No Heritage Soon

Where did the inspiration come from for our National Health Service? Historians have a habit, given that Nye Bevan was a Welshman, to look to Wales, to the miners’ and metalworkers’ mutual aid schemes at Tredegar and elsewhere.

Wessex has at least as good a claim. The Mechanics’ Institute at Swindon, opened in 1855 and paid for by the men of the Great Western Railway, contained the UK’s first lending library and ran many activities and classes. The same body that ran it also opened up health services to other workers. Bevan said of it that “There was a complete health service in Swindon. All we had to do was expand it to the country.”

This iconic institution closed in 1986, since when it has become increasingly derelict, and prey to vandals, arsonists and those who want to demolish it. This month the Victorian Society identified it as one of the top ten endangered buildings of its era anywhere in the UK. That it carries a Grade II* listing ought to ensure its protection, but doesn’t.

In fact, the Mechanics’ Institute is about as safe as the NHS. Bevan isn’t around to see what became of his baby. He’d be appalled if he was. What we’ve seen is a Conservative-led coalition drive through legislation to prepare the NHS for privatisation. The Coalition Agreement promised no ‘top-down reorganisations of the NHS’. (It didn’t rule out a policy that imposed a bottom-up one against the will of those at the bottom.) We’ve a Labour ‘Opposition’ whose credibility is shot to pieces after 13 years of support for ‘internal markets’, ‘trusts’ and ‘foundations’, all designed to soften-up the NHS for a more profit-oriented regime. This, after all, is a party comfortable with the idea of hospitals going bankrupt under the pressure of PFI schemes. Sir Richard Branson’s predatory offshoot Virgin Care has been seeking to run a range of health services in Wiltshire, as well as several other Wessex shires. How long before we see his logo plastered across Swindon’s Great Western Hospital?

We invite all who aren’t on the waiting list for a brain transplant to write a scenario for NHS 2020. Outsourcing all provision to the private sector, while protecting the principle of free-at-point-of-use, can only be Phase I. Then come ‘small’ charges to discourage frivolous patients, meet hospital food and heating bills, or contribute to the cost of ‘non-core’ treatments. The new 49% limit on private income sources for supposedly NHS hospitals is sure to be relaxed. Phase III means de-prioritising those unable to upgrade, lifting the regulatory ‘burden’, and letting the market rip.

Whichever party’s in power. Because while Bevan called the Tories ‘lower than vermin’, his own party have now spent too long scurrying around on the floor with them to aspire to anything better. Sue Slipman, Chief Executive of the NHS Foundation Trust Network, has described the idea of removing the 49% cap as "a really creative way of bringing more money into the health service". What readers may not remember is that Slipman, a former President of the National Union of Students, was first a high-ranking member of the Communist Party, then joined the Social Democrats in 1981 as a convert to Thatcherism. The destruction of the NHS is a long-term strategic goal of the spoilt hippy Left, their revenge against the working class for lacking revolutionary spirit. And the toffs round the cabinet table are delighted to oblige.

The recent launch of the National Health Action Party shows the degree of despair that so many folk feel at the way the three-headed dog of London politics is sinking its fangs into the things we treasured. The NHAP intends to stand against leading Tory politicians across the land. (No need in Wessex, of course: our policies are already 100% behind the NHS, so its supporters need only rally behind us.)

Labour have issued their ritual denunciations about ‘splitting the anti-Tory vote’. Yawn. Heard it all before. Labour’s definition of a democratic election is one where the Labour candidate wins, and not otherwise. In fact, the best way to eliminate any need for tactical voting is to introduce proportional representation. (It was Labour policy between the wars: how come it isn’t now?) That way we can choose our own alternative, to all three of the big Tory parties with their London bases and cosy links to the City. Labour might be shocked to find that, given a proper electoral system, the alternative turns out to be the biggest bloc of all.

Scotland and Wales have proportional representation and no-one is dismantling their NHS.  On the contrary: both countries have put the privatisation process into reverse, with NHS trusts being largely abolished and radical democratic reforms now on the agenda.  But then they have devolution.  Which, if you listen to the London parties, is something patients in Wessex just don't deserve.

All At Sea

Cornwall is bigger than Wessex. Yes or no? It depends on definitions. Land area is one thing, but there are some rights of sovereignty that extend out to the 200-mile limit of the Continental Shelf. And it’s not just sovereign states who have clearly demarcated areas of seabed to their name. So do the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. So would Cornwall and Wessex if they too had devolution. Our area takes in half the width of the Bristol Channel, from Marsland Mouth upwards, and half the width of the English Channel, from Plymouth to Portsmouth. Cornwall is everything to the west and so, it’s true, is bigger than Wessex. With marine resources that dwarf its land area.

