The Management of Savagery

“You know of course that no-one can make known any skill, nor direct and guide any authority, without tools and resources; a man cannot work on any enterprise without resources.  In the case of the king, the resources and tools with which to rule are that he have his land fully manned: he must have praying men, fighting men and working men…”

King Alfred the Great, commentary on Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy

In 2012, Oxford don David Priestland published Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A New History of Power.  It takes up the very theme familiar to Alfred in the 890s, that a society’s leaders are a combination of the three estates, those who get what they want through transactions, those who do so through violence or the ability to threaten it and those who do so through wisdom.  The balance between them changes over time, defining the character of one society in comparison with another.

The neo-liberal project underway since the 1970s has been very much a matter of ‘all power to the merchants’, whose freedom of action is defined as the essence of freedom itself, trumping even democracy.  Which means a world unprepared for the re-emergence of other ways of thinking.  It means, for example, a world accustomed to the idea that violence is wrong, unless clothed perhaps in a claimed humanitarian intent.  Such a world imagines that denouncing savagery as savagery is an anathema capable of having a real impact.  What if the savagery is a very deliberate choice?  A drive to power through fear?  You wanted ‘shock and awe’?  Well, you got it.  Up against a liberal – famously defined by Robert Frost as someone too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel – who’s going to win?

The collapse of political or economic stability is usually followed by authoritarian rule of one kind or another.  Chaos breeds a craving for order: good order if possible, evil order if necessary.  Nature abhors a vacuum.  And the whinier anarchists change their minds fast once their dole money stops.  So let’s ask the question: if central government failed, if the debt economy imploded, if as communities, locally and regionally, we were thrown back upon our own resources, how would Wessex fare?

It’s not an unnecessary question but a prudent one, given what the demographic, environmental and geopolitical trends tell us about the changes coming over the course of this century.  So far we have shown only our chronic unwillingness even to resist the impositions of a relatively benign London regime.  The merchants continue to batter down the barriers that democracy has erected, while the globalised society they have advocated offers no protection against importing to our shores the consequences of other nations’ actions.  Trade and war alike are threats to our way of life; those in more empathetic and far-seeing occupations have a vital role in keeping both equally at bay.

False Flags & The Fallen

It takes a lot of planning to fit the First World War in between Sunday’s closing ceremony for the Stolenwealth Games and tonight’s televised independence debate between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling.

The juxtaposition may give cause for thought.  Scotland’s choice seems to lie between two visions of Europe.  On the one hand, it can become a modern, pragmatic, Nordic-style social democracy whose guiding light is the common weal and not the enrichment of the slyest.  On the other, it can remain part of the one centralised monarchical empire in Europe that was not toppled by the events that began a century ago.  Choose well: the same class of inbred twits whose inept diplomacy launched that war is still at the helm.

That much is evident from the handling of the anniversary.  The focus is on British and colonial casualties, with little attempt at reaching out to understand realities shared with the ‘enemy’.  Tactics and trauma will be the thing, not the bigger picture, which is way too much of an embarrassment.  But gloriously, needlessly dead is gloriously, needlessly dead: what does nationality have to do with it?  The silo mentality is what wins, loaded to overflowing with our selective remembering.

What do we remember?  And why?  Yes, you, small child with no memory of the last century, let alone of its wars.  What must you never forget of the experiences you never had?  The lessons of history?  We mark the centenary of the war to end war with yet more war.  The sacrifices that must never be thought to have been in vain?  Heresy it may be to say but was the post-war world a better world?  Was it all ‘homes fit for heroes’?  How many of the social and political changes that did occur were going to occur anyway?  Was it all for nothing then?  Quite possibly, but you won’t hear the twits admitting it.

One huge consequence of 1914-18 was to militarise the anti-London struggle in Ireland to an unprecedented degree.  Should Scotland vote ‘Yes’ it will be worth watching the Scottish reaction to any dirty tricks or delaying tactics from Westminster, now that a new generation of Scots soldiers have battle experience in Iraq and Afghanistan.  A worried establishment this week finally conceded ‘devo-max’, the option they wouldn’t allow on the ballot paper.  Can any but a fool trust the London parties’ final desperate offer of further powers?  Too little, too vague and far, far too late to make any difference.  But presumably requiring another confirmatory referendum before implementation – since no-one will announce the details – and so to be kicked into the long grass in the meantime.  No SNP gains at Westminster next May?  Oh well, it’s a changed world, so never mind what we promised.  It wasn’t exactly binding, was it?

In Wessex, we have our own regional recollections of service in the First World War.  The 43rd (Wessex) Infantry Division spent the war in India and the Middle East (as apparently did the duplicate 45th (2nd Wessex)).  The Wessex county regiments saw action both on the Western Front and across the Mediterranean and Middle East.  Military leaders seemingly understand the motivating power of the Wessex name rather better than their civilian counterparts who struggle to breathe life into ‘The South West’ and ‘The South East’.  Or is that an over-simplification?  Do the civilians know exactly what they’re up to?  The Wessex name has been well-used by the military: for the Wessex Brigade, the Wessex Division, the Wessex Regiment, the Royal Wessex Yeomanry, even HMS Wessex.  But the British Army is not a democracy: Wessex patriotism is fine when confined to cap-badges but not so fine when it gets political.  That’s when it becomes less of an asset and more of a threat.  To take a Welsh analogy: a male voice choir at the Albert Hall singing ‘God Bless The Prince of Wales’ is one thing; Plaid Cymru is another; the Free Wales Army something else again.

In 1997 we held a strategy conference in Reading.  One of the questions we sought to answer was: where should we look for allies?  The Army’s record on Wessex looked promising but even in terms of Wessex as a purely cultural project it would be self-limiting.  It’s not a pride of place that comes from below but from above.  At its heart is loyalty to the Crown, not loyalty to the land.  Since it’s ‘their’ army, not ‘ours’, it’s more likely to end up part of the problem, not of the solution.  A London fist in a Wessex glove.  A sustainable future won’t lie with yet more wars for global domination beneath the Union Jack or Le Tricolore but in a Europe at peace with itself and the world, the Europe of a Hundred Flags.  Are we closer to it than we were in 1914?  Only time will tell.

