Wilful Neglect

We try, within the limits of our resources, to report and comment on what’s happening in Wessex.  That’s to say, what’s actually happening and not what we or anyone else would like to be happening. 

Political correctness has been described as a war on noticing.  The blinkers were well and truly on in Oxfordshire recently, judging by today’s report into child sexual exploitation there.  But not only there.  (Bristol has also been mentioned.)  Oxfordshire County Council’s former Leader told the BBC that his authority ‘is not another Rotherham’.  Well, only relatively: 373 youngsters, predominantly from Oxford, groomed and exploited over the course of 15 years, as compared with 1,400 in the Yorkshire place.  But what’s yet to come to light?  A senior investigative source told The Guardian (a London newspaper): “If you think you haven’t got a problem in your city or town, you are just not looking for it.”

Not looking for it.  And even if you are, looking in the wrong place.  The BBC’s coverage and the reactions of London politicians have been remarkably uniform.  It’s ‘the system’ that’s broken.  Cameron offered a new offence of ‘wilful neglect’, promising to jail social workers who don’t notice.  (The tabloids are hovering: social workers are as damned for what they notice mistakenly as for anything they miss.)  For Labour, Yvette Cooper bizarrely insisted that nothing was more important than introducing compulsory sex education in schools.  It’s everybody’s fault then.  Police.  Social workers.  Educators.  Councillors.  A report speaks up for the abused and ignored girls and all the establishment can do is put the spotlight yet again on the girls and how they are treated.  It’s everybody’s fault but the perpetrators’.  Let’s not mention them.  Let’s not take their communities apart with a crowbar and expose what it is that produces the same familiar pattern, again and again.

No, let’s not.  There’s a higher priority.  Let’s go after those who by their war on noticing have allowed the problem to fester, those whose soixante-huitard sociological prejudices have warped their ability to understand the individuals of which society is composed. 

Let’s try a zero-based budgeting approach to social work.  Why do we have it?  Even the term is vaguely Victorian.  Nurses nurse, police police, teachers teach.  Social workers?  Work socially?  Why not scrap the entire profession and replace it with one or more professions defined by what they actually do and seek to achieve by doing?  The post-Climbié split between children’s services, linked to education, and welfare services for vulnerable adults, linked to health care and housing, may have some distance still to travel before reaching a settled form.  Especially in an era of constrained resources where questions about focus and value for money are unavoidable.  A public interested in integrated outcomes won’t care if social work as such disappears in the process because it finds it unable to describe itself.

There are some common perceptions of social workers that they have done little to dispel.  That instead of responding to a political agenda they think society should resource and empower them to pursue their own.  Or that they have no incentive to solve society’s ills because this would do them out of a job.  Or that, in contrast to the tightly defined roles of 50 or 100 years ago, their role is now so all-encompassing that their ambitions are bound to be undeliverable.

For example, the Wikipedia article ‘History of social work’ asserts that “Social work has its roots in society to deal with poverty (relative poverty)”.  That’s a start but it’s wholly inadequate to describe the actual range of activities that social services today undertake.  Problems associated with age or disability, for example, are problems associated with age or disability.  Lack of money worsens them but having money won’t fundamentally make them go away.  It’s also far too easy to confuse social services with social security, one more area of government where assumptions tend to have a very long shelf-life.

The financial and political reality is that social services will be expected to do more with less, and failing that, to do less with less.  Politically and professionally, the challenge is how to do that with the least possible harm.  A herd of sacred cows is likely to face slaughter along the way.  And that's an outcome that may be long overdue.

Kleptocracy UK

The MP for Maidenhead made a very interesting speech this weekend. Theresa May set out what some observers perceive to be her stall in a future contest for the Tory leadership. (Sad isn’t it, that the chatter is about what British politics can do for her career and not what she can do for British politics?) At the heart of her speech was a call for corporatism: still more private sector involvement in the provision of public services, coupled with, curiously, strategic industrial planning by the State. She denied, of course, that what she intends is anything like corporatism. (It’s always the best way to lay a false trail.)

