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.

Infra Digging

Public opinion remains divided over the wisdom of bombing Syria.  Much less so than the House of Commons, which this week allowed the red mist of ‘hitting evil hard’ to out-vote reasonable doubts over what military action can achieve without a lasting political solution in sight.  Who benefits, besides the suppliers of Brimstone missiles at £183,000 apiece and those who eventually win the contracts to rebuild a country’s shattered infrastructure?

There’s something quaintly 20th century about the UK joining the aerial posse over Syria when the evidence is that the Paris attacks were planned from within Europe.  And funded from where?  It could be anywhere.  Which means that foreign policy alone cannot guarantee home security.  BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday broadcast a documentary on the threats posed by growing reliance on the Internet.  With hackers becoming ever more sophisticated, cyber war is joining nuclear war in the thinking of those whose job it is to predict and avoid catastrophes.  Hackers who gain even temporary control of a national power grid could do real damage by overloading critical equipment that can take two years or more to repair.  And where there is chaos there are casualties too.

Austerity and resilience make bad bedfellows.  Cost pressures are driving the transition to ‘digital-by-default’.  But digital-by-default is a fair weather system.  Rip out the back-up, rely on microwave signals, not copper wire, computer programs, not manual valves and paper manuals.  Then cope with a real crisis.  It’s not just about the back-up technology.  It’s about retaining the skills you need to operate it.  From the floods of 2014 to Fukushima, it’s still knowing what levers to pull when the screens go dark that makes all the difference.

Britain has a great deal of ageing infrastructure.  There’s a real drive on right now to upgrade it.  But it’s not just about running to stand still.  UK population is still rocketing, while the increasing frequency of extreme weather events means that previous standards of protection simply aren’t good enough.  So far, not so good.  The UK, the world’s fifth largest economy, was this year ranked 27th by the World Economic Forum when it comes to delivering quality infrastructure.  So critical is this problem that governments stripped bare by privatisation are turning to global investors to fund it, even ones about whom there are entirely reasonable security concerns.  That’s a measure of how far governments of all parties have abandoned their primary responsibility to uphold our way of life.  The investment being sought is competing for cash with other parts of Europe.  Is there scope for better co-ordination?  Much of the continent thinks so and while the UK is agonising over Brexit, they’re pushing ahead.

Let’s assume that the UK gets the investment it wants.  Now, who gets that investment next?  Where does the Middle Eastern and East Asian capital all end up?  What are the new national priorities?  The Conservatives have set up the National Infrastructure Commission, headed by ex-Labour man Andrew Adonis, to answer those questions.  We can be sure of two things.

One is that London will receive vastly more than its fair share.  We’ve shown before the extent to which this happens.  The reason it happens is that the nations and regions outside London fail to elect sufficient nationalist and regionalist MPs to stop it.  It’s that simple.  Any provincial representative of the London parties can be easily bullied into voting more cash for the capital.  Because we all benefit from London’s prosperity, don’t we?  Because the ‘experts’ tell us it’s the best possible value for money, don’t they?  Because we’re all in it together, aren’t we?  As long as it’s public spending, Labour can’t think of a single reason to fault it.

The other certainty is that any regional dimension will be skewed in London’s favour.  This is a well-established principle seen in other centralised European countries.  In France, spending on motorways and high-speed railways has been designed to reinforce the Parisian view of France, linking cities deemed to be within the same official region, while ignoring links across those boundaries.  Brittany’s historic capital, Nantes is tied more tightly to other cities within the artificial ‘Loire Country’ region than it is to the rest of historic Brittany.  Rennes, capital of the administrative region of Brittany, has better links to Paris than it does to Nantes.  (Those who understand French can read more in a book called Bretagne et Grand Ouest by Pierre-Yves Le Rhun.)

Within the confines of still-inadequate devolution, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales have all developed national plans with a significant infrastructure component.  With devolution bedded-in, each has now reached at least its third round of plan-making.  England has no equivalent, national or regional, though the UK Government has what it calls a National Infrastructure Plan, in fact just a list of big projects taken out of context.  Powerful interests insist that only local clubs of councils, in theory equal partners in city ‘deals’ with the London regime but in practice wholly under its thumb, can plug the gap.  This is plain wrong, for three reasons.

Firstly, because its approach to place is wrong.  The emphasis on functional economic areas, the cities-first agenda of combined authorities and metro mayors, flies on the rhetoric of globalisation and the irrelevance of broad territory.  Equally though, it flies in the face of the fact that cities are not islands but depend for much of their life-support on those broad territories that the anti-regionalist consensus would like to ignore.  The places where you’ll find the water-gathering grounds, the power stations and the landfill sites.  Mayors-for-all is a timid retreat from real devolution, failing to provide joined-up government at the regional scale, the scale at which meaningful links can be made between the major infrastructure providers.  Highways England plan roads.  Network Rail plan railways.  So who’s planning transport?  No-one knows how much wealth is wasted by the silo mentality prevalent among the utilities.  These are companies set up to milk public services for private profit.  Poorly equipped regulators make matters worse because their remit is protecting the consumer from exploitation by natural monopolies.  It isn’t the wider public interest, so utilities are, for example, prevented from funding investment ahead of demand (but are allowed to use their own, unco-ordinated projections of what it will be).  Different aspects of a single scheme – like the new reservoir at Cheddar – get split between different control periods and held up accordingly.  None of this would be necessary if powerful regional assemblies ran the public utilities and decided their own priorities.

