Our Silent, Supine Cities

It’s been a good week’s viewing for fans of Wessex history.  On Monday the BBC ran a repeat of Michael Wood’s portrait of Alfred the Great, warming up for Neil Oliver on Tuesday, who wove a documentary about the king’s bones and their present whereabouts.  If it was supposed to be an exclusive, it didn’t work.  The press ran the story over the weekend, so it was no longer a surprise to learn that a single surviving bone excavated at Winchester’s Hyde Abbey is either Alfred’s or his son’s.  At most one bone of William the Bastard is thought to survive, in Caen, so it’s disappointing to think that Alfred has only a 50:50 chance of matching that.

There’s a slight possibility that other, scattered bones still lie beneath the site of Hyde Abbey but who will fund another excavation?  Wintonians down the centuries have had something of a love-hate relationship with their heritage, as the mixed fortunes of Hyde demonstrate.

From time to time, the city inspires a generation to really care about its past, present and future, and then slips back into its philistine ways.  We received news this month that the local civic society, the Winchester Residents’ Association, has wound up after 40 years.  Two of its stalwarts, Chris Webb and the late Alan Weeks, will be familiar to WR members as defenders not only of the city’s identity but of that of the wider Wessex region.  We can see in the demise of the Residents’ Association a metaphor for what is happening right across Wessex as a caring generation finds that there is no-one else to whom it can hand on the torch.  Thatcherism has bred a fractured and dis-spirited nation, of utilitarians contemptuous of the joy of learning and of cynics unable to believe that voting or campaigning can prevail against them.

An obituary for Alan Weeks in the Hampshire Chronicle in 2010 commented that his indefatigable campaigning had been based on a strong sense of right and wrong:  “He had a very simple view that people in Winchester must understand how important Winchester is.  He could not understand people who didn’t.”

There is no doubt that Winchester is special.  Nor is there any doubt that the threats to what makes it special have come thick and fast – motorways, urban sprawl, central area redevelopment – and while campaigners can point to some marvellous victories there have also been crushing defeats.  The water meadows at St Cross were saved from the road builders but Twyford Down was not.  It stands as a scar upon the Wessex landscape that will easily outlive humanity.  Housebuilders have deep pockets, deep enough to hire the best lawyers to take on even the London regime and over-turn its decisions if they go the ‘wrong’ way.  Barton Farm, so long the subject of citizens’ protests, is set to become a carpet of yuppy-box homes for those hurrying for the early train and another day doing despicable things in the City.  (Why do Londoners want to live in Wessex towns and cities?  Is it for any other reason than that they’ve made such an almighty mess of their own?)

If concerned residents no longer gather in their associations to express their faith in democracy, is it because local politicians have at last got the message and mended their ways?  Have the associations rendered themselves unnecessary?  Absolutely not.  Most historic cities of Winchester’s scale and vulnerability – Bath, Cambridge, Durham, Oxford, York – are protected (at least in theory) by Green Belt.  Not Winchester.  Residents still fear that the green backdrop to the city will disappear beneath housing within their lifetimes.  The city and county councils have their orders from London to build, build, build and the carrots and sticks are such that the orders must be obeyed.  Local opinion is to be fobbed off, not followed.

Local politics is the usual Tory/LibDem contest that is no real contest at all.  (The two parties are evenly matched on the current city council.)  Labour won the Parliamentary seat once, in 1945, to universal surprise (though having Eastleigh’s industrial workers helped in those days), losing it again five years later.  Wintonians have had three opportunities to elect a Wessex Regionalist MP and taken none.  Decades of conditioning have persuaded many that they are part of a London-leaning ‘South East’ rather than of Wessex.  Occasionally, conversations will start up in the city’s pubs about how Wessex could do with Home Rule.  Great idea.  Who’s going to organise it?  Oh, someone else.  Someone less busy.

And in the absence of Home Rule, Winchester is slowly ground away, made uniform with every other dormitory town within reasonable distance of London Waterloo.  Its fields are replaced by houses; its historic buildings are replaced by flats; its identity, instead of being cherished, is subverted for profit.

Winchester’s bus station, a city landmark for generations, is due to close to make way for the retail-led Silver Hill redevelopment.  The developers promised a replacement.  Now the economics suggests that it will be deleted from the scheme in order to preserve the latter’s viability.  We can see in Salisbury how that works.  Salisbury’s bus station closed this month, the buses were evicted and passengers now queue at bus shelters set up in the mediæval streets.  On pavements too narrow for the flow of pedestrians to pass comfortably behind them.

The fate of the bus stations is a sign of the times.  Privatisation of profits, including those from redevelopment.  Socialisation of losses, and of the expense involved in providing somewhere for the buses to park.  Andover and Bournemouth are determined to build new bus stations.  Clearly, there are still some who care, but how to motivate the rest?

The decline of collective responsibility happens because we accept a model of economics and politics that decrees that the community doesn’t matter.  That there is no such thing as society.  That government must help everyone to achieve their ambitions for their own lives, not those of others.  That government, be it in the form of bigger unitary councils, elected mayors, or straightforward regulatory capture through ‘partnerships’, exists to oil the wheels of commerce and certainly not to provide the context for civic virtue.  It’s tragic that Salisbury, Winchester and so many other places in Wessex are being ruined, often irreparably, but by our inaction we signal that it’s our choice.  And who in our individualistic, inward-looking world will dare argue against that?