Upping the Occupation

Nearly a quarter-century after the Cold War ended, Defence Secretary Philip Hammond this week announced detailed plans for the withdrawal of British forces from Germany (along with the £600 million annual injection into the German economy that they represent). The Army’s presence there dates from the Second World War, nearly 70 years ago. We may like to think we have flexible armed forces but much of the time their basing is determined by the availability of facilities constructed decades ago in a quite different world from that of today.

Bringing the troops home is therefore a logistical headache. Where to put them all? Hammond’s rationalisation of the defence estate is planned to accommodate a smaller army, but in fewer, better places. So an overall run-down is a run-up for Wessex, with Aldershot and Salisbury Plain identified as key bases. Is that good news, or bad?

Good, according to Wednesday’s Western Daily Press, which focused on the economic benefits of more public sector employees in our region. Curiously, an increase in civil servants would doubtless have been seen as a drain on the economy and a worrying sign of state-dependency. The difference lies in the fact that soldiers, by themselves, aren’t going to force up local wage rates. They spend money, but they don’t ‘distort’ the labour market. They are, in a very real sense, ring-fenced.

There is a down side. The move to Salisbury Plain will mean building homes for more than 3,000 extra soldiers and their families, in a fragile environment already under huge pressure from private housebuilders. Those who welcome the injection of cash should bear in mind that the cash came out of their own pockets before it went into soldiers’ pay. If the London regime would now hand it back, it would do more good giving it to the parish councils to spend on things that are actually needed. Even before the payroll costs are counted, £850 million is planned to be spent on MoD infrastructure in Wiltshire and £100 million in Hampshire. But we somehow ‘can’t afford’ to spend that sort of money on anything useful…

The Army came to Salisbury Plain in 1897, considering the then ‘forlornly desolate’ farmland ideal for practising cavalry charges. As it turned out, the very last cavalry charge in its history came the following year, but it held on to its purchase. No permanent camp was intended. That changed the following year too. Since 1897 the area the Army controls has more than doubled. Sometimes land is taken over as an emergency expedient that by degrees solidifies into a permanent policy. Remember Imber. Army commanders will miss Germany, with its wide open spaces. Its training areas are vastly bigger than anything our crowded region can currently offer. Will we see more of Wiltshire compulsorily purchased to compensate? Time will tell. (In 1872 the Army did acquire temporary training rights over half a million acres stretching all the way to Somerset but that appears to have been just for one big exercise, and was well before the era of mechanisation.)

Hammond proposes seven key bases, or ‘clusters’, across Great Britain. One in Scotland, one in Northumbria, two in Mercia and one east of London. The two in Wessex have already been mentioned. The Scots are disappointed to be getting only 600 more soldiers when they’d been promised 7,000 by Liam Fox in 2011. Never mind. It’s all grist to the independentist mill.

By 2020 the 15,000 troops based at the Salisbury Plain Super Garrison will be twice as high as the number at any other British base. Wessex is, by tradition, among the most militarised parts of Britain, with whole shires economically dependent on the London regime’s generosity with our money, and so firmly bound in their loyalties to the politics of centralism. (The military is the largest employer in Wiltshire.) Electoral fraud? You might very well think that.

With the population expected to grow fastest in the south of England there is, in terms of recruitment, some geographical logic to this emphasis. There are also sound reasons for grouping certain units together where facilities can be shared, while still not keeping all the eggs in one basket. Nevertheless, it helps to know what the recipe is before you decide how many eggs you need. And that underlying question still hasn’t been answered. What exactly is the Army FOR?

In terms of its primary military role, there are three possible answers. To keep the peace at home. To defend the realm against attack. And to launch retaliatory, or even pre-emptive strikes against other countries whose rulers have upset Her Britannic Majesty’s Government.

The first of these functions shouldn’t be under-estimated. In an economic crisis, with bankers turning the screws and police budgets squeezed, a bit of back-up on the streets could be very handy. Ultimately, the law that is upheld is not the law arrived at by rational debate but the law arrived at by decisive violence. Ireland furnishes several proofs that that isn’t automatically in the gift of governments.

The second function would appear to be the main reason we have our armed forces. To prevent others storming up the beaches. In truth, the threat of invasion has never been more remote. We are certainly vulnerable to attack, but not as we know it. The further we travel into the digital age, the more critical our region’s energy and communications infrastructure becomes. It’s at risk from hostile governments, from terrorists and even from criminal gangs. But conventional weaponry isn’t an effective deterrent or an effective reaction in most cases. Let alone Trident.

So is the MoD really a Ministry of Defence? Or of War? Is it us that it’s defending, or itself? The top brass. The bureaucrats. The contractors. All have a reason to keep the show on the road. The third function allows them to do just that. And our economic model makes it unavoidable. The UK imports over half its food and raw materials. It has to keep open the lifelines of trade and take a dim view of anyone who would disrupt them, no matter how laudable their political ambitions for their country. Remember Suez. The old imperialist slogan, used to justify colonialism, was ‘trade follows the flag’. Today the flag follows trade wherever trade directs it to go. Which is why any move towards greater regional self-sufficiency is a move away from international tension.

With a new scramble for Africa opening up, led by the Americans and the Chinese, it’s not a good time to be locked tight into any global system, economic or military. It is a good time to be thinking ahead for once, not about short-term prosperity but about long-term survival. Greater freedom for Wessex is a good thing, for us, but it’s a good thing for the rest of the world too.

Mud, Blood & Poppies

Last month we commented, with due acidity, on David Cameron’s £50m plan for a great national festival to mark the centenary of the Great War. Marking the anniversaries of momentous events is not in itself a bad idea. But in this case there are three things wrong with its implementation.

