South By Southwest

Guest contribution by Nick Xylas, WR Council member and prospective candidate for Bristol City Council, Eastville Ward

As someone who has lived in both Wessex and the American South, I can’t help but be struck by certain similarities between the two.  Both are primarily rural and agricultural regions.  Both have low-status accents that provide a lazy comedic shorthand for ignorance and backwardness.  And both have areas that have been hurt economically by the loss of their textile industries, whether it’s the Cotswolds or South Carolina, where I lived for 6 years.

There is, however, one major difference in their regionalist traditions.  The main regionalist / Celtic nationalist parties in the Disunited Kingdom are all on the Centre Left.  The Southern patriot movement, on the other hand, is a creature of the fringe far Right.  That master of the political dog whistle, Ronald Reagan, used “states’ rights” as a euphemism for segregation: an extension of Nixon’s Southern strategy to woo mostly (though not exclusively) Southern racists, who had abandoned the Democratic Party over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, into the Republican fold.  The success of this strategy can be seen today in the current popularity of Donald Trump, who has become the Republican front runner by proposing to deport Mexican immigrants en masse and to strip American Muslims of their constitutional rights (though it should be pointed out that Trump leads a very crowded field, and only enjoys the support of some 25-30% of Republican primary voters). 

As a result of this, support for the right of the federal government to override the will of individual states has become a totem of liberal orthodoxy, and there is no left-of-centre decentralist tradition to speak of.  Anyone on the Left supporting states’ rights in a literal, rather than a euphemistic sense, is an aberration: an isolated phenomenon like the handful of monarchists that exist in the USA, in defiance of that country’s entire history.

Like Wessex Regionalists and Celtic nationalists, the Southern patriots identify themselves through the use of a flag.  In this case, they use the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, commonly (though incorrectly) referred to as the Confederate Flag.  Based on the Scottish saltire, to reflect the Scots-Irish heritage of many Southerners, it was incorporated into the state flag of Georgia in 1956, two years after the Brown v Board of Education court decision that led to the desegregation of American schools and, since then, has become a symbol of defiance against Yankee destruction of “traditional Southern values”.  The flag was still flying outside the South Carolina Statehouse in the state capital, Columbia, when I lived there, but public protests have since forced its removal.

There have been attempts to forge a Southern identity that isn’t entirely based on racism.  Some revisionist historians have suggested that the “recent unpleasantness” (the tongue-in-cheek way that Southerners refer to the American Civil War, aka the War of Northern Aggression) wasn’t really about slavery at all, but about supporting a confederal over a federal form of government.  This seems to be based on wishful thinking, however, as it completely ignores the fact that every single Confederate state included a clause in its constitution protecting the institution of slavery and prohibiting its abolition.

Demographics in the South are changing.  Whilst de facto segregation continued long after its de jure abolition, the old racial barriers are breaking down, and the younger generation are far more accepting of a diversity of races, religions, nationalities, genders and sexual identities.  The current Republican governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, is a woman of Indian extraction, elected by the general public against stiff opposition from the good ole boy network within the state party.  The challenge will be to reflect this new reality without erasing the South’s identity and heritage altogether.

Exceeding Expectations

We’ve always enjoyed watching Mebyon Kernow’s progress and learning from what they get right, or very occasionally wrong.  Our association dates back to the 70s, when the founding generation of MK members was still at the helm.  It was the era of grainy, photocopied leaflets and duplicated magazines, produced in a political climate that is barely conceivable today.  British nationalism wasn’t the preserve of UKIP.  It was the mainstream consensus and any questioning of parliamentary sovereignty or cultural uniformity was treated to torrents of abuse.  Even Cornish nationalist arguments struggled to escape the confines of a unionist past, to cast off deference to the Duchy and loyalty to Liberalism.  A web of self-censorship was the accustomed response to an uncomprehending electorate.

The 80s saw a reaction against the colonels and the county set – with new policies that were radically Left-wing, but not exceptionally Cornish – amid great reluctance to accept that all parties, and all communities, have a Left and a Right.  Today MK has settled down to a synthesis that reflects where the wider world has got to.  Still radical, but more confident in asserting a Cornish dimension because Cornishness can now be much less defensive about itself.  The flag is flown widely, as Cornwall’s flag, no longer accused of being simply the flag of a political movement.  The language is used in schools, in local government offices and for tourism purposes, not so harrumphingly derided as a sign of deliberate division at odds with a gloriously united kingdom.  This year saw it praised by folk as diverse as comedian Ed Rowe and poet Benjamin Zephaniah.  Cornwall is changing, because peripheral Britain is changing and becoming a place more at ease with itself.

There’s one very big problem though.  Cultural confidence hasn’t led to political confidence and without that Cornwall continues to be subject to colonial-style government, both externally in terms of powers denied and internally in terms of aspirations curbed.  All of that is evident in the feeble ‘Devolution Deal’ its political and business elites have been handed by the London regime.  MK Leader Dick Cole commented that “From our perspective, it is not ‘democratic’ to give more influence to unelected bodies with limited democratic legitimacy such as the Local Enterprise Partnership, and it is also extremely disappointing that Cornwall has failed to secure any new powers over planning or housing.” 

The London regime remains adamant that devolved powers are only available to those areas willing to give 100% support to its own objectives.  One of these is de-democratisation – handing powers to unelected bodies and replacing what democratic debate does exist with elected mayors and fewer councillors.  Another is the whole ‘turn your environment into cash’ scam of growth and development.  Devolving only the power to lock yourself in to someone else’s vision would cause riots in Scotland or Wales.  So why are there none in Cornwall or the English regions?

