Light Relief

Any fool can do irony.  It takes an Eton education to do irony on the grand scale and get away with it.

David Cameron’s regime announced with glee today that a multi-billion pound nuclear hazard, turning out radioactive waste that no-one knows how to manage sustainably, is to be built on the north coast of Wessex (on the estuary where the great ‘tsunami’ occurred in 1607).  It’s ‘clean’ energy, apparently.  It will generate 7% of UK electricity (the same % as is lost in transmission and distribution).  And it will all be done, risk-free, by private enterprise.

Right.  By companies owned by the French and Chinese governments, to be a little more accurate.  (Just how much kowtowing was there in Beijing recently?)  Underwritten by UK taxpayers, and subsidised by UK consumers to the tune of double the current wholesale price for electricity?  If it’s a good deal it’s only because prices will have more than doubled by the time the electricity starts to flow.  Altogether, it’s a brush with future reality we don’t often experience in such frank terms.  Politicians would much rather be making empty promises to hold energy prices down.

It wouldn’t be possible for our own public sector to do it for less?  It might well be, if we had one, and past experience shows that the region is an excellent geographical scale at which to organise such things as power supply.  (Wessex, for example, which once had its own Wessex Electricity Company, has a much more coherent independent power grid than Wales.)  Public ownership is also ridiculously popular.  With everyone but the London parties.

Why did it happen?  Why did politicians decide to evade responsibility for any industrial decision (even those of strategic importance) by selling it all off cheap? 

Anyone who remembers the 1970s will know how mired the politicians became in labour relations, having to have a view on exactly how much a miner or a railwayman was worth in weekly wages.  But they were at least accountable for such judgements.  Now, when stratospheric salaries are set by scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours remuneration committees in the City, no-one else has any redress.  The managerialist network of interdependence is how the system really operates, skimming off wealth from employees and shareholders alike.

In 1988 the Chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board, responsible for a successful nationalised industry the size of a small multi-national corporation, was paid twice as much as the Prime Minister.  In 2009, the highest paid director at EDF was paid £1 million, about seven times David Cameron’s salary, currently £142,500.  The system we live under, totalitarian liberalism, judges money to be above morality.  It will take politics, not preaching, to alter that.

The gap between directors’ pay and the PM’s pay has grown as the latter’s authority has shrunk.  It’s self-inflicted shrinkage.  And it produces the most pathetic consequences.  Endless complaining by politicians that voters don’t trust them, that turnout is falling, that folk are losing faith in politics.  What do you expect if for 30 years you stand inside the system and tell everyone beyond that it’s their enemy and that for their own good you plan to dismantle it and expect to be rewarded for doing so at the polls?  And don’t tell them that your promises will become increasingly meaningless in proportion to the extent to which you have destroyed the means of redeeming them?

One thing we’ve not had over the past 30 years is a consistent long-term energy policy.  Instead we’ve had a series of desperate short-term measures.  The politically motivated destruction of the deep coal industry, necessitating the sterilisation of tens of millions of tons of workable reserves.  The ‘dash for gas’.  Lavish subsidies for renewable technologies that haven’t been matched by investments in energy storage and smart grid technologies to store and manage the power generated.  At least not on the scale that would win over sceptics who rightly want to know what happens when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.  A foot-dragging attitude to the enormous potential of wave and tidal power.  And, as Jonathon Porritt is forever reminding us, we need, above all, to push the energy conservation button and keep on pushing.

(We oppose a Severn barrage, which would create as many problems as it solves, but would like to see far more advanced research into tidal lagoons.  Currently, renewables are not cost-effective but will become increasingly so as oil declines.  We all know this, so even if we aren’t going to start harnessing tidal power for decades yet, we CAN commit now to doing so and thus provide certainty for all those affected.  Continuity of nuclear expertise has been lost.  Continuity of renewables expertise should not.  We should be training now the generation of engineers who will devote their working lives to such projects.)

How would a self-governing Wessex set about doing things differently?  We could start by having an energy ministry that also has oversight responsibility for housing and transport, two of the biggest users of energy.  We need an end to the current nonsense whereby the Department for Transport sees its job as getting folk and things from A to B as quickly and cheaply as possible, when its real job should be to eliminate the need for that travel.  (Apparently, HS2 is needed because, in a competitive economy, businessfolk can’t make rational decisions unless they’re looking the other crook in the eye.)  We all have to think through the implications of the fact that the current purchase price of a new house will be less than its lifetime running costs.  Higher house prices as a result of sustainable design and construction can be a good thing if they mean lower energy bills.  Housing finance needs to be restructured to take more account of this.