Her recipe is more interesting for the hidden ingredients than for those listed. The ever-greater exposure of public services to market forces has long been presented as motivated solely by a desire for greater efficiency. (Because, of course, services run by the British State are inherently inefficient, whereas they miraculously become efficient when sold to the French State.) In fact, the rules are routinely distorted to prevent in-house, public sector bids from succeeding, even where they clearly represent better value for money. It’s not about efficiency at all but about shovelling taxpayers’ cash into the pockets of those very private companies that are the most enthusiastic donors to Tory funds. Or it could be LibDem funds. Or Labour’s. All three are equally receptive to stale old ‘new ideas’ with an unerringly familiar theme. None apparently has the wit to recognise that if the best managers are in the private sector then the answer is to recruit them for the public sector. It isn’t to dismantle what's left of democracy.

What are we to make of the sudden re-emergence of that very un-Thatcherite phrase, a ‘strategic role for the State in our economy’? Perhaps we are to make of it that the very richest in our society have decided that free enterprise isn’t making them rich enough. The banking ‘crisis’ has revealed the weakness at the heart of the market: that in a big, generous country like the UK, banks too big to fail are not too big to bail. State planning of the economy can produce returns that are less volatile but also inherently more profitable, mainly by favouring some sectors or scales of business at the expense of others. There is an appetite for this among those in public administration who see the banking scam as horrifically disruptive of the public finances, which it is. But there is also an appetite among politicians to diversify the UK economy away from its dependence on the City of London casino. Rising energy prices are already beginning to force a re-localisation of manufacturing away from the Far East. There are prizes to be won by countries that manage the transition well. And for those companies who can get the Government to do their marketing for them.

So what’s our view on industrial planning? The first thing to point out is that the private sector plans all the time. If it doesn’t look ahead, it doesn’t survive. We believe in co-operation, not competition, so we have no ideological objection to industries considering needs as a whole and organising production accordingly. If the result is not to be a cartel put together to exploit the consumer, then industrial planning is something that needs to be done under the full glare of public scrutiny. It will be found that you cannot plan what you do not control, and that very often you cannot control what you do not own. A large public sector is not something to be ashamed of, any more than democratic accountability is something to be ashamed of. It is in fact the only effective way to ensure that economic interests do not elbow environmental and social/cultural ones out of the picture. What’s more, a decision not to plan is still a decision, and so still, unavoidably, a plan. Whether the captain of the ship of state steers it onto the rocks or lets the waves take it there unaided, he or she still bears responsibility for the consequences.

The past century has revealed both the strengths and the weaknesses of State planning of industry, which is another way of acknowledging that the phrase encompasses a wide range of possibilities. To start with, is it ‘bottom-up’ or is it ‘top-down’? On that, all else depends. Is it about enabling our transition to a more ecologically conscious, decentralised society, or a final desperate attempt to preserve the opposite? Is it about strengthening the regions by winding-down their links to London, or is it, like HS2, about shackling them all the more tightly to their exploiter? Between the 1930s and the 1970s, successive UK governments practised a travesty of regional economic planning that zoned heavy industry in the peripheries, research and development in the Home Counties and the top management and financial functions in London. Much of Wessex got designated as the tourist and retirement zone. We can do without any more of that. It wasn’t just that centralist controls were ineffective in shaping regional economies for the long-term; it was also that they were far too effective in suppressing any local initiative that might actually have worked. Powerful elected assemblies in the regions would have pointed that out straight away. If we'd had them.

It isn’t only actions that get suppressed; values and visions get smothered too. We are proud to be a nimbyist party, with genuine concerns about the urbanisation of Wessex. We stand with those communities slandered as ‘irresponsible’ for not accepting London’s surplus population into their midst. We fear for their future once Theresa May’s State planners seek to draw media attention away from London’s chronic inability to act sustainably. We fear for their future once she points the magic wand of power at sites for a rash of new towns right across eastern Wessex. It WILL happen, if we have correctly interpreted what the London regime – us first, old chap – unfailingly understands by State planning.

