Green as Gravel

Natalie Bennett, Leader of the Green Party in England & Wales (& Cornwall) was one of the panel on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions? this week.  To the amazement of anyone concerned about the ecological crisis we face, she launched into an impassioned defence of massive urban development and a rejection of those measures that might keep population growth within locally acceptable bounds.

So, what’s the Green Party for?  Why does it pretend to be part of the solution when it clearly has the same analysis of the problem as all the other London-based parties?  Namely that the damage done by growth is to be cured by yet more growth.  It has over recent years courted the red-green vote, by playing up the red, but seemingly at the expense of the green.

All parties are constantly challenged to say what they would do to create more jobs.  A really courageous party would challenge the question.  We don’t need the maximum number of jobs.  We need the optimum number of jobs for the optimum size of population, given the sensible limits that define our region’s place in a sustainable world.  The UK has far, far too many jobs for its size, many of them in the wrong places and many of them financially profitable (for others) but socially useless and environmentally harmful.  That’s one reason why it’s importing folk at the rate of 250,000 a year net.  It also has a failed education and welfare system, because it has 2 million unemployed who should be matched to the jobs available and trained to do them if they lack the skills.  Come on, this isn’t rocket science, it’s the basic sustainability that corporate interests prevent us enjoying.

Growth isn’t necessary for economic reasons.  It’s necessary only for fiscal reasons, because without it the UK cannot pay the interest on the imaginary debts it’s been fooled by bankers into believing that it owes.  The continued refusal to confront this fact is what’s leading to planet-wide disaster as rising debt outstrips the capacity of the real, resource-limited economy.

The future needs green politics.  What it obviously doesn’t need is Green politics.

The People v. The Profit

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell painted a picture of the future as a boot stamping on a human face, forever.  The boot now has a name.  TTIP.  The Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership.  Hammered out in secret talks between Europe and the USA, it will make democracy illegal, by giving corporations the right to sue governments for passing laws that restrict their profits, such as laws that raise environmental or social protection.

Campaign group 38 Degrees gave evidence this week to a select committee at Westminster.  One of their members described the experience as follows:

“This week I was shouted at by a group of MPs.

I'd been asked to explain to the Business Select Committee why 38 Degrees members are so worried about TTIP.  That's the dodgy EU-US trade deal that could bring further privatisation of our NHS.  But once I got there, they didn’t seem to want to hear why we were against privatisation.  Or why we want to stop American corporations having the power to sue our government in secret courts.

Instead they attacked 38 Degrees members for wanting to have a say.  They kept arguing that 38 Degrees members didn’t know enough to have valid opinions about the deal.  And when I said we don’t trust politicians to deal with something as important as this behind closed doors, the chairman told me to shut up!”

If, like us, you’re sceptical about the value of trade and concerned about the threat that trade poses to democracy, you’ll understand where he’s coming from.  TTIP has to be defeated but, in the long term, it’s just as important to defeat the mindset – totalitarian liberalism – that thinks something like TTIP could ever be acceptable in a society that values vital democracy.  We’ve become numbed to the idea that it’s not for business to compete for access to our markets, it’s for nations to compete for the privilege of investment by businesses.  Because if the businesses are disobeyed, they have the power (that we gave to them) to lay waste to everything.  Faced with the threat of our sovereignty now being for sale, defence is nowhere near enough.  Politics must re-conquer economics or go down fighting.  A boycott of US goods might be a start?

It’s just a shame that David Babbs – the man who now complains about being shouted at – is the man who decided only last year that the voters of Eastleigh ought not to hear from Colin Bex.

Seeing the Light

Here’s a story from the North Somerset Times, a story with outlines applicable throughout Wessex, and maybe across other regions too:

“A long-standing member of North Somerset’s Conservative party has resigned from the organisation which he believes ‘has no interest’ in the area’s issues.

Arthur Terry, who is the representative for Portishead’s East Ward on North Somerset Council, has left the party and will continue his work for residents as an independent councillor.

