessex enjoyed its first Golden Age under the guidance of King Ine and St Aldhelm. Whether the history around us is cherished for the richness it gives to our lives, or wiped out as an affront to ‘progress’, is a matter of will. The belief of progressives, that policy must, like time, be ever advancing, is a belief that can admit neither to ignorance of superior knowledge from another era nor to the mistakes that result. At best the mistakes go uncorrected; at worst, history repeats itself in ways that are unexpected and unwelcome.
The second conclusion is that insularity cuts us off from part of ourselves. Nationalism, conceived of as a fortress, politically, culturally, economically, is not the way to go. In Shakespeare’s day, the moat defensive against the envy of less happier lands made sense. But it came at a cost, both in terms of autonomy denied within and fraternity denied without. Regionalism recognises that everywhere is a region of something else, in a world composed of communities within communities. Like fractal images, one nests within another, from the parish to the planet, and each has its place, its call upon our loyalty, as individuals and collectively, and in their defence we find meaning and solidarity.
The third conclusion is that the informed intellect can be a vital tool in carving out a new politics. Wessex must be vigilant in defence of its folk culture – including aspects of mass popular culture that stem from Wessex roots – but need not therefore reject high culture as foreign to its nature as a region. It must find a proper place too for those whose concerns are more material than cultural. For Alfred, society was composed of praying men, fighting men and working men. As a party, our equivalents are thinkers, activists and donors. All three are needed and we need more of all three.
Why Latin? A cloud of celebrities ranging from Joanna Lumley, a native of Kashmir, to Boris Johnson, former MP for Henley-on Thames, has recently been gathered in support of the proposition that Latin should again be taught in schools. Presumably in those areas that still have grammar schools it still is. For what good would be a grammar school that eschewed Latin grammar?
If Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’, complete with its laboured mis-labelling to the locative case, comes to mind most vividly for those who learnt Latin at their alma mater’s knee then a pause for thought is needed. From the traditional date of Rome’s foundation in 753 BC to the end of the western empire in 476 AD is 1,229 years. The post-Roman afterlife of Latin to the present is 1,534 years and it is not an uneventful tale. Textbooks are largely silent about what remained the international language of churchmen, scholars, scientists and diplomats until modern times. We know a 17th century Swedish king as Gustavus Adolphus because news of his actions travelled in Latin. So too did those of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, Columbus and Erasmus, Copernicus and Linnaeus. We know the Chinese sage K’ung-fu-tzu as Confucius and the emperors of India and Russia by the name of a Roman assassinated over two thousand years ago (and who probably spoke Greek when he really wanted to impress). Et tu, Brute? Kai su, teknon!
For a Europe that needed to communicate with itself, Latin long ago became the earliest Esperanto. French eventually displaced it as the language of diplomacy, German as the language of science, and English ultimately as the language of everything, but until nationalism made neutrality a nasty word, Latin reigned supreme. The Kingdom of Hungary, the multi-lingual melting-pot of the Carpathian basin, insisted that Parliamentary debates were conducted in Latin as late as 1847. Some thirty years ago, an attempt was made to use Latin on the floor of the European Parliament but the speaker was ruled out of order. The Parliament has 23 official languages but Latin is not one of them. Those who believe the EU to be more super-state than club of nation-states might reflect on that lack of a language that transcends borders.
No-one knew the value of Latin like King Alfred the Great. His biographer, the Welshman Asser, records that, although Alfred had visited Rome as a child, he did not learn the language until he was nearly 40. His motivation was to partake personally in the revival of learning that he launched after securing the kingdom against further attack. Today, among mainstream English nationalists, it is fashionable to argue the uniqueness of Englishness, to decry any hint of cultural impurity. Not so for Alfred, who looked to Mediterranean civilisation for his model and cultivated links with lands even further afield. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, begun in Alfred’s reign, is written in English, not in Latin. An early case of ‘up yours, Delors’? Far from it. The choice was imposed on Alfred by a dearth of Latin scholars in Wessex. In the terms of the time it was a sign not of cultural strength but of abject cultural weakness.
Wessex has been subject to many influences down the centuries, Celtic and Nordic, Latin and Greek, African and Asian. All lasting impressions deserve study because they aid understanding of who we are. Can our encounter with Latin provide us with pointers to the future, lessons about how we view our place in time and space and thought?
