Thou Shalt Not

Thursday last week saw a plethora of different elections across the UK and among these polls was a referendum in St Ives.  Local folk voted by 83% to 17% in favour of a policy to ban the building of new second homes.  Faced with a housing market described as ‘financial cleansing’ of the locals, that’s no surprise, though of course it does nothing to ease the pressure on houses already built.

Reactions ranged from great interest, among towns and villages elsewhere, including western Wessex, to threats of judicial review by appalled developers.  Wessex already has an example of this type of policy, in the Lynton and Lynmouth Neighbourhood Plan in Devon, but this could be argued as an exception because of its location within the Exmoor National Park.  What happens when exceptions become the new rule?

Ministers in Lunnon insist that this is the sort of thing up with which they will not put.  The law will be changed to curb these uppity yokels.  Cornwall is surely somewhere that only comes into existence during the holiday season and switches itself off afterwards.  Localism?  Oh, we really are having a laugh.

The current issue of the MK magazine Cornish Nation highlights the raw deal that Cornwall is increasingly getting.  A cross-border Devonwall Parliamentary constituency is looming, regardless of token recognition of the Cornish as a national minority.  (If approved, this will make it impossible for MK candidates to represent Cornwall and only Cornwall, just as it will make it impossible for us to represent Wessex and only Wessex.)  Last month, a paltry £150,000 a year grant to support the Cornish language – equivalent to about three MPs’ expenses claims – was peremptorily withdrawn, to widespread dismay.  Cornwall’s Grand Bard described this spiteful act, so damaging to the tourism offer, as “an ideological decision based on indifference and not a financial one based on fiscal responsibility”.

Last year’s ‘Cornwall Devolution Deal’ was so feeble as to be an abuse of the word ‘devolution’, so limited in scope that it did not merit legislation or even a Commons debate.  The key areas of housing and planning are excluded from the deal.  Instead, the centralist inspection regime has imposed on Cornwall a much higher housebuilding target than that deemed appropriate by the majority of local residents and also re-written the council’s affordable housing policies to undermine their effectiveness.

As if to pour petrol on the flames, the Court of Appeal yesterday ruled it lawful for the London regime to prevent councils seeking contributions to affordable housing from sites of 10 homes or fewer, overturning a previous ruling obtained by Reading and West Berkshire councils.  These small windfall sites, often redevelopment sites, are the sort that can make a significant – and generally uncontroversial – contribution to housing development in our towns and villages.  Excluding them means that councils are ever more reliant on the volume housebuilders to deliver their one affordable for every two market houses.

This in turn puts ever more pressure on councils to allow more market houses than are actually needed by the local population, leading to yet more second homes and an influx of retired folk whose social care costs later in life are met from local taxation, not from national taxation or by the areas in which they paid taxes when working.  Meanwhile, as the Revenue Support Grant is being squeezed out of existence its place is being taken by the New Homes Bonus, a shameless bribe to councils to build or lose out.

This all began in the 1980s when we largely stopped building council houses and loaded the cost of social housing onto homebuyers, who themselves are often struggling to afford the prices.  Landowners do nicely though, with three attempts since 1945 at capturing their heightened development value through taxation or public ownership overturned by the Tories and no fourth attempt in sight.

The point we have to hammer home is that you really do get what you vote for.  Cornwall elected the full set of six Tory MPs last year.  What did it expect to get in return?  Little victories like St Ives mean nothing if the one lot can still count on your vote ‘to keep the other lot out’.  Tory, Labour, LibDem.  All centralist and all rotten to the core.  So forget ‘the other lot’.  Be your own lot and deny them all the power to do your community lasting harm.

Useful Idiots?

This week saw a rally at Westminster in support of housebuilding.  There’s no denying the heartache if you’re not adequately housed, but many demanding a cull of our countryside are being duped by those who stand to benefit financially from a yet-more-bricks-and-mortar solution.

There’s no sound case for adding to our housing stock if we can’t properly manage the stock we already have.  Leading politicians who bang the drum over a shortage of affordable homes have done nothing to end Right-to-Buy, which continues to bleed the social rented stock much faster than it can be replenished.  That includes replenished on the basis that housebuilders get to build two market homes for every affordable one, market homes in places they might otherwise not get to build at all.

Do we have sensible lettings policies for the stock we do still have?  No.  Often the townies get priority.  In parts of Cornwall, the landlords, or their nominating authorities, are councils from Birmingham, London and Manchester.  The locals aren’t eligible.  How widespread is that?  Are Wessex retirement zones similarly blighted?  And this is before we start on second homes and holiday lets, long-term empty properties, derelict buildings and under-used floorspace.

Above all, let’s not forget the elephant in the south-east corner, whose wealth distorts everyone’s housing market.  We know all the jibes about nimbyism.  We know we’re meant to feel ashamed that we fight so hard for the Wessex countryside that feeds, powers and waters London, amuses it at the weekend and buries its unending stream of waste.  We know we supposedly lack a sense of ‘social responsibility’ if we refuse to take London’s overspill.  But d'you know what?  We’re not the irresponsible ones.  They’re those who suck the world’s wealth into London and then expect others to solve problems we didn’t create.

In Northumbria there are whole streets, even whole villages, of sound housing that has no takers.  The so-called ‘bedroom tax’ makes the older two-bed terraces unviable for those on benefits.  (Not that Labour cares.)  Will they be abandoned to ‘market forces’, as the population re-locates south?  To join the international migrants who also congregate in the south because that’s where the work is.  Let’s remember that UKIP, as yet another party of free market ideologues, are essentially unconcerned about inter-regional migration.  And what are those international migrants if not a regional problem on a bigger scale?  The Poles would still be in Poland if their economy hadn’t been stuck behind the Iron Curtain for 45 years.

Is it all inevitable, this surrender to the ineffable will of the market?  Wrong question, because this is NOT solely about the market.  It’s also about the corporate capture of the British State and the renunciation of its power to influence events in a win-win direction.  Not just in terms of policy but hard cash too.  The UK is a big enough spender to shape the market.  UK public spending this year is £731 billion.  Is it all spent well?  So that those who want development can get it and those who don’t can breathe a sigh of relief?  No, it isn’t.  And the result is an economic catastrophe for the one and an environmental catastrophe for the other.

We don’t need more housing.  We need more fairness.  We won’t get it from London.  Which is why Wessex so urgently needs to take its sovereignty back.