The first is the political agenda of national re-unification, planned ahead to co-incide with the Scottish independence referendum and the 2015 election. It’s so blatant that you’d have to be blind not to see through it. The Scots are certainly not fooled. Then couple that with what’s expected to be a heroes’ homecoming as the Fourth Afghan War inevitably ends just like the others did. With the departing foreigners wondering what enduring achievement lies behind the self-congratulation. It isn’t history’s fault that 2014 lands in the middle of all this but it’s very much the fault of ruling politicians if they exploit the fact.

The second, the consequence of the first, is that we’re not expected to look back from a position of greater wisdom but from precisely the position that led to war in the first place. If Europeans would commemorate their common tragedy then Europe should do so together, along with the colonials who also gave so much. The Council of Europe might be the institution to look to to organise this, since it includes Russia and Turkey. That’s not the politics of a super-state, it’s subsidiarity in action. There is simply no way that national silos can sensibly commemorate a conflict they caused. Cameron’s plans pit the resurrected British Empire against Fritz the Hun and Johnny Turk, with everyone else floating freely in the vicinity. Perhaps a token link-up with the Germans somewhere. If you insist. But let’s not forget who WON, eh? What’s a few million war dead to set beside the transient buzz of glory?

The third, the consequence of the second, is that the unmentionable victims of the war will remain unmentionable. It will be remembered as a Great Power conflict, in which only the losers can be the bad guys. John Redmond, leader of the Irish Party at Westminster, urged Irishmen to enlist to defend Belgium and Serbia in the belief that his cause might benefit from some general sympathy for the small. It proved not to be the case. It took another 35 years for at least the majority of Ireland to rid itself of egregious foreign rule. While new states flourished from the Baltic to the Adriatic, small nations and historic regions trapped within the boundaries of the western allies suffered renewed persecution. The independent Republic of Alsace-Lorraine, proclaimed as hostilities ceased, was crushed by French arms after 11 tumultuous days. No plebiscite for you, mes amis. The German-speakers of southern Tyrol were ordered to become Italians, their heritage systematically closed down and removed. Breton patriots, backed by no less a figure than Marshal Foch, asked for their own seat at the Versailles peace conference. Breton losses in the war were proportionately double those of Paris. The Bretons believed they had earned a seat. It was denied them, on the grounds that their sacrifice only proved them to be twice as French as anyone else. France continues even now to oppress Brittany and deny its existence as a nation.

Today the usual Whitehall farce will be played out. Those who continue to wage war will cry their crocodile tears. Murderers will lay red poppies at London’s cenotaph, remembering, but learning not a thing. Those who remember and want others to learn might consider sporting the white poppy of peace. Either instead of or as well as the much more restrictively focused red one, which still deems irrelevant the sufferings of civilians and those innocents designated ‘the enemy’. The Royal British Legion, as a charity, can neither glorify war nor denounce it. Would it disapprove if it could? There are those enough who welcome a regular renewal of warfare, just so the youngsters know what the Legion is on about. As an organisation it has no interest in a lasting peace that would ultimately abolish its reason for existing. So who speaks for the truth that prevention is better than cure?

In Edwardian Britain, poppies, given their narcotic properties, were a symbol of sleep, oblivion and death. Nothing better marks the inversion of values brought about by the Great War than that a symbol of forgetfulness became the symbol of remembrance. And through the fog of current war ‘they’ struggle still to grasp the point, remembering how and forgetting why.

The Evil Empire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defending the Defensible

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot.
Rudyard Kipling, Tommy (1890)

Never in the field of current affairs have there been so many unflattering headlines about the military as we have witnessed this weekend. Marines accused of murder. Retired top brass accused of corrupt-(ish) practices. The Territorials to be renamed the Reserve and made to fill the gaps in regular provision. Gaps brought on by a semi-bankrupt nation attempting still to play at being a world power to please empire loyalists in the shires.

It seems Britain’s establishment continues to crave ‘influence’ in the world largely because its upbringing inhibits it from respecting the autonomy of others (at home as much as abroad). Greed is good, according to Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. You want it? Grab it. Why ever not? After three decades of regulatory capture, of rules rewritten at the expense of social and environmental stability, the dividing line between enterprise and theft has become increasingly flexible. The self-interested men (and women) are our new heroes.

New Labour, inspired by American neo-cons and ably supported by the Opposition, took Gekko’s doctrine to a new level. Violence is good. Especially with the ending of the Cold War, the cold-blooded killing of people in other countries has become an acceptable and sometimes popular tool of normal politics. And so a part too of the cross-party consensus. Since 1945, the UK has been involved in more military operations than any other country, including the USA, and there is no sign of this belligerence diminishing.

We are all sucked up into the vortex and expected to play our scripted part, ‘celebrating’ ‘our’ armed forces even as they convert psychologically damaged raw recruits into long-term victims of PTSD, shooting to order in illegal wars that have no moral purpose, never did and never will. The armed forces have become in effect a cult: the disciplined use of rational means in pursuit of utterly irrational ends.

Back to 1945 then. Remember the four ‘D’s of the Potsdam Agreement? Opinions differ as to what exactly they were but de-militarisation, along with de-nazification, features in everyone’s list. The Germans were to be cleansed of their militarist past because it was a bad thing. Our own militarist past – and PRESENT – still require similar attention. Will it take a well-deserved, comprehensive defeat to bring that about? And then what? If we want a military we can possibly consider to be doing a worthwhile job then the best way to start may well be to abolish the whole lot of it and think it through again.

So, from the beginning, why do we need the armed forces at all? What good do they do? Several countries get by without having any. Iceland is one, yet it still won the Cod Wars of the early 70s, humiliating the Royal Navy by a combination of diplomatic pressure and fisheries protection vessels engaged in sea rage. Ideally, military spending everywhere would be nil. Spending directed towards military objectives is almost always waste (though research can lead to civilian applications that transform our lives for the better). If it leads to war, the waste is ghastly. If it doesn’t, it’s still money that could have been spent on better things. The challenge is to so organise our affairs as to minimise the need for military spending, especially as conventionally understood. The real need is for an emphasis on tension reduction, rather than on the received wisdom that violence is a necessary part of the human condition, let alone one to be glorified. No easy thing to do, but so much better than the alternative. And the key lesson remains that tension can be raised as surely by too much military spending as by too little: so don’t be the one who started it.

