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.

Izzy, Whizzy, Let’s Get Bizzy

Or maybe 'Ozzy, Wheezy'.  What is the sound of one hand clapping?  George Osborne ought to know, following his announcement this week that business rates will be ‘devolved’ to local councils, along with the one-directional power to lower them.  Osborne’s understanding of devolution is that it’s that degree of autonomy that allows others to take the same decisions as the London regime would take anyway, given the opportunity.  And nothing more.  Devolution in an era of spending cuts is in effect an invitation to self-mutilation if associated radical changes are all ruled out.  Labour, of course, are happy to do what it takes to preserve their hereditary power.  And will surely agree that local government shouldn’t be allowed to have policies that central government disagrees with.

Osborne described the move as “the biggest transfer of power to our local government in living memory".  So it is, for those whose memory extends no further back than 1990, when the Thatcher government, as part of its poll tax legislation, nationalised business rates, before which they had been set locally for centuries.  For Thatcher, this counter-revolution against democracy was entirely justified, to prevent representatives elected locally raising the money locally to do locally what they’d been elected to do.  To say that hard-Left Labour councils weren’t as democratic as they claimed to be was a fair point, but one that could easily have been corrected by moving to proportional representation.  Now that would have been a radical change.  One that would have permanently denied the Tories a majority at Westminster level too.

Not that the Tories have ever been that keen on local democracy, given that collective decision-making is prima facie socialist.  But just fine if it involves awarding public sector contracts to national or global business chains with no long-term commitment to the area.  When council services do fail, the answer should be to let elections sort things out, as we do when promises made nationally are broken.  Not for the Tories, who’d rather undermine, then seize and privatise.  Very localist that.  With that kind of encouragement, don’t be at all surprised if the calibre of local councillors isn’t what it was.

There’s a theme developing.  Labour offered ‘regionalism’ that was nothing of the sort.  The Tories offered ‘localism’ that was nothing of the sort.  And now we have ‘devolution’.  Which is…?  Well, usually understood as involving directly elected national or regional assemblies, able to take over whole swaths of Whitehall power, leaving most of Osborne’s Cabinet colleagues redundant.  Not the creation of a condition of national amnesia in which the return of recently stolen powers, with strings attached, can be hailed as ground-breaking generosity.  That’s quite some conjuring trick and the sad fact is that so many supposedly intelligent and well-read folk will fall for it.  The proof of that is that they continue to vote for the London parties that all offer only marginally different versions of the same sleight of hand.

The law of the political jungle being to define or be defined, it’s only natural that the London regime should wish to colonise the language of its enemies.  Words like ‘regionalism’ and ‘localism’ can be chewed up and spat out, but only if we deferentially accept the regime’s right to define them for us.

When John Prescott made a mess of regionalism, there were those urging us to find new conceptual ground, untainted by failure.  ‘Provincialism’, perhaps, or maybe ‘areaism’.  It’s an easy thing to do and the wrong thing.  Those who retreat in the face of adversity show only their unfitness for public office.  Those who see only a debate about the internal administrative nomenclature of England don’t see that the Europe of regions is about bigger issues in an unstable world.  (‘Provincialism’ doesn’t work in that context, where provinces are the county-sized units into which Belgian, Italian and Spanish regions are sub-divided.)  Those who think that a little local set-back in the North East referendum of 2004 marks the end of the road don’t see the historical timescale over which devolutionary issues unfold, and have always unfolded.  Generations come and go but the battle over power’s location continues.

So when Osborne attempts to present his nannying of local democracy as a ‘devolution revolution’ we don’t just have the right to say ‘hands off a word that means much more than you can imagine’.  We have the duty to do so too.  The current issue of Plaid Cymru’s magazine, The Welsh Nation, describes Welsh political life today as ‘post-nationalist’.  Did we miss something?  Enough of this nonsense!  Let’s not vote for parties who don’t know what they stand for and therefore can’t be trusted to stick to it.  Let’s leave the conjuring tricks to the Blairites and supplant a dishonest past that’s over-run its allotted hour.

Christmas Crackers

In the run-up to the festive season, all three main London parties set out their stalls on English devolution.  On the whole, they’re rather against it.

Labour were first, with a promise to devolve power to ‘city regions’ and ‘county regions’.  Anything but region regions.  These areas appear to correspond to those of the Local Enterprise Partnerships, business-led quangos that have never faced the electorate before and won’t be facing it in the future.  Is Labour’s plan to hand big business control of our money on a plate and pretend it’s what we, the people, want?  The lack of detail on governance arrangements could imply pretty much anything.  What is clear is that powers will not be devolved to directly elected councils: if that was the plan, Labour would have said so.

Labour have seen in Scotland what happens if you devolve real power to substantial areas and they want no more of that.  Having concluded that even the pseudo-regionalism of the Prescott zones constitutes too big a threat, they are now into ‘area-ism’, dividing England into clumps of counties.  The Environment Agency’s new areas – it abolished its regions in favour of areas in April – could provide clues as to where Labour may be heading.

The Siamese twins followed on Tuesday last week, with a glowing end-of-term report they wrote themselves about how they’ve decentralised power.  Can’t say we’ve noticed actually.  Then appended to it are the respective party positions of the Tories and FibDems.

For the Tories, English devolution is primarily about strengthening the all-England dimension – devolution from the centre to the centre – through English votes for English laws.  True to their feudal roots, they reject entirely the idea of regions in favour of local self-government, strictly limited and deferential, under the watchful, absolute authority of a Norman-style parliament supervising the children at play.  As with Labour, their plans involve concentrating power as much as possible in the hands of celebrity mayors with the charisma to shut down any inconvenient debate.  And, of course, they want to have another go at breaking the link between local identity and parliamentary constituencies.  The paper makes no reference to Cornwall, the Cornish or national minority rights, but does mention all the other home nations by name.

A few phrases stand out.  “There would be a presumption in favour of devolution, but checks in place would aim to ensure powers were not granted inappropriately.”  Oh dear.  The powers that Whitehall decides it’s ‘inappropriate’ to devolve are exactly the ones worth having.  We have to build the political movement that will force these creatures to acknowledge that subsidiarity means we decide what it’s appropriate to centralise, not the other way round.