Seabed sovereignty means that geopolitics doesn’t stop at the shoreline; Britain is not an island in these terms but shares borders with France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and certain Nordic countries, as well as Ireland. Wessex has a boundary with Brittany and Normandy (and the Channel Islands) that is longer than its boundary with the rest of England. Since those regions are also keen to develop the economic potential of their seas, there ought to be huge opportunities for hi-tech industries in Wessex to seek business there.  For their part, Cornwall and Plymouth Councils are already pushing.

Within these areas at sea, all kinds of things happen. There are large islands – Lundy, Steep Holm, Brownsea, Wight – and many smaller rocks. There are cables and pipelines in the seabed, dredging and drilling, fishing, sealife, recreation, navigation, naval exercises and, increasingly, installations to capture energy. The most optimistic estimates tell us that tidal, wave and offshore wind resources around the British Isles are sufficient to meet all our electricity needs by the end of the century (provided we use the power wisely).

To help such activities co-exist without conflict, the Marine & Coastal Access Act 2009 set up a streamlined system for planning and licensing the use of the marine environment – from below the seabed, on the seabed and up through the water column to the surface. In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland this system is part of the devolved administration’s remit. The Scottish Government has been vigorous in applying it to develop a renewables industry to take the place of North Sea oil. England has the Marine Management Organisation, based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, its plan-making work moving slowly round the coast, priority area by priority area, with parts of Wessex maybe another nine years away yet. As for the consents regime, it can take up to four years to process a Harbour Revision Order.

Things are rather different in Wales. There the Welsh Government is sorting out its environmental powers, with many soon to be vested in a single new natural resources body, and forging ahead. Those concerned with our own marine environment may need to deal with as many as five different bodies. We have the Marine Management Organisation (Newcastle), Natural England (Sheffield), the Environment Agency (Bristol), the Devon & Severn Inshore Fisheries & Conservation Authority (Brixham), and the Southern Inshore Fisheries & Conservation Authority (Poole). The next step after unifying these on a regional basis would be to devolve the Crown Estate Commissioners, the body that rents out the seabed and pockets the money for the London regime. It’s a priority for the Scottish Government. It would make sense in Wales too. And Wessex. If simply being English didn’t disqualify us, in the eyes of the decision-makers, from doing things so sensibly.

Just why so many English folk think that effective, efficient government is such a dreadful idea is something we’ll need to explore in future posts. The roots of an explanation lie in the centuries when absolute monarchs ruled the world, hanging, beheading and burning all who queried the views held by those at the top. But in 2012?

All the arguments against regions in England are deeply, deeply irrational. Regionalism is ‘un-English’? More like un-Norman. (How can Wessex be un-English?) Regionalism plays into the hands of Brussels? So we do without good government because the continentals have it? (The EU is a club of nation-states, with no enduring interest in promoting regions.) Regionalism will mean more bureaucracy? Scotland and Wales show the opposite: the reorganisation of environmental work in Wales is expected to deliver benefits worth £158 million over the next 10 years. (Regional administration in England already exists in many fields – it’s a fact of geography – but devolution leads to even more streamlined, cheaper, faster and better decision-making.)

The experience of our marine environment ought to be a warning. Never grumble about the incompetence of the London regime if you’re unwilling to work to replace it with a now proven alternative.

Happy King Alfred’s Day.

Seizing Power

Those old enough to remember the world before it went completely mad may fondly recall nationalisation as an inspirational idea incompetently implemented. Good, in theory, because it allowed democracy to be extended into the field of economics, so that choices can be determined by intelligent debate rather than by a mindless love of money. Bad, in practice, because the rules of procedure remained unchanged and were exploited in damaging ways. The same old over-centralised managements carried on with their same old haughty methods, with only nominal accountability to over-centralised ministries that answered to Parliament only when they felt it was Parliament’s business to know.

Accounting remained based on a concept of profit that precisely aligned costs and revenues, sometimes arbitrarily, with relatively little of the flexibility that might have allowed social priorities to intervene, but just enough of it to identify nationalisation with reckless loss-making. Thatcherism re-imposed the discipline of the market, refusing to allow declining industries to be run as social services. It was a logical response to the failure of the Callaghan government to balance the national books. Of course, there were strategic exceptions even then. Nuclear power and London commuter services might be lame ducks but they couldn’t be allowed to go to the wall. Coal, steel and engineering could. Which is why Swindon is now known for shops and not workshops and we buy our trains from abroad.

Thatcherism grew out of the problems that flowed from the 1973 oil crisis. It came to power in 1979 and merged seamlessly into Blairism after Labour, in 1995, ditched any remaining commitment to economic democracy. Since 2008 it has been in its death-throes. Bank bail-outs have proved that, politically, the free market is a lie. Cameron’s attempts to use the cover of austerity to drive forward privatisation of local government services and the NHS are facing determined opposition. Moves to sell-off our forest heritage have already been thwarted.

