Valuing Europe

As tens of thousands flock in renewed hope to join the Labour Party, much of the last Shadow Cabinet has walked off in disgust at the thought of actually having to believe in something.  Yes, British politics is about to get much more interesting.  Jeremy Corbyn though is no friend of Wessex.  So long as his party remains implacably opposed to proportional representation it continues to block the road to real reform.  Democracy is still defined as an election that Labour wins.  And there will be no more devolution.  Corbyn’s primary loyalty is to the tribal organisation that is Labour, even though Labour, a 19th century, British nationalist relic, is wholly unsuited to 21st century challenges.

A sign of the times is Corbyn’s suggestion that segregated, women-only train carriages might be re-introduced, to assure the safety and comfort of female passengers.  No-one dares call to account the men who make the female passengers unsafe and uncomfortable.  Europe, nasty old colonial Europe, has lost the will to set moral boundaries against wrong-doers and to challenge any crossing of them; in these besieged circumstances its only other possible response is to retreat from its aspiration of inclusiveness into the formation of physical barriers, safe spaces, gated communities, panic rooms, to roll out the barbed wire along its borders again.  Labour’s next idea for the protection of women will doubtless be compulsory headscarves for them all.

Corbyn’s first act as leader was to attend a rally in support of refugees.  Should that be “refugees”?  Quite possibly.  Some are undoubtedly genuine – at least in intention if not necessarily in definition – while others can be matched to those Bangladeshi and Pakistani passports found flung over hedges in Serbia.  The whole country-shopping world wants to be Syrian now because to be Syrian is the stated path to becoming European.  The Germans this week started unpicking the Schengen Agreement, having belatedly realised that they’ve bitten off far more than they can chew.  Frau Merkel’s Bavarian allies, with their own regional parliament and politics – a kind of German Scotland – are among those now breaking ranks.

Fortunately, Jean-Claude Juncker has a cunning plan.  To set quotas and spread the migrants around.  Easier said than done, because the capacity to take in more people is not uniform.

David Cameron has offered to take 20,000.  If the current patterns of refugee allocation continue, just under half will end up living in the north of England.  That’s because the UK’s failure to achieve balanced regional development means it’s cheaper to house them up there.  Since 2012, when the contract for managing the distribution of asylum-seekers was handed to Serco, the number of asylum-seekers in the north-west has risen by 50% but fallen by 20% in London.  Cameron’s Witney constituency has contained not a single refugee since 2008.  Do as I say, not as I do?

Natalie Bennett, Leader of the Green Party has put in a much higher bid than Cameron’s, for 240,000 refugees, based on 2 million Europe-wide and the UK’s proportion of total EU population (12%).  That’s a city the size of Plymouth or Southampton.  It’s roughly 100,000 families, or at 12 houses to the acre, 8,333 acres of farmland, the equivalent of concreting over 2 or 3 whole parishes.  And this is the Green Party?  It’s just so very easy to sign away the environment of others without asking.  Do those calling for more migrants to be accepted think the cities will take them all?  That there will be no consequences for the fields they can see out of the window, fields already under pressure from London overspill as the pampered capital boils over?  Not even Lancashire is infinite.  Germany has a shrinking population.  Its rate of natural increase – the excess of births over deaths – is negative, at -2.87 per 1,000 population.  The UK’s is positive, at 3.01 per 1,000.  That’s why Cameron’s numbers make some degree of sense and his critics’ make none.

Juncker’s agenda has two parts.  The first deals with quotas, on which EU leaders yesterday agreed to disagree.  The second redefines ‘refugee’ to include not only those fleeing war or persecution but those fleeing poverty too.  Now, it should be clear from their mobile phones and credit cards, not to mention the means to pay the smugglers’ fare, that today’s migrants are not as poor as they used to be.  Developing countries have developed beyond the point where such journeys were simply impossible and into new circumstances where they’re now the epitome of ambition.

Nevertheless, relative poverty continues to drive that ambition and Juncker, in pandering to it, has invited almost the whole world to come to Europe.  In doing so, he may have destroyed the EU itself, because a desire for national suicide is not as widely shared as his policy would suggest.  Opening the doors of the European house and fining those countries that keep the doors to their own rooms closed allows the EU to be portrayed not as defending Europe but as orchestrating its destruction.  In the absence of an alternative Europe, one proud of Europe’s achievements and determined, for the sake of the whole world, to preserve them at all costs, the chief beneficiaries of this stance will be the parties of the nationalist Right, opposed equally to the EU and to regionalism.

Instead of naming and shaming the Gulf states whose actions and inactions contribute most to shaping the crisis, the Brussels-Berlin axis is pointing the finger at EU countries defying a European line that hasn’t actually been fully agreed   It’s become an issue of reputation management, as befits a regime of PR men.  What will the world think of Europe if supranational order cannot be substituted for a diversity of national opinions?  Europe’s reputation must be defended, even as Europe itself is not.  No sacrifice by Europe is too great to secure favourable headlines elsewhere in the world.

It’s alright though, because Europe will be destroyed in the name of ‘common European values’.  The chutzpah is certainly admirable.  If countries have to be fined for failing to adhere to these common values, how common were these values in the first place?  What price respect for subsidiarity and national democracy?  Defining common values is always fraught with difficulty, because if they’re common then they cannot just be imposed.  To define European values is to define their counterpart, un-European values, and we’re then into some very familiar McCarthyite territory.  It’s one reason why we won’t define ‘Wessex values’.  We’ll define Wessex Regionalist values – and we have done – and we’ll advocate them, but what’s our choice won’t be everybody’s. 

If we were to seek out Europe’s values today we might find a fusion of classical and Judaeo-Christian ideas, tested and modified through centuries of conflict: religious and civil wars, the struggle against totalitarianism, the ever-changing challenging of perceptions and prejudices.  The result isn’t fixed by any means and there are threads within European thought that if developed further will take us in very different directions.