Then there’s local growth.  The report launches straight into a discussion of how decentralisation can accelerate growth.  Hold on.  Let’s first decide whether growth is appropriate for our area, shall we?  Not according to the London parties.  EVERY initiative to regionalise power in England has been about the economy.  Not ONE has been about democratic choice.  In the 1940s we had Regional Boards for Industry.  In the 1960s we had Regional Economic Planning Councils.  In the 2000s we had Regional Development Agencies.  All applying an answer to a question we never heard asked.  Namely how the ‘provinces’ can best contribute to enriching the City of London / HM Treasury.  Absolutely not how the regions can set their own agenda.  Every time they try that, the regional institutions are abolished faster than you can say ‘distinctive sense of identity’.

According to the Planning Minister, Brandon Lewis, last week, “Localism means a choice over how the needs of communities are best met, not whether they are met.”  Or even being allowed to say what they are.  Lewis was responding to an adjournment debate initiated by Liam Fox, Tory MP for North Somerset, whose trenchant criticism of the Government and its Whitehall machine might surprise those who remember him being part of it just three years ago.  Come April he’ll be telling everyone how breathtakingly wonderful it’s all been.  Hansard records that his neighbour, the Tory MP for Weston-super-Mare, may have similar concerns but, being still on the Government payroll, is barred from voicing them.  A jolly jape is this ghastly game of ‘Parliamentary representation’, where one’s adoring constituents are but meat to the procedural grinder.

All the parties continue to pick at the idea of a constitutional convention.  Either as a way to come up with some workable fix (forget it) or as a way to send everyone to sleep.  We’ve been telling everyone the most fundamental answer to the West Lothian question for decades now.  Why keep asking it?

Of the three parties, the FibDems say the most encouraging things about regional devolution, quite pointlessly since they remain bound to work with one of two larger parties that hate the very idea.

The fact remains that all the countries of the United Kingdom are conquered countries.  Scotland was (and still is) conquered with bribes.  The others were all conquered by unimaginably violent means.  Those who sit in London and fine-tune the unwritten constitution are all accessories after the fact.  They are not our friends.  They laugh at the aspiration to be free of London rule.  And they seriously expect us to see the joke.  Go on, pull the other one.

Choosing to be Beggars

Last week, an environmental coalition – Butterfly Conservation, the League Against Cruel Sports, the Mammal Society, the Ramblers, the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts – held a ‘Rally for Nature’ at the Palace of Westminster.  Why?  To lobby MPs ahead of the next election, reminding them of how important nature is.

MPs need reminding.  Because across Wessex, wildlife is under siege.  In Alton, for example, there’s currently a campaign to save its wildflower meadows from housebuilders.  This area is a beautiful example of Hampshire countryside and a haven for butterflies.  Spearheading development at Alton is the Homes & Communities Agency, a central government quango.  Yes, it’s our own taxes that are paying for our destruction.

Any campaign against imposed development has our support.  Wessex is, for us, a community of communities, every one of which must be truly free to decide its own future, without interference from those in London who think they know best. 

But how effective are these isolated actions?  The rallies.  The petitions.  The implorings?  Not very.  Look at Winchester.  At Twyford Down, the Department of Transport carved the M3 through one of the most heavily ‘protected’ landscapes in England.  Nearby, the battle for Barton Farm was lost, due to the winning combination of Winchester College as landowner, a dogged developer, and a government that spectacularly failed to deliver on localism.

The system can be beaten.  Occasionally, a developer goes away empty-handed.  But such cases are all too rare.  They serve mainly as ammunition for those who claim that the system works and that it can be beaten, with reasoned argument, and that therefore there’s no cause to change it.  Most folk don’t engage with the system until it impinges on them, and so they fail to see the bigger picture, the campaigners in neighbouring shires facing the same developers, the same arguments, the same strategies aimed at defeating them.  They place their faith in non-party pressure groups like County Wildlife Trusts or the Campaign to Protect Rural England.  More hardened campaigners refer to them as the ‘fluffies’, those who are simply too nice to win.

They really are their own worst enemies.  They lose because even when they do think politically they do not act politically.  Development is being imposed on Wessex by a Tory/FibDem coalition.  So what does Wessex do?  It votes Tory or FibDem.  Alton has a Tory MP (with 57% of the vote).  Its district council, East Hampshire, is 100% Tory/FibDem.  Hampshire County Council is 79% Tory/FibDem.  You get the lies you voted for.  These are folk from whom you cannot expect anything better.  And you chose them to represent your views.  Do they not represent your views?  Then why do you keep voting for them?

How do they get away with it?  ALL London-party politicians play pass-the-parcel.  MPs will insist that planning decisions are for local councils to make and nothing to do with them.  But councillors will point out that as decisions can be overturned by Whitehall they are never truly masters in their own house.  Some of them undoubtedly enjoy putting the blame on the faceless mandarins, knowing that voting loyalties are too tribal for this to make any difference at all come polling day.

Because who would you vote for if the Tories and FibDems disgust you?  The argument goes that there’s only one realistic alternative – the Labour bogeyman – and that ‘socialist’ Labour would be so much worse.  That’s widely believed because it happens to be widely true.  (Except for the socialism, transformed long ago into the petty spitefulness of political correctness, which, being obsessed with individual reward and punishment, is everything but social.)  Labour are the party of Big Growth.  But no more so than the other London parties.  Labour are worse because, as an urban party, they aren’t shy about destroying the countryside.  For them, protecting countryside is the hobby of the well-heeled who want to keep house prices up.

Maybe, but the butterflies have committed no crime.  Those who defend them may well be sincere in believing that a better England is not the overcrowded concrete jungle it’s becoming.  The problem for the Tories and FibDems is that the outrage is bound to grow as ever-more-sensitive sites reach the top of the ‘to build on’ list.  That’s when a belief in the free market reaches revulsion point.  Labour meanwhile, accustomed to State intervention as a means to facilitate growth, not to reverse it, are left hopelessly unable to respond to that opportunity.  Grand analysis gives way to marginal differences.  Should we build more flats in villages?  Or convert old Dutch barns in the middle of nowhere?  Would using floodplains for housing be fine if we just raised defences?  What’s the cleverest way to undermine support for the Green Belt?

