Plans to sell off forestry land have been put on hold as the Coalition confesses that it misjudged the public mood. The plans will be back. All three of the main London parties are committed to continuing privatisation in order to fund big giveaways to their respective backers.
The great fire-sale is driven by five key principles.
The first principle is that if it makes money, it must be sold to the bankers. In the case of forestry, the trees come with a very helpful tax regime attached. The State, having lost the revenue and given away the capital receipt, must then raise taxes to fill the gap. Bankers know how to arrange their affairs to avoid paying those.
The second principle is that if it doesn’t make money, it must be sold to a voluntary group, under the threat that it will otherwise be shut down. These groups need to raise capital to finance the purchase and any future investment. Banks extract interest in return. If, or rather when, the voluntary groups fail to balance the books, the banks can repossess and sell the assets. The failure of the voluntary groups will provide baseline data about costs that will then enable multi-national corporations to price their bids for State funding to provide any services still deemed vital.
The third principle is that taxes must remain high, even though services are in decline, in order that the State may continue to shovel money into bankers’ pockets. Banks will continue to make profits on debts they have created out of nothing. The UK’s government debt is now £2.32 trillion, of which the cost of bailing out Lloyds Group and RBS accounts for £1.3 trillion. Smaller banks are already included in the larger figure. RBS lost £1.1 billion last year but paid out £950 million in bonuses anyway.
The fourth principle is that property rights must continue to take precedence over human rights. David Cameron recently set out his vision of a State that has withdrawn from everything except provision of the coercive power – the police, the intelligence services, the judiciary and the armed forces. The Pig Society does not extend to farming out justice to local vigilantes, nor security to foreign mercenaries. Cameron knows just enough history not to want to share the fate of Vortigern. His vision nevertheless is a starkly regressive one. The poor are to be taxed to pay for protecting the interests of the rich, not the other way around.
The fifth principle is that any opposition must be neutered, employing ever more draconian laws and sophisticated psychological manipulation to disarm any criticism of the elite consensus. The new emphasis on cyber-security is not about fighting off virus attacks on critical infrastructure but about monitoring and disrupting any organised reaction to the looting. Meanwhile, Cameron’s establishment of the Behavioural Insight Team at Number 10, building on Labour’s ‘Mindspace’ project, demonstrates the extent to which politicians from all three London parties now view voters as no better than lab rats to be subjected to ‘libertarian paternalism’.
The alternative we seek is a Big Democracy, one where the power of money to corrupt our lives is reined in and other values, like accountability, inclusiveness and stewardship, are re-asserted. It also needs to exist as of right, not as a hand-down from the PM that can be swept away at the first sign of a bad headline. This requires leaders less testicularly challenged than Cameron, Clegg and Miliband, all of whom are too close by far to the City of London to take it on. Like the rest of the essentially fraudulent (but allowed-to-be-legal) globalised ‘competitive’ (reptilian) economy, the City must become a thing of the past. Its ill-gotten gains need to be redistributed to local communities to begin the work of restoring all those life-enhancing qualities that the financial class has so long despised.
The coming ecological crisis will require clear thinking about real things. Things like food, fuel, regions, resources, skills, land and clever technology. It will have no room for sociopathic bankers, and they know it. It does no harm to remind them that their crimes against humanity and against the planet will end. And will Big Bang then become Big Whimper? We shall see.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
The Infamous Five
In 1945, the Labour Party campaigned to destroy Beveridge’s 'five giants' of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. In 1997 and each subsequent election it tried the same trick, the latest pledges being to “secure the recovery”, “raise family living standards”, “build a high tech economy”, “protect frontline services”, and “strengthen fairness in communities”. All a bit desperate really.
It has been said that Labour deserved to lose last May, while the Conservatives did not deserve to win. That’s how it turned out, though happily for David Cameron the third party was waiting in the wings, to hand him the keys to Number 10 anyway. Since then, nostalgia for Labour has been growing daily as memory decays. Here then is a reminder of what we have lost, five reasons why we should detest the whole lot of them, five reasons to vote only for parties that advocate real change worth having.
1. Labour took power promising an ethical foreign policy. It left power embedded in American-led wars for oil. Illegal wars sold on the basis of lies. Tens of thousands have died needlessly, deaths for which Labour’s leaders, no less than their Conservative collaborators, must stand trial. A by-product has been the increasing re-militarisation of our own society, with death in war now once more normalised and any criticism of armed intervention smothered in the name of patriotism. Meanwhile, our arms trade continues to make a killing.
2. Labour’s onslaught on civil liberties was relentless. Historic freedoms of expression, association and assembly have all taken a terrible mauling, along with many guarantees of due process. The icing on this loathsome cake was a hideously expensive identity card scheme, expressing Labour’s view that the People belong to the State and not the State to the People. Overall, Labour’s actions, at home and abroad, have increased, not reduced, the terrorist threat.
3. Labour’s contempt for the environment has been a badge worn with pride. The challenges posed by runaway population growth have been met with reckless indifference. Only the collapse of the mortgage market, High Court challenges under European law, and finally a change of government have prevented the destruction of tens of thousands of acres of Green Belt and other protected countryside in Wessex. Half-hearted attempts at a sustainable transport policy, all stick and no carrot, provoked a predictable backlash.
4. Labour’s piper-payers called the tune. Propped up by rich donors as an insurance policy against the declining popularity of John Major’s Tories, New Labour continued the policies of privatisation and debt-based public finance that have got us where we are today. It did nothing as vital industries passed into the hands of international investors devoid of local loyalties. Labour’s leaders would sell their own grandmothers; they already have sold everyone’s grandchildren.