To be fair, these things do take decades to reach fruition.  It took Wessex 40 years to go from first steps to legal recognition of our flag.  It will take a while yet for politics to pass from the hands of a generation that can’t see the point of what we’re about (or even views it as dangerous) to one that can’t see why we should wait any longer.  That’s why, in Gramscian terms, achieving cultural hegemony is so important: it makes political change easier, to some extent automatic, while without it political success can only be ephemeral.

The current issue of Cornish Nation reports on the defection to MK of Michael Bunney, a much-respected member of the Labour Party and former county councillor.  In a statement to the media, Michael said: “After 22 years of membership of the Labour Party, and having been a parliamentary candidate, I have taken the decision to leave Labour and join MK…  In so many areas of policy, the one-size-fits-all approach from London has damaged Cornwall.  Planning policy is ruining our beautiful landscape.  House building targets are enforced on us by Westminster and yet there still aren’t houses for local people and the Government prevents Cornwall from tackling the problems of second homes.  Economic policy has enforced cuts in Cornwall, while vast sums are spent on infrastructure projects elsewhere, such as HS2…  MK exists to represent all the people of Cornwall, whether they were born here or have chosen to make our beautiful Duchy their home.  I believe it is time for a new generation to join the campaign for Cornwall and that only MK can unite all people in working for the best interests of our local communities.”

Those east of the Tamar may well be asking how they too can have some of this.  Where can they find a political party that is open to new ideas benefitting the place where they live and the people who live there?  As far as the shires of Wessex are concerned, they need look no further.  We’re here for them all, to be for Wessex no less than what MK strives to be for Cornwall.

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.

A Wealth of Possibilities

Last week, BBC1 aired a programme called Millionaire Basement Wars.  It described how, over the past decade, some 2,000 new basements have been excavated beneath high-value properties in central London, most notably in the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea.  The buildings are often listed, so there’s little scope to extend up or out.  That only leaves down.

Some basements are merely one-storey.  Some are two-storey.  Some, known as ‘icebergs’, are bigger than the house above them.  They provide room for all those essentials that wouldn’t otherwise fit.  The cinema.  The gym.  The sauna.  The swimming pool.  The hairdressing, manicure and pedicure suite.  The garage for five classic cars.  In one case, the developer provided an indoor, underground waterfall, 30 feet high.  Why?  Rich people get bored easily, he explained, so they need something to talk about.

That’s the problem with extreme wealth.  It’s so boring.  There’s a point beyond which increased wealth doesn’t make you any happier.  All it does is deprive others of the happiness that that wealth, better distributed, could have given them.  Economic efficiency without social efficiency doesn’t deliver the greatest good of the greatest number.  ‘Trickle-down economics’ just distorts priorities, increasing the production of, say, caviar rather than hospitals.

Saying this isn’t ‘envy’ at all.  Envy is wanting a better life for yourself and expecting somebody else to do something about it.  Wanting a better life for everyone isn’t envy.  It’s justice.  The Scandinavians have a phrase for their supportive social welfare system that explains why they also have a culture of enterprise: ‘secure enough to dare’.

Of course, the same is true of power.  When you think what could be done, locally and regionally, with just a fraction of the taxes we send up to London every year to subsidise the infrastructure of imaginary money-making, it’s enough to leave you feeling genuinely sick.

We’ve allowed ourselves to become the easy victims of a narrative of aspiration.  One in which the minor folk turn on each other and not on those whose industrial-scale grasping is what makes us minor.  ‘Hard-working families’ has become the must-have soundbite for all politicians with ambition.  You can almost hear the anxious twitching of curtains and the rumbustious rustling of today’s Daily Mail.  There are two things wrong with it.  One, naturally. is the idea that only families count.  That those working too hard to have time to form a family contribute nothing to society.  The other is that ‘hard work’ is easily recognisable.  It isn’t.

In the commercial sector, hard work will get you nowhere if what you’re working hard on isn’t profitable.  It’s the quality – that's to say, the relevance – of what you’re doing that matters, not its quantity.  Working smarter, not harder, is the key to productivity and profitability.  All economy, as Karl Marx noted, is economy of labour time.  In 1932 Bertrand Russell wrote a very perceptive essay entitled In Praise of Idleness, in which he pointed out that ultimately the purpose of work is to create the ability to stop doing it.  That in turn poses other questions.  How much of the work we currently do is necessary work?  How much of it would we miss if it weren’t there? 

Arguably, a lot, perhaps most, of the work we do is highly damaging, psychologically, socially and environmentally, in which case our quality of life would be greatly improved not by economic growth but by economic shrinkage.  High net immigration is a sign of an unhealthy economy, one that is taking more than its fair share of the world’s resources and so dragging in the inhabitants of other countries who have come here to follow their wealth.  Internal migration, with London as the magnet, is another aspect of the same phenomenon, driven in that case by the power that London has to tax the provinces for its benefit.  The only solutions that the London parties can imagine – like HS2 – do not enable those provinces to serve themselves but only reinforce metropolitan dominance.  Underpinning them all is the silly idea that we can have more growth in total, let alone that we need it or want it.

We can see the outlines of a better solution forming but before we examine it further, let’s remind ourselves how irrelevant the London parties are to it.

The Blue Tories have been so busy lately promising give-aways it’s a wonder they’ve not been arrested for corrupt electoral practices.  Right-to-Buy is always a vote-winner because who’s going to vote against free money?  Since the super-rich don’t pay tax, it’s the squeezed middle who’ll foot the bill and they always vote for the Blue Tories anyway.  Plus, they can be pacified by exempting up-to-one-million-pound properties from Inheritance Tax.  Those whose homes have accelerated in value while they sat back and did nothing will enrich their children and consider it all their own really ‘hard work’.  As we’ve shown, half of all Inheritance Tax receipts come from London and the south-eastern corner of England.  It’s the taxes of every other corner that have created the boom economy there and it’s the taxes of every other corner too that will make up the shortfall in UK Government revenue if no tax is paid on homes up to £1 million.