That Figures

The Campaign to Protect Rural England is good at collecting statistics.  It may be no more than a gnat on the side of the development elephant but at least it knows how to document the scale of the deception being practised upon us by the London regime.  However, there is rather more to the data than a first glance suggests.

Localism, we were promised.  Figures published by CPRE – in a pamphlet optimistically called A Landmark Year for the Countryside – show that in the last accounting year (2013/14), Whitehall overruled 67% of the major housing refusals by local councils.  In 2008/09 it overruled just 31%.  That’s a measure not so much of which party is in power or of philosophical attitudes to localism but of how far the easy solutions have been used up, leaving the controversial ones to follow.  There are currently plans to build 700,000 homes in the countryside, including 200,000 on Green Belt land. 

Government figures estimate that previously developed – 'brownfield' – land could accommodate 1.5 million homes, but 1.5 million isn’t enough for the population growth that the London parties favour.  And CPRE must know this, even if it won't admit it: assuming 2 persons per home, the current net immigration rate of 250,000 a year, and even that no homes are sold to the existing population as it spreads out or re-locates, 1.5 million homes is only 12 years supply.  Besides, brownfield land is more expensive to develop, leading housebuilders to claim that in order to make a profit they'd have to charge housebuyers more.  Or reduce their contributions to local infrastructure.  Not only that, but some "brownfield" land is beautiful parkland, such as that surrounding Victorian asylums.  Some is deep in the countryside, such as disused airfields that might more rationally be dug up and returned to farmland.

There's another statistical deception that also goes unnoticed.  It's said that the supply of brownfield land is continually being renewed as old uses are abandoned, leaving factories, warehouses, hospitals and the like to be redeveloped.  That's true, but if the uses are relocating to greenfield sites – which they often are – then countryside is lost just as if it had gone for housing.  We just don't get so worked up about the figures because they aren't presented in the same high-profile way.  It's also assumed that non-housing uses have more of a 'right' to expand into the countryside, being socially or economically 'essential' and with less flexibility over where to locate.  It's all part of the prejudice that measures development as 'progress' but is selective about measuring the loss to those rural environments into which development is progressing.  Successive governments – though not this one – have had targets for the proportion of housing built on brownfield sites.  None has dared have a target for any of the other uses.  And so no-one grasps the overall picture.  Politically, no-one wants to.  There's something inherently negative about measuring the total loss of farmland rather than the increase of goodies that take its place.  Folk might even panic about where their future food will come from.  As well they might.

CPRE is a fine example of a safety valve, ‘moderately’ and deferentially expressing what needs to be uncompromising rage if it’s to be effective.  Its stance only serves to perpetuate the myth that planning decisions are essentially ‘fair’ and ‘reasonable’, rather than bought by the development lobby through party donations aimed at changing national policy.  CPRE naively supports HS2, thinking it might reduce the building of new roads and runways.  It won’t.  You’ll have those too.  Its pamphlet congratulates its Northumberland branch for ensuring that 70% of new homes in and around Newcastle will be on brownfield sites.  So 30% will be on farmland?  Is that sustainable development?  If that’s the best that can be achieved on Tyneside – a depressed area if ever there was one – what chance does the Wessex countryside have?

Pop Goes the Weasel

“Governments with money centralise and claim the credit.  Governments without cash decentralise and spread the blame.  Those are not the views of a hardened media cynic. They are what I was told by one of the Tories’ top policy wonks before the election.”

Nick Robinson, BBC Political Editor, December 2010

Surprised?  Why?  The masters of the universe move in circles where cynicism is a sign of sophistication.  The double standards are everywhere: privatise the profits, socialise the losses; what goes wrong is the last lot’s fault, what goes right is all down to us; introduce a Localism Bill, then use it to set limits to local discretion.  The long-awaited discussion on English devolution turns out to be a discussion on English votes for English laws.  Devolution from the centre to the centre.  Westminster, faced with the unpleasant necessity of discussing devolution, turns inwards and debates instead its own procedures and party interests.

It’s more than tiresome and we believe the lies less and less.  The Lord Mayor of London insists that she is not a member of the establishment.  If she’s merely a member of the Outer Party, what is it you have to do to join the Inner Party?

Don’t despair.  Politics does work.  If, and only if, you vote for change and then keep on voting for change.  Tony Blair’s government was as centralist in outlook as any but was forced by inherited circumstances to devolve power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.  The political dynamic produced one other devolved assembly, for the one area of England that needs one least.  London.

There continues to be a debate on whether, in a regional context, the Greater London Authority – the Mayor and Assembly – is the right answer to the question of London’s governance.  There are many Londons, some smaller and some larger than Greater London.  Other European capital regions – notably in France, Italy and Spain – are larger than the urban area alone.  But for Labour, and for Ken Livingstone in particular, there was unfinished business left over from Thatcher’s spiteful abolition of the GLC.  Putting it back together (but not too recognisably) was a political priority that also made a lot of sense administratively.  After 14 years of chaos, Thatcher’s City backers were persuaded that even the return of Red Ken was better than a decapitated capital.

The result is England’s only regional assembly.  Which creates some interesting anomalies.  Hilary Benn recently coined the ‘West Ealing Question’ – why can an Ealing MP not vote on buses in Ealing (a matter devolved to the Mayor) but can vote on buses in Benn’s Leeds constituency?  We might question whether MPs anywhere should be voting on buses or whether in a properly decentralised country they would find better things to do.  But buses are a good example to use.  London was the only part of England to be exempted from bus deregulation in 1985: congestion obviously is for the other man.  It’s the only area where the colour of the buses is specified by the authorities, because London’s iconic heritage must be protected while that of lesser cities was long ago sacrificed to the free market.

Wessex and London have about the same population.  So we should have no difficulty in claiming the same powers.  What might be more of a struggle is to achieve a fair funding formula that doesn’t favour the capital as present arrangements clearly do.  The Barnett formula doesn’t apply to the distribution of public spending within England.  So London is free to grab whatever its lobbying can obtain.  This is an issue we have covered in a number of posts, so let’s recap, with a spot of updating and expanding.

London contributes 22% of UK Gross Value Added, while Wessex contributes 13%, Scotland 8% and Wales 3%.  Wessex, with roughly the population of Scotland and Wales combined, comes out where we might expect it to be.  So why does London appear to be storming ahead, the economic engine of the UK?  Do its workers really go for it that much harder than everyone else?  Any analysis of what’s going on must question how much of the economic activity that ends up there has any geographical reason to be there, assuming that it was ever real in the first place.  London’s economic success cannot be entirely unrelated to its role as the political capital of a unitary state with access to the taxable resources of the whole UK.  Wessex folk even subsidise its sewers.  No doubt we shall subsidise its defences against sea level rise too until we can take it no more.

