Ourselves Alone

One of the most persistent demands made of us by non-members is that we should work to set up a confederation of decentralist parties, on an all-England or all-Britain basis.  It’s a course of action fraught with difficulties, rather like trying to get the cart to go before the horse.  So let’s take it apart, piece by piece.  Get set for some iconoclasm.

The first assumption is that confederation is the politics of the present.  And that it’s working.

It’s that the UK, or maybe the British Isles grouping, is moving towards a confederal model and that political parties need to organise to reflect this.  There are indeed some institutions arising mainly out of the Good Friday Agreement that appear to be quasi-confederal.  There’s the British-Irish Council, based in Edinburgh, the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, based in Belfast, the North/South Ministerial Council, based in Armagh, and the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, which moves around.

The British-Irish Council meets twice a year.  Would it be missed if it didn’t?  Probably not.  It’s a nice day out of the office but it does nothing that couldn’t be done by email.  Guernsey might want to align its marine energy policy with Scotland’s, but alignment with Brittany and Normandy seems a more practical proposition.  It’s the perfect example of what’s wrong with that form of confederalism.  It starts with the idea that we need an institution to co-ordinate things, and then looks for things for it to co-ordinate, instead of asking what needs to be done and how.

If anything, a confederal Britain is the politics of the past.  It comes in any number of models but they all draw a line round the British Isles to keep them together and to exclude the rest of Europe.  Often there’s a confederal capital envisaged as neatly placed on the Isle of Man.  It might well have worked, circa 1910, but this is a boat that sailed with Irish independence.  Areas with a shared history or language don’t always make for a good confederation.  Especially when some were forced by others to share their history and language whether they liked it or not.  At the expense of other links they could have made, such as a Celtic grouping.  So that just leaves a shared geography, like old television weather maps that ignored the very existence of the European mainland.  Fog in Channel: Continent isolated.  That isolation is not wholly irrelevant – it keeps migrants in Calais who’d rather be in Dover – but the moat defensive is a poor basis for common security in the era of global powers.  The unification of the British Isles was driven by a series of military necessities that have now passed and need not dominate our politics today.

The second assumption is that confederation is the politics of the future.  Or could be, if we all work at it.

This seems highly unlikely.  Those who urge a confederal organisation upon us fail to take into account that the various movements within the British Isles have existed for different periods of time, have established themselves electorally to strikingly different degrees, and have very different ideas about the constitutional solution they’re working towards.  You won’t be seeing Nicola Sturgeon sitting down to chair a coalition of cripples that in Plaid’s case cannot get beyond four MPs and in the case of the rest are still struggling to get into Parliament.  The SNP’s openness towards regionalism in the north of England is a really interesting development but it has to be seen for what it is: Scottish foreign policy in formation.  If the result is a better-governed England then that’s a result for everyone, but a better-governed England, or Wales, or Cornwall is, rightly, not the SNP’s primary concern.  What motivates a territorial party isn’t the rightness of self-government for all, even though solidarity helps share many things.  What motivates a territorial party is the rightness of self-government for us, regardless of what others may think.

The assumption is that we’ll be better-placed to engage with Westminster politics if we pool resources.  A single press office.  A single lobbying machine.  Never mind the complexity of ever agreeing on anything, this gives Westminster a respect it doesn’t deserve.  It only sucks us in and turns us into a supplicant pressure group.  The lesson we should learn from the SNP is that success comes to those who go it alone.  In the film Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera is given the line, ‘We defeat the British Empire by ignoring it.’  The quote attributed to Gandhi about being the change you wish to see is another way of expressing the same idea.  Never under-estimate the opposition, that’s true, but never under-estimate yourself either.  The Wessex Regionalists have a London Bureau but it won’t be in London that we make our breakthrough.  It could be in Bristol.  It could be in Winchester.  It could be in any one of our urban or rural communities.  We guarantee that it won’t be in London, however helpful a London branch might be.  If the metropolitan chattering classes like the idea of a free Wessex then let them spread the idea.  Either way, we don’t need their permission to exist.

A further problem inherent in the idea of pooling resources is that to pool is to mutually recognise.  Three overlapping regionalist groups in Northumbria and at least two in Mercia require some careful judgment.  We shouldn’t be in the business of picking winners on others’ turf but that’s what’s demanded by any co-operation that goes beyond maintaining contact and exchanging experiences.  We could sit down and agree the map with others and feel really good about that, until some new group springs up, refuses to be bound by discussions to which it was not party, and starts the whole thing up again.

The third assumption is that confederation is an idea whose time has come.

Why has English regionalism failed to take root?  One answer is because it fails to nurture those roots.  Every generation comes to regionalism thinking that it invented it.  That no-one had ever thought of it before.  But there is a genealogy of ideas and it’s as fascinating as any family tree.  Among Celtic nationalists, there’s a longer continuity of organisation that enables stories of the earlier stages of the struggle to be conserved and passed on.  They stand on the shoulders of giants, they know it, and they can name them.  They have national libraries, where the pioneers’ papers are preserved, and academics who will treat them as a subject worthy of serious study.

We are the oldest regionalist party in England, launched in 1974 and formally constituted as an organisation in 1980.  Yet we’re still discovering things about those who argued before us for a contemporary Wessex.  Charles Kingsley, William Barnes, Thomas Hardy, Rolf Gardiner.  Amnesia sets in early.  Kingsley and Barnes were both writing in the 1860s about a contemporary Wessex, yet a decade later Hardy introduced the concept into his novels and went on to tell the world it was all his own work. 

Unless we work harder at developing a collective memory, this is the sort of thing that will go on happening.  It happens today because too few English regionalists are fully committed to their regions, viewing regionalism as just one of a host of good political causes, some of which align with regionalism while others cut across it.  Some genuinely fear a descent into ‘narrow’ nationalism, to such an extent that they can’t even see the sense of putting their own region’s interests first.  In fact, such a fear is unfounded: we have a common interest with the north of England in keeping their economy alive so that their population doesn’t drift south and destroy our countryside.  The London regime, supposedly looking after the common national interest, has betrayed us both.

Those who are new to regionalism and can’t understand why there isn’t a national body – co-ordinating, directing and generally bossing the regional parties about – do so probably because they’re unaware of what’s already been tried.  The newcomer’s voice often pipes up that ‘that was then, this is now, we can make it work today’.  In fact, so long as the issues are no different the outcomes will be no different.  If this isn’t grasped intuitively, it just has to be learnt the hard way.

In 1980, Anthony Mockler, on behalf of the Wessex Regionalists, convened a seminar in Oxford to which he invited all the civic nationalist and regionalist movements then active within the UK.  The result was the Declaration of Oxford: “We, the signatories of this Declaration, representing various movements for autonomy, declare that we are joined together in determined support for the right to self-government of communities and nations within Britain and against the centralism of the Westminster Government.”  The signatories besides ourselves were Cowethas Flamank and Mebyon Kernow (both from Cornwall), the Orkney Movement, the Shetland Movement and the Campaign for the North.  Plaid Cymru maintained a semi-detached interest.  The SNP remained aloof. 