We need to use regional networks – the electricity and gas grids, combined heat and power, the railways, telecommunications, etc. – as the framework for a smart, low-energy society.  Networks are ‘Level 1’ in this plan and they need action at the regional level to integrate them much better than at present.  Let’s end 70 years of talking about integrated public transport and actually do it.  Let’s have real, underground metro systems in cities like Bristol, instead of make-believe ones that are just a fancy name for bus lanes.  Let’s have a local railway electrification programme that doesn’t leave us as the laughing stock of Europe.  Let’s get everyone, everywhere, onto superfast broadband, saving the cost of unnecessary travel in the first place, and enabling smarter two-way domestic energy management as a side effect.  Unbelievably, the London regime is still spending money on building ROADS in Wessex.  Who in the future is going to be using them?

‘Level 2’ are the places the networks link.  We need to think about retro-fitting energy conservation measures into buildings and laying down footpaths and cycleways.  Not along disused railway lines that will need to be used again but maybe following similar routes that link local destinations.  It will be a lot easier to think about how we retro-fit these things once we’re no longer wasting our time wondering where we’ll put the millions of new homes needed for London overspill.  Once effective devolution to Wessex and other regions forces London to solve its own problems, Londoners will have to think twice before causing them.  Denying them the automatic right to help themselves to our land, transport, energy and water resources is as much for their long-term benefit as it is for ours.

‘Level 3’ is perhaps the key to success and also the most difficult to organise.  Level 3 is all those activities that go on within the regional and local networks that we as a society have created.  Activities that need to be re-thought in a low-energy direction, even by politicians.  Should we, for example, be funding ‘free schools’ or other educational experiments that involve children being driven in opposite directions across our towns and cities instead of attending an inclusive local school of assured quality within walking distance?  We already have as party policy the radical proposition that all publicly-funded schools must be community schools, paid for out of local taxes and accountable only to the community, with Michael Gove’s interfering London-based department abolished.

All of these things require joined-up thinking, something completely incompatible with private ownership of the process.  We want a self-governing Wessex for many reasons.  We want to be free of the strangling red tape of a London regime whose patronising attitude to local initiative would be bad enough even without imposed policies whose content is irrelevant to our needs.  But we also want to use the freedom we win to build something worthwhile for the future.  A region whose physical and social infrastructure is resilient to the global changes now inescapable over the course of this century.  Our society may never again have as much energy at its disposal as it does today.  We can use it to create a sustainable future.  Or we can allow the London regime to go on wasting it.

Some will breathe a sigh of relief that the deal on Hinkley C has been done.  The lights won’t go out.  Not yet.  But the fact remains, as energy prices continue to climb several times faster than incomes, that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Stampede at the Sales

MK Leader Dick Cole blogged this week about the sell-off of Royal Mail, which has now taken place despite the opposition of two-thirds of the public.  (Unsurprisingly, the strongest support for the sale came from an urban environment, London, but even there it was little more than a quarter of those polled.)

He pointed out not only the massive under-valuing of the company’s shares but also that large slices were snapped up by sovereign wealth funds, from the likes of Kuwait, Norway, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

Where is OUR sovereign wealth fund in all of this?  Why is it that we don’t have one?  (We certainly had the oil, some of it in Wessex.)  Why is it a cause for celebration when vital national, regional and local assets are bought cheaply by foreign governments?  And a cause for great anxiety amongst politicians of all the London parties if anything is left still owned by us?  Whose government are they exactly?  Not the one that we, or the majority of the public, would like to see in power.

Taken For A Ride

Since 2000, London has had to contend not only with the pomp of its ancient mayoralty within the Square Mile but with the brashness of its new one within the broader mass of Greater London.  Lord Mayor and Antimayor, like Pope and Antipope in the Middle Ages.  Henley’s former MP, Boris Johnson, is the current Antimayor, never out of the news for long.  This week he offered the Chancellor a bold suggestion: provide tax relief for commuter fares.