Does the community benefit from its own destruction? Clearly not, but the community will never have a real say in any planning system designed primarily for private benefit (as all in the UK are). We know precisely who does though. Planning of all kinds, carried out in the public interest, depends upon absolute probity. Yet we seem to be sliding further and further away from that ideal as private enterprise becomes ever more pushy, public servants ever more corruptible, and the media ever more lax in its duty to scrutinise. The Daily Telegraph has been a shining exception to the rule and led yesterday with a story about a Tory councillor in Devon caught offering his services as a planning consultant, as one who knows what strings to pull to get that lucrative permission. It seems it’s not illegal to take money for insider information in this way. But perhaps the voters will judge him more harshly than the law will?

David Cameron yesterday responded to the jailing of Chris Huhne by trotting out the usual platitude about no-one being above the law. Another one we often hear is that those who make the law shouldn’t break the law. The real problem comes when those who make the law know where the loopholes are. They can frame legislation and other processes from which they can ultimately derive personal benefit. The crooks have always done that. What should especially worry us is when they become increasingly open about it and start drawing lines that the State may cross but democracy may not. Mrs May’s big corporate society is looming over the horizon. And one old definition of corporatism, from the 1970s, remains true today. It is ‘fascism with a human face’.

The New Menu

“the merchant’s function… is to provide for the nation. It is no more his function to get profit for himself out of that provision than it is a clergyman’s function to get his stipend. This stipend is a due and necessary adjunct, but not the object of his life, if he be a true clergyman, any more than his fee (or honorarium) is the object of life to a true physician. Neither is his fee the object of life to a true merchant. All three, if true men, have a work to be done irrespective of fee – to be done even at any cost, or for quite the contrary of fee; the pastor’s function being to teach, the physician‘s to heal, and the merchant’s, as I have said, to provide. That is to say, he has to understand to their very root the qualities of the thing he deals in, and the means of obtaining or producing it; and he has to apply all his sagacity and energy to the producing or obtaining it in perfect state, and distributing it at the cheapest possible price where it is most needed.”
John Ruskin, Unto This Last (1862)

Europe’s ‘horseburger’ scandal reveals starkly what happens when Ruskin’s vision is rejected. It is particularly embarrassing for the Co-operative Group to find horsemeat in its ready meals, given the Co-op’s origins as an alternative economic model that was supposed to guarantee working folk wholesome food, free from adulteration by unscrupulous shopkeepers.

Rogue traders there always are, especially in a culture that uncritically lauds enterprise and can’t easily spot when creativity crosses over into crime. It’s also a culture that regards taxation as theft, so we can’t expect any more food inspectors to be hired in current circumstances. That leaves inspection to the supermarkets, who will pass on the cost to the consumer. We pay one way or the other, but what we really need is a change of mindset, towards one that promotes zero-tolerance of bad business practices in the first place. Perhaps a revival of the old guild system?

There’s no doubt that our food supply is a mess in all kinds of ways. Take a look at one website that sets out all the inter-related aspects we need to be thinking about reforming. We’ve written before about food, and wouldn’t change a word of that. So it’s good to see that we’re in at the beginning of a worldwide re-evaluation of what goes on our plate and how it gets there.

The Sack of Wessex

Pressure is being piled on MPs to toughen scrap-metal legislation in a bid to stop thieves stripping out our infrastructure in search of a quick profit.

There was a time when metal theft was more or less restricted to opportunist pilfering from building sites and removing lead from the roofs of abandoned churches. Not any more. The wholesale looting of metal has lately developed into organised international crime on an industrial scale, causing widespread damage, danger and disruption.

Churches in rural locations are targeted by well-equipped gangs operating under cover of darkness who will return on several occasions until they have taken everything. Fundraising for the repair of historic buildings puts a heavy burden on local communities; some congregations have been brought to the verge of bankruptcy and are facing the closure of their church.