Looking ahead, conflict seems as likely to require military software as military hardware, as rival teams of hackers work to bring down each other’s critical national infrastructure. More brain, less brawn? Quite possibly. As defence blurs seamlessly into counter-terrorism, surveillance and interception, as movements, not states become the enemy, so the internal/external divide dissolves and questions of civil liberty arise to challenge what is being done, by whom, to whom, and for whose benefit. ‘National security’ is becoming an increasingly unconvincing reason for not discussing national security.

It may well be that the military mind of the future will be even more focused on systems and logistics. Valuable skills exist in dealing with crisis situations, in military aid to the civil authorities when circumstances overwhelm the response normally available. Natural disasters furnish the best example, as when the Army was asked to help out in Cheltenham and Gloucester during the floods of 2007. It’s not just about manpower, not just about soldiers filling sandbags. It’s also about the strategic thinking needed to put in place parallel systems, such as for distributing drinking water or back-up generators. And to do so on timescales that bureaucracies or businesses, for whom the unexpected is a rare event that usually cannot command instant resources, would find truly challenging. Amidst all the rhetoric about outsourcing and encouraging the public sector to take risks, it’s worth pondering the consequences for resilience when contractors fail or risks go too far. (Remember G4S.)

Military planning is at the other extreme from financial whizz-kiddery: what matters, what has to be argued for, is what needs to be done, where, how and when, not what the price tag says. It’s about physical realities, not made-up money, which in the Mad Max scenario of the future isn’t worth a thing. When the Soviet Union collapsed after 1990, legal ownership, bureaucratic regulation and money were all bent to the will of those who had physical control over the material resources. What mattered wasn’t who had jurisdiction over the factory but who controlled the machinery, the energy sources to run it, and either the co-operation of those who could work it or access to enough violence to take it over anyway. Another parallel could be the fall of Rome, when the senatorial landowners merged with the barbarian chiefs to lay the foundations of feudalism. If we would avoid rule by diversifying drugs barons, local warlords and ruthless opportunists generally, then collective security needs to move up the agenda, sharpish.

During the decades either side of 1980, computer consultant and Welsh nationalist writer Derrick Hearne set down his political philosophy in three books: The Rise of the Welsh Republic, The Joy of Freedom and The ABC of the Welsh Revolution. Today more than ever they deserve detailed study, not least because Hearne’s aim was to map a route to survival in what he predicted was the forthcoming Age of Scarcity, looming larger now than then. Equally rejecting big monopoly capitalism and big bureaucratic socialism for the alternative of a ‘community-benefit state’, Hearne visualised a Wales in which markets and interventions therein were led to support rather than destroy communities. It was a no-nonsense vision with universal youth conscription for public works, including the building of a new rail network, a focused exports policy modelled on the Japanese zaibatsu, and utter contempt for Labour’s legacy of cowed colonial cronyism. Not all of this programme is transferable: the English have a deep distrust of large standing armies, and hence of conscription, and are, on balance, quite right to feel that way. That said, there are thought-provoking arguments all round.

In building his ‘model’ of a free Wales, Hearne the computer consultant was keen to set up some creative tensions and feedback loops. The institutions he described were designed to balance short-term economic thinking with long-term strategic thinking. The latter role he assigned to the Army of the Republic as ideological guardian. It’s a role often played by the military elite in countries struggling to escape from a past world. Atatürk’s Turkey is perhaps the best-known example. Outside Switzerland, it’s not a role that sits easily with democracy, but in Hearne’s not unrealistic future, democracy would have to work hard for its survival. His suggestions were intended to assist, not hinder, that goal. Indeed, the primary purpose of his proposed army was not to wield weaponry at all, but willpower.

The Army’s job was to identify, create and maintain the facilities and stocks required for survival, including survival of an economic blockade. There is, Hearne pointed out, a difference between an economic planning consideration, based on investment returns, and a survival consideration, based on the worst-case scenario. One concrete example he gave was that “the Army would insist upon a reserve stock of steam locomotives and their attendant servicing facilities, which [economic] planners might find somewhat quaint”. In Wessex, a comparable example might be the battle to protect farmland, as the source of our future food supply, against those ‘economists’ who consider its short-term residential development value to outweigh any need to think ahead. Food security. Energy security. Environmental security. There are more threats out there than we might care to think.

There are many terms used to describe the kind of strategic thinking needed. ‘Horizon scanning’ is one. And there are many ways of applying that thinking. One is to think simply about the future of everyone, as in really caring about posterity. Another is to look back as far as forward in the life of a specific community, as in the Seven Generations concept. What is lacking is any mechanism for turning such thoughts into action. Think-tanks often appear disconnected from the day-to-day policy measures that really need to start to be turned around now. The military are much more used to grasping the connection between objectives and resources and both the opportunities and the threats presented by change.

We condemn the misuse of taxpayers’ money to fund needless wars, to subsidise the arms trade and to keep some of the most beautiful countryside in Wessex out of bounds. (Nor should we belittle the political consequences: the occupying forces in the Devizes constituency number 11,000, plus their families, easily more than the Tory MP’s majority.) But we also need clear perception and resolute action to build a viable future for Wessex in uncertain times, when many military skills could prove their worth in a mixture of crisis management service and survival think-tank. Time for some creative tensions of our own?

Analysing ‘Dave’

The MP for Witney is a Tory Prime Minister for our times. Not too blatant a representative of the landowning and military class (though do scratch and sniff), nor the child of a grocer, but a public relations man. What you see is anything but what you get. Like Blair, Cameron is first and foremost an actor.

So it pays to unpick his pronouncements this week. Take the conference speech.

Let’s begin with the brief: “Here was the challenge: To make an insolvent nation solvent again. To set our country back on the path to prosperity that all can share in. To bring home our troops from danger while keeping our citizens safe from terror. To mend a broken society.”