The UK has a very strange economic geography, with wealth massively concentrated in the south-east corner.  Market forces have little to do with this, since public spending is massively skewed towards supporting this agglomeration.  In the 1990s it was worked out that the annual subsidy for London commuter rail services came to more than the entire annual budget of the Welsh Development Agency.  No-one seemed concerned.  Apologists for the City like to argue that London pays in far more than it draws out but such arguments routinely ignore the unapportioned (and largely unnecessary) cost of running central government itself, which is of course based in London.

Few folk seem willing to believe that the figures really are unfair (or unfair enough to stir them to action), even though they are entirely real.  The problem stems from the fact that it is not just political power that is centralised.  Where the power is, there too is the wealth.  So we have the economic centralisation already mentioned.  And where the power and wealth are, so too is the talent.  We have massive cultural centralisation in all departments, from the arts to museums to newspapers.

The media are mainly centred in London or dependent on decisions, proprietorial and editorial, taken in London (or from a global ‘big city’ perspective that echoes the same concerns).  These decisions are not shaped by journalists personally disinterested in London’s prosperity.  So a sophisticated language of doublethink has grown up, whereby public spending in ‘the provinces’ is a waste of money, propping up dead regions in defiance of natural economic law.  But public spending in London and the south-east is a vital national ‘investment’ in success, even where the project cannot operate to normal commercial standards and therefore becomes a burden to taxpayers throughout the UK.

BoJo’s cheeky demand that we all chip in towards transport costs for his city’s workforce is more of the same.  If accepted, it would mean hard-pressed house-hunters in much of eastern Wessex seeing house prices rise still further beyond their reach as the market adjusts to the newly enhanced spending power of long-distance commuters.  Who in turn will therefore be able to commute over even longer distances instead of adjusting their working lives to the fact that oil is on the way out.

Johnson can say these things and be listened to because as Antimayor he has been given a platform that few others can share.  Perhaps the only other politician outside Westminster whose words matter in the same way is Alex Salmond.  Johnson speaks for a city.  Salmond speaks for a nation.  Who, besides us, will speak for the downtrodden residents of the region of Wessex?  Not the dozens of local authority leaders, individually meaningless.  Yet Wessex has as big a population as London, or as big as Scotland and Wales combined.  If Wessex folk would be heard, then Wessex folk must likewise learn how to all shout at once.

Growing Into What?

Labour announced last month that it will return to its bad old ways with a vengeance. Towns and cities will be given ‘the right to grow’, that is, the right to build over adjoining land. Neighbouring areas that resist will simply be stamped upon.

It appears that Ed Miliband really is thick enough not to realise that the last time ‘the right to grow’ was out and about it was known as Lebensraum. There’s a lot more to that than Godwin’s Law: it’s an entirely serious point. Miliband, like all big nation-state politicians, cannot grasp the vital analogy between national sovereignty and local autonomy.

Invade a country uninvited, with tanks, etc. (because you have an expanding population and the power to dismiss as worthless what others treasure) and that’s a crime. Invade the countryside uninvited, with bulldozers, etc. (for exactly the same reason) and that’s trumpeted as a progressive social policy. In the world which WR strives to create, it’s still a crime. The policy is that of a bully, dressing up a love of force in pretend social conscience, and with an environmental conscience approaching zero.

Oh, but we have a housing crisis! We do not. We have a population crisis, thanks to Labour. And whom does Labour punish? The reckless masses of the burgeoning towns and cities? No. It punishes the innocent. The rural areas that just want to be left in peace. To grow food for THEM.

Labour really doesn’t do agriculture. Even more than the market fundamentalist wings of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, Labour is blind to the fact that ‘growth’ has to displace something that is already there and which has a value in its own right (even before Peak Oil bites). The ‘growth’ that all the London parties crave is not taking place into a vacuum. It isn’t just a load of worthless scenery disappearing beneath those bulldozers. Growth is taking place into a resource – our farmland – that represents our future.

That resource has a value, or at least a price, but how it is valued by policy-makers drastically under-estimates its worth.

Consider the ‘blue finger’. It’s a strip of high-grade farmland on the edge of Bristol, so called because, as Grade 1 land, it is coloured dark blue on Agricultural Land Classification maps. It has a long history of market gardening to meet Bristol’s food needs. There is a local group, the Blue Finger Alliance, devoted to its protection.

On its website is an article on the true value of land, which exposes the false accounting used when deciding to take land out of food production and use it for something else, like housing or road building.