Do we have the right to be angry?  Wait and see.

The Yellow Tories’ pitch to the public is that they’re the party to rein-in the extremes.  Without their moderating presence we could see radical change.  Cameron-Farage.  Or even Miliband-Sturgeon.  Time was when the Liberals viewed themselves as radicals.  Middle-of-the-road radicals maybe, but at least nominally radical.  There’s a strong possibility though that they’ve misread the times in which they now operate.  There’s a thirst for change, with Scotland leading the charge.  And that thirst for change operates in the wider context of a European revolt against Wall Street corporate colonialism and its dismantling of democracy.  The way money is being shovelled into the Purple Tories shows how far even the old guard have lost trust in the established parties and want things shaken up, just a little.

The Greens are promising to build 500,000 homes, against the 200,000 promised by both Blues and Reds.  (The Yellows want 300,000, including at least ten new garden cities.)  In the areas under pressure, there isn’t enough derelict land to provide anywhere near those sort of figures.  So if you’re not comfortable with seeing the Wessex countryside transformed into New West London, that’s yet another option to cross off the list.  What’s “green” about turning (mostly) greenfield sites into half a million houses?

The Red Tories look every bit as irrelevant as the rest.  When Miliband tries to position them as the voice of working people throughout the UK, it’s a muffled echo from the 70s that won’t do any more.  Who are really the selfish nationalists?  The SNP, who speak for Scotland and ignore the other home nations (while practising a genuine internationalism)?  Or Labour, who speak for the UK and ignore the rest of Europe (while boldly going wherever the White House directs)?  Labour are trying to tap into a sense of British-based solidarity that died with the industries Thatcher slaughtered.  For three decades they’ve been trying to get it back.  They can’t admit they’ve failed.  And that’s why they’re being superseded.

We look forward to the continuing wipe-out of the Unionist parties in Scotland.  In Wales, it will take longer.  Despite Leanne Wood’s master stroke in describing the London parties as four shades of grey, the fact is that the Welsh seem to like their bondage too much to break free of it right now.  It is, however, only a matter of time.  Renewed interest in regionalism and federalism within England points to a generalised demand for self-government that will not stop at Celtic borders.  And will not be content with any cobbled-together nonsense of metro mayors or combined authorities either.

What we’re seeing is a convergence of several themes.  Perhaps the most pivotal is the rise to real power of the first generation who lived through Thatcherism as young adults, who watched the kindlier world of their childhood being shattered by brash London loadsamoneys, backed up by a semi-fascist State with no respect for local democracy.  (A State that aped Labour instead of really challenging it.)  No wonder there’s a thirst for change: vengeance has been long awaited.

Such change requires a framework for action, one which the idea of a Europe of small nations and historic regions readily provides.  The scale of change throughout Europe over the next decade, as one country copies another, could well match that which followed the fall of the Berlin Wall.  This time it will be the turn of the old imperial states of western Europe and the smug elites they defend.  The only role here for dinosaurs like France, Spain or the UK is to keep getting in the way until patience can be contained no longer.

At the regional level, and that of small nations of equivalent scale, there’s a lot of work to be done, in creating new institutions, breathing life into long-suppressed identities, and in taking back our stolen wealth and power from London and its co-conspirators.  At the European level, there’s even more to be done.  To break the economic and political stranglehold of the USA and awake to our common interest as Europeans.  To take the banking system apart and bring to justice the thieves who run it.  To create the climate of thought that will allow our vital industries and services to be taken back into common ownership with little or no compensation payable to those who have sucked them dry.  To end private landed estates not through the minor irritant of taxation but through a radical re-evaluation of title.

Those who wait for the Labour Party to even consider such a programme will wait for ever.  The programme is one that needs to be more radical than anything on Attlee’s agenda in 1945.  Even to do as much as Attlee did is impossible in today’s Britain.  It won’t be done at the British level, because the British level is now irrelevant.  It’s a job for the Europe of a Hundred Flags.  Change will come about through the growth of nationalist and regionalist parties that are not afraid to define London as their adversary.  Not the London of ordinary Londoners but the London of assumptions, assumptions of innate superiority in politics, economics and culture.

Labour cannot deliver that.  Labour have their sights on way too many marginals in London and the surrounding shires to ever be credible as an authentic voice for marginalised Britain.  Labour have no plans to cut off London’s drip-feed of our tax money.  Labour have no plans to abolish entire Whitehall departments in favour of genuine localism.  They have no plans to get even with the parasitical City of London.  They have no plans to shut down huge swaths of London's cultural funding and disperse it across the UK.  That is why the nationalist and regionalist parties must do all of this for them.

Toward a Truly Free Market

Guest contribution by Nick Xylas, WR Council member

The following is a review of Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Health Care, Deficits, and More, by John C. Médaille, published in 2011 by ISI Books of Wilmington, Delaware, USA.

When in my wife’s home town of Weirton, West Virginia, it is almost impossible not to notice the words “WEIRTON STEEL – AN ESOP COMPANY” written in giant lettering on the roof of the steel mill that dominates the town.  Weirton Steel was, for a long time, West Virginia’s biggest employer.  But these days, the mill is operating at less than a third of its total capacity and that mantle has been passed to Wal-Mart, a company, owned by the obscenely wealthy Walton family, which pays its employees so little that new entrants are given guides on how to claim welfare benefits in order to supplement their wages.  It brutally illustrates a theme running throughout this important book from John Médaille, namely that capitalism, far from being socialism’s polar opposite, inevitably leads to it when left unchecked.