No wonder UKIP are rejoicing.  UKIP can expect to pick up votes from three sources.  There are the true believers, those who think that to be really cynical is to be really cool.  Then there are the protest votes, finding a home, any home, that gives vent to their anger and frustration.  Finally, there are those who are easily fooled into thinking that UKIP is them.  Those who believe, for example, that UKIP is an anti-immigration party when it has made clear that it’s nothing of the kind.  It’s pro-immigration, but on the UK’s own terms.

And so it goes: Third World immigrants might work for less than eastern Europeans.  Don’t mention the argument that filling a glut of vacancies by stripping developing countries of their most skilled workers is far from fraternal.  Or ask what it is that made those countries so relatively unattractive.  Above all, keep folk well-confused and focused on immigration – THEM – instead of on population, which is them AND us.  UKIP is yet another economically libertarian party, whose main gripe is that the EU, unlike little Britain, might just conceivably stand up for sovereignty and tell the globalists and the growth junkies where to go.

A vote for UKIP is not good, but neither is it bad.  In the long view, anything that breaks up the hereditary, class-based tribalism of British politics has to be a positive development.  The more fragmented the vote becomes, the less credible it will be to continue with first-past-the-post or with a media focus on just the ‘top three’.  Those who have left the Tories behind will have shown that it’s possible to move on.  And beyond UKIP, or maybe the Greens (enthusiasts for ‘green growth’, so hardly sound), lies what?  Territorial parties like ours have a vital role to play in the 21st century.  The long-term limitation of UKIP is that it isn’t actually interested in the territory of the UK, in the way that, for example, the nationalist parties are interested in the territory of Scotland, Wales or Cornwall.  For UKIP, the UK is just Airstrip One.  Any hint to the contrary in its 2010 manifesto need not be taken seriously, since its own leader condemned it as ‘drivel’.

Essentially, the smaller the territorial focus of politics, the better the chances of defeating Big Growth, because the closer the connection between those who make decisions and those who live with the consequences.  That might suggest localism rather than regionalism, let alone europeanism, but there’s no contradiction so long as subsidiarity is observed.  Wider solidarity can avoid one area being set against another for a third party’s benefit.  Regions, properly designed from below (not the Prescott zones imposed from above) can be a shield for local democracy, not its negation.

We want a self-governing Wessex because we want a completely different kind of politics, taking for granted changes like proportional representation to break the hold of the old parties here.  Instead of admiring Switzerland, with its self-governing cantons, citizen initiatives and binding referenda, why not imitate it?  What are we waiting for?  Why would we rather choose to be beggars before the lords and members of a despotic and self-obsessed Parliament, the guardians of an English democratic tradition that objective observers might judge to be no better than tyranny?  We should talk politics with our neighbours, because they are part of our ability to change whatever we choose, not with our MPs, who exist only to abuse the power we lend them.

In 1992, we issued a pamphlet entitled Your Region Needs You!  Its ever-more-relevant conclusion is as follows:

“Wessex is for its people West-Saxon or not, native or settler who cherish it for what it could be and should be.  But what of its future without regionalisation?  The answer is disaster! – The remedy in your hands…?”

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.

Serfs For Sale?

“Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor liberty to purchase power.”

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1738)

If you’re going to keep on repeating lies, the risk isn’t that others will start to believe them.  It’s that you’ll start to believe them yourself and end up trapped inside them.

Thatcherites are now in that position, confronted by realities they failed to anticipate, mainly because they were convinced that the rest of the world plays by the same demented rules that they do.

Let’s start by taking a look at two of her favourite ideas.

The first is that the private sector is good and the public sector bad.  Thatcher famously told a group of nationalised industry executives that if any of them were any use they’d be in the private sector.  It doesn’t take long to work out the corollary: that in her view public services should all be run by second rate managers to ensure that they fail.  The very services for which as Prime Minister she was responsible.

Today, many of those services are back in the public sector.  Owned by the Dutch, French and German governments, to name just a few.  And there’s the problem for Thatcher’s successor.  Either these nationalised firms are managed competently, which is impossible, since they’re State-owned, or they’re not managed competently, which ideologically would be much more comforting.  And if indeed they’re not, then David Cameron has just placed Britain’s energy future in the hands of incompetent State bureaucrats in Paris and Beijing.  Which means they’re doing a more competent job than he is.

Time for the second great idea.  The idea that the State doesn’t have any money of its own.  According to Thatcher, every penny it spends is wrung out of taxpayers, without whom it would be nothing.  It never was true, since at the core of every State is the common wealth, the rights of the community to things managed in common.  The air, the water, and in some cases still, even tiny little bits of a once-common heritage in land.  When publicly-owned industries make profits, those profits too flow into the common treasury.

Today they flow into other countries’ treasuries, allowing them to reduce taxation on their own folk.  In the case of railways, for example, our taxes go to pay operating subsidies to companies owned by the railway administrations of France, Germany and the Netherlands, allowing them to invest more in their own systems.  The case for public ownership of utilities is that these are natural monopolies, providing things we need in order to live and which, for various reasons, are impervious to competition.  The prices they’re allowed by regulators to charge are therefore little different from taxes.  And by allowing other governments to buy the right to make those charges, our own has in effect sold the right to tax us to foreign powers.  We are serfs for sale.

None of this was supposed to happen.  Nationalised industries were to be replaced by lots of little local companies all competing for business.  Not national and international conglomerates able to dictate terms to any government daft enough to let them.  Totalitarian liberalism is unrepentant, since if this is what the market produces then it cannot be questioned.  The problem never lies with the market.  It lies with the alternatives we champion, with our failure to understand the rationality of values far superior to the choices we are capable of making together.  For the liberals, we, the customers, are the problem when we unite in our refusal to play by the rules.

Public anger at the sell-off of Royal Mail and at the deal struck over Hinkley C with French imperialists and another foreign regime, one with an even worse record on human rights, will not abate easily.  Too many things are happening all at once for that.  The failure of even the Co-op to act responsibly, destroying a treasured institution, has folk of goodwill grasping at any straw that will re-assure them that the future is not one long dark night of corporate piracy without end.  In the process, they will clutch at many straws that will soon blow away in the wind.