The benefits of a development, say a road, are measured over its expected lifetime, say 60 years. But the value of the food production lost over that time is ignored. Only the immediate compensation value of the farmland is measured. The cost of a scheme is what it takes to build; the benefits are calculated on a far more generous basis, so the result can never be fair to objectors.

Over the course of the 20th century, politicians have had to make ever more complex decisions about the use of resources, and technicians have therefore come up with ever more complex systems for measuring costs and benefits. But do they – can they? – get it completely right? Accountancy and economic forecasting are hugely political areas, where a little fiddling with the figures can turn a dead duck into the panacea for all our problems. Think HS2. At times it really has been about dead ducks, or at least dead geese. In the 1960s the choice of where to put a third London airport involved trying to assign a price to the wildfowl of the Thames estuary.

So: we try to measure the unmeasurable and yet we ignore what can be measured. Advantages are exaggerated and monetised, while dis-benefits are minimised or ignored and not monetised. Tiny time savings by individual travellers – minutes or even seconds – are aggregated up to persuade us that the result will be an economic boom. The result of all this false accounting is massive spending on the wrong kind of infrastructure and other development. Not the kind that will be needed in a regionalised future but the kind that results from projecting unsustainable trends into infinity. It’s high time for a new politics that values other values than ‘value’.

When we point out the bare facts, they are routinely dismissed. Weren’t the existing cities green fields once? Yes, of course they were, but adding more damage won’t make a better world. We’ve long passed the point where we can go on accommodating urban growth and still have enough land to be self-sufficient in food. The right of the cities to grow equals the duty of the countryside to shrink and always, always, to retreat, and that cannot be in anyone’s long-term interest.

No Federal Finale

Officially, the Coalition doesn’t do regions. Much play is made of the apparent deconstruction of the institutional legacy heaped up by successive governments. Yet too much remains in place for the spin to be taken seriously. The regions still exist for statistical purposes and for European elections and are still used by numerous organisations, both inside government (such as English Heritage) and outside (such as the National Trust).

We have even witnessed the creation of new regional institutions, as when on the 1st February this year the two ambulance trusts in ‘The South West’ merged under the name of – you’ve guessed it – the South Western Ambulance Service. There remain two ambulance trusts for the two very different arms of the mainland ‘South East’, with the Isle of Wight sensibly retaining its independence. How long these latter arrangements will last is open to question. Elsewhere, the amalgamations have already delivered pure, unamended Prescottism.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to realise that Lord Prescott may have good grounds to smile at the persistence of the regional tier in English administration. However much English nationalists may rant to the contrary, regions are needed if a country the size of England is to be governed effectively and efficiently. They’ve been around in one form or another for thousands of years. The Romans had them. And the Saxons. And everyone since who has tried to manage without a regional policy has either relented, or sat back and let its absence ruin huge swaths of the country as power, wealth and talent gravitate to the bloated centre of government in one small corner. Those who inhabit the peripheries of England are to be congratulated (or is it pitied?) for their patience. Less craven folk would have run up the flag of separatism long ago.

How must this be viewed abroad? Probably with some bemusement. ‘We’re all English, so, obviously, all decisions of more than local importance must be taken in London’. That’s a fair summary of English nationalism. Imagine how contested the equivalent statements would be in France, Italy, Germany or Spain. And how upset the Eng nats would be at the idea that ‘we’re all European, so, obviously, all decisions of more than local importance must be taken in Brussels’. So what still holds it all together, this Norman-derived view of a one-size-fits-all England?

Fear of more cost? Yes. But is that rational? Regions already exist, for sound, practical reasons. (They just don't have sound, practical boundaries.) The only additional cost is democracy and that can be offset by reducing the number of MPs at Westminster. How do you measure in advance the savings that would flow from better co-ordination of services regionally and better scrutiny of regional budgets? The elimination of waste and duplication? Does England need nine regions? We could probably manage very well with five. The reason we have more has a lot to do with Whitehall divide-and-rule, with not wanting powerful challengers in ‘the provinces’. All these things would be exposed if we could only have the debate that is needed, unconstrained by politicians from the London regime setting parameters we aren’t allowed to question. Exposed too would be the cost of the status quo. We shall be paying £73 billion (or more) to build HS2, the rail route ‘needed’ (in the face of all commercial evidence to the contrary) to maintain London’s grip on the northern peripheries.

