South By Southwest

Guest contribution by Nick Xylas, WR Council member and prospective candidate for Bristol City Council, Eastville Ward

As someone who has lived in both Wessex and the American South, I can’t help but be struck by certain similarities between the two.  Both are primarily rural and agricultural regions.  Both have low-status accents that provide a lazy comedic shorthand for ignorance and backwardness.  And both have areas that have been hurt economically by the loss of their textile industries, whether it’s the Cotswolds or South Carolina, where I lived for 6 years.

There is, however, one major difference in their regionalist traditions.  The main regionalist / Celtic nationalist parties in the Disunited Kingdom are all on the Centre Left.  The Southern patriot movement, on the other hand, is a creature of the fringe far Right.  That master of the political dog whistle, Ronald Reagan, used “states’ rights” as a euphemism for segregation: an extension of Nixon’s Southern strategy to woo mostly (though not exclusively) Southern racists, who had abandoned the Democratic Party over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, into the Republican fold.  The success of this strategy can be seen today in the current popularity of Donald Trump, who has become the Republican front runner by proposing to deport Mexican immigrants en masse and to strip American Muslims of their constitutional rights (though it should be pointed out that Trump leads a very crowded field, and only enjoys the support of some 25-30% of Republican primary voters). 

As a result of this, support for the right of the federal government to override the will of individual states has become a totem of liberal orthodoxy, and there is no left-of-centre decentralist tradition to speak of.  Anyone on the Left supporting states’ rights in a literal, rather than a euphemistic sense, is an aberration: an isolated phenomenon like the handful of monarchists that exist in the USA, in defiance of that country’s entire history.

Like Wessex Regionalists and Celtic nationalists, the Southern patriots identify themselves through the use of a flag.  In this case, they use the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, commonly (though incorrectly) referred to as the Confederate Flag.  Based on the Scottish saltire, to reflect the Scots-Irish heritage of many Southerners, it was incorporated into the state flag of Georgia in 1956, two years after the Brown v Board of Education court decision that led to the desegregation of American schools and, since then, has become a symbol of defiance against Yankee destruction of “traditional Southern values”.  The flag was still flying outside the South Carolina Statehouse in the state capital, Columbia, when I lived there, but public protests have since forced its removal.

There have been attempts to forge a Southern identity that isn’t entirely based on racism.  Some revisionist historians have suggested that the “recent unpleasantness” (the tongue-in-cheek way that Southerners refer to the American Civil War, aka the War of Northern Aggression) wasn’t really about slavery at all, but about supporting a confederal over a federal form of government.  This seems to be based on wishful thinking, however, as it completely ignores the fact that every single Confederate state included a clause in its constitution protecting the institution of slavery and prohibiting its abolition.

Demographics in the South are changing.  Whilst de facto segregation continued long after its de jure abolition, the old racial barriers are breaking down, and the younger generation are far more accepting of a diversity of races, religions, nationalities, genders and sexual identities.  The current Republican governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, is a woman of Indian extraction, elected by the general public against stiff opposition from the good ole boy network within the state party.  The challenge will be to reflect this new reality without erasing the South’s identity and heritage altogether.

History is Sunk

“My Lords, a nation gets awarded the character that it deserves.  By neglecting to promote some aspect of this character, that aspect becomes increasingly insignificant within the image which other nations regard as our worth.  And this might also hold true for the way future generations of our own nation come to regard what we ourselves were worth…

There is a danger if the arena for artistic performance is permitted to become too centralised, with the regions required to focus upon what is going on within the capital city to discover the potential of their own individualistic excellence.  The situation will become healthier if we can revive the notion of there being a thriving local culture within each region, proud of its own traditions, and of its aesthetic potential.

Government should therefore assume the responsibility to promote the re-emergence of the English regions, so that they are encouraged to create their own local artistic excellence in distinction from one another, and in competition with one another to draw the maximum number of tourists to come and be entertained in the significant regional manner.  But this should involve the creation of regional assemblies, whose main purpose will be to tailor the quality of life within that territory, so that its true individualism can be perceived for what it best might become…

Then finally there is the question of improved display: a display at sites of easy access for the region as a whole.  It should not be necessary for an aspirant artist to visit the capital city to discover the inspiration for his native art.  The finest collections should be on his very doorstep.  And the regional assemblies should be in a position to allot funds to transform existing museums so that they can fulfil this required function – funds which should also be used to put on arts festivals where the special character of the region can be publicly proclaimed.