Having met, it was agreed to be useful to keep in touch.  The Oxford seminar was the first of 14 held between 1980 and 1994, from Durham to St Austell and Bristol to Norwich.  There was an absolute consensus that links were good, at most a network, but not an organisation that risked replicating the very centralism we opposed.  Paul Temperton, Director of the Campaign for the North, warned against anything that would evolve into some kind of British Regionalist Association with its headquarters, inevitably, in London.

One thing that did emerge from the seminar series was a magazine, The Regionalist, which ran from 1982 to 1992.  Each issue included a feature article about a small nation or historic region and by the time of the last issue every part of the British Isles had been covered, along with Brittany and Normandy.  The seminars and the magazine were seen as a way to involve new people who weren’t members of any existing organisation.  Three attempts were made to get an East Anglian regionalist group off the ground, but apart from some regional flag-flying the East still dozes to this day.

By the mid-90s the original impetus had been lost, though contacts lasted informally into the 21st century.  The usual thing happened: people took their eye off the region.  We had discussions about whether there were different kinds of devolution, cultural, and economic, as well as political, and whether they ought to join up or be kept apart for the sake of balance.  This was about as far removed from the integrated vision of Wessex Regionalism as it’s possible to get.  And we said so.  We had a longstanding debate too about general decentralism.  Should we involve the Greens, or limit ourselves to movements with a specific territorial basis?  That debate still hasn’t gone away, with the SNP and Plaid backing the English Greens in last year’s election.  They could at least have pointed out that in Cornwall and some parts of England there’s another choice, one that doesn’t involve a party who in Scotland and Wales are the nationalists’ rivals.

Meanwhile, in 1999, we helped to establish a new focus of joint activity, all-English this time rather than all-British.  The Confederation for Regional England also included groups from Kent, Mercia and Northumbria, all signed-up to yet another high-sounding document, the Stourbridge Declaration.  We left after three years, alarmed at the time and expense involved in national meetings that offered us nothing and only diverted energy from the regional campaigning that alone can make regionalism work.  Worse still was the pressure to agree a unified English regionalist position on policy issues.  We struggled to get across the point that if one size fits all, you don’t need regionalism.

The Confederation proved to be one of those luxury items that it’s nice to have but isn’t necessary, or indeed helpful if its role is undefined.  Using it to try to plug gaps in the regional map is a noble idea, except in so far as this can become a case of ‘prompting the witness’ as to what regions there should be.  A better way to generate allies in currently unorganised areas would be to set the example of a strong movement in Wessex for them to emulate, rather than through national co-operation between existing movements all of which currently are relatively weak.  Especially if all are constrained to proceed at the pace of the weakest.

The fourth assumption is that confederation is a good reflection of where we wish to be.  So that, regardless of whether or not the UK is perceptibly moving towards confederalism, this is the solution we ought to favour.

In some ways, this is a repetition of the second assumption and is flawed to the same extent, namely that it perpetuates a discourse about the good governance of the UK that is increasingly alien to those who reject the UK.  And what can be said of the UK can also be said of England.  The idea of confederation is a kind of comfort-blanket for those who aren’t really ready for regionalism.  It reassures them that there’s some safety-net, some mechanism for enforcing the common good, for reining-in those who actually do want to set their own priorities.  For those who aren’t convinced of the Scottish nationalist case, it holds out the hope that the UK can survive in some ghostly form that continues to exert influence from beyond independence.

A region-centred view of the world isn’t bound by past alliances.  Yes, there may be cultural issues on which a free Wessex would wish to work with other English regions – as well as English-speaking areas elsewhere or areas with related languages, like Frisian.  Yes, there are geographical issues on which a free Wessex would wish to work with others throughout Great Britain, such as transport links.  But neither England nor Britain defines a Wessex-centred world.

Wessex has a number of neighbours.  They don’t include the Scots.  As well as the Londoners to our east there are the Welsh and Mercians to our north, the Cornish and Irish to our west and the Bretons and Normans to our south.  Which of these should we refuse to work with because they don’t neatly fit the priorities of Westminster politics?

In a Europe of regions, our friends could come from even further afield.  Our founder, Alexander Thynn, proposed that Wessex should be promoted “as the political and economic ally of all other agricultural regions within Europe, to operate in defending common interests against their transformation by those regions which are more highly industrialised”.  He also highlighted the interests of coastal regions as contrasting with those of the continental interior.  Nor are our links as a region confined to Fortress Europe: Wessex has important cultural connections with Newfoundland, Massachusetts and Virginia, among others.

Those who urge upon us the necessity of formal co-operation do so with the best of motives.  Experience and reflection show that it can be not a springboard to success but a straitjacket that curbs the aspirations of any authentically regional group.  We’ll cheer-on our neighbours but we can’t do their job for them.  Any more than they can do ours for us.  While remaining ever-aware of our surroundings, we need to reach deeper, not wider, to grasp the essence of Wessex.

Presi in Paris

“We know and we have seen that conferences are events which bring together important people who are unable to act on their own, but who together are always able to resolve that in fact nothing can be done...  Why is [Europe] unable to forecast and prevent one crisis after another?...  Today the European spirit and its people believe in superficial and secondary things...  but what does renewal mean?  A rule of thumb is that the depth of renewal must be at least equal to the size of the problem...  The task, therefore, Dear Friends, is not to do a few things better – we must do more than that.”

Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, addressing his party’s congress, December 2015

The world is not short of problems, current or predicted.  One published list of converging catastrophes foresees a perfect storm brewing, reaching its zenith sometime around 2020 and built from the extrapolation of seven great trends that reinforce one another:

• Political and cultural stalemate, especially in an ageing Europe unsure of its place 
  
• Demographic replacement, including of skilled and productive by unskilled and unproductive populations  
• Social chaos in the global South as the effects of late industrialisation ('development') spread around the world 
• Economic collapse, brought about by physical limits to growth to which a speculative, debt-driven financial system has no answer  
• Armed conflict, a response to population growth against a backdrop of diminishing resources, inflamed by fanatical religious cults  
• North-South confrontation underpinned by ideologies of equitable treatment at odds with political reality in one direction and resource reality in the other 
• Ecological collapse, of which climate change is one component 

This month’s climate change conference in Paris was set up to tackle one important part of the last of these challenges, and only that, though its actual deliberations showed how inseparable they are all becoming.  That lack of joined-up thinking is the problem that may be the key to the rest.

WR President Colin Bex was in Paris, on the fringes of the conference, flying the flag and meeting other representatives.  Colin’s request for official accreditation, as the leader of a UK political party, was ignored.  The implication is that alternative politics has nothing to offer the world, even though it’s alternatives to the failed status quo that are most urgently needed.  Developing the links made at events like the Paris conference is vital to advancing our own alternative.  Colin reports that the demonstrators he met were very positive in their outlook: “Not least on account of atrocities visited on Parisians recently, the demonstrators are motivated by feelings of peace, love and respect for and in solidarity with all in the city, especially those who continue to encounter grief and other suffering as a consequence, and accordingly they are committed to generating an exclusively peaceful and friendly experience.”