Fear of less power? Yes. But is that rational? English nationalists online frequently pop up in discussions involving the Celtic countries, never to put a positive case for England but always to belittle their neighbours. ‘You wouldn’t be viable without money from English taxpayers.’ Look into it and you’ll find that it’s England that’s being subsidised, not the other way round. Those who believe, despite the evidence, that England subsidises the other parts of the UK and that that’s a bad thing should, far from criticising the Celtic nationalist parties, surely join them and work to put a stop to it. It’s an odd sort of argument that defines Englishness mostly in terms of ability to influence what happens in other parts of the UK. The white man’s burden and all that. But it’s very revealing of the true nature of English nationalism as British nationalism’s last stand, still clinging to Greater England. While resisting all bids for territorial reform within because they concern issues and areas that don’t ‘matter’. London is heavily subsidised by the rest of England and it has an elected assembly too. That’s fine, because we’re all English. Let’s whine about the Barnett formula instead.

Fear of less sovereignty? Yes. But is that rational? The case for a regionalised England would be the same even if the continent did not exist. The fact that our neighbours over there are regionalised should at least cause us to ask if we’re not missing something important. The way in which Europe and the regions have become tangled in the popular imagination is shocking. The politicians responsible for spreading misinformation should be ashamed of themselves. The fact that they don’t care about the truth tells us all we need to know. Regionalism has a long history in England, among folk who are not by any stretch of the imagination anti-English.  And if regions round the edges do start talking to their foreign neighbours, what business is that of London's?  Why should the abused peripheries not trust foreigners more than they trust the callous representatives of the London regime?

Cost, power and sovereignty are three significant cards. How does an establishment under attack play them to best effect? By proposing a federal Britain of four states: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. (Cornwall is missing, obviously, but academics and politicians alike who ponder constitutional questions are steeped in 19th and 20th century history; they’ve yet to catch up with the 21st.) Federalism can be argued for on the basis that only one more parliament is needed, though it would be interesting to see whether that’s cheaper than a set of regional ones, once travelling costs are compared. It can also be argued for on the basis that power remains largely centralised and that it’s a different set-up to the one that Johnny Foreigner has, so a very British way of doing things. There are even Commonwealth parallels, in Australia, Canada and Malaysia, all federal constitutional monarchies.

Expect to see the federal solution pushed hard in the run-up to Scotland’s referendum on independence. The UK establishment are desperate to play it cool. The idea that they might lose the referendum isn’t one they want to talk about. No doubt the civil service has a plan. Delaying tactics. Negotiations over the split of assets and liabilities. Currency. Sovereign bases. A new UK-wide mandate to halt change. Anything just to make it go away. And if they win the referendum – as polls still suggest they will – quell the Scots just like after 1979. How? Why not try locking everyone into a federal constitution?

Try it and see. It might at least shut them all up for a while. Buy some time. The Welsh would have to accept more powers than they’re ready for but so what? It might have to mean a written constitution, which would be dangerous for the old order, but it’s possible it might not come to that. Some fudge involving the Supreme Court as arbiter might work…

It’s doomed. Folk from all parts of the UK, but especially from England, imagine that a federal solution is an easy one. It isn’t. There are no examples of stable democratic federations in which one state accounts for over four-fifths of the total population. Prussia and Russia were able to dominate Imperial Germany and the Soviet Union respectively because neither federation was truly democratic. It was possible therefore for the Prussian and Russian governments to be enmeshed with the federal governments to the point where any distinction became merely formal. Prussia’s experiment with a democracy all of its own, under the Weimar Republic, was abruptly terminated in 1932. The federal government cynically suspended the regional government and installed its own commissioners, setting precedents that the Nazis were then to exploit over the following two years.

Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia are further examples of federations that didn’t work out, because one ethnic group was usually in charge. Within the common law tradition, we remember the balanced colonial federations that held together (Australia, Canada or Malaysia), not the unbalanced ones that fell apart (the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland or the West Indies Federation).

Federalists place great faith in the constitutional division of functions (along with an apportionment of revenues to fund them). So: this area is British (defence, foreign affairs); this area is English (health, education). Simple, in theory. But in practice, dividing lines are hard to draw, even with the aid of a constitutional court, because the areas of responsibility tend to flow into one another. What enables lines to be drawn, in most federations, is the difference in scale between state and federation. Each recognises the limits of what is practical, of what is too big for the one to handle and too detailed for the other. But where state and federation are evenly matched, continuous dispute over competences is inevitable. Add in the possibility that they could be under different political control and the fuse is lit. Add in the fact that in the EU context a British government would be responsible for negotiations over matters affecting English competences and the gunpowder is ready to explode.