So whose ‘common European values’ are we talking about here?  Who are they designed to exclude?  In the event of conflict, do the elites plan to side with the natives against the migrants, or the migrants against the natives?  Every elite needs a thug class to implement its orders, one whose roots in society don’t go too deep.  Will assimilation give way to a forced ‘meeting in the middle’, producing a culturally embarrassed Europe in which fear masquerades as tolerance and guilt as inaction?  Or will the natives wise up to the fact that it’s only they who are being asked to forgo their identity out of politeness to their guests?  It may read like a scene from Michel Houellebecq’s Submission but Saudi Arabia has reportedly offered to fund 200 new mosques across Germany to meet the spiritual needs of migrants.  If these are permanent buildings, ‘migrants’ may be the wrong word and ‘colonists’ the right one.

Those elites certainly have a problem.  Gordon Brown’s attempts to define ‘Britishness’ were a joke.  No real, living culture needs a public debate on what it is and isn’t.  It has better things to do.  ‘What does it mean to be English?’ is another angst-ridden query.  If Englishness is that invisible then it’s probably dead.  Chauvinistic answers won’t fool anyone for long.  To be English is, uniquely, to value freedom above all.  Really?  More than the Scots did in the Declaration of Arbroath?  More than the French in ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’?  More than the Germans in ‘Mit Gott für Freiheit und Vaterland’?  Language barriers often blind us to the essential unity of Western thought.  They also blind us to the fact that there are other world traditions for which liberty has no value, for which liberty, far from being hard-fought-for, is hard-fought-against.

To have no sense of your own values – and of how untypical they really are in the global context – is to assume that everyone is equally nice, no matter what they believe, think or represent.  For the drinker, everyone is welcome to drink; for the person with no culture, or one sunk in a cultural coma, everyone is welcome, with no pressure to fit in.  If you no longer have values, you have no grounds to reject anyone else.  Not even if your society is living at its environmental limits, its quality of life about to tip into the abyss because the safeguards of its culture have been systematically disregarded.

If you stand for nothing, then you fall for everything.  It isn’t the classless society that lies at the end of all differentiation and of every history: only the culture-less society will achieve that.  Common European values are easy enough to define when all they amount to is a vacuum.  And nature, as we used to know, abhors one of those.  Perhaps Europe’s values are best left unspoken, but nonetheless fervently held.

That Sinking Feeling

In the late 1940s, large numbers of people were forced out of the lands where they and their ancestors had lived for generations, since at least the time of the Crusades.  Their ancestral homes were handed over to immigrants from other parts of the world, who brought their own history with them.  The displaced lived in refugee camps in neighbouring territory, where they were made welcome by those who spoke their language and shared their culture.  Eventually, a concrete wall was built to separate them from friends and family left behind.

Despite all this, they never lobbed missiles into Czechoslovakia or blew themselves up on public transport in Gdansk.  These are not the Palestinians.  They’re the Germans, expelled from East and West Prussia, eastern Pomerania, eastern Brandenburg, Silesia and the Sudetenland.  Many of them were resettled in Lower Saxony.  The total number comes to over 12 million people, equal to 16% of Germany’s 1938 population.  When Chancellor Merkel offers sanctuary to 800,000 Syrians, a 1% addition to the population, we can only assume that the Germans still have the means to organise these things better than most.

Has Angela set an example for the rest of Europe to follow?  Or acted irresponsibly, energising a magnet that draws thousands uninvited across the sovereign territories of others who now have to play along?  To be a euro-cynic one only has to see things from a Brussels perspective, that the Syrians can be the first true European citizens, spread around every Member State, a constant reminder of a common European problem with a common European solution.  Too important a transformational prize ever to be allowed to return to their homeland or encouraged to dislodge those destroying it.  On account of a huge range of internal political anxieties, this is one area of policy where EU unanimity is unlikely to be achievable.

Germany has waived the limits on its legal responsibility to Syrians under the Dublin Convention, but what is Europe’s moral responsibility overall?  How many refugees should it take?  The answer could well be far fewer than it is taking.  Europeans played a relatively minor role in causing the refugee crisis.  One view is that it’s all the fault of an inhumane US foreign policy: a bunch of kids with sticks poking the beehive.  In which case, how many Syrian refugees have the Americans taken in?  About 1,500.

Alternatively, it’s attributable to the rise of Salafism in its most militant form, promoted and funded from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.  Have they opened their doors to the refugees?  They have not.  Yet Makkah and Madinah both host gigantic mosques that could be converted into refugee camps for Syrian Christians.  Why not?  The Saudis would, of course, have to completely re-write their law code so that immigrants feel under no pressure to assimilate.  The ban on church-building would have to go for a start.  Do the Saudis have none of the basic human compassion expected to flow so freely from the ever-malleable Europeans?  How many refugees have the Saudis taken?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is nil.  The Saudis aren’t signatories to the UN refugee convention, though there are plenty of Syrians present in the country without being recognised as refugees.  The Saudi relationship with ISIS is complicated, because officially the two sides are sworn enemies, so the Saudis are wary of who they let in.  Not forgetting the pro-Assad fighters in disguise either.  In any case, the Saudis are too busy bombing the Yemenis and guess who sold them the weaponry with which to do that.  The flag over ‘our’ Parliament was lowered to half-mast when the bloodthirsty brother and predecessor of the present king died in January.  ‘Our’ Prime Minister almost immediately dashed off to Riyadh to kiss the hand of the new ruler, just in time for the first beheadings of the new reign.  Defence of the regime is considered a vital British interest.  Right.

Labour’s Yvette Cooper argued this week for a clear distinction at all times between refugees and economic migrants.  In the interests of population stability this surely has to involve something along the lines of ‘one in, one out’, which would mean identifying and deporting all those illegally living and working in the UK, below the radar.  In short, zero tolerance of those to whom Labour turned a blind eye not so long ago, so don’t expect it to become that party’s policy.  Cooper’s words are hollow because no-one believes that the distinction she makes will be respected and enforced.  The legacy of past policies has made the suffering of genuine refugees far worse than it could have been.

Cooper’s other repetitive soundbite is the Kindertransport of 1938 to 1940.  It’s a false and distracting analogy for four reasons.  One is that even had the UK embraced the whole of European Jewry, that was a figure ascertainable and not overwhelming for a country that still had a global empire.  Today, according to the International Organization for Migration, there are at least 50 million irregular migrants in the world, over one-fifth of all international migrants.  If migration to Europe occurs on that sort of scale, then Europe will notice the difference.