Churches are particularly vulnerable to the consequences of theft of roofing material because insurance payments for damage are capped at £10,000. Repair bills can easily exceed this when rain seeps in where metal has been taken, causing damage to plasterwork and pews. And then there is the cost of replacing the roof. English Heritage has been impelled to abandon its policy of requiring ‘like-for-like’ replacement when a church roof is restored, knowing that traditional lead and copper will simply be plundered. Church bells and other treasures can be targeted too. Not even war memorials are sacred now. When the metal elements listing the names of the fallen are ripped off, the very record of history is obliterated.

Lead is in demand worldwide for lead-acid batteries and a constrained supply has fuelled speculation, driving the price higher. Even more lucrative is the trade in stolen copper which is in particular demand in emerging nations such as China, India and Brazil, so that even a few yards of cabling can net over £100 for the thief. It is reckoned that the theft of copper from lineside installations alone has cost Network Rail over £40 million in the past two years. When copper wire is removed, the signals stop working and trains have to stay where they are or be cancelled or diverted; there is no costing the time lost and the anxiety suffered by countless passengers delayed by such incidents, which are currently running at the rate of eight a day.

Even the telephone lines have not been spared, cutting off subscribers and disrupting 999 services. In some cases BT vans have been stolen by criminals who can use them to pose as legitimate workers, tear out the wires at their leisure and arouse no suspicion. Agricultural vehicles, tools and equipment, garden gates, railings, children’s swings and even metal beer kegs are also easy prey. CCTV is no obstacle: the thieves just take the cameras.

When, in the predictable chaos following the fall of Saddam, news reports told of Iraqi infrastructure grinding to a halt as equipment of all kinds was stolen, it was easy to be complacent. Iraq is Iraq. Britain is Britain. Now it is clear that the skills involved in metal theft are universally deployable and it has come into the province of serious organised crime. It is regarded as less risky than robbing a bank but potentially just as rewarding. So far, fatalities have been limited to the criminals themselves, including, astonishingly, folk attempting to steal live cable from pylons, but it can only be a matter of time before an innocent victim suffers more than mere inconvenience. Manhole covers are an obvious target and an obvious source of concern.

It has been proposed in Parliament that the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 1964 should be replaced by new legislation imposing a single licensing scheme with greater powers for the courts to shut down scrap yards that do not comply. Metal could not then be legally purchased without proof of identity and address and all trade would have to be carried on through accounts rather than with the traditional, mostly undocumented cash payments. So far, deregulatory ideology has held up the legislation and there are no signs of early action from the crooks’ best friends in power. (Crime, along with waste, increases GDP by stimulating demand for replacement items, so the Coalition are very much in favour of both.) Meanwhile, an increasing number of undertakings which use copper wire are coating it with ‘smartwater’, each preparation of which has its own ‘signature’ enabling its owners to be identified, in the unlikely event of it being recovered.

In the short-term, legislation is required urgently. So too are more stringent policing, greater community vigilance, and a tackling at source of the drug culture that underlies so much criminal activity. Now that metal theft is an established lifestyle, even a fall in commodity prices is no deterrent: in fact it acts as a spur to more theft in order to sustain value.

We are becoming an increasingly wired society, dependent on telecommunications, especially the Internet, for more and more of our daily lives. Rail transport, the backbone of all future planning for the movement of goods and passengers over any significant distance, is likewise vulnerable. Renewable energy installations, such as solar panels, also offer the lure of metal content. Economic growth, fortunately at an end in the materially obese countries of the developed world, is, for now, continuing to play a role amongst the emergent economic giants of the south and east. Their aspiration to lift themselves out of absolute poverty is a noble one. But it should not be achieved through tolerating predatory attacks on our own civilisation as we enter the era of ‘peak everything’. We have to be resolute about that. And instead of trying still to impose our way of life on other countries, it’s time to wake up to the pressing need to protect it at home.

Urban Harvesting

Much has already been written about the unrest that has struck Banbury, Bristol, Gloucester, Oxford, Reading, Southampton and other places since the weekend. Over a long, hot summer, many more words will appear, whether or not the events themselves recur. After the political debate, the weighty inquiry will ponder and pontificate. Recommendations will be insubstantial and – where not ignored altogether – will be incompetently implemented. British government, doing what it does best.