The first conclusion must be that the past is rarely as dead as current fashions dictate. A glance around Europe will identify nations and regions long suppressed and now firmly back in business, their languages spoken and written again, their flags flying from the citadels of the former dominant power. From Ypres to Warsaw, Berlin to Budapest, monuments and cities blasted to rubble have been painstakingly reconstructed just as they were. Catalans are ruled by their Generalitat, a name dredged up from early in the 18th century. Scotland’s Parliament was re-convened in 1999 with words that connected to its last sitting in 1707. On our own patch, those who feared we might never again hear the phrase ‘Bath, in Somerset’ have been proved wrong. For those who claim that nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, it’s worth noting that even Alfred, when he set about his revival of learning, was inspired to re-create the splendours of the later 7th century, when Wessex enjoyed its first Golden Age under the guidance of King Ine and St Aldhelm. Whether the history around us is cherished for the richness it gives to our lives, or wiped out as an affront to ‘progress’, is a matter of will. The belief of progressives, that policy must, like time, be ever advancing, is a belief that can admit neither to ignorance of superior knowledge from another era nor to the mistakes that result. At best the mistakes go uncorrected; at worst, history repeats itself in ways that are unexpected and unwelcome.
The second conclusion is that insularity cuts us off from part of ourselves. Nationalism, conceived of as a fortress, politically, culturally, economically, is not the way to go. In Shakespeare’s day, the moat defensive against the envy of less happier lands made sense. But it came at a cost, both in terms of autonomy denied within and fraternity denied without. Regionalism recognises that everywhere is a region of something else, in a world composed of communities within communities. Like fractal images, one nests within another, from the parish to the planet, and each has its place, its call upon our loyalty, as individuals and collectively, and in their defence we find meaning and solidarity.
The third conclusion is that the informed intellect can be a vital tool in carving out a new politics. Wessex must be vigilant in defence of its folk culture – including aspects of mass popular culture that stem from Wessex roots – but need not therefore reject high culture as foreign to its nature as a region. It must find a proper place too for those whose concerns are more material than cultural. For Alfred, society was composed of praying men, fighting men and working men. As a party, our equivalents are thinkers, activists and donors. All three are needed and we need more of all three.
Monday, November 15, 2010
The Pageant of Death
“I have said that we must base our future thinking on the acceptance that nation states, individual, independent nations, can no longer really seriously influence the way in which the world develops. There is nothing that we or, I believe, any other single country can do on its own to affect these great trends of history and of the future… It seems to me that the accepted Clausewitzian doctrine of the military arm as an extension of national political power is dead and ought to be dead, and that we ought to be re-thinking, soldiers and politicians, the whole new interrelation between the political and the military establishment… I hope I may have stimulated the thought in some minds that some of the problems that occupy so much of our time and energy today are in fact false problems… We commit the familiar heresy, the Manichean heresy of creating enemies where none really exist in order to satisfy some irrational psychological need.”
Lord Chalfont, 1969
Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday. Across Wessex, and across the world, it was a time to reflect. To remember bad things that have happened to us in our collective past is meaningful, at least in part, for the opportunity it provides to learn from our experience. Yet learn we do not. The war to end all wars is still being fought and the Nobel Prize has been awarded to the Commander-in-Chief. War is peace.
One of the least forgivable actions of the Blair/Brown regime was to taint remembrance with controversy. The casualties of illegal and irrelevant wars now join those of just ones in thoughts and prayers. All those who take up arms against the Queen’s enemies are equally honoured, as custom dictates. Those who prefer to reject the crimes committed in our name may well ask, who is this bellicose woman, who makes enemies so easily?
Mainstream politicians have been very quick to wipe their bloody hands on the rest of us, in a brazen attempt to make us their accomplices. It began with cross-party talk about the 'military covenant', the supposed duty supposedly owed by society to those who supposedly defend the realm against the supposed forces of darkness. The phrase came from nowhere in 2000 when it was first codified in Army doctrine. It went unchallenged and now looks to be made binding upon members of the public. Under cover of concern that resources are inadequate to the military’s current mission and its aftermath, a sinister agenda is now fast infiltrating the civilian world. The spotlight is turned on military equipment, housing and healthcare. A better deal for those injured or bereaved. Those who dissent from the mission, those who would rather prevent injury and bereavement happening at all, are to be first sidelined and then persecuted for their conscientious opinions.
Gordon Brown commissioned the Davies report of 2008. Note carefully that this report was commissioned by a Labour government, a government determined to make the world a better place. Through ceaseless struggle and the glorification of violence. One of its key recommendations, soon acted upon, was Armed Forces Day, the brand new annual opportunity for the nation to express its gratitude to the services. MoD money was chucked at local councils willing to organise parades, to show off the glamorous hardware of war and permit recruiters to point yet more fools the way to dusty death.
