Our story continues at https://www.wessexregionalists.info/
Tuesday, February 22, 2022
Wednesday, June 15, 2016
Another Europe is Possible
‘Believe in Britain’, they say. And why not ‘Believe in Europe’? Grassroots Out have taken to
arguing that Brexit isn’t ‘anti-Europe’ at all, rather as if the SNP had
presented independence as being pro-British.
Confused? The underlying idea is
that the EU is not just at present objectively anti-European – in its
submissive attitude to others it clearly is – but that it’s also incapable of
changing into anything better. The UK can be
improved, easily; the EU, never, so let’s not try. That’s more than inconsistent with the facts.
Facts get selected and
highlighted to inform perceptions of past and present, and future. British unity is a historical fact, but so
too are the Auld Alliance, the Danelaw and the Celtic languages of the Atlantic
arc, all of which cut across it. The
British royal family is German, the royal motto is written in French, and all
our talk of democracy and politics is down to the Greeks. All of that suggests a need for flexibility
of thought, but also of political institutions to match it.
Does that mean that there’s
a European ‘demos’ in any meaningful sense?
If the answer is ‘No’, then the usual suspects are to blame for keeping
things strictly inter-governmental and so preventing its formation. Have they ensured that there can never be one? That’s a very different question.
Stresses build solidarity:
there was never a time when everyone within the UK felt fine having a British
identity but it was made to work by those who feared a worse alternative. In Europe’s
case it could be that its puny 19th century nation-states get picked off one by
one by the new global players. The
demographic squeeze as Third World populations
form an ever-expanding proportion of humanity will force closer co-operation
because the alternative to Europeans thinking of themselves as one people may
be that they cease to exist at all.
Always beware the illusion of permanence.
That’s something that also
obscures the realisation that a successful campaign for Brexit would only
launch in its wake a new campaign for Bre-entry. ‘Remain’ is not as attractive an option as
‘Remain, but’. The unattractive nature
of ‘Leave’ is magnified by the fact that ‘Leave, but’ is ruled out. But for how long, and on what humiliating
terms might Brexit be reversed?
The UK and the US
are two countries separated by a common language: politically the UK has more in
common with the European social democracies.
Culturally, we perhaps under-estimate the Old World’s
shared legacy of experiences like aristocracy, peasantry and buildings over 500
years old. That happens only because we
don’t share enough. The more one reads
in translation of mainland political theory the more obvious it becomes that
importing the minimalist politics of the wild frontier and the big open spaces
just because it’s in English can only be damaging to England. The US
is not Europe’s enemy but it does need to be
understood as a commercial and ideological rival. Are we going to stand up to it all on our own?
Wessex is a European region, as authentic as Normandy, Tuscany or Bavaria. Europe is an
idea in the making, despite its growing pains, and so is open to influence. England
and Britain
are ideas that too often are used to curb our aspirations for self-government
and not to nurture them. They shouldn’t
be mere glove-puppets for a London-focused regime, but that’s what they’re fast
becoming as regional identity continues to be ridiculed and diminished.
Among our friends and allies
in Celtic nationalist parties and in regionalist movements across Europe, the
EU is given the benefit of the doubt not from any love of the big but from love
of the small, and from the realisation that we cannot work together to cherish
the small within a nation-state straitjacket.
The idea that we can have the regionalism we want nesting within a
retained nation-state framework is refuted by recent history, in which nation-states
have frequently done everything they can to destroy the regional identities
from which they’re built. Besides, for
those whose region sees itself as a nation that cannot thrive under another
nation’s yoke, only a European framework will do.
The idea of neat nesting is refuted
too on many of Europe’s borders, where authentic
regions straddle lines drawn through them by absolute monarchs, sustained by
dictators, and enforced today by one-dimensional bullies. France’s
borders separate Flanders from Lille, its
historic capital, German-speaking Alsace from
the rest of Swabia, Savoy
and Nice from the rest of Piedmont, Roussillon from the rest of Catalonia and three
provinces of the Basque Country from the other four. Not to mention Brittany
from Cornwall. Other examples are Tyrol (Austria/Italy), Pomerania (Germany/Poland) and Scania
(Denmark/Sweden). It’s by rubbing out
those lines that we progress to allowing better choices. If regionalism is about having the
flexibility to do things regionally, intricate EU regulations are bad
news. But, for some, the news is not as
bad as the olds that they’ve lived with for a very long time.