At the end of the story, nothing will have altered. When the IRA blew up the Baltic Exchange in the City of London in 1992, and Bishopsgate the following year, that altered everything. The chaps with the cash told Major to get it sorted and attitudes to Irish affairs saw their greatest transformation in 800 years. Money talks. Emptying JD Sports and Foot Locker can’t compete with that.

If the changes likely are all cosmetic, what brands of make-up exactly are we discussing? Two, mainly. The debate that has been sparked will be dominated by the stale shibboleths of Left and Right, united by a fanatical desire to exclude anyone different from having a say.

The Right starts with the advantage of being in office, albeit not necessarily in power. Its short-term focus will be the exemplary punishment of wrongdoing, an exercise that will sadly disappoint its supporters. Offenders will not be roasted alive on spits. Few will even be sent to prison, unless other criminals are released early to make room and keep within budget. Sentences that go beyond the norm will be challenged by the defence as irrational. Looters will laugh, last, longest and loudest.

The long-term focus of the Right will remain exactly the same as now. On more looting of its own. The looters on the streets have learned their callous inhumanity from 30 years of loadsamoney liberalism. Free enterprise? The enterprise has been audacious, certainly, and the goods free, to be sure. That no money changed hands is a detail that will detain only those who fail to hail the dawn of a new business model, the next ratcheting-up of the Hayekian dialectic, more efficient, less altruistic, with 50% fewer parties to the transaction.

At the time of writing, the riots are confined to England. The Celtic nations, small enough to acknowledge the human scale, where a sense of community endures and the Right has been largely rejected, have escaped. So too has the continent, where the social democratic model survives in still better shape. There has been an Arab Spring, but no sign yet of a European Summer.

The Left comes to the debate with a confession it will not make. That having held power for 13 of the past 14 years, the events it condemns are largely of its own making. It has created a human zoo, an act for which it must not be allowed to avoid responsibility. Four decades of hippy thinking – that time and resources are infinite and that there are no right answers – have fostered a culture of excusing and celebrating what must nowadays always be termed ‘deferred success’. An older, blunter Left would have called a failure a failure and learned its lesson. The newer, parasitical Left dares not solve problems or it would be out of its well-paid job. Institutional empathy has to take the place of solutions, because success would be the new failure. At least the greying student revolutionaries who now run the show are having to think for once before deciding who their heroes are.

Tonight it was reported that Manchester suffered badly yesterday because its police were simply overwhelmed. Their available strength had been diminished by lending officers to keep the peace on the streets of London. It was last night too that unrest spread in Wessex, where previously only Bristol was featured nationally as the scene of disorder. Now we should be concerned. A chief constable’s top priority should be the protection of the force’s own area, lending to others only when that objective has been secured. Every Wessex officer sent to London is one less to defend those at risk in our own towns and villages. It will be instructive to see data on burglaries in the Cotswolds, the Vale of Pewsey or the New Forest while police from the Thames Valley, Wiltshire and Hampshire forces are elsewhere. When trouble flared in Stokes Croft in Bristol earlier this year, in the notorious ‘Tesco’s riot’, foreign police, from south Wales, were brought over to enforce the law. Police from another Wessex force might have been better received but there’s no prospect of that if they’re busy helping Londoners lance their own festering boils.

The possibility of being shot is actually highest in the countryside, not in inner cities. Rural areas are where the guns are, especially the ones held legally. And they’re needed, given the likely police response time if there is any incident. Events in London will lead to the questioning of many longstanding assumptions. Will Cameron’s goal of privatising everything but the police and army survive, or will they in fact be the first victims of the Big Society, as communities decide that if the protection they have paid for is not around then they need to start making their own arrangements? Farmers have already started, following a 17% increase in the cost of agri-crime in just two years. Livestock rustling has doubled in six months. Thefts of quad bikes are a particular plague in Wessex, as are high value tractor thefts in areas close to motorways. Heating oil has also been targeted since the price rose last year and it isn’t even a luxury yet.