It will take much more than this however if the world is to turn away from catastrophe.  Yes, there is a deal, and yes, it says world leaders will try to limit global warming to 1.5°C.  But there are no means to actually achieve this.  The collective reductions promised by world powers only head us closer to 3°C.  And even those reductions are not legally binding.  Governance is surely key, especially the decentralisation of power so that those who make decisions are surrounded by the consequences and cannot run from them.  This is bad news for those who would like to make climate change the cause upon which a campaign for lawyer-led world government can be built.  But it need not be incompatible with combining wider moral responsibility (thinking globally) with the vision of a co-operative community (acting locally).  Or with the notion of a bridge between them (planning regionally).

France has often been in the news this year, faced with terrorist attacks, a climate conference, and now elections for the country’s revised regions (their areas still largely botched by control freaks in Paris).  There has been much coverage of the fortunes of the far Right Front National in those elections but almost no mention of the result in the one Mediterranean region that nature prevents Paris from gerrymandering.  The island of Corsica – conquered by France in 1769 – has elected a regionalist government for the first time.  To much alarm in Paris, which has responded to demands for political and cultural concessions with the usual huffing and puffing about France's immutable constitution.  The new President of Corsica's Executive Council, Gilles Simeoni put things into a better perspective: "We want dialogue with Paris and political solutions but it is also an undisputed fact that we belong to the Corsican nation and Corsican is our language."

In Spain, pro-independence and pro-sovereignty parties made some intriguing advances in yesterday's elections, which also produced very bad results for the established Madrid parties.  In Corsica and Catalonia, as in Scotland, Europe is leading the way to a decentralised politics that also recognises the challenges of inter-dependence.  What is failing these places, what is failing Europe, and what is failing the world, is a system of old imperial states unable to manage the transition to a radically different kind of future.

Review of 2014

Every year when we submit our accounts to the Electoral Commission we are also required to provide a ‘Review of Political Activities’ covering the year just gone.

The 2014 Review has recently been forwarded to the Commission and here is what it says:

“Coming between elections – Eastleigh in 2013 and the General Election in 2015 – it might be thought that 2014 would be a quiet year.  Far from it.

Scotland’s referendum on independence provided the pivot.  Our President, Colin Bex, spent a few days in Edinburgh before, during and after the poll and made many new media and political contacts there.  The Party participated as fully as we were allowed in the media reaction to the result and the subsequent debate on an English dimension to devolution.  This included multiple television and radio interviews for the President and the Secretary-General.  The debate has since been narrowed down and moved on.  The London parties would rather discuss English-votes-for-English-laws (devolution from the centre to the centre) and city-regions and metro-mayors (shuffling the local pack of powers, not the constitutional dynamiting of Whitehall that is actually required).  We continue to be active in promoting the real alternative.

Popular and media interest has continued to grow, as charted by support on Facebook and Twitter and visits to our website and blog.  Throughout the year, the President and Secretary-General made use of online petition sites such as Avaaz, 38 Degrees and Change.org to lobby for Wessex and in supporting related causes to publicise the Wessex dimension.

In addition, Colin has joined marches and has participated in demonstrations on a number of high profile issues local, European and global, including against the TTIP and climate change.  He also continues to contribute to the debate about the real nature of economics and money, and the need for radical reform, as the establishment worldwide entrenches austerity in shameless collusion with those responsible for the chaos that produced it.

Upon invitation of the CAMRA and the Leader of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, Wessex son Alan 'Howling Laud' Hope, Colin has been special guest at several promotions of a number of new 'CoALEition' Ales produced in microbreweries across the region.  One brew, Hope and Glory (motto ‘Insanity prevents austerity’) has been served in the House of Commons bar.  These events resulted in coverage for us in 11 different newspaper and magazine articles in Somerset, Hampshire and Surrey, and we were featured in 6 of the photos used by these publications.

In November, Colin attended the Annual Conference of Mebyon Kernow – The Party for Cornwall at Truro once again, and links with other regionalists have been cultivated, in England and across a turbulent Europe.

In broader terms than just party politics, 2014 was a great year for Wessex.  Following the removal in 2012 of legal constraints on flying the Wessex Wyvern, the region’s cultural association, Wessex Society, persuaded a third of the county and unitary councils in Wessex to fly the flag for St Ealdhelm’s Day (25th May).  It was also unfurled by our Secretary-General, David Robins, for BBC West during their discussion programme on devolution that aired on 5th November.  Our appeal to the mainstream was boosted when historian Tom Holland coined the term ‘progressive heptarchism’.  This describes the imaginative approach we take to regional names and areas, in contrast to the bureaucratic compass-points still favoured by the London parties.”

The Party’s Annual General Assembly is being held today in Weston-super-Mare.  Key decisions are expected to be taken on our participation in the General Election, which could see unprecedented interest in parties such as ours offering a radical decentralist alternative to the self-obsessed Westminster charade.

The Final Countdown

What a week ahead!  Panic guys.  Family ties.  Major lies.  Scots rise.  Get wise.  Vote ayes.  Union dies?

If Scotland votes ‘No’ to independence, ‘devo-maybe’ will most likely vanish into mist.  We’ll give you more power – if you vote for less power.  Will we, really?  Not a chance.  You’ve had your little bit of fun, lads and lasses.  Now kneel and kiss the Butcher’s Apron.  Gordon Brown has already called for the abolition of the separate Scottish education system.  Attacks on the existing powers of the Scottish Parliament are unavoidable if the London parties are to do what they perceive to be their job, of ‘co-ordinating’ things UK-wide, ‘in the national interest’.  The only way to stop them is to consign all of these parties to history.

Project Fear may yet win next Thursday.  If it does, the political stormtroopers will be all over the place, wreaking a vengeance not seen since Culloden.  But nothing can ever erase the pleasure of seeing the London regime, complacent almost to the last possible moment, dashing north in unison in a state of total, existential panic.  Downing Street’s inability to keep its Saltire up is a beautiful metaphor for David Cameron’s flagging political virility.

What’s so deeply offensive is how the Three Stooges appear on Scottish stages to tell ‘them’ that ‘we’ in the rest of the UK want ‘them’ to stay.  They speak for the London regime.  They do not speak for ‘us’.  Have they never considered the possibility that support for Scottish independence may be as high (or higher) south of the border as north of it?  ‘We want you to stay.’  Why?  Whatever for?  Why wouldn’t we want you to be free?  How are we supposed to free ourselves if you don’t?