The Tyranny of Growth

“The substance of the eminent Socialist gentleman's speech is that making a profit is a sin, but it is my belief that the real sin is taking a loss.”
Sir Winston Churchill

What if the ‘real sin’ is neither, but to engage in a particular economic activity in the first place?  Is it a sin to leave the rainforest alone, or is it ecocide to destroy it?

Conventional economics is not neutral about the desirability of economic activity.  It places no limit to the extent of the economy.  Nor does conventional politics.  The centuries-old battle of ideas between laissez-faire and State intervention is over which can achieve the most growth in the shortest time at the lowest cost.

Is growth necessary?  If growth is zero, the same quantity of goods and services is constantly being brought into being, so provided the workforce to produce them and the population to consume them also remain constant, no-one is any worse off than before.  The lack of growth causes panic only because so many decisions are based on the idea that growth will continue, and so it must continue.  In this game, the only options for those in control of the economic process are to increase their income through attacking the environment (growth) or through attacking society (austerity).  Just stopping the treadmill is unthinkable.

In reality, the model has to be modified in a number of ways.  Population is not constant: even within a constant total there will be ongoing changes in the age structure that affect the size of the working population.  Natural resource costs are not constant either: as the energy cost of accessing resources increases, so does the overall cost even of maintaining a constant output of goods and services.  The implications are that we ought to be debating what kind of society we wish to see in the future, and within what limits, rather than blindly following the assumption that we can have more of everything yet lose nothing important in the process.

Public policy, which is well-placed to uphold the holistic view that the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment and not the other way round, is increasingly not up to the job of framing that rounded debate.  The problem of regulatory capture is becoming acute, with even the most environmental of national agencies, such as English Heritage and Natural England, now seeing their remits redefined to support development at pretty much any cost.  Massive damage is happening, but we are assured either that we are wrong to perceive it as negative at all or that the benefits outweigh the harm.  Either way, it is our values and priorities that are attacked as the ‘problem’, not the damage that is being done to them.

There is no clear mandate from the electorate for governments to implement a totalitarian liberal agenda – one that marginalises any view that there is more to life than consumption – yet that agenda is being rolled out anyway.  The idea that the State should promote pro-growth policies is an old one, but one previously balanced by others.  One traditional conception of the State is as neutral adjudicator between competing interests.  It is a role that cannot be fulfilled if the State has repeatedly thrown in its lot with one side.

Libertarians may point out the extent to which fiscal considerations compel the State to back the ‘wealth creators’, to the detriment of others, in order to go on funding its spending commitments.  It is certainly worth asking if the UK is living beyond its means precisely because it is the UK.  Radical decentralisation – and even independence in some areas – could cut the cost of government substantially by reducing distances between the decision-makers and their decisions, as well as by curbing unproductive military expenditure.  (Libertarians in fact tend to be quite protective of the coercive forces of the State: they’ll happily pay for the security of others’ persons and property, just not their education or healthcare.)  But radical decentralisation also risks empowering those with a democratic, anti-growth agenda, potentially placing barriers in the path of universal growth, and so has many enemies.

Research suggests that large industries are very good at capturing large governments and then using them in ways that are detrimental to local areas that lack the constitutional power to resist.  The much more robust response to the financial crisis in Iceland as compared with that in the UK – or the EU generally – illustrates the point.  The reverse may also be true – that small governments are vulnerable to capture by small industries concentrated in small areas.  The domination of local councils in seaside resorts by hoteliers and restaurateurs is a familiar theme in Wessex.  There seems much less reason, however, to suggest that this isn’t what local voters want.  A balance seems most likely to be achieved where there is a diversity of industries, in terms of both range and scale, such as might be expected at the regional level or in areas not dominated by one sector that is a major source of public revenue.

Other means of limiting regulatory capture include appointing staff with a public or voluntary sector background in preference to those with a business background.  The whole ‘revolving door’ culture which has been assiduously cultivated over the past 35 years has been fatal to perceptions of integrity but is the inevitable consequence of disregarding the need for government to remain neutral when dealing with commercial interests.  ‘Experience of the real world’ isn’t helpful if all that is learnt is the fine art of corruption.  How are politicians to rely on impartial advice that is potentially tainted, by past connections or future prospects?  The rebuilding of integrity in public administration is as important as devolution itself in creating the kind of Wessex we wish to see.  Why not have more of a ‘them’ and ‘us’ relationship between business and government?  It’s a whole lot healthier, because it isn’t the job of government to help the private sector.  It’s the job of government to govern.

One other side-effect of the revolving door culture has been the corruption of the language, so that the democratic sector now sees itself as serving ‘customers’ (rather than patients, students, arrestees and so on).  The implication is that all relationships can be, and ought to be, reduced to cash, which in turn reinforces the idea that life is economics and economics alone.  The democratic sector needs to be different in its whole outlook from the commercial sector, precisely because its difference is its justification.  Making things ‘more businesslike’ can be a catchy way of saying that there should be a constant search for efficiency but take the analogy too far and the organisation ends up totally efficient but totally ineffective.