Secondly, because its approach to time is wrong.  There is much more to survival than economics, and getting cities fit to compete in a global economic system heavily dependent on oil.  In building sustainable regions it’s paramount that we build for the future, for how the world will be and not for how it is.  That means a process of infrastructure planning driven by long-term political campaigning, not short-term economic speculation.  It means building (or rebuilding) things like north-south rail links in Wales and Wessex, or improving those that run east-west across the Pennines.  These are schemes that struggle to pass any conventional cost-benefit test because that conventional analysis is weighted so as to reinforce the status quo.  One reason why such a huge amount of transport funding goes to London is that savings in travel time count as economic benefits of a scheme that can then be quantified in terms of the travellers’ incomes.  The more highly-paid the travellers, the greater the benefit assumed.  As taxpayers, we fund things like the London weighting allowance that drive up those incomes, and this in turn helps attract more public spending.  Low-wage areas are starved of transport investment because workers’ time is not valuable enough to tip the cost-benefit scales in their favour.  Decision-making needs to pay less attention to the biased outputs of computer modelling and get assertively political instead.

Finally, because its approach to people is wrong.  The devolution ‘deals’ are characterised by next-to-no public involvement.  The various closed-door Leaders’ Boards, Enterprise Partnerships and what-have-you that come and go exist in the legal shadows, inspiring no confidence either in their own permanence as entities of local governance or in the stability of the strategies they devise.  That’s no way to attract long-term investment or to act as the credible equal of the UK State.  And accountability?  The best you’ll get is to vote once every four years for a mayor you never asked to have.  The result is likely to be very low turnouts that undermine any claim to political legitimacy for the new single voice of the area.  It’s sad but true that the only reason to vote at all will be to keep out the candidate most likely to ignore the public and abuse the power to spend your money on his or her personal preferences.

With investment decisions now being planned that will shape our society for the next 30 to 50 years, strong regional voices are more important than ever.  We should remember that the regional dimension in England is closely related to questions of resilience.  In both world wars, regional structures were central to civil defence (and in between for organising the Government response to the 1926 General Strike).  The regions in use today – the boring zones still being touted as the only possible basis for elected assemblies – trace their administrative roots to the areas for which Regional Commissioners were appointed in 1939.  In the event of invasion, with London captured or destroyed, these men would have assumed all civil powers within their regions.  In Wessex, those men were, in the west, General Sir Hugh Elles, briefly replaced by Sir Geoffrey Peto, and in the east Harold Butler, later replaced by Sir Harry Haig.  Familiar names, no doubt, to those who needed to know.  An article in The Political Quarterly in 1941 commented that: “At last we have established regionalism, after much discussion and excessive delay.  But the experiment in regional government represented by the Regional Commissioners is utterly different from the kind of institution which was the subject of so much advocacy and controversy during the past three or four decades.”  It wasn’t the last time that principled regionalists would be disappointed by chronic imagination-failure in the corridors of power.

So it’s no surprise to see renewed calls for regions to take the lead in identifying their infrastructure needs.  In our previous post, we referred to Surveyor magazine’s coverage of local devolution.  Plans are already in place to develop Transport for the North into a statutory body by 2017.  The Midlands Connect Partnership is developing similar ambitions.  Andrew Pritchard of East Midlands Councils told Surveyor that the Government’s agenda is “having an impact on the way we do things.  We recognise if we are to compete for funding we have to take a more collaborative approach.”  This need not be limited to transport: Martin Tugwell of the Chartered Institution of Highways & Transport told the magazine that he welcomed the move to regional transport planning and said it should also extend to other infrastructure such as digital, energy supply and distribution and water networks.  Flood risk and waste management might be thought useful additions to that list.

With sufficiently determined regional leadership, this is an agenda that can be wrested out of the hands of the London regime.  If not, we shall see more London-oriented investment, packaged as ‘helping’ the regions plug in to what they need while in fact adding to what has colourfully been called London’s ‘vampiric suction’.  It can be done.  We just need a new set of MPs: they’re the obsolete infrastructure we really need to replace.

Unenlightening Europe

Quelle surprise!  As we noted in September, France was an easy target for terror.  So, ten days on from the Paris attacks, how’s the reaction unfolding?

Canadian blogger Vlad Tepes sums up the polarisation:

“The most important thing you can do when people you don’t know are murdered by Muslims in an act designed to promote the primacy of Islam, is show your moral superiority to people who would like to take meaningful action by demonstrating grief…  People tripping over themselves in self-sacrifice, trying to tell the people who want them dead or enslaved how there will be no ‘backlash’ instead of at the very very least going en masse to the mosques and screaming: ‘stop the hate’.”

Eloi turning on the Morlocks then?  But would that help or not?

And when the candles and the flowers and the teddy bears have been cleared away, what will remain?

There’s little serious anger that carries through.  From a position of strength, that would be good news.  From a position of weakness, it only underlines that weakness.  The silence is nervous.  It’s well-known that the ISIS strategy is to destabilise Europe, to make normal life unpredictable, to create the conditions in which submission to the gangsters’ will seems the safest option.  Part of that strategy is placing Europe’s leaders apart from the led.  They won’t be targeted.  They’re too useful as they are: mostly perceived as bumbling, incompetent, and lacking any will to defend their people.  Get rid of them and you only invite the more determined to replace them.