The first thing we need to realise is that the UK, as it has long been understood, cannot form part of the solution.  It’s too late for that.  Attlee’s Britain no longer exists.  His model is not repeatable and it would be a ghastly mistake even to try.  It was always bound to be a betrayal of truly democratic principles, as our forebears in Common Wealth argued at the time.  The industries nationalised were managerialised, not democratised.  Yes, there was a Scottish Region of British Railways, but no Scottish Parliament to oversee it.  There was a Wales Gas Board, but no Welsh Assembly.  In England there were ultimately regions for electricity, gas and water, for railways, for hospitals, and for many other things.  But how many of them matched?  How many were designed around areas that made sense as the basis of future elected regional governments?  Few, if any.  No wonder it all ended so badly.  Thatcherism arose in the 1970s as the establishment response to demands for devolution-all-round.  It preserved London-based power by transferring the keys to Britain from Whitehall to the City, which is now in the process of handing them on to the Chinese.

The second thing is to beware any attempt by Labour to tap into the demand for re-nationalisation.  For Labour, the nation is Britain and the clamour is there to be manipulated in defence of a centralised union under its absolutist control.  There are better ways, ways offered by the nationalist and regionalist movements of these islands.  Labour, to misquote Aneurin Bevan, is simply the future refusing to be born.  It was revealed this week that London and the south-east of England continue to be the principal beneficiaries of the mess for others which those in power there have long sought to engineer.  With more to come.  Labour will equally continue to argue that the social distribution of power is everything, while its geographical distribution is irrelevant.  Despite centuries of evidence to the contrary, millions will go on believing it.

The third thing to note is that restoring common ownership in a modernised form today has been made more difficult by the British State’s determined attempts to bankrupt itself.  How is it all to be paid for?  Even if assets are deprivatised at the same 30-40% discounts at which they were privatised, that is still a huge amount of money.  Surprisingly little is said about how easy it is to find the money to buy problem assets, like toxic banks, or failing airports in Scotland, Wales or Cornwall.  Politically too, it’s a smoother path to attend to precious lame ducks than to prise assets seriously worth having from the grip of more reluctant sellers.  It’s the profits, not the losses, that need diverting from the private to the public realm.  Marx and Engels are rarely read these days but they did wickedly point out that those who make such a fuss about the sacred character of property rights are the heirs of those who got rich by treating past property rights with contempt, say during the French Revolution, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, or the Norman Conquest.  A little less reverence where rights do more harm than good would be no bad thing.  In a real crisis, the City’s worldwide paper ‘assets’ will amount to nothing at all.  What’s on the ground is what will count.

Inevitably, such matters are ones of opportunity and pragmatism rather than a precise strategy to roll forward the State.  What we know is that the world is changing, and changing faster than we have been willing to notice.  The more successful countries of the future will be those already thinking long-term, say 30-50 years ahead.  Watch China’s moves in Africa, and now in Europe, and weep at our weakness in that regard.  Fortunately, we are not alone.  There are many, perhaps surprisingly many, parallel movements for change in small nations and historic regions right across Europe and beyond, opposed to dogmatic centralism in all its forms.  Wessex is one piece of a very big jigsaw.

So what are the basic tasks a self-governing Wessex should look to organise?  One list of ‘foundation occupations’ for any well-founded society that doesn’t wish to be occupied, economically any more than militarily, is as follows:

Category 1 – Occupations calling for the exercise of considerable professional skill, e.g. administration, justice, security, education, health.  To the extent that a society alienates these services it also alienates itself.  The identification of these professionals with the territory in which they work, its customs, its needs and its interests, is what gives a society its essential character.  Deprive them of the opportunity for loyalty to place and no-one else will feel any either.  There is room for unsubsidised, non-core private sector involvement in education, health and the law but public values are inevitably subverted if that involvement enters core services.

Category 2 – Occupations with duties where incentives are impractical, e.g. ambulance and fire services, post, prisons, traffic police, waste collection.  Target-setting is likely to be counter-productive if it ends up degrading the service provided.  There is therefore no substitute for managers sensitive to circumstances.  The private sector has nothing to offer that is not equally available to an adequately resourced public sector.

Category 3 – Occupations with specialist technical skills, e.g. electricity, telecommunications, water and sewerage.  These are areas where private sector involvement has often been the norm, but on a tight leash given how vital these services are to modern life.  It’s likely that we under-estimate the consequences of losing control over them.  It’s also likely that they’ll become ever more vital to our future and ever more vulnerable, e.g. to cyber-attack.

Category 4 – Occupations where productivity can be affected by the worker, and where worker co-operatives could therefore be organised, e.g. transport operation and maintenance.  The problems of worker co-operatives in these sectors do not relate to the organisation of work but to the funding of investment.  Every one of the transport co-operatives resulting from privatisation has since been bought out by corporate capital.  To guard against any repetition, that funding issue needs to be addressed.  Capital, according to William Barnes (in Views of Labour and Gold), is no more than that part of wealth that is rendered useful by labour.  Considered thus, there is therefore no reason why it should not be organised by means of a democratic process, though necessarily on whatever scale, or scales, is commensurate with the needs of a modern society.  Does a transport company with an ageing fleet always have to be bought out by those with the money to replace it, or are there other options such as asset leasing?

Category 5 – Occupations whose nature could change with circumstances.  This is where watching the signs really matters.  There are many services we normally entrust to the private sector, but what do we do when things are abnormal?  Where would we be without tanker drivers or those overseeing the logistics of supermarket deliveries?  To whom do they answer in a diplomatic crisis involving a foreign owner?  Let’s not panic. But let’s at least have the answers to hand in a self-governing Wessex region of the future that seeks to prosper in interesting times.