Last month, the Leader of Blaby District Council, in Mercia, took the astonishing step of describing himself as naïve in believing his party’s policy on localism, as it had been expressed in opposition.  Yet he’s still a member of that party.  To overthrow the tyranny of growth before it wipes out every decent human value requires a whole range of actions.  Mass resignations from the London parties, of course.  But also the replacement of political structures that privilege the least attractive economic interests with new structures that place decision-making beyond their grasp.  That revolution starts in the mind, with a simple substitution of loyalty to Wessex for a worn-out loyalty to London that has been comprehensively betrayed.

Wise Men (and Women) From The East?

January’s issue of BBC History Magazine includes an interview with Professor Linda Colley, described by Wikipedia as “a historian of Britain, empire and nationalism”.  It’s a very revealing article, to the extent that Colley articulates what are the common, unconscious prejudices of the metropolitan chattering classes – the MCCs – towards the past, present and future of these islands.  In 1999, when she held a post at the London School of Economics, Colley was one of several speakers invited by the Blairs to deliver a Millennium Lecture at 10 Downing Street.  This talk, Britishness in the 21st Century, was subsequently widely referenced by the British Council and other mouthpieces of the regime.

If we believe her latest piece, “London has been influential in lots of different ways, some of which have been benign: it does continue to pump a lot of money into the economy, for instance”.  It’s astonishing that someone as ignorant of the facts as Colley can achieve the influential position she holds.  London is habitually presented as the UK’s cornucopia, through comparing its contribution to tax revenues against a highly selective reckoning of money spent there specifically for its benefit.  Money spent there that is deemed, however questionably, to be for the benefit of the whole UK is excluded from the calculation. 

A historian of empire ought, one would think, to be more inquiring about how London’s wealth is amassed and at whose expense, since it mostly doesn’t come from growing or making things locally.  In double-entry terms, most of the money pumped into the economy is made up to correspond to an equivalent amount of misery inflicted, here or elsewhere.  The systematic eradication of the City of London would undoubtedly be the greatest advance in human freedom since the abolition of the slave trade.

While Colley refuses to be drawn on the outcome of next year’s Scottish referendum, her contribution does outline some ways in which Britishness might mount a recovery.  The three-headed hydra we shall need to slay comprises federalism, a written constitution, and a charter of UK rights.  Expect to hear all three argued to death by the MCCs over the coming years as a means of keeping real change well off the agenda.

We have explained before why federalism cannot work to turn an unequal union into an equal one.  There’s no point in labouring the numbers.  The word has a deceptively gentle ring to it, an air of fairness drawn from other contexts where federalism does work because the facts of geography are favourable to it.  It can’t make a silk purse out of the pig’s ear that the UK has always been.

How about a written constitution?  For England, it might work, as might a federal union of English regions (though better still a confederal one).  So it might too for the other nations of these islands, individually, as sovereign states.  What good could it do the UK?  To demand a written constitution in advance of sorting out the territorial power relationships is profoundly reactionary.

An unwritten constitution is fluid, allowing devolution to be expanded relatively easily as compared to getting a constitutional amendment passed.  The purpose of a written constitution – in the UK context – is to make constitutional change more difficult, especially through requiring the consent of the whole UK to any change.  So Scotland wants devo-max?  Fine, but only if the UK’s English majority agrees.  A written constitution, just like federalism, is more likely to fan the fires of separatism than leaving well alone.  It will make what could be an amicable dissolution into a bitter and even violent break-up if one part of the UK seeks to thwart the ambitions of another for self-government.  Those who advocate it have learnt nothing from Irish Home Rule save how to repeat the process in as horrible a manner as possible.

A charter of UK rights?  Yawn.  Just like a written constitution, this is a device to kick the debate into the long grass.  Who, honestly, is going to spend years sifting through all the citizens’ tweets of what they’d like included?  We can be sure that community rights to self-government won’t be allowed through.  The London regime is obsessed with individual rights and nothing else because it is local communities, united in indignation, that pose a threat to its dominance.  Individuals are no threat at all.  They can be repeatedly assured of how valued they are, even as everything they value around them is torn apart for profit.  (And, in law, private corporations, remember, are people too, with the same inhuman rights as everyone else but with bigger legal teams to enforce them.)  Eliminating every intermediate identity between the State and the individual is the essence of the still-dominant Jacobin worldview.  But there is more to the project even than that.  It isn’t just a device to avoid discussing the realities of property and power in a London-dominated island, and maybe entrench them further.  It’s also a device to avoid questioning what’s so special about the UK that it has to be the fundamental focus of that project.

The Coalition has wasted considerable resources on setting up a commission to look into a UK Bill of Rights and has received some interesting rebuffs.  One is to ask why the devolved areas can’t have their own.  Scotland has its own legal system, one very different from English common law.  Wales has its language issue.  Northern Ireland lives with sectarian nuances that may suggest different requirements from a charter that will succeed in keeping the peace there.  And if the UK is too big to be meaningful as the maker of rights, might it also be too small?  If we must have rights above the level of the basic nation, why not have rights that are European or universal?  What is it that the UK dimension adds?  What is it that we are supposed to all have in common that separates us from the rest of humanity?  What is the tradition appealed to in defining a ‘UK right’, ‘British values’, or whatever other piece of chauvinistic nonsense happens to be doing the rounds?

