An Empty Space?

The second issue of Wessex Citizen, edited by Keith Southwell and Rick Heyse, is now online.  Many thanks to all who contributed.  Earlier this month we mentioned the current – seventy-second – issue of MK’s equivalent, Cornish Nation, which this time gave us a brief mention.  Joanie Willett, reporting back on the General Assembly of the European Free Alliance recently held in Corsica, wrote:

“One of the Parties that MK members became acquainted with was Yorkshire First.  We have much that we can learn from each other, and it would be a really interesting exercise to have some sort of group meeting or conference of all the regionalist parties in mainland UK, including the North East Party and the Wessex Regionalists, to see how we can combine our voices in our campaigns for better, stronger, and more people-led devolution in the UK.”

That might be so, and the WR Council has resolved to make enquiries, though as we’ve noted, it’s been done before.  More than once.  Perhaps every generation has to give it a try and there’s certainly no shame in emulating success.  WR is different though, mainly because of how far official recognition of our regional identity lags behind.

Cornwall is not just home to a distinct nation.  It’s also (apart from the Isles of Scilly, who have their own council) a single unit of local government.  The complaint isn’t that Cornwall is unrecognised; it’s that it’s not recognised enough, or in the right way.  Cornwall Council has broadly the same powers as a London borough, even though Cornwall’s geographical isolation would allow it to do far more for itself, without treading on any of its neighbours’ toes.  It’s treated as an English county when it’s actually something more that just happens to be the same size as an English county.  The motto ‘One and All’ sums it up.  The argument that ‘there’s no such place as Cornwall’ isn’t heard though, because it’s not conceivable.

Up north, the North East Party and Yorkshire First both operate within the boundaries of their respective Prescott zones, boundaries still widely recognised by the public and voluntary sectors and used for everything from Euro-elections to the English Heritage handbook.  This is part of the legacy of the Blairite ‘big push’ for top-down regionalisation that has never fully gone away.

(Interestingly, the National Trust used also to be loyal to Prescottism but this year’s handbook departs from it.  Apart from South Humberside, now placed with the rest of Lincolnshire, the basic Prescott geography is respected everywhere except the South West and South East, where the Trust has introduced five new groupings of its own invention, plus a separate Cornwall.  If the NT now has so much property in Wessex that its presentation needs to be this fragmented, maybe Wessex needs a National Trust all of its own?)

There is, of course, another definition of Yorkshire, the Yorkshire of the ridings rather than the one of a map drawn in London, but any attempt to restore this is fraught with difficulties.  The biggest risk, revealed in the work of the Banham Commission in the 1990s, is of tokenistic proposals emerging to appease sentiment rather than to accommodate it, new ridings with old names but the wrong boundaries, which make things worse rather than better.

Until this year, a different approach was evidenced by the Northern Party, voice of the historic North of England – Northumbria – with a united claim to all three northern Prescott zones.  South Humberside apart though, this was still a claim that worked with rather than against the Prescott geography.

Wessex is different because faced with that geography our response is that we wouldn’t have started from here.  We devoted most of The Case for Wessex to explaining why Wessex is, to quote Thomas Hardy, a ‘practical provincial definition’.  Much more so than a South West that runs from the Scillies to the Cotswolds and a South East that wraps round two-thirds of London and whose extremities can only communicate with each other by passing through a national capital that forms a separate region.

If Wessex is a practical province, and not just a romantic image of myth and legend that doesn’t even merit its own official tourist board, why isn’t it shown more on maps?  We must note that briefly and for specific purposes it does come into being, as with the Army’s Wessex Brigade or the short-lived Wessex Trains franchise.  The London regime always realises its mistake and pulls back from taking things further.  Then busily covers up the evidence while encouraging others to do likewise.

Alternatively, it hides behind forms of official recognition that don’t require Wessex to be defined.  Like recognising St Ealdhelm as our patron saint or the Wyvern as our flag (and even allowing it to be flown from public buildings, something several county and unitary councils are doing today).  Another example would be awarding our earldom to the Queen’s youngest son.  The re-use of the title for Prince Edward in 1999 launched a tsunami of sneering from the London press, ranging from massive pride in not knowing where Wessex is to asking whether the brand isn’t damaged for eternity, given that Wessex Water was once owned by Enron.  When in 2011 Prince William became Duke of Cambridge, the reaction was more like ‘how nice’.  The Wessexes are one way of acknowledging that Wessex exists but, like the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, they can be a convenient device when needed for ensuring loyalty to the London regime among the grovelling classes.  Their full potential for obstructing self-government has yet to be tested.

Yet another trick is to use ‘Wessex’ as the name for something smaller than Wessex, like Wessex Water, or the Wessex Regional Health Authority.  Another still is to associate aspects of Wessexness, like cider or the dialect, with a vague area that won’t match county boundaries, but simply not to notice how these things form bundles that add up to an identity.  There are lots of words for folk from Wessex – Wessaxon, Wessexer, Wessexian, or – best of all – Wurzel, but probably none that would be acknowledged outside Wessex because if you don’t look and listen you won’t find.

In all these respects, Wessex is less comparable with other movements for autonomy within the UK and more with mainland movements in the likes of Alsace, Brittany, Moravia or Scania.  These are likewise places that exist in the heart but have been truncated, partitioned or even obliterated for purposes of governance, by centralist states jealous of any rival for the people’s affections.

Some regions have their capital city at their centre.  The central geographical feature of Wessex is the empty expanse of Salisbury Plain.  (Our big cities are round the edge, places of exchange with a wider world.)  That sense of a hollow centre is often how it feels politically.  We’re told that we’re campaigning for a region that most of its residents don’t recognise.  Yet that’s a throw-away line; it just avoids the need for any further thinking.  Thinking about how and why the London regime controls the space within which a Wessex identity could flourish, and controls it with the deliberate intention of ensuring that it doesn’t.  Thinking about the ruling class of Wessex, MPs and councillors sitting for the London parties, media hacks, academics, in many cases with anything but the good of Wessex as their motivation.  Thinking too about the opportunities we now have to build a radical Wessex movement from the bottom up.

It’s easy for critics to present the Wessex Regionalists as rather like one of those bands that were big in the 80s and are still trying to make a comeback, playing the occasional gig in obscure places like Witney.  The fact is that the raising of the election deposit in 1985 – it was more than trebled – was a huge blow that stopped us in our tracks.  We had until then been ramping up the number of candidates at each election.  Instead, we were kept out of electioneering for over a decade, times when it looked as if we might not survive.  The Tories claimed that raising the deposit was necessary to deter ‘frivolous’ candidates.  It didn’t.  All it did was deter serious candidates without the Tories’ access to loads of money.

And it shows how worried they were, as well they ought to be.  Devolution for peripheral areas is one thing; devolution for the area that encapsulates the deepest memories of statehood is an existential challenge the UK is ill-equipped to weather.  So if the current set-up is designed to deny us our identity, culturally and politically, then we should feel honoured rather than surprised.  Let’s get on with re-awakening it for ourselves.  That means, above all, not trying to influence those who have power but rather to do everything in our power to sweep them aside.