François Hollande ramps up the rhetoric but results will be another matter.  Pending anything better, la gloire is back.  France is bombing Raqqa, because France is now at war.  France was bombing Raqqa anyway, because that was just fooling around?  The tricolour has been much in evidence across the globe.  It’s forgotten, for now, that its history is no more glorious than the swastika’s.  Remember the Vendée, the génocide franco-français.  France’s politicians, gathering last week at Versailles, belted out their national anthem, as we’re all now encouraged to do.  ‘Do you hear, in the countryside, the roar of those ferocious soldiers?  Let's march, let's march!  Let an impure blood water our furrows!’  Yes, they still get away with that, but it’s not our Europe: it’s a gory theatre of the absurd, founded upon a lie (that France in 1792 was not the aggressor).

Hollande insists that he will defend the Republic.  Not so much France.  Not so much the French.  La République, a hate cult of hypocrisy, historic enemy of European regionalism, the proto-fascist State over which Hollande presides, one that despite his best efforts still cannot bring itself to legalise any indigenous language on its territory besides French.  (To quote Musa Anter, a Kurdish writer assassinated in 1992, "If my mother tongue is shaking the foundations of your state, it probably means that you built your state on my land.")  Republican values are the new Falklands factor – the art of war turned to domestic political advantage.  A false flag operation?  We’ve no evidence, but the motive is clear enough.

France likes to think it has a special relationship with the Mahometan world, one strangely informed by a millennium of conflict with it, real or imagined.  Charles Martel at Tours.  Roland at Roncevaux.  St Louis on Crusade.  Napoleon in Egypt.  Charles X seizing Algiers.  Charles de Gaulle letting it go.  It’s not actually the most promising basis for peaceful co-existence.

Nor is Britain’s record.  A century ago the UK made promises to the Arabs and the Jews.  It would be simplistic to say that the promises to the Jews were kept and those to the Arabs were not.  Neither got everything they expected.  But the Arabs, and the Kurds, got a lot more than they bargained for.  Promises of self-government if the Ottoman yoke were thrown off became the reality of a new colonial yoke.

In 1920 an insurgency broke out in Iraq against the British occupation.  RAF bombing of the area continued throughout the decade.  The Air Ministry considered it useful practice for other territories where “armed forces are required to give effect to British policy and uphold British prestige”.  Not least because it was so much cheaper than deploying ground troops.  Squadron Leader Arthur Harris reported after several such punitive raids that: "The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage.  Within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out, and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured, by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape."  At the time of the Arab revolt in Palestine in the late 1930s, Air Commodore Harris, as he then was, declared that "the only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand, and sooner or later it will have to be applied".  Ancient history this may now be, but the lands cursed with oil have a particular way of keeping the past in mind as they navigate the present.  The wonder is not that Europe suffers from terrorist atrocities.  It’s that patience proved so long-lasting.

What strikes westerners as not-quite-cricket is the worldwide extra-territorial jurisdiction that religious regimes claim, in defiance of international norms.  Killing cartoonists is the ever sharper expression of an idea that began in the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran and which the civilised world failed to challenge effectively.  In the UK we may tend to remember the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.  In France it’s more likely to be the murder in Paris of Shapour Bakhtiar, a remarkable man who was secular Iran’s last hope.  But all such incursions into European sovereignty pale into insignificance set against the western assumption that eastern regimes exist to be changed at will, whatever the locals think.  However tempting it is to bomb Syria without UN authority, the result will be more anti-western feeling, coupled with more European guilt for the collateral damage (damage that’s only terrorism by another name).  Or if nothing is done, an equal and opposite guilt for inaction.  If Europeans are to defend themselves, they must first question on what terms they think it proper to decide the fate of others.

Europe’s defence is bound to become more inward-looking because Europe is forming a smaller and smaller proportion of the world’s population.  (Its share is expected to halve between now and 2050.)  The ultimate triumph of universal human rights is no longer assured, because the expanding populations of the world may have no use for them.  They may view them with indifference, or with hostility.  Either way, Europeans need to be more watchful of what happens to their own rights and make that task their first priority, because it may be that no-one else will.  Europe is busy renouncing its enlightenment heritage because others find it offensive.  Since only those with something to hide are offended by the truth, it would be better not to retreat from the enlightenment but to shine the torch deeper, into our own society and into others’.  But that’s not what will happen.  On the contrary, we’ll continue to allow victims to be created by allowing others to use the value system of the victims’ own society against them.  Nice work for lawyers.

As terror attacks escalate, so the paradigm by which Europe’s rulers rule crumbles.  It survives only so long as it offers satisfying explanations of why the world is as it is.  European unity has been shaken by the migrant crisis, with one of its most unambiguous achievements – the borderless Schengen area – now in tatters.  Counter-terrorism demands closer co-operation across borders, better sharing of intelligence, perhaps a Europe where unity is enjoyed by the rulers even as it ceases to exist for the ruled.  It’s not a Europe that necessarily requires the EU, democratic or otherwise, which may be one reason why the EU is under political challenge.

Predictions of Mahometan conquest are far-fetched but only because they’re wrongly framed in military terms: a formal State structure can survive long after the internal reality of which active minority wields power in society has been utterly transformed.  One only has to look at Tower Hamlets under Mayor Lutfur Rahman to see how easily the corruption of Bangladesh can be reproduced wholesale in a London borough if standards are not upheld.  Given the London party consensus that elected mayors are better than open government, we can only expect to see more of this.  But even Europe, tolerant, self-loathing Europe, ever apologetic, ever happy to accept that two wrongs make a right, has a tipping point, a point of calling to account.