One such tradition could be that stodgy constitutionalism that is forever looking around for ways to make the ruling class do what is theoretically their job instead of ways to abolish them.  England, in particular, is awash with wannabe Wat Tylers waving Magna Carta and demanding the redress of grievances instead of questioning the basis of central authority itself.  Constitutional rights are the enemy of democratic choice.  In placing certain things beyond normal debate they fossilise into a dictatorship of the dead.  Though all dressed up as ‘de-politicising’ the issue, it’s actually all about de-democratising it.  Labour seem particularly keen on this as a means of retaining power even when out of power.  We don’t need ‘rights’, by definition limited.  We need freedom, bounded only by the freedom of others.  Should we respect the accumulated mess that is the constitutional status quo and further sanctify it, simply because we are assured that where we are is broadly speaking a good place to be?  Do we not know that starting from where we are assured that we are (even when we are not) is the surest way of being persuaded essentially to stay put?

Professor Colley offers no immediate answers to any of these questions.  Nor can anyone among the MCCs.  For all their accumulated qualifications, they simply cannot see that the London-based system of decision-making is not benign, never has been and cannot be made to be.  Their belief in the self-evident goodness of the UK, of the micro-management of Wessex towns and villages from London, is so entrenched that they will do everything in their power to suffocate any other way of debating the issues.  Instead, we must discuss how to make everyone British again, deferential to London, respectful of the wisdom and thankful for the gifts coming to Wessex from the mighty east.  Sorry to spoil your dinner party, chaps and chapettes, but that record is well and truly broken.

Tarzan’s Monkey Cage

Localism.  What does it mean?  It seems to mean that local communities can decide whatever they like but if they ever make the wrong decision, as judged from London, they will be severely punished for doing so.  And will know that they jolly well deserve it too.

Who’s a naughty community then?  George Osborne announced yesterday – see 2.209 in the Autumn Statement – some changes to the New Homes Bonus.  That’s the bribe, paid by London, paid for out of all our taxes, paid to local councils for the number of new homes built each year in their area.  Until now, the bribe has been paid even where the homes are approved not by the council but on appeal by the London regime.  How was that loophole missed?  Never mind, now the bribe will not be paid where the London regime itself gave the permission, in the teeth of local opposition.  It will keep the money (which ultimately, remember, is our money).

The community, who may have spent thousands fighting the appeal to save some treasured local environment, will now gain no financial benefit from the houses imposed upon them.  On the contrary, they will have to pay all the more from their own resources for the extra services required to meet needs generated by the new development.  Councillors will have to think twice, then twice again, before turning down proposals, even where the case for refusal is strong, because appeal decisions are entirely unpredictable.  Everything hinges on how the Planning Inspector handling the appeal is feeling.

In Margaret Thatcher’s first Cabinet, the post of Environment Secretary was held by Michael Heseltine, nicknamed ‘Tarzan’ on account of his trademark mane of blond hair.  Today aged 80, Lord Heseltine is still making waves.

In a series of speeches to local leaders this year he has argued that “We must not wait for ‘what London wants us to do’… we need a peasants' revolt and we need local people to argue their case and fight the dominance of London…  If you want your power back you are in a battle and you don’t win battles by cosying up to the enemy”, warning that there is a “war going on in government about this whole localism agenda”:

“There's an inevitable battle going on in Whitehall.  There are those trying to protect their own interests.  So frankly, you'd better start protecting yours.  Lobby your MPs, and use the local and national media to drive your campaign.  This is not about giving in gently, which local communities have done for far too long.  You have to go out there and fight for it.”

Whenever Heseltine speaks or writes, there’s always a very firm agenda, evident or hidden.  Elected mayors.  City regions.  HS2.  It could be anything, and it isn’t always an agenda we’d endorse.  But it’s not impossible that Heseltine is sincere in believing that many more decisions could be made locally and regionally instead of centrally.  He may not entirely have lost touch with the idea that such decisions should be democratic ones, though that is not something he appears willing to champion.  As an ex-minister, he certainly knows what he’s dealing with in taking on the centre:

“If you let those monkeys loose they will cock it up – that’s what they [the Government] think.”

Less than a century ago, women were denied representation in Parliament.  It was argued that their brains weren’t up to handling complex political issues.  In other parts of the world, a franchise restricted by skin colour was the norm until even more recently.  Today these viewpoints are considered barbarous and indefensible by most of the world.

Yet the London regime is still able to over-ride democratically expressed local opinion just because it feels like it.  Just because it deems the locals incapable of making the right decisions on what their community needs and how to go about providing it.  Just because the decisions made don’t suit the whims of maxed-out growth junkies in London.  In a hundred years from now, the question will surely be why we put up with it for so long.  Why did we tolerate civil servants coming to our towns and villages to inquire into local decisions and reverse them?  Why didn’t we just toss the blighters onto the nearest muckheap like a free folk with any lingering self-respect would have done?