The age of scarcity into which self-government is born will require a range of ‘foundation projects’ as well as occupations, though these are less easy to predict from history.  Let’s not allow current prejudices to prevent us contemplating future solutions.  They not only can be radical but will need to be radical.  Today is the anniversary of the death, in 899, of King Alfred the Great, a Wessex hero, but also a warning to us.  Alfred took risks for the sake of Wessex, such as assuming responsibility for kingless Mercians and Northumbrians, that were soon to lead to the unification of England and, under the Normans, to the eclipse of Wessex for centuries to come.  All his investments of effort, in the physical infrastructure of military and naval defences, and in the defences of the mind provided by his revival of learning, were ultimately ineffective against the superior organisation and determined infiltration of hostile neighbours, despite their relatively small numbers.  High-tax, high-spend policies of the Alfredian kind, directed towards rebuilding and securing a worthwhile society, won’t always be effective, it’s true (a well-organised world actually makes a more tempting target for top-down takeover).  It's just that they're always better than not trying at all and succumbing to unintelligible chaos.

In the 1940s, Friedrich von Hayek wrote a famous critique of the State entitled The Road to Serfdom, yet still concluded that “In no system that could be rationally defended would the State just do nothing.”  The small, community-benefit State we envisage for Wessex is one that ought to do much more than nothing if it is to have a better chance of lifting the yoke from our necks than the blind pursuit of post-Thatcherite sell-out we endure today.

Ins & Outs

So, what is the Conservative Party’s settled policy on Europe?  Not one to be written without a regular check over the shoulder in the direction of Monsieur Farage.  Expect many more gimmicks like the one we saw recently: in effect taking scarecrows on wheels around the inner cities, urging illegal immigrants to get the message and get packing.  It’s not the effectiveness of the policy that matters, it’s the effectiveness of the politics.

Another gimmick is the ongoing, rolling consultation whose sub-text is the taking-back of selected powers from Brussels.  The whole thing stinks of hypocrisy from a government that believes subsidiarity is too good for the likes of us.  Less power for Eurocrats, more power for Ukocrats.  Great.  Super.  Less power for them in London, more power for us in our communities?  Frightfully sorry, but, no.

We’ve explained before that we are ‘Euro-wary’ rather than pro or anti in principle.  The EU is a force for good so long as it promotes genuine subsidiarity, drawing the poison from the Norman dogma that the Crown-in-Parliament can do no wrong.  It is not a force for good when it builds its own managerialist dogmas to replace it.  That genuine subsidiarity has any possibility of co-existing in the long run with a drive for ‘ever closer union’.  That the acquis communautaire cannot be reduced.  And that the EU is committed to deepening the competitive market economy rather than nurturing a co-operative, democratic one (see the Lisbon Treaty, Article 119, which applies regardless of national, regional or local choices at the ballot box).  Much of the emerging EU constitution seems designed more to frustrate reasoned debate than to facilitate it.

The capture of an idealistic project by bureaucratic and business interests is always tragic but it won’t be reversed by a refusal to engage.  UKIP’s faults aren’t just that it lives permanently in the 1950s; they are also that it believes the UK can be improved but that, from the UK’s perspective at least, the EU cannot.  It’s not interested in finding the ardent allies who most certainly do exist.  Regionalists, from many countries, have argued for fundamental reforms that would change not only how the EU works but how the UK works, if the UK continues to exist at all.  The system is broke.  All of it.  And so it needs to change radically at EVERY level.  There can be no no-go areas of policy, nor, since we all have to get on with our neighbours, can one identity (such as English, British or European) exclusively dominate the rest.  New structures must ensure that we can co-operate with each other, without feeling put upon.  Existing structures struggle to achieve the first; they fail spectacularly to deliver the second.  No wonder folk are angry.

In the 1975 Common Market referendum, only two areas of the UK voted ‘No’.  They were Shetland and the Western Isles.  Support in Scotland generally was lower than in Wales, which was lower than in England.  (Every area in Wessex, except Avon, was then more pro-Europe than the England average.)  It might seem that the greater the distance from the heart of Europe, the cooler the reception.  Norway voted to stay out, twice (1972 and 1994).  Greenland voted to leave (1982).

Yet in 2013 it was on his trip to Edinburgh that Farage was given the roughest ride.  UKIP has become the protest party of choice primarily for the English electorate.  North of the border, it isn’t viewed as a liberating force but as the bearer of the old shackles.  The combined votes for the main avowedly Eurosceptic parties – UKIP and the BNP – in the 2009 European elections exceeded 23% in every English area but London.  Wales was not far behind but Scotland didn’t even make 8%.

Scotland, Wales and Cornwall do well out of EU funding, but so do many of the old industrial areas of England.  There is an understandable unease that, were the funding to vanish, there is no guarantee that the UK would either replace it or devolve the powers required to make it unnecessary.  Yet funding arrangements alone do not explain England’s attitude: UKIP came second in the Barnsley Central by-election in 2011, right in the heart of EU-assisted South Yorkshire.

So why the popularity in England?  Perhaps because UKIP appeals to nostalgic images and national stereotypes that have nothing to do with the way the world actually is in 2013.  But there are three themes it does especially well.  One is that our national wealth is solely or largely wrapped up in the City of London and its post-imperial connections and these must not be challenged (hence the £-sign logo).  Another is the anti-immigrant theme (all those Bulgarians and Romanians, for whom we quite rightly should NOT be building houses).  Though where Farage would put the 2.2 million British ex-pats if they had to leave the other EU countries where they’ve made their homes we just don’t know.  And then there’s the real joker in the pack: that Europe wants to smash England up into regions.

We want to see an England whose regions are thriving politically, economically and culturally.  It can’t happen while all key decisions are being made in London.  Nor can it happen by pretending that a host of often tiny and always cowed local authorities can make the really big choices on education, health or transport, or exercise law-making and tax-varying powers.  Whether a regionalised England would be an England without national institutions – institutions at the all-England level – is however not actually in the gift of Brussels at all.  It depends on decisions made by the government of the UK.  It depends on how the relationship between Britain and England is expressed.  EU membership is wholly irrelevant to the issue, which would continue to exist even if the continent did not.