Médaille is one of the leading advocates in America today of distributism, a political philosophy rooted in Catholic social teaching.  Whilst he can in no way be accused of running away from his Catholicism, Toward a Truly Free Market is written for a general audience, so the smell of incense is not as overpowering as it can be with some distributist works.

The first section of the book provides a general overview of economics.  Médaille prefers the term 'political economy', the name by which it was usually known until some time in the last century, when it changed as a result of economists’ desire to paint their discipline as a natural science like physics, rather than the result of conscious choices by governments and societies.  Speaking as someone for whom the business pages of the newspaper may as well be written in Estonian, it is testament to Médaille’s skills as a teacher that I was able to understand most of it.

There then follows a series of chapters on specific topics relating to the problems caused by morality-free capitalist economics and how to fix them.  The key doctrine, on which all the rest hinge, is that of the just wage.  Médaille avoids giving a specific figure for this wage, as that will be different in different times and places.  Rather, he bases it on general principles: that it should be enough to support a family’s basic needs on a single full-time income; that it should be enough to also allow that family to save money instead of living pay cheque to pay cheque; and that it should give them security against enforced periods of unemployment (sickness, layoffs etc) with minimal recourse to welfare benefits.

Finally, the book considers in detail two examples of distributism in practice: the region of Emilia-Romagna, on which more shortly; and the Mondragon co-operative.  The latter is a network of workers’ co-operatives in Spain with over 100,000 members and €33 billion in assets.  The survey of its activities provides the launch pad for a more general overview of the co-operative movement and of ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Program) companies, which give workers a stake in their ownership.  Médaille warns that there exist fake ESOPs such as Enron, created primarily as a tax dodge, but commends the real thing (I’m afraid I don’t know which category Weirton Steel falls into).  He also sees strong unions as vital for worker participation in the economy, though as he is writing within an American milieu, the restoration of the guilds doesn’t play as large a part in his thoughts as it traditionally did for English distributists such as G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

There isn’t space in a review to do justice to the full range of Médaille’s arguments, but two things particularly commend it to Wessex Regionalists for me.  The first is the chapter on the role of government.  Médaille vigorously defends the ability of government to provide for the common good, as against the current political orthodoxy, which sees it as an impediment to the ultimate goal of capitalism without democracy (hence the current round of secret trade negotiations seeking to give corporations the right to sue governments for any regulations they deem too onerous).  His philosophy of government revolves around what he terms a horizontal and a vertical axis, represented by the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity respectively.  Solidarity means the creation of networks between different sectors of society, and different governments.  It particularly means the ‘preferential option for the poor’, examining all policies in the light of how they affect the most vulnerable in society.  Subsidiarity means that no decision should be taken at a higher level of government that could be implemented at a lower one.  It means both local control and local funding, since funding dispensed from central government to local communities can appear to be 'free' money, leading to irresponsibility in the decision-making process.  These principles have always been at the heart of Wessex Regionalist thinking, and it is a pleasure to see them so eloquently expressed.

The section on Emilia-Romagna, the Italian region centred on Bologna, will also be of interest to readers of this blog.  35% of the GDP of the region is supplied by co-operatives, but unlike Mondragon, where the co-operatives operate like divisions of a single company, the Emilian co-operatives are independent firms, of varying sizes, all supported by a regional development agency (ERVET) and the National Confederation of Artisans (CNA).  Unfortunately, the questions that Wessex Regionalists will naturally be asking themselves at this point are not ones that the book really concerns itself with.  How did co-operatives become such a large part of the economy?  How big a part did Italy’s decentralised system of government, with strong regions, play in allowing them to flourish in this way?  Which parties and political groupings supported the development and which opposed it (Médaille does mention that the Fascists suppressed the co-operatives in the 1930s)?  Nonetheless, I commend this book as a starting point that will hopefully lead Wessex Regionalists towards further investigation of Emilia-Romagna as a potential model for our region’s economy, rather than Wessex becoming one more plantation in the global slave state.

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.

Scotland the Bold

How’s this for a map to follow?  Not perfect, indeed, but certainly perfectible, as much for Wessex as for Scotland.

We too have the ability to wake up and grasp a better world.  Let's give it a try…

Reasons to be Regional

Two common objections to regionalism are that another tier of government means more politicians and more cost.  It needn’t in fact mean either.

First though, let’s be a bit more broad-minded.  We need government to be more effective and efficient – but to achieve that you need to invest, politically in the right people and financially in the right resources.

More politicians aren’t necessarily a bad thing.  Fewer politicians mean fewer ways to scrutinise government and hold it to account.  Over the past 50 years we have seen repeated cuts in the number of local councillors, in the range of services they oversee and in the power that ordinary, backbench councillors have to make decisions.  So, to sum up, we have less democracy.  We have less ability as voters to influence what public money is spent on.

More cost isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Cost is not the same thing as waste.  If we want better services, or even services no worse than those we have now, then they have to be paid for.  But a system of government that pretends it can reduce costs by centralising decisions is missing something.  It is missing the fact that centralised solutions tend to be standardised solutions that might not be what we need or want.  They will be shaped by what the centre thinks we should have, and the centre’s thought in turn will be shaped by lobbies whose outlook we may not share.

Back to the devolution debate.  Politicians are looking for easy answers, by empowering existing local councils, or at worst setting up joint authorities, or maybe sweeping up all the powers into the hands of a metro-mayoral Caesar that bankers can trust to do the right thing.  But localism, as we have learnt, is a lie.  Localities are only being empowered to make the decisions that the centre would have made anyway if it had had direct control.  And even in theory, there are practical limits to localism because big, strategic decisions are beyond the capacity of a fragmented local government system.  Councils aren’t going to get powers to re-shape the NHS or the railways.  They aren’t going to be able to make laws or set income tax rates.  Is the devolution debate in England a sham, just like localism?

