Fighting On The Beaches

Sussex isn’t Wessex.  We don’t claim it and the Saxon chronicles, read attentively, back up us on that.  Nevertheless, it’s fascinating to glance east at present.

At Balcombe, environmental protestors are making life difficult for Cuadrilla, the firm that wants to frack for oil and gas.  It’s been well described as ‘extreme energy’, a last desperate squeezing of the fossil fuel fruit that defers by a few years the real reckoning we need to undertake.  And all the while adding to climate change.  Cuadrilla’s response?  That they have complied with all relevant laws and regulations.  Which says a lot for the competence of our law-makers.  One of the exceptions is Caroline Lucas of the Green Party, who got dragged away by police yesterday.  Balcombe’s actual MP is Francis Maude, a Conservative, Paymaster-General and Minister for the Cabinet Office.  Now, watching him get arrested would be real fun.  Watching him lose his seat would be better still.

At Newhaven, there’s a different issue.  The French, who own the West Beach, have sealed off public access and the locals want it back.  It’s a story with all the right ingredients.  (And the online comments are a hoot.)

Start with a populace who’ve woken up to the fact that if you want to protect your community’s rights, don’t allow them to be sold off.  Private corporations have no loyalty to place.  If you want to defend your heritage, keep it public.  Yes, Maggie, that means the STATE has to own it because no-one else can be trusted to do the job.  There shouldn’t need to be a debate about this, only about how locally the responsibility should rest.  If you put the government’s assets up for sale they’ll be bought by someone else’s government.  The French.  The Germans.  The Arabs.  The Chinese.  Do we own any of their assets?  Do they look that daft?  And it’s not only the governments.  Private companies from across the world now own huge swaths of what used to be our public sector.  The money raised from those sales?  Oh, we had SUCH a big party up in London.

Then there’s attitudes towards the French.  Always good for a WW2 joke at their expense.  Nothing like resting on our laurels to remind others of events before most of their parents were born.  The fact is, they DO own a lot of southern England now.  And in Newhaven’s case, who exactly are these French owners?  The Département of Seine Maritime, in Normandy.  Imagine East Sussex County Council owning the port of Dieppe.  It’s like that, only in reverse.

It’s well known that the Queen owns the foreshore here, all of it, so the froggies are clearly in the wrong.  You’d think so, reading the outpourings of patriotic internet bores.  But it ain’t necessarily so.  The Crown Estate Commissioners are responsible for only 55% of the foreshore around the UK, about 320,000 acres.  In Cornwall and Lancashire, the respective royal duchies stand in for the Crown.  In Orkney and Shetland, Norse udal law suggests that the foreshore rights go with the land, not the sea, so adjoining landowners usually have the sounder claim.  And elsewhere?  We’ll come to that.  The Crown certainly owns the seabed below mean low water mark, about 23.8 million acres.  Or does it?  Not all, especially where estuaries are concerned.  The Port of London Authority owns part of the tidal Thames river-bed.  Several river-beds in Devon belong to the Duchy of Cornwall, while the Beaulieu River in Hampshire is part of the Beaulieu Estate.  And a large slice of the Severn Estuary forms something called the Beaufort Royalty, owned by the Duke of Beaufort through his property company, Swangrove Estates Ltd, to which are paid the dues for sand dredged from the bed.  Never heard of the Beaufort Royalty?  Unless you need to know, you probably won’t.  Maybe with tidal energy now on the agenda, you’ll be hearing more.

Land with no other owner belongs by default to the Crown.  That is how the royal forests originated, as well as the ownership of upland commons like Dartmoor (granted away in 1337 to the Duchy of Cornwall and still owned by it today).  The Crown is assumed to own the seabed and things that come out of the sea, like whales and wreckage, and, except in Orkney and Shetland, the foreshore is treated as an ‘incident of the sea’ rather than an ‘incident of the land’.  That doesn’t mean that the Crown cannot part with its rights, and along half the coastline it has done just that.  In seaside resorts the beach often belongs to the council, ensuring that at least some of the money from the deckchairs and the ice creams stays local.