A four-state federal solution will not work. A federal solution with England partitioned into regions might have been popular with theorists a generation ago. England didn’t exist in those days, as something politically distinguishable from Britain. Now it does. Celtic nationalism has created it. (It never had any reason to stir itself.) Since it won’t go back in the bottle, the challenge is to accommodate it. Dissolution of the UK may be one way to achieve a better relationship between the five nations but since not all are ready to demand their independence that remains a painful option.

By itself, separatism-all-round does not answer the question of what sort of England works best for those who live here. It transforms a debate that has long been largely between London and the peripheral nations into one solely between London and the peripheral regions. English nationalists appear to assume that once borders are in place with Cardiff and Edinburgh, England will settle down to a new Golden Age of national unity. It’s at least equally likely to fuel the fires of discontent in Bristol and Newcastle, with envious glances across those borders. Envious because Wessex and Northumbria are at least as capable as their Celtic neighbours of managing their own affairs. An England that wants stability will be an England wise enough to devolve most questions of less than national importance to a new breed of regional parliaments. And that, in practice, can mean almost everything.

Federalism works where everyone wants the same degree of autonomy. It comes under strain where some have greater aspirations than others and falls apart where the range of aspirations becomes too great to accommodate within a single framework. Often, that’s down to geography. Remote islands, for example, are clearly capable of exercising wider powers simply because what they do doesn’t impinge much on others. Peninsulas – like Cornwall and Scotland – are almost in the same position.  England forms a more compact block, though still a huge one, where opportunities for federalism or something like it have yet to be fully explored.  It is one nation, in theory.  But it's also a nation whose geography has moulded long regional histories and deep-rooted cultural differences. The one-size-fits-all crowd have yet to recognise the damage done to real English lives by ignoring this.

Different laws, languages and administrative frameworks are no obstacles to a political union within the same commonwealth, any more than different religions, classes or individual outlooks. The only means to unite them is precisely to respect them. So wrote Yann Fouéré, in L’Europe aux Cents Drapeaux. Federalists have their work cut out if they think they can manage that in the Disunited Kingdom.  They'd be far better off looking beyond it.

Thin Red Line In The Sand

In our massively over-centralised world, subsidiarity mainly means moving power back towards the individual and to the most local communities wherever possible.  But not every time.  It’s also about co-operation in place of competition.  It’s always about doing things at the right level, the smallest level that works.  The level at which global security works is global.

There are two kinds of rogue state.  There are those that do terrible things.  And there are those who go after them as vigilantes, impatient with international law and due process.  Those for whom it is better to do something than nothing, even if the very best outcome they can achieve is not to make matters worse.  More often than not we have seen how military action without a clear political strategy does anything but that.

Parliament’s rejection yesterday of military action in Syria will not prevent military action taking place.  But it does end the assumption that wherever there is a fight to be had Britain will be there, wearing the deputy sheriff’s badge.  Is it such a disaster for Britain if this time the US takes France along instead to share the burden of being le gendarme du monde?  France is the former colonial power in Syria, as Britain was in Iraq (and had made a few bold attempts to be in Afghanistan).  While the mandate may end, the colonists never mentally go home.

If yesterday’s vote marks the turning point in foreign policy that some are claiming it to be, what next for the British lion?

First of all, it really is time for a clean-up of government policy towards the arms trade.  The David Cameron who today is licking his political wounds is the same David Cameron who has hawked military hardware all round the Middle East as an unpaid commercial traveller for the death industry.  Do British companies not make anything else the Arabs might like to buy?  Medical equipment perhaps?

Second, we need to appreciate that projecting British power in the world comes at a cost.  Successive governments have met that cost by selling off the family silver.  The result is a growing mismatch between the imperial-era rhetoric of being able to influence events abroad and the commercial reality of having lost the ability to influence them at home.  Reading the roll-call of vital industries and assets that are now foreign-owned ought to bring into question just how British the hollowed-out British national interest now is.

Third, we really must press for an answer to the question of what the possession of nuclear weapons is supposed to achieve.  Are they a cost-effective addition to our security or just a status symbol?  Is there any realistic prospect of them being any more useful and relevant in the next 20 years than they have been in the past 20?  Do the Swedes or the Swiss lose sleep over not having any?