Nope, not done any of that. Fail. A sovereign nation becomes solvent by repudiating non-existent, made-up, so-called debts, not by imposing austerity on the most vulnerable. (Precautions are necessary, however.) A decent country ensures prosperity for all by zero tolerance of tax evasion, not just of benefit fraud. To avoid soldiers being killed and maimed and the public becoming a target for terrorism, why not stop being Washington’s eager little poodle? (Special relationship? Nice gimp mask Dave.) As for a broken society, it is NOT broken. Thanks to the incompetence of the London regime under all three major parties, it is in fact wrecked.

“We are in a global race today. And that means an hour of reckoning for countries like ours. Sink or swim. Do or decline. To take office at such a moment is a duty and an honour and we will rise to the challenge. Today I’m going to set out a serious argument to this country about how we do that. How we compete and thrive in this world, how we can make sure in this century, like the ones before, Britain is on the rise. Nothing matters more. Every battle we fight, every plan we make, every decision we take is to achieve that end – Britain on the rise… And to those who question whether it’s right to load up a plane with businesspeople – whether we’re flying to Africa, Indonesia, to the Gulf or China …whether we’re taking people from energy, finance, technology or yes – defence … I say – there is a global battle out there.”

Nothing matters more than winning that egg-and-spoon race, does it Dave? Britain on the rise. Throbbing with thrust. We have to ask what planet Cameron is on. As far as we’re aware, there’s only the one. So to talk of continuing growth in order to maintain our differentials is catastrophically irresponsible. To avoid planetary burn-out, the developed world must mark time while the rest does what it has to do to deal with absolute poverty and adapt, just as we must, to the post-oil world. This really is no time for jingoism. Superficially, the theme might appear to be about meeting the challenge of global competition, perhaps as an alternative to global growth in a world that recognises the finite nature of its resources. But Cameron has not in fact moved beyond growth, which he mentioned eight times in his speech. Competition gets only one mention by name.

It’s also worth questioning what, in Cameronland, national success actually means. In what sense is a global company, based in Britain, actually British? If it arranges its affairs to pay tax somewhere else? Or if its shareholders could be just about anybody? Bristol Airport belongs jointly to an Australian investment bank and a teachers’ pension fund in Canada. The French government runs Bournemouth’s buses and supplies electricity to half our region. Wessex Water is owned by a conglomerate in Malaysia. Until we are prepared to take our community’s assets back under democratic control, any stake we may have in Dave’s world is by condescension and not by right. And since on average these assets were privatised at a discount of 30% on their market value, let’s not be hearing any nonsense about full compensation.

If you can stomach it, listen to Cameron praising the NHS as he buries it. The number of managers down? Of course, if you contract-out everything to the private sector the staff magically disappear from the payroll and become someone else’s problem. The numbers of doctors, dentists, midwives and operations all up? Well, what do you expect in a country with sky-rocketing population growth? More of your money spent on health care abroad? And since when was it the UK Government’s job to meet any shortfall in the health budgets of other countries (many of them more than rich enough to look after their own)? Thanks to the Big Society initiative, the donations that used to aid charity work overseas now have to keep services running at home, and all because the UK has made the political choice to pretend to be skint.

What’s the real story behind ‘public service reform’? A phrase to conjure with there. Not public service improvement, please note. Just reform. Change, for better or for worse. Unless you’re a contractor bidding for whole new tranches of profitable activity. That’s better. Definitely. And it should come as no surprise that donations to Tory funds follow. The taxpayer gives money to the contractor and the contractor gives some of it to the Tories, who respond with more of the taxpayer’s money. Surely, any firm donating money to a political party, especially one that is either in government or with a strong chance of becoming so in the near future, should automatically be barred from tendering for government contracts? Isn’t that obvious? Wriggling around the issue with talk of due process and administrative safeguards won’t make the smell of corruption go away.

There is regularly concern about the power of lobby groups and think-tanks but the concern is to some extent misplaced when the entire Government is in effect a lobby group for its funders. A party that governed in the public interest would as a matter of unshakeable principle subordinate capital to community, and not the other way around. We have the quasi-religion of ‘propertyism’, when what we need is economic democracy. And the only folk more opposed to that than the Tories are the other two big parties.

“We don’t preach about one nation but practise class war …we just get behind people who want to get on in life.”

And far too often do so, at the expense of what others hold dear. Nice for them, but being a bully isn’t nice. Cameron rounded on the nimbies in his party, and rightly so, even if for the wrong reason. For Dave accepts the insane policies of economic growth that drive the demand for housing that is correctly seen as offensive by those whose environment is being ruined. Let’s be clear. NIMBY is nowhere near good enough for us. Nobody’s back yard should be up for grabs.

Dave’s caring side showed through earlier in the week when he was asked by the Western Boring Views whether he’d back a cap on second homes: “Some of the controls people have suggested will drive out the investment and the building that is required to give these communities support. What is necessary in some cases is that we're not building enough homes that are affordable to local people. Getting rid of some of the planning controls. I think that will help those sorts of communities. Often the suggestion is why don’t you stop people selling their homes if someone else is going to use it as a second home. I think that is quite difficult to deliver in practice. It would be very bureaucratic. And I think it would rob a lot of people of the value of their homes.”

It’s impressive how delighted Cameron is that house prices in our rural communities are being driven up to meet the demands of the wealthy (such as those working ever so hard in the City of London at “socially useless” activities); and delighted too that more homes are to be built to meet those demands, despite the environmental damage this will do. It’s almost like listening to a Labour politician. Far from being an investment in the community, second homes mean that locals have to pay more for housing than they should and that the community has to find more funding than it should to offset the costs imposed by up-country predators.

When he turned to education, Dave talked a lot about success. But what he really meant was failure. Because in praising free schools he was praising the losers. Those who were too lazy (or arrogant) to engage in the democratic process to change the education policies of their local council. Or, having tried, had lost the argument. But now expect to be handed millions of pounds of public money anyway to experiment on children. If that’s a lesson in democracy, we can only hope no other countries are paying attention.