Expect far Right, anti-EU parties to fill at least part of the vacuum left by the collapsing paradigm of the politically correct.  Expect xenophobia to make no distinction between guilty and innocent: a presumption of innocence is essential for justice, but not for security.  It’s not impossible to imagine some countries taking things as far as mass expulsion of religious minorities deemed too troublesome to remain, especially once those countries are outside the EU.  It’s what happened in Spain in the 17th century, a move obviously considered worth it despite the economic damage it wrought.  Many of Spain’s moriscos ended up in north Africa, swelling the ranks of the Barbary pirates who took their revenge on Europe’s coastal communities, including those in Wessex.  Terrorism is nothing new and neither is the suite of possible responses.  About the only ‘self-evident truth’ is that the less Mahometanism there is in Europe, and in the world, the less terrorism there can be.  That calculation, that suspicion of the murky middle ground, that condemnation even of the fiercest fighters against the likes of ISIS, is the real tragedy.  Europeans aware of their history and confronted once again by an ideology that demands the death penalty for thought-crime may rather be safe than sorry.  It doesn’t lessen the tragedy.

If far Right parties fill part of the vacuum it’s also true that they can’t fill it all.  There are equal opportunities for other visions of Europe: most vitally a Europe of small nations and historic regions, decentralised, democratic, inclusive (of those willing to be included), yet passionately protective of traditional rights and committed to international justice rather than to the addictions of repression and war.  It’s a strong possibility in the longer term, but getting there could be a close-run thing.

Wrapped in Golden Chains

“There's been a lot of pressure to highlight human rights abuses but the Chinese haven't mentioned the DWP once.”

Tory Comedians on Facebook

Questioned in London this week on his country’s human rights record, Xi Jinping responded with the kind of explanation that would have appealed to Deng Xiaoping back in the 80s.  Something along the lines of ‘human rights, with Chinese characteristics’.  Universal, but to be applied only as it suits us.

WR Council member Douglas Stuckey was in London too, joining others in drawing attention to China’s chronic oppression of Tibet and reporting that:

“I was with the Tibetans to view the arrival of the Chinese dictator.  The Chinese showed scant courtesy in dumping boxes of kit all over – baseball caps, red flags, etc – and ordering students and others to line the route.  We should oppose Hinkley Point on grounds of security, technology, finance and humanity.  After all, we should be first to say: ‘once you pay the Danegeld’.”

Earlier this year the Dalai Lama, perhaps the greatest regionalist of all, was another visitor to Britain, and specifically to Wessex.  He was invited on-stage at the Glastonbury Festival (despite the usual foot-stamping warnings from the Chinese) before addressing a rally at Aldershot Town FC that Douglas also attended.  Tibet matters absolutely.  The involuntary loss beyond redemption of an insightful culture that took centuries to form is no less a crime against the world than the mass extinction of species demanded as the price of economic growth.  Tibet also matters relatively.  The media silence is deafening.  Just why destructive events in east Asia matter less than those in west Asia is one of the sad mysteries of the British media malaise.  Are the Tibetans not setting off enough bombs to be interesting?

Until 2008, the UK maintained its long-standing view that China’s relationship to Tibet was one of suzerainty, not sovereignty.  Gordon Brown was the first PM to kowtow on that point.  And clearly not the last.  China’s detailed interest in Tibet arguably began as a defensive move, to keep the British out.  Today, that’s as meaningless an argument as a Union Jack in Dublin now that France and Spain are our allies.  Chinese attitudes to Tibetan nationalism are ones not simply of arrogant opposition – Beijing knows best – but of old-fashioned outrage that self-evident truths are being challenged.  For Chinese diplomats, the right of nations to self-determination applies to existing states only, and if it does apply to aspiring nations then it is one that must not be exercised.  The State defines the People.  The People do not define the State.

How different things are in Europe!  Well, watch carefully.  The facts are that democratic change here would be ‘destabilising’ too and we just can’t have it.  It might spook the markets.

The Catalans, denied by Madrid the right to hold a referendum on independence, voted for it anyway through elections to the regional parliament.  Alex Salmond, interviewed for Catalan television recently, observed that Scotland had the process without the result, while Catalonia had the result without the process.  Madrid, not content with prosecuting the Catalan leadership for being over-democratic, is now hinting that Catalonia’s existing autonomy might be revoked.  Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution allows it to do this, in defence of the national interest.  The last person who revoked Catalonia’s autonomy was General Franco: that’s how bad things are.  West along the Pyrenees, in the region of Navarre, NATO is preparing its biggest troop exercise since the Cold War.  Wonder why?

Further north, the French Parliament struggles to ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.  Not because to do so would make French any less important, but only because it would deny French a monopoly in those historic territories where French is a foreign language.  The Chinese, the Spanish and the French all have the same world view: THEIR rights to self-importance must be protected against any interference in their internal affairs, but the internal affairs of those they occupy are there to be trampled upon.  It makes you feel so good to be British.  At least we allow an independence referendum to be held, albeit with every institution of the status quo briefing against.  But no, there’s no cause for self-congratulation here either.  Consider ‘guided localism’ and all the other sinister phrases the Coalition inspired and the majority Tory government doesn’t even need to repeat.  All these regimes regard autonomy as something they wind out on a string; not one sees it as a reflection of power rising from below, the only direction compatible with a vital democracy.