Suppose we take Ed Miliband’s advice and fly the Saltire that we all (of course) have kept waiting in a bottom drawer to show the Scots that we really do care.  Why shouldn’t it be to express a wish to see it raised over an independent Scotland?  Miliband talked today of solidarity.  Does he think he and his fellow imperialists have a monopoly on it?  Arrogant little fake.  At the head of a fake party, living in a past it can’t even legitimately claim as its own any more.  Did anyone in Wessex take his flag advice?  All we’ve heard is that Southampton City Council refused to fly the Saltire.  Not surprising, seeing what angst is generated there by a simple request to raise the Wyvern on the officially designated Wessex Day.

Meanwhile, Sir John Major weighed-in to the debate today with an astonishing concoction of nostalgic drivel and downright lies.  He had some reputation for integrity.  Who put him up to sacrificing every last shred of it?

Not content with recruiting the ghosts of 1914-18 to ‘No’, Major made great play of Britain’s ‘influence’ in the world, ‘the most successful partnership in history’ and all that.  Would that be the partnership that conquered a quarter of the globe, leaving a trail of genocidal atrocities in its wake?  ‘Statesmen’ like Major would be the first to condemn the idea of any other country having ‘influence’ over the UK.  So if you can’t take it, don’t dish it out.  In the same breath there was the usual nonsense about Trident keeping us safe.  Safer than the Swiss or the Swedes?  Perhaps you only need WMDs to keep you safe if you insist on having ‘influence’ that just might provoke a thoroughly deserved backlash?

Worst of all, Major speculated that the UK could lose its permanent seat on the UN Security Council.  This was a lie and he couldn't have failed to know that it was a lie.  The status of the five permanent members is agreed in Article 23 of the UN Charter, which identifies them by name.  The Soviet Union no longer exists.  Russia is a successor state.  But no-one got in Boris Yeltsin’s way when he claimed the Soviet Union’s seat for Russia.  The rest of the UK would be a continuing state from which part of its territory had seceded (just as France remains France notwithstanding the loss of Algeria).  Its Security Council seat is therefore not in doubt.  Even if it changed its name it would still be unquestionably the continuing legal entity identified in the Charter as the United Kingdom.  Major’s intervention in the Scottish debate marks a new low.

Regionalists from across Wessex will be watching next week’s vote closely, some more closely than others.  WR President Colin Bex plans to be in Edinburgh with the Wessex flag, to be present when history is made and hope is perhaps extended to all suppressed nations and regions across Europe.  Will he be joining Scotland’s freedom celebrations – surely the best party ever – or reflecting on the work still needed to turn a marginal ‘No’ into ‘Yes’ the next time round?  It’s not our decision.  We can only envy those who have opened up such tantalising possibilities for themselves.  But it would be better to stop the envy and start the emulation.

Vote No Evil

Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, explains why the London regime has to go.

The Eastern Question

“‘Fighting’ was one of the most honourable words in the vocabulary, ‘the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man’, as Thomas Hughes put it…  Of course, the fight had to be for a good cause.  But one of the effects of imperialism had been to imbue very large numbers of people with a religious belief in Britain as the great force for good in the world…  That England could be in the wrong was almost inconceivable.”

Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (1981)

One of the key arguments in the debate on Scottish independence is that a splintering UK would lose the ability to throw its weight around in the world.  Is that an argument against independence, or one of many strong moral arguments in favour, one of the instances where Scotland’s gain is also a gain for others, here and abroad?

When David Cameron writes, as he did in the Sunday Telegraph last week, about Britain’s ‘military prowess’, he hopes the lack of connection with other issues won’t show through.  He heads the government of a country that is supposedly bankrupt (though, as we’ve noted, in no hurry to pay down its debts).  Local services are being more than decimated, while food banks proliferate.  Never mind ‘charity begins at home’.  What about ‘competence begins at home’?

The incompetence of the London regime explains why our energy security has been outsourced.  It’s why the next nuclear power station in Wessex will be built by two rogue states if ever there were, the French and the Chinese.  The French, whose position on minorities is 200 years out-of-date.  So much so that if France applied to join the EU today it would risk a refusal on human rights grounds.  And the Chinese?  China is an economic giant and emerging superpower but arguably has the worst human rights record of all.  Just 25 years ago in June, troops of the People’s ‘Liberation’ Army mowed down students demanding reforms before the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing.  Justice is still awaited.  France and China share an image of themselves as modern, enlightened states that in fact carries forward the contemptuous centralism of absolute monarchy at its worst.

In 1969, following the crushing of the Prague Spring, two young Czech students burned themselves to death in Wenceslas Square.  Their example has been widely repeated, notably by autonomists in India and by victims of the European sovereign-debt crisis.  But nowhere do the figures equal those in Tibet, where 35 cases were reported in 2011/12.

Do we hear about these deaths?  No, we do not.  Gaza, yes, Lhasa, no.  Whole editions of Newsnight are devoted to every little flare-up in the Middle East.  China might as well be another planet.  That can’t just be because there are fewer Tibetan Buddhists at the BBC than Jews, Arabs and Maoists.  Acute oppression makes news headlines; chronic oppression does not.  Those who have rockets to lob at their neighbours are, from a relative perspective, the lucky ones.  The unlucky are those whose oppression is so total, whose fear of reprisals is so great, that their voices are never heard.

The United Nations should be standing up for the oppressed everywhere, without favouritism.  It faces huge difficulties in doing so.  It is composed of the winners, the states that exist and not the unrepresented peoples who are still in the queue.  The least that British diplomacy can do is nudge it in the right direction.  Can British diplomacy do that?  Or is the shadow of empire cast too long?  Are we too busy doing our own thing, exercising our military prowess?  Bombing other countries, then sanctimoniously patching-up the injured and welcoming (or not) the refugees whose homelands our actions have disrupted.

Most of the time, over 95% of the world is at peace.  It shouldn’t be beyond the wit of man, acting collectively, to treat violence and the causes of violence, problems no more inevitable than smallpox or polio.  Unilateral action may be swift but it’s rarely decisive and it effectively absolves the rest of the world of its responsibility for collective security.  We need to confront the fear that if we aren’t acting as the world’s deputy sheriff, someone else will fill the vacuum.  The UN’s job is to prevent the vacuum emerging.  The sad fact is that our own efforts seem to have created far more vacuums than we’ve filled.

Look around the world for hotspots and you’ll see the Union Jack disappearing over the horizon, its mischief-making done.  Kashmir.  Palestine.  Iraq.  The Libya operation cost around £1 billion and only succeeded in replacing a crazy but competent dictator with a bunch of bandits.  While spreading conflict across the central Saharan states in its wake.  Leaving well alone was always a sensible alternative.  Now, when last week’s evil enemies are proposed as this week’s necessary allies, it makes even more sense.