Not only didn’t we do it.  We did much less than that.  We actually voted for the London parties to carry on treating us as monkeys.  We went on chattering politely to them instead of recognising them as the deadly enemy they really are.  We fondly imagined that the bars of the cage were there to protect us when all they did was deny us the freedom to shape the future of our communities for ourselves.

Distant Thunder

"We have just received a document which has been given to the world under the title of a ‘Statement of Certain Scottish Grievances’…  The two most important heads of complaint are, that a revenue of £5,764,804, raised in Scotland, is transmitted to England and disbursed for Imperial purposes, and that the representation of Scotland is unfairly small as compared with that of England…  We would venture to suggest to the consideration of our Scotch friends the following two points:–  1.  Does Scotland contribute more than her fair share of the public revenue?  2.  Is the revenue disbursed in the wisest way for the general advantage of all portions of the empire?  If this be not so, no doubt it is the duty of every member – be he Scotch, English, or Irish – to raise the question in Parliament.  So, again, with regard to Parliamentary representation – the Scotch are dissatisfied with the present arrangement.  We share their dissatisfaction.  We are of opinion that the representation on this side of the Tweed is in an unsound condition, and it is our full intention to endeavour, by constitutional means, to get the inequalities redressed.  But does this constitute a reason for threatening to resolve ourselves once more into the kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, and what not?...  A politician who recommended such a course for the adoption of a minority would be justly deemed a fit subject for Bedlam; and yet, here we find a number of our Scotch friends – who are old enough to know better – affixing their signatures to a parcel of trash about Bannockburn and sticks of sulphur of which a schoolboy in his calmer moments might feel ashamed."

It’s an editorial from The Times (a London newspaper).  It could have been written yesterday.  Or even tomorrow.  It’s actually from the issue dated 7th July 1853.

Here’s another item from that newspaper, this time reporting a Commons debate on Irish Home Rule, held on 2nd July 1874.  J.A. Roebuck was first elected to Parliament for Bath, in 1832, when he was among the most radical of the radicals, even leading the campaign in 1834 to free the Tolpuddle Martyrs.  By 1874, now representing Sheffield, he was among the most reactionary of the reactionaries:

“Mr Roebuck said he wanted before he left the House to express his opinions upon this great question…  He had to ask himself whether this proposition to give a limited Parliament to Ireland was for the benefit of the whole United Kingdom.  The arguments that had been used in support of this motion were arguments which, if carried to their natural and logical conclusion, would call back the kingdom of Wessex and re-establish the Heptarchy.  That was the real effect of the arguments of hon. gentlemen who had talked about Nationality... he called upon hon. gentlemen who represented Ireland to desist from talking about a fantastic Irish Nationality and calmly to consider this question in the large and generous spirit in which he wished to address himself to it.”

The point common to Roebuck and the editor of The Times is that constitutional change produces a domino effect.  Before you start, it helps to know where you’ll end up.  The Irish Home Rule debates inspired the first faint movements for Home Rule in Scotland and Wales.  It was the breakthroughs by Scottish and Welsh nationalists in the 1960s and 1970s that inspired our own founding.  Suppose England does become an independent state, shorn of its Celtic dependencies.  What sort of England should it be?  A mini-UK, continually sucking power, wealth and talent to London?  Or an England with strong regional institutions to hold that trend in check?

The frequent response from those in England is that events among our neighbours have no effect upon us.  It’s all put down to being part of the English character, which it is, but only in the sense that the English seem to have given up on politics in the belief that in our top-down society we have no ability to change anything.  (We don’t, which is why we need to build our own.)  A history of our future might reveal that our surroundings mattered quite a lot.  Joining the EU has been hugely beneficial in exposing English thought to ideas previously judged unsound by the London regime, ideas like popular sovereignty and subsidiarity.  That the EU itself does little to honour these ideas is not the point; the point is that our own thoughts now have other tracks to follow than those laid down by ever-suspicious Normans and Tudors.  Devolution, or even independence, will go on surprising us too.  Without leaving our own island, we can go and see things being done differently, then come home and ask ourselves why we can’t equally be constructing a new society.

One recurrent theme in politics is the divide between the revolutionaries and the gradualists, between those who believe that nothing will change until everything changes and those who believe that concessions can be wrung, and wrung to the point where a real transformation is clearly visible.  In one sense, it’s a false distinction, since only a movement that has gradually built itself up is in a position to launch revolutionary change.  The real distinction is perhaps between those who push on to the goal and those who pause half way.  Always bearing in mind, of course, that the goal itself may be changing over time as the context for your community’s life also changes.

Reading the Scottish Government’s White Paper on independence, it’s not hard to see it as a claim that, while everything is capable of changing, nothing will actually change very much.  Many more decisions will be made in Scotland, but a host of cross-border arrangements will remain in place.  Scots will still be able to watch EastEnders and Doctor Who.  Independence will deliver all of the positives that are claimed for it, while the cross-border arrangements will mitigate all of the negatives to the point that no-one will think them worth noticing.  It all sounds so reasonable that you wonder why it hasn’t happened already.