These are interesting times for Europe because Europe is losing the plot, demographically, economically and politically.  The price is one to be paid in freedom.  We don’t criticise the Arabs over sharia law and the funding of terrorism: we need their oil.  We don’t criticise the Chinese over Tibet or human rights generally: we need their investment.  Even if it’s a desperately bad deal for us, pursued for ideological reasons.  And even if it means handing over the keys to our infrastructure, against sound military advice.

It can only get worse.  The UK is becoming a Cornwall writ large, a place whose heavy industry has been destroyed by changing global markets, leaving only speculation and tourism to fill the gap.  Cameron swims beside Xi like a minnow beside a whale.  It's the pretence of mattering, in a world where even a united Europe looks lightweight and confused.  Who benefits more from the UK becoming China’s new best friend, as the USA’s star sets in the west?  The Chinese have views on trade unions and the work ethic that will fit nicely in Cameron’s Britain, but revenge for the Opium Wars will be sweeter.

The Left, wracked with post-colonial guilt, find it hard to offer an alternative.  China’s economic success is a good news story to them, but if China now has surplus cash to invest abroad then China’s success has clearly been overdone.  As for giving our power and wealth away to those elsewhere in the world who do not share our values, it’s a fair question whether this won’t increasingly lead to the undermining of those values at home.  It’s a debate to which the Left have nothing constructive to contribute.  They’re much too busy attacking free speech, and sawing off the branch that sustains them.

A fundamental aim of the Wessex Regionalists is to contribute to the creation of a sustainable and equitable global economy in which the health, security and liberty of all is paramount, regardless of race or creed.  There’s no better place and time to start building that world than right here, right now.  Do we still have the self-respect as Europeans to do that?  We face a bleak future if we don’t.  So far, all the signs point towards Thatcher’s poisonous legacy that everything has its price and that any exceptions to the rule must therefore be more cosmetic than real.

All Washed Up

Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, told BBC Radio 4 listeners today that the service could do with new surveillance powers to tackle the terrorist threat.  That’s hardly surprising, according to the cynical view that you never let a good crisis go to waste.  If necessary, you create one.  We face a toxic combination.  On the one hand, the consequences of an aggressively interventionist foreign policy pursued for the benefit of US interests, not ours.  On the other, disaffected youth of south Asian heritage liable to identify strongly with at least some of the victims of that policy.  The Government is working on plans for ‘Extremism Disruption Orders’, to target not so much terrorists as anyone who exercises their supposed right of free speech in ways that this Government – or any of its successors – decides it doesn’t like.

We won’t let counter-terrorism measures interfere with our lifestyle.  Of course not: that would be letting the terrorists win.  Even though that’s precisely what’s happening, as the threats continue to proliferate and so too does the apparatus supposedly designed to contain them.  If we can feel that, on the outside of government, what’s the atmosphere like on the inside?

The Swiss Army has carried out two exercises in recent years related to migration and its consequences.  The first dealt with a stream of migrants that was out of control.  The second took things a step further.  It assumed a breakdown of public order in France, the fragmentation of authority into local fiefdoms and a consequent need to resist looting expeditions onto Swiss territory.

Why France?  France has a large population of North African and Middle Eastern extraction.  Religion is deemed irrelevant.  France’s secularism has moved on from being a policy to being a blindfold, so it doesn’t collect census information on religion.  For a true picture, consider that France’s top Mahometan official recently offered to take over the country’s redundant Catholic churches to meet a demand for 5,000 new mosques.  The problem facing the security services is not the proportion of his followers who may be terrorists.  That proportion may well be unchanged, year on year.  It’s that as the absolute number behind that proportion increases, so the strain on the security services also increases.  It’s a statistical certainty that militants with potential or actual Jihadi sympathies are entering Europe every day.  The security services now have far more potential Jihadis on French soil than they’re resourced to keep under surveillance.  Managing that risk is, well, risky.  It’s not polite to mention it, but it’s there nevertheless.  A spectacular 9/11-style attack on France is now regarded by some experts as inevitable.

Government-by-advertising is starting to fail.  The idea that well-placed words and pictures can get us out of the domain of reflection and into that of sentiment has worked in every previous crisis, but…  An increasing number of people are now questioning whether their ruling elites are taking care of their best interests, and whether the taxes they collect are legitimate.  Psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe described the legacy of the failed 2009 Copenhagen summit on climate change as the realisation that our "leaders are not looking after us... we are not cared for at the level of our very survival".  No, you guessed right there and don't sound so shocked.  So do we want a State that from Brussels downwards regulates everything but the fundamentals, neglecting the real issues of movement and resources and ideology that underpin our security?  A lot is written about the accumulating critical mass of terrorists in Europe but much less about the accumulating critical mass of ordinary folk who are asking such questions.  Once it forms, things could get perhaps too interesting.

Military exercises cost money.  Even if your priority is to spend the budget rather than ensure it’s spent well – and that’s an insider criticism of the Swiss military – you’ll still pick exercises that usefully focus minds over ones that don’t.  So if the Swiss think a scenario in which France falls to pieces is worth considering, so should we.  (It’s an off-the-shelf scenario, by the way, which anyone can read in Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age.)  In which case, while we’ve been pondering the fate of boat people with names like Yusuf or Maryam, we may be failing to spot the longer-term possibility.  Which is that communities on the south coast of Wessex should get ready for boat people with names like Joseph and Marie.