The best intentions can go awry.  The 1916 Sykes-Picot accord is now viewed as a shameless example of European colonialists carving up territory that was none of their business.  Yet Mark Sykes, the British half of the deal, was a Yorkshire squire who fell in love with the Middle East.  He had his doubts about imperialism, thinking that "the White Man’s burden is a bag of gold".  He hated cities and their inhabitants (he was, after all, MP for central Hull) and greatly admired the nomadic life of the desert.  It was his deepest wish to protect the area’s ancient civilisation from corruption, "the smearing of the east" with the "slime of the west".  He hoped Sykes-Picot would provide the focus for emergent Arab nationalism.  Which in a much less predictable sense it now has.

In a globalised economy, actions have unexpected consequences.  The idea that Islamist fundamentalism was deliberately promoted by the British Empire in order to weaken Ottoman rule – and strengthen London’s influence in its place – is about as believable as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  The Brits backed fighters, not theologians.  But successful fundamentalism never lacks funding.  Oil is oil and if the Islamic State is financed by the oil wealth it now controls and by donations from others whose wealth also comes from oil, then we may indirectly be funding terrorism every time we top up the tank.

Muscular humanitarianism has been the subject of debate ever since Disraeli and Gladstone locked horns over the Eastern Question of their day.  But whatever its achievements, crusader-style chivalry starts to look insincere once we consider how cramped its priorities are by realpolitik.  In the 21st century, 19th century multi-national empires like the UK are not the best means of doing good and they only get in the way of other institutions better placed to deliver.  At the 2005 G8 Summit in Scotland, Tony Blair told the world’s press that “we are trying to do good”.  Might it not be far, far better for states like ours to stop trying to do good and simply be good?

Thin Red Line In The Sand

In our massively over-centralised world, subsidiarity mainly means moving power back towards the individual and to the most local communities wherever possible.  But not every time.  It’s also about co-operation in place of competition.  It’s always about doing things at the right level, the smallest level that works.  The level at which global security works is global.

There are two kinds of rogue state.  There are those that do terrible things.  And there are those who go after them as vigilantes, impatient with international law and due process.  Those for whom it is better to do something than nothing, even if the very best outcome they can achieve is not to make matters worse.  More often than not we have seen how military action without a clear political strategy does anything but that.

Parliament’s rejection yesterday of military action in Syria will not prevent military action taking place.  But it does end the assumption that wherever there is a fight to be had Britain will be there, wearing the deputy sheriff’s badge.  Is it such a disaster for Britain if this time the US takes France along instead to share the burden of being le gendarme du monde?  France is the former colonial power in Syria, as Britain was in Iraq (and had made a few bold attempts to be in Afghanistan).  While the mandate may end, the colonists never mentally go home.

If yesterday’s vote marks the turning point in foreign policy that some are claiming it to be, what next for the British lion?

First of all, it really is time for a clean-up of government policy towards the arms trade.  The David Cameron who today is licking his political wounds is the same David Cameron who has hawked military hardware all round the Middle East as an unpaid commercial traveller for the death industry.  Do British companies not make anything else the Arabs might like to buy?  Medical equipment perhaps?

Second, we need to appreciate that projecting British power in the world comes at a cost.  Successive governments have met that cost by selling off the family silver.  The result is a growing mismatch between the imperial-era rhetoric of being able to influence events abroad and the commercial reality of having lost the ability to influence them at home.  Reading the roll-call of vital industries and assets that are now foreign-owned ought to bring into question just how British the hollowed-out British national interest now is.

Third, we really must press for an answer to the question of what the possession of nuclear weapons is supposed to achieve.  Are they a cost-effective addition to our security or just a status symbol?  Is there any realistic prospect of them being any more useful and relevant in the next 20 years than they have been in the past 20?  Do the Swedes or the Swiss lose sleep over not having any?

Finally, can we perhaps remember what the United Nations is for?  According to its charter, members reject the use of armed force, save in the common interest, and agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council.  Just because the Security Council doesn’t always agree with you doesn’t prove that the Security Council is wrong.  Its greatest flaw is of course the position of the five permanent members, who owe their seats – with the right of veto – to the fact that 68 years ago they won the Second World War.  It’s an untenable position, one that kicks dirt in the face of any who truly believe in the sovereign equality of all nations, the UN’s very first founding principle.

How to remake the UN for the 21^st century?  One course of action – cutting the Gordian knot – would be to dissolve it and start again with a new constitution that rogue states can veto only by not re-joining.  Another would be for the UK to do the decent thing, abandon its permanent seat and the veto and return the seat to the pool for others to have their chance.

It’s not an entirely fanciful scenario.  If Scotland becomes an independent state, what happens to the UK seat?  Russia was quick to claim the Soviet Union’s place and England would no doubt attempt to claim the United Kingdom’s.  Whether it would get away with that is anyone’s guess.  With the nuclear subs based firmly on Scottish territory, and no immediate prospect of being able to relocate them, expect some fine diplomacy, to say the least.

The Evil Empire

Incredibly, in the USA it’s actually a crime to use basic computer skills to access military information that isn’t adequately protected. We say ‘information’ rather than ‘secrets’ because to call something a secret and not put in place the means to keep it so is wishful thinking and a little bit laughable.

Laughable? It’s very serious (according to Labour’s Alan Johnson). No, seriously.

Oh, all right then. It’s hilarious. The Pentagon, with an annual budget of $700 billion, can’t even defend its own computer systems against a man looking for UFOs. Does it sack its IT specialists and get some better ones? And give the man a medal for identifying the lapse in security? No, it tries to get him extradited. Because he isn’t American and he doesn’t live in America. Nor was the ‘crime’ committed there.

Now the UK’s extradition arrangements with the US are being reviewed. Surely the question ought to be why they’re allowed any at all. Because if US courts are anywhere near as flawed as their computers, no-one can honestly expect justice from such a bunch of malignant clowns.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the US enjoyed worldwide sympathy and goodwill. It squandered both faster than it burns oil. Its record in overthrowing democracies that make the wrong choices and in wading in where it isn’t wanted is shameful. No British government should surrender sovereignty to an organisation where it’s expected to act as junior partner to this shady regime.

The counter-argument used to run along the lines of ‘at least we’re not the Russians, look at their human rights record’. Now it’s more likely to be ‘at least we’re not the Chinese, look at their human rights record’. No, we’d rather look at Uncle Sam’s, thank you very much. If it’s that good, what’s to fear in recognising the International Criminal Court like most of the world? The US is one of only three states – along with Israel and Sudan – to have signed the Rome Statute and since reneged, in its case less than a year before the invasion of Iraq.

The decline and fall of the American empire is inevitable. Its average IQ is now 19th in the world and facing some stiff competition. (The top 10 nations are either east Asian or central European.) Then there’s its unsustainable energy footprint. As well as a defence budget five times its nearest rival, accounting for over 40% of world military expenditure and draining away 5% of GDP, to do little more than irritate, annoy and occasionally enrage. It’s a pity that the day of reckoning won’t come soon enough to secure justice for the maybe millions who lost loved ones in its numerous crusades to impose ‘freedom’ at the point of a gun.

Peace & Goodwill?