Regions require headroom,
which a united Europe governed by subsidiarity
provides, and thus there’s no contradiction in demanding both. Our founder, Alexander Thynn, stood as a
‘Wessex Regionalist & European Federalist’ candidate in the first
Euro-election in 1979, for the seat of ‘Wessex’ (in reality, not Wessex, just Dorset
plus parts of Hants and Wilts). His
election leaflet offered a 24-point programme entitled ‘Wessex within a
Federal Europe’. In these days of
negligible vision, it pays to be reminded of what it said:
“1: The
Parliament at Strasbourg should furnish a
political platform where the voice of Wessex
can be expressed as participating within a Europe of Regions, rather than a Europe of Nations.
2: We
should look forward to the emergence of a United Regions of Europe, that might
be compared with the United
States of America. Wessex will be one of these
Regional States.
3: There
should be a European Head of State: some much revered elder statesman, to be
elected by the Parliament at Strasbourg.
4: All
decisions of the European Supreme Court of Justice should be upheld and
implemented by the authority of the European Parliament.
5: There
should be a gradual transfer of sovereignty from Westminster
to Strasbourg
in three important spheres:
(a)
the control of the armed forces
(b)
the control of foreign policy decisions
(c)
the control of the economy.
6: The
supreme officers within the European High Command should be responsible to Strasbourg, with the
entire British armed forces serving under this command.
7: Strasbourg must debate
the foreign policies of all Western European nations, so that they can be fully
co-ordinated.
8: There
should be a European Foreign and Consular Service, responsible only to the
Parliament at Strasbourg. This will replace the present national
system.
9: Strasbourg must encourage
European monetary union, with due regard to the transitional problems that this
may involve for the weaker currencies.
10: The Parliament
at Strasbourg must furnish Europe
with a uniform tax structure (involving income tax, super tax and capital gains
tax) applicable at the same levels within all European nations. This will not preclude the right of national
or regional governments to raise taxes by additional methods, if they so
choose.
11: Wessex and all
other regions should receive a substantial tax rebate from such taxation
revenue, apportioned in accordance with their per capita and per hectare rating
as European Regions. This rebate should
be spent as the regional assemblies see fit.
12: Another
large portion of all federal taxation revenue should be paid annually into the
regional fund at Strasbourg, with a view to
effecting a gradual redistribution of capital and social resources over Western Europe at large.
13: A
further portion of the federal taxation revenue should go into a European
redevelopment fund, with a view to assisting those nations such as Britain with
peculiar transitional problems, or generally assisting towards the cost of
unifying the nations of our continent.
14: Applications
should be made to the European Parliament to shoulder the cost (from out of
this redevelopment fund) for changing the British road system from left to
right.
15: The
cost of linking Britain to France by
several bridges and tunnels should also be financed from this fund.
16: The
Common Agricultural Policy should be modified so as to ensure efficiency in
farming, without destroying the idea that Europe
should become agriculturally self-sufficient.
17: The
representatives from Wessex should seek to ally themselves with the
representatives of those European regions where farming is practised
efficiently, asserting our mutual interests against regions where farming is
practised inefficiently, or where the interests of agriculture as a whole are
subordinated to industrial interests.
18: Strasbourg must
co-ordinate and control the scientific and technological research of its member
nations, so as to attain maximum efficiency and co-operation.
19: The
operation of multinational companies in Europe
should be carefully monitored, so as to avoid any upsurge of their influence to
a degree that cannot be safely controlled by the elected representatives of the
people.
20: Strasbourg must take charge of energy policy within Europe, which should be carefully planned to allow for
the situation that will arise after our oil supplies have run out, involving
heavy investment in alternative energy research.
21: Strasbourg must take
general charge of environment policy, to ensure that national standards are
consistently high.
22: The
standardisation of weights and measurements according to the European metric
system should be pressed forward to its conclusion.