The second reason is that the flow of refugees is contaminated with economic migrants.  ‘Contaminated’ is a term used here not for effect but for accuracy, because blurring the truly desperate and those just trying their luck will provoke an ugly outbreak of empathy fatigue.  Libya’s boat people include Gambians, Senegalese, Malians, Ivorians, Nigerians, Ethiopians, Eritreans and Somalis.  Afghans and Pakistanis as well as Syrians were camped out in Budapest.  No doubt people-traffickers tell their customers that Europeans are a pushover.  If the people-traffickers are proved right, the flood will have no end.

The third reason is that refugees coming to Europe through already safe countries are not in danger, and so not entitled to come (not even small boys drowning off Turkey).  Escaping from danger doesn’t open up an unrestricted choice of where to live next that isn’t available to others who play fair.  Arguments that ‘this is about human beings’ aren’t designed to save life but to subvert lawful authority.  Hungary’s Viktor Orbán may be seen as applying the political equivalent of ‘work-to-rule’ but this is about more than being a stickler for the regulations.  The regulations are there for a purpose.  If you don’t like the purpose, change the regulations.  Meanwhile, they are there to be enforced.

The fourth reason is that Jews aren’t in open war against European values.  Whatever one may think of their cultural and economic influence, they aren’t waging violent jihad against Europe, as a rather dangerous number of Mahometans clearly are.  The fact that many migrants are apparently fleeing from this violence doesn’t of itself dispel mistrust.  What are the implications of so many being young men of military age, apparently more interested in coming to Europe than in staying behind to defend their beloved homeland against somewhat harder targets than the Hungarian police?  Do they perhaps, so the argument runs, care less about their homeland than about stamping the will of Allah upon the world?  Chants of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ outside Keleti station certainly aren’t the way to win friends and influence people.  When Orbán tells the world that he doesn’t want to see Europe’s cultural and religious character transformed beyond recognition he knows what can happen in such circumstances.  For over 150 years, almost the entire Carpathian Basin suffered a brutal occupation by the Ottoman Empire before the tide began to turn at the gates of Vienna on 11th September, 1683.  The attitude of ‘Old Europe’ to co-existence with Mahometanism is one based on hope.  The attitude of ‘New Europe’ is one based on experience, optimism being too great a risk to take.

Can Europe be the same with different people in it?  It’s the question posed recently by Christopher Caldwell.  In one sense it’s a misunderstanding, because the people who make up Europe are forever changing as births and deaths occur.  Demographic trends do matter though.  If Europe’s deaths continue to exceed births, as in many countries they currently do, then the future will be formed by substitution, not inheritance.  For the far Right, Europe’s woes are caused by the traitors who let the immigrants in.  On deeper analysis, they’re the result not so much of what immigrants or anyone else has done as of what natives have not done.  ‘They’re taking our jobs!’  (So why aren’t you taking them?)  ‘They’re taking our homes!’  (So why aren’t you taking them?)  ‘They’re replacing our whole population!’  (So why aren’t you replacing it?)  The solution to the demographic winter isn’t a European armed resistance; it’s ‘make love, not war’.

And so the questions continue.  Was it the fault of the Left?  Of feminism, encouraging women to have careers instead of babies?  Of environmentalism, encouraging Europeans to sacrifice themselves for the planet while others multiply like there’s no tomorrow?  Of anarchism, desiring society’s downfall in favour of something a bit more edgy, and potentially much, much worse?  Was it the fault of the Right?  Of consumerism, valuing stuff and experiences over children?  Of individualism, believing that personal choices do not have social, selective, evolutionary consequences for others?  Of economic liberalism, treating humanity as one enormous labour pool that does not come with other, sometimes very illiberal values attached?

In 1973, the French writer Jean Raspail published a controversial apocalyptic novel apparently set in the early 21st century.  Since translated into English as The Camp of the Saints, it records the arrival in the Mediterranean of a vast fleet carrying Third World migrants (hostile or desperate, according to viewpoint), a crisis which finds Europe lacking any concerted idea of how to respond.  The book explores the quandary: What will a liberal society do, or not do, to protect its way of life when confronted with the consequences of its ideals?  Will it allow itself meekly to be infiltrated, overwhelmed and ultimately trampled underfoot because of hyper-liberal trust in the good intentions of others?  In the south of France, an old professor finds his historic home invaded by a hippy, who expounds his hopes that the migrants will trash the place and go on to end European civilisation.  Won’t this mean, asks the professor, that you lose your own identity?  That’s exactly what I want, replies the hippy, before the professor, bored with the conversation and preferring to spend his remaining hours more pleasingly, reaches for a shotgun and kills him.

Europe has plenty of hippies, for whom boundaries do not define home and responsibility, for whom boundaries are no more than the foul scars of history.  Migration is ‘inevitable’, because it’s always happened.  True, it has, but so too has racism.  We have laws to manage migration’s impacts, just as we have hate speech laws and anti-discrimination laws to manage the strife sometimes emerging in response to migration that isn’t welcome.  If the first set of laws are no longer respected, the second set will be the next to go in reaction.  ‘Inevitability’ is a powder keg, more an attempt to frame political debate than a serious objective commentary.

Weston-super-Mare’s derelict lido, once Europe’s largest open-air pool, is currently home to ‘Dismaland’, an exhibition of contemporary art curated by Banksy.  In one of the more overtly political of the themed areas is an image of a butterfly, captioned ‘Migration is Beautiful’.

Is it beautiful to flee for your life, your male relatives beheaded, your female relatives enslaved, your people’s contribution to world culture burnt or blown to dust?  Europe’s jesters perennially miss the point: migration, external or internal, is always a means to an end.  Safety.  Prosperity.  Education.  Retirement.  Re-joining family.  Leaving family, to marry.  The sense of power your followers give you as you ride at the head of a conquering army.  Viewed from the other side there are other ends.  Filling rubbish jobs.  Filling skilled jobs for which we can’t be bothered to train.  Assuaging post-imperial guilt.  Self-loathing.  Getting more interesting sports players, clothes, music and restaurants.  Who is it we really care about?