Left and Right share the perspective of Jacobin individualism, one which seeks the elimination or subjugation of all institutions intermediate between the central State and the citizen. Neither can tolerate, or even comprehend, the idea of community responsibility, for good or ill. But we do not have to abandon a thousand years of progress in other fields to see that a system the Saxons knew as frankpledge, in which everyone is accountable for their neighbours’ actions, and for any failure on their own part to bring them to justice, creates a self-policing society.

Early in the 19th century, liability for riot damage was imposed on the hundred in which the damage occurred. The hundred was responsible to the king for keeping the peace, so if it failed in its duty, and the troublemakers could not be traced, it was only fair that everyone had to pay the compensation. In 1886 that responsibility was transferred to the police and so rests today ultimately with Council Tax payers in the county or larger area for which a constabulary is constituted. It’s a much fairer idea than insurance, where the future burden of higher premiums falls on the victim and never touches the perpetrator even indirectly.

You would think so. Except that under Labour a consultation paper in 2003 proposed to abolish altogether the last trace of the collective liability for riot damage. Why? Because insurance was seen as a better way, one that did not divert resources from the police, who should not be punished for not doing their job effectively. Top cops, of course, are now wriggling for the review to be revived, claiming that “in a context of cuts the public will see little sense in a shrinking police fund being diverted to pay for criminal damage”.

The public might conceivably disagree. It is no criticism of the frontline copper to say that, for those at the top, payment by results should work both ways. When so much investment has been made in ‘policing by consent’, for apparently so little return where criminals don’t consent to be policed, chief constables and police authority chairmen cannot just shrug off the results as the unpredictable nature of social complexity.

A lot of that complexity has just undergone a rapid simplification. The world will not be same again. When the dust settles, communities will be demanding that the authorities earn their keep, or the communities will keep their taxes. And maybe build for themselves something that history tells us will work.

Good Works, Bad Shouldn't

"Þæt is nu hraðost to secganne, þæt ic wilnode weorðfullice to libbanne þa hwile þe ic lifede, and æfter minum life þæm monnum to læfanne þe æfter me wæren min gemyndig on godum weorcum."
"I desired to live worthily as long as I lived, and to leave after my life, to the men who should come after me, the memory of me in good works."
King Alfred the Great, in his translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy

The politicians who today are Alfred’s successors in power may be remembered for many things but good works are unlikely to feature in the list. Yesterday it was reported that Kerry McCarthy, Labour MP for Bristol East, had been cautioned for breaking electoral law. Despite having qualified as a solicitor, Ms McCarthy chose to reveal on Twitter the number of postal votes cast per party in the 2010 election, contrary to the Representation of the People Act 1983.

A caution is a paltry punishment for breaking the secrecy of the poll ahead of its close. The crime is less of a surprise. Lying and cheating are tools that come with the red rosette, tools embraced with glee by those so keen to win that they long ago lost any idea of why they should want to. They are what we expect of a party that lacks moral conviction, that doubts its ability to win by fair means, that secretly recognises the emptiness of its rhetoric, the contradictions of its message, the pointlessness of its existence when, win or lose, the consequences are the same.

We are a radical party, the natural heirs to the Common Wealth tradition, of co-operation as the basis of economics, democracy as the basis of society and morality as the basis of politics. We share a long-standing disappointment that the Labour Party rejects all of these things in favour of money markets, control freakery and ends-justify-the-means. Some seemed seduced by Blair’s bleating about the forces of conservatism, before the fleece fell off to reveal a lupine arch-privatiser and curtailer of civil liberties. Not us. This is Labour’s heritage, back to the first Fabian imperialists and later apologists for Stalin. The real sheep are those who think they can only vote for one of the three identikit parties of the establishment. Ed Miliband for PM? ? Why?

The People’s Ponzi

We’ve been hearing quite a lot recently about Ponzi schemes, as the financial chickens come home to roost. A Ponzi scheme is an investment scam that promises investors a high rate of return but in fact is paying earlier entrants out of the money collected from later entrants. Eventually, for whatever reason, the scheme will be unable to go on expanding, at which point the game is up.

