Review of 2010

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

The 2010 Review has recently been forwarded to the Commission and here is what it says:

During 2010 the Party’s on-line presence was maintained and strengthened. The website – www.wessexregionalists.org – is linked to a Facebook page and to a blog. The latter proved particularly useful during the General Election in permitting a running commentary on the campaign independent of the negative bias frequently displayed in the mainstream media. Page-view statistics show that the blog has attracted readers from across the globe.

Colin Bex was elected Party President in February and at the same time selected as prospective candidate in the forthcoming General Election. It was decided to consider contesting Witney, the only Wessex constituency represented in the old Parliament by one of the three major London party leaders. Initial canvassing confirmed that this would be a good choice and Colin was duly nominated.

A folded A4 leaflet – ‘The Truth in Black & White’ – was distributed by Royal Mail to all constituents. At 50,000 copies, this was our highest-ever print-run. Publicity was also provided by the local press, with coverage in the Oxford Journal, Oxford News, Oxford Press and Oxford Times. Interviews were given by Colin to Banbury Sound, BBC Oxford (television and radio), CNN and to Dutch radio and by Nick Xylas to Japanese radio. The Wessex Wyvern standard was much used as a visual aid on the campaign trail and was commented on by David Cameron (the Conservative candidate) at the count. Major publicity appeared shortly before polling day in the form of a full-page article in the London Guardian of 4th May. This included a colour photograph of Party members with the Wyvern at Chipping Norton, sadly in bad weather that offered poor conditions for canvassing. The article was by Alexis Petridis, who had been tasked with writing a piece on an attractive smaller party and as a bonus found himself at the heart of national debate in the Leader of the Opposition’s constituency. A further report appeared in the Guardian on the Saturday after the election. Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail also visited the constituency and noted our candidate’s lively presence in Burford. Travelling almost wholly by public transport, Colin visited all the major towns and some smaller villages, including return visits in some cases.

Two public meetings were attended, at Woodstock and at Witney, both organised by local clergy. At Woodstock, all candidates – or their representatives – were accommodated equally and Colin was able to engage with the audience as he wished. In disgraceful contrast, at Witney parties – and others – without recent UK or current EU Parliamentary representation were excluded from the platform – 50% of the candidates – and the audience was forbidden to express disapproval of views expounded. Colin protested vigorously against this curtailment of balanced debate but without success. The organiser’s pre-selection of candidates deemed fit to be heard is symptomatic of the hypocrisy of an establishment that claims to seek wider participation in political and civic life yet increasingly restricts opportunities to do so to ‘approved’ channels only, which include the near-identical major parties.

Whatever discretion may or may not be allowed to the voluntary organisers of a public meeting, much less can be conceded to the public authority responsible for organising the election. West Oxfordshire District Council’s actions were generally fair and efficient but we consider it unacceptable that the microphone at the count was turned off once David Cameron had completed his acceptance speech and while others were still waiting to add their own remarks. This was an appalling discourtesy to candidates who should be entitled to equal treatment. It was also a discourtesy to the counting staff, as it is customary for candidates to thank the Acting Returning Officer and his assistants for their work. It may be that this action was inspired by a desire to allow the major parties to proceed to give media interviews without interruption; if so, it confirms our view that elections in the United Kingdom are not free and fair, because they provide additional facilities to some parties at the expense of others.

The televised debates between the three major London party leaders were another example of this unwelcome trend towards re-inforcing the existing distribution of power by denying critical voices a hearing. This structural bias is compounded by the disproportionate inputs of rich beneficiaries and the disproportional outputs of the FPTP voting system. It is to such factors rather than to any supposed deficiency in our own campaigning that we attribute the results we have obtained at recent elections. In standing, we are in effect acting as a political thermometer, testing the extent to which the electorate has or has not grasped the dire reality of its situation and become supportive of the radical changes needed to correct it.