Cllr Terry has been a Tory party member since 1981 and was elected to Woodspring Council [as North Somerset Council was then known] in 1984.

He cites issues including police funding and new housing figure demands as reasons for leaving the Conservatives.

He said: ‘Over the years it has become increasingly clear to me that the national political parties of all persuasions have no interest in this area.

‘This is demonstrated by their repeated failure to address the serious inequities in the distribution of the revenue support grant to our local authorities and it would appear the consistent failure of our local Members of Parliament to influence this.

‘Clearly as a lone voice I can do little to influence these issues, but I can be honest and no longer represent a party that has no interest in the views and concerns of ordinary members.’

Comment is barely necessary.  Centralist diktat steamrollers on, oblivious to promises of localism.  Unfair funding arrangements continue.  Protests to those at the top of the London-based parties go unheeded.  Experienced local councillors draw their own conclusions, and so we see the centuries of deference to London dominance slowly start to wither and die at the root.

Scotland the Bold

How’s this for a map to follow?  Not perfect, indeed, but certainly perfectible, as much for Wessex as for Scotland.

We too have the ability to wake up and grasp a better world.  Let's give it a try…

Scared As A Bully

On 9th November 2014, Catalonia voted 4 to 1 for independence from Spain.  Madrid isn’t ready to begin talks on separation.  Instead, it’s determined to prosecute Catalonia’s leading nationalists for organising the vote.  Will David Cameron protest?  Will there be airstrikes?

On 20th November 2014, the French Parliament voted to abolish many of the historic regions of France through forced mergers, against the wishes of those affected.  An amendment calling for the reunification of Brittany – split since the Vichy era between two regions, one predominantly non-Breton – was haughtily rejected.  Will David Cameron protest?  Will there be airstrikes?

In both these states, the full force of the law is being used to crush democratic feeling.  All in defence of the outdated primacy of ‘France’ and ‘Spain’, and of the power of centralist politicians to glorify a long-dead past and view other, more human-scale loyalties as a threat.  This is what happens when the Europe of a Hundred Flags steps up from bookish theory to impassioned practice.  There are those who really don’t like the idea one bit.  Warmongers, austerity-merchants and lovers of technocracy.  David Cameron is among them, so watch this space.

Let’s step back to 14th November for an insight into the true depth of establishment paranoia.  Cornelius Adebahr’s article for the Carnegie Endowment explores the problems facing a fragmenting Europe, from the perspective that fragmentation is somehow a ‘bad thing’.  Xenophobic hatred certainly is, but that isn’t the subject matter of debate among Europeans seeking greater autonomy.  All we want is genuine subsidiarity free from centralist manipulation.

Including the power to judge for ourselves what functions we’re capable of exercising.  Europe is in crisis because it has become a project of elite dominance, the preserve of a managerialist class that denies the right – or even the ability – of ordinary folk to shape their own governance.  Adebahr sneers at what he terms ‘populism’ because it’s too democratic.  He sneers at nationalism because it isn’t driven by a narrowly economic conception of rationality.  Because it rejects that ‘rationality’ in which economic power rests not with democratic states but with anonymous global ‘investors’ shopping around for the choicest bargain.

The Europe of the Investors is an integrated economic space in which barriers to the movement of capital do not exist and democratic ownership of key economic assets is repeatedly eroded.  Together, these two things make it easy for markets to punish policy-makers who dare to be different.  (UK governments make things more than usually hard for themselves – and for us – for contorted ideological reasons that stem from City overlordship of our political system.)  Populism is labelled as bad because it’s the opposite of what we might call investism.  TTIP and the Lisbon Treaty are part of the process of declaring democracy illegal worldwide because it cannot be guaranteed to put investor interests first.  And we now see in France and Spain on which side of the argument nationalists and regionalists are judged to stand.  Voting is the way to change everything, or it is nothing.  OK, nothing it is then.

We’ve made clear our own view that vital industries, utilities and public services must be owned and controlled locally and regionally – not bought and sold by the multi-nationals.  Common ownership is a widely held ideal, even among Conservatives.  The consensus now needs to be put into effect.  Obviously, not through Labour or its continental equivalents, all tainted beyond recognition, but through radical nationalist and regionalist alternatives.