That still leaves a lot of the one-half in private ownership and even the other half can be exploited for profit, since the Crown Estate Commissioners have a money-raising job to do for central government.  Should they?  Or should all beaches be locally owned, turned over to the parish council to manage, in partnership with a wider authority if necessary?  Should the seabed off our coasts be plundered for London’s benefit, or conserved for ours?  These are the sort of questions we’d love to see a Wessex Witan debating in respect of our two coasts and the narrow seas we share with Wales, Brittany and Normandy.  Scotland’s recent experience of sweeping land reforms has shown that it will take a fresh constitutional settlement to inspire the fresh thinking needed.

Down The Drain

Thames Water’s bills are set to rise.  That’s bad news in Swindon, especially as the reason given for needing the money is to upgrade infrastructure in London.

The locals aren’t happy and the suggestion has been made that perhaps Thames should be split into Upper and Lower zones for billing purposes.  An excellent idea.  London can well afford to pay for its own infrastructure.  Which of the London parties will include it in their manifesto?  That’s right.

It makes sense to us as an interim solution but what is really needed is for Wessex to take back control of its own natural resources.  Forty years ago, most of Wessex was supplied by local water boards, made up of councillors from the area served.  Swindon, along with Bath, Plymouth, Southampton and Winchester, was one of five Wessex councils that still ran its own water department.  These were financed by municipal bonds, and ultimately by ratepayers, but under democratic control, as befits a natural monopoly.  

Because of Treasury interference, however, the publicly owned water service was never able to spend what was needed to keep itself up to date.  When we hear about 'crumbling Victorian sewers' needing replacement we really ought to ask why the Victorians were willing to put public money into public works and our generation is not.  Might it have something to do with the ruling ideology that sees public utilities as pipes for channelling customers' payments into deep private pockets?

Today Thames is a subsidiary of Kemble Water, a consortium based in Australia.  Surely decisions about water bills in Wessex shouldn’t depend on what London demands, let alone what suits investors in Sydney?  In recent years, large slices of the company’s shares have been bought by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and the China Investment Corporation.  Are they elected by the voters of Swindon?  If not, ought we to describe this situation as progress?

The Wealth of Wessex

Here is a link to the case for Scottish independence, set out in maps and numbers.  The second map shows the extent to which the wealth of England, measured in GDP per head, is concentrated along the M4 corridor.  It’s our wealth: our answer to the claim that we all depend on London's cleverness with noughts.  It's a diverse wealth too, based on our natural resources as well as our talents.

The M4 corridor has been the engine of England’s real economy all the way back to the 80s.  When our constitutional policy document, The Statute of Wessex, appeared in its third impression, in 1996, we highlighted that three county areas in the M4 corridor (Avon, Wiltshire and Berkshire) had significantly above average GDP/head and that three in the peninsula (Devon, Dorset and Somerset) had significantly below average GDP/head.  The Isle of Wight came bottom in our list, below both Scotland and Wales.

The matching of high and low output areas within Wessex indicated then, as now, that as a whole it could be financially viable as a self-governing region of the future.  It was neither dependent on extreme and unsustainable wealth, as London is, nor poorly-resourced, as the former industrial regions are (and will continue to be until regional self-government gives them the powers they need to recover from the effects of centralism).  For ourselves, self-government offers the opportunity to spread the prosperity base wider within Wessex so that the lower output areas do not remain dependent retirement zones.  (Dividing GDP by population will inevitably tend to produce a below average figure so long as the economically inactive population are an above average proportion of the whole.  Reducing the influx of retirees has the same effect as increasing economic development, which is why control over our housing stock is so vital.)

Had Wessex responded at that time to the call for self-government we could by now be as rich as the Swiss and possessed of the best public services in the world.  Instead folk sat back and watched as that wealth was systematically squandered by the London regime.  On wars.  On bank bailouts.  On prestige projects that have rarely worked and are often of no conceivable benefit to Wessex.  And above all on maintaining the system of micro-managing local affairs from the centre for London’s benefit. 

The Scots are waking up to the fact that they’re being robbed.  We need to do the same.

If Enough Is Never Enough

“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best.”
Otto von Bismarck, 1867

Bismarck’s most famous quote is characteristically double-edged. Understood passively, it implies working within the constraints of the world as we find it. But to what end? Understood assertively, it implies redefining those limits, steadily moving the goalposts onto new territory. So that what was previously impossible becomes possible. And what was previously possible – for others – ceases to be so.