Britain, like all the imperial powers of a past age, struggles to pull itself together. War is the unifying factor its politicians need. The Falklands War flowed from the incompetence of Mrs Thatcher’s government yet it ended up securing her a second term. Many of those Parliamentarians who in 2003 voted to wage aggressive war in the name of the British people have now retained their seats through two general elections. Brown, obsessed with ‘Britishness’, could have asked for no stronger symbol of it than ‘our boys and girls’ doing their bit for Queen and Country. Or at least for U.S. oil. It remains true, in F.D. Roosevelt’s words, that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. But fear, along with hate and arrogance, are tools that politicians and the media know how to wield. And will if we let them.
Can Wessex transcend its violent past and present? It will not be easy, for we have become to a high degree economically dependent on the manufacture or maintenance of weaponry and the training of service personnel. It all goes back a very long way. Even if scholars doubt that Alfred founded the Navy, it is a matter of record that Portsmouth Dockyard existed in the reign of Richard I, Devonport following in that of William III. The Army’s roots are shallower. It took up residence on Dartmoor in the early 1800s, at Aldershot in 1854, on Salisbury Plain in 1897. The RAF’s roots are necessarily shallower still, though it was here at the outset, and even before, His Majesty’s Balloon Factory at Farnborough dating from 1908. The MoD Procurement Executive came to Abbey Wood at Bristol in 1995.
Wessex has moved on before. The merchants of Bristol fought long and hard to save the centuries-old slave trade and with it the wealth that benefited not only them but indirectly much of Wessex society. Yet Bristol had its abolitionists too. Stroud has the one contemporary monument to abolition, the ‘Anti-Slavery Arch’. Wessex today can make a similar stand for peace. It can reclaim the land from beneath the tank tracks and the soldiers’ boots. For ours is an occupied region, doomed to re-enact the war preparations of Europe's unhappy centuries until saner counsel prevails. The MoD owns, leases or holds on licence over 100,000 acres of Wiltshire (12% of the county), 32,000 acres of Devon (14% of the Dartmoor National Park), 10,000 acres of Hampshire and 8,000 acres of Dorset. That it protects some of our finest landscapes, archæology and biodiversity from the rapacious grasp of agronomic and development interests is beside the point. Less bad is not the same as good and the money it all costs could be doing much more of the latter. Of course, there will be those who argue that Wessex Regionalists should back the cosy status quo in our part of the world but that is a low aspiration for a transformative party.
The recent Strategic Defence and Security Review marks a step towards the necessary rethinking but it remains an excuse for inertia while the assumptions of an ex-empire predominate. The UK continues to support the fourth largest military budget in the world, yet there is no reason to believe that it is any more vulnerable to attack than those countries whose budgets are smaller. Si vis pacem, para bellum – if you wish for peace, prepare for war – has been the universal advice of generals throughout the ages. It would be, wouldn’t it? We flatter ourselves that we are an intelligent species but the Campaign Against The Arms Trade has estimated that every minute the world will spend £1 million on arms while in the same time 15 children will die of poverty, famine or disease. The UK has become the world’s second largest arms exporter while lecturing others on peace and stability.
The real challenge of security is to be tough on violence and tough on the causes of violence. It is not, and must not become, what the London parties seek to make it, a smokescreen for the remilitarisation of society, for renewing the backbone of centralism. It is said that where there’s a will there’s a way. In the case of defence, there’s a way sure enough. For now, the popular and political will, at home and abroad, is what’s sadly lacking.
Lord Chalfont, 1969
Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday. Across Wessex, and across the world, it was a time to reflect. To remember bad things that have happened to us in our collective past is meaningful, at least in part, for the opportunity it provides to learn from our experience. Yet learn we do not. The war to end all wars is still being fought and the Nobel Prize has been awarded to the Commander-in-Chief. War is peace.
One of the least forgivable actions of the Blair/Brown regime was to taint remembrance with controversy. The casualties of illegal and irrelevant wars now join those of just ones in thoughts and prayers. All those who take up arms against the Queen’s enemies are equally honoured, as custom dictates. Those who prefer to reject the crimes committed in our name may well ask, who is this bellicose woman, who makes enemies so easily?