The artistic potential of the nation is thus indirectly linked to the Government’s ability to enable the English regions to re-emerge in a spirit of their most colourful individualism.  So the most significant step which government could take today, in the encouragement of the arts, will be in the creation of our regional assemblies; and I urge that this step should be taken without delay.”

Alexander Thynn, Marquess of Bath, addressing the House of Lords, 18th March 1998

Not a lot to ask, you might think.  After all, the provincial cities of Germany and Italy are cultural powerhouses, attracting tourists in their millions.  In contrast to France or Spain, theirs is the legacy of not being unified politically until late in the 19th century and so continuing to benefit from particularistic patronage.  In England, sadly, few listened to our founder’s words, and today the curtain is coming down on culture in the provinces.

Nowhere more so than in Northumbria.  Last month, we drew attention to a spate of museum closures in Lancashire, contrasted with continued spending on a vacuous vanity project designed to really ‘put London on the map’.  Lancashire is not alone.  Across the Pennines, Bradford’s National Media Museum is facing the asset-stripping of its photographic collection, to be removed to London.  Cumbrian Melvyn Bragg has spoken out on radio against the closure of small museums.  In Co Durham, closures planned, threatened or implemented include the Durham Light Infantry Museum at Durham, the Monkwearmouth Station Museum at Sunderland and Bede’s World at Jarrow.  The last of these was an ambitious project to regenerate the town through tourism.  A new museum was built to re-interpret the Golden Age of Northumbria for today, complete with a reconstructed Anglo-Saxon settlement in the grounds.  Whatever that blighted area has been promised to make up for jobs lost in heavy industry – whether it was to be call centres, hi-tech manufacturing, retailing or tourism – has been promptly ripped from beneath its feet.  It’s now being robbed of the means to understand itself.  ‘History’ will be owned by the victors of one inter-regional power struggle, making another that much less likely to succeed.

Identity is inseparable from continuity: a place without a past lacks the materials from which to build its own future with confidence.  According to Historic England, 64% of folk in England value their local heritage.  Breaking this average down by Prescott zone, we find the figure rises to 71% in the North East, 69% in the South West and 68% in both London and the South East.  Four of the five below-average zones are where the Danelaw used to be.  Coincidence?  Maybe, but the fact is that where Alfred was acknowledged as overlord there was continuity of government and a physical survival of heritage on a scale that wasn’t true of Viking-devastated areas.  You value more where there’s more to value.

Wessex hasn’t been exempt from closures.  Bristol’s award-winning Empire & Commonwealth Museum, housed in Brunel’s original terminus at Temple Meads, was closed in 2008.  This was done with the specific intention of re-locating the collection to London, where, of course, ‘more people can see it’.  The logic is unassailable, at least for those too lazy to get a train to Bristol and walk a hundred yards.  Fortunately, the deal fell through.  Most of the collection was donated to the city of Bristol.  But the museum never re-opened.

Wessex hasn’t been exempt from closures.  Scotland and Wales have a choice.  Their national museums and galleries are devolved matters and they have devolved administrations to defend them.  We suffer from the affliction that is England, not the England of us all that values all, but the one-size-fits-all England that in practice means London.  All the key decisions are taken in London by those who live, work and play in London, who can grasp no other perspective and who feel deeply offended by the idea that one can even exist.  And, as Simon Jenkins pointed out last week, BIG projects are protected while it’s the little folk who suffer.

It might be argued that, in times of austerity, culture should take a back seat.  We don’t need to argue back that austerity is a posh word for corporate bailouts and tax evasion on an unimaginable scale.  Even if austerity had a credible justification, it would still be unfair that we’re not exempt from it but London is.  Loss-making museums in the provinces are being shut.  Throwing them a lifeline would be subsidising failure, we’re told.  Yet as taxpayers we all pay to keep London’s ‘national’ museums and galleries free to visit.  Even though there are national museums in Wessex that are not.  (For example, both the National Army Museum and the RAF Museum in London are free, but not Portsmouth’s National Museum of the Royal Navy.  How fair is that?)  Free admission to London’s attractions is somehow considered a service to the whole nation.  We’re even treated to patronising half-truths: “Arts Council funding for museums is lower per capita in London and the South East than in any other part of the country.”  We should hope so, given the millions London’s national museums receive as direct funding that bypasses the Arts Council pot.  How can there ever be a level playing field when money for London’s pets is top-sliced and the rest are left to fight over the crumbs?