According to the National Infrastructure Plan, planned infrastructure spending per head in London is ten times that in Wessex.  Statisticians argue over just how big London’s lead over the rest really is – it’s easily pushed downwards by adding in nuclear power projects whose final customers are many miles away from the plant – but no-one can doubt that it’s massive.  And it’s set to get worse.

In 2010/11, London, with 15% of England’s population, got 34% of public spending on transport.  The South West, with 10% of the population, got 6%.  (The South West is the fourth smallest of the Prescott zones by population but received the least transport spending per head.)  Devolution, linked to a fair funding formula, could therefore roughly double our money.  Bristol might even get a real metro, with underground stations and wholly new lines, instead of the toytown version which is all that can be afforded while London helps itself to our taxes.  Instead of HS2, we could start to put places back on the rail network for the first time in 50 years.  Places like Gosport, claimed as the largest town in Britain without an operational railway station.  London is NOT the only desirable destination on the railways yet national thinking still assumes that it is.

Arts funding – from the London-based Arts Council and DCMS – is even more scandalous.  In 2012/13, London got £69 per head.  The rest of England got £4.60 per head, a ratio of 15:1.  The National Lottery was supposed to correct this geographical imbalance.  But what do we find there?  £165 per head in London, £47 per head in the rest of England: still 4:1. 

There’s also a qualitative aspect to cultural funding.  If budgets are centrally controlled, they will deliver the culture that the centre thinks we ought to have, not the one we choose for ourselves.  If quangocrats in London haven’t heard of Wessex culture then they aren’t going to fund it, because it won’t tick any of the boxes.  A similar attitude rules in planning, where development is always viewed as having a positive cultural impact.  That’s because the new facilities that it can fund, for cultural products to be displayed or performed, are usually more measurable in standardised terms than what’s destroyed to make room for the development.

The Treasury publishes regional data for what it calls ‘identifiable public expenditure’.  That isn’t the same as public expenditure by region.  Things that go on in London but are deemed to be for the indivisible benefit of the whole UK aren’t included, so London’s share will be an under-estimate.  About 14% of spending is ‘non-identifiable’ in this way.  It includes debt payments, some defence items and overseas representation but there are also costs, such as tax collection, that must have a geographical base within the UK.

It’s this under-reporting that allows Boris Johnson, for example, to present London as a net contributor to the rest of the UK by at least £5 billion annually.  If non-identifiable spending comes to 14% of the total, and that £5 billion is from the fiscal year 2009, when total spending was £634 billion, then 14% (£89 billion) leaves plenty of room in which to lose a mere £5 billion very easily.  We need far better politicians, of course, but it seems we also need far better accountants, to track what really happens to all of the ‘non-identifiable’ money that is spent within the UK.

Despite the under-reporting, in 2012/13 London got 107% of the UK average spending per head on services.  The South West got 94%, the South East 87%.  London got 135% of the average spent on economic affairs (substantially more than any other English region), including 184% of the average on transport.  It also got 158% of the average on recreation and culture and 157% of the average on public order and safety.  London exceeded the average in 10 out of the 17 statistical categories in PESA 2014, Table 9.16.  Nowhere else in England was so consistently well-funded and agricultural spending (15% of average) was the only category in which London fell below 79% of the average.  The South West was well-funded only on agriculture, defence and environmental protection (presumed to include nuclear decommissioning) and fell below 79% in 6 categories.  The South East did well only on science & technology and defence and fell below 79% in 8 categories.  The high spending in some northern regions – mainly on employment, health and social protection – can be seen as a measure not of the UK’s success but of its chronic failure.

Does this distribution of spending reflect need?  Not necessarily, because ‘need’ is itself a contested idea.  If London ‘needs’ more money because its population is growing and the city is pulling in poor folk from across the globe then perhaps it should stop.  London’s environmental unsustainability is being paid for by the rest of us who are doing things right.  The more we pay to deal with London’s infrastructural shortfalls, the more it grows, the more attention it attracts and the bigger the problems become.

If London ‘needs’ more money because the cost of providing services is higher then the same applies.  Do those services need to be in London?  London’s high costs are caused by its over-expanded economy relative to its territory.  Those who are convinced that regional assemblies would increase the cost of government should reflect on the lower property and labour costs that would be payable if more of government were done outside, and less of it inside, the M25.

Taxation is often presented as simply a class issue but it has a strong geographical basis that impacts on how daily life is lived in areas dominated by the affluence over which London presides.  Half of all Inheritance Tax receipts in the UK come from London and the South East.  That isn’t necessarily the result of thrift: much of it will be unearned ‘wealth’ produced by rising house prices, as government commentary makes clear.  (That the Prescott zones next in line after those two are the South West and the East of England is perhaps a reflection of their attractiveness as retirement zones for an ex-London elite.)  In London your house can make more than you do.  So no wonder the political pressure to abolish Inheritance Tax is unlikely to go away.

Labour’s plans for a ‘mansion tax’ have been labelled an attack on the middle classes, because in central London all house prices are mansion prices, aren’t they?  One estimate is that 85,500 of the 110,000 houses likely to be hit are in London.  Better by far that those provincials pay more than that Londoners should find themselves a bit strapped for cash, don’t you think?

Well, no.  It’s time we had a property taxation system that adequately reflects ability to pay.  Council Tax banding only reaches the foothills of serious wealth.  For as long as that happens, it means that the most regressive of taxes gives up the ghost before it has a chance to bite those whose accountants and lawyers can get them out of paying most other taxes.  So London goes on being a magnet for some of the world’s worst economic psychopaths.  The cost of living in London continues to rise for everyone there – and indirectly for everyone not there so long as we pay the difference through UK taxation and distorted public spending patterns.  Those spending patterns remain inevitable without real regional power to hold a London-obsessed Treasury to account.

The Union works very well for London.  The question the rest of us should ask is what we get out of it.  If we don’t like the way the money goes, then we need to organise politically to get it back.  The inflated weasel needs to feel the press of the pin.

A Taste of Wessex

Political fiction has a long and influential pedigree, from More’s Utopia to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.  One of our aims is fun: to make politics relevant and enjoyable.  So here’s a brief glimpse into one possible Wessex of the future.  A very Happy Scottish Referendum Day tomorrow to all our readers: may all be inspired by the dream of freedom.