How radical?  Should compensation be paid to the present owners?  And if so, how much?  If the aim is to achieve common ownership, in the public interest, can the private (or foreign public) interests represented by compensation claims be viewed as anything but self-centred trivia, irrelevant to the core issue of achieving economic democracy?  Or should those who invested in good faith be reimbursed, it being no fault of theirs if they sank money into a politically sensitive industry?  In short, is the current set-up a crime against society or just a mistake?  Have the investment giants earned our rage or our pity?

Any such theories of ‘fairness’ can be laboured so as to slow down necessary progress.  Even to visualise the issue as a transaction is to bow to a hostile point of view.  Why not decouple progress from that which retards it?  Why not take back now, and pay back later (if at all)?  Our thinking has been so polluted by investism – even governments claim to be 'investing' in roads or a better NHS when what they mean is they're devoting more resources to transport or healthcare – that we miss the most obvious, direct answers to our problems.  Cut the Gordian knot.  Or perhaps, in the case of PFI, the Gordon knot.

Bear in mind (a) that many of our nationalised industries were created by seizing municipal assets without compensation (and this sort of thing still goes on, quite shamelessly), (b) that they were then privatised at an average 30% discount on the market price, (c) that as natural monopolies they have continued to be cash cows ever since, and (d) that corporations spent – and spend – millions on subverting the democratic debate, belying the idea that they exist only to serve.  False title.  False value.  False benefit.  False intent.  It would be entirely reasonable to conclude that the owners are worth rather less to us than they claim.  Moreover, the owners aren't the ones who know how to run buses, trains, power plants or treatment works in Wessex.  Their only expertise is in financial engineering, which any sane society would be better off without.  So how do we value their contribution?  On balance, negatively.  THEY should be paying US.  At the very least, let's start the negotiations at nil and work upwards EVER so reluctantly.  We can't increase taxes or borrowing, so the third option it has to be.

What we need is not so much ‘UK plc’ as ‘Wessex Common Estate’, our resources managed for this and for future generations.  Public assets belong to everyone, born and unborn, and should only ever be leased, never sold, let alone given away.  We need a politics of stewardship, not a politics of trading.  Friends are motivated by love to share, willingly, within the restraints of a common bond.  Enemies are motivated by fear to trade, suspiciously, without the restraints of a common bond.  It’s true for us, it’s true for Europe, and it’s true for the world.  You share with your friends and you trade with your enemies.  What does that say about those who want global trade to grow?

Europe stands at a crossroads.  A second Berlin Wall can come tumbling down, destroying the needless political centralism of old global empires AND, if the will is there, the needless economic centralism of new global corporations too.  These are two causes that can make common cause in delivering what folk clearly want to see happen.  Either that, or the military will be on the streets to make sure it doesn’t happen.  That’s how scared the bullies are.

May It Be

Thanks to the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 we know that the next General Election will be on 7th May 2015.  This means that small parties with few resources and little flexibility now have the same chance to plan ahead as the London-based big battalions with their ear to the ground at Westminster. 

WR President Colin Bex and Secretary-General David Robins were in Bridgwater today, in one of the Party’s possible target seats.  Bridgwater is a much under-rated place, proud of its past and with good reason but, as a working-class town hit by plant closures, also one concerned about its future.  There were some cracking good conversations to be had on the main shopping streets, and real interest in an alternative to the status quo.

Colin was being shadowed by an independent film production company looking to follow him throughout the campaign.  Along with the flag, they proved to be a valuable visual prompt to passing members of the public to stop and talk.

After Bridgwater, Colin travelled on to Truro for the Mebyon Kernow Annual Conference, an event WR members try to attend whenever possible. With the Cornish now recognised as a national minority and the campaign for a Cornish Assembly again making waves, it can only be a matter of time before those in the English regions look closely at their Celtic neighbours and start to ask why they can’t have some of that new politics too. Our power.  Our wealth.  Let's have them back.