Shouldn’t we expect this?  Isn’t being kicked and punched by the London regime part of being English?  Mustn’t grumble, must we?  Up north, regionalisation has been an on-off issue for over a century.  That’s a century in which to organise a political party to achieve real, lasting change.  A century of votes cast instead for the monkey with the red rosette.  And we’ve been as bad, even if our monkey’s rosette is blue, or sometimes yellow.  He or she is still more interested in a career in a London-obsessed system than in defying convention on our behalf.

Recent media coverage has been sure to present the museums story as one aspect of a north-south divide.  That’s a convenient narrative that can be played around with, baiting northerners about deprivation in pockets of inner London being just as bad.  It’s a narrative that actually helps to obscure something much deeper – the London-rest divide that no amount of ‘benign’ centralism or ‘socialist’ redistribution will touch.

It’s inevitable then.  Let’s move on to the ‘real’ issues instead.  No, it isn’t inevitable.  When Northumbria and Wessex strode the stage, London was on the periphery of events: Frank Musgrove’s The North of England: A History identifies no fewer than four eras of northern pre-eminence.  History reminds us that there are alternatives.  That’s why the teaching of history is being so heavily discouraged.

Richard Carter, Leader of Yorkshire First, commented on the museum closures as follows: "We are not against a strong capital, but this has to change, for the good of the country and for London too."  We’d go further.  The capital’s strength is both the cause and the effect of our weakness as it recirculates across the generations.  If London disappeared into a vast sink-hole tomorrow, Boris and all, we’d get by well enough without it.  There comes a point when patience with pretty promises from on high should no longer be judged a virtue.

Bristol Begins

Nick Xylas reports that preparations are well underway to contest Bristol City Council’s Eastville Ward in local elections this May:

“I have almost finished collecting signatures for my nomination papers.  The opening date for handing in nomination papers is 22nd March and the closing date is 10th April.  It doesn't help that Bristol Central Library will only be open at weekends in March due to the basement being converted into a posh school, severely limiting my access to the electoral register.  Anyway, I have set up a campaign website, and hope to add a blog to it soon.”

Content added to the site so far includes Nick’s biography and the mini-manifesto of policies for Bristol.

Autarky for All

What’s the point of political devolution in a world of globalist economics, where democracy can’t change a thing because there’s no world government to hold multi-nationals in check?  A good question, to which the answer is to reject not only over-centralised government but also over-centralised economics.  Demand autarky for all.

Autarky – self-sufficiency – is a principled response to globalist economics.  It’s a product of the ‘Historical’ school of economics that arose in 19th century Germany and included such giants as Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter.  Adherents maintained that economics could only be understood within the cultural context of a specific historical era, and not using standardised formulae or theories.  They were also often concerned with the plight of the common worker.  Autarky in the form of European preference has since been defended by the French Nobel Prize winner Maurice Allais.

Autarky is not against trade but views it as a way to obtain only those things that can’t be produced domestically.  The reason is to subjugate economics to politics, allowing ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’ to be expressed in broader, especially non-monetary terms.  The aim is not to exclude imports, but to exclude dependence, especially in terms of vital needs like energy and food that could become the subject of foreign economic reprisals.  This can be attempted at any scale but the full effect can only be seen to work at something approaching a continental scale, say an internal market running into the hundreds of millions of people and thus able to support the full range of products.  Any continent will do.  For example, why should the Chinese invest their surplus in Europe – or be allowed to do so by Europeans – when they still have unmet needs of their own?

The result is an avoidance of over-specialisation.  It therefore rejects many of the most sacred free market dogmas.  It’s the opposite, indeed, of economism, the idea that life is about short-term profit: always man as producer and consumer, never as colleague and citizen.  In The Wealth of Nations, Scotsman Adam Smith famously described how the manufacture of pins could be massively increased by division of labour.  Wessexman William Barnes, in Views of Labour and Gold, pointed out that such wonderful productivity levels have unacknowledged human costs.  There’s the insecurity in the market for jobs and wages that comes with having too narrow a skill, plus potentially the impaired health of repetitive strain or unwholesome working conditions.  Smith had largely admitted as much, and had seen a role for the State in relieving the results, but such reservations are rarely remembered when the story of the pin factory gets quoted today.