Happy St Ealdhelm’s Day

Wessexit

Of all the reasons for remaining in the EU the most compelling arises from quietly contemplating the alternative.  Being marooned on a small island run by Gove, Johnson and IDS is a chilling prospect.  It also smacks of betrayal of those elsewhere working for a better Europe.  The Danes in particular fear isolation without their sceptical British friends.  What needs testing – and testing hard – this month and next is the idea that Brexit would unleash a decentralist wave upon whose crest regionalists as much as eurosceptics will surf smoothly to success.

That was the idea dismissed this week in a front-page report in the Western Boring Views.  Mark Berrisford-Smith, head of economics for HSBC UK Commercial Banking, told regional business leaders in Plymouth that negotiations over Brexit, and associated economic uncertainties, could pre-occupy Government for years, delaying other decisions, with the decentralisation agenda being one item moved to the back burner.

Of course, ministers could clear their desks of unnecessary distractions by pressing ahead with that agenda right now, but that sort of trust has never existed between central and local government and no amount of crisis will create it.  Our diagnosis is that the sickness goes to the heart of the relationship.  Earning central government’s trust should be no part of local government’s job; central government should exist solely as the obedient servant of the localities that elect it and if it fails them it should expect to be abolished forthwith.  Wessexit.

So let’s not get too excited by the idea of devolution, Osborne-style.  It’s not what we’ve campaigned for all these years.  The Municipal Journal last week allowed Cllr George Nobbs, Leader of Norfolk County Council a page to share his frustration.  Beneath a photo of the East Anglian flag and the headline ‘Killing off devolution’, he wrote:

“There is no more enthusiastic proponent of regional devolution than myself.  I have supported the idea of moving powers from Whitehall to East Anglia all my adult life.  When on Budget day the Chancellor announced a draft deal for East Anglia I nailed my colours to the mast in the most literal way, flying the flag of East Anglia from Norfolk County Hall.  However, remarkably, the institutional arrogance of central government seems set to give us a deal that cannot be sold locally.  As it stands not one of the three counties that make up the ‘Eastern Powerhouse’ look likely to be able to sell the current deal to members or residents…

The current ‘devolution deal’ was the result of a knee-jerk reaction to the Scottish referendum result and bears no resemblance to any other form of devolution in the UK, other than the insistence on the office of a London-style mayor for rural England…

The office of elected mayor is fine for London but universally opposed in shire county England.  Senior government ministers have said time and time again that in the past devolution has failed because it was top-down.  They had learned, they said.  This would be bottom-up.  We could design our own deal.  We would be in the driving seat, they said.  When we urged them to consider any alternative to an elected mayor (because we couldn’t sell it to our citizens) they said it was non-negotiable.  ‘No mayor no deal’ was the answer.  They were not even prepared to consider changing the one word mayor for another title.”

First it was Prescott, now it’s Osborne.  You can have any colour of devolution you want as long as it’s black.  So black you can’t see what’s going on.  The mayoral model is non-negotiable because it’s part of a London-party consensus that values opaqueness above all.  The democratic model, taking decisions openly, in full view of the press and public, and transparently, subject to the forensic examination of political debate in council chamber or legislative assembly, is judged not fit for purpose.  End all the politics, we’re told.  Actions, not words.  But efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things, and without continual accountability it’s very easy both to do things wrong and to do the wrong things.

Next month, we’re told, we need to reject the unaccountable Brussels bureaucracy in favour of, well, what?  How is accountability unfolding here?  We need to put our own, British values first, apparently.  Values like privatising our schools and our NHS, transforming them into profit centres far beyond any hope of democratic redress.

We’ve been told many times that the dissolution of English political unity would be too high a price to pay for the benefits regionalism brings, even if the regions reflect deep-rooted identities like Wessex and East Anglia.  Yet the displacement of our historic shires by ‘Greater Lincolnshire’, ‘North Midlands’, ‘Tees Valley’ and other mayored innovations isn’t viewed as a problem.  (Nor is it viewed as part of the ‘euro-plot’, as would any attempt to give England the regional governments now standard across all large west European countries.)  As Ben Page, Chief Executive of Ipsos MORI, also writing in the Municipal Journal, noted, “The new rash of elected mayors for improbable geographies face some real challenges in getting noticed in any way at all.”   That’s just it though.  They’re not there to be noticed.  A revolution in how England is governed is now underway as secret deals are lined up for sign-off.  Personality mayors and commissioners for made-up areas will preside as local services are handed wholesale to global financial interests.

Do the public care?  According to Ben Page’s data they do.  Around half (49%) support the principle of decentralising local decision-making powers, with only 17% opposed.  There are two main worries that are shared by 58% of those who don’t support devolution.

One is the spectre of ‘postcode lottery’ – the fear that services would start to vary between areas to an unacceptable degree (though it’s surprisingly acceptable for the Irish or the French to have different standards).  Keeping the number of English regions well below double figures is one way to minimise this fear: the present hotch-potch of ‘improbable geographies’ is going to have to be sorted out sooner or later and the sooner the better.  Another way is to make devolution real, so that regional politicians cannot blame Whitehall if they fail to match the standards of the best.

The second worry is that politicians in the provinces aren’t up to the job and so can’t be trusted with real power.  That’s hardly surprising: real talent isn’t going to be attracted to run an ever-shrinking range of services subject to ever more intrusive interference from ministers and their civil servants anxious about poor performance.  Breaking that vicious circle is easy.  Tolerate responsibility through the ballot box, open up the opportunities and the talent will come.  Or, to be more accurate, it will stay exactly where it is and not be lured to London.

If being locked indoors with the Tories is the best reason for opposing Brexit then a good second is that the debate has been framed in terms of sovereignty instead of subsidiarity and on those terms Brexit poses an unacceptable risk.  That risk is that sovereignty regained will be sovereignty hoarded.  All Europe needs a debate on what can be done closer to the people than it is today.  Even if that means identifying things that are done too close to be done well – because there are some activities that can now only be effective on a scale beyond that of the classical nation-state.

It needs to be a European debate, not a British or English one, because only in the idea of a Europe of a Hundred Flags can small nations and historic regions achieve the recognition the nation-states are determined to deny us.  We hear a lot about how the EU is a malignant conspiracy to destroy those nation-states and their historic identities long-forged in good old-fashioned lethal conflict.  Michael Gove looks forward to ‘patriotic renewal’, while Jacques Attali fears another Franco-German war before the century is out.  Meanwhile, the British State for which we’re supposed to boldly patrify shows how much it really cares about our identity, turning our ancient shires, the roots of our democracy, into clone-zones of the metropolis and topping each with its own little Caesar.

A Tale of Two Cities

Bristol City Council is still weathering the storm it brought down upon itself for not marking St George’s Day this year, having argued that the city is ‘too multicultural’ for such an event.  Lack of interest might have been a plausible excuse, but not that all cultures are valued except one.