Let's take a common objection to the absence of an English Parliament.  That England is the only European country without an elected national voice of its own.  It’s not quite true, since England dominates the UK Parliament numerically and so the counter-objection that England doesn’t deserve two parliaments when others only have one each is not entirely unfounded.  It’s also the case that the English Parliament even in mediæval times included representatives from Scotland, Wales and Cornwall.  There is a much reproduced image of Edward I in Parliament flanked by Alexander, King of Scots and Llewelyn, Prince of Wales.  If you go around claiming overlordship of the whole island then centuries later this sort of thing does come back to bite your descendants.  There’s a precedent for a Scottish Parliament that just covers Scotland.  There isn’t a precedent for an English Parliament that just covers England.

So make one?  France has its Parlement.  Germany has its Bundestag.  Italy has its Parlamento.  Spain has its Cortes Generales.  Why not England?  What all these countries also have is regional government.  Yet English centralists, so keen to make international comparisons when demanding an English Parliament, take a strangely different line if regionalism is mentioned.  It’s somehow not quite English enough.  Too foreign.  (Wessex, foreign?)  Or, perhaps, grudgingly, something for an English Parliament to discuss later.  Why later?  If you’re going to change the constitution, why leave the job half-done?  Why set up distinctly English ministries for a whole range of topics that could be dealt with regionally if you then have to dismantle them to bring regional devolution into being?  We don’t work for an English Parliament, because it would not of itself advance our cause.  We don’t take issue with its creation, so long as it has no power whatsoever to override the views of a Wessex Witan on what works best for Wessex.

What is clear is that if England were an EU Member State, the EU could no more be a threat to England than it can today be to any other country, including those that already have regional government.  England, what crimes are committed in thy name!  Full recognition of the rights of the other four home nations is denied out of a misplaced belief that the English national psyche cannot cope with the loss of empire, with the inability to find a leading ‘role’ in the world.  Always the need to find someone to dominate, and someone to fight with.  All so very Norman.  Just like the refusal to devolve power to meaningful regions within England.

We have a ruling establishment that slips easily between being mainly English and being wholly British but cannot bring itself to be European.  (Maybe it’s an Anglican thing, a hangover from the Tudors.)  To its immense disappointment, it has discovered over the past 40 years that Europe is too big to be dominated.  So it now wants to look elsewhere for a victim, while convincing as many folk as it can that the rest of Europe wants to dominate us.  Instead of seeking allies in Europe, we in Wessex are urged to shun those with whom - as one of a number of predominantly rural regions being transformed for the worse by a powerful metropolitan neighbour - we actually have every reason to make common cause.

Contesting The Legacy

“There are certainly parts of the country that are more anti-her than others, but I think they tend to be the parts that have become relatively less important.”
Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph

Moore spoke on the day that we saw the last of the Rt Hon the Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. At least he’s honest. We’re really seeing the UK establishment for what it is now, contemptuous of all outside the charmed circle of the M25 doughnut ring. So if the United Kingdom doesn’t work for us, why should we work to sustain it? Answers on a postage stamp please.

It’s been a fascinating week. The Thatcher funeral was history in the making. And the writing. And the re-writing. The victors get to do that. And more. They get to shout down anyone with a different point of view. ‘We’re all Thatcherites now’, according to Cameron. Speak for yourself. Ten million quid to give the most divisive PM ever a triumphalist send-off? Not in our name. Austerity? You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?

The London parties have taken to heart Orwell’s words, that whoever controls the past controls the future. And they’ve been every bit as passionate about possession of it as any of Thatcher’s victims.

You have NO right to remember. You can mourn the passing of a politician who in the realms of hagiography is fast overtaking Churchill. But you cannot mourn the communities she destroyed. You can feel for her grieving family and applaud her support, in theory, for the family as an institution. But you cannot point out the families she wrecked. The broken marriages. The suicides. The children who hardly saw their grandparents because their parents had to ‘get on their bikes’ and ‘move to where there is work’. As if work is something that grows randomly like a plant and is not the product of human thought and action.

You have NO right to a view on events from 30 years ago if you weren’t around at the time. Even if your own life has been harmed by them. Full employment has never been restored, even in the Blair/Brown years when boom-and-bust was abolished. A ‘flexible labour market’ has become the new normal. Complete with the huge additional cost that represents for public spending. And the incalculable cost of wasted lives.

You have NO right of respect for free expression. Download what you will, but the music charts will be censored to show official disapproval of the choices that you, the once-so-sovereign consumer, make in the market place.

You have NO right to party. Is that so? If YOU don’t want to party, then don’t. Spare a thought if you can though for those who endured Thatcher’s reign of economic terror. Empathise with the catharsis involved in celebrating the end of a woman whose rule was brutal, callous and heartless. To rejoice at outliving your worst nightmare is a natural human reaction, even 23 years late; those who uncomprehendingly objected merely prolonged the cruelty.  Spare a thought not just for the lame ducks Thatcher sent to the wall but for the small businesses that also expired as a consequence of her illiterate policies. Ironic that, for a grocer’s daughter.

You have NO right even to question the now settled historical account of the 1980s. Move on. It’s 2013. It certainly is, and we still live by the assumptions imposed back then. They still go unchallenged by mainstream parties. Anyone who says ‘move on’ has something to hide from the piercing light of justice. Well, at least those mining communities have got closure now. (Pun intended.) They’ve had their bit of fun. Draw a line and return at once to your assigned prole sector. No chance of that. ‘Achieving closure’ is manipulative psycho-babble. In plain English, ‘accept defeat’. Accept the victors’ view.

The crackdown has been so over-the-top that it’s a fair bet that it has actually backfired rather spectacularly. No-one could have been the saint that Maggie was made out to be and more than a few who knew nothing of her policies will now be doing some digging for the truth. A watershed moment for British politics? Almost certainly. There is one person who has come out of the past week with a reputation genuinely enhanced. That person is Clement Attlee, who didn’t get a £10 million ceremonial funeral but did far more than Maggie to deserve one. Thatcher destroyed one half of his legacy, the nationalised industries, because she was too thick to examine how best to reform and modernise them without removing every last trace of democratic accountability. So she delegated the job to brighter folk in the commercial sector, who didn’t have a clue about democracy. Now her successors are destroying the other half, the welfare state, for precisely the same reason.