5. Labour once again bungled devolution, just as it did in 1979. This time it got Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London away but this was always the limit of its enthusiasm. It hitched itself to a set of unworkable regional boundaries inherited from the Tories, then deliberately obstructed grassroots movements in Cornwall, Mercia and Wessex pointing to a more promising way forward. In local government it refined the Tory policy of arrogant interference and dismantled public debate, substituting executive members and elected mayors for meaningful scrutiny and collective decision-making.
We attack Labour not because we are happy to see Wessex under Coalition rule. We are far from happy. We attack Labour, as we attack all the London-based parties, because each falls short of our vision for Wessex. We attack the other two for what they are. We attack Labour for trying to fool folk that it is what it demonstrably is not.
It has been said that Labour deserved to lose last May, while the Conservatives did not deserve to win. That’s how it turned out, though happily for David Cameron the third party was waiting in the wings, to hand him the keys to Number 10 anyway. Since then, nostalgia for Labour has been growing daily as memory decays. Here then is a reminder of what we have lost, five reasons why we should detest the whole lot of them, five reasons to vote only for parties that advocate real change worth having.
1. Labour took power promising an ethical foreign policy. It left power embedded in American-led wars for oil. Illegal wars sold on the basis of lies. Tens of thousands have died needlessly, deaths for which Labour’s leaders, no less than their Conservative collaborators, must stand trial. A by-product has been the increasing re-militarisation of our own society, with death in war now once more normalised and any criticism of armed intervention smothered in the name of patriotism. Meanwhile, our arms trade continues to make a killing.
2. Labour’s onslaught on civil liberties was relentless. Historic freedoms of expression, association and assembly have all taken a terrible mauling, along with many guarantees of due process. The icing on this loathsome cake was a hideously expensive identity card scheme, expressing Labour’s view that the People belong to the State and not the State to the People. Overall, Labour’s actions, at home and abroad, have increased, not reduced, the terrorist threat.
3. Labour’s contempt for the environment has been a badge worn with pride. The challenges posed by runaway population growth have been met with reckless indifference. Only the collapse of the mortgage market, High Court challenges under European law, and finally a change of government have prevented the destruction of tens of thousands of acres of Green Belt and other protected countryside in Wessex. Half-hearted attempts at a sustainable transport policy, all stick and no carrot, provoked a predictable backlash.
4. Labour’s piper-payers called the tune. Propped up by rich donors as an insurance policy against the declining popularity of John Major’s Tories, New Labour continued the policies of privatisation and debt-based public finance that have got us where we are today. It did nothing as vital industries passed into the hands of international investors devoid of local loyalties. Labour’s leaders would sell their own grandmothers; they already have sold everyone’s grandchildren.
5. Labour once again bungled devolution, just as it did in 1979. This time it got Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London away but this was always the limit of its enthusiasm. It hitched itself to a set of unworkable regional boundaries inherited from the Tories, then deliberately obstructed grassroots movements in Cornwall, Mercia and Wessex pointing to a more promising way forward. In local government it refined the Tory policy of arrogant interference and dismantled public debate, substituting executive members and elected mayors for meaningful scrutiny and collective decision-making.
We attack Labour not because we are happy to see Wessex under Coalition rule. We are far from happy. We attack Labour, as we attack all the London-based parties, because each falls short of our vision for Wessex. We attack the other two for what they are. We attack Labour for trying to fool folk that it is what it demonstrably is not.
Friday, February 11, 2011
It's That London Again!
Good news, for some, but not for all. Yesterday, Vince Cable’s Department for Business, Innovation & Skills announced arrangements for the winding-up of the Regional Devastation Agencies. Wessex will breathe a sigh of relief now that their reign of tendentious mediocrity is drawing to a close. Wessex does not need ‘development’. It needs conservation, along with the rest of our abused planet. Instead, with ‘local economic partnerships’ filling the void, we are promised, according to Cable’s department, “a new economic delivery landscape”. No joined-up thinking is allowed, no imaginative marketing of the Wessex regional brand. It all comes down under the Coalition to something as boring as functional labour market areas instead.
Bad news, for some, but not for all. The assets built up by the RDAs are not to be handed over to local communities as we have argued they should be. At least not in Wessex. In most cases they are to be sold, to help pay off the Government’s silly, imaginary debt to the banks (who created the debt out of nothing, like all bank-created money). There is an exception. In London, all the assets of the London Development Agency will pass to the Greater London Authority, to “give the GLA an important portfolio of regeneration assets to support its new responsibilities for housing and regeneration”. London, apparently, is a functional labour market area, and a world city too. So, it’s all right then, isn’t it, that we wurzels should slave for its benefit and be denied a voice of our own?
Bad news, for some, but not for all. The assets built up by the RDAs are not to be handed over to local communities as we have argued they should be. At least not in Wessex. In most cases they are to be sold, to help pay off the Government’s silly, imaginary debt to the banks (who created the debt out of nothing, like all bank-created money). There is an exception. In London, all the assets of the London Development Agency will pass to the Greater London Authority, to “give the GLA an important portfolio of regeneration assets to support its new responsibilities for housing and regeneration”. London, apparently, is a functional labour market area, and a world city too. So, it’s all right then, isn’t it, that we wurzels should slave for its benefit and be denied a voice of our own?
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
The Land is Whose?
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.
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 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.
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