Of course it is, if a new tier of government is ruled out on ideological grounds.  Had that been the starting point, the Scottish Parliament and the London, Northern Ireland and Welsh Assemblies could never have been created.  The number that matters isn’t the number of tiers.  It’s the overall cost of government – and the extent to which government is seen to deliver what it promises.

Will regionalism mean more politicians?  That, ultimately, is a political choice.  One way forward is to argue that if two-thirds of decisions are moved out of Westminster into regional hands, you then cut the number of MPs by two-thirds to match.  Since most Assembly Members would live within commuting distance of the assembly venue, there’d be none of the nonsense of flipped second homes in London necessitated by having a constituency hundreds of miles away.  (In a smaller House of Commons, everyone would get a place to sit down if they turned up for a popular debate, which isn’t possible today.)

So on to cost.  Having a regional assembly will cost us more, won’t it?  Here are five reasons why not.  It comes down to political will.  A Wessex assembly is likely to be run by politicians with enough sense not to impose unnecessary burdens on the electorate and so the savings below are savings they are likely to make.  They are savings that an assembly government led by the Wessex Regionalist Party would certainly prioritise.

1.         Moving government out of London cuts costs

That's why much of the back office work is already done in places like Wales or Northumbria.  Labour and property costs are lower there and there is very limited need to travel back and forth to London.  But devolution means the top jobs have to move out too.  Some of the mandarins who currently advise Ministers in Whitehall will instead be advising a Wessex government.  These are jobs that command big salaries.  That spending power is then put into the Wessex economy, not the London economy.  It’s also worth noting that savings aren’t confined to the political sphere – the media would also have to become less London-obsessed and there would be a bigger role for the regional newsrooms and production centres busy following debates in the regional assemblies.  Lobbyists too would need to decentralise.

2.         Integrating the region manages costs better

Regional administration already exists.  What is missing is regional government.  Most government employees do not work in London.  The work of government is carried on in the regions through a tangle of quangos and local offices, all of which could be rationalised as part of an integrated regional government.  Something similar happened in local government in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the various Improvement Commissioners, School Boards, Boards of Guardians and the like were replaced by unified councils levying a unified rate.  Integration saves money.  The Welsh Government has merged three of its environmental quangos into one and delegated some of its own powers to it in order to save £158 million over the first ten years.  That’s money that can then be spent on services or used to reduce taxation.

It’s often said that an assembly will need an expensive new headquarters.  That’s not how public sector property works.  The stock of public buildings turns over constantly as older buildings are replaced by new ones with lower running costs.  Eventually, the same money will be spent on new buildings by the UK as by a Wessex assembly.

Meanwhile, Wessex civil servants will go on working in the same places that they worked as UK civil servants.  Assembly meetings can be rotated around our leading cities if that’s seen as a way to prevent any one of them fancying itself as a new London.  Winchester is our historic capital, Bristol is our largest city, Bath already has its Assembly Rooms.  But if we’re serious about a new, decentralised approach to government then we need to re-think the whole idea of a capital city.  Along the lines of a network that allows all areas to have a share in the work of governing Wessex.  That means departments locating where their main customers are, or the geographical focus of their work.  It means politicians being willing to travel and able to see things not just from their own constituents’ point of view. 

This isn’t revolutionary.  Germany and the Netherlands are two examples of countries where the work of government is shared out.  Germany’s Constitutional Court is in Karlsruhe, not Berlin – deliberately distanced from the other institutions of government.  The Dutch capital is Amsterdam but the seat of government is The Hague; the broadcasting centre is Hilversum.

3.         A democratic region delivers better value for money

The point of devolution is the power to do things differently.  Not only does regional administration already exist, so too does a regional budget, even if it’s currently split between numerous government departments.  A Wessex assembly can see to it that the money is used wisely, setting its own priorities, which may well differ from those handed down from Whitehall.  With law-making powers too, an assembly can really tailor services to what its area needs.

4.         A strong region can defend its budget

When Michael Gove was Education Secretary, he dreamt up a plan to fund every school in England directly from Whitehall, cutting out local education authorities.  The bargaining power of a single LEA against the might of Whitehall is limited.  The bargaining power of a single headteacher is non-existent.  Regions big enough to stand up to Whitehall bullying will get that money out of London.  They will have the resources to commission their own research to challenge official figures and to brief the media with it.  It will no longer be a one-sided dialogue.  Regions with taxation powers will be guaranteed a degree of financial freedom from Treasury interference.

Local government services have borne the brunt of austerity, while the UK State protects its own.  The Welsh Assembly too has seen its finances cut but within its budget it has found the money to increase local government spending by 3%, at a time when English local government is looking to cut spending by 7%.  Applying the Welsh model to Wessex and other English regions could create a coalition of opposition to the City-driven priorities of the London regime.

5.         A region understands its businesses better

Far from being a burden on the region’s businesses, a Wessex assembly would be in a strong position to help them succeed.  Its powers would include education and training, transport, housing, planning, economic development, tourism and the arts, agriculture, forestry and fisheries.  It would be well placed to take on new responsibilities that may emerge at the regional scale, such as oversight of infrastructure and public utilities.  The more powers that are devolved, the more incentive the region has to make a success of them because the more that success will be reflected in the assembly’s own rising revenues.

Businesses that have a hard time convincing BIS or the banks in London can expect a different reception in Wessex, especially if they can show how their plans fit with specifically regional aspirations.  A Wessex assembly will be one part of a wider expression of the Wessex ‘brand’, with tourism in particular benefiting from a more coherent narrative but with related industries like food & drink and music also potential beneficiaries.

There are many reasons to be regional, but doom and gloom are not among them.  The small scale, territorial integration and flexibility of action that come with being a region are precisely what’s needed to respond to the challenges of the 21st century.