Dig for the truth and it will emerge. How many of our problems today are NOT part of the Thatcher legacy? Her manipulation of the unemployment figures, by parking the disabled and long-term sick on other benefits, underpins the furious debate over welfare reform. Complaints about rip-off utilities are the poisonous fruit of privatisation. And the shortage of social housing would not be what it is without Right-To-Buy.

Many voters did well out of Right-To-Buy and Thatcher knew they would reward her for making it possible to buy their council houses. Not just legally possible, but financially possible. With discounts that amounted to free money. Loads of it, stolen from ratepayers right across the land. Thatcher was a thief, pure and simple. She took what did not belong to her government – the property of local authorities answerable to their own electorates for its management – and gave it as a political bribe to a whole new social class. Duly noted. When private property is next taken into public ownership, no-one should expect to receive full compensation. Indeed, any at all might be viewed as needlessly excessive.  It certainly was when the water industry was privatised; its previous municipal owners were paid not a penny.

Make no mistake, the tide is turning back towards public ownership. Thatcher’s death, and the re-appraisal of the past that it has now unleashed, will speed that sea-change. Those who say ‘move on’ would like to remind us that history cannot be reversed. Indeed it cannot. But policy can. Thatcherism proves that it can. And so Thatcherism too can be undone. In the grand scheme of history, it may not even merit a mention.

The challenge now is to shape that undoing. The Left remains poorly placed to do it. The impotent rage of the Left during the 1980s was, sadly, all of its own making. How could it defend Labour-run councils, how could it uphold their right to make their own decisions, when it would have done the same sort of thing had it been in Thatcher’s shoes? What answer was there to the sell-off of council houses when a Labour government would have interfered as much if not more, for example to abolish grammar schools in areas that had repeatedly voted to keep them? It is that kind of contempt for local choice that places Labour and the Coalition equally in our sights. Neither is fit to preside over the rebuilding of the democratic sector that we so badly need. A rebuilding in which the region, as an area neither too large nor too small, ought to play a vital role. Labour, left to its own devices, will nationalise, centralise, and concentrate yet more power and talent in London at the expense of those areas deemed 'relatively less important'.

The Thatcher years saw some hard re-thinking on devolution. Many a Labour supporter came to rue the day that Scotland and Wales rejected the escape route from Thatcherism. A profound and vigorous regionalism throughout the UK would have had the effect of isolating the Thatcherite virus in its heartlands, depriving it of the resources – such as North Sea oil – that it needed to do its work, and creating in regions like Wessex a new politics that could have challenged the Tory hegemony here. Class division in Britain has a strong geographical dimension. Old Labour tried, and ultimately failed, to interpret geographical problems purely in class terms and to present control of the Westminster law-machine as the solution. It’s time now to try the alternative, to liberate the regions to find their own solutions.

Old Labour played by the old rules and it lost. It opposed proportional representation and the dispersal of power. And so allowed power to concentrate in the hands of an unrepresentative gang of free market thugs. Radicals in Wessex must be clear about what went wrong. And about what is now needed to put it right.

Among The Ruins

Lector si monumentum requiris circumspice.
(Reader, if you seek a monument, look around you.)

The media had decades to prepare for the death of Margaret Thatcher, who checked out at The Ritz today. It still seemed this evening to have taken them by surprise. The BBC were the worst, like a bunch of prefects, busily orchestrating the nation’s grief. Female chauvinist cooing about how she was the first woman Prime Minister (which she was, and a pretty rotten example for any more to follow). Hints that she was anti-socialist (yet introduced the hyper-egalitarian Poll Tax). And all the London party leaders lining up to say how wonderful she was.

You can already visualise the flowers piling up like it was Princess Diana all over again. And there’s more to come as taxpayers’ money (£3 million has been mentioned) is splashed out on a funeral for the old girl at St Paul’s. (St Paul’s is a big church in London that thinks itself important, the work of the well-known Wiltshireman remembered in the Latin line above.) Such a shame that firm friends of hers like General Pinochet can’t be there. An even bigger shame that the rites aren’t to be funded entirely by private sponsorship as she’d surely have wanted.

Channel 4 did a much more balanced job. They actually went to the areas that Thatcher devastated and got reactions from those on the street. A big thumbs-down from Wales and Northumbria. And in Scotland, Alex Salmond cannily pointed out how much she’d done to make the case for a Scottish Parliament. Thatcher is gone but her legacy lives on. Part of that legacy has been to weaken and perhaps destroy the myth that the London regime works for the good of the whole UK. Thatcher worked for the spivs who still infect her party, and now the other big London parties too.

Sickest of all the comments made today was Cameron’s eulogy praising Thatcher as ‘the Patriot Prime Minister’ (‘the People’s Princess’ being, of course, already taken). She rolled back the frontiers of the British State, thereby enabling its assets (privatised at fraudulent prices) to be bought-up by foreign ones. She will be remembered for helping to bring democracy to eastern Europe. While destroying it in Greater London and the metropolitan counties like a nanny confiscating toys. She lectured others on freedom while curbing human rights and entrenching prejudice. Her most infamous, most unguarded remark was that there is no such thing as society. Society can at least now say that there is no such thing as Margaret Thatcher. Patriot Prime Minister? Loyal to something, yes, but never to her country.

The way is clear for the rebirth of that politics of community that so nearly made it through in the 70s before it was so horribly handbagged. Thatcher advocated what she claimed was true devolution, a return of power to the atomised individual. Post-crash, we now know what that world looks like in all its glory. A world where not only the individual but communities, and whole countries, are alone and defenceless against the will of ‘the markets’ and ‘the investors’ who must be placated. Not to mention the failed firms that, far from going to the wall as Thatcher told us they must, are kept alive by endless transfusions of public wealth. Worse, if everyone’s looking out for themselves, day by day, who’s looking out for our shared long-term future?

The damage that woman did is vast, so vast that the generations who have grown up since sometimes struggle even to imagine that a better world is possible. The repairs must start in earnest tomorrow.

Eric the Ostrich

The Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, has an assured place in history as the man who oversaw the first regulations to officially recognise the flag of Wessex. Although the Wyvern has a long pedigree, the current design of the flag dates from 1974, meaning that it took just 38 years to go from an idea to recognition in law. Few can match that. East Anglia took about a century. Cornwall and Wales didn’t have it easy either. It’s a point worth quoting whenever we’re accused of making no progress. Well done to the Tories for changing the law in our favour. It certainly makes a mockery of Labour’s claim to be a ‘progressive’ party, which ought to be on our side.