This September, those who died in terrorist attacks on U.S. cities were commemorated, ten years on. Although the death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan combined is over 300 times the death toll of 9/11, few words were spared for the victims of those U.S.-led crusades for oil, unleashed under the pretext of fighting terror, with terror. Those who care at all will not care enough to withhold their votes from the politicians responsible and cast them in a more sensible direction. Although about 71% of Britons think the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, according to a ComRes poll for ITV, most tolerate the lies, the lies about ‘our boys’, devoting themselves to ‘keeping us safe’, that we may ‘sleep at night’. Well, wake up!

In October, the conflict in Afghanistan involving western troops entered its second decade. It has cost the UK taxpayer £18 billion and rising. Deaths among the British armed forces have reached 392, among Afghan civilians over 8,800.

Today, we ought to reflect on how little it has all achieved.

Saddam Hussein was tried and executed, for unrelated crimes, while Osama Bin Laden was not tried at all but executed anyway. In contrast, our own conspirators are still very much at large. Some of those, like David Cameron, who voted for war in 2003 enjoy all the trappings of high office, courtesy of the British electorate. So should we now accept Tony Blair’s advice, to ‘draw a line and move on’? It’s true that such issues may seem a long way removed from devolution but they do demonstrate the pressing need for change in our constitutional arrangements. If ‘our leaders’ can be excused justice for reasons of state then there is NO justice, no equality under the law. And the longer they’re allowed to get away with it, the more they’ll feel capable of doing the same again.

Meanwhile, 3% of Wessex continues to be occupied as training grounds by those preparing for the next pre-emptive strike to keep the peace. A less cynical, less Orwellian world used to call them wars.

Almost nightly, our screens are filled with the uniformed portraits of the latest casualties in Afghanistan. Newsreaders don’t normally tell us the names of everyone who has died in a preventable accident at work. Or in collisions on our overcrowded roads. Is it because morale is so low that those ‘heroes’ foolish enough to take the Queen’s shilling are paraded before us? So that, surely, we ought to nod helplessly and approve of them wasting their lives in a pointless cause? British soldiers are NOT ‘heroes’. For two reasons. One is that heroes save lives, not take them. The other is that there is nothing heroic about this shabby little war.

What most appals those who lived through the Second World War is that rampant militarism now goes unchallenged. The priority of disarmament has given way to the priority of ‘intervention’, as if ‘our’ government had some right to act not just as world’s policeman but also as world’s political surgeon. As the dust settles in Libya and talk turns to the contracts for reconstruction, we can see the real agenda all too plainly. As ‘statesmen’ look around for something to restart the engine of ecocide, plenty of advice will suggest that trade follows the flag, that the markets demand greater and greater offerings of human hearts. There’s even a name for it: weaponised Keynesianism. Globalisation – aggressive trade liberalisation coupled with contempt for sovereignty, identity and democracy – is a crime against humanity, a desperate bid to win control of the world’s resources before they run out. Daft, but true.

‘Royal’ Wootton Bassett now has the same initials as Red, White & Blue. It began to enter the national consciousness by spontaneously honouring the war dead passing through. It ended up receiving an honour of its own, for which it never asked, an honour some find manipulative and tawdry. The Mayor told journalists that he expects locals will carry on calling the place simply ‘Bassett’. The establishment could not spare the Queen to present her Letters Patent in person this year but deputed the Princess Royal to convey to the townsfolk the thanks of “the whole country”. Thanks for what? Thanks for “responding with dignity and respect to the losses that this country’s operational responsibilities have forced upon us”. Forced? And when exactly did a war of choice become violence under duress? Perhaps the Queen, as ultimate commander-in-chief, would like to answer that question at The Hague?

We are all Cameron’s conscripts, despite the best efforts of the Peace Tax campaign. It has become unacceptable in most circles to voice any criticism of the remilitarisation of our society. Laws are being twisted to punish those who do, trampling on fundamental rights of free expression in a chilling evocation of the flag desecration laws found in totalitarian states. True patriotism cannot arise from coercion and it would be a despicable thing if it could. The burning of Remembrance Day poppies as a protest against the continuing fact of war does appear to be on the increase, an ugly sign of ugly times. Does it show less respect than allowing the warmongers to lay their wreaths of hypocrisy? Who then are the real criminals?

We are all instructed, even by the young Lefties of the BBC, what to think and feel about RWB and Carterton, and much else surrounding the British murder machine. It’s time the truth was able to be told and fingers to be pointed in accusation. Because regime change begins at home.

The Return of the Region

The leading article today in The Times (a London newspaper) is about the north-south divide. It reports a call – actually made back in March – from Paul Hackett of the Smith Institute for a ‘Council of the North’ to be established, “a body that would bring together politicians, business leaders and academics to speak for the region as a whole. Such a body last existed between 1484 and 1641. It was set up by Richard III to give more power to the north after centuries of depression. Mr Hackett pointed out that London had representation that was becoming increasingly strong, and Scotland and Wales were also able to argue their cause. He suggested that bringing together the North West, Yorkshire and Humber and the North East would strengthen the whole region’s voice.”

The history is broad-brush but the political point is well made. The figures reproduced are damning – especially that transport spending per head in London is three times higher than up north.

What does this have to do with Wessex? Plenty. The case for centralism is that it allows resources to be shared out fairly by an impartial elite seated in Whitehall. It is demonstrable nonsense. All it does is thwart regional initiative and favour those closest to the metropolitan power-base. In 1971, John Banks, later our Party’s President, wrote in his book, Federal Britain?: The Case for Regionalism, that centralisation “has meant the concentration in London of the best jobs in government and business, and the corresponding drain of talent from the provinces and smaller national areas. High incomes have been earned in the metropolitan region, which have then been taxed in order to subsidize the regions from which enterprise has been attracted to the high income area, in order to persuade some of it to go back again. It is ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’ economics, from which nobody can ultimately gain.”

We advocate a regional solution that can begin to redress unfairness in a dynamic and lasting way. We are regionalists, not separatists, and work with those in the Celtic nations and in other areas of England – even with ordinary Londoners – to dismantle the structures of arrogance that suppress us all. There is no place in our Party for those who wish to whine about Scots or northerners getting their hands on money that could have been spent in Wessex. Much of the money that apparently needs to be spent in Wessex is only needed because of reckless population growth outstripping the capacity of our public services to cope. Centralism has delivered a ‘lose-lose’ scenario where the older industrial regions are gutted and abandoned while Wessex disappears under concrete. Regionalism can hardly do worse than that.

Our Party puts Wessex first, always. But we seek to do it in an intelligent way, one that builds successful alliances that will benefit us at least as much as they benefit others. We have always been the Wessex Regionalist Party: proud of the fact that we view Wessex as a region – a community of communities that joins with others to form still larger communities as the need arises, in every case upon the basis of enlightened self-interest, not empire-building, nor uniformity for its own sake. In this view, we stand shoulder to shoulder with so many good folk throughout the length and breadth of Europe. We follow their progress with interest, as we hope they follow ours. A rising tide lifts all boats and, as we pursue our goal of self-government for Wessex, we trust we shall never be so blind to the world that we miss the signs of the turn, nor so deaf that we cannot listen and learn from the struggles and successes of our friends and neighbours.