Folk have indeed moved throughout history, but reasons vary enormously.  To say that you’re for or against migration, regardless of origin and motive, regardless of receiving capacity, regardless of the potential for things to develop badly, is to lump all those reasons together.  That single reason can mean either swamping the boat of your own society or ignoring the genuine plight of those whose own countries have become uninhabitable for them.  So let’s do something really unfashionable.  Let’s not be afraid to draw distinctions, and ensure they’re firmly upheld.  (If we say we’re full, then we do have the right to defend ourselves against those who disagree, otherwise defence has no point.)  Let’s also ask if we can do more as a world to make migration an informed choice, with respect on both sides, and not a terrifying necessity that neither side would wish was happening.

X for Xylas

The WR Council met at Wokingham earlier this month.  A raft of new policies was agreed, about which readers may expect to hear over the coming weeks.  WR President Colin Bex reported on the election campaign in Witney and it was noted that page views on this blog almost reached 3,000 during April, double the number achieved during the Eastleigh by-election and roughly 20 times the figure for the 2010 campaign.  Regrettably, our core website has been down for some time following a catastrophic failure of the platform that hosted it, Zyweb.  A replacement is being sought and in the meantime we can still be contacted via email, wessexinfo@aol.com and at our Facebook page.

Looking ahead, one of the key decisions we took was to endorse Nick Xylas as a WR candidate in next year’s elections to Bristol City Council.  Nick is a freelance writer and publisher who was raised in Patchway and currently lives in the Eastville ward, which he plans to contest on our behalf.  In between, he lived for six years in the USA with his American wife and so can speak authoritatively on the differences between there and here that we would do well to cherish.  His current publishing venture – Parthenia Comics – is a range of comics aimed at adult literacy and ESOL learners.   Previous jobs include 15 years in the civil service and three years in US state government.

Wessex has been one of Nick’s interests since childhood: both the ancient kingdom and what a contemporary revival will look like.  Throughout his adult life, Nick has demonstrated a commitment to public service and social justice.  Half-Greek, half-Wessaxon, Nick is also well-placed to represent the cultural diversity of Bristol’s inner suburbs.  We’ll endeavour to report further on the campaign as it develops.  If you can help with highlighting neglected local issues or in any other way then do get in touch.

Northern Lights?

One of the most intractable problems in British politics is voters’ perception that they should be enjoying a Scandinavian standard of public services while only paying American levels of tax.  No wonder governments get into debt as they struggle to balance the books.

The solution, of course, is to decentralise so that what voters get is a better match for what they’re prepared to fund.  Within Scandinavia itself though, decentralisation has not, so far, been as great a favourite with the major parties as it might.  At the heart of Scandi social democracy is the idea that everyone is equal.  And, therefore, the non sequitur follows that everything must be the same.  As in Jacobin France, all political templates are equal, but some are definitely more equal than others.

Sweden makes an interesting case study.  OECD statistics show that, in 2010, public spending was 34.8% of GDP in the UK and 45.5% in Sweden.  In the UK, locally raised taxes amounted to 1.7% of GDP and nationally raised taxes to 26.2%, while in Sweden the local figure was 16.1% and the national figure 23.7%.  (The balance is accounted for by social security funds like National Insurance.)  The lesson seems to be that if folk know that the money they pay to keep society from falling apart is raised and spent where they can see it being raised and spent then they’ll be more supportive of the idea.  Even in the USA, where public spending was only 24.8% of GDP, the local figure was 3.9%, more than double the figure in the UK.

In Sweden’s case the results of local spending are immediately evident to the visitor in a very well-kept environment.  There's a county-based public transport system (Swedish counties being of regional scale), delivered by private contractors but to the county’s specification and livery.  Besides buses, this can include regional railways, trams and ferries, with timed tickets interchangeable between modes.  Look out for the bus shelters changing to a different design and the buses turning a different colour and you’ll know you’ve crossed the county boundary.  In such small, symbolic ways, local identity is made manifest even in a globalised economy.

Nonetheless, there is something rotten in the state of Sweden.  The long shadow of half-a-century of social democratic rule has left it as perhaps the most totalitarian society in western Europe.  Stories abound of children seized by social services for parents’ minor infractions of the rules of political correctness.  Governments of the Left were still practising eugenics and forced sterilisation in the 1970s; in 1932 the Swedish State Institute of Race Biology at Uppsala was publishing studies of the Sami to proclaim how inferior they were and promote their sterilisation.

The Sami have had a hard time all round.  Centuries of persecution for being different, then patronising policies to ensure that ‘the Lapps will remain Lapps’, depriving them of the technological means to function politically in the modern world.  And at last some limited recognition with the creation in 1993 of Sweden’s Sami Parliament, a consultative body which also has equivalents in Norway and Finland, and then in 2000 official minority status for their language.

The Sami remain as a distinct people because of their relationship to the land and to the nomadic occupations it provides.  At this point, Sweden’s accommodating approach hits the rocks.  Folklore and costumes are fine – accurate or inaccurate – and good for tourism, but natural resources are the common property of all Swedes.  Development policies have introduced roads, railways, hydro-electric schemes and managed forestry that have all played havoc with reindeer herding.  The alternatives of fishing and hunting have been curtailed by the Swedish State’s confiscation of Sami land rights.  Demands that indigenous people provide proof of title to support their claims to State property turn reality on its head: the truth is that indigenous people belong to the land, not the other way round, but either way they’re a unit.

There’s talk of expanding the Sami Parliament’s role to include land management but for radicals it’s not enough to be allowed to manage a heritage they’re not allowed to own.  For some Sami, a Swedish identity – or a Norwegian, Finnish or Russian one – is something to cling to, a second string to the bow.  For others, the battle to preserve the Sami language in the face of past attempts to suppress it remains a painful memory, ‘the Sami sore’, and for those who regard that history as reason enough to mistrust Stockholm nothing less than a separate Sameland will do.