The United Kingdom has an ageing population, with Wessex, as the centre of the retirement industry, having a particular interest in the matter. Three out of the five ‘most aged’ local authority areas are in Wessex and the statistics reveal something of a ‘retirement belt’ stretching across the south of our region from Exmoor to the Isle of Wight and beyond.

It is generally asserted that immigration is needed to sustain a working age population capable of supporting this mass of greybeards. The problem is, of course, that everyone who survives long enough gets old, and immigrants are no exception. The population equivalent of a Ponzi scheme is the belief that you can deal with the economic consequences of ageing simply by having an ever-expanding population. The reality is that this is simply not sustainable in environmental terms. Once ecological capacity is exhausted, the result is collapse. To maintain the ratio of 15-64 year-olds at its current level, the UK population would need to rise from about 61 million today to 136 million by 2050. Pro rata, the figures for Wessex would see a rise from about 8 million to over 18 million. Bristol, for example, would need to become a city of over a million folk.

The available data suggests an almost totally misplaced concern about ageing, and that concern needs to be refocused elsewhere. The UK spends about 6.2% of GDP on State pensions, rising to 8.5% by 2050. But if the retirement age were to be raised proportionately in line with life expectancy, the rise is only to 7.75%. So a third of the problem simply disappears.

Low population growth actually brings massive economic, social and environmental benefits. Productive work can be aimed at improving the quality of life, instead of building ever more infrastructure and housing. Less money spent on rearing children and on education means more to spend on pensions. In the UK 43% of young folk go into higher education and can be dependents well into their twenties. Young folk are also disproportionately reflected in crime and unemployment statistics. Conversely, many retired folk remain active in developing the social capital of their communities, giving time to voluntary organisations, in effect free labour that might otherwise have to be paid for. In 2007/08 the UK spent £76 billion of public money on support costs for young folk, compared to £71.5 billion supporting the over-65s. Financial assistance is given down the generations – not up – on average until the age of 75.

Smaller families can mean that folk inherit more housing capital: two children each inherit half the parental home, three children only inherit a third. The potential importance of housing equity – which can be freed up to part-fund consumption in retirement – is huge. The value of housing assets in the UK, even after mortgage debt, is considerably larger than all pension funds combined. (How much of this money really exists is, of course, another matter!)

Economist Phil Mullan, author of The Imaginary Time Bomb, has suggested that the obsession with a looming pensions deficit has less to do with demographic fact and more to do with a political agenda to cut back the welfare state. Countries with much older age structures have out-performed those with younger ones, while a report for the Institute of Public Policy Research confirmed that “there is little correlation between ageing and increased health care costs”.

In short, the way we relieve the ‘burden’ of an ageing population is that we draw upon the money that would otherwise have been spent on the extra housing, schools, hospitals, roads and other infrastructure needed to accommodate population growth. Energy infrastructure is one very significant part of that package. So too are the additional costs of growing a population through immigration, such as translation costs, along with those that stem from inter-communal tension and divided loyalties.

The alternative to population restraint is a planet confronting unsustainable trends, where each new child will likely produce more than 20 tonnes of greenhouse gases every year and where civilisation everywhere is in imminent peril as a result.

If we go on building, we are sure to find ourselves living in a house of cards, miserably waiting for the wind to blow.

A Smaller World, Please

Think globally, act locally. The sentiment is sound but the first instruction requires a lot less effort than the second. A lot less effort, because successive centralist governments at Westminster have made the second instruction well nigh impossible to carry out.

Take the example of planning, where local discretion has now been all but abolished. When the 2004 ‘reforms’ were pushed through at the behest of the power of money, community groups naively fell in behind them. The package included a requirement that councils bind themselves to a ‘Statement of Community Involvement’. Community groups thought that Christmas had come early. At last, councils would be forced to do as they told them, and not as elected local politicians wished. The reality is – and always was – that this was a smokescreen behind which decisions were taken away from the locality altogether. Now unelected civil servants decide everything of any importance in the planning world and matters are getting progressively worse. The Campaign to Protect Rural England had the true measure of ‘community involvement’ all along. As their poster proclaimed, “Your new airport goes here. What colour would you like the fence?”