We & They

Our website currently includes a page of links to movements for autonomy among our neighbours – the Cornish, the Welsh and, within England, the Mercians. Our southern neighbours the Bretons and, within France, the Normans, are not neglected either. In a Wessex-centred perspective, within the Europe of Regions, we have no false loyalties to wider unities that do not, or will not, work for us. Cross-channel ferries are part of our economy, generating jobs in our coastal communities. Tartan tins of shortbread are not. In theory, what goes on in East Anglia or Northumbria, let alone Scotland, should be no more relevant than what goes on in Poitou and Picardy, our other neighbours’ neighbours. And as for Scotland, it might as well be on the moon.

In practice, what goes on in Scotland is very interesting indeed, because Scotland is the motor of constitutional change within our Disunited Kingdom. Thirty years ago, in the aftermath of a referendum defeat, even a relatively weak Scottish Assembly seemed a pipedream. A Scottish Parliament with an SNP majority was a foolish fantasy. That is not to say that the Union today is in jeopardy. A referendum on Scottish independence may well do to the SNP what the referendum on AV is now doing to the LibDems. Misreading the voters’ mood can have devastating consequences. Be careful what you ask for; ask only if you confidently command the charisma to carry it through.

Mischievous provocations by Unionists, however, such as suggesting a UK-wide referendum that gives English voters a veto over dissolution, will only stiffen Scottish resolve as the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn approaches. Even to float the suggestion is counter-productive and serious politicians will recognise that. The reality is that Labour is in deep trouble whatever form the referendum takes and whatever its outcome. Whether the SNP becomes the natural party of government in a devolved Scotland or takes it on to independence, the prospects for a Labour majority at Westminster are going to be severely dented. English regionalists should not think that Labour will soon be in a position to deliver devolution here, even if it wanted to. This realisation, which cannot spread quickly enough, leaves regionalist parties as the only viable option for those who advocate decentralisation and democracy. There are no shortcuts.

Meanwhile, the next four years at Holyrood will be interesting times. Thatcher hated Livingstone for building, across the Thames, a working model of everything she most despised. Salmond will be giving Cameron the same delightful treatment. The prospect of two Scots with two very different visions facing each other from their respective Parliamentary bastions will enliven political life for everyone. Abolition won’t be a way out for the PM this time. The lessons start with that simple fact, that devolved government is a constitutional, not simply administrative device. Nothing less than a civil war could remove it now. That is the kind of security against Westminster bullying that Wessex too so desperately requires.

That the SNP now dominates the Holyrood Parliament is another outcome we can welcome. Not because we care who the Scots elect to govern themselves, but for the boost this gives to a re-territorialised politics. More nationalist – and ultimately regionalist – MPs at Westminster would mean fewer Conservative, Labour and LibDem ones. That is the politics we support, because it is bottom-up politics, in which MPs work as advocates for the communities who sent them there, not for ideological factions manipulated by London-based think-tanks, funded by creeps and crooks, whose primary objective is the smoothing-away of the differences and distinctions that give variety and value to life.

A well-informed Cornish blogger, commenting on the AV referendum result, has suggested that the ‘No’ campaign won partly because UK politics overall are insufficiently ‘Scottish’ in outlook, in the sense of putting community first. (This defect was to lead AV to defeat even in Scotland itself.) There is something in this. The LibDems and all their works were punished, but in a range of cruel and unusual ways in different areas. They alienated their most ardent and hope-filled supporters by allowing themselves to become Tory glove puppets. They alienated floating voters by not providing a more responsible lead on over-population and over-development. Where they were strongest they suffered huge losses; where they were weakest they ended up entrenching still further the peculiarly nasty politics of the sado-monetarists, the slavering, reptilian denizens of a Daily Mail world of imperial destiny, swivel-eyed xenophobia and the mine, all mine social Darwinism that stalks the southern shires.

Such a stereotype also happens to be that of the typical campaigner for a ‘one-size-fits-all’ English parliament, gleefully envisaged as the means to spike all regionalist guns. We do not campaign for an English parliament. We cannot, because we cannot put the interests of England, or anywhere else, ahead of the interests of Wessex, nor put the latter ‘on hold’ indefinitely for the sake of somebody else’s priorities. If Celtic independence-all-round delivers an English parliament by default then we shall work within it, but the job of removing power from London goes on regardless. Without Celtic pressure, the decentralist cause within England would undoubtedly suffer a setback, which only a renewed drive for Europe-wide regionalisation might be expected to reverse. For Wessex to succeed, it must be seen as the equivalent of Scotland and Wales on the European stage and folk must be willing to look for such an equivalent. Instead, viewing the world from a truly parochial perspective, they will sometimes complain today that Wessex is ‘far too big’, then paradoxically declare that they prefer an English parliament that would be seven times bigger!

The task of differentiating Wessex from its neighbours, while working with them to undermine the foundations of uniformity, is acknowledged to be huge. It is also hugely worthwhile and, pursued with passion, can be hugely enjoyable too. The region is going to become the key political, economic and cultural unit of the post-oil age as old state structures render themselves irrelevant. Those who regionalise first will be those best placed to make the inescapable transition in a humane and democratic fashion. The Scots are way ahead. We’ll need to run if we’re to keep up.

Fool's Gold

On Tuesday, the Coalition announced that it would no longer be giving money away to China, Russia and a long list of other countries. Opinion polling suggests that two-thirds of voters query the priority given to foreign aid during this gloomy ‘age of austerity’ at home. (After all, this is money we borrow in order to give away and therefore have to pay interest on.) Labour, having espoused ‘joined-up thinking’ while in office, now denounces the targeting of aid to achieve security and other foreign policy goals. A surer target might have been to point out that the Coalition wants a Pig Society at home, where charity replaces the State and bankers pocket the difference, but wants to not only ring-fence but increase State intervention in other peoples’ countries.

We have reason to be suspicious of all the wildly whirling agendas. Tying vulnerable economies into providing us with the food and other resources we won’t provide for ourselves is not an ‘ethical’ foreign policy. It would be far better to leave well alone so that others can choose for themselves their relationship with development. Instead we underwrite with guns the elites who seize the crops to keep us fed. And then we wonder where Third World immigration comes from. Wouldn’t you want to follow the crops to see where they go?

The latest wheeze, to link aid to security, has all the markings of Danegeld. Don’t bomb us or we won’t pay you not to. So for how long do we pay? We paid the Vikings until they decided to help themselves to England. We paid the Barbary pirates for two centuries, so it looks as if the Somali ones need never work again.