23: A
uniform electoral system of proportional representation, with single
transferable vote, should be adopted by the Parliament at Strasbourg before the next Euro-elections.
24: Research
should be undertaken at Strasbourg for a computerised voting system, for future
adoption, whereby the voting strength of each delegate from a regional state is
registered automatically within the European Parliament in direct relation to
the number of people that the delegate’s party can be shown to represent.”
As with earlier radical
causes like Chartism, readers will be able to judge for themselves how much has
been achieved, how much would now be modified or discarded, and how much,
sadly, remains undone.
The case for regionalism
would be the same even if the European mainland wasn’t there. Government that serves us all means getting
power, wealth and talent out of London. Set that case in the context of a Europe of regions though and it starts to become a
reality, however clunkingly, and however unimaginatively the eurocracy is
forced by its Member States to react.
Deny that framework and it’s not that the argument dies: it’s that it
reverts to being a nice idea that’s obviously right but which London,
triumphantly unchallenged by any wider view, will simply never allow to happen. Because the anti-Brussels rhetoric has a clear
beneficiary.
Wednesday, May 25, 2016
An Empty Space?
The second issue of Wessex Citizen, edited by Keith
Southwell and Rick Heyse, is now online.
Many thanks to all who contributed.
Earlier this month we mentioned the current – seventy-second – issue of
MK’s equivalent, Cornish Nation, which
this time gave us a brief mention.
Joanie Willett, reporting back on the General Assembly of the European
Free Alliance recently held in Corsica, wrote:
“One of the Parties that MK members became acquainted
with was Yorkshire First. We have much that we can learn from each
other, and it would be a really interesting exercise to have some sort of group
meeting or conference of all the regionalist parties in mainland UK, including
the North East Party and the Wessex Regionalists, to see how we can combine our
voices in our campaigns for better, stronger, and more people-led devolution in
the UK.”
That might be so, and the WR
Council has resolved to make enquiries, though as we’ve noted, it’s been done
before. More than once. Perhaps every generation has to give it a try
and there’s certainly no shame in emulating success. WR is different though, mainly because of how
far official recognition of our regional identity lags behind.
Cornwall is not just home to a distinct nation. It’s also (apart from the Isles of Scilly,
who have their own council) a single unit of local government. The complaint isn’t that Cornwall is unrecognised; it’s that it’s not
recognised enough, or in the right way.
Cornwall Council has broadly the same powers as a London
borough, even though Cornwall’s
geographical isolation would allow it to do far more for itself, without
treading on any of its neighbours’ toes.
It’s treated as an English county when it’s actually something more that
just happens to be the same size as an English county. The motto ‘One and All’ sums it up. The argument that ‘there’s no such place as Cornwall’ isn’t heard
though, because it’s not conceivable.
Up north, the North East
Party and Yorkshire First both operate within the boundaries of their respective
Prescott zones,
boundaries still widely recognised by the public and voluntary sectors and used
for everything from Euro-elections to the English Heritage handbook. This is part of the legacy of the Blairite ‘big push’
for top-down regionalisation that has never fully gone away.
(Interestingly, the National
Trust used also to be loyal to Prescottism but this year’s handbook departs
from it. Apart from South Humberside,
now placed with the rest of Lincolnshire, the basic Prescott geography is
respected everywhere except the South
West and South East, where the Trust has introduced five new groupings of its
own invention, plus a separate Cornwall.
If the NT now has so much property in Wessex that its presentation needs
to be this fragmented, maybe Wessex
needs a National Trust all of its own?)
There is, of course, another
definition of Yorkshire, the Yorkshire of the ridings rather than the one of a
map drawn in London,
but any attempt to restore this is fraught with difficulties. The biggest risk, revealed in the work of the
Banham Commission in the 1990s, is of tokenistic proposals emerging to appease
sentiment rather than to accommodate it, new ridings with old names but the
wrong boundaries, which make things worse rather than better.
Until this year, a different
approach was evidenced by the Northern Party, voice of the historic North of
England – Northumbria – with
a united claim to all three northern Prescott
zones. South Humberside apart though,
this was still a claim that worked with rather than against the Prescott geography.
Wessex is different because faced with that geography our response
is that we wouldn’t have started from here.