Others do things differently.  Professor John Denham is Director of Winchester University’s Centre for English Identity and Politics.  Interviewed by Wessex Society for its magazine The Wessex Chronicle, he recalled the situation in Southampton during his time as a Labour MP there:

“I helped organise St George’s Day in Southampton and Southampton’s a very diverse city – so how do you have a St George’s Day which can involve everybody and yet is still an English festival?  The story we tell is that Southampton is a great English city, that’s been there throughout English history, and it’s always been made up of all the people who’ve lived there, which because it’s a port city has always been people from all over the world.  People can understand that you can be both English and very diverse, through your history and everybody that’s come together to make the city.  A couple of years ago I was working on this with a young Sikh woman councillor, born in Southampton, and we discovered that we both had had relatives in the British forces serving in the Far East during the Second World War.  That’s an example of how family and local histories can be inter-twined as part of a common story.”

The difference then is that Southampton projects the primacy of territory, locally and nationally – loyalty to place rather than to race – whereas Bristol appears scared of any continuity with its foundational past.  Curiously, when it comes to Wessex and the marking of St Ealdhelm’s Day, the roles are reversed.  Bristol is happy to fly the Wyvern outside the Council House (or ‘City Hall’, for the Anti-Mayor and his fellow deniers of distinctiveness); Southampton still sits in stony silence, unmoved by calls to fly.  Perhaps this will be the year Southampton sees sense?

Gearing Up

Surveyor is the magazine for highways and transport professionals.  This month’s issue is headlined ‘Return of the Regions’ and opens to reveal an editorial by Dominic Browne, and more besides.  The editorial starts as follows:

“In January of this year the Department for Transport (DfT) launched a small (by government standards) pilot competition for local authorities to find ‘total transport’ solutions in rural and isolated communities.

To some this may have seemed fairly innocuous; a scrambled attempt to cover ground in local services left barren by revenue cuts.  Yet the guidance for bidders contained a line that appeared to herald something more than spin, smoke and mirrors; something that looked like an honest appeal.

‘Service integration has not been attempted on any scale up to now, so the essential first step is for local authorities to work out how to go about it.’

Events this month, where we have seen the wheel of public reform turn once more, recalled this line.

When the coalition government first came into power, the word regional was banned.  Localism was the new watchword.  This month saw the concept of regionalism bloom again.  Across the North and the Midlands two major bodies built of local authorities are ready to take on statutory powers for regional transport planning.  While in the West Country, Surveyor has been told there is an ‘aspiration for more formalised regional control of transport’.

Further south, we see major sub-regional groups developing.  In the East Midlands we have the two great communities of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire planning a joint combined authority and in ‘England’s Economic Heartland’ of Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, we have an integrated total transport plan blossoming that, in its conception, actually pre-dates the DfT’s competition.

Some of this goes back to traditional English regionalism.  The North, and to a lesser extent the Midlands, have always been comfortable seeing themselves as individual cultural entities, while some even still see Cornwall, another beneficiary of recent devolution, as a country in itself.  In the south, where demarcation is more of an economic issue, sub-regional transport planning may be more practical.  The capital of course, effectively a region in itself, already has the might of Transport for London working for it…”

Poor old South.  The devil’s in the demarcation, isn’t it?  Boundaries may be fuzzy but we know where the North and the Midlands are.  We might even be able to point out East Anglia, another traditional entity but now one sadly subsumed into the ‘East of England’ Prescott zone, where it rubs shoulders with north London.  But the South?  And the West?  Here it gets confused.

In 1919 Professor C.B. Fawcett published a famous, not to say infamous, work entitled Provinces of England: A Study of Some Geographical Aspects of Devolution.  It included a map of 12 provinces, defined by physical features and ignoring county boundaries.  The only nod to history was the re-use of certain names as labels of convenience.  Cornwall and Devon were combined as the ‘Devon Province’.  The ‘Wessex Province’ comprised no more than the Solent basin.  In between was an area stretching from the Wye valley to the English Channel, grouped as the ‘Bristol Province’.  Fawcett explained its name as follows:

“Round Bristol the popular regional name has been ‘West of England’ or ‘West Country’.  But our Bristol Province has no better claim to the name ‘West of England’ than the West Midland Province has, and a less claim than could be made on behalf of Devon; while the term ‘West Country’ has different local meanings from north to south of England – in Durham and Northumberland it refers to Cumberland and Westmorland.”

Generations of the more materialist regionalists have praised the prof for his objectivity and lack of sentiment.  Most fail to comment on the fact that in 1942 Fawcett revised his map, now with 11 provinces, several minor and some major boundary changes, plus a couple of name changes while he was about it.  Surely unassailable objective reality ought not to be that malleable?

Cultural geography is about people and the place they call home.  It picks up where physical geography leaves off and it’s what’s rightly central to any discussion about English regionalism from below.  It’s because that voice from below is so often suppressed that we have this difficulty with demarcation down south.  It’s why we’re assured that it’s absolutely all about economics, and the functional parameters of accommodating and responding to growth, and not at all about culture.

Is Cornwall part of the ‘West Country’?  For a Cornishman, the west starts at Truro and carries on to the Isles of Scilly.  Cornwall has the Cornish Riviera.  Devon has the English Riviera.  You might think the penny of national separation would have dropped by now.  So if England’s West Country extends no further west than the Tamar, how far east does it go?  According to a recent study of regional accents by YouGov, no further than Somerset.  Not even as far as Brisawl, me lover.

The ‘West Country’ is a slippery term because it’s defined by those living to the east of it.  It’s what’s down west from London and as London’s sphere of influence grows so the West Country shrinks.  Between the wars it was still possible to describe Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset as the ‘Middle West’ (the reference is from Lovely Britain, edited by Mais and Stephenson), somewhere too far west to be the Home Counties and not west enough to be the real West Country.

Wessex today is split west-east – between the ‘South West’ and ‘South East’ Prescott zones – but another line would be north-west / south-east.  Even in the days of our independence we had Wessex west of Selwood and Wessex east of Selwood, the diocese of Sherborne and the diocese of Winchester.  As with the Highland / Lowland line in Scotland, our geography has shaped our history, creating divisions for others to exploit if they will.  Whereas a self-governing region could work to strengthen the lines of communication that bind us together, the priorities of the London regime for centuries have been to follow the lines of least resistance, the tentacles that reach into deepest Wessex.  There’s the Bath Road, the Kennet & Avon Canal, the Great Western Railway and the M4 going to the west; the Portsmouth Road, the London & South Western Railway and the M3 going to the south.  Or so it’s presented.  The reality is that of travel in the opposite direction, for these are not primarily the bonds of a resilient and self-confident region.  They’re the great veins along which our region’s tribute flows up to London, never to be seen again.