Being Sub-Human

The Pyrenees are a formidable geographical barrier, the terror of would-be conquering armies approaching from north or south.  What they are not is a formidable cultural barrier.  Basque culture in the far west and Catalan culture in the far east transcend them and have done, peaceably, for millennia.

The national frontier of today results from the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, when a line was drawn through the mountains by the imperial states based in Paris and Madrid.  To tidy things up.  No need to consult the locals. 

The provinces to the north-west are now within France’s département of Pyrénées-Atlantiques, with its capital at Pau.  Those to the north-east form Pyrénées-Orientales, with its capital at Perpignan (Perpinyà in Catalan).

Basque nationalists have long claimed their lost lands as part of a free Euzkadi: an idea expressed in the formula 4+3=1 (4 Spanish provinces, 3 French provinces, 1 nation).  And the Catalans are no more content with the status quo than the Basques.

France is having none of it.  The European Free Alliance reported this week that a French court has banned the area’s political movement, the ‘Committee for the self-determination of Northern Catalonia’, on the grounds that it represents a threat to the territorial integrity of the French State.  That’s how France survives, not by consent but through injustice.  It’s a paranoid, police state, and always has been.  The Revolution changed nothing of any substance.  The real revolution is still awaited.

French regionalists are still smarting from a territorial reorganisation law that rejects the rights – indeed the very existence – of Alsatians, Basques, Bretons, Catalans, Flemings, Occitans and Savoisians.  An inclination towards separatism would be a reasonable response.  France’s swift reaction against the Catalans is a warning that freedom of association in pursuit of democratic aspirations will not be tolerated.  French democracy, such as it is, is State property and not to be trespassed upon.  It does not, and cannot, belong to the people.  You can say ‘Je suis Charlie’ as much as you like, but you can forget about ‘Je suis Catalan’.

If Europe is such a beacon of democratic light, as it keeps informing the Russians, just how does France get away with it?  It’s certainly a pariah state by European standards; only Bulgaria and Greece are as obstinate and repressive in denying the objective existence of national minorities on their territory.  But Europe’s laws are crafted by an imperialist cabal: we have explained before that the European Convention on Human Rights offers no protection against those determined to enforce long-redundant state boundaries.  Separatists do not have human rights as others do.  What does that say about how they are viewed in law?

Jeux Sans Frontières

Events in Paris this week have exposed Europe’s anxieties to the full.  Let’s consider some of the possible reactions.

On the far Right, and among the not-for-prophet movement generally, this is I-told-you-so time.  Even those who disagree with the politics must find recent analysis strikingly prescient.  And at least it’s an opportunity to highlight some double standards.

Then again, cui bono?  Who benefits?  Will Le Pen prove mightier than the sword, deepening the backlash?  About the only certainty is that there will now be further restrictions on civil liberty in order to intensify the ‘war on terror’.  Threats to national security will be enumerated, movements for autonomy doubtless among them.  Those who like the theory of a false-flag operation – a few fanatics supplied with guns and training by the security services and then shown the direction to go – will point to other conspiracy theories that turned out to be at least partially true.  The humanitarian catastrophes that have resulted from intervention across North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia are too systematic and repetitive to be put down to incompetence.  Those in charge know what they’re about.  The challenge for anyone else is to say what that is, though for starters what do the letters O.I.L. spell?

That sense that there isn’t a trustworthy narrative is bound to be destabilising.  Its consequence is fear and more fear, coupled with appeasement as a means to restore breathing space.  Freedom of expression will not be defended (if anything, the pressure will be to remove freedom of non-expression in the hunt for the non-conforming).  Liberals and anyone to the left of them will certainly not defend it, because it’s a fixed principle and liberal power depends on being able to manipulate a debate and steer its unfolding, contradictory development.  Power, for them, depends on the ability to set, and to arbitrate on the setting of, social and cultural boundaries.  An uncompromising defence of free expression is a nuance-free zone in which born control-freaks can make neither mischief nor money.  There can be no political correctness where nothing’s incorrect.

Migrants, and perceptions of migrants, play a relatively small part in what’s essentially a struggle for hegemony between the elites of Left and Right.  That being so, we cannot expect measured but steadfast leadership from either side.

The closing of the European mind is a mark of Europe’s lost place in the world.  You don’t annoy the oil sheikhs.  You rant against the terrorists, not their funders in the Gulf, whose wealth you court.  Does the Royal Navy’s new base in Bahrain serve any credible military purpose, or is it a taxpayer-funded shop window for the UK arms trade?  The BBC’s Robert Peston last month suggested that the dramatic slide in the oil price has been deliberately engineered to put high-cost oil extraction – fracking, deep sea, etc. – out of business.  And after that, the price will again rise.  It’s all a game, mes amis, c’est tout un jeu.

The War on Identity

“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory.  Destroy its books, its culture, its history.  Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history.  Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.  The world around it will forget even faster.”

Milan Hübl (1927-1989)

History is written by the victors.  Just now, it’s the centralists who are winning across much of Europe.  They have spied their opportunity and seized it.  But history hasn’t finished with them yet.