Whose Hospitals?

“I don’t know how much any of you realise that with the Lansley act we pretty much gave away control of the NHS… we don’t really have day-to-day control.”

Jane Ellison, Public Health Minister (June 2014)

In Scotland and Wales, car parking charges at hospitals have been largely abolished.  That’s one of the consequences of devolution.

In England, car parking charges at hospitals still exist because the NHS in England is a network of property companies run on behalf of bankers.  That’s one of the consequences of Andrew Lansley’s £3 billion reorganisation that was in nobody’s manifesto.

It’s also what became clear last week when ministers published new guidelines on parking charges that sought to address the chief complaints about the system, especially from folk with disabilities and from staff whose shifts mean they can’t use public transport.  These guidelines are just that.  Guidelines.  The Health Secretary has no power to compel NHS providers to comply.

That would be fine if the NHS providers were accountable in some way to a democratic institution locally that did possess the power to compel.  It’s not fine at all that they appear to be simply unaccountable.  The warming-up of the English NHS for privatisation has been presented as a hands-off policy freeing clinicians to make their own judgements on patient needs and the best way to meet them.  They will be held accountable for clinical outcomes but nothing more.  So the management of publicly-owned assets built up over many decades passes out of democratic sight.  Unelected bodies are handed huge amounts of public money that is to be used to achieve specified objectives, yes, but with the ability to adhere to or to ignore other objectives at will.  Objectives that might seem peripheral to the core aim of the NHS but which nevertheless have an impact on our lives.

The united aim of the London parties is to take the NHS further down the privatisation road.  They really will do anything to avoid direct responsibility for the well-being of those who elect them.  So we can expect to hear more about empowering the unelected managers of trusts and foundations and commissioning groups to make their own decisions.  Decisions about what to do with our assets and our money.  But these are not our decisions.  And if they’re decisions we don’t like, then we have no redress.

It’s so very easy to cheer-on the stripping-out of democracy.  ‘Good thing too.  Get the politicians out of decision-making.  Put the experts in charge.’  Then again, if you find yourself at the hospital, visiting a dying relative, and without the right change for the parking, the penny must drop even for the densest of Daily Mail readers.

The boundary between what is debatable as policy and what is to be delegated as mere administration is being pushed further and further in the direction of empowering an inaccessible oligarchy.  Inevitably, the more centralised the system, the more pressure on its rulers’ time and so the smaller the realm of policy and the larger the realm left exclusively to the bureaucrats.  Eventually, something big goes wrong at the sharp end; the politicians say ‘nothing to do with us’ and present privatisation as the answer to the ‘lack of accountability’ inherent in a system that they designed to fail.

In 1948 the NHS was deliberately set-up within a Government department – and not as a public corporation, like the nationalised industries – because it was seen as a service and not as an industry.  It was to be run on lines of Parliamentary scrutiny and ministerial accountability, not commercial performance or independent access to the capital markets.  It has since fallen victim to a cross-party consensus that is far from unique (since education and the fire service are going the same way), one that combines long-term guile on the part of its promoters with short-term stupidity on the part of its receptors in a currently winning formula.  One that views turning all caring into a profit-seeking business as the only means of motivating staff to do better with increasingly constrained resources. 

Patients can expect more respect as customers, surely?  Why?  The contract isn’t with them personally and the ultimate truth is it’s then the money that motivates, not them at all.  Going the extra mile won’t happen if it wasn’t allowed for in the bid.  Costs increase as the moral hazard is to order more stuff that can be charged for, even when not really needed.  Nobody is transparent about their costs any more, because that becomes a matter of commercial confidentiality.

In Somerset, NHS Trusts are in the process of being reorganised, not on the basis of what they can do for patients but on the basis of their financial prospects.  This is a requirement of the Lansley act, which forces every NHS Trust either to become a full-blown Foundation Trust or to give up, for example by handing over to a private contractor.  Weston Area Health NHS Trust is England’s smallest Acute Trust (someone has to be), yet ranks as one of its top six for clinical efficiency, and has the smallest percentage of patients readmitted to hospital within seven days.  So it’s not surprising to see it being destroyed.  As with academies, the new language is that of mergers and acquisitions, of chains and groups; soon it will be the language of share options and directors’ bonuses.  Public money, private pockets.

We need to be abundantly clear that our own aim is democratic decentralisation.  Democratic institutions without the decentralisation of real power are a facade behind which centralist interference in local affairs continues unabated.  Decentralisation without democracy is a sell-out (often literally) to a managerialist form of tyranny that is no improvement.

Masters & Servants

Not a working day goes by without London interference in local decision-making.  What makes the UK such a desolate place to live is that this interference is so widely accepted, at best as something that cannot be changed, at worst as something entirely natural, a system under which London provides ‘leadership’ for a grateful nation.

It is, ultimately, an assault upon democracy.  Because if locally elected representatives cannot be trusted to make the correct decisions, and regionally elected ones are dismissed as more of the same, how is it that nationally or internationally elected representatives suddenly acquire the wisdom to do things so much better?  Or is it just that they are more easily swayed by the moneybags, and by the high life in London or Brussels?

Is it the schools that ministers and their civil servants come from that give them the assumed right to overturn the supposedly narrow judgments of parish and shire?  Not always.  Labour ministers, even those that come from the comprehensives, are actually far more contemptuous of local choice.  Theirs is the legacy of vanguardism, Lenin’s idea that the working class are too thick not to have rings run round them and so need the protection of a party elite.  Hence, for example, Labour’s opposition to proportional representation.  Bugger democracy, let’s get the Labour man (or woman) in.  From its Jacobin and Christian Socialist traditions, Labour has also inherited the idea that everyone is equal, and therefore that difference cannot be tolerated.  The One True Answer is to be imposed nationally through centralism and ideally through a globalised tyranny.  Labour’s refusal to take issue with multi-national capitalism is entirely explicable in terms of its desire to break down borders and eliminate diversity.