Pickles is a mixed blessing though. He picks and chooses shamelessly when it comes to turning localism on and off. Some things he does get right and long may it continue. We applaud his support for community identity, marked, for example, by the series of county flags that have been flown outside his London headquarters. We applaud too his no-nonsense approach to local government finance. Second-home owners should pay full Council Tax – why ever did they not? Councillors must question more to improve value for money. Cutting real services and causing real pain, in order to blame the Coalition while protecting politically-correct pet projects, is what Labour does. Pickles yesterday challenged everyone to do better, in advice entitled 50 ways to save. It’s blunt, using the language a Yorkshireman prefers, with no hint of the carefully crafted phrases of the civil service. When Pickles tells councils to cut the ‘posh hotels and glitzy award ceremonies’, you can hear Sir Humphrey cringe.

We applaud many of the suggestions, which offer potential for huge savings with no harmful effect on services. That we’d rather see the savings go to maintain and improve those services than line bankers’ pockets is beside the point. Waste is waste.

We particularly applaud the suggestion that councils make money by doing business, for example by using spare capacity at depots to offer MoT tests to the public. Now that councils have a general power of competence there are few legal limits to municipal trading. Pickles has, knowingly or not, opened the way for a new wave of gas-and-water-socialism. In the 19th and 20th centuries, many councils ran profitable businesses in electricity, gas, transport and water and some even managed banking, restaurants and telephones. Specific Parliamentary approval was needed for every venture and many were successfully opposed by private businesses who felt threatened by public enterprise. Today the door is open to local communities to claw back some of that profit for themselves. Well done to the Tories for changing the law in our favour, yet again.

We do query one other suggestion, however, that councils should lapse their subscriptions to regional organisations now that regions are no longer in favour with the London regime. Just because its regional institutions have been abolished doesn’t mean that regional issues have. We think the Prescott geography was wrong but we don’t say that councils should be made to feel guilty if they work together at regional level. If the issues are too big for them to handle individually, or on a local cross-border basis, then regional thinking is inevitable if good government is to be achieved. The only alternative is for Whitehall to interfere in problems that don’t need to be resolved at so exalted a level. The result of Pickles’ irrational hatred of regionalism is bad government. It’s time he pulled his head out of the sand.  Because regional co-operation might very well be the 51st way to make some really significant economies.

Blue Touch Paper

It’s an interesting possibility that those who want a kind of war, on terror, on non-growth, or whatever, are in fact aching for a real fight between countries. War is the dominant thought that occupies their waking moments. David Cameron and his party don’t do morality. The idea of a supposedly ethical foreign policy, with its unprovoked invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and its sabre-rattling towards Iran, can be safely parked with Labour. Cameron has a supposedly commercial foreign policy. Using taxpayers’ money preferentially to subsidise the arms trade.

Why does he do that? If the goods were any good, wouldn’t they sell themselves? That’s not how the deals are done. It’s politics, ultimately, not business. Think of the contract as a subsidy to the UK to obtain from its government the correct point of view. This routine prostitution of sovereignty is the price paid for basing an economy on global trade and finance and not upon using our indigenous resources (including high-tech know-how) primarily for our own long-term benefit.

So on a sales tour of the Middle East this month, the Great Warmonger praised British arms exports, deflecting criticism by saying that countries, even the autocratic ones, have the right to defend themselves. Leaving aside the fact that weapons and equipment can also be used for internal repression, the question remains: defend themselves against whom? Neighbours with more money than sense, happy to spend it when British salesmen come knocking? It’s an ethical foreign policy of sorts. A policy of fair play. A policy of dealing death and destruction equally to all sides. And playing with fire to the point where Cameron cannot be excused responsibility for the consequences. As a principled example to the world, it’s almost as good as Blair becoming Middle East peace envoy. Now, where’s that Nobel Prize?

In the current climate, it’s easy to say that morality has to go out the window, because jobs and profits and taxes and debts are all at stake. It’s a shame folk won’t draw the conclusion from this: that our system, having been acknowledged even by its supporters to be immoral, should not be sustained for one day more.

The Great Dictator

David Cameron told the CBI yesterday that he wants a war economy, with himself as Winston Churchill, to pull the country out of recession.

Of course, it’s all ridiculous, prep school nonsense. The only real war is being fought by British troops in Afghanistan, despite public opposition. No-one in the UK is going to be shot or bombed by the fiendish forces fought against in the war on non-growth. Many of us are actually relieved to have some respite after decades of seeing our communities ravaged by developers and weekenders wielding their fat-cat cheque-books.

In putting the war analogy into play, Cameron’s aims are two-fold. Firstly, to cut through all the democratic safeguards that prevent his chums in the commercial sector lording it over us, slashing social and environmental protection, and in effect rebuilding feudalism. Clearly, Cameron is no historian. Otherwise, he would know that a real total-war economy involves massive, detailed State control of every aspect of productive activity. Which is about as far removed from his real intentions as can be imagined. For him, the job of the State is simply to smash any opposition to the new national infrastructure needed to crush the provinces still further and speed their exploitation. Not in the public interest but in that of the global system to which he has devoted his service. A system that views democracy and liberty as irksome irritations.

Secondly, Cameron’s rhetoric has the same menacing tone as George W. Bush’s ‘you’re either with us, or against us’. He wants to anathematise any alternative to his own bleak vision. Like all the London politicians, he starts from the premise that, of course, EVERYONE supports growth. The corrupt financial system that bankrolls his party can’t cope with its absence. So the only question is what destructive practices are to be introduced next in order to stimulate it. Those who fail to acknowledge the ‘seriousness’ of the situation and submit accordingly are to be regarded as traitors. Watch out for Regulation 18B.

Veteran Republican Congressman Ron Paul said, in his valedictory speech this month, that real patriotism is not blind loyalty to the government but a willingness to challenge it when it’s wrong. We can see that with idiots like Cameron at the wheel, there’s a whole lot of challenging to be done.