There are three reasons why we take an interest in regionalism on the mainland, and in the regions of France in particular.  One is that a Wessex-centred world must view Brittany and Normandy as a more meaningful ‘next-door’ than Northumbria or Scotland, separated from us by Mercia.  That’s an illustration of how seeing things from the perspective of the imperial states creates a bloc mentality that really does block out other aspects of geographical reality.  A second reason is practical solidarity, because the Jacobin mindset is something that gets passed around Europe like a virus, finding new strength from new victims.  When Alsatians, Catalans or Tyroleans suffer at the hands of control-freak states, we know very well that we could be next.  The third reason is ideological solidarity, because English regionalism can be part of a trans-European ideal, the Europe of a Hundred Flags.  If it fails to see itself in those terms, then it will fail to achieve its potential to engage and enthuse.

How fares the Europe of a Hundred Flags today?  Very poorly, as one imperial state after another starts to roll back the gains made since the Second World War.  Europe is being restructured in ways that threaten to undo all its achievements in terms of economic (and even political) democracy, social welfare, environmental protection and cultural autonomy.  All these things need to be defended on a secure territorial basis, the basis provided by regional identity.  Our assets.  Our institutions.  Our neighbours.  Our land.  Our way of life.  London parties not welcome.  Amazingly, the mainstream Left can’t even begin to understand the importance of this.  Labour puts up candidates against the nationalist parties in Scotland, Wales and Cornwall.  What good can possibly come of that?  Labour ekes out its existence as a parasite on the system, having no views on how to change it for the better.  In some ways, it’s set to make matters worse.  As its continental allies already are doing.

France has now definitively redrawn its regional map.  The partly German-speaking region of Alsace has come off worst, merged with two French-speaking regions to create ‘ALCA’ – Alsace-Lorraine-Champagne-Ardenne, an area bigger than Belgium.  It’s one of several such combinations, doomed to be known by their initials, just like, as one French MP put it, cattle-brands.  Alsace heads a long list of regions to be abolished as their number is reduced from 22 to 13.  Others include such historic names as Aquitaine, Auvergne, Burgundy, Limousin and Picardy.  The one group who can celebrate are the Mouvement Normand, since the re-unification of Normandy is one feature of the plan.  Wessex looks out at what will now be officially the coast of Brittany and Normandy; it’s only further inland that the chaos becomes evident!  They can, as always, look back at Cornwall, with Wessex waiting to take its place alongside.

So have the Normans been good garcons and filles?  It might seem so to the Alsatians and the Bretons.  These two peoples are ones whose loyalty to the French State has often been regarded as suspect, as if loyalty isn’t something that has to be earned.  Now they’re the two peoples most bitterly disappointed and with good reason to ask why they should remain part of a State that won’t even recognise their existence.  Brittany remains truncated, while Alsace will be wiped off the map.  A challenge has been launched in the Constitutional Council, alleging inadequate consultation, but for now the plan is to implement the cull on 1st January 2016.

During the debates it was made clear that the restoration of traditional provinces is not something that will be tolerated.  Sometimes, as in the case of Normandy, it happens by accident, but accidents do happen.  Reorganisation is about improving the efficient, functional operation of the French national territory, as viewed from Paris.  Substitute ‘English’ for ‘French’ and ‘London’ for ‘Paris’ and it becomes a familiar story.  Indeed, an article in The Regionalist in 1991 stated that “By introducing its own definition of Brittany, excluding Nantes, France has been able to sow confusion and to re-assure itself that Brittany is, after all, only a French region that France can make and unmake at will.”  Before long the phrase was taken up by Silesian autonomists arguing that the division of Poland into artificial voivodeships is likewise a project to supplant historic provinces with regions that Poland can make and unmake at will.  Napoleon is as much a hero to the Poles as to the French, having briefly liberated their country from the surrounding empires.  Yet in both France and Poland, notions of national liberty are built upon the ruins of regional identity.

Cross the Alps and we find that the ruling party in Italy has introduced a Bill to reorganise the Italian regions, a cut from 20 to 12, replacing historic names like Piedmont and Tuscany with Jacobin-style geographical labels – Regione Alpina, Regione Appenninica, Regione Adriatica.  The message is the same as in France, or England, or Poland: regions exist to help the centre manage its territory; they do not deserve to exist as something worthwhile in their own right or to be an inspiration to those challenging the centre’s monopoly of real power.

Two proposed casualties are the small regions of Valle d’Aosta and Trentino-Alte Adige, home to Italy’s French-speaking and German-speaking minorities respectively.  Both these areas have a special regional status that was introduced following the defeat of fascism, in recompense for persecution under Mussolini.  The German-speakers of south Tyrol feel particularly betrayed, with counter-demands now being made for greater autonomy, independence and/or re-union with the rest of Tyrol, from which this area south of the Brenner Pass was separated after the First World War.

With France and Italy deracinated, Spain can expect to be next.  One of the happy peculiarities of regionalisation there was that the boundaries were left largely to the locals to decide.  And one result of that was a relatively large number of single-province regions that saw no need to link up with their neighbours.  These account for 6 of the 15 mainland regions.  So while there are some large regions with a similar population to Wessex – Andalucia and Catalonia for example – there are others about the size of Cornwall – Cantabria and La Rioja.  Both these smaller regions are required in their devolution statutes to allow for the possibility of merger with their big neighbour Castilla-Leon and no doubt will come under pressure to do the deed.  It’s interesting that Spain is tightening up its anti-protest laws.  Clearly, those in charge are expecting trouble.