Regardless of party, the London machine is dismissive of ‘Lilliputian’ local concerns.  It has an empire to run.  Yet cannot see that its own concerns are Lilliputian in global terms.  It’s a paradox for which it will heartily die in a ditch.  No foreigner may tell Britannia what to do.  But Britannia’s trident may poke each and every peasant who isn’t on-message.

There is a long-established view that ‘the Army is the State’, and therefore that states, in return for maintaining external security, have the right to demand internal subservience.  It’s a doctrine that has no place in a real democracy, where the government serves the citizens and not the other way round.  And yet it lingers.  The idea of military conflict, or even a fundamental economic disagreement, with France or Germany is now unthinkable.  Despite this, we are still ruled by a class of classicists who see it as their job to maintain the balance of power within Europe and to make whatever mischief is necessary to achieve this.  Talent being lost from London to Frankfurt or Geneva is a national crisis.  Talent being lost from Newcastle or Plymouth to London is not.

Desperate unionists recently launched the ‘No Borders’ campaign to stop the UK ‘sleepwalking into separation’.  It’s certainly a canny choice of name, appealing to all that imaginative generation of hippies who know their John Lennon.  The problem is that a world without borders is not a world without orders.  Somewhere in the borderless society resides the power to make decisions.  Borders between countries – and boundaries between regions, shires and parishes – are what prevent that power gravitating to one point.  The Left didn’t listen; they insisted it was all about class and not really about geography.  And what they got was Stalin and Mao.  The Right didn’t listen; they insisted it was all about individual enterprise and not really about the freedom of vast, often inherited wealth to flee where it pleases.

Lines on maps often appear arbitrary, and sometimes are.  But without them, there is no escape from either arbitrary government or arbitrary finance, or possibly both, as a corporatist cocktail.  That is why we need many more lines on maps, and why they need to mean more, both in practical terms and within the ideologies that defend them.

Borders get a bad press that associates them with chauvinism and racism.  Really?  You may as well refuse to drive a car because it might, just might, crash and kill somebody.  You can have borders and still have free movement across them: how liberal or restrictive an immigration policy should be is a matter of day-to-day politics, not necessarily something enshrined in the constitution.  Without borders, you don’t have the choice of making a choice.  There is a positive narrative to be championed about borders and boundaries, about how they secure freedom and democracy by excluding outside interference in the life of the community.  For that narrative to be free of hypocrisy, it is not enough to champion borders alone.  The boundaries that define local and regional autonomy are still more worthy of respect because it is within such communities that democratic values are learned and treasured.  Reduce democracy to a mass that benefits the big battalions, where there is no real debate and only the viral trending of donor-sponsored soundbites, and it ceases to be democracy.

Some Folk With Attitude

The folk of Wessex think of themselves as free, but are slaves to their own poor self-esteem, forever doubting their capacity for self-rule.  Nine hundred years after the brutal conquest of their land, they have so little pride left in them that they cheerfully reject at every election the escape route offered by regionalism, preferring to submit yet again to five more years of the London yoke.  Even a devolved assembly as limited as those of Scotland or Wales would give them some little voice, which could not be completely ignored when their fate is to be determined.  You can be sure the voices of London’s Mayor and Lord Mayor are both heard loud, clear and shrill, so why should ours stay silent?

Yet there remain also those who would stir the indifference of the majority to reconsider whether they could not in fact do better than this.  We stand in the midst of that agony of reappraisal that is British politics today, that realisation that the common wealth has been squandered for nothing but shiny baubles, the realisation that the bonds of serfdom are being re-imposed, literally through choice, because too many believed all that was too good to ever be true.  We stand in the midst of that agony, but we are not part of it.  We saw it coming decades ago.  We warned.  We were ignored.  So if we will be listened to now, we can speak with the cool certainty of conviction.

Politics in England needs to be transformed, with parishes, shires and regions, each tier in turn, as the territory widens, possessing a diminishing share of the responsibility (not power) of government.  Economics, here as everywhere, needs to be transformed, with democratic debate revolving around the benefit to the community of any investment, not its profitability for others.  Culture in Wessex needs to be transformed, turning a despised provincial existence into the golden thread linking a self-confident community to its past and future.  We aren’t looking for protest votes.  We’d rather have the support of those who believe that radical constitutional change is no longer an option but a necessity.

These are revolutionary ideas, with dangerous implications for vested interests.  There will be no place for the legal, financial or media sectors as we know them.  The clear writ of popular power will slice through them all.  Well-paid, parasitical jobs in London will need to be destroyed in their tens of thousands.  We may or may not believe in the class war.  The London regime certainly does, and acts accordingly.  For them, this is a struggle of the possessors and manipulators against the dispossessed and disinherited.  They are few, but they are united in their arrogance, greed and spite.  Are we united against them?  How many councillors or candidates will stand up and say these things that need to be said?

Ought these things to come to pass?  Yes.  Will they?  To say ‘yes’ to that question too is the first step in the process of attitude formation.  Old regimes do collapse.  Those who step forward to fill the vacuum are those who have bent their energies exclusively to attitude formation, to conditioning the minds of their folk to the inevitable.  Any inspirational movement, tightly organised and thoroughly aware of an uncompromising ideological line, can impose its authority on a fluid situation caused by the bewildering disintegration of former certainties.  That is precisely how the states of Baltic, Central and Balkan Europe emerged at the end of the First World War.  It is also how the virus of Thatcherism took hold.  In politics, it is the attitudes, not the reasons, that count.  Attitudes are the emotional ground out of which the reasons spring.