“’Ark ee all a-I.  Train now standen a’ Pla’vorm 3 be th’ 08:49 Wyvern Ways service gwain vrammards Bris’ol Temple Meads t’wards Bournemouth Central.  Thic train d’call at Nailsea an’ Backwell, Yatt’n, Winscombe, Cheddar, Wells, Shep’n Mallet, Evercreech Junction, Wincant’n, Templecombe, Stalbridge, Sturm’ster Newton, Blan’vord, Broads’one Junction, Poole an’ Bournemouth Central.  Jange at Yatt’n vor inbetwix stations to Templecombe.  Jange at Wells vor Glas’nb’ry an’ Street.  Jange at Evercreech Junction vor Yeovil an’ stations to Bath Green Park.  Jange at Templecombe vor inbetwix stations to Poole.  Jange at Broads’one Junction vor Swanage an’ Wimborne.  Jange at Poole vor Drakkar Verries sailens to Britt’ny an’ Norm’dy.”

Great to hear at least some of the old accent making a comeback, thought Edwin as he ran up the steps to the platform.  It’s not quite what it was, but so much of an improvement on that ghastly Estuarine whining that filled the airwaves when I were a dapper.  He paused to run an engineer’s perceptive eye over the elegant lines of the freshly delivered locomotive, resplendent in red with its name in gold lettering on the side.  Eric Pickles.  One of the new Alexander Thynn class, 30 electric locomotives named after individuals who played a pivotal role in the renewal of Wessex.  Eric Pickles – nicknamed The Fat Controller – finally had an engine to call his own.  Of course, it was his actions in support of the Wessex flag that had earned him a place in history and not his I-know-best attitude towards local autonomy.

Edwin settled down in his seat and opened his briefcase to take out his complimentary copy of The Times.  He could see by the headline why it was given away free these days: ‘Wessex show trials: confessions mount’.  It was such a shame the Marnen Post had sold out today; he always relied on that for accurate coverage of happenings outside what was left of London.  Show trials indeed.  Nobody was on trial.  These were simply the hearings of the Truth & Restitution Commission and all those who appeared before it did so voluntarily.

Ably chaired by the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, the Commission was at last uncovering what really went on in the last days of the London regime.  Former politicians from the London parties were queueing up to spill the beans.  A recurrent theme had been their sense of helplessness as they tried to run a ‘democratic’ form of politics in which property developers and financiers were the ones who really called the shots.  They seemed genuinely relieved now that all that was over and done with.  As for the restitution part, they were putting their names down for community and environmental work not just in their home areas but right across Wessex.  There was a waiting list for those wanting to go to Twyford Down to dig up the remains of the M3 motorway and help with the re-landscaping work.

Most of The Times was advertising, for things that didn’t interest Edwin.  The sports pages included some reasonable coverage from the English inter-regional competitions, in which Wessex was currently in second place, behind Northumbria but ahead of East Anglia.  Edwin folded the paper and reached for his briefcase again.  He checked his phone for messages.  Two.

Tilly Hibbs, Development Manager at Wyvern Ways in Exeter, wanted to discuss the energy implications of some ongoing schemes.  Phase II of the repair workshops at Yeovil.  Was Edwin being unreasonable to demand a bigger contribution from on-site renewables?  He didn’t think so, if the alternative was a major upgrade to the local distribution network.  Electrification west of Okehampton.  Could he support the use of surplus power from Cornwall?  On a small scale perhaps, if a continuing supply could be guaranteed and if the imports could be offset against exports to Mercia.  He’d phone her once he reached Poole and wasn’t constrained by the ‘noise-free’ rule on trains.

The other message was from LAMMAS, the Land & Marine Management Advisory Service in Southampton, confirming the date and time of a video conference call early next month.  It would be a link-up with all the Wessex county councils to discuss the balance between food crops and fuel crops in their areas.  Afforestation was moving up the political agenda again, after the recent heavy flooding.  Edwin would insist that everyone think long-term, planning for needs 100 or 200 years ahead.

A steward entered the carriage, pushing a refreshment trolley.  Edwin asked if there was any coffee today.  No such luck.  Tea and coffee, once everyday items, had reverted to the luxuries they’d been a couple of centuries ago.  Africans didn’t grow crops for the European market now.  They had their own millions to feed.  As well as those of their Chinese masters.  Yet the English still had ‘tea-time’, even without their tea.  One of the functions of language is to reassure us that things haven’t changed all that much, even as meaning imperceptibly shifts.

Edwin settled for an apple juice and a sandwich.  Cheddar cheese and Wiltshire ham.  At least there were some things you could always rely on in Wessex, always provided that London wasn’t allowed to mess it up again.

Spetisbury.  The station nameboard flashed past as the train raced for the Dorset coast.  The Bristol to Bournemouth service – often jokingly referred to as the Spine Express – linked two of the main urban areas in Wessex without having to rely on routes directed towards London.  Its very existence would have been laughed at in the days when London ruled Wessex.  Back then, regionalists had been used to hearing themselves described as dangerous men and women, plotting constitutional experiments unprecedented in modern times, dabbling in ideas that could undermine the priceless nonsense of national cohesion.  ‘Unity’ is such a pleasant-sounding word, when you live in London and expect your lead to be followed without argument.

Edwin was reading through his speech, making final adjustments.  At Poole he would catch the ferry to Cherbourg, where his Norman hosts would collect him.  He hoped they’d forgive his French; Norman was now the official language of Normandy.  French was despised there, as in most of France, as the favoured tongue of the Jacobin oppressor.  Norman was now an option in Wessex schools, along with Welsh, Cornish and Breton, but those of an older generation were disadvantaged by speaking only the languages of the former imperial capitals.  Edwin consoled himself with the thought that at least everyone at his level would understand Latin, even if their accents differed wildly.

Tonight there would be a buffet reception at the hotel and then the conference tomorrow.  Having decided to decommission the nuclear power plants they’d inherited from the defunct French State, the Normans were keen to compare the approaches to renewable energy embraced by different regions across Europe.  Edwin was the star attraction.