What’s true for the individual can be true for society at large: ‘economic growth’ continues without effective challenge as the supreme goal of public policy, despite the evidence that everywhere it results in huge environmental damage and social disruption.  Economics is said to be subject to ‘iron laws’, while everything else – ecology, culture, sentiment – is judged infinitely malleable.  Globalism, by insisting that nowhere is off-limits, that nowhere is allowed to defend itself, because that would be a ‘distortion’, encourages this race to the bottom.  Protectionism – economic protection – is everywhere decried but neither environmental protection nor social protection is possible without subordinating corporate actions to political will.

The United States is equipped with a very strong political will to use regulations and subsidies (and foreign policy) to pilot an economy that’s privately owned, though with public ownership of utilities and other resources on a scale that would astonish Thatcherites.  Paradoxically, the US is much better at all of this than we are in ‘socialist’ Europe, where we’re still over-reacting against the Cold War era in ways so accommodating to big business that they often appear suicidal.

From a long-term perspective, economism actually weakens economic power, because it under-values the other factors holding vulnerability at bay, such as political independence, assured resource availability and demographic stability (who pays the promised pensions?)  Note that all of these can be just as real, in a materialist sense, as economic factors, and in their long-term consequences can be even more transforming.

Markets are a means, not an end.  So too are States.  We currently have the worst of both worlds – anarcho-tyranny – in which States have largely abdicated their grand political function as governments but retained and expanded their bureaucratic power to regulate the problems arising from that political vacuum.  Ideas of sovereignty and a transcendent sense of history have been reduced to one of ‘managing the nation’ as a sort of imagined business: ‘UK plc’.

Western civilisation – which aims at substituting a universal market ideology for popular sovereignty – stands opposed to a European civilisation that values things other than price.  A European unity of purpose therefore demands the ability to define and defend something that differs from the familiar reality of being a protectorate of ‘the West’.  Subsidiarity needs an economic as well as a political dimension.  The solution with the lowest short-term costs attached may say ‘centralise’ but a holistic assessment may say the opposite.  Our political institutions must be ones that enable that judgment to stick.

Generals are often best-placed to warn politicians against militarism, against the hubris that will ultimately lead to catastrophic defeat.  Economists likewise need to warn against taking economics any more seriously than it deserves.

London Pride

Here is why the power of London, and the Britain it represents, must end.  For all our sakes.

It's time for regionalism, the only constitutional change that will turn England the right way up.

Independence for Europe?

“No European can be a complete exile in any part of Europe.”

Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796)

It was a curious coincidence (or was it?) that on the same day that David Cameron dressed up as success what was clearly failure, the USA announced a quadrupling of its defence spending in Europe.  It’s a reminder that Europe remains occupied, because there’s no such thing as a free lunch.  The price of Europe’s defence is paid in other ways, such as submission to TTIP.

An independent Europe would require a European Union that worked, one that allowed much more to be done locally and regionally, while focusing on what actually needs doing at European level.  The fear that a European army could be used against dissenting countries within the EU is real enough.  The rhetoric coming from Brussels about enforcing (western) ‘European values’ on eastern Member States – that have democratically made different choices – chillingly demonstrates that.  But there are other reasons why the EU has no comprehensive common security policy.  Public debate contrasts two arenas of independence.  If the UK leaves the EU, as UKIP wish, should Scotland leave the UK, as the SNP wish?  What of the third arena, the independence of Europe as a whole, independence against the world?  Is it too big an ask?  Or are we just not seeing the wood for the trees?

We’ve long argued in favour of a ‘third option’ for Europe.  Our version is one that rejects unhelpful centralism, whether it comes from the EU or from its Member States.  That this requires fundamental reform of the current institutions is a given.  What the deal negotiated by Cameron does is demonstrate the difficulty of any reform happening at all.  The diplomacy, designed to retain the UK’s place in Europe, is likely to have had the opposite effect, inviting its critics to present the EU as unreformable.  The ‘concessions’ are cosmetic, as they were intended to be.  No powers will be returned to the UK.  Few were seriously requested in the first place.