It very well might be as reasonable as it sounds, a simplification of our constitutional architecture that will benefit both sides of the border.  A long-overdue unbundling that will turn the anomaly that is Scotland within the Union into one part of a grown-up family of nations with enduring social ties.  No-one outside the far Right will argue today that the Republic of Ireland should re-join the UK.  One reason for that is not its treasured independence but the continued diluting of it where this makes sense: all those cross-border arrangements that allow life to go on without unnecessary hassle.  Some are quite unexpected: the Department for Transport in London remains partly responsible for lighthouses around the whole of Ireland, 91 years after the south left the UK.  Attempts to alter this following the Good Friday Agreement have been abandoned; the legal complexities are just too great.  Transitional arrangements for Scottish independence may be equally complex, and equally not as transitional as they first appear.

Independence then is NOT the final step if what you seek is total separation.  But why would you seek that extreme solution, if you can make your own decisions as a sovereign entity but still be on good terms with the neighbours?  It’s not just a question for the Scots.  It’s a question for us too.  It’s a question for those who say that England can’t be regionalised, nor can local self-government be constitutionally guaranteed, because the fruits of sovereignty are indivisible.  It’s centralism or nothing; London power or nationalist revolution.  Only if you insist.

In 1956, the party that we (among others) can claim as our predecessor, Common Wealth, published Our Three Nations jointly with Plaid Cymru and the SNP.  Besides names familiar to WR members, like John Banks and Douglas Stuckey, the authors included names familiar on a wider stage such as Gwynfor Evans and Robert McIntyre.  (Despite the title, O3N is one of the first books to acknowledge the possibility of autonomy for Cornwall, as well as for the English regions.)  We can hardly fail to wish Scotland luck as it first debates, then judges how much autonomy it currently requires.

The Victorians were often a far-sighted lot.  They recognised that the dispersal of decision-making would alter the character of these islands irrevocably.  They were right to predict that, but quite wrong to fear it.  The post-imperial era will only truly begin when power returns to where the story began.  When it returns to Wessex.

Receiving The Water Bill

DEFRA – to some cynics the Department for Eliminating Farming and Rural Activity – is piloting a Bill through the Westminster Parliament to change how the water and sewerage industry is regulated.

It tells us that “privatisation of the water industry has been successful in attracting over £116 billion of investment… Without this investment, water companies would need to collect all of the money needed to upgrade the infrastructure from their customers, which would make bills around a third higher than they currently are.  Water companies would also have to collect money from customers in the year that they spend it on a ‘pay as you go’ basis, which would make bills more volatile from year to year.  The Government places a high priority on ensuring that the water sector continues to remain attractive to investors…  We need to encourage greater innovation and efficiencies alongside this investment, and to deliver it without undermining the reputation for stable regulation which attracts investors to the sector.”

What utter rubbish!  What economic illiteracy!  Ever wondered how Victorian councils funded all those mighty civil engineering works?  You know the ones – the reservoirs, the aqueducts and the pipelines – that bring water from the hills to the cities, and which now grease the sovereign wealth funds of assorted dictatorships.  They didn’t do it by putting the whole cost onto one year’s rates bill.  They did it through access to capital markets, just as the water companies do now.  They issued bonds secured on the rates for however many years ahead were needed to pay off the debt.  After that, the profits were their own, though some deliberately didn’t think in terms of maximising profits: cheap, clean water was deemed its own justification.  That was in the days when pluralism ruled, the days before totalitarian liberalism intervened to order that every alternative to naked market forces must be shut down.  Except for those clothed in a highly lucrative and stable regulatory regime.

So today it seems the key question is no longer what needs to be done to maximise community benefit.  The key question is how investors can be attracted by having the scent of helpless consumers’ money waved before their nostrils by a succession of tarts posing as governments.  Attracted indeed to take part in what has been aptly termed ‘the tollbooth economy’, one in which the essentials of life are parcelled out among private monopolies.  It’s one where investors are no longer willing to lend to public authorities for a fixed return if instead they can have their own direct slice of the action, and have the poodle politicians to deliver it to them.

Wessex has ten main water suppliers, which are, from the Tamar eastwards, as follows:

·        South West Water (based in Exeter) – once publicly owned, now part of Pennon Group plc

·        Wessex Water (Bath) – once publicly owned, now part of the Malaysian group YTL

·        Bristol Water (Bristol) – always privately owned, currently owned by Capstone Infrastructure (a Canadian investment trust), the Catalan group Agbar (itself partly French-owned) and the Japanese group Itochu

·        Severn Trent Water (Coventry) – once publicly owned, now a public limited company

·        Thames Water (Reading) – once publicly owned, now owned by the Australian-based consortium Kemble Water (some of the shares in which are owned by the governments of Abu Dhabi and China)

·        Sembcorp Bournemouth Water (Bournemouth) – always privately owned, currently part of the Singaporean group Sembcorp

·        Cholderton & District Water (Cholderton) – always privately owned by the Stephens family as part of the Cholderton Estate

·        Southern Water (Worthing) – once publicly owned, now owned by the investor and pension fund consortium Greensands Investments

·        Portsmouth Water (Havant) – always privately owned, now a private limited company

·        South East Water (Snodland) – always privately owned, currently owned by Australian and Canadian investment funds

Why is there more private ownership than there ever used to be, and why is water now such an attractive and secure investment, especially for foreign investors?  Because we have a gutless State that expects our loyalty yet will not exercise its duty to provide and protect the framework of community life.  Its duty now is to the owners of capital and no-one else.  Concerns about financial engineering at the heart of the water industry go unheeded.