Finally, can we perhaps remember what the United Nations is for?  According to its charter, members reject the use of armed force, save in the common interest, and agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council.  Just because the Security Council doesn’t always agree with you doesn’t prove that the Security Council is wrong.  Its greatest flaw is of course the position of the five permanent members, who owe their seats – with the right of veto – to the fact that 68 years ago they won the Second World War.  It’s an untenable position, one that kicks dirt in the face of any who truly believe in the sovereign equality of all nations, the UN’s very first founding principle.

How to remake the UN for the 21^st century?  One course of action – cutting the Gordian knot – would be to dissolve it and start again with a new constitution that rogue states can veto only by not re-joining.  Another would be for the UK to do the decent thing, abandon its permanent seat and the veto and return the seat to the pool for others to have their chance.

It’s not an entirely fanciful scenario.  If Scotland becomes an independent state, what happens to the UK seat?  Russia was quick to claim the Soviet Union’s place and England would no doubt attempt to claim the United Kingdom’s.  Whether it would get away with that is anyone’s guess.  With the nuclear subs based firmly on Scottish territory, and no immediate prospect of being able to relocate them, expect some fine diplomacy, to say the least.

Ins & Outs

So, what is the Conservative Party’s settled policy on Europe?  Not one to be written without a regular check over the shoulder in the direction of Monsieur Farage.  Expect many more gimmicks like the one we saw recently: in effect taking scarecrows on wheels around the inner cities, urging illegal immigrants to get the message and get packing.  It’s not the effectiveness of the policy that matters, it’s the effectiveness of the politics.

Another gimmick is the ongoing, rolling consultation whose sub-text is the taking-back of selected powers from Brussels.  The whole thing stinks of hypocrisy from a government that believes subsidiarity is too good for the likes of us.  Less power for Eurocrats, more power for Ukocrats.  Great.  Super.  Less power for them in London, more power for us in our communities?  Frightfully sorry, but, no.

We’ve explained before that we are ‘Euro-wary’ rather than pro or anti in principle.  The EU is a force for good so long as it promotes genuine subsidiarity, drawing the poison from the Norman dogma that the Crown-in-Parliament can do no wrong.  It is not a force for good when it builds its own managerialist dogmas to replace it.  That genuine subsidiarity has any possibility of co-existing in the long run with a drive for ‘ever closer union’.  That the acquis communautaire cannot be reduced.  And that the EU is committed to deepening the competitive market economy rather than nurturing a co-operative, democratic one (see the Lisbon Treaty, Article 119, which applies regardless of national, regional or local choices at the ballot box).  Much of the emerging EU constitution seems designed more to frustrate reasoned debate than to facilitate it.

The capture of an idealistic project by bureaucratic and business interests is always tragic but it won’t be reversed by a refusal to engage.  UKIP’s faults aren’t just that it lives permanently in the 1950s; they are also that it believes the UK can be improved but that, from the UK’s perspective at least, the EU cannot.  It’s not interested in finding the ardent allies who most certainly do exist.  Regionalists, from many countries, have argued for fundamental reforms that would change not only how the EU works but how the UK works, if the UK continues to exist at all.  The system is broke.  All of it.  And so it needs to change radically at EVERY level.  There can be no no-go areas of policy, nor, since we all have to get on with our neighbours, can one identity (such as English, British or European) exclusively dominate the rest.  New structures must ensure that we can co-operate with each other, without feeling put upon.  Existing structures struggle to achieve the first; they fail spectacularly to deliver the second.  No wonder folk are angry.

In the 1975 Common Market referendum, only two areas of the UK voted ‘No’.  They were Shetland and the Western Isles.  Support in Scotland generally was lower than in Wales, which was lower than in England.  (Every area in Wessex, except Avon, was then more pro-Europe than the England average.)  It might seem that the greater the distance from the heart of Europe, the cooler the reception.  Norway voted to stay out, twice (1972 and 1994).  Greenland voted to leave (1982).

Yet in 2013 it was on his trip to Edinburgh that Farage was given the roughest ride.  UKIP has become the protest party of choice primarily for the English electorate.  North of the border, it isn’t viewed as a liberating force but as the bearer of the old shackles.  The combined votes for the main avowedly Eurosceptic parties – UKIP and the BNP – in the 2009 European elections exceeded 23% in every English area but London.  Wales was not far behind but Scotland didn’t even make 8%.