The demarcation problem in ‘the South’ is insoluble so long as London is allowed to dominate.  The North and the Midlands aspire to break free of London and they have the distance and the spirit to make it so whenever they choose.  As Surveyor’s editorial notes, the South may be tending to see its future solely in terms of sub-regions, satellites submissive to the will of the Great Wen, not defined, as others are, in resistance to it.  So long as that’s the case then it deserves the environmental and social catastrophe that’s heading towards it as London overspill eyes its fields.

It doesn’t have to be that way though.  Wessex has a flag, Wessex has a patron saint, Wessex has its own, much abused dialect.  We have as much right as any Mercian or Northumbrian to govern ourselves.  In so far as we’re on London’s doorstep, our culture in the front line facing the steamroller, we have a stronger and more urgent case than they do.

Our first priority, naturally, is to jettison the idea of the ‘West Country’, a concept far too flexible for its own good.  Wessex is an alternative name that retains the idea of being placed geographically to the west of London.  It does so without the notions of ineradicable inferiority, mental dumbness and infinite recession into peninsular twilight that have characterised a view of the ‘West Country’ handed down from above.  One busy lopping off our eastern shires one by one.

Time to stand, men of the west.  And then push back.

The Progressive Patriot

Guest contribution by Nick Xylas, WR Council member

The following is a review of The Progressive Patriot: A Search for Belonging, by Billy Bragg, published in 2006 by Bantam of London.

This is really three books in one. The first is an autobiography of Billy Bragg, the singer and songwriter who took the blues and the music of the American folk revival and made them into something distinctively English. The second is a history of his native Barking. And the third articulates an inclusive, forward-looking vision of English patriotism far removed from the puce-faced xenophobia of UKIP and the Daily Mail. The way Bragg switches somewhat awkwardly between the three can be a little frustrating at times, but there can be little doubt that he sees them as intrinsically linked.

“I’m Billy Bragg and I’m from Barking in Essex”. These are the words with which Bragg closes every concert, and as he explains here, they amount to a mini-manifesto of sorts. Of course, Bragg now lives in Dorset, and we West Saxons might feel a little put out that he doesn’t show his adopted homeland more love. But this misses the point. The statement is his way of saying “I am from somewhere, I have roots”. It is a calculated rebuke to the rootlessness that permeates American rock ‘n’ roll in particular, with its recurring imagery of open-topped Cadillacs cruising along endless highways. Bragg brought the epitome of this trope, Route 66, closer to home by turning it into A13: Trunk Road to the Sea, in which the highway from Santa Monica to Chicago has been replaced with the road from London to Shoeburyness. His patriotism manifests itself in his unapologetic belief that he has not devalued the song in any way by doing so.

Barking is effectively the key to the whole book. It is the environment that nurtured Bragg, and he treats it as a microcosm of England as a whole. As a town whose history revolves around boat-building and fishing, it has long welcomed visitors from many parts of the world, and this informs Bragg’s desire to affirm a patriotism that looks outward rather than inward. Like the Wessex Regionalists, he is informed by an English radical tradition that includes Levellers and Chartists, Ned Ludd and Captain Swing. He presents this history well, and whilst I suspect that this book won’t tell most readers of this blog anything they don’t already know, I am glad that it exists. When Michael Gove was Education Secretary, one of his aims was to rewrite the school curriculum in order to put the “tory” back into “history”. Though Gove is no longer responsible for education, this may yet lead to a generation that will never get to learn English radical history in any other way. It once again falls to the bards and minstrels to teach people the truths that they won’t hear at school.

Our Three Europes

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.”

The quote is attributed to Buckminster Fuller.  Another variation on the theme is that new ideas don’t triumph by changing opinions; they triumph because those holding the old ideas die out and those holding the new ideas take their place.

The Swiss can have a referendum on what they like, when they like.  In the UK we tend to stage them for reasons of party politics, including as a tiebreaker in internal party politics.  No-one outside the Westminster circus has any direct say on whether they’re held or not.

The Bill paving the way for an EU in-out referendum received its Second Reading in the Commons last week, opposed by the SNP for its failure to protect Scotland’s right to opt right back in again.  And for its failure to give 16 and 17 year olds a vote on their future.  There are plenty of 16 and 17 year olds who feel cheated by that.  As well they might, since their future may be swayed by the elderly end of the age range voting disproportionately ‘Out’.  That’s to say, the only end of the age range who’ve already voted once before on the issue, in 1975.  Two votes for them then, four decades apart.  And none for the young.  That’s a shame, because the deep-seated view that the older are also the wiser isn’t necessarily borne out by events.  Wars, quite infamously, are started by old men (and old women) for young men to fight.

After a conflict that may come to be viewed as at least in part a European civil war, we at last got a chance to re-assess who we are and whether our historic enmities matter as much as we thought they did.  The European issue is not about policies, because they can be changed, and in a dynamic democracy forever adapting to a changing world it’s right that they should.  It’s not about structures, because they can be changed, and those of Europe, 70 years old or less, are more malleable than those of our Anglo-Norman elite, 950 years old and dug in deep.  It’s not even about values, because they too can be changed, preferably to be improved upon and never to be placed beyond reasoned challenge.  The European issue at root is about identity and our place, or places, upon the planet.

What is it to be European today?  The history of Europe as a name and an idea is the history of that search for place.  Mythology ascribes its origin to Europa, carried off across the sea by Zeus in the form of a bull.  A folk memory, perhaps, of the role that cattle, and therefore dairying, played in the continent’s opening-up for agriculture.  One linguistic theory links the name to the Akkadian for ‘to go downwards’.  The European peninsula in that case, like the Maghreb in Arabic, is literally the West, the place of the sunset when viewed from the centre of the ancient world.

Wessex, as England’s peninsular West, mirrors this on a smaller scale.  ‘To go west’ is to die, and it is to Avalon, the land of the orchards, that King Arthur is carried, the same land of the apples of immortality that the Greeks knew as the Garden of the Hesperides.  A chance to drink up thy zider then, as the sky turns red and gold and, like Chesterton, watch “the western glory faint along the road to Frome”.  For those who have followed the sun’s path to the shore, there’s always the sea and new-found land.  Little wonder then that Charles Kingsley, a great advocate of a contemporary Wessex, should have penned Westward Ho!, re-siting the phrase from London to the Atlantic coast, in geographical terms the most European part of Europe because also its sharpest interface with the rest of the world.

Europe is an encircled continent, often wary of what lies beyond.  To stand in defence of the West is a theme that runs from Leonidas to The Lord of the Rings.  Rome’s focus was the Mediterranean, the Mare Nostrum that was a highway, not a border; what we know as Europe is the product of reaction to the success that came early to the followers of the Prophet.  The first reference to the Europeans – Europenses – is in a near-contemporary account of Charles Martel’s victory over the Arabs at Tours in 732.  Roman Christianity pushed northwards and north-eastwards more frantically – and more brutally – than it might have done because to survive it had to win new lands to replace those lost.