We devoted most of The Case for
Wessex to explaining why Wessex
is, to quote Thomas Hardy, a ‘practical provincial definition’. Much more so than a South West that runs from
the Scillies to the Cotswolds and a South East that wraps round two-thirds of
London and whose extremities can only communicate with each other by passing
through a national capital that forms a separate region.
If Wessex is a
practical province, and not just a romantic image of myth and legend that
doesn’t even merit its own official tourist board, why isn’t it shown more on
maps? We must note that briefly and for
specific purposes it does come into being, as with the Army’s Wessex Brigade or
the short-lived Wessex Trains franchise.
The London
regime always realises its mistake and pulls back from taking things further. Then busily covers up the evidence while
encouraging others to do likewise.
Alternatively, it hides
behind forms of official recognition that don’t require Wessex to be
defined. Like recognising St Ealdhelm as
our patron saint or the Wyvern as our flag (and even allowing it to be flown
from public buildings, something several county and unitary councils are doing
today). Another example would be awarding
our earldom to the Queen’s youngest son.
The re-use of the title for Prince Edward in 1999 launched a tsunami of
sneering from the London press, ranging from
massive pride in not knowing where Wessex is to asking whether the brand
isn’t damaged for eternity, given that Wessex Water was once owned by
Enron. When in 2011 Prince William
became Duke of Cambridge, the reaction was more like ‘how nice’. The Wessexes
are one way of acknowledging that Wessex
exists but, like the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, they can be a
convenient device when needed for ensuring loyalty to the London regime among the grovelling classes. Their full potential for obstructing self-government
has yet to be tested.
Yet another trick is to use
‘Wessex’ as the name for
something smaller than Wessex,
like Wessex Water, or the Wessex Regional Health Authority. Another still is to associate aspects of
Wessexness, like cider or the dialect, with a vague area that won’t match county
boundaries, but simply not to notice how these things form bundles that add up
to an identity. There are lots of words
for folk from Wessex –
Wessaxon, Wessexer, Wessexian, or – best of all – Wurzel, but probably none
that would be acknowledged outside Wessex because if you don’t look
and listen you won’t find.
In all these respects, Wessex is less comparable with other movements
for autonomy within the UK
and more with mainland movements in the likes of Alsace,
Brittany, Moravia or Scania. These are likewise places that exist in the
heart but have been truncated, partitioned or even obliterated for purposes of
governance, by centralist states jealous of any rival for the people’s affections.
Some regions have their
capital city at their centre. The
central geographical feature of Wessex
is the empty expanse of Salisbury Plain.
(Our big cities are round the edge, places of exchange with a wider
world.) That sense of a hollow centre is
often how it feels politically. We’re
told that we’re campaigning for a region that most of its residents don’t
recognise. Yet that’s a throw-away line;
it just avoids the need for any further thinking. Thinking about how and why the London regime controls the space within which a Wessex identity
could flourish, and controls it with the deliberate intention of ensuring that
it doesn’t. Thinking about the ruling
class of Wessex, MPs and
councillors sitting for the London parties, media
hacks, academics, in many cases with anything but the good of Wessex as their
motivation. Thinking too about the
opportunities we now have to build a radical Wessex movement from the bottom up.
It’s easy for critics to
present the Wessex Regionalists as rather like one of those bands that were big
in the 80s and are still trying to make a comeback, playing the occasional gig
in obscure places like Witney. The fact
is that the raising of the election deposit in 1985 – it was more than trebled
– was a huge blow that stopped us in our tracks. We had until then been ramping up the number
of candidates at each election. Instead,
we were kept out of electioneering for over a decade, times when it looked as
if we might not survive. The Tories claimed
that raising the deposit was necessary to deter ‘frivolous’ candidates. It didn’t.
All it did was deter serious candidates without the Tories’ access to
loads of money.
And it shows how worried
they were, as well they ought to be.
Devolution for peripheral areas is one thing; devolution for the area
that encapsulates the deepest memories of statehood is an existential challenge
the UK
is ill-equipped to weather. So if the current
set-up is designed to deny us our identity, culturally and politically, then we
should feel honoured rather than surprised.