This should come as no surprise, given that the British State is irrevocably captured by the City of London.  Every aspect of potential policy is judged by whether or not the City benefits.  The City’s trade is no longer in facts but in fictions.  Without laws and the power of force to compel obedience to them, its wealth, and therefore the standing of the whole British economy, is as fleeting as the blips on its computer screens.  One reason why we as a party support deep cuts in the military budget is because we fear that the military today have no real role in the defence of the realm but exist mainly to enforce the City’s writ at home and abroad.  Third World regimes that seek to repossess their common wealth for the benefit of their own folk will not be tolerated.  (Think Suez.  Think Mossadegh.)  It can’t be allowed, not least because that sort of thing might even encourage us to do the same.

There are some superficially good bits to the Water Bill that will increase the supply to Wessex with minimal effort.  It will make it easier for those with private water supplies – farmers and industrialists – to feed the surplus into the public supply.  It will also make it easier for water companies to trade bulk supplies across their boundaries.  Not exactly a national water grid – which isn’t really practical – but a poor man’s version perhaps.  It’s not the solution because it’s not addressing the real problem.  We’ve noted before that Wessex is running out of water, for domestic and for industrial consumption.  The chalklands are being sucked dry and that’s because nothing must stand in the way of London overspill housing.  That’s the real problem we aren’t allowed to mention.

These measures at the margins aren’t going to transform the industry because they won’t alter the fact that the distribution network is a natural monopoly.  No competitor is going to lay a whole new set of water mains.  As with electricity, gas, telecommunications and railways, somebody owns and operates the network while being forced by the regulator to allow others access to it for a fee.  Those others can be little more than trading and billing operations, with a foreign call centre attached.  They don’t actually get their hands dirty at all.

So if there’s no real competition in the provision of real services, what’s the benefit to the consumer?  There isn’t one: it’s a tollbooth economy.  Indeed, in the water industry there is what is called the ‘special merger regime’, which means that even if a merger offers clear cost advantages to the consumer it might still not be allowed, if the number of companies would fall below that needed for comparison purposes if the regulator is to have any idea of what is really going on.

Public provision would be cheaper, if only the democratic sector would allow itself to have access to capital.  To do that requires a model of State action that is now all but illegal under international law.  The laws are made by the glove puppets of private capital, with or without public consent.  In politics, you can have any colour, it seems, as long as it’s blue.  The ongoing theft of public assets is legal; the repossession of private ones therefore requires first a revolution of the mind.

So the answer is?  Solidarity.  Among decentralists.  It isn’t to fight private centralism with public centralism on the Soviet or Labour model.  It isn’t to sneer at nationalists in Scotland or Catalonia for not seeing the ‘big picture’ and to predict their imminent demise at the hands of global finance.  It’s to recognise how they fit into the big picture, like every other bit of the jigsaw of resistance.  It’s to support local and regional initiatives wherever they may be, and never to lift a finger in defence of the property claims of private corporations.  (They’ve had their chance and they’ve abused it shamelessly.)  It’s to demand not the dissolution of the EU for the benefit of the liberal imperialist nation-states but its transformation into a true Europe of the regions, where subsidiarity really does what it says on the tin.  There’s no shortage of solutions, and never has been, only a shortage of mainstream politicians willing to argue for them.

Scotland and Wales, along with the Crown Dependencies, are part of the seedbank of alternative economic models.  Some better than others, no doubt, but all different from the One Solution imposed throughout the English regions whether we like it or not.

Welsh Water, though initially privatised along with the rest, is now owned by a not-for-profit company.  Scottish Water has never been privatised, despite Gordon Brown’s attempts to put it on the sales list to fund his spending habit.  Scotland’s independence White Paper issues a call for Royal Mail in Scotland to be returned to public ownership.  Scotland’s canals have never left, while those in England & Wales now have.  The Coalition plans to privatise English Heritage, judging conservation to be no part of the core functions of government.  Alex Salmond and his colleagues could hardly be clearer that they won’t be following suit: “This Government does not measure the worth of culture and heritage solely in money – we value culture and heritage precisely because they embody our heart and soul, and our essence."  It’s a different world.  Everything in England that ought to be cherished is regarded instead as a resource to be exploited, preferably by foreign capital; England itself is viewed as nothing more than a base for economic and military aggression.

Why the difference?  It comes down to the fact that in the Celtic fringe the home State and the community are viewed as complementary, not as sworn enemies.  In Scotland’s governance, the contribution of civil society is welcomed as that of a critical friend.  In England’s governance, the contribution of civil society is welcomed as that of an abused domestic servant, carrying the burden of ‘the Big Society’ while the toffs trouser the cash that is meant to pay for the services our government used to provide.

The problem is that it isn’t ‘our’ government and never has been.  The mixed economy and the welfare state were a fleeting illusion in England because England isn’t English.  England is Norman.  Scotland’s constitutional bedrock is the sovereignty of the people.  England’s is that the Crown in Parliament can do no wrong.  It can be held to account only in accordance with concessions it has chosen to make.  Magna Carta doesn’t apply in Scotland because it was never needed there.  It is applauded in England only because the English are the most conquered subjects of all.