Yann Fouéré, in L’Europe aux Cents Drapeaux, set his views in the context of three successive Europes, past, present and future.  The first, Christendom, existed for most of a millennium before fragmenting.  The second Europe, of religious divides and imperialist rivalry, repeatedly came close to destroying itself.  The third, Fouéré’s Europe of a Hundred Flags, is one of co-existence between regional power and transcontinental co-operation.

It isn’t the EU, but the EU is somewhere on the road that leads ahead, perhaps to a pared-down EU, designed primarily to safeguard regions against the predatory intent of nation-states.  The EU has its critics, and many make sound points, but the staunchest are those shuffling backwards towards a world of now long-gone empires that has no conceivable role today.  One does have to ask, for example, which century UKIP inhabit.

Quite possibly the 20th, amid dreams of a revived Commonwealth, even though with each passing generation the family ties become looser.  And trade moves on.  Goods from Australia and New Zealand aren’t sitting on the quayside waiting for the call from the motherland.  The UK is a much smaller player on the global stage now because Europe is much smaller too and demographic trends will only make it more so.  In a world dominated by semi-continental blocs like the USA or the BRIC countries it’s difficult to see where the UK would hope to go.  UKIP fantasies of plugging-in to BRIC growth rates could only be delivered by matching their rates of environmental degradation, but perhaps that’s the plan.

The current alternatives to Europe don’t include the land of Rule Britannia, colonies, coal and cotton; they do include 51st State of the USA, in all but name, or perhaps ultimately to become a satellite of India or China.  Norway’s independent, but awash with oil; it’s also forced to apply the EU’s legislation in order to trade with it but has little say over the content.  Switzerland’s proudly independent too, but as the world’s money laundry it can afford to be.  The ultimate in centralisation is not the EU; it’s globalism, which UKIP seem to endorse.  The evolution of the EU into a bulwark against that globalism is fraught with difficulties but look forward to the world of 2050 and there could be worse places to be.

And… if not the 20th century, then quite possibly the 16th?  Euroscepticism’s founding document is the declaration of the Reformation Parliament in 1533 that “this realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world”.  It’s the double standard of Fouéré’s second Europe: no-one tells us what to do but you disagree with us, local folk, and it’s off with your heads.  We demand your subservience in all things as proof of loyalty.  The Irish, the Welsh and the Cornish were among those who discovered how one-sided the Tudor idea of English independence could be.  And not only English: many an Alsatian or Breton has died fighting for France against not-so-distant cousins across the Rhine or the Channel.

The most compelling argument for staying in the EU, while insisting on its radical reform, is that withdrawal would further empower the London regime, parliamentary sovereignty and ‘fortress Britain’.  Might a re-invigorated UK not share out its enhanced functions in a generous wave of regional devolution?  Not on past form.  More likely by far is that triumphalist waving of the Union Jack would turn into a paranoid hunt for the nationalist and regionalist ‘enemy within’, egged on by Fleet Street and by a State apparatus looking out for itself.

The UK has NO commitment to subsidiarity, even in constitutional theory.  Federalism, for example, is for the other man.  If only the UK had as little power over Wessex as the EU does!  If the EU is a corporatist conspiracy, so too, blatantly, is the UK, and we need completely different choices all round.  Claims that the EU is unreformable, however, sit ill with the facts.  The EU now labelled oppressively neo-liberal and the one previously denounced for its social chapter are the same institution under different managements sponsoring different treaties.  Politics happens and no ideology therefore can own Europe forever.  The longer the EU exists, the more vulnerable it is to attack, because both Left and Right can pile up precedents that support their case.

A simplistic view might be ‘EU bigger, therefore bad; UK smaller, therefore good’ but there is more to decentralisation than that.  It depends just how much power is centralised at that wider level, whether the modern world needs it to be there for reasons of subsidiarity and how much headroom is left for more local levels to flourish.  In the context of subsidiarity, net decentralisation – a few things up but many more down – is a fundamentally credible position to advance.  The real debate should be over who gets to decide what’s decided where: subsidiarity is only genuine if judged from ‘below’.

And… if not the 16th century, then quite possibly the 13th?  Today we mark the 800^th anniversary of Magna Carta, the short-lived foundation of English liberty.  Short-lived because the Runnymede original was declared null and void by the Pope ten weeks later.  The charter that forms the basis of what survived was the heavily edited version re-issued by the regency council of Henry III meeting at Bristol in November 1216.  It was the result of strategic bargaining with the Pope’s man in England, Cardinal Guala Bicchieri.  Stop press: islanders do deal with continent over share-out of powers.  It could be David Cameron today as much as William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke way back when.  Magna Carta continues to influence our politics, producing in some a kind of resting on laurels that means we don’t have to update our ideas because 13th-century feudalism can’t be beaten.  Looking at how England is still governed today, the bad bits of that feudalism may be more evident than the good ones.

The good bits show the importance of a radically decentralised Europe in which ideas that others have discarded as quaint and old-fashioned can survive, rather like old plant varieties, until they’re ready for a comeback.  Take juries, a Frankish administrative innovation, adopted early by the English, later applied by them to criminal trials and retained when the rest of Europe moved on.  France introduced jury trials at the Revolution, modelling them on English practice, and spread them across Europe.  For UKIP-inclined conspiracy theorists, jury trials are doomed because they’re incompatible with continental, Roman law.  In fact, juries exist today in many countries across the EU, which really spoils the argument, especially as UK governments are quite capable of restricting trial by jury without needing any external encouragement.  As for the wider point on legal systems co-existing, Scots law is a mixture of Roman and common law, and the Scots have juries.  The same is true of the laws of Quebec and Louisiana.

The practical divide within Europe isn’t between common law and Roman law jurisdictions.  It’s north / south.  When it comes to drafting EU laws, it’s the Mediterranean countries that are more laid back and happy with statements of general principle, and the northern Europeans who insist on precision, regardless of legal system.  (The Germans, it should be remembered, also had their own version of common law, based on Saxon practice, down to 1900 and our own word ‘law’ comes not from Old English but from Old Norse.)  Montesquieu, writing De l’Esprit des Lois in 1748, tried to answer the question of why different peoples have different laws.  They have, he suggested, different temperaments, due to different climate.  So will climate change alter English law?  We shall see. 

What we do know is that the north / south divide in Europe is mirrored in north / south divides in many of its larger countries, notably England, France, Italy and Germany.  Differences in landscape and vegetation (and hence in agriculture), in language, in religion and in wealth continue to find political as well as cultural expression.  There’s a particularly remarkable zone of transition between the 44th and 46th parallels of north latitude, roughly halfway between the Equator and the North Pole, which runs through many of the world’s best wine regions and also marks the northern limit for growing olives and rice.  As one might expect, it disregards national boundaries far more often than regional ones.