Little Things Please Little Minds

The Scots recently held a referendum on independence.  They discussed what currency to use, whether to join NATO, and what to do about Trident.

BBC West’s televised debate on devolution this week took a different approach.  At one point, the politicians on the panel were challenged with the problem of different wheelie bins on opposite sides of the same street in Kingswood, on the Bristol fringe.  It’s a common enough phenomenon on the boundaries between London boroughs but Londoners have other things to get excited about.  Like what to spend our taxes on next.

Anyone watching from Dorset or Wiltshire must have been deeply disappointed that Bristol hogged the limelight.  It wasn’t even as if the politicians were that well-informed.  South Gloucestershire’s Leader went on about the 1,000-year-old county boundaries, unaware that Bristol’s boundary with its rural neighbours dates from 1951.  A long time ago now, but not before the Norman Conquest.

What this clearly wasn’t was a debate on devolution.  Not until the very end, when the Wessex Wyvern was raised and a show of hands sought on whether or not we need the same powers as Scotland.  The ‘No’ vote won, but a surprisingly large number of hands went up for ‘Yes’, considering that this was a proposition the programme-makers had largely sought to bury beneath a mantle of municipal minutiae.

It could have been worse.  Viewers might have been, yet again, denied the knowledge that a regionalist alternative exists.  Viewers elsewhere in Wessex were indeed denied that knowledge.

There is no regional television channel that serves the whole of Wessex.  Its creation has been one of our aims since 1979.  Meanwhile, the BBC divides Wessex into the four sub-regions into which it naturally divides geographically.  The north-west is served from Bristol, the south-west from Plymouth, and the south-east from Southampton.  The north-east is served from Southampton too, via bases in Reading and Oxford.  The way these various stations treated the devolution issue varied enormously, illustrating one of the challenges for a regionalist party whose aspirations the centre struggles to recognise and accommodate.

BBC West, from the Bristol Cathedral Choir School, did as well as could be expected.  A range of views was aired, but the Wyvern was the only splash of colour in an otherwise drab offering.  On Twitter, the programme was variously described as dreadful, dire and dreary, with the limited capabilities of the superficial Points West format coming in for criticism.  One tweet sums up the reaction: “I wish I had gone to bed instead of watching.”

BBC South West, from Cornwall’s Eden Project, could have had a Wessex presence too.  Their researcher was in discussions with our President, Colin Bex, in late October but by early November he’d been dropped from the shortlist.  Mebyon Kernow’s Leader, Cllr Dick Cole, put in a sustained effort on the night but it would have been good to allow viewers east of the Tamar to know that they too have an alternative to the London-centric status quo.  Subsequent tweets suggested that the English south-west had been badly let down by the programme-makers – but if they will exclude the one political party that has something specific to say about the English south-west then you have to expect that.

BBC South, serving the heart of Alfred’s kingdom, was the one station where you might think a Wessex Regionalist presence would be imperative.  Apparently not.  The South didn’t even get a programme to itself, but a joint one with the South East.  One of the presenters agonised over whether the area had any coherent sense of regional identity.  Define it like that and it’s not hard to find the answer.

Now, we know that BBC stations do talk to each other.  They share contact details and get each other to film extra footage or record audio that they can pass around (and they co-produce the occasional programme, like Late Kick Off).  We hope they go on doing so.  What they seemingly do not do is share editorial perspective.  When The Case for Wessex was launched at Wantage in 2003, BBC South turned up to film the event.  Other BBC stations in Wessex declined to cover the story at all.  Not in their area.  True, Wantage is not, but Wessex is.

Politicians and media alike share a local perspective that is set within a national context.  Regions perplex them.  Too big to be local.  Too small to be national.  That’s right.  They’re something in between, the missing piece of the jigsaw, the piece whose absence explains why the governance of Britain is so dysfunctional.  Imagining the difference that having them will make is not easy, though Scotland and Wales are there to be visited should you need a model.  The benefits will be clear enough once regions are in place in England.  Those benefits will be forever denied us though, without the ability to see over the hedge.