More fundamentally, the intellectual argument has been shot through the heart. The spivocracy of the free market no longer delivers choice. The choice of whether or not to sacrifice our lifestyle in order to prop up the financial class is now transparently a political one. Sadly, politics generally isn’t up to the job of responding. We have Labour continuing to champion competition and deregulation, while the case for State control of energy prices was last week made on the floor of the House of Commons by a supposedly Conservative Prime Minister.

As with railways, the pressure is building to take the energy sector back into common ownership. Maybe even democratic common ownership? There’s been none of that in energy since the last municipal gas and electricity departments were regionalised under the Attlee government. But regionalised in the usual ad hoc way. Two different sets of regional boundaries, pre-determined by agglomerating private company territories, neither set aligned with political boundaries, and in no way intended as a preparation for decentralised democratic control through elected regional bodies. If that ever was the ultimate intention, we’re still waiting.

We could, for example, have had a Wessex Electricity Board. (We did have a Wessex Electricity Company, whose expansion was cut short by nationalisation.)  It would have been difficult to achieve in the 1940s, when the priority was post-war reconstruction and ad hoc solutions ruled. But the industry was reorganised twice in the 1950s, ultimately creating a federal structure across England/Wales/Cornwall, while Scotland got its own separate institutions. The next time reorganisation was on the cards was in the 1970s, when Labour’s Tony Benn sought to centralise the industry into one vast corporation on the precedent of British Gas. Only the need for Liberal support to prolong the minority government’s life vetoed that. As for gas itself, John Osmond’s 1974 book The Centralist Enemy gives a breathtaking account of the damage done as British Gas was formed out of the regional boards. It’s the usual tale of looking to London for answers instead of coming together in defence of the region.

Then came privatisation and all that followed. With the result that the energy sector today looks nothing like what was sold from 1986 onwards. It’s been diced and sliced and reassembled into conglomerates that make what the banks did with mortgages look relatively straightforward. Sometimes electricity is generated by one company, transmitted nationally by another, distributed locally by a third, and supplied to the consumer by a fourth. Sometimes the four are completely independent of each other. At other times one company does two or more but never entirely all four. It can also do one or more aspects of gas, and some suppliers have also done other things, like double glazing. But you can’t guarantee that yours will. And as for tariffs, the free market gives you a choice of about 400, a tactic known as confusion marketing. Which applies to rail fares too.

It’s chaos, and chaos is becoming unfashionable. Chaos isn’t good any more. It wearies the brain. The public looks to politicians to cut the Gordian knot and restore simplicity and sanity. To renationalise the railways, the energy companies, the water companies, and all the rest. If Labour won’t do it, maybe the Tories will. Who knows? There’s no reason why they couldn’t. It was Disraeli who bought shares in the Suez Canal, Churchill who took a stake in what became BP and Chamberlain who nationalised coal royalties. Even Edward Heath made the U-turn, selling off State assets to start with, but bailing-out Rolls-Royce in the end. It was the Tories too who stole our local water boards off us by stealth between 1972 and 1989.

Nationalisation always finds its way onto the agenda when firms look to the taxpayer to socialise their losses, simultaneously demanding asset sales as the means to continue to privatise profits. The acid test of true intentions is what, if any, compensation is paid, and to whom. Municipal undertakings have always been nationalised on less generous terms than private ones, thanks to the convenient myth that the State is one entity, even though its parts are politically separate and can even be diametrically opposed in outlook. One of the greatest boons of devolution may be to break down this unitary thinking, so that a parish or county council is at last seen as having rights that are vested in local folk and not in the London regime.

Our own contribution must be to point out the folly of simply repeating recent history. Nationalisation is centralisation and that means more of the same. More top jobs in London. More disdain for the folk on the spot. Priorities set in London for London’s gain and our loss. One size being made to fit all. And the whole show fanfared as Britain on the rise, united once more under its natural leaders.

Scotland and Wales will be sceptical. They won’t want to play that game. And neither should we. We need to take control of our energy resources and networks for our benefit, under the guidance of a Wessex Witan beholden to no-one beyond our boundaries.

Keep Calm And Cut It Down

So Andrew Mitchell has at last resigned over his altercation with a police officer in London’s Downing Street. Those who battled in vain to defend him helpfully stressed how stressful the job of helping to run the country is just at this moment.

Then why not make it less stressful by spreading the workload? Alex Salmond looked very unstressed this week, as all his ducks (or are they grouse?) start to line up. Salmond has the fun job of running a small country well, not Mitchell’s part in running a big country badly.