The treatment of the Sami shows how repressive the parties of the Left can be when everything lines up for them.  Unbroken rule for 40 years.  Under a doctrine of national unity – folkhemmet (‘the people’s home’) – that embodied a real enough sense of community but allowed for no differentiation.  And all set in a country that used to be one of the most aggressive on earth.  Sweden’s glory days ended in the early 18th century when the cost of an all-conquering army could no longer be sustained.  In the previous century it dominated the Baltic and northern Germany and even had a colony in North America: New Sweden, today’s Delaware and Pennsylvania.  For all the protests about laid-back Swedes, such a legacy is bound to linger.

Psychologically, there’s probably nowhere else in Europe that provides such an instructive parallel to the UK, as the UK continues its own transition into post-imperial self-justification.  Last at war in 1814, and so never forced fundamentally to modernise its self-image, Sweden also shares with the UK a tendency to refer to the heartland of Europe as ‘the continent’, something from which both consider themselves detached.

The similarity shows too in the absence of a regional dimension to Sweden’s constitution, though as in the UK there have been moves to regionalise, badly, ignoring readily available historical precedents.  Sweden has been attempting to negotiate the merger of its 21 counties into 6 or 9 regions, following the pattern of a similar centralisation implemented in Denmark in 2007.  Since 1999 three Swedish counties have been designated as regions on a trial basis, with additional powers devolved to them.  Since it’s only a trial, they’re assured of nothing.

Nationalists and regionalists should note that bureaucracies under pressure always centralise, even if letting go would produce better outcomes.  (In Denmark, the county councils raised their own taxes; the regions that have replaced them do not, being largely funded centrally.)  It’s a process that can be seen at work in Scotland and Wales at present and in the creation of unitary counties and metro mayors; it’s also a process we need to denounce where it runs unreasonably against the grain of the decentralisation we seek.

Some of Sweden’s counties can be fiercely independent in spirit.  Dalarna is famous for its small, painted wooden horses that have become a national symbol, but that fact only shows how effortlessly Sweden has dealt with local identity – by nationalising it, absorbing it and disarming it.  What’s Dalarna’s is everybody’s.  Only in the southern tip of Sweden has an identity of regional scale resulted in a questioning of Swedishness itself.

The region of Scania or Skåneland – the three counties of Blekinge, Halland and Skåne (along with the Danish island of Bornholm) – was historically as separate as Scotland.  (It’s also where the Old English poem Beowulf is thought to be set and where the Normans originated.)  Sweden’s royal arms – three gold crowns on a blue shield – are thought to represent the three kingdoms ruled over by King Magnus Eriksson, who died in 1364.  That is to say, Norway, Sweden and Scania.  For most of its recorded history down to 1658, Scania was one of the three provinces of Denmark, though always protective of its autonomy.  Its landscape and architecture remain much more Danish than Swedish.

The Treaty of Roskilde that transferred it definitively to Sweden in 1658 included all the usual promises about respecting traditional privileges, soon laughed away.  The Scanians’ parliament was illegally abolished and a cultural war was set in motion to Swedify everything from the language to clerical dress.  Yet Scanians still speak differently.  Written down, Danish and Swedish are separate languages, but Sweden is a large country: Danes can understand southern Swedes and vice-versa, while northern Swedes do need the subtitles for Danish films.  Especially since the Øresund Bridge opened in 2000, Malmö has become in effect a suburb of Copenhagen (as viewers of The Bridge will be aware).  A Scanian regionalist party ought to be able to undo a historic injustice and allow the pivotal point of the Baltic to look both ways, to be almost Danish, and not quite as Swedish as others.

It ought to, yes, but what has happened?  The irony is that if Scania has provided one-third of royal Sweden’s identity, and a name and historic logo for some internationally renowned trucks, that’s as far as it goes.  Labels in Stockholm’s Nordic Museum repeatedly fall over the fact of Scania, telling visitors that the custom is this in southern Sweden and that in the rest of the country, or that particular traditions in painting and weaving are unique to the south.  It’s all reminiscent of the days when Scotland was just ‘North Britain’ and Cornwall was part of the ‘West Country’.  There had to be a reckoning.

It came in 1979 with the launch of Skånepartiet, the Scania Party.  Scanian regionalism ranges from grumbling about Stockholm getting everything to demands for full independence.  The party’s populist policies called for the abolition in Scania of Sweden’s State-owned off-licence monopoly, Systembolaget, and the creation of a Scanian commercial television channel.  But Skånepartiet also decided to play the anti-immigration (and especially anti-Islam) card, a calculation that worked well enough in Malmö in the mid-80s.  Then its fortunes took a turn for the worse, its number of elected representatives dwindling until 2006, since when it has had none.

Its place has been taken by the Sweden Democrats, a Swedish version of UKIP or the Front National that emerged first in Scania and has since spread across central Sweden.  Like its French and UK equivalents, the party wants a single, uniform national culture.  It has no time for minorities, however many thousands of years they can claim to have been in the country.  It wants to abolish the Sami Parliament, claiming that the parliament’s existence discriminates against those in Sameland who are not Sami and do not rely on the traditional way of life.  It’s curious how happy far Right parties are to rant about colonists coming in and changing how we live but never recognise themselves in the description.  ‘They’ are immigrants; ‘we’ are ex-pats.

In the 2014 elections, the Sweden Democrats stormed to 12.9%, and 49 seats in the Riksdag.  They’re one of a group of far Right parties now making headway in each of the Nordic countries.  That’s bad news for regionalists; Skånepartiet may be rueing their choice of strategy.  To play the anti-immigrant card when an influx of immigrants into your region is one of its distinctive characteristics may look attractive; once that influx extends nationwide it’s nationwide parties that will pick up the resulting protest vote.  The Swedish Right have also been able to dig deep into the votes of the Swedish Left.  The Left have moved on to new fields of political correctness, leaving their traditional folkhemmet power base behind.  Meanwhile, the tensions resulting from mass immigration are calling into question the very survival of the Scandinavian welfare model.  A party that will defend the legacy of folkhemmet when its creators will not, a party that prioritises Swedes in Sweden, is bound to do well.