Those who wonder how a diverse Europe can hold together should ask how well diversity is accommodated in some of its Member States.  Not very well is the answer.  France from 1789, Italy from 1861 and Germany from 1871 tried to make single countries out of regions that simply don’t think in the terms dictated from the capital.  Nor do the several parts of the UK: Brexit propelled by the votes of southern England would be likely to provoke a Scottish exit from the UK, making UKIP not the saviours of British sovereignty but among the chief architects of its destruction.

The problem with learning from history is that we don’t.  The Europe we need to see, with sovereignty at the narrowest level, solidarity at the widest level and subsidiarity in between, is not what we have.  How we get where we’d rather be is up for debate, but it’s fascinating to listen to those who claim to be pro-European and anti-EU, just as if it were possible to be pro-British and anti-UK.  (Perhaps voters are viewed as making the wrong choices.)  Structures give concrete form to identities, so it is important to get them right and that means not allowing them to be defined by others.

If Brexit happens, it will be for two reasons.  One is that Eurosceptic myths will not be subjected to the forensic dissection they deserve, and that misinformation once in circulation and insinuation becomes impossible to stop.  The other is that the Brussels gravy train will respond with arrogance, complacency and weariness, and will fail to make a positive case for Europe.  That is, it will fail to own up to its mistakes and to understand that a workable vision of Europe must have a broad cultural base, upon which the economics and the politics are built, not the other way round.  Some splendid books have been written – none more splendid than Norman Davies’ Europe: A History – that join up the dots of a common heritage much vaster in time and space than Little Englanders can imagine.  Primed with that information, it’s much easier to see the bedrock of Europe, its small nations and historic regions, and not be distracted by the shifting sands of states determined to partition or assimilate them.

A clear discussion has been made immensely difficult not only by Euroseptic antics – demonising the EU while presenting national parliaments as implausibly fine paragons of virtue – but by uncritical enthusiasm in the opposite direction.  A good example of the latter is the SNP’s draft constitution for an independent Scotland, Section 24 of which states that Scots law will be inferior to EU law.  Technically, it may be true, subject to equally technical safeguards, but what a message it sends politically.  We’d much rather not criticise the SNP, so how come, having worked for centuries to regain national sovereignty, is the first act, apparently, to give it away?

It will be a shame if 16 and 17 year olds don’t get a vote.  They won’t be the only ones to be disappointed though.  A choice of in or out, of ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, is not much of a choice.  Why not a box for ‘Maybe’?  Because without the really wide-ranging debate that we, as advocates of a third, rather different kind of Europe, would like to see, that's the answer we prefer to give.

Empire at Sunset

All is explained so beautifully... here.

The Wyvern Flies Again, No Thanks To Labour

News reaches us of a groundbreaking initiative by Wessex Society, the cultural association devoted to promoting our region’s identity.  To mark St Ealdhelm’s Day, which falls today, the Society offered Wyvern flags to all the county and unitary authorities in Wessex to fly outside their offices.

There has been a good take-up from county councils – Dorset, Isle of Wight, Somerset, Wiltshire – and some of the unitary districts – the Borough of Bournemouth, the City & County of Bristol, South Gloucestershire (who have two offices and so requested two flags), and the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead.  Six of our eight shires are therefore included.  Wyvern flags are also flown, or have been flown recently, by the town councils in Wantage and Weston-super-Mare and at Oxford Castle and Winchester University.  Today’s omissions are mainly around the peripheries, where identity could be expected to be weaker, so give them time, but what happened to Hampshire County Council?  Are they trying to tell us that Winchester isn’t in Wessex?  How stupid do they want to look?

We are also told that Eric Pickles’ Department for Communities & Local Government planned to fly the Wyvern again this year outside their London headquarters but discovered, too late, that they had mislaid the flag.  You can just imagine what Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It would make of that.

While the political niche we fill is necessarily a narrow one – at this stage in the development of Wessex consciousness – the success of Wessex Society’s initiative should now silence those who insist that Wessex doesn’t exist at all and that there is no wider sense of identity into which a Wessex political movement can potentially tap.

What the initiative also reveals is where the real threat to Wessex lies.  Positive responses were received from half the county councils but only a quarter of the unitary districts.  Many unitaries are urban and three of them are controlled by Labour.  The overall response rate across Wessex was 33%; the response rate from Labour-run councils was precisely nil.  Nothing from Plymouth or Reading, while Southampton just dithered indefinitely.

Why?  The Labour movement is happy to come to Tolpuddle once a year; the RMT union’s Wessex branch even takes part with a gurt big wyvern on its banner.  Labour in government did nothing to lift the ban on our flag, leaving it to Eric Pickles to restore our freedom to fly.  But that’s history now.  Surely they’ve moved on?  So why the sour-faced refusal to join in the fun today?  Would Labour refuse to fly the Welsh dragon or the Scottish saltire in their respective home territories?

Or has some directive gone out from London that the boundaries of the Prescott zones are never, ever to be questioned, even in the interests of promoting a real regional identity capable of mobilising support for devolution across a significant chunk of the south of England?  Tell us, please, why DOES Labour hate Wessex so much?

On Banking And Being Boring

Ed Miliband spoke this week at the conference of the British Chambers of Commerce. He called for regional banks to be set up to lend to local businesses, an idea modelled on Germany’s Sparkassen. It’s an idea we first published in our 2005 election manifesto: “a Wessex regional government will support the formation and foster the growth of a Wessex-wide, community-owned banking system”. Once again, where WR leads, the London parties belatedly follow.

Vince Cable, speaking at the same conference, didn’t warm to the idea, saying that Britain isn’t Germany. No, it’s rather less successful than Germany at a lot of things. It isn’t that we can’t do the same things here – Birmingham had a popular, though unique municipal savings bank for decades until centralisation overwhelmed it – it’s that generally we WON’T do the same things. Even when they’re patently good for us. Look at how long it took Scotland and Wales to get legislative assemblies of the kind that the Federal Republic of Germany just takes for granted as part of the national character. If the UK has a national character, it’s not an attractive one once all the chauvinistic hubris about our ‘democracy’ is stripped away.

As for regional devolution, why DOES Labour keep on bungling it? As Miliband’s speech shows, there’s no shortage of need for a regional approach. But would his regional banks be anything more than the hated Regional Devastation Agencies with a different logo? Would they be accountable to the regions, or, as usual, to the posh boys of HM Treasury? What lasting and meaningful regional accountability can there be without elected regional assemblies? And how do you get THEM set up if voters won’t do as they’re told?

You cannot have regionalism without regions. But Labour still refuses any debate about what those regions might be, especially about how they need to be changed to make them both practical and popular. It’s made up its mind and won’t be budged. It won’t even engage with the intellectual argument about what kind of regions are needed to do the job envisaged. For Labour, it is self-evident that the regions are those that the Tories, advised by the civil service, created in 1994, based in their turn on wartime civil defence groupings. The advantage of this approach is that the regions exist. They are the status quo. That is all that can be said in their favour. Labour’s myopia forbids it to see beyond that simple bureaucratic fact of their existence. Box ticked. Labour’s myopia forbids it to ask searching questions, such as what is expected of a region, not just now, but in 50, 100 or 500 years’ time.