‘Tidal power and the Severn Estuary: challenges and solutions’.  That would define the subject nicely.  By Edwin Brimble, Director of Strategy, Wessex Energy.  Edwin thought about Trydan Cymru and the work they were doing on their side of the estuary.  He ought to acknowledge them.  Perhaps a brief mention, after the discussion of why a Severn barrage was a bad idea, compared to alternative technologies with less impact on wildlife, navigation and national/regional identity.  He could refer to the joint meeting in Gloucester of the Welsh Senedd and the Mercian and Wessex Witans that had agreed the way forward.  Should he mention Project Olympus as well?  His audience would be familiar with the plan to strengthen the Europe-wide interconnector network and develop pumped storage, to even out the peaks and troughs that inevitably came with reliance on intermittent sources of supply.  Then finally a word or two about some of the major users of the power generated.  The railways and tramways in Wessex and Mercia, without which he would have had great difficulty in being where he now was.  The Wessex canal system, even after the recent re-openings, was much smaller than Mercia’s and, like the cycleway network, it wasn’t the way to travel any great distance in a hurry.

The speech read fine but there was something missing.  Perhaps he’d said too much about the technical issues and failed to mention the frame of mind that was crucial to addressing them.

First of all, the holistic management of resources and infrastructure in Wessex, wary of what’s lost by compartmentalising specialisms.  Transport depended on electricity, which came from renewable sources, with water a crucial contributor to generation and storage.  Joined-up thinking was what Wessex did best.  Partly this was because so many environmental organisations and their associated research teams had based themselves in Wessex, ensuring that connectedness had become a way of life.  Networks, not hierarchies.  Thinking globally, planning regionally, acting locally.

Then there was the commitment to maximise self-sufficiency in energy, nutrition and all essential manufactured goods.  From the beginning, there had been a consensus in the Witan that this was the way to go, the only alternative to having terms dictated by despots and markets.

The corollary was that ‘living within environmental limits’ really had to mean what it said.  It was why no new houses had been built on farmland in Wessex for over a decade and why it was unthinkable that they would be ever again.  The London regime had ordered that they be built in their millions, mindless of the consequences.  Now new houses were built at the rate of a few hundred a year and then mainly to replace old ones conclusively shown to be structurally unsound.  In some of the most heavily overdeveloped areas the housing stock was at last going down, allowing the environment to recover, and there was talk of rewilding, even of eagles returning to Wessex skies.

One question that used to be heard quite often was ‘where will my children live if we won’t trash fields to build more homes?’  It was a question that it would now be embarrassingly stupid to ask, given that births and deaths were roughly in balance and net migration was zero.  The Witan had issued a stark warning that if everyone attracted by history, beauty and tranquillity were to move to Wessex then these were the very things that collectively they would surely destroy.  Consequently, the housing market was tightly regulated to prioritise local needs.  No-one from outside could buy that old widow’s cottage as their weekend getaway while village newly-weds were confined to mum and dad’s spare room.  The parish council wouldn’t register the sale, and the parish council was the ultimate law.  Its power to commandeer empty property was one it didn’t shrink from exercising.

So lastly, there was the core belief that the territory and resources of Wessex belonged to the community of Wessex and were not for sale to outlanders (or anyone else) who wished to exploit them for private gain to the disbenefit of the community.  Except for the shire-based savings and loans co-operatives, which only dealt with individuals, the ‘financial services’ sector had been largely abolished.  Any need for it had been eliminated by the introduction of a guaranteed basic income for all.  If any good had come from the British armed forces presence now receding into history it was the view that control over the use of real stuff is what makes the difference and that money is just a means to one of many possible ends, not a few of them contradictory.

It hadn’t been easy.  Democracy’s struggle against continuous global robbery had been worldwide and prolonged.  It had been a rough ride for everyone but the world was a more settled place at the end of it, finally convinced, in John Ruskin’s words, that there is no wealth but life.  Today a ‘moneyic’ – a combination of ‘money, ‘maniac’ and ‘alcoholic’ – could be diagnosed early and treatment for their addiction was available.  Free of charge, obviously.

There was now an acute sense among Wessex folk that all the good things arising from self-government could easily be lost again by taking a wrong turn politically, from which it would be difficult to recover.  Ideas like centralised rule from London or by ‘free’ market corporations were treated as toxic by all those elected to protect the community-benefit State.  Only obvious charlatans on the political extremes still advocated them and those who bothered to listen were generally regarded as a bit odd.

Edwin struck through the earlier passages.  He’d use the material in answering questions if they arose and put it on online later.  The philosophy was the thing to impart.

He was looking forward to hearing the other speakers too.  Hints had been given that Catalonia and Lombardy had interesting things to say about energy-from-waste and the Silesians would be sure to have something new to report on district heating.  Conferences like this – real face-to-face meetings – were so rare now that energy was scarce yet so useful when they did happen.  And then it was back to Wessex, where he’d promised his daughter that for St Ealdhelm’s Day this year he’d take her to Windsor Castle: “a well-arranged store of antiquities of various kinds that have seemed worth keeping.”  Maybe they could fit in a day trip across the border to explore some of the fields and forests that were slowly taking the place of London as its villages re-emerged.

He made a mental note to get her something by William Barnes for her birthday, now that she was interested in his poetry.  Views of Labour and Gold, perhaps.  It was never too early to think politically.  Without politics, Edwin thought with a shudder, without the Revolt of the Regions, Wessex and its heritage would long ago have been washed over by the suburbs of disdainful, global-hub London.  Even in deepest Devon you wouldn’t have found a native, not with the second home problem being as it had been.  If the Wessex Regionalist Party had given up the fight, that’s exactly what would have come to pass.  It was everyone’s good fortune that it hadn’t.

Housing Whom?

Oxford professor Danny Dorling is the rising star of radical sociology.  Some of us heard him speak in Witney during the 2010 election campaign.  He has his critics, but he has an impressive grasp of statistics and deploys them with devastating effect.

A review of his latest book, All That Is Solid: The Great Housing Disaster, appeared in Metro last week.  Did you know that in 2012 one in every four new jobs in Britain went to a new estate agent?

What’s that?  Yes, someone’s definitely doing alright.  And those who aren’t still hope to.  Dorling wants to challenge the idea of a home as something for which we incur titanic debts in the hope of profiting from buyers even more desperate than us further down the line.  For him, as for any sane person, homes are shelter first and assets second.  Yet we seem to have lost sight of the idea that they are something basic, like education or healthcare, whose provision public policy could address.  The loudest complaints are not about homelessness but about being unable to get on to the ‘property ladder’.  The London parties have no answer because they too are wrapped up in the idea that the job of government is to enrich competing individuals and families, rather than to enrich society and so spare them the trouble.