In the New York Times of 9th June 2010, Stephen Farrell's 'Peace Protest, London-Style' included reference to Colin's candidacy and his view that the only reason Britain may pull its troops out of Iraq or Afghanistan would be on the basis of saving money. It would have nothing to do with legality, let alone morality.

In November, two WR officers who are also members of Mebyon Kernow – the Party for Cornwall attended its Annual Conference in Bodmin. We consider it important to support other movements for autonomy on the principle that a rising tide lifts all boats. In the case of Cornwall, success also helps to establish in the public consciousness both what our own borders are and the historical basis for them. We have nevertheless continued to resist all calls for any federation of efforts under an all-England organisation or philosophy that would simply mirror the centralism we oppose.

We were particularly concerned during the latter part of 2010 at the implications of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. This, by requiring cross-border constituencies in order to meet an inflexible electoral quota, will prevent both ourselves and Mebyon Kernow fielding candidates across our respective territories, the whole of those territories and nothing but those territories. The defence of local and regional integrity is at the heart of our world-view and we are ill-served by Jacobin arrangements that treat politics simply as a question of which brand of a single global ideology should dominate the House of Commons.

Localism, R.I.P.

We have long been critical of the Coalition’s localism agenda. Not because we disagree with it in principle. Far from it. We would devolve power further and faster, and instead of dismantling those anti-democratic regional institutions we would democratise them in the form of a Wessex Parliament – the ‘Witan’ – an accountable voice for the region able to mount an effective challenge to Whitehall bullying.

We disagree with the Coalition’s plan because we don’t believe a word of it. It was always going to be a one-way street. (For example, giving communities the power to allow more housing than the local council wished to see but not less.) Now we are hearing phrases like ‘guided localism’ to describe what the Coalition really wants. Nick Raynsford, a former Labour minister, said that “for all that ministers want to talk the localism talk, they find it hard to resist interfering in local decision-making when it suits their wider public relations agenda”. And as a former Labour minister, Raynsford knows about that temptation, all too well.

The Localism Bill is still making its way through the Commons but George Osborne admitted this month that the Tories, like Labour, may promise people-power but all they will deliver is profit-power. What he is reported to be saying is that he wants to make it much easier for companies to obtain planning consent for new projects – even if they go against the wishes of local residents. When this sort of thing happens in China there’s an almighty stink about human rights violations. When it happens here, protesters are labelled ‘deficit deniers’ and plainly told that there’s no alternative to rebooting the same failed system that got us where we are.

There you have it. Did you vote for these crooks? Will you be doing it again? And again? And again?

Must Try Harder

One of the authors of the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report, published by the World Economic Forum this week, has branded Britain an ‘appalling’ tourist destination. Though coming seventh out of 139 countries studied, poor marketing, among other factors, let the country down.

Seventh place was earned largely by high standards of public health, the current level of air services and availability of car hire, as well as an improvement in price due to the lower exchange rate of sterling over the past two years. Set against this, the UK was placed 84th on government expenditure on travel and tourism, at 43rd on the effectiveness of its marketing and branding, and at 46th even on the timeliness of providing tourism data.

Reactions are as expected. VisitBritain hit back (rather weakly) to defend its tourism strategy, claiming that, with the Royal Wedding, the Diamond Jubilee and the 2012 Olympics coming up, there has never been a better time to come to the UK as a tourist.

The idea that anywhere outside London might be worth seeing in its own right is obviously a difficult one for these folk to process. Their timeline of British history manages to stretch 'Romano Britain' to 1065, neatly avoiding any mention of those troublesome Saxon chaps. (Please remember that our taxes are paying for this rubbish.) Meanwhile, Britain’s top 10 regional foods are said to include 3 from Scotland, 2 from Wales and 1 from Cornwall. After deducting the generic category of ‘British cheeses’, that leaves just 3 from the whole of England and 2 of those are from the Thames estuary. Ten words about Cheddar cheese are all that we get.