Is there anything wrong with ambition? Beware. Ambitious folk are, by definition, unhappy. At times there’s something not quite right about them, something swivel-eyed. When they don’t mind hurting others to get where they want to be. That’s not to say that folk shouldn’t do their best. Or even more – as Churchill insisted – if that’s what it takes to get the job done. But that’s something that should come naturally. Not from a sense of being driven, the sense of insecurity and fear on which the Tories feed. According to Cameron, “I’m not here to defend privilege, I’m here to spread it.” Which can mean either that he has no idea of how the English language works or that he wants a still more unequal society. Not good news either way. But either way a completely unsustainable position. The philosophy that has dominated the last 30 years is that income distribution doesn’t matter. It’s better to grow the cake than squabble over how to divide it. In a post-growth world, income distribution does matter because the cake won’t ever be getting any bigger. And that should cause any Tory sleepless nights. As well as the military, since income distribution is as much an inter-national as inter-class issue.

“This is the country that… fought off every invader for a thousand years.”

Here was a quote that had historian Dan Snow in stitches. We could ask what Cameron thinks William of Orange and his Dutch army were doing marching across Wessex in the autumn of 1688. Dave’s maths are as approximate as his history, given William the Bastard’s victory 946 years ago this evening, but we can let that one pass. A much better target would be the idea that ‘this’ country is that old. The UK didn’t exist 1,000 years ago, but are facts to be allowed to get in the way of all this Boy’s Own stuff? Arch-unionists will always denounce our part in the revival of the Wessex identity, claiming it as anachronistic, an undoing of a historical destiny to centralise (but only as far as the Channel, mind you). In fact, we are careful to distinguish Wessex, the geographical frame of reference through which we view our world, from whatever other state or states existed on its territory at particular dates in history.

Unionists, Cameron included, make no distinctions. One country. Always have been. Always will be. Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set. In contrast, we see nothing but a cause for disgust in the idea that Britain should be ’great’, if by that is meant having a sense of superiority over others, equally blind to their merits and to our faults. No chauvinism please, please, we’re too small a planet for that.

If you can’t have them punching the air for Britain, how about shedding a tear? Was it Dave’s masterstroke to mention his dead disabled son and bask in reflected Paralympic glory? Or just mawkish?

But that was merely the warm-up for Thursday’s unveiling of plans to mark the centenary of the First World War, to be orchestrated by Wiltshire MP Dr Andrew Murrison. A warmonger makes casual reference to the war to end all wars and it passes largely without comment. So does the fact that quite a few of Britain’s disabled athletes wouldn’t even be disabled if the PM had given peace a chance. It’s long been seen as sophisticated in establishment circles to embrace war, as a normal part of making the world safe for capital to do its business, at the expense of broken lives and squandered taxes. Now that the last men who fought in it are silent, the stage is set to re-present the First World War not as an avoidable human tragedy but as a great national triumph. And invite history to repeat itself yet again. For to commemorate what was an utterly pointless European civil war as Britain’s second finest hour and to elbow the context out of the way is to learn nothing. Cameron, a thoroughly revolting man, would have it so. Dulce et decorum est. (Best buy-in the bunting before prices rise.)

Money to Burn

In the midst of ‘austerity’, the Coalition has gone shopping for new submarines, from which to launch WMDs against the morally challenged. The purchase price comes to at least £20 billion: that’s £3 billion already spent, £3 billion committed and £14 billion awaiting clearance as the ‘now too costly to cancel’ argument. On top of this, there are annual running costs of £1.5 billion.

The Coalition’s challenge is to explain why this makes sense, to anyone but their own armchair A-bombers. Why an ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent achieves anything. Why grown men should patrol the oceans awaiting a surprise attack by an ‘enemy’ we no longer have, or maybe haven’t invented yet. Perhaps occasionally crossing paths with subs from other countries engaged in the same pointless activity. Protecting jobs in the defence industries – in this case largely outside Wessex – is clearly a significant political consideration but protecting jobs that do more harm than good only inhibits their replacement by better ones.

We’re told that replacing Trident is an ‘investment’. We’d like to know the annual rate of return then. Or some quantification of the extra security we gain that the Swedes or the Swiss lack, with such obviously devastating consequences for their quality of life. Given the resources the planet is called upon to sacrifice to this and similar projects, might it not be better value, as well as safer, just to heap the money in the middle of the street and set fire to it all?

Ardent for Some Desperate Glory?

George Galloway’s sensational win in the Bradford West by-election ought to be a wake-up call to all who have swallowed the line that there is no alternative to austerity at home and the waste of lives and treasure abroad. A one-off, it may be, but it demonstrates what can be done with sufficient commitment. Galloway is the first independent or smaller party candidate to have won a Parliamentary by-election from another party since Dick Taverne in 1973.

The new MP made it clear in his acceptance speech that he is above all a Labour politician, a Labour politician without the party he once knew, who wants to bring it back to its senses. He aspires to be Labour’s saviour, not its gravedigger. His ‘independence’ is a sham, his sham Respect party characterised by a total lack of respect for any long-term allegiance by its voters. His record as a constituency MP in east London was profoundly disappointing. There’ll be sound and fury enough, but what will be left when it ends?

Galloway’s anti-war rhetoric is commendable. What he has said needs to be said, and not only by him. Could he have won in Wessex? Probably not. We have a deep-rooted, unthinking sense here that the armed forces are a good thing, that their missions must be assumed to be for the best, and that any casualties are a cause for the nation to pull together and push on.

It’s an attitude we struggle to combat. Though almost everything else is cut, and cut hard, defence spending is justified to us on the grounds that it keeps the peace. So, judged against that stated purpose, every war, every shedding of blood, whether of British personnel or of their opponents, is a failed policy, one for which those responsible must be held to account. There is no victory in victory, where the opportunity for victory should never have been allowed to materialise.

Everyone’s Fault But

More ‘creative thinking’ from the banksters and their buddies...

And note well the comment from one respondent here, especially towards the end. Draining the Labour Party of its strength remains THE key task for genuine radicals today, including in Wessex, where it has no conceivable future if not as a parasite clinging to more powerful forces long-based outside our region.