The Foreign Affairs Select Committee this week at Westminster held an investigation into the foreign policy implications of Scottish independence. They were told by retired diplomat Sir Jeremy Greenstock that the global standing of an independent England of 50 million would not be appreciably different from the global standing of a United Kingdom of 60 million. (It was rather pleasing to hear him suggest that even Cornwall might want to go its own way.)

To put Sir Jeremy’s conclusion slightly differently, a unitary England would be almost as complex to run as a unitary Britain used to be. That is, for us, why England cannot remain a unitary state. Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia need to re-assert their own identities against the omni-dominance of London, ensuring that government is dispersed more widely for everyone’s benefit. Not least that of frazzled politicians. Think of it as a humanitarian act.

The Democracy Haters

“He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably – since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner – she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines.”
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Orwell’s technicians at Minitrue work for David Cameron these days, churning out press releases. Like the one that this week heralded the publication of the Growth Bill.

Now it’s sad that even the titles of legislation have become an ideological battleground. Canada recently passed a law to undo much of its federal environmental protection legislation. It called it the Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act. (The Japanese in World War Two named their empire the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in a similar attempt to deceive.) When Enterprise Zones were introduced by the Thatcherites in 1980, a Labour backbencher tried in vain to have them renamed Industrial Development Areas. Not a chance. There is no room for neutrality in the war against economic democracy.

Or against democracy, pure and simple. All the bile in the press release is directed at folk who have used commons legislation to thwart development by getting local beauty spots declared to be village greens. Reading the press release, you can visualise folk with no local connection getting up petitions to oppose the democratic will of the community and deprive young couples there of the home they’ve always dreamed of. (Ever compassionate, those housebuilders. It’s amazing they don’t give houses away for free.)

There are actually four reasons why village green legislation is ‘abused’, as the Government would have it. One is that no-one associated with the London regime gives a damn about protecting anyone’s environment. Two is that the local folk most directly affected have no other way to protect it, because even if the parish is 100% against development, it can be over-ruled by the district council. Third is that the district council, even if it agrees with the parish, can be over-ruled by Eric Pickles or one of the thugs in his employ. Fourth is that the district is forced to meet the demand for housebuilding whether it likes it or not, so its agreement to allocate a site for housing is obtained under duress.

The Tory party is deeply split over the environment. One half really believes in it. The other half can only see the £ signs. And that’s the half that’s winning and will probably go on winning because that’s where the party’s funding comes from. The other half would be better advised to join the Wessex Regionalist Party and fight for democracy. Our view is that if development enjoys genuine local support, untainted by bribes and threats, then it’s for local folk to live with the consequences whatever they may be. It’s also that calling in the big fist of London government if you can’t get your own way is not how our society should seek to deal with conflict.

Right Royal Ruination

Prince Charles likes to let his mother’s Ministers know his views. In at least 27 letters to seven Government departments in just seven months, many of the letters being “particularly frank”. To release these letters would damage the Monarchy. And there again, since we now know this, the Monarchy is damaged anyway and the clamour for release will only grow. Who’d be Attorney-General with that one to juggle? Only a Tory one like Dominic Grieve could get away with being so bold about it. Labour have always been a load of lickspittles out of fear of alarming the tabloids.

HRH faces the difficulty that he doesn’t fit any of the ideologies of the age. He’s not a self-made millionaire. He’s a millionaire thanks to the generosity of King Edward III, who died in 1377. He’s never stood for election to any public office, been given a job on merit, or won a notable award, yet he still ranks as a VIP. The Duchy of Cornwall, despite the name, has its estates mainly in Wessex. The latest capital and revenue figures on its website show the extent of the Prince’s extraordinary good luck, bestowed on a man of evidently abysmal intelligence.

‘Charlesgate’ raises many questions. We have three to add to those which the London media deem important.

1. Why is £677 million of public money managed as a private landed estate rather than by the local folk whose environment it is?

2. Is funding Charles and his hobbies the best possible use of £17.2 million a year (less tax generously donated) when local authorities in Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire – all shires with Duchy properties – are faced with making huge cuts in public services?

and

3. Is there a similar file of embarrassing letters from the Earl of Wessex?

Royal Commissions are out of favour these days but if ever one were needed to delve through the mediæval murk to the heart of the matter, a Royal Commission on the Monarchy, with power to not take no for an answer, would be a very good place to start. We’re all in it together, after all, but some are rather more in it than others.

The Challenges of Paradox

Not a Doctor Who adventure. Just a series of thoughts for the day, to keep those sociologists, economists and politicians puzzling.

1. Couples who care most about rising population have the smallest families, abdicating the future to those who care least.

2. Countries that believe privatisation will restore national pride sell their assets to the foreign governments who dispute this the most.

3. Advocates of more democracy are rarely in the majority.