Then, this month, two gruesome murders in an IKEA store in Västerås, near Stockholm, carried out by an Eritrean migrant, shocked the nation.  The latest YouGov poll indicates that the Sweden Democrats are now the top political party in Sweden.  Polling at 25.2%, they beat the ruling Social Democrats, on 23.4%.  Watch Sweden closely and you’ll see the tide on the turn.  It won’t be a pretty sight; Game of Thrones fans might care to note that Västerås is pronounced rather like ‘Westeros’.

Crown Jewels for Sale

One of the contentious issues between Westminster and Holyrood of late has been the future of the Crown Estate in Scotland.  UK-wide, the portfolio of property and other investments brings in £285m a year to HM Treasury and pays for HM herself and any hangers-on who, unlike the Duke of Cornwall, aren’t funded from other public assets.  Control of the Crown Estate is vital to a government like that of Nicola Sturgeon that wants to tap the potential of offshore renewables, because it’s the Crown Estate that owns most of the seabed and takes the rents from the use of it.

If the Crown Estate has now become something of a devolutionary football, there’s a clear way out for a Treasury that doesn’t want to see its share of the cash cut.  That’s to sell anything territorial and re-invest the cash somewhere safer, like London.  If the money’s left your area, it’s no longer your government’s to demand.  That’s a principle that can be applied in anticipation of any similar devolution of power to the English regions.  Sure enough, the Crown Estate Commissioners have started to sell off the rural portfolio, turfing out the tenants without a second thought.

The 4,700-acre Bryanston Estate in north Dorset has just been offloaded to Viscount Rothermere, non-dom owner of Blackshirt-backing rag the Daily Mail.  Private Eye reported last month that its 14 farms class it as a “working” country estate, meaning it can be passed on entirely tax-free.  No wonder “working” estates are going for record prices, in this case a rumoured £65m.  Meanwhile, ownership of the Portman Hunt Kennels will add an open door into rural high society.

The Crown Estate Commissioners manage that part of Crown property held for investment purposes but much more is held for operational purposes by Government departments.  And they’re under constant pressure to sell.  The last administration made a number of attempts to sell the Forestry Commission but failed to take public opinion with it.  The present administration may feel it’s safe to ignore that now.

Last month it was the Ministry of Defence’s turn in the spotlight.  There’s talk of selling surplus land for housing, especially in the south-east of England where housing demand outstrips supply.  (Because successive governments have put money into developing London’s economy at the expense of everyone else’s.)  There’s nothing new about releasing land for housing though.  The MoD has huge holdings around Aldershot that have been picked at for years.  According to the MoD, work continues to scope opportunities to significantly reduce its estate by up to 30% over the next 10-15 years, which would seem to signal some major facility closures.

Will a series of sales at the margin be ambitious enough for Osborne and his chums?  It’s unlikely.  His ‘Productivity Plan’ envisages Government property being put on a commercial basis, handed to one or more new bodies that will charge departments the market rate for it.  But if you’re going to ‘go commercial’, why not ‘go private’?  HMRC have already sold their offices, to a company based in a tax haven.  (You couldn’t make this up.)  Osborne’s plan recalls the former Property Services Agency – which even earlier was the Office of Works – that used to do facilities management for central government.  Since the PSA’s break-up and privatisation, many government departments have taken back management of their own property, presumably at higher cost than when the PSA provided an integrated service.  Such is the price of ideology.

Generations of governments have promoted owner-occupation – first of farms, then of homes – because it’s paid for by loans that enrich the financial services industry, based in the City of London.  Now Government is volunteering to return itself to tenancy because rental income benefits, well, well, the financial services industry.  Find the pattern, spot the inconsistency, then follow the trail and you’ll discover who really rules Britain.  Paid-for freeholds are dead property – nobody else can make money out of them and that’s why they’re under attack.  And the best time to offload them is at the start of the economic cycle, so that private owners can maximise the uplift in value in a rising market.

Sale-and-leaseback comes at a cost in terms of lost flexibility – it was one of the reasons given for the collapse of the Woolworths Group, which had tied itself into a deal with its new landlord that looked good enough at the time.  And how do you – or rather, how do highly paid consultants – value some of the land uses the Government operates, for which there is no market equivalent?  Military activity might look like one of those but in fact not all MoD land is freehold.  Three-quarters of the Dartmoor Training Area, much used by the Royal Marines, is held under licence from Devon’s largest landowner, the Duchy of Cornwall.  Salisbury Plain Training Area – one-ninth of Wiltshire and as big as the Isle of Wight – is mostly MoD freehold but for how much longer?  What might Arab or Chinese investors offer for it?

The ground is shifting beneath our feet.  Not literally, but certainly in the sense that Wessex is changing hands.  With cash-strapped local authorities selling off smallholdings and other property, more and more of Wessex is being turned into opportunities for new money made in London to sink itself into the countryside and settle-in to a post-democratic new feudalism.

Osborne’s challenge to the public is to ‘re-imagine the State’, although only imaginings in a downward direction will be accepted.  Nothing new here though; it’s part of a process of progressive plunder that’s gone on regardless of party colour for the past 36 years.  It comes down to whether there’s nothing left but the coercive core – armed forces, police and judiciary – or whether anything more attractive is added, and why.  Note well that a smaller State does NOT imply lower public spending, just the routing of more of it through the plunderers’ hands in the form of one subsidy or another, from agriculture to housing to railways.  Taxes certainly won’t fall if governments sell off productive assets that provide an alternative revenue stream.

Selling assets to pay debts is false economics if the economy itself depends on the existence of debt as its driving force.  Banks will force governments into debt over and over again, so long as governments fail to govern.  It’s when there are no more assets to sell that the full force of austerity comes to be applied.  New Labour, the bankers’ friend, was taken for a merry old ride over privatisation, with John Prescott quoting Aneurin Bevan – ‘the language of priorities is the religion of socialism’ – to justify the sale of municipal enterprises.  Selling productive assets to finance non-productive expenditure is more accurately the language of the madhouse.

What isn’t often appreciated is that to shrink the British State is to shrink Britishness itself.  As fewer folk have a stake in it, so it becomes less worth defending.  The contrast with Scotland and Wales is striking.  There the democratic sector has been defended, innovative ways round EU rules have been found and some privatisations have even been reversed.  While Scotland and Wales have a will to survive against the forces of globalised plunder, the UK – and therefore England – has only a death-wish, a will to liquidate itself and disperse the proceeds to the super-rich.