Mainstream politicians have been very quick to wipe their bloody hands on the rest of us, in a brazen attempt to make us their accomplices. It began with cross-party talk about the 'military covenant', the supposed duty supposedly owed by society to those who supposedly defend the realm against the supposed forces of darkness. The phrase came from nowhere in 2000 when it was first codified in Army doctrine. It went unchallenged and now looks to be made binding upon members of the public. Under cover of concern that resources are inadequate to the military’s current mission and its aftermath, a sinister agenda is now fast infiltrating the civilian world. The spotlight is turned on military equipment, housing and healthcare. A better deal for those injured or bereaved. Those who dissent from the mission, those who would rather prevent injury and bereavement happening at all, are to be first sidelined and then persecuted for their conscientious opinions.
Gordon Brown commissioned the Davies report of 2008. Note carefully that this report was commissioned by a Labour government, a government determined to make the world a better place. Through ceaseless struggle and the glorification of violence. One of its key recommendations, soon acted upon, was Armed Forces Day, the brand new annual opportunity for the nation to express its gratitude to the services. MoD money was chucked at local councils willing to organise parades, to show off the glamorous hardware of war and permit recruiters to point yet more fools the way to dusty death.
Britain, like all the imperial powers of a past age, struggles to pull itself together. War is the unifying factor its politicians need. The Falklands War flowed from the incompetence of Mrs Thatcher’s government yet it ended up securing her a second term. Many of those Parliamentarians who in 2003 voted to wage aggressive war in the name of the British people have now retained their seats through two general elections. Brown, obsessed with ‘Britishness’, could have asked for no stronger symbol of it than ‘our boys and girls’ doing their bit for Queen and Country. Or at least for U.S. oil. It remains true, in F.D. Roosevelt’s words, that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. But fear, along with hate and arrogance, are tools that politicians and the media know how to wield. And will if we let them.
Can Wessex transcend its violent past and present? It will not be easy, for we have become to a high degree economically dependent on the manufacture or maintenance of weaponry and the training of service personnel. It all goes back a very long way. Even if scholars doubt that Alfred founded the Navy, it is a matter of record that Portsmouth Dockyard existed in the reign of Richard I, Devonport following in that of William III. The Army’s roots are shallower. It took up residence on Dartmoor in the early 1800s, at Aldershot in 1854, on Salisbury Plain in 1897. The RAF’s roots are necessarily shallower still, though it was here at the outset, and even before, His Majesty’s Balloon Factory at Farnborough dating from 1908. The MoD Procurement Executive came to Abbey Wood at Bristol in 1995.
Wessex has moved on before. The merchants of Bristol fought long and hard to save the centuries-old slave trade and with it the wealth that benefited not only them but indirectly much of Wessex society. Yet Bristol had its abolitionists too. Stroud has the one contemporary monument to abolition, the ‘Anti-Slavery Arch’. Wessex today can make a similar stand for peace. It can reclaim the land from beneath the tank tracks and the soldiers’ boots. For ours is an occupied region, doomed to re-enact the war preparations of Europe's unhappy centuries until saner counsel prevails. The MoD owns, leases or holds on licence over 100,000 acres of Wiltshire (12% of the county), 32,000 acres of Devon (14% of the Dartmoor National Park), 10,000 acres of Hampshire and 8,000 acres of Dorset. That it protects some of our finest landscapes, archæology and biodiversity from the rapacious grasp of agronomic and development interests is beside the point. Less bad is not the same as good and the money it all costs could be doing much more of the latter. Of course, there will be those who argue that Wessex Regionalists should back the cosy status quo in our part of the world but that is a low aspiration for a transformative party.
The recent Strategic Defence and Security Review marks a step towards the necessary rethinking but it remains an excuse for inertia while the assumptions of an ex-empire predominate. The UK continues to support the fourth largest military budget in the world, yet there is no reason to believe that it is any more vulnerable to attack than those countries whose budgets are smaller. Si vis pacem, para bellum – if you wish for peace, prepare for war – has been the universal advice of generals throughout the ages. It would be, wouldn’t it? We flatter ourselves that we are an intelligent species but the Campaign Against The Arms Trade has estimated that every minute the world will spend £1 million on arms while in the same time 15 children will die of poverty, famine or disease. The UK has become the world’s second largest arms exporter while lecturing others on peace and stability.
The real challenge of security is to be tough on violence and tough on the causes of violence. It is not, and must not become, what the London parties seek to make it, a smokescreen for the remilitarisation of society, for renewing the backbone of centralism. It is said that where there’s a will there’s a way. In the case of defence, there’s a way sure enough. For now, the popular and political will, at home and abroad, is what’s sadly lacking.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