Peace & Goodwill?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Will Wessex Flag Ban Cease?

We are the dispossessed. Dispossessed of our liberties by the Norman Conquest. Dispossessed of our livelihoods by the enclosures. And now dispossessed by the Coalition as it flogs our communities’ assets to pay bankers their bonuses. Bonuses then spent squeezing us out of our homeland to make way for commuter mansions and weekend cottages. The speech of King Alfred is mocked as that of rustic idiots, while quislings in our councils try to gag users of our dialect. Today is St Aldhelm’s Day, still unacknowledged by the UK authorities as the feast day of our patron saint, as important to Wessex as St Andrew is to Scotland and St David is to Wales.

At least we can freely fly the flag of Wessex, the Wyvern, recently added to the Flag Institute’s UK Flag Registry, the first step towards its long-awaited official recognition. Surely we can?

No. We can’t. We can freely fly the Scottish flag in Wessex. Or the Welsh flag. Or the Cornish. Or the national flag of any country anywhere, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. But it is technically an offence to fly the Wessex flag in Wessex, unless planning permission has been obtained. Which can cost up to £335 and has to be renewed every five years.

This month the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, announced his “intention to launch a consultation to allow a wider variety of important and historic flags to be flown by people keen to celebrate their local and national heritage and culture”. We can’t wait. The last time the rules were reviewed, under Labour, county and saints’ flags were deregulated but regional flags were not. East Anglia’s flag, dating from the early 1900’s, has continued to be widely flown regardless. The Wessex flag is also flown by a growing number of individuals and organisations, including local councils. Labour, control-freakery at Warp 10, refused to decriminalise these harmless expressions of identity and continued to levy what is in effect a ‘stealth tax’ payable on our patriotism.

Pickles too has chosen his words with care: “local and national heritage”, not ‘regional’. His press release tells us that the Coalition will “make it easier for communities wanting to celebrate the contribution of our armed forces by easing rules on flying local regimental flags. Other local flags, and projects like environmental awards, could also all be freed up from existing bureaucratic restrictions.” The man himself says, “If people want to celebrate something that is important to them by flying a flag they should be able to do so without having to fill in forms or paying town hall officials for the privilege. We will make it easier for people to celebrate their allegiance to a cause, a county or a local organisation if they choose to do so.” The ‘R’ word we are looking for is still conspicuously missing. Ominously, the press release ends with the warning that any flags outside the extended categories will “continue to be prohibited without express consent.” No doubt Pickles, deluded fool that he is, genuinely believes that the United Kingdom is a model of human rights and democracy. One where it is expected that folk will ‘celebrate’ the contribution of the Queen’s Own British Murderers to the needless deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. But that it must remain out of the question to allow an oppressed minority the freedom to fly our own flag in our own land.

We can and will fight back. Fly your Wyvern with pride. Drop Pickles a line. Let him know that our region is here to stay. And that he cannot fine or jail everyone who cares for Wessex.

UPDATE 1: here

UPDATE 2: here

UPDATE 3: here

The Infamous Five

In 1945, the Labour Party campaigned to destroy Beveridge’s 'five giants' of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. In 1997 and each subsequent election it tried the same trick, the latest pledges being to “secure the recovery”, “raise family living standards”, “build a high tech economy”, “protect frontline services”, and “strengthen fairness in communities”. All a bit desperate really.

It has been said that Labour deserved to lose last May, while the Conservatives did not deserve to win. That’s how it turned out, though happily for David Cameron the third party was waiting in the wings, to hand him the keys to Number 10 anyway. Since then, nostalgia for Labour has been growing daily as memory decays. Here then is a reminder of what we have lost, five reasons why we should detest the whole lot of them, five reasons to vote only for parties that advocate real change worth having.

1. Labour took power promising an ethical foreign policy. It left power embedded in American-led wars for oil. Illegal wars sold on the basis of lies. Tens of thousands have died needlessly, deaths for which Labour’s leaders, no less than their Conservative collaborators, must stand trial. A by-product has been the increasing re-militarisation of our own society, with death in war now once more normalised and any criticism of armed intervention smothered in the name of patriotism. Meanwhile, our arms trade continues to make a killing.

2. Labour’s onslaught on civil liberties was relentless. Historic freedoms of expression, association and assembly have all taken a terrible mauling, along with many guarantees of due process. The icing on this loathsome cake was a hideously expensive identity card scheme, expressing Labour’s view that the People belong to the State and not the State to the People. Overall, Labour’s actions, at home and abroad, have increased, not reduced, the terrorist threat.

3. Labour’s contempt for the environment has been a badge worn with pride. The challenges posed by runaway population growth have been met with reckless indifference. Only the collapse of the mortgage market, High Court challenges under European law, and finally a change of government have prevented the destruction of tens of thousands of acres of Green Belt and other protected countryside in Wessex. Half-hearted attempts at a sustainable transport policy, all stick and no carrot, provoked a predictable backlash.

4. Labour’s piper-payers called the tune. Propped up by rich donors as an insurance policy against the declining popularity of John Major’s Tories, New Labour continued the policies of privatisation and debt-based public finance that have got us where we are today. It did nothing as vital industries passed into the hands of international investors devoid of local loyalties. Labour’s leaders would sell their own grandmothers; they already have sold everyone’s grandchildren.

5. Labour once again bungled devolution, just as it did in 1979. This time it got Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London away but this was always the limit of its enthusiasm. It hitched itself to a set of unworkable regional boundaries inherited from the Tories, then deliberately obstructed grassroots movements in Cornwall, Mercia and Wessex pointing to a more promising way forward. In local government it refined the Tory policy of arrogant interference and dismantled public debate, substituting executive members and elected mayors for meaningful scrutiny and collective decision-making.

We attack Labour not because we are happy to see Wessex under Coalition rule. We are far from happy. We attack Labour, as we attack all the London-based parties, because each falls short of our vision for Wessex. We attack the other two for what they are. We attack Labour for trying to fool folk that it is what it demonstrably is not.