An example of this is the desire to pull down the BBC, ‘because the BBC is doing too much’.  (Rupert Murdoch’s empire, naturally, isn’t, though it could hardly do a worse job of airing the views of parties critical of the BBC’s vision of Britain.)  The BBC reduces opportunities for the private sector, which is obviously a Bad Thing.  Except that it isn’t.  In a democracy, there should be no presumption that the job of Government is to create private money-making opportunities out of public services.  That’s the issue that goes to the heart of the demolition job.  It’s not about efficiency or inefficiency, because no investor will buy an asset and no entrepreneur will offer to take over a public service unless the deal is structured in such a way as to make money for them.  They call the shots.  We end up paying.  And by the time we figure out that we didn’t get what we were promised it’s too late to go back.

It’s not about efficiency.  It’s about democracy.  That’s where the Left has let us all down.  It has failed to defend public ownership and operation on democratic grounds, because too much of its thinking is managerialist and so fundamentally hostile to any real democracy, political or economic.  Radical politics is democratic politics and it’s up to radicals to make the case for more democracy, not less.  Freedom to do your own thing is laudable; making off with the common wealth is not.  We all need to be clear about the difference.

Labour in Vain

What a joy today to hear again from war-crimes suspect Tony Blair!  He’s never sounded more panicked, falling over his words as he warns Labour not to be true to itself.  He clearly shares the anxiety of so many of his fans who fear the Left is about to steal their party from them.  That’s karma, unfortunately.  ‘Don’t go back,’ he pleads, ‘embrace modernity!’  No-one’s going back: the Left is moving forward because the whole Thatcher-in-a-suit con trick has failed and Karl Marx’s views from the 19th century are seen to be rather more relevant than Adam Smith’s from the 18th.

That’s not to say we wish Jeremy Corbyn well, even though he’s a Moonraker by birth.  A successful Labour Party is just what the Disunited Kingdom needs to reboot itself yet again, save the Union and renew the consensus that Whitehall knows best.  Labour in power again, Left or Right, will be as centralist as it’s always been.  One can well imagine the establishment favouring a Corbyn-led Labour Party because of its potential to suck the life out of the SNP while still falling short – in England – of the number of seats needed to govern.  Two anti-austerity parties killed with one stone.

In terms of our strategy, a Labour Party led by another Thatcher clone would be preferable.  Successful radical politics in the regions of England depends upon the demise of Labour.  It means working with the Celtic nationalist parties that Labour despises.  Labour doesn’t understand regionalism, never has and never will.  It can’t understand how trusting communities to make their own decisions can ever result in the right answers.  Labour is part of the problem.  It can sometimes be used to advance the solution, but it can never be part of it.

The Founding Fixers

Avon Local History & Archæology – ALHA – does exactly what it says on the tin.  It’s an organisation for local history and archæology in the Avon area, serving some 80 affiliated societies, with a collective membership of about 10,000.  Founded in 1976, it has outlived Avon County Council, recognising the economic and social – and therefore historical – unity of the area, not so much separate from as special within the grand historic counties of Gloucestershire and Somerset.  In 2011 ALHA launched its annual Joseph Bettey Lecture, named after the Bristol academic responsible for Wessex from AD 1000, Rural Life in Wessex 1500-1900, The Landscape of Wessex and other books that present our history from the inside looking out, not the outside looking in.

ALHA also holds an annual spring conference, with this year’s entitled ‘The rocky road to democracy and freedom: from king John to mayor George’.  In the wake of Magna Carta, Bristol’s first mayor may have been the one chosen in 1216, another concession made by ‘Bad King John’.  The first directly elected one followed in 2012, the renowned, red-trousered Wintonian, George Ferguson.  London’s first mayor was in 1189, the first directly elected one in 2000, yet more evidence of how Bristol tends to mimic London’s every move.  Professor Murray Stewart’s closing talk at the conference, ‘The elected mayor: democrat or autocrat?’ provoked vigorous audience reaction.  As well it might, because one of the reasons for having an elected mayor was identified as “more direct communication with central government”.

So it seems that having an elected mayor as the key to city devolution is less about restoring civic confidence, more about training better beggars.  It isn’t about giving local folk the power collectively to shape their own lives; it’s overwhelmingly about putting in place a network of local fixers who can be summoned to Whitehall for instructions whenever any smoothing needs to be done.

Keep that point in mind, because there’s a familiar theme behind every local government reorganisation.  At the time of the ‘big bang’ reforms of 1974, official explanations referred the reader to the problems: the previous local local authorities were “too small” and there were “too many of them”.  Size can be a problem: there’s a relationship between it and functional competence and that’s what underlies the idea of subsidiarity.  Being over-numerous though is not a problem for local authorities or the communities they individually serve.  It’s not a problem they have any reason to recognise, let alone worry about.  It’s only a problem for outsiders, more especially for those who have to deal with them all.  The drive for fewer and fewer councils is about improving the London regime’s range of effective control.

Every reduction in the number of councils is accompanied by a reduction in the number of councillors.  Replacing committee government by cabinet government has concentrated power even further and left the remaining councillors with little to decide, and therefore little reason to stand.  Progressively replacing elections by thirds with whole council elections is already cutting by two-thirds the number of opportunities for democratic involvement by voters.

The ultimate aim is surely to have directly elected mayors everywhere, covering huge areas – though certainly short of regions, which pose an actual threat to centralism.  A gaggle of municipal Caesars voted into dictatorial power for four years, with no means of popular redress in the interim.  The result is ‘stable government’.  But it’s not what could be described as bottom-up vital democracy.

Do not imagine that what has begun in the big cities will not touch the shires.  The current Cities & Local Government Devolution Bill allows for mayors for combined authorities that include all (or just part) of a county council area.  A quarter of Ireland’s county councils have chosen to style their chairman ‘mayor’.  Although these county mayors are not executive mayors, they set a precedent that may, one day, produce an elected Mayor of Devon or Hampshire or Somerset.  Not very long ago, a Mayor of the North East – Greater Tyneside but with a vast rural hinterland – was perhaps the most preposterous idea in politics; now it’s a real possibility.