Let’s get on with re-awakening it for ourselves. That means, above all, not trying to
influence those who have power but rather to do everything in our power to sweep them aside.
Happy St Ealdhelm’s Day
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Wider Still and Wider?
Leaflets for this year’s
Royal Bath & West Show are starting to drop through letterboxes. Far be it from us to suggest that the show is
run by a far Right clique but the leaflets are
easily confused with party literature for UKIP or the BNP, draped in more Union
Jacks than you can shake a halyard at.
Far be it from us to suggest either that the organisers aren’t aware
that they run the premier agricultural show in Wessex: the Countess of Wessex was Show
President in 2010 and 2011 and since then has been Vice-Patron. The B&W is one of the few longstanding
organisations that have served both ‘the West’ and ‘the South’ within Wessex: its
full name for many years was the Bath & West and Southern Counties Society,
the result of a merger in 1868. Before
the permanent showground at Shepton Mallet was established in 1965 the show was
held all over Wessex, with
occasional forays as far as Swansea and Maidstone
(and on two occasions even Nottingham).
But here we are: the ‘Great
British Festival of Agriculture, Entertainment, Food & Drink’. In fact, for visitor numbers the B&W is well
behind both the Royal Welsh and the Royal Highland. On the inside pages, we’re told about ‘England’s
biggest celebration of rural life’, words incongruously accompanied by yet another
Union Jack. Numerically, this is
contestable. Yorkshire has a perfectly
good county show which styles itself ‘England’s premier agricultural event’
and its attendance figures lie in a similar range. There’s no mention of Wessex at all
in the leaflet: even the ‘West Country’ only just slips in on the back page,
which tells us about traders exhibiting in the West Country for the first time. All in all, it sounds like a lost opportunity
for showcasing the region’s produce rather than somebody else’s.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT2Xf_Bm6zEg42SKqwCqlD7ckuMTiRbMqgCPbm4jBtDZW5_yF0ki_ZaqTncjzWhJUEiPfLBZ1EwMBpxIhOQWrcrZ0yqT2qubIR94ljwcPYJ8JTJyML3An30yWzgu-q_UiT5zky3XkVTePj/s320/RBWS.jpg)
It seems that under its new
Chief Executive the B&W, instead of remaining what it is, and being good at
it, is determined to be what it’s not, another national festival that happens
to be located in Wessex. A bit like Glastonbury (and, yes,
Michael Eavis, this year’s President, is credited with sourcing the live
music). In that case, it needs even more
visitors to fill the site and pay for it all.
Now just short of its 240th birthday, the B&W has survived by moving
with the times but we hope it doesn’t bite off more than it can chew. The fate of Stoneleigh is a solemn reminder of
the risks ag show organisers must now constantly face. We’d like to say, go and support it while you still can, but if
it’s no more distinctive than many of the others, where would be the point?
Labels:
Agriculture,
Countess of Wessex,
Countryside,
Shepton Mallet
Monday, May 16, 2016
Post-Truth Politics
Is an Eton
education good value for money? From the
public’s point of view, it seems not, given Boris Johnson’s underwhelming analysis
of European history. He lit up the
weekend with his dire warning that the EU is little better than a Fourth
Reich. For others, it’s the EUSSR, but
we’ve learnt to recognise that political consistency is no barrier when
conspiracy theories are in town. The
string-pullers can also be variously identified as Saudi
Arabia, the CIA, Mossad, the Vatican…
BoJo was backed by a fellow
Old Etonian, Somerset MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who told the media that “Philip II
of Spain, Louis XIV of France, Napoleon and Hitler all wanted to create a
single European power. What Boris has
said is the EU is following the footsteps of these historic figures but using
different means." Not so fast,
Jacob: an Oxford
history graduate should be rather more precise.