The Pageant of Death

“I have said that we must base our future thinking on the acceptance that nation states, individual, independent nations, can no longer really seriously influence the way in which the world develops. There is nothing that we or, I believe, any other single country can do on its own to affect these great trends of history and of the future… It seems to me that the accepted Clausewitzian doctrine of the military arm as an extension of national political power is dead and ought to be dead, and that we ought to be re-thinking, soldiers and politicians, the whole new interrelation between the political and the military establishment… I hope I may have stimulated the thought in some minds that some of the problems that occupy so much of our time and energy today are in fact false problems… We commit the familiar heresy, the Manichean heresy of creating enemies where none really exist in order to satisfy some irrational psychological need.”
Lord Chalfont, 1969

Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday. Across Wessex, and across the world, it was a time to reflect. To remember bad things that have happened to us in our collective past is meaningful, at least in part, for the opportunity it provides to learn from our experience. Yet learn we do not. The war to end all wars is still being fought and the Nobel Prize has been awarded to the Commander-in-Chief. War is peace.

One of the least forgivable actions of the Blair/Brown regime was to taint remembrance with controversy. The casualties of illegal and irrelevant wars now join those of just ones in thoughts and prayers. All those who take up arms against the Queen’s enemies are equally honoured, as custom dictates. Those who prefer to reject the crimes committed in our name may well ask, who is this bellicose woman, who makes enemies so easily?

Mainstream politicians have been very quick to wipe their bloody hands on the rest of us, in a brazen attempt to make us their accomplices. It began with cross-party talk about the 'military covenant', the supposed duty supposedly owed by society to those who supposedly defend the realm against the supposed forces of darkness. The phrase came from nowhere in 2000 when it was first codified in Army doctrine. It went unchallenged and now looks to be made binding upon members of the public. Under cover of concern that resources are inadequate to the military’s current mission and its aftermath, a sinister agenda is now fast infiltrating the civilian world. The spotlight is turned on military equipment, housing and healthcare. A better deal for those injured or bereaved. Those who dissent from the mission, those who would rather prevent injury and bereavement happening at all, are to be first sidelined and then persecuted for their conscientious opinions.

Gordon Brown commissioned the Davies report of 2008. Note carefully that this report was commissioned by a Labour government, a government determined to make the world a better place. Through ceaseless struggle and the glorification of violence. One of its key recommendations, soon acted upon, was Armed Forces Day, the brand new annual opportunity for the nation to express its gratitude to the services. MoD money was chucked at local councils willing to organise parades, to show off the glamorous hardware of war and permit recruiters to point yet more fools the way to dusty death.

Britain, like all the imperial powers of a past age, struggles to pull itself together. War is the unifying factor its politicians need. The Falklands War flowed from the incompetence of Mrs Thatcher’s government yet it ended up securing her a second term. Many of those Parliamentarians who in 2003 voted to wage aggressive war in the name of the British people have now retained their seats through two general elections. Brown, obsessed with ‘Britishness’, could have asked for no stronger symbol of it than ‘our boys and girls’ doing their bit for Queen and Country. Or at least for U.S. oil. It remains true, in F.D. Roosevelt’s words, that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. But fear, along with hate and arrogance, are tools that politicians and the media know how to wield. And will if we let them.

Can Wessex transcend its violent past and present? It will not be easy, for we have become to a high degree economically dependent on the manufacture or maintenance of weaponry and the training of service personnel. It all goes back a very long way. Even if scholars doubt that Alfred founded the Navy, it is a matter of record that Portsmouth Dockyard existed in the reign of Richard I, Devonport following in that of William III. The Army’s roots are shallower. It took up residence on Dartmoor in the early 1800s, at Aldershot in 1854, on Salisbury Plain in 1897. The RAF’s roots are necessarily shallower still, though it was here at the outset, and even before, His Majesty’s Balloon Factory at Farnborough dating from 1908. The MoD Procurement Executive came to Abbey Wood at Bristol in 1995.

Wessex has moved on before. The merchants of Bristol fought long and hard to save the centuries-old slave trade and with it the wealth that benefited not only them but indirectly much of Wessex society. Yet Bristol had its abolitionists too. Stroud has the one contemporary monument to abolition, the ‘Anti-Slavery Arch’. Wessex today can make a similar stand for peace. It can reclaim the land from beneath the tank tracks and the soldiers’ boots. For ours is an occupied region, doomed to re-enact the war preparations of Europe's unhappy centuries until saner counsel prevails. The MoD owns, leases or holds on licence over 100,000 acres of Wiltshire (12% of the county), 32,000 acres of Devon (14% of the Dartmoor National Park), 10,000 acres of Hampshire and 8,000 acres of Dorset. That it protects some of our finest landscapes, archæology and biodiversity from the rapacious grasp of agronomic and development interests is beside the point. Less bad is not the same as good and the money it all costs could be doing much more of the latter. Of course, there will be those who argue that Wessex Regionalists should back the cosy status quo in our part of the world but that is a low aspiration for a transformative party.

The recent Strategic Defence and Security Review marks a step towards the necessary rethinking but it remains an excuse for inertia while the assumptions of an ex-empire predominate. The UK continues to support the fourth largest military budget in the world, yet there is no reason to believe that it is any more vulnerable to attack than those countries whose budgets are smaller. Si vis pacem, para bellum – if you wish for peace, prepare for war – has been the universal advice of generals throughout the ages. It would be, wouldn’t it? We flatter ourselves that we are an intelligent species but the Campaign Against The Arms Trade has estimated that every minute the world will spend £1 million on arms while in the same time 15 children will die of poverty, famine or disease. The UK has become the world’s second largest arms exporter while lecturing others on peace and stability.

The real challenge of security is to be tough on violence and tough on the causes of violence. It is not, and must not become, what the London parties seek to make it, a smokescreen for the remilitarisation of society, for renewing the backbone of centralism. It is said that where there’s a will there’s a way. In the case of defence, there’s a way sure enough. For now, the popular and political will, at home and abroad, is what’s sadly lacking.