This is a measure of how unconservative the Conservatives can be in re-shaping the meaning of words.  It’s also a measure of London’s ability to get areas that are nothing like London to imitate its thoughts and actions, whereas doing things differently is actually what’s needed to give them an advantage over it.  The onward march of the mayors is but one example of this.  Tony Blair’s devolution of power to London was designed to evoke as few memories as possible of the old Greater London Council during Ken Livingstone’s term as its last Leader.  So the GLC became the GLA, the Leader became the Mayor, and London Transport became Transport for London.  Since then, we’ve seen Transport for Greater Manchester, Transport for New South Wales, Transport for Edinburgh, Transport for Ireland and, most recently, Transport for the North, which the Government now proposes to put on a statutory footing.  The first step to a northern regional government?  There’s unlikely to be a Transport for Wessex: the chronic under-funding of our region demonstrates the London view that if we think we have transport problems we must be imagining them.

Against this dismal backdrop, the Cornish experience is all the more remarkable.  Devolution of power to Cornwall is finally happening, so one cheer for that.  It’s inadequate and it’s undemocratic, so only the one cheer.  What’s to be devolved will allow better integration of public services and therefore produce better outcomes for less money.  It’s the case for devolution in a nutshell.  But what’s to be devolved will not allow Cornwall to decide its own future.  The crucial powers over housing and planning needed to halt the destruction of Cornwall’s communities and environment remain in Greg Clark’s hands, demonstrating that devolution is not defined by what’s devolved but by what’s retained.  Governments, aloof from it all, keep the important powers; councils take unpopular decisions they couldn’t shape but will be blamed for anyway.  Inadequacy is compounded by a lack of democracy; key powers are to be handed not to Cornwall County Council but to quangos like the Local Enterprise Partnership, to those who have never fought an election, let alone done so successfully, yet are still allowed to set local priorities because they’re rich.  It’s like the 20th century never happened.

What’s most remarkable about Cornwall however is that local institutions that already exist are being entrusted with anything at all.  Cornwall is the first rural county to make such gains, just as it was the first royal duchy back in 1337: forms of precedence that all help to build a case for more powers to follow.  It’s also the first area not to be forced down the mayoral route considered de rigueur for the conurbations, where a single directly elected focus is currently lacking.  (The Government was recently defeated in the Lords on this point, but that’s far from being the end of the parliamentary debate.)  It has to be said that if the conurbations lack an elected focus it is the Tories that the Tories have to blame for that because it was they who abolished the relevant county councils in 1986 and 1996.  Without putting in place a regional replacement worthy of the name.

Who has current responsibility for devolution?  The Ministry of Justice used to be the Department for Constitutional Affairs but constitutional affairs are now firmly the province of HM Treasury.  This became clear this month from the launch of a paper setting out the Government’s ‘productivity plan’, Fixing the foundations.  It contains some interesting facts, such as that London accounts for 28% of the UK’s GDP, while New York contributes 7% of the USA’s and Berlin just 5% of Germany’s.  The comment that ought to follow is that both those countries have federal systems of government that prevent the over-concentration of economic activity by preventing the over-concentration of political activity.  The printers seem to have missed that bit out.  An unfortunate omission.

There’s a section devoted to Mr Osborne’s fixation on elected mayors.  It quotes research showing that cities with fragmented governance perform badly.  It doesn’t point out that one reason why governance is so fragmented is that the London regime has taken power after power away from local councils because they can’t be trusted to toe the party line.  Returning a few with strings attached doesn’t address this key issue.  Moreover, so long as devolution is to business-dominated quangos rather than to those untrustworthy councils, joined-up governance will remain elusive.

So too, it seems, will consistency.  Fragmentation wasn’t judged a problem when the Tories abolished those county councils.  They talk too of a Northern Powerhouse, yet power is something that will not be exercised at the northern level: the Northern Powerhouse will be directed from the Chancellor’s office and delivered across a fragmented region by locally elected metro-mayors acting as his district commissioners.  How long is the north of England going to put up with this colonial-style regime?  It’s a vital question because the future of regionalism in England hinges on the willingness of northerners to lead the revolt against London divide-and-rule.  We’d love the revolt to start in Wessex but we face different issues – regions are different and that’s why we need to empower them all – and so we must watch and wait for our own moment of opportunity.

It cannot come too soon.  The Treasury’s paper bemoans the fact that England has as many as 353 councils, with 18,000 councillors, all able to put a democratic spanner in the works.  (It doesn’t point out that France has 37,000 councils, linked in a labyrinth of joint authorities, yet still manages to survive in the modern world.)  The tone is unmistakeably that economic survival depends on rooting out democracy.  Investors won’t come here if they have to persuade – in public – some irritating people who just don’t understand how corporate deals are done.  Without effective scrutiny, before decisions are taken, the whole thing is unavoidably suspect, but so what?  Greed is good, right?

Previous generations strove to bring the key economic levers under democratic control, to make business accountable.  Today’s is rushing headlong in the opposite direction, making democracy more businesslike, not in the laudable sense of efficient operation but in the altogether more unpalatable sense of making it less democratic.  If it starts with local government, it will not end there.  Why have MPs if we can have an elected Prime Minister, beyond criticism’s reach for a fixed five-year term?  (Mr Cameron referred this weekend to having to take “my Parliament with me” over Syria, as clear a case of lèse-majesté as can be imagined.)  Why have 200 separate states when we can have a single world president applying a single corporately written law?  Powerful institutions are what safeguard democracy, by being persistently awkward; powerful individuals are what undermine it, by attacking them as vested interests obstructing change.

The irony is that elected mayors, pushed again and again as an extension to and modernisation of our democratic traditions, are now being imposed on cities like Manchester that have already rejected them in referenda.  Bristol, meanwhile, is the only city to have voted to have an elected mayor under new legislation that prevents it voting to change its mind in the future.  The arguments for and against having elected mayors are essentially academic – and irrelevant – so long as the London regime is determined that we shall have them at all costs.