When Labour politicians – and the Tory ones are no better – speak of empowering communities, the rhetoric translates into reality with so many caveats as to be deeply deceitful. A new generation of environmental protestors is now coming to the fore, one that will not be content with sit-ins and stunts that simply delay the bulldozers by days. Westminster diktat may find itself met with a more resolute denial of authority and legitimacy. We should not be surprised to see big developers and their pocket decision-makers vilified very personally as the public enemies they clearly are. No moral individual could defend those who are busily wrecking Wessex in the name of a despotic Parliament whose right to rule is nothing but self-proclamation backed up with tanks. When road protestors set fire to the contractors’ plant, can we say that that was a crime? And that what that machinery was doing to our land was a lawful act, advancing truth, beauty and goodness? We shall have to think again very thoroughly about what we mean by the law. The only certainty is that Westminster has no claim to be making it.

One pressing reason why power needs to be radically decentralised is that the planet needs this. World government is not the answer to the world’s problems. Small is beautiful not because it allows good things to happen, although it does, but because it prevents big, bad things being allowed to happen. Those who have to live with the consequences don’t willingly foul their own nest.

So a philosophy that puts Wessex first is not one that denies our interdependence with the rest of the world. Quite the reverse. We seek to contribute to a sustainable, equitable world where the health, security and liberty of all is paramount, regardless of race or creed. But we do that from our own land, by showing solidarity, morally and economically, not by gung-ho intervention where we’re not wanted. Humanitarian aid – well-organised by charities – is best kept quite distinct from political meddling. ‘Foreign policy’ is a fancy term for not minding our own business. It could be a very attractive as well as unique selling point for the Wessex Regionalists to be the only party whose foreign policy is not to have one. Globalisation is on the defensive – protectionism is making a comeback – and internationalism is up for redefinition.

Watching the television news it is hard to resist the feeling that anywhere and everywhere matters except home. Recent events in Gaza were tragic. But did they justify top billing night after night after night after night after night after night after night? Let us examine why foreign news has such a fascination for broadcasters.

There are the superficial reasons. One is that foreign correspondents cost money. If you have them, you use them. Not using them would only get you into trouble with the accountants. Another is that editorial control is in the hands of a generation whose background leads them to embrace the foreign and despise the domestic. Hippies who spent the 60’s out east don’t care much what happens in Easton or Eastleigh. The Middle East is ‘cool’, whichever side you take. And so it’s assumed that everyone else would want to give it the same gravity.

But there is a deeper agenda. George Orwell’s proles and his ‘outer party’ won’t have spotted it but the ‘inner party’ will have thought it through carefully.

Firstly, for every foreign story that dominates the headlines there is a domestic story that has been spiked. So what is the bad news that this is a good day to bury? Corruption in high places? Another piece of repressive legislation waved through Westminster without the public’s knowledge? Revelations about a failed Government policy? The squandering of public money? Your guess is as good as mine.

Secondly, foreign news fosters a sense of powerlessness. Domestic news makes folk angry and there is plenty they can do about it. They can change the government. Even change the system. But foreign affairs are by definition immune to the outcome of a British general election. Whether Brown, Cameron or Clegg sits in Number 10 makes no real difference to the sufferings of others thousands of miles away (unless British troops are involved). So when foreign news makes people angry, that is all it does. And belief in politicians drains away all the faster. And if politicians can’t change anything, why have them? When pundits now talk about a ‘post-democratic Europe’, its handmaidens are easily identified. They are the sirens wailing their song nightly upon our screens.

When cuts fall on the broadcast media, it is not the foreign correspondents who suffer. The first casualty is always regional news. Understandably so, since it often amounts to little more than ‘cat stuck in tree in Chippenham’. One of our key tasks in the years ahead will be to change the media organisations, so that they speak to us primarily about ourselves. Together we can then make that story interesting as local action increasingly challenges our oppressors. Yes, folks. The revolution WILL be televised.