Philip wanted a more powerful Spain, headed by himself. Louis and Napoleon each wanted a more
powerful France,
headed by himself. Hitler wanted a more
powerful Germany,
headed by himself. Not one of these rulers
wanted a powerful Europe, an association in which all countries are regarded as
equals, a Europe designed to clip the wings of
imperial ambition on the part of unfettered autocrats. In fact, the most appropriate equal of all of
them could be none other than BoJo, who wants a more powerful Britain, headed
by himself and up to who knows what mischief in the world. Those advocating a united Europe have done so
chiefly with the aim of ending centuries of internal strife through challenging
or breaking up the great powers: the Duc de Sully’s Grand Design (1630),
William Penn’s European Diet (1693), Auguste Comte’s Occidental Republic (1852)
and Mikhail Bakunin’s United States of Europe (1867) were all schemes with this
end in mind.
The fawning media remind us
that BoJo is a ‘classical scholar’, as if knowledge of the Roman
Empire is really that much help.
The entity most consciously modelled on it was the British
Empire, the Pax Britannica, greatly admired by Hitler, largely for
that reason. BoJo was quite right to say
that pan-European thinking does sometimes draw on the Imperium Romanum as a model. Does he think that re-creating the Roman province of Britannia out of its post-Roman nations was
something different? Perhaps drawing on
the legacy of Rome
is OK if we do it? BoJo is also quite right that there’s little deep
loyalty to a common European identity.
Nor will there be if he and other nation-state grandstanders succeed in
blocking its emergence. The question is
whether Europe in 2050 will be better off if
Europeans stop working together, as Europeans.
The EU referendum debate ought
to matter but instead it’s been reduced to a willy-waving contest among overgrown
schoolboys over who gets to lead the Conservative Party. What should be a debate about an uncertain
future has been reduced to which unpleasant bit of history is judged most
likely to repeat itself, in altogether different circumstances. Jonathan Freedland, writing in the Guardian (the ex-Manchester London newspaper) on Friday,
highlighted the alternate reality of ‘post-truth politicians’, buffoons who
aren’t. These are the folk who form the
Government. If we voted for them then the
bigger fools are us.
As usual, what’s never
injected into the debate is any criticism of the UK and how it’s governed. From a regionalist perspective, the European issue
comes down to whether ‘Leave’ or ‘Remain’ is more likely to deliver regional
parliaments in England powerful
enough to end London
dominance forever. None of the big
players will be asked that question by the media and so we won’t get an
answer. We’d just like to point out that
if the EU is undemocratic, unaccountable, bureaucratic and corrupt, what's the
UK? How is a multi-national structure alleged to
have been put together by banks and big business worse than a union that well
suited investors in the Bank of England, the Honourable East India Company and
Lloyds of London? Who will defend, with
any sincerity, the further entrenching of a subsidiarity-free constitution
involving huge over-centralisation of power, wealth and talent in one small
corner of the country, an electoral system in which the vast majority of votes
are thrown away as worthless, and a Parliament that since 1571 has been firmly
under the City of London’s
thumb? The frying-pan, however hot, is still
a safer place than the fire.
Saturday, May 14, 2016
Stacking Up
Libraries news tends to be
bad news. Closures mainly, accompanied
by the snarling of those who think that in the Internet age all books should be
burned, as useless relics of a barbarous past.
Little thought is given to the social role of libraries as places to
meet and share, especially for the elderly and vulnerable, or their educational
role in actively promoting literacy.
Some good news comes from
the LibrariesWest consortium, which links Somerset
and the four unitary authorities in what used to be Avon. The public library services of Dorset and Poole will be joining the consortium in June. As a result, users will be able to access over
150 libraries ‘coast to coast’, from the Bristol Channel to the English Channel, using a single library card. Items can be reserved, borrowed, renewed and
returned at any LibrariesWest library regardless of where borrowed from. LibrariesWest is also introducing a shared computer
system to manage loans and stock, offering online searches of a unified
catalogue of 2.5 million items.
The London regime’s expectation is that councils
will increasingly work together to reduce costs, including through pooling
their buying power. Financial pressures
and technical changes mean that it’s happening across a wide range of services,
from police and fire to archives and museums to smaller councils pooling back-office
functions like audit, payroll, procurement and IT.
