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.

Wilful Neglect

We try, within the limits of our resources, to report and comment on what’s happening in Wessex.  That’s to say, what’s actually happening and not what we or anyone else would like to be happening. 

Political correctness has been described as a war on noticing.  The blinkers were well and truly on in Oxfordshire recently, judging by today’s report into child sexual exploitation there.  But not only there.  (Bristol has also been mentioned.)  Oxfordshire County Council’s former Leader told the BBC that his authority ‘is not another Rotherham’.  Well, only relatively: 373 youngsters, predominantly from Oxford, groomed and exploited over the course of 15 years, as compared with 1,400 in the Yorkshire place.  But what’s yet to come to light?  A senior investigative source told The Guardian (a London newspaper): “If you think you haven’t got a problem in your city or town, you are just not looking for it.”

Not looking for it.  And even if you are, looking in the wrong place.  The BBC’s coverage and the reactions of London politicians have been remarkably uniform.  It’s ‘the system’ that’s broken.  Cameron offered a new offence of ‘wilful neglect’, promising to jail social workers who don’t notice.  (The tabloids are hovering: social workers are as damned for what they notice mistakenly as for anything they miss.)  For Labour, Yvette Cooper bizarrely insisted that nothing was more important than introducing compulsory sex education in schools.  It’s everybody’s fault then.  Police.  Social workers.  Educators.  Councillors.  A report speaks up for the abused and ignored girls and all the establishment can do is put the spotlight yet again on the girls and how they are treated.  It’s everybody’s fault but the perpetrators’.  Let’s not mention them.  Let’s not take their communities apart with a crowbar and expose what it is that produces the same familiar pattern, again and again.

No, let’s not.  There’s a higher priority.  Let’s go after those who by their war on noticing have allowed the problem to fester, those whose soixante-huitard sociological prejudices have warped their ability to understand the individuals of which society is composed. 

Let’s try a zero-based budgeting approach to social work.  Why do we have it?  Even the term is vaguely Victorian.  Nurses nurse, police police, teachers teach.  Social workers?  Work socially?  Why not scrap the entire profession and replace it with one or more professions defined by what they actually do and seek to achieve by doing?  The post-Climbié split between children’s services, linked to education, and welfare services for vulnerable adults, linked to health care and housing, may have some distance still to travel before reaching a settled form.  Especially in an era of constrained resources where questions about focus and value for money are unavoidable.  A public interested in integrated outcomes won’t care if social work as such disappears in the process because it finds it unable to describe itself.

There are some common perceptions of social workers that they have done little to dispel.  That instead of responding to a political agenda they think society should resource and empower them to pursue their own.  Or that they have no incentive to solve society’s ills because this would do them out of a job.  Or that, in contrast to the tightly defined roles of 50 or 100 years ago, their role is now so all-encompassing that their ambitions are bound to be undeliverable.

For example, the Wikipedia article ‘History of social work’ asserts that “Social work has its roots in society to deal with poverty (relative poverty)”.  That’s a start but it’s wholly inadequate to describe the actual range of activities that social services today undertake.  Problems associated with age or disability, for example, are problems associated with age or disability.  Lack of money worsens them but having money won’t fundamentally make them go away.  It’s also far too easy to confuse social services with social security, one more area of government where assumptions tend to have a very long shelf-life.

The financial and political reality is that social services will be expected to do more with less, and failing that, to do less with less.  Politically and professionally, the challenge is how to do that with the least possible harm.  A herd of sacred cows is likely to face slaughter along the way.  And that's an outcome that may be long overdue.

Losing Direction

Last week, plans were announced for a Bucks / Oxon / Northants combined authority, a move that raises important questions of local and regional identity.  We’re assured that this is just a practical measure of co-operation that won’t affect day-to-day services but these things have a habit of acquiring their own momentum.

The case for a combined authority is that it might unlock billions of pounds of public spending.  It can make the case for new infrastructure, such as an Oxford-Cambridge expressway or completion of the East-West Rail Link.  But can’t the councils already do that?  For better or for worse, it could open up for development those relatively sparsely-populated areas that form Oxfordshire’s historic boundaries with its eastern and northern neighbours.  These are areas that have remained undeveloped because they’ve been on the edge, although the edge may be where they’re comfortable being.

One danger of the realignment is that past investment in infrastructure will be under-valued, with Oxford’s strategic position in the Upper Thames Valley ignored.  With its M4, M40 and A34 links and its close connections with Swindon, Newbury and Reading, Oxford sits far more naturally within a Wessex region looking west to Bristol and south to the Solent.  For starters, consider where the Environment Agency, the BBC or the NHS ambulance service place it.  Whatever happened to joined-up government?

There’s no doubt that combined authorities are in favour with Whitehall right now – and on a cross-party basis – but that ought to set alarm bells ringing.  Not being directly elected, their mandate is at one remove from voters.  And if what they do is ‘unlock’ money from Whitehall, how did the money come to be locked up in the first place?

It’s our money, paid in taxes to London.  We shouldn’t need begging-bowl consortia of councils to make the case for having it drip-fed back to us.  A proper, directly elected regional assembly – such as the one Wessex Regionalists demand, and Wessex is 8 million strong – would keep our region’s taxes as of right and spend them on the priorities that matter to us, not the ones handed down from Whitehall.

Too remote?  Not as remote as Whitehall, while the ‘headroom’ above county councils would ensure their continued existence as local bodies directly accountable for their decisions.  Something that ad hoc groupings cannot.  Refusing to think on a truly regional basis is a fault that will come back to bite local government badly.

First Impressions

Colin Bex, WR Prospective Parliamentary Candidate, was out in Witney today testing the ground for a possible challenge to David Cameron. No final decision has been made on the choice of constituency to be fought but the Leader of the Opposition does make a very good target. Voters who've had enough of the Government's voodoo economics will be thinking twice about an alternative out to outdo it in nastiness.

We met at the Angel, a pleasant pub in the Market Square, chatting to locals about their discontents before we got down to the main business of the day. Down on the High Street, with myself waving the Wyvern flag to attract interest, Colin handed leaflets to passers-by and engaged with their reactions.

The idea of Wessex was clearly attractive, especially to older folk who feel robbed of history itself by the Blairite project of 'modern' Britain. Being lumped in for regional purposes with Kent - on the other side of London - was unpopular too. There was some puzzlement over boundaries from those whose idea of Wessex is shaped too sharply by Thomas Hardy but once the local background was explained all doubts were dispelled. Oxfordshire was where Wessex started, where its first capital is recorded and where the Wyvern itself first flew as the battle standard of our kings. The town of Witney owes its existence to the Bishops of Winchester, who built one of their 24 palaces there in the Middle Ages.

Older voters and first-timers alike welcomed the possibility of a WR candidate, whose presence would at the very least widen their choice and at best provide real colour to what was expected to be a generally drab election campaign. David Cameron was seen as pre-occupied with posturing at Prime Minister's Questions and far too busy to be an effective local representative with time for his constituents, their problems or their views. Life-long Labour voters promised 'never again' and grasped at the opportunity to back a fresh alternative. With its Leveller, Chartist and William Morris connections, the Witney constituency has a radical heritage second to none. The WR message of local self-determination and freedom from London diktat met with particularly strong approval from all sides.

Heavy rain after lunch forced a change of plan. The afternoon was spent in Chipping Norton and Burford collecting local information, such as town maps and bus timetables. If Witney is the chosen seat, Colin intends to campaign by public transport, speaking to voters on the move. And in stark contrast to David Cameron's token greenism, there won't be a chauffeur-driven car coming along behind.