For Dorling, the solution isn’t to build more houses everywhere, at the expense of the environment and primarily for the benefit of landowners, developers and the banks.  His claim is that Britain has plenty of housing but doesn’t use it efficiently.  It’s a bold claim, undoubtedly over-stated given that the population really is growing and really is spreading out, with average household size declining.  But let’s examine his solution, which could make some inroads into the problem, however big it happens to be overall.

The answer isn’t the so-called ‘bedroom tax’ but heavier taxes on multiple properties.  Why is that politically a non-starter?  Dorling’s claim, reasonably enough, is that MPs won’t vote against practices that benefit them – and, we might add, benefit them probably more than any other group.  He brings up an interview in which David Cameron appeared to forget just how many homes he owned.  (Regional government, allowing almost all legislators to live within commuting distance of their assembly, would be a very much better bargain for the taxpayer than Westminster.)

The social problems caused by multiple home ownership don’t correlate with economic and political power, do they?  Where are the holiday second homes?  Largely on the peripheries: Cornwall, Wales, the Lake District, coastal East Anglia, and some parts of Wessex (the south coast, Exmoor and the Cotswolds).  And where do their owners live?  Largely in the south-eastern quadrant, we suggest.  The power certainly isn’t where the homes are, nor where the desperate, badly housed locals are.  So we need to take it back through meaningful devolution and start putting people before property.

As well as the homes that are empty for most of the time, there are the homes that are empty the whole of the time, the long-term vacant properties, some of which in Wessex have been empty for 30 years.  Why?  To free market theorists, such a waste of assets is inexplicable.  Their economics textbooks say it can’t happen.  The reasons why it happens are complex.  One can be that the owner has died and their estate hasn’t been sorted out, or there are family disagreements or joint ownerships where the owners no longer speak to each other.  The owner may be in prison.  Or aged or in poor health and just not bothered.  Sometimes there may be negative equity, and so difficulty in funding any necessary improvements.  Yet these are assets that could be providing shelter, without damaging the environment.  Why is more not done to fill the empties?  Why are we so tolerant, equally of so many wasted opportunities AND of the wholly needless destruction of farmland that results?

Taxation is a relatively benign way of rebalancing the housing market in favour of local need.  It falls short of the outright confiscation that might appeal to some of the market’s most scarred victims.  But it would give them enough hope not to reach for the petrol can and the matches to make their views felt.  Dorling suggests removing the limit on council tax banding so that the wealthiest pay in line with the value of their multiple properties.  A land tax would address a whole range of problems, while higher inheritance tax would do something to tackle the huge accumulation of unearned wealth in London and its suburbs.

The next question is what to do with the money raised.  If local communities need affordable housing, why not provide some?  Not necessarily by building new houses, which often come at an environmental cost, remember.  But by buying up existing ones and letting them out to the sons and daughters of the parish.  It’s not beyond the wit of lawyers to devise a system of lettings, leases, covenants or parish council consent to guarantee that the recycling of such housing always prioritises those with a local connection.  Through such means it would be possible to build up a two-tier housing market of the kind that helps keep the Channel Islands as they are, relatively undeveloped, with enough housing for the locals, plus a few to spare, in their case for rich tax exiles.

Instead of doing what’s right for us in the round, we currently provide affordable homes by imposing them as a requirement on housebuilders.  And to sweeten the pill we let them build two market houses for every affordable one.  We need a new model that allows the affordable ones to be built, if suitable sites exist, without the market ones coming along as the ball-and-chain.  We could let local councils build them, and call them ‘council houses’.  That way, housing misery need never be a source of private profit ever again.  Which, of course, is exactly why a solution as obvious as that enjoys no mainstream political support.

It’s through formulating such policies that we can begin to envisage the ‘reconquest’ of Wessex assets from the London and global interests that have failed us.  We need to take back our housing, our water, our electricity, our trains, our land, in short, our future.  Can this be done without devolution, given the legal and financial screws that the London regime continually places on local expenditure?  No.  That is why we need devolution.

The Plantation of Wessex

Last April, one of Eric Pickles’ Planning Inspectors opened a public inquiry in the Oxfordshire village of Bloxham.  The Coalition promised localism – local decisions made by local folk, without interference from London – but – as we have mentioned many times – their localism is a lie.  Under real localism, there would be no such thing as a Planning Inspector because there would be no such thing as a right of appeal against a local decision.

At the inquiry, local residents gave their views on a proposal to build up to 85 more houses on farmland east of the village.  One argued that: “There has been a remarkable expansion of Bloxham in the last fifty years.  Recent developments have been on agricultural land and have clearly put further strain on the village infrastructure…  Six farms within the village boundaries have been lost and due consideration should be given to future demand for agricultural land for food production and our future food security.”  A local councillor added that: “The village is already bursting at the seams with traffic and flooding problems, power outages and surgeries and schools that are at capacity.”

The Inspector, if he recognised the arguments at all, gave them short shrift in his report: “I accept that Bloxham has seen a considerable amount of development since 2001 and note that residents consider it to be now ‘full’.  However, … I cannot accept that the quantum of development can be a determining factor in this appeal…  Government policy is strongly directed towards an increase in housing designed to stimulate the economy.  Nowhere is there guidance that requires the retention of agricultural land per se for future food security.  This is not therefore a matter that can weigh against the proposed development.”

Pickles duly concurred.  His assistant issued a grant of planning permission, noting that: “The Secretary of State agrees with the Inspector that there are no grounds for weighing the loss of agricultural land per se for future food security against the appeal proposal.”  The Government’s view then is not that food security matters generally, but that other factors outweighed it in this particular case.  It is far more stark than that: it simply won’t acknowledge the problem at all.  And so the fantasy continues: Britain will build houses to accommodate a bigger workforce that will do stuff in ‘financial services‘ to pay the bills, enabling us to buy whatever food we need on world markets.  Until one day the food isn’t there, because the growers have kept it to feed their own growing families.  One does have to wonder if there isn’t a grand plan by self-loathing loons (Pickles included) to create the conditions for starvation in that old imperial power off the north-west coast of Europe.

So who is standing up for our farmland?  Farmers?  Landowners?  Certainly not.  Watch the food security card being played for all it’s worth in defence of subsidies, to go on farming marginal land that might be better used for wildlife or forestry.  But go on watching and the card magically disappears if good, productive land on the edges of towns and villages can be generously contributed towards solving the nation’s housing “crisis”.