Labour doesn’t do the long term. It will be dead by then. But because of its myopia it is meanwhile doomed to preside over a succession of failed regional initiatives. The initiatives fail and will go on failing because they are so BORING. Scots wave the Saltire and Welshmen the Red Dragon because these represent identities that set them apart, that engender community, and, fundamentally, the sense that there are other ways to relate to humanity and the planet than through the filter of Westminster politics. No-one outside the Labour Party and its cronies would wave a flag for The South West Standard Region of England.

Folk can and do wave the Wyvern. It’s a symbol with roots deep in history. For obsessive modernisers, that’s a problem, but the revival of the St Piran’s Cross in Cornwall shows very well that a movement for today and tomorrow can draw on yesterday without being labelled ‘nostalgic’ or ‘sentimental’. The great strength in doing so comes from tapping into half-forgotten memories that are widely shared, and shared across the generations, however much re-interpretation the ideas undergo at the margins. It contrasts with the great weakness of constant re-invention of basic principles, namely that only the re-inventers are allowed to play. Only they get to design the logo, write the mission statement, run the training course, and applaud the leader’s speeches.  What unites them is not a common belief in anything that forms their destiny but a common disbelief in everything that forms their inheritance.

The new present exists in a bubble. It has no past and so it has no future. It will be re-invented into something else. Folk will believe in it for as long as it’s useful and then it will be discarded. That’s no way to build a regional community that will take on the might of London and, with its friends across these islands, comprehensively slay it. That’s OUR mission and there’s nothing boring about that. It’s the one great cause that has yet to have its day.

London and the English

The place and the people are the subject of a recent on-line article by Professor Eric Kaufmann analysing what the 2011 Census says about national identity. It reveals wide variation in identification across England, with Englishness concentrated, perhaps paradoxically, in the Danelaw (and some additional coastal retirement zones, mainly in Wessex).  Areas around the Humber and Thames estuaries not only identify strongly as English but have supplied the English Democrats with many of their best election results.

Also evident from the first map is the outer-outer London ‘hot belt’ from Southampton and Brighton through to Peterborough and Cambridge, ‘home’ in part to a rootless population of consumers for whom any territorial identity is passé.  It's an attitude against which we continue to battle.  Professor Kaufmann’s second map illustrates the attraction of the M4 corridor for those of Celtic origin.

Wessex overall is shown to occupy a mid-position, with an English majority in all areas, Oxford and Reading aside, but neither staunchly embracing an English identity nor staunchly rejecting it.

English Is Not Enough

“What we think of when we talk of English traits really narrows itself to a small district. It excludes Ireland and Scotland and Wales, and reduces itself at last to London, that is, to those who come and go thither.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Identity today is in flux: so the Census results tell us. There are many currents but a key event, especially for political radicals, was the launch of the unprovoked attack on Iraq in 2003, backed by almost the whole of the London political establishment. So thorough was that backing that it is difficult to find an appropriate reaction short of repudiating the British State itself.

It’s easier for those on the Celtic periphery to do this, slipping easily into an alternative identity removed both in distance and in scale from the London regime. It’s not so easy to do here, where the difference between England and Britain has historically been seriously blurred. England is 81% of Britain by population and its capital is also Britain’s capital. But one seriously big consequence of devolution is undoubtedly that more folk today identify as primarily English, rather than primarily British, than would have done 20 years ago. And they are prepared to organise as such. These facts have spawned a growing stream of pseudo-academic mush from a self-referential British Left anxious for an ideologically sound response that doesn’t rock the unionist boat.

The challenge facing a distinct English identity is the extent to which it has for a very long time been a dormant one. Tom Nairn, a Scot, wrote in The Break-up of Britain that the price of the Union has been a “peculiar repression and truncation of Englishness”. Anyone looking for an English identity today will find some odd, and often disagreeable, role models. Billy Bragg has done his best to present a radical view of England – and been pilloried for his pains by a labour movement that will happily march behind its trade union banners but views national flags with some unease. So the fringe has it. Dr Frank Hansford-Miller, who founded the English National Party in 1974, used to dress up as a Beefeater, in the belief that this was the English national costume. It didn’t do his cause a lot of good. Today’s English nationalists are as likely to dress in chain mail and pretend to be crusaders, especially if they dislike their neighbours from Asia.

Insisting that the only England is the far Right England does nobody any good. The far Right will find plenty who reject Englishness itself as tainted, for the same reasons that they also reject Britishness. And it can hardly be to England’s benefit to have to choose between a far Right vision and a total vacuum.

It certainly is to the benefit of the UK establishment to foster the idea that there is no third option. That way, the far Right bogeyman can be recruited in support of the status quo. England needs the Celts. They must understand that they have a responsibility not to be selfish but to stay in an abusive relationship for the sake of the English. Separatism would abandon England to be ruled by skinheads with swastika tattoos on their foreheads. Only the eggshell-thin veneer of Britishness protects the English from themselves and the havoc they would unleash... It’s ridiculous. It’s manipulative. It serves well the electoral interests of the Labour Party. And it’s not less real for being untrue.

So it’s important to those in power to suppress the creation of any third option. Regionalism can be spiked by insisting that the Prescott zones were it, that no more imaginative solution is open for discussion. Those who accept that as true are pushed back upon either the far Right unitary England or the status quo, lacking, as they do, the confidence to assert that actually there are several different paths down which England could travel and that it isn’t a betrayal of it to say so. A federal England, for example, isn’t any less English than a unitary one. It is MORE English, to the extent that it allows expression for regional and local identities too, which are necessarily part of any inclusive picture.

English nationalism’s greatest fear, stemming from the Prescott zones experiment, is that England will disappear completely. That it won’t be possible to be English at all. That division and disunity will accelerate to the point where Englishness becomes a crime. Yet there’s no problem with division and disunity at the international scale, or with denouncing a European identity, because those are deep-rooted attitudes that go back to the origins of our modern State. English nationalism still dances to a Tudor tune. Beefeaters, remember?

Disappearance does seem an unlikely scenario, though one easily exploited, both by those who might want such an outcome and those who don’t. What puts regionalists off nationalists is the degree of over-reaction this engenders. England becomes an embattled identity and a greedy one, one that wants it all. Any identity that doesn’t subordinate the particular to the national is railed against as an enemy within. Any recognition of legitimate claims – that Kernow and Gwent aren’t English or that it’s time to be friends with the Germans – is feared as a crumbling of the defences that will bring the whole citadel crashing down.

We aren’t opposed to an English Parliament that minds its own business and never interferes in the internal affairs of Wessex. We don’t campaign for one, because it would do nothing to advance our own cause. But we don’t campaign against one either so long as its powers aren’t envisaged as inhibiting the self-government of Wessex, now or at any time in the future. An English Parliament that practised subsidiarity might find itself with little or nothing to do, but that wouldn’t be bad news. We do agree that there’s injustice at large when you cannot write ‘English’ as your nationality on official forms. We do believe you should always have that right. What we don’t believe is that being part of the same nation as us gives those in London the right to dictate to regions that are more than capable of making our own decisions. Let the English identity flourish, because a secure identity is also a generous identity, able to view England as a community of communities. We aren’t afraid of it. It’s a pity if it feels the need to be afraid of us.