Across Europe, the 2008 financial crisis has spawned new, happy-clappy parties and movements of the Left.  Their leaders talk a lot about greater public ‘involvement’ in decision-making but are (un)surprisingly cagey about who will actually take the final, unappealable decisions.  Spain’s Podemos is an example, opposing Catalan independence in favour of having some undefined wider ‘influence’.  Moves to get the SNP into formal coalition with Labour are part of the same outflanking manoeuvre that tries to tempt with fleeting political concessions instead of agreeing the need for lasting constitutional changes.  (Though getting to look at the real UK accounts certainly WILL be tempting for Salmond and Sturgeon!)

Among the large continental states, that just leaves Germany, where the possibility of re-drawing regional boundaries has come to the surface several times since 1949.  So far, the democratic Germans have always put firm proposals to the vote and not since 1952 have the voters decided to agree a regional merger.  (Even that was largely about re-uniting an area that had been split by the zones of occupation.)  Germany is often quoted as the model for other continental countries.  In France the debate was driven – or poisoned – by the idea that France needs regions of ‘European scale’.  Yet Germany is actually marked by huge diversity.  There are regions like Bavaria, almost as big as Ireland, but also tiny city-states like Bremen and Hamburg.

So what is a region of ‘European scale’?  Does the EU have a view?  The EU, sensibly, doesn’t.  European statistics are kept on the basis of regional and local units that ultimately are determined by the Member States’ own legislation.  Sometimes that works in favour of identity, as when Cornwall obtained Objective 1 regional aid status, for which it would not have qualified as part of a slightly more prosperous Devonwall area.  Sometimes it can result in a kind of statistical apartheid.  Welsh local government is planned to be reorganised again (for the third time in 50 years).  The Williams Commission that looked into the matter disappointed any nationalist who might have longed for the reconstitution of Morgannwg or Gwent.  The reason?  That west-east split, linking depressed coalfield areas to their respective, wealthier coasts, would endanger European aid.  So the poor coalfield has to stick together, separate from the coast.  In terms of the infrastructure European aid might fund, it’s nonsense, as transport largely radiates from Cardiff and Newport, following the valleys from south to north.

So much for a Europe that works for its peoples.  Instead we have inflexible funding rules – the Europe of the figures – re-shaping our very constitution, for good or ill.  The most sensible boundaries – in terms of community geography – may be ruled out in favour of much less sensible arrangements in order to save the funding.

Who are the EU’s real masters then, if not us?  A generation ago there was the fervent hope that an alliance of europeanists and regionalists might be the twin millstones that would grind away the imperial states, dividing up their powers between them.  If the EU hasn’t been the most active of allies, it’s perhaps because the European ideal has been much more easily co-opted by the centralists, by those who wish to write the imperial-state idea wider still.  And that shouldn’t surprise us.  The EU is the creature of the treaties that establish it and those treaties are written by the Member States.  They may concede consultative institutions like the Committee of the Regions but they aren’t going to sign their own death warrant.  Rather than meet the financial crisis by cutting their own wasteful spending and devolving power, they look to save money by cutting out somebody else’s tier and centralising power instead.  Money has to be saved now, urgently, if the centre itself is to be saved.  Attacking any identity lucky enough to have been respected this far is the quickest win.  The promise in ‘The Vow’ to not abolish the Scottish Parliament some time down the road is significant not because it was said but because it was thought necessary to say it.

More recently, the EU bureaucracy itself has realised the importance of keeping its national paymasters sweet.  Barroso could have opened up a debate on internal enlargement, about the further treaty changes needed to avoid any ambiguity over what happens when part of a Member State secedes.  His neutrality was just too Pilate-like for the EU’s own good.  It came across not as neutrality but as change-weariness.  Not more treaty negotiations.  Just to please the Scots and the Catalans.  Do they really think their national freedom should matter that much?  Juncker has already set the tone of his presidency, sceptical about environmental and social protections that hinder Europe’s bid to join the race to the bottom.  His warning to Greek voters about the kind of government they should or shouldn’t elect is further proof that the ‘post-democratic’ Europe advocated by Peter Mandelson is firmly taking shape.

Regionalists have always been wary of Europhile claims, while equally distancing ourselves from Eurosceptic adoration of the imperial states.  There is a genuinely third way that is not about those states, nor about a Jacobin map of Europe where identity is to be erased as a barrier to ever closer union.  Actions produce reactions and the current war on identity will produce a renewed determination to resist.  A determinaton to build a different Europe, the Europe of a Hundred Flags, in place of the worthless regimes in London, Paris, Rome and Madrid – and of their Brussels puppet.  (That so many assume Brussels to be the puppet-master just shows how well the imperial states know their work.)

We should increasingly expect to see nationalist and regionalist parties succeed at the polls, making inroads into the dead thinking of Europe’s indistinguishably conservative / socialist establishment, while seeing off those equally indistinguishable challengers who are just more of the same.

It’s been said, and not wholly in jest, that a nationalist is a regionalist who means it.  One who isn’t fooled by the Labour Party or the Parti Socialiste into backing change that isn’t really there.  Many regionalists, who’ve been deliberately moderate to win concessions from the centre that are now being torn up in scorn and suspicion, will be asking whether separatism is such a dirty word after all.  States with a more authoritarian tradition will be turning up the heat.  States with a less authoritarian tradition will be trading clunking old chains for sleek new wires.  Either way, advocates of autonomy will need to be careful who and what they trust.