Two quotes from Peter Clery’s recent polemic, Green Gold: A Thousand Years of English Land illustrate the point.  On one page he tells us that: “In a time of pending world shortages of food and fuel, a nation which relies too much on others to feed it is unwise to say the least.  The next war, when our land will again be crucial to survival, may not be military but a creeping economic attack.  Others, who work harder or more efficiently than we do, may outbid us for food on world markets leaving us even more dependent on what we can produce at home.  In any case, food issues will become more important and food will cost more.  The interests of bats and badgers will take second place in the public mind if there is insufficient bread in the shops.”

Yet on the very same page he also tells us that: “There are few landowners in England who would not be willing to release perhaps one per cent of their land for intelligent well designed housing or light industry and offices.  One per cent of farmland is some 220,000 acres – more than enough to meet the perceived housing need with increasing supply reducing the price to a more sensible relationship between plot cost and building cost.”  That’ll be 1% now, 1% later, 1% after that, and so on bit by bit to the crack of ecological doom.  Elsewhere, Clery is good enough to point out that 100,000 acres – roughly the area lost to motorways since 1945 – is 300,000 tons of wheat foregone every year, forever.

Such confused thinking is not at all unusual among those with a vested interest in making the most money from land.  We need to rethink not only the planning laws but also laws on the ownership, tenure and taxation of land if we are to remove the huge incentives for farmers to destroy the most basic tool of their trade.  Old Labour tried three times to establish a betterment tax to capture the unearned increase in land value upon change of use; three times their work was undone by the Tories.  New Labour, a perfect poodle of the propertarians, never bothered.

So if those most directly affected are not defending our land, who is?  If you’re a Tory, appalled at the development frenzy that Cameron’s gung-ho City yobs are now getting away with, where do you turn?  The LibDems?  The Chair of that party’s backbench housing committee is Annette Brooke, MP for Mid-Dorset and North Poole.  Her solution to the housing “crisis” is a wave of ‘garden communities’ of around 10,000 homes.  Where promoted by local councils and enjoying local support.  (As if.)  But according to Brooke, “local people will need to understand why they are needed”.  Classic London-speak.  It’s now the common currency of all three main London parties, this patronising tone that politicians use when they talk down to the implicitly thick electorate, whose views they’re supposed to be representing, not manipulating.

For as long as voters think they have only three choices, the only alternative to the Coalition parties is to re-elect the last lot of rogues who were unseated in 2010.  According to design consultant Andy von Bradsky, who has his finger on the Labour pulse, that party is more comfortable with top-down approaches.  It has no need to justify itself to a Wessex electorate that, thanks to the voters of the rest of the UK, can be safely ignored.  Labour’s housing review, led by Sir Michael Lyons, is looking at “how the pace of development might be forced”, according to von Bradsky.  Shadow housing minister Emma Reynolds, who sits for Wolverhampton, has suggested that up to five new towns could be created under a future Labour government.  Not all necessarily in Wessex, but who knows for sure?  The means envisaged aren’t at all subtle.  Either imposition through national legislation, or an unbeatable offer to exhausted councils desperate for an alternative to the salami-slicing of treasured environments that goes on daily thanks to the appeals system.

The best that can be said about the prospective plantation of Wessex with new towns is that it will concentrate the environmental damage in a few places instead of spreading it thinly.  Which is not a great recommendation.  It isn’t the fault of Wessex if London cannot manage its population and so casts envious eyes on our broad acres for overspill.  The Wessex dialect and the customs, traditions and memories that make Wessex special are in retreat across much of the east of our region.  It‘s not so much because of cockneyisation in principle that this happens – anyone is capable of adopting a mix of identities – but because we lack the political institutions – and even the cultural ones – to defend our regional differences and encourage native and settler alike to value them.  London sets the tone for us all and whatever London doesn’t value is trampled underfoot and ridiculed.

Suggest five new towns in Cornwall or mid-Wales and watch the active reaction take hold.  Suggest them in Wessex and the reactions will range from indifference to resignation.  What can we do?  What can you do?  Rip up that membership card from the party of self-annihilation: whether Cameron’s, Clegg’s or Miliband’s, or Farage’s too for that matter.  And join the party of the Wessex resistance instead.

Tarzan’s Monkey Cage

Localism.  What does it mean?  It seems to mean that local communities can decide whatever they like but if they ever make the wrong decision, as judged from London, they will be severely punished for doing so.  And will know that they jolly well deserve it too.

Who’s a naughty community then?  George Osborne announced yesterday – see 2.209 in the Autumn Statement – some changes to the New Homes Bonus.  That’s the bribe, paid by London, paid for out of all our taxes, paid to local councils for the number of new homes built each year in their area.  Until now, the bribe has been paid even where the homes are approved not by the council but on appeal by the London regime.  How was that loophole missed?  Never mind, now the bribe will not be paid where the London regime itself gave the permission, in the teeth of local opposition.  It will keep the money (which ultimately, remember, is our money).

The community, who may have spent thousands fighting the appeal to save some treasured local environment, will now gain no financial benefit from the houses imposed upon them.  On the contrary, they will have to pay all the more from their own resources for the extra services required to meet needs generated by the new development.  Councillors will have to think twice, then twice again, before turning down proposals, even where the case for refusal is strong, because appeal decisions are entirely unpredictable.  Everything hinges on how the Planning Inspector handling the appeal is feeling.

In Margaret Thatcher’s first Cabinet, the post of Environment Secretary was held by Michael Heseltine, nicknamed ‘Tarzan’ on account of his trademark mane of blond hair.  Today aged 80, Lord Heseltine is still making waves.

In a series of speeches to local leaders this year he has argued that “We must not wait for ‘what London wants us to do’… we need a peasants' revolt and we need local people to argue their case and fight the dominance of London…  If you want your power back you are in a battle and you don’t win battles by cosying up to the enemy”, warning that there is a “war going on in government about this whole localism agenda”:

“There's an inevitable battle going on in Whitehall.  There are those trying to protect their own interests.  So frankly, you'd better start protecting yours.  Lobby your MPs, and use the local and national media to drive your campaign.  This is not about giving in gently, which local communities have done for far too long.  You have to go out there and fight for it.”

Whenever Heseltine speaks or writes, there’s always a very firm agenda, evident or hidden.  Elected mayors.  City regions.  HS2.  It could be anything, and it isn’t always an agenda we’d endorse.  But it’s not impossible that Heseltine is sincere in believing that many more decisions could be made locally and regionally instead of centrally.  He may not entirely have lost touch with the idea that such decisions should be democratic ones, though that is not something he appears willing to champion.  As an ex-minister, he certainly knows what he’s dealing with in taking on the centre:

“If you let those monkeys loose they will cock it up – that’s what they [the Government] think.”