It took the London regime 950 years to become as inflexible as the EU has become in just 60.  The only thing that could correct that would be a directly elected European government.  One with a popular mandate to break the costly inertia of government-by-treaty and force through reform of all the EU institutions.  Eurosceptics would hate that, because their answer to claims that the EU is undemocratic is to abolish it.  Democratising it is the other answer, the one that no-one must offer.

If Cameron has dealt the eurosceptics a winning hand it’s a pity.  The EU, by opening an umbrella across nation-state rivalries, has created an irreplaceable opportunity for small nations and historic regions otherwise silenced by tub-thumping jingoism.  Those down the west side of Britain can now choose to organise themselves as part of the Atlantic arc.  Those down the east side can see themselves as part of the North Sea rim, or a cross-Channel grouping.  Ancient enemies can be viewed at last as neighbours, friends and allies.  The Cornish and the Bretons can no longer be ordered by London and Paris to hate each other.  It’s such an advance that it could be outweighed only by something monumentally stupid emanating from Brussels.  No doubt that can be arranged.

There’s the problem with the ‘Leave’ campaign.  Brussels loses, but who then gains?  Wessex does not, and cannot, benefit from a stronger UK.  The UK, like England, has proven in practice to be mostly a metaphor for London financial interests.  In politics, it’s an expensive luxury to have two opponents at once.  A choice of Brussels over London is therefore a logical one to make if London is standing in the way of regional devolution and Brussels is not.  It’s also difficult to see how a Europe of the regions could be constituted without a Europe to, at the very least, agree collective security against external threats.

Reality has fallen short of aspiration not because Europe has failed the regions but because the nation-states have failed both the regions and Europe.  Despite some promising signs such as the Committee of the Regions established under the Maastricht Treaty, the EU remains eternally the creature of its Member States.  It’s been powerless to prevent the abolition of France’s historic regions or in England the substitution of unwanted elected mayors for real devolution.  Its only contribution to the debate over independence for Catalonia or Scotland has been to look for problems.  The EU needs friends with a broader vision.  It hasn’t a clue how to find them.

Cameron’s negotiations are but a small part of the big European picture.  It’s easy to denounce them as a distraction when Europe is grappling with the migrant crisis but the two issues are intimately connected.  With migrant-related crime reported (inaccurately, but influentially) to be running unchecked in Germany, the temptation for British voters to raise the drawbridge may prove irresistible.  The very process of the referendum helps the ‘Leave’ cause.  With the SNP’s amendment of a four-nation lock rejected, the voting unit is ‘the British people’, about whom we shall no doubt be hearing quite a lot.  Among other things, the vote should tell us whether or not they still exist.

It could be the last opportunity to breathe life into British exceptionalism, the idea that there is ‘Europe’ and there is ‘Britain’ and the two are as different as chalk and cheese.  Never mind that 40% of British DNA is shared with the French, evidence of a common past stretching back into prehistory.  Never mind that English is a Germanic language, overlain with Latin, closely linked to Frisian and West Flemish.  Never mind that the oldest secular work in Byelorussian is a 1580 version of the Cornish tale of Tristan and Isolde.  Never mind that the EU’s chief negotiator, Donald Tusk, is a Kashubian with a surname that’s the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish for ‘German’ and a first name that’s decidedly Scottish.  Never mind that Ireland isn’t going anywhere and will be a constant reminder that Europe exists to the west of Britain as well as to the south and east.  Never mind that Europe is a web of cultural connections, while the UK is a forced accident of geography.  Never mind.  The UK can run to Washington and Beijing for a pat on the head.

As Norway’s ‘fax democracy’ shows, it won’t make a scrap of difference to how the rest of the EU makes decisions, nor to its power over the UK economy.  British foreign policy for centuries was to maintain the balance of power in Europe as it built up an overseas empire.  Divide, and conquer.  That’s history now, in both respects, but the way the UK is debating disengagement from Europe and planning new forays into the wider world suggests that a great many folk have failed to notice.

Ending Invisibility

Colin Bex continues his efforts to highlight the connection between regionalism and resistance to climate change.  Read his latest report here.