Hope lies in the regions, not in London.  The political and economic elites that govern the UK from London are completely interchangeable through the revolving door of jobs and directorships.  That system cannot be taken over.  Labour tried, and failed so miserably that it was Labour that was captured instead.  Increasingly, those in Scotland and Wales now recognise that.  We need to follow them into making our own decisions.  To be English, rather than simply Anglo-Norman, is not to dream of occupying the citadels of power but to deny them the legitimacy they crave.  It is to build the regional alternative, to link up with the technicians and the administrators, with those who are sick of the bankers and the lawyers, with all those who can envisage a better way.

Before nationalisation, the electricity industry included companies with some rather interesting names: the Cornwall Electric Power Company, the East Anglian Electric Supply Company and the Wessex Electricity Company.  In water, there was the Wessex Water Board, later subsumed into the Wessex Water Authority.  In telecommunications, Post Office Telephones had a South-Western Region that stretched as far east as Southampton.  In radio and television, the BBC’s West Region once did the same.  And we once had Wessex Trains.  Wessex has had so many opportunities to get it right, to form a joined-up, self-reliant region within a free England and a co-operative Europe at peace with itself and the world.  So many opportunities.  And every one of them thrown away to take up again the London yoke.  The message needs to be hammered home again and again: if you can’t join them (and you can’t, without betraying all around you), then beat them.

Write Lines

Although politicians from the London parties routinely associate the words ‘education’ and ‘choice’, the thing most striking about their policies is that they offer the electorate no choice at all.  Would you guess, from following the roll-out of academies and free schools, the constant undermining of local democratic choice, which party was in power?  The transition from Labourtory to Torylabour is seamless.

(Note, however, that despite this unanimity there are no academies or free schools in Wales, where education policy is devolved.  Welsh Labour and UK Labour are increasingly different parties.  The choices offered therefore are not determined by what the party is called but by the milieu in which it operates, in Labour’s case by whether it has a nationalist rival to keep it true to its roots.  An interesting lesson for Wessex!)

The parties are equally united in their enthusiasm for more taxpayer-funded faith schools, notwithstanding the recent scandal in Mercia that was absolutely predictable and irrespective of whether it is the faith element that is actually key to standards.  On Michael Gove’s watch, a deal with the Church of England will allow it to incorporate former community schools with no religious character into its Diocesan Academy Chains, with bishops having the power to appoint governors.  The non-religious choice is being squeezed out as provision is outsourced.  In our rural areas, where the CofE dominates primary provision, choice doesn’t exist and never has.

Does the faux-Maoist mantra of constant revolution in the classroom and the abdication of any common responsibility chime with public opinion any more than the similar churning of the NHS?  No, it doesn’t.  According to a YouGov poll recently, only a third of the adult population approves of State funding for faith schools; nearly half actively disapproves.  Meanwhile, free schools are being desperately flogged.  Planning rules have been ripped up, to allow children to be herded into redundant cinemas, factories and prisons, with local communities barred from commenting on anything besides noise and traffic.  All because local communities, through their councils, might otherwise sabotage the Coalition’s flagship policy.  So if free schools can’t pass the local democracy test, let’s not have local democracy.

Here’s a radical decentralist alternative.  One, abolish Gove’s job, along with his entire department.  Two, devolve all schools spending to councils.  Three, let them make every decision that cannot be made at the level of the school itself.  Decisions such as planning and building new schools in line with population changes, schools they are currently banned from initiating, as totalitarian liberalism insists they be.  Or making provision for area-wide services, such as educational psychology, the music service and, where cost-effective, school meals and transport.  Heads should be able to find better things to do than waste their time juggling budgets for outside contractors.  Four, tell the evangelical bishops and the misogynist imams to fund their own hobbies henceforth unless they can fairly win control of their council first.  Five, scrap academies, free schools and all other experiments in segregationist child abuse and reinstate community-accountable education.  Six, for a proper level playing field, give all schools the same freedoms that these cotton-wooled cuckoos enjoy.  And above all, seven, remind voters that the way to get rid of a bad Labour council with destructive education policies isn’t to transfer all its powers to a bad Tory minister in London.  It’s to vote for real change.

It was always predicted that centralisation would prove too unwieldy to work and last week, with half of all secondary schools now rebranded as academies, Gove had to fess up.  The idea of running tens of thousands of schools directly from Whitehall has been abandoned.  It will be replaced by eight regional bodies, to be known as ‘Headteacher Boards’ (HTBs).  What’s the betting that there’ll be a ‘South West’ and a ‘South East’?  And what happens to the viability of each HTB if the density of academies / free schools versus traditional arrangements varies from region to region according to what’s popular locally?  You know, that choice thing.

Two black marks for the price of one.  Not just an unaccountable, self-regulating firewall of a bureaucracy to save the Education Secretary’s skin when the wheels finally come off the three-party liberal bandwagon.  Worse than that.  One that is neither central nor local but, yes, regional.  How off-message can you be?  Why, even readers of the Torygraph are bemused by the ramifications.  What does the future now hold for Gove?  Detention, or expulsion?  We know what report we’d like to write.