Costs could be reduced and
effectiveness improved much more rapidly, and with much less pain, if Wessex
had an elected assembly to co-ordinate all these ad hoc efforts. For example, the Welsh Government’s National
Procurement Service has led the commissioning of a single library management
system for all 22 public library authorities in Wales. This is but one of its many initiatives,
designed to empower local economies as well as cut costs across the whole
public sector. An assembly in Wessex would
have its own ‘invest-to-save’ budget to spend on driving forward regional
priorities, which could be very different from those that London thinks best
for us. Wessex
needs to be free of interference from Whitehall
departments that, by imposing ideological solutions through institutional
silos, only gets in the way of sensible answers to challenging questions.
Thursday, May 12, 2016
Thou Shalt Not
Thursday last week saw a
plethora of different elections across the UK and among these polls was a
referendum in St Ives. Local folk voted
by 83% to 17% in favour of a policy to ban the building of new second homes. Faced with a housing market described as
‘financial cleansing’ of the locals, that’s no surprise, though of course it
does nothing to ease the pressure on houses already built.
Reactions ranged from great
interest, among towns and villages elsewhere, including western Wessex,
to threats of judicial review by appalled developers. Wessex
already has an example of this type of policy, in the Lynton and Lynmouth
Neighbourhood Plan in Devon, but this could be argued as an exception because
of its location within the Exmoor
National Park. What happens when exceptions become the new
rule?
Ministers in Lunnon insist
that this is the sort of thing up with which they will not put. The law will be changed to curb these uppity yokels. Cornwall
is surely somewhere that only comes into existence during the holiday season
and switches itself off afterwards. Localism? Oh, we really are having a laugh.
The current issue of the MK
magazine Cornish Nation highlights
the raw deal that Cornwall
is increasingly getting. A cross-border
Devonwall Parliamentary constituency is looming, regardless of token recognition
of the Cornish as a national minority. (If
approved, this will make it impossible for MK candidates to represent Cornwall and only Cornwall,
just as it will make it impossible for us to represent Wessex and only Wessex.) Last month, a paltry £150,000 a year grant to
support the Cornish language – equivalent to about three MPs’ expenses claims –
was peremptorily withdrawn, to widespread dismay. Cornwall’s
Grand Bard described this spiteful act, so damaging to the tourism offer, as “an ideological decision based on
indifference and not a financial one based on fiscal responsibility”.
Last year’s ‘Cornwall
Devolution Deal’ was so feeble as to be an abuse of the word ‘devolution’, so
limited in scope that it did not merit legislation or even a Commons
debate. The key areas of housing and
planning are excluded from the deal.
Instead, the centralist inspection regime has imposed on Cornwall a much higher
housebuilding target than that deemed appropriate by the majority of local residents
and also re-written the council’s affordable housing policies to undermine their
effectiveness.
As if to pour petrol on the
flames, the Court of Appeal yesterday ruled it lawful for the London
regime to prevent councils seeking contributions to affordable housing from sites
of 10 homes or fewer, overturning a previous ruling obtained by Reading and West Berkshire
councils. These small windfall sites,
often redevelopment sites, are the sort that can make a significant – and generally
uncontroversial – contribution to housing development in our towns and villages. Excluding them means that councils are ever
more reliant on the volume housebuilders to deliver their one affordable for
every two market houses.
This in turn puts ever more
pressure on councils to allow more market houses than are actually needed by
the local population, leading to yet more second homes and an influx of retired
folk whose social care costs later in life are met from local taxation, not from
national taxation or by the areas in which they paid taxes when working. Meanwhile, as the Revenue Support Grant is
being squeezed out of existence its place is being taken by the New Homes
Bonus, a shameless bribe to councils to build or lose out.
This all began in the 1980s when
we largely stopped building council houses and loaded the cost of social
housing onto homebuyers, who themselves are often struggling to afford the prices. Landowners do nicely though, with three
attempts since 1945 at capturing their heightened development value through
taxation or public ownership overturned by the Tories and no fourth attempt in
sight.
The point we have to hammer
home is that you really do get what you vote for. Cornwall
elected the full set of six Tory MPs last year.
What did it expect to get in return?
Little victories like St Ives mean nothing if the one lot can still
count on your vote ‘to keep the other lot out’.
Tory, Labour, LibDem. All
centralist and all rotten to the core. So
forget ‘the other lot’. Be your own lot
and deny them all the power to do your community lasting harm.
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