But the biggest part of the big picture is that which describes our place in the global economy. We are told that our quality of life must be sacrificed to enable UK plc to ‘compete’ in world markets. We must join the race to the bottom, striving to match the costs of economies that rely on what is little better than slave labour. The word ‘compete’ is used in quotes because we are told that China, India, etc. are our competitors in this life-and-death struggle, yet we have been happy to subsidise their space programmes and nuclear weapons development, however indirectly, through foreign aid. If the competition were genuine, we would not be doing all in our power to enable their industries to undercut ours. The reality is that UK plc is a monstrous myth. No British government has any interest in our prosperity. It only cares for its own.

The alternative is protectionism, which ticks all the boxes. Especially, it accustoms us to an economy less dependent on moving goods around, which will become less of an option as the Oil Age ends. Nothing scares the financial class like the ‘p’ word. Which is why we are not allowed to mention it in polite company. But we have. We have ever since our 12-point programme in 1979, which argued for current revenues from our natural resources to be invested in building a region self-sufficient in energy, nutrition and all essential manufactured goods. Since then, Wessex has lost 32 irreplaceable years, lost in a Maggie-in-Wonderland world of ever-increasing prosperity and ever-expanding credit for which the first of many bills has now arrived. So don’t dare say you weren’t warned.

Naturally, as regionalists, we are not talking about ‘Imperial Preference’ here. Goods imported from, say, Brittany or Normandy imply a smaller carbon footprint than those from Northumbria or Scotland, let alone Canada or New Zealand. We cannot have jingoists in London or Paris imposing malignant barriers to trade with our neighbours. But trade rules that reflect the true cost of burning precious oil to bring us what we could have obtained locally, regionally or inter-regionally cannot come soon enough. Many good trends are becoming evident right now - Wales has voted for more powers, oil prices are rocketing, London politicians are looking increasingly out-of-touch with reality. Now is the time to seize this opportunity and make the case for local life and regional rule. Here, there and everywhere.

Non Homo Insula Est

No man is an island. The famous words of John Donne, Dean of St Paul’s in London. Written in English, translated here into Latin.

Why Latin? A cloud of celebrities ranging from Joanna Lumley, a native of Kashmir, to Boris Johnson, former MP for Henley-on Thames, has recently been gathered in support of the proposition that Latin should again be taught in schools. Presumably in those areas that still have grammar schools it still is. For what good would be a grammar school that eschewed Latin grammar?

If Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’, complete with its laboured mis-labelling to the locative case, comes to mind most vividly for those who learnt Latin at their alma mater’s knee then a pause for thought is needed. From the traditional date of Rome’s foundation in 753 BC to the end of the western empire in 476 AD is 1,229 years. The post-Roman afterlife of Latin to the present is 1,534 years and it is not an uneventful tale. Textbooks are largely silent about what remained the international language of churchmen, scholars, scientists and diplomats until modern times. We know a 17th century Swedish king as Gustavus Adolphus because news of his actions travelled in Latin. So too did those of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, Columbus and Erasmus, Copernicus and Linnaeus. We know the Chinese sage K’ung-fu-tzu as Confucius and the emperors of India and Russia by the name of a Roman assassinated over two thousand years ago (and who probably spoke Greek when he really wanted to impress). Et tu, Brute? Kai su, teknon!

For a Europe that needed to communicate with itself, Latin long ago became the earliest Esperanto. French eventually displaced it as the language of diplomacy, German as the language of science, and English ultimately as the language of everything, but until nationalism made neutrality a nasty word, Latin reigned supreme. The Kingdom of Hungary, the multi-lingual melting-pot of the Carpathian basin, insisted that Parliamentary debates were conducted in Latin as late as 1847. Some thirty years ago, an attempt was made to use Latin on the floor of the European Parliament but the speaker was ruled out of order. The Parliament has 23 official languages but Latin is not one of them. Those who believe the EU to be more super-state than club of nation-states might reflect on that lack of a language that transcends borders.

No-one knew the value of Latin like King Alfred the Great. His biographer, the Welshman Asser, records that, although Alfred had visited Rome as a child, he did not learn the language until he was nearly 40. His motivation was to partake personally in the revival of learning that he launched after securing the kingdom against further attack. Today, among mainstream English nationalists, it is fashionable to argue the uniqueness of Englishness, to decry any hint of cultural impurity. Not so for Alfred, who looked to Mediterranean civilisation for his model and cultivated links with lands even further afield. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, begun in Alfred’s reign, is written in English, not in Latin. An early case of ‘up yours, Delors’? Far from it. The choice was imposed on Alfred by a dearth of Latin scholars in Wessex. In the terms of the time it was a sign not of cultural strength but of abject cultural weakness.

Wessex has been subject to many influences down the centuries, Celtic and Nordic, Latin and Greek, African and Asian. All lasting impressions deserve study because they aid understanding of who we are. Can our encounter with Latin provide us with pointers to the future, lessons about how we view our place in time and space and thought?

The first conclusion must be that the past is rarely as dead as current fashions dictate. A glance around Europe will identify nations and regions long suppressed and now firmly back in business, their languages spoken and written again, their flags flying from the citadels of the former dominant power. From Ypres to Warsaw, Berlin to Budapest, monuments and cities blasted to rubble have been painstakingly reconstructed just as they were. Catalans are ruled by their Generalitat, a name dredged up from early in the 18th century. Scotland’s Parliament was re-convened in 1999 with words that connected to its last sitting in 1707. On our own patch, those who feared we might never again hear the phrase ‘Bath, in Somerset’ have been proved wrong. For those who claim that nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, it’s worth noting that even Alfred, when he set about his revival of learning, was inspired to re-create the splendours of the later 7th century, when Wessex enjoyed its first Golden Age under the guidance of King Ine and St Aldhelm. Whether the history around us is cherished for the richness it gives to our lives, or wiped out as an affront to ‘progress’, is a matter of will. The belief of progressives, that policy must, like time, be ever advancing, is a belief that can admit neither to ignorance of superior knowledge from another era nor to the mistakes that result. At best the mistakes go uncorrected; at worst, history repeats itself in ways that are unexpected and unwelcome.

The second conclusion is that insularity cuts us off from part of ourselves. Nationalism, conceived of as a fortress, politically, culturally, economically, is not the way to go. In Shakespeare’s day, the moat defensive against the envy of less happier lands made sense. But it came at a cost, both in terms of autonomy denied within and fraternity denied without. Regionalism recognises that everywhere is a region of something else, in a world composed of communities within communities. Like fractal images, one nests within another, from the parish to the planet, and each has its place, its call upon our loyalty, as individuals and collectively, and in their defence we find meaning and solidarity.

The third conclusion is that the informed intellect can be a vital tool in carving out a new politics. Wessex must be vigilant in defence of its folk culture – including aspects of mass popular culture that stem from Wessex roots – but need not therefore reject high culture as foreign to its nature as a region. It must find a proper place too for those whose concerns are more material than cultural. For Alfred, society was composed of praying men, fighting men and working men. As a party, our equivalents are thinkers, activists and donors. All three are needed and we need more of all three.