We live, increasingly, under a system of totalitarian liberalism, where democratic choices are assumed to be limited to superficialities, to whether Leader A appears to have more charisma than Leader B. Because nothing striking separates them on policy. The London parties fight for control of the centre ground when what is actually required is to roll up the centre ground and re-locate it. Lenin did that in 1917, not just for Russia but for the world. Thatcher did it in 1979. The scale of the challenges we face today demands no less a transformation. Do it now and we at least have some chance of avoiding the suffering they both relished imposing.

Last week’s news was dominated by population growth. We ought to be alarmed that human numbers are exploding but the BBC – what a vile organisation that’s become – was shamelessly biased in its coverage. Those for whom growth is an opportunity rather than a problem received significantly more prime airtime for their views. Once again we were assured that growth is good, that it will pay for our pensions and our long-term care. How thick do they think we are if they believe we won’t spot the flaws in their population Ponzi scheme?

With impeccable timing, last week also saw the publication of the latest issue of Population Matters Magazine, a periodical put out by the pressure group Population Matters. It certainly does matter, especially on the frontline of the battle against growth, here in Wessex. Norman Pasley writes of his own experience in Hampshire:

“Last year I remember a flurry of letters in the Hampshire Chronicle – mostly generated by members of the Winchester Population Matters local group – about the population pressure on Winchester’s primary school places and classrooms, and the controversy about taking cherished green spaces for more housing. 

In April this year, Jonathon Porritt gave a talk to 225 people in Winchester. Also in April I gave a talk to 120 members of U3A in Fareham called, ‘As we journey to 2050, do we need to look after the planet?’ The audience were on-side, the hour went well, and they asked lots of questions. Only 30 people took my hand-out (it seems you can’t inspire everyone!).” 

So concerned folk puzzle over what, if anything, they can do. Elect dozens of Wessex Regionalist MPs and thousands of Wessex Regionalist councillors. Every one of them unafraid to defy Westminster’s anti-Wessex laws because they understand the fundamental illegitimacy of top-down rule. That much ought to be obvious. But all the while the puzzling continues, so does the destruction. It rolls on because totalitarian liberalism insists that the locusts must go where they will. Green Belt is invaded. Villages double and triple in size. Roads slash the countryside. So much beauty. So much history. So much food security in an uncertain future. Lost, for what?

A false promise of prosperity from perpetual motion, fuelled by a system of debt-driven finance that inexorably ratchets up the damage. Blessed are the accountants, for they shall devour the earth.

A different approach isn’t difficult to define. Moving to a steady-state economy, tackling unemployment through shorter working hours, not through ever higher levels of socially useless activity that piles on more stress. Measuring success other than in monetary, GDP terms. Anti-globalisation and defence of the common wealth. A community-benefit State that does not shrink from ruthless punishment of those companies that put profit before people and place. Repudiation or rescheduling of debt wherever it is doing more harm than good. The inspirational books have all been written. Their prescriptions are well-known. Political debate manipulates them where it can and ignores them where it can’t.

Labour in 1997 and the Coalition in 2010 both came to power promising to rein-in the insaner plans for housebuilding that we have witnessed. Prescott promised to replace ‘predict-and-provide’ with ‘plan-monitor-and-manage’ but in no time he was back to ‘think of a number and double it’. Pickles promised localism, but then admitted that the only discretion devolved was how to accommodate growth, not whether to do so. (A case of ‘you pick the beauty spots to destroy, so we don’t have to shoulder the blame’.) We know, of course, that by 20th century standards housebuilding is currently at a rather low level (hurrah!), but the damage it does is cumulative and in the past there was at least an understandable reason: slum clearance and post-Blitz rehousing. Today we do have a choice but are failing to exercise it openly. It is being made for us by those who think they know best. No wonder there is such widespread despair at the failure of the London parties to articulate real local concerns honestly and consistently.

Breaking the pro-growth consensus requires a whole new level of campaigning. We are engaged with the intellectual debate, the ‘metapolitics’ that defines the centre ground. And, being a political party, we are engaged with the more rough-and-tumble world of demonstrations and elections. We need both, to sharpen the weapons of argument and to use them, to stand in the vanguard of a movement for change in Wessex.