English nationalism’s second great driver, besides fear of non-existence, is a fear of unfairness. The classic oppressor-as-victim. If Celts can feel oppressed, so can the English. It doesn’t work, because the English are the majority in the UK by 4:1. It’s true that the English are oppressed, but it’s the English, or some of them, who are doing the oppressing. An English Parliament, without a commitment to subsidiarity, will only go on doing it.

Unfairness implies disadvantage. And the regions of England would be no less disadvantaged without regionalism than England would be with no recognition of its own status. Is the denial of status unique? Far from it. While much depends on what is a nation, there are several traditional national entities in Europe that are divided into regions and have no parliament of their own. For England, you could also read Occitania, Prussia, the Mezzogiorno, Aragon or Castille, all areas of Europe with either their own language or a history of powerful monarchical independence. And there are ways to recognise such entities without denying regional autonomy.

So are Scotland and Wales not disadvantaged, having no regional assemblies? Why is England singled out for special ill-treatment? Territorial government is underpinned by geography. Ignore geography and you ignore the possibility of any sensible arrangement of anything. Scotland and Wales are a fraction of the size of England, so any sub-divisions there count as local government units. An England without regions is, and would continue to be, badly governed because it suffers from diseconomies of scale.

It’s worth pondering just how vast a country England is. So too are the quantities of energy and other resources expended in governing it, and which won’t be around for ever. It’s worth pondering, because it’s difficult for those who live within commuting distance of the capital to understand what it’s like to live on the periphery. Often you’ll get the ‘write-off the regions and invest in London’s success’ line of reasoning from Tory think-tanks, who also fail to understand how the English periphery’s economic weakness is directly related to its political invisibility.

What English nationalists routinely propose as their ‘alternative’ to regionalism is to build high-speed rail lines to Newcastle and Penzance so that those coming cap in hand to London can do so all the quicker. The London view of England is that it’s better by far that those on the periphery should spend their unimportant, provincial lives on trains than that London should surrender any part of its monopoly of power. Centralism has determined nothing less than the very shape of England (and who gets to call themselves English). Lothian, now Scottish, was once part of Northumbria. It was abandoned by the united English realm, quite possibly because a king based in Wessex couldn’t hope to get an army there quickly enough to defend it in the event of invasion.

English nationalism’s third great driver is a belief in the responsibility of the sovereign centre to inspect and correct the localities, a tradition which regionalism would decisively break. The fear is not just that England is being mapped out of existence, not just that it’s being discriminated against by a Celt-loving Labour Party, but that without institutions to impose a uniform culture and a sense of subservience to the centre, all hell would break loose. You’d have different areas doing whatever they want, and that would never do. These things have to be carefully doled out, by royal charter, by private legislation, by ministerial fiat. You can’t just do it.

Why does the leading English identity only grudgingly concede a pinch of autonomy to counties and cities, while bringing down a metaphorical mace upon the heads of those who would restore England to its regional roots? We are all conquered. The Celts know they lost. The English lost too but have been taught to identify with their conquerors to the point where they think they won. They won at Hastings and have gone on winning ever since. If we want an end to Norman rule by 2066, regional government has to play a pivotal part.

It’s fashionable to sneer at the idea of the Norman Yoke, dismiss it as a 17th century fable and carry on the issuing of orders from London as if that’s simply an inevitable fact of nature. It’s not inevitable and it’s not natural either. Scholars like Jim Bulpitt have written about the centuries-old relationship between ‘Court’ and ‘Country’, between ‘high politics’ and ‘low politics’. What we’ve seen with devolution is a partial re-instatement of ‘middle politics’ that needs to go much further.

Our aim is, so far as Wessex is concerned, to lead that process of going further. Professor Jonathan Bradbury has written that the Blair government’s introduction of devolution succeeded “precisely because of its focus on local origination in each territory. From a central Whig perspective this produced adhockery and incoherence; from a Bulpittian perspective on territorial management it was a lesson in peripheralising the problems and legitimation of reform in each territory to local actors, thereby freeing the centre from the difficulties of imposing solutions but also arriving at workable answers.”

In other words, you cannot make ‘English regionalism’ work by drawing a map in London and expecting the locals to conform. The demand has to come from below and for that reason every region should be recognisably different. We don’t work any more closely than we need to with regionalists in other parts of England because that would be an undermining of the very ethos of regionalism. A tidy solution is the thing we rightly fear most, because it is the thing that leaves regions most susceptible to continuing central co-ordination and control.

Going further means having a thorough understanding of our place within England. The language of nationalism isn’t helpful to this. Is Wessex a nation in its own right? No, it isn’t. It’s a good theme for pub chats, but let’s be honest about it here. We can claim to be Saxons and not Angles/Engles, but so can Essaxons and Sussaxons. We can claim to have had our own kings. So did Rheged. Why should it matter? A region and a nation are both areas that assert their right to self-government and in both cases the only limit is the will to succeed. The word used tells us very little. Northern Ireland – a province that certainly didn’t set out to be a nation – has enjoyed more self-government for longer than any of the nations still enclosed within the UK.

When English nationalists come to investigate regionalism they always do so with an agenda. Does it represent a good idea for ‘England as a whole’? Or should it be suppressed as a threat to ‘England as a whole’? (That is to say, to the Anglo-Norman State.) Two can play at this game. Is England a good idea for Wessex? We have the right to reserve judgement, because Wessex created the unified English kingdom, for reasons that made sense at the time. It was our idea. As Britain is Greater England, so England is Greater Wessex. In a sense, Wessex owns England. And could dissolve it should it so choose, back to the mere geographical expression it was in the days of Bede.

Not that we advocate that. But it’s just worth remembering every time you’re told that ‘it’s for an English Parliament to decide whether England should have regions or not’. It isn’t. We aren’t dictated to by Mercians or Northumbrians who don’t know their history and so hide behind the Norman/Tudor version of it. You can imagine the reaction if England’s right to exist was judged by its relevance to ‘Europe as a whole’, but that’s somehow ‘different’, in a deeply irrational way.

The relationship between England and Wessex clearly matters more to some than to others. It matters to those nationalists, Celtic as well as English, who insist on dividing the world into silos of sovereignty. It matters much less to regionalists with a more flexible and accommodating approach to political geography. It matters least of all to those who realise that Wessex is real to the extent that folk talk about Wessex and not about something else, even if that something else is England. So maybe enough has been said on the subject. To make Wessex, we need to talk about Wessex and nothing more. England and Wessex are in no way identities in conflict. There is room for both. But to be English is not enough. We assert the right to be Wessaxon too.