Scotland, Wales and Cornwall do well out of EU funding, but so do many of the old industrial areas of England.  There is an understandable unease that, were the funding to vanish, there is no guarantee that the UK would either replace it or devolve the powers required to make it unnecessary.  Yet funding arrangements alone do not explain England’s attitude: UKIP came second in the Barnsley Central by-election in 2011, right in the heart of EU-assisted South Yorkshire.

So why the popularity in England?  Perhaps because UKIP appeals to nostalgic images and national stereotypes that have nothing to do with the way the world actually is in 2013.  But there are three themes it does especially well.  One is that our national wealth is solely or largely wrapped up in the City of London and its post-imperial connections and these must not be challenged (hence the £-sign logo).  Another is the anti-immigrant theme (all those Bulgarians and Romanians, for whom we quite rightly should NOT be building houses).  Though where Farage would put the 2.2 million British ex-pats if they had to leave the other EU countries where they’ve made their homes we just don’t know.  And then there’s the real joker in the pack: that Europe wants to smash England up into regions.

We want to see an England whose regions are thriving politically, economically and culturally.  It can’t happen while all key decisions are being made in London.  Nor can it happen by pretending that a host of often tiny and always cowed local authorities can make the really big choices on education, health or transport, or exercise law-making and tax-varying powers.  Whether a regionalised England would be an England without national institutions – institutions at the all-England level – is however not actually in the gift of Brussels at all.  It depends on decisions made by the government of the UK.  It depends on how the relationship between Britain and England is expressed.  EU membership is wholly irrelevant to the issue, which would continue to exist even if the continent did not.

Let's take a common objection to the absence of an English Parliament.  That England is the only European country without an elected national voice of its own.  It’s not quite true, since England dominates the UK Parliament numerically and so the counter-objection that England doesn’t deserve two parliaments when others only have one each is not entirely unfounded.  It’s also the case that the English Parliament even in mediæval times included representatives from Scotland, Wales and Cornwall.  There is a much reproduced image of Edward I in Parliament flanked by Alexander, King of Scots and Llewelyn, Prince of Wales.  If you go around claiming overlordship of the whole island then centuries later this sort of thing does come back to bite your descendants.  There’s a precedent for a Scottish Parliament that just covers Scotland.  There isn’t a precedent for an English Parliament that just covers England.

So make one?  France has its Parlement.  Germany has its Bundestag.  Italy has its Parlamento.  Spain has its Cortes Generales.  Why not England?  What all these countries also have is regional government.  Yet English centralists, so keen to make international comparisons when demanding an English Parliament, take a strangely different line if regionalism is mentioned.  It’s somehow not quite English enough.  Too foreign.  (Wessex, foreign?)  Or, perhaps, grudgingly, something for an English Parliament to discuss later.  Why later?  If you’re going to change the constitution, why leave the job half-done?  Why set up distinctly English ministries for a whole range of topics that could be dealt with regionally if you then have to dismantle them to bring regional devolution into being?  We don’t work for an English Parliament, because it would not of itself advance our cause.  We don’t take issue with its creation, so long as it has no power whatsoever to override the views of a Wessex Witan on what works best for Wessex.

What is clear is that if England were an EU Member State, the EU could no more be a threat to England than it can today be to any other country, including those that already have regional government.  England, what crimes are committed in thy name!  Full recognition of the rights of the other four home nations is denied out of a misplaced belief that the English national psyche cannot cope with the loss of empire, with the inability to find a leading ‘role’ in the world.  Always the need to find someone to dominate, and someone to fight with.  All so very Norman.  Just like the refusal to devolve power to meaningful regions within England.

We have a ruling establishment that slips easily between being mainly English and being wholly British but cannot bring itself to be European.  (Maybe it’s an Anglican thing, a hangover from the Tudors.)  To its immense disappointment, it has discovered over the past 40 years that Europe is too big to be dominated.  So it now wants to look elsewhere for a victim, while convincing as many folk as it can that the rest of Europe wants to dominate us.  Instead of seeking allies in Europe, we in Wessex are urged to shun those with whom - as one of a number of predominantly rural regions being transformed for the worse by a powerful metropolitan neighbour - we actually have every reason to make common cause.