The end of cheap oil will happen within the lifetime of many now living, so if anyone is going to see the world they may as well do it now. With its history and landscape, music, food and drink, Wessex has plenty of wonderful opportunities that cry out for creative marketing. If our tourist industry would just get up off its knees, stop pandering to a London-centred view of Britain and start selling Wessex for all it’s worth. And not just abroad. Watch television for any length of time and lush advertisements for Scotland or Wales will show up. Where’s Wessex in all of this? Largely silent and invisible, as ever, by our own suicidal choice. Let's pull together and put Wessex on everyone's map. If we want them to come, the least we can do is let them know that we're here.

Fool's Gold

On Tuesday, the Coalition announced that it would no longer be giving money away to China, Russia and a long list of other countries. Opinion polling suggests that two-thirds of voters query the priority given to foreign aid during this gloomy ‘age of austerity’ at home. (After all, this is money we borrow in order to give away and therefore have to pay interest on.) Labour, having espoused ‘joined-up thinking’ while in office, now denounces the targeting of aid to achieve security and other foreign policy goals. A surer target might have been to point out that the Coalition wants a Pig Society at home, where charity replaces the State and bankers pocket the difference, but wants to not only ring-fence but increase State intervention in other peoples’ countries.

We have reason to be suspicious of all the wildly whirling agendas. Tying vulnerable economies into providing us with the food and other resources we won’t provide for ourselves is not an ‘ethical’ foreign policy. It would be far better to leave well alone so that others can choose for themselves their relationship with development. Instead we underwrite with guns the elites who seize the crops to keep us fed. And then we wonder where Third World immigration comes from. Wouldn’t you want to follow the crops to see where they go?

The latest wheeze, to link aid to security, has all the markings of Danegeld. Don’t bomb us or we won’t pay you not to. So for how long do we pay? We paid the Vikings until they decided to help themselves to England. We paid the Barbary pirates for two centuries, so it looks as if the Somali ones need never work again.

But the biggest part of the big picture is that which describes our place in the global economy. We are told that our quality of life must be sacrificed to enable UK plc to ‘compete’ in world markets. We must join the race to the bottom, striving to match the costs of economies that rely on what is little better than slave labour. The word ‘compete’ is used in quotes because we are told that China, India, etc. are our competitors in this life-and-death struggle, yet we have been happy to subsidise their space programmes and nuclear weapons development, however indirectly, through foreign aid. If the competition were genuine, we would not be doing all in our power to enable their industries to undercut ours. The reality is that UK plc is a monstrous myth. No British government has any interest in our prosperity. It only cares for its own.

The alternative is protectionism, which ticks all the boxes. Especially, it accustoms us to an economy less dependent on moving goods around, which will become less of an option as the Oil Age ends. Nothing scares the financial class like the ‘p’ word. Which is why we are not allowed to mention it in polite company. But we have. We have ever since our 12-point programme in 1979, which argued for current revenues from our natural resources to be invested in building a region self-sufficient in energy, nutrition and all essential manufactured goods. Since then, Wessex has lost 32 irreplaceable years, lost in a Maggie-in-Wonderland world of ever-increasing prosperity and ever-expanding credit for which the first of many bills has now arrived. So don’t dare say you weren’t warned.

Naturally, as regionalists, we are not talking about ‘Imperial Preference’ here. Goods imported from, say, Brittany or Normandy imply a smaller carbon footprint than those from Northumbria or Scotland, let alone Canada or New Zealand. We cannot have jingoists in London or Paris imposing malignant barriers to trade with our neighbours. But trade rules that reflect the true cost of burning precious oil to bring us what we could have obtained locally, regionally or inter-regionally cannot come soon enough. Many good trends are becoming evident right now - Wales has voted for more powers, oil prices are rocketing, London politicians are looking increasingly out-of-touch with reality. Now is the time to seize this opportunity and make the case for local life and regional rule. Here, there and everywhere.

Joined-up Looting

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.

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'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?