Against us are ranged two camps. There are the boneheads who think that an ever-expanding population inhabiting a finite environment is an opportunity for innovation (if they’re LibDems), for profit (if they’re Tories) and for repression (if they’re Labourites), not a problem that an ecologically aware and freedom-loving society ought to confront before it reaches catastrophic proportions. And then there are the airheads who won’t even discuss the issue because it’s too difficult for them to cope with. The mentally cauterised who imagine that there has to be some racist sub-text behind population concerns (so how DO you raise them?) or that to complain about the loss of all that we value is only subjective after all, while their own selection of values has to be objective truth because they learnt it in first year sociology.

Simon Ross, writing in Population Matters Magazine, put it thus:

“Developmental and environmental groups, particularly, seem determined to ignore the ‘elephant in the room’… The Campaign to Protect Rural England’s charter to ‘save our countryside’ from development carefully avoids addressing England’s high population density and population growth. Such groups are one focus for our lobbying but we may have to wait some time for a change of heart.” 

It’s a nuanced assessment, but it ignores the gaping chasm of reality. Time is something we just don’t have.

A Broken Constitution

We’re SO all in it together. Professor Sir Peter Hall of University College London, an expert on regional economic policy, had this to say about the figures in George Osborne’s Comprehensive Spending Review:

“Even on capital spending, which Osborne claims to be boosting – actually only after election year 2015, but let that pass – two-thirds of planned spending on regional transport infrastructure is going to London, a staggering 86% to London and the South East, against 6% to the North and just 0.4% to the South West. The same discrepancies appear when spending is measured per head of population: Londoners get more spending per head than people in all other regions combined.”

There’s a lot of anger this week about MPs getting a 9% pay rise. Now, there’s an argument that MPs are indeed underpaid compared to what the commercial sector offers and that better paid MPs would have less of an urge to see what they can get away with on expenses. But the least we should expect in return is results. How can the majority of us believe that our MPs are guarding well our interests when they allow Osborne and his chums to grab all the goodies for London?

Three reasons are claimed. One is that London and its hinterland jolly well need the money. That’s where the growth is happening. And that’s where it will go on happening if London continues to gorge itself on taxes raised from all other parts of the UK. If London’s infrastructure is groaning under the weight of its own prosperity, it’s about time it lost some fat. Centralisation produces ‘apoplexy at the centre and paralysis at the extremities’ and that's never going to be healthy.

Then there’s the old ‘world city’ argument. There are places that count in the global economy and places that just don’t. We should be proud to be London’s serfs and not someone else’s. Why? What benefit do WE gain from watching our taxes bail out incompetent toffs? London’s clout just forces up the cost of housing and farmland in Wessex and destroys both our environment and our communities.

So is there a third reason why the legislature is failing to do what the constitutional theorists claim is its job, of holding the executive to account? It would seem so. MPs from Wessex and other disadvantaged regions could deny the Coalition its majority if they acted together against the robber barons of London. All that would be necessary for that to happen is for MPs to put their party – and their lust for ministerial office – in second place behind the interests of those who elected them. Us. That will happen only when we have Wessex Regionalists representing Wessex at Westminster and not the cardboard cutouts from the London parties we put up with today. UKIP? EngDems? Two parties for whom England is just London’s back yard, so expect nothing different from them.

Remember those figures. London and the ‘South East’: 86%. ‘South West’: 0.4%. Because the ‘South West’ doesn’t have such things as problems with transport, does it? So remember. You get what you vote for. Vote for a London party and you get London put first.

The Flag of the Future

Eric Pickles is a Tory, and a member of the Coalition Government, and so one would think no friend of Wessex.  Yet this weekend, his department flew the Wyvern outside its head office, Eland House in London, to mark St Ealdhelm's Day, the 25th of May.  View the photographic proof.

Pickles' politics apart, he has done good work for all who value our traditional shire and regional identities.  Having begun by flying county flags outside his office, the Communities Secretary has now stepped up a gear by offering regions the chance to have their flags flown too.

And so the flag of Wessex flew at the heart of centralised government, a bright flame of hope for all who wish to see that system consigned to history.  We welcome all cultural initiatives that help to put Wessex on the map, but that Wessex, for us, is not the dead stuff of history.  The best days of Wessex are yet to come, when the Wyvern flies above the first Witan of a free folk to gather in nigh on a thousand years, with a thousand years of misrule to correct.  What then will be its priorities?

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