Less than a century ago, women were denied representation in Parliament.  It was argued that their brains weren’t up to handling complex political issues.  In other parts of the world, a franchise restricted by skin colour was the norm until even more recently.  Today these viewpoints are considered barbarous and indefensible by most of the world.

Yet the London regime is still able to over-ride democratically expressed local opinion just because it feels like it.  Just because it deems the locals incapable of making the right decisions on what their community needs and how to go about providing it.  Just because the decisions made don’t suit the whims of maxed-out growth junkies in London.  In a hundred years from now, the question will surely be why we put up with it for so long.  Why did we tolerate civil servants coming to our towns and villages to inquire into local decisions and reverse them?  Why didn’t we just toss the blighters onto the nearest muckheap like a free folk with any lingering self-respect would have done?

Not only didn’t we do it.  We did much less than that.  We actually voted for the London parties to carry on treating us as monkeys.  We went on chattering politely to them instead of recognising them as the deadly enemy they really are.  We fondly imagined that the bars of the cage were there to protect us when all they did was deny us the freedom to shape the future of our communities for ourselves.

Come On, Wessex!

WR President Colin Bex and Secretary-General David Robins were in Cornwall on Saturday, sitting in on the Annual Conference of Mebyon Kernow.  The venue was what used to be New County Hall, Truro and is now Lys Kernow (‘the Court of Cornwall’).  The building’s directional signage is all bilingual, in English and an expanding language still widely imagined by the imperial media to be as dead as the dodo.  (And there were even genuinely Cornish pasties for lunch.) 

MK, now with four councillors on Cornwall Council, is entitled as a party group to borrow the Council Chamber for meetings.  With Cllr Dr Loveday Jenkin in the chair, and the semicircle opposite filled with rows of Cornish nationalists, the sight provided a real sense of déjà vu, more like sitting in on a session of the future legislative Cornish Assembly.  (The empty seats in the photo are those which in a Council meeting would be occupied by Cabinet members and chief officers.)

The conference decided party policy on a number of matters.  A carefully balanced, scientifically grounded position on badgers and bovine TB was agreed, opposing culling while also being supportive of the farming community as the search continues for a workable vaccine.  The point was made that shot badgers are not being tested to see if they really do have TB (only to confirm that they were humanely killed), also that since TB can be carried by other mammals, such as deer, the culling route ultimately implies eradicating most of our larger wildlife.  The London regime’s policy came across as doing something for the sake of being seen to be doing something, whether it works or not.  And better not to ask questions in case it spoils their script.

Transport is another area where MK’s policy is researched with an impressive thoroughness.  The conference called for a statutory Quality Bus/Rail Partnership under the 2008 Local Transport Act, using a council-owned ‘arms-length’ bus company to return Cornwall’s public transport to local control.  These powers are equally available to Wessex local authorities.  Why are they so timid in using them?  Why do so many assume that FirstGroup, Stagecoach and the like can just get away with whatever they please?

Two themes dominated the proceedings.  One was the failure of the London parties to build a fair society, all of them viewing austerity coupled with tax avoidance as the new normal.  Why, asked MK Leader Cllr Dick Cole, do Conservative and LibDem councillors, ordered to make cuts in local spending, out of all proportion to the cuts being made to central government’s vanity projects, not send the necessary signal to Westminster by resigning from their parties?  Are their political loyalties more important than their duty to the electorate?

The other dominant theme was the accelerating destruction of environmental and cultural heritage through housebuilding, driven by dodgy data that supposedly informs us that there is no alternative.  All three main London parties are part of the scam, which in a Cornish context is exposed in a well-researched polemic, The land’s end?  The great sale of Cornwall by Dr Bernard Deacon.  The author told conference that massive suburbanisation is now destroying the essence of a distinctive Cornwall.

The Cornish are calmly but firmly angry, and they have every right to be so.  So are many in Wessex.  We heard that some of the research now being quoted in Cornwall comes from rural Wiltshire.  The difference is that the Cornish are doing something about it.  There is apparently more grit and determination in the little finger that is Cornwall than in the whole of England.

What is the English response to the great social and environmental crisis of our time?  It is to place a childlike faith in centralism to make things better.  It is to join well-meaning organisations like the CPRE and be always at pains to be moderate and reasonable in writing to Ministers of the Crown.  Why?  Psychopaths don’t respond to reason and moderation.  And what will happen in 2015?  The English electorate will vote one or other of the psychopath parties into power for another five years of legalised tyranny.

Celtic nationalists live under oppression.  They know the enemy well.  The English, in contrast, are not one folk but two part-folks.  There is the arrogant Englishness of the ruling elite, Norman to the core, especially the Labour bits of it (since if you ape your masters’ subtleties, the result will always come out as a clumsy parody).  And then there is the deferential Englishness of those ruled, the ones who won’t question the orders from London because, well, it’s ‘our’ government, isn’t it, so they must know best, right?

Wrong.  Wessex Regionalists are part of a truly revolutionary movement, one that wishes to see the world turned not upside down but the right way up, with sovereignty to the parishes in an England that governs itself on a human scale.  One thing the Celtic countries have to their advantage is a manageable territory that can be understood and loved.  England is a land of 32 million acres, with a population of 57 million.  To drive from one end to the other takes a whole exhausting day.  A human-scale England has to be a regionalised England.  Otherwise it will remain what it has been since 1066, one fully comprehensible and directable only from above by its haughty rulers.

To get to a human-scale England will take much action by many individuals.  There will be those who occupy green fields designated for destruction by democracy-overturning Planning Inspectors, and who suffer the blows of the police and private thugs sent there to uphold developers’ ‘property rights’.  There will be those who scale the offices of hated agencies and corporations to unfurl the Wyvern flag of freedom.  There will be those who stand in elections to oust the Tory, LibDibDib and ‘Labour’ representatives complicit in the destruction of one of the most beautiful and historic lands on the planet, a part of the common treasury of all humanity, born or yet to be born.

Or maybe there will be none of this.  Maybe we will just stand back and spend our time sneering at Celtic neighbours who have got life right.  Maybe we will just go quietly into the twilight.  Being English.  Not wanting to make a fuss lest we appear impolite.