The most effective way to destroy old attitudes is to show that the society in question can be refashioned very efficiently using means considered beyond the bounds of respectability.  You can’t let local communities do whatever they like.  Yes you can.  You can’t judge investment priorities against the resulting community benefit rather than against the demands of private property and global finance.  Why ever not?  You can’t do without London-based expertise.  Want to bet?

In the perspective of history, a decade is little.  What is important to individual regionalists is to influence the attitudes of others to such an extent that the climate of opinion within which another generation of regionalists will work is more favourable.  Two steps forward, one step back will get us there in the end.  Our weaknesses may often be more apparent than our strengths but do not under-estimate our capacity to punch above our weight.

The same ratchet effect is true for nationalists: whether Salmond’s great gamble next year succeeds or fails, the debate it has opened cannot ultimately be closed until freedom is achieved.  We should capitalise on the result, whichever way it goes, since Wessex too needs to debate its fate.

We also need to ensure that we record, cherish and pass on the stories, of the marches and the motorway protests, of the flag-flying and the poll counts, of the pioneering pamphlets, and of those who have passed away.  Just as the nationalist movements have done, we should accumulate and document the regionalist past and present in order to inspire a regionalist future.  A future that will be there for the taking by those true to the deepest memories of why we act as we do.

Wallace versus Wonga?

The Anglican Bishop of Portsmouth, speaking on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday, warned of the social consequences of ending naval shipbuilding in the city, including that jobless families could turn to loan sharks as the lenders of last resort.  Cue Labour’s latest, greatest initiative.

And what an odd policy announcement it was: Ed Miliband commits a future Labour government to ban the advertising of payday loans on children’s television.  Socialism in our time!  What will the Daily Mail say?

Since the Thatcherite takeover of Labour in 1994 there have been nearly 20 years of pretend politics, in which the Left and Right of the new consensus argue over minutiae rather than each offering a radically different prospectus.  The Right, as Thatcher’s true heirs, believe the State to have a wholly negative role in domestic politics and wish it rolled back.  The Left, as Little Miss Echo, believe the State to have a wholly negative role in domestic politics and wish it rolled forward.  The New Labour analysis is always that there is a lack of regulation.  Its response is to look around for something to ban.  Always a symptom, never a cause; Labour doesn’t do causes now.

Neither side can grasp the positive potential of the community-benefit State in tackling the roots of a dysfunctional economic system through redistributing the power and the wealth currently hoarded by the London elite.

George Monbiot, writing for The Guardian (a London newspaper) this week, gave a damning account of the corporate takeover of what is supposed to be the public’s power.  Lamenting that the main parties are all complicit, he lists the last remaining bright spots in a darkening universe: the Green Party, Plaid Cymru and a few ageing Labour backbenchers.

The Labour backbenchers are not obvious allies.  They are, as he says, ageing, and, we would add, clearly committed to that brand of socialism that distrusts the masses, especially the masses organised in geographical communities.  They would rather fight centralism with centralism.  The Greens and the Blaid have a rather different outlook.  It’s one that we equally embrace.  So too do Mebyon Kernow, at whose 2013 Conference this weekend we hope to be represented.  So had George dug a little deeper he could have nearly doubled his list of the good guys.

What is remarkable about the list as revised is its decentralist character.  Even the most (relatively) centralist party on this new list, the Green Party of England & Wales, is not organised on the basis of the UK, or even Great Britain.  The movement for communities and against corporations is structured not on the basis of the politics that exists but the politics that is sought.  It recognises that the UK and the Labour Party alike are gutted shells, held together by history but containing nothing of future relevance.  The alternative is taking shape outside.  Miliband’s gimmick of a policy, protecting the poor from temptation instead of tackling those who have made them poor, makes a grand epitaph for a party and a system corrupted beyond redemption.

New Wessex, New World

Our attention was recently drawn to a couple of very interesting links.

The first link is to a blog that asks of Mebyon Kernow why it has a view on anything more than the internal affairs of Cornwall:

“…the MK manifesto is littered with ‘policies’ relating to national and global issues over which the party will never have any influence. It starts with MK’s ‘mission statement’: ‘Mebyon Kernow is a modern and progressive political party, campaigning for a better deal for Cornwall and a fairer, more equitable World.’ It was all looking good right up to those last six words. I’m sure many of us share their desire for a ‘fairer, more equitable World’ but in that quest, wouldn’t you be better off supporting organisations like Oxfam or the UNHCR? They are probably in a better position to deliver it than Mebyon Kernow.”

It’s a fair question and one that we too need to ask ourselves from time to time.

Strategically, there are two sound answers to the question. One is that a party whose long-term aims include having its own MPs at Westminster must be willing to engage with the full range of political issues, regardless of how much influence it currently wields. Or else lose votes to other parties that are willing. The other is that in a globalised world we must be alert to the indirect consequences that globalisation has for us, even as we do our bit to put globalisation into reverse. Another, tactical answer is that nationalist and regionalist parties have deliberately emphasised their outward-looking stance in order to refute allegations of chauvinism, isolationism and racism. Unionists and centralists fling such mud routinely, even though it would stick far more readily to themselves.

We believe that Wessex has the right to as much self-government as it wishes. We don’t think that would ever extend to independence but it’s not for us to say what future generations may think. As regionalists we’re comfortable with the idea that some wider decisions may best be made collectively, so long as we believe that it’s in our interests for this to be so. It’s not the case then that Wessex – or Cornwall for that matter – can only have a political movement that debates dog bins and bus shelters, and little more. Our voice has been silenced too long for us to allow others simply to assume that they have the right to speak on our behalf in the UK, the EU, or the UN. It’s our job to speak up for ourselves on every issue and to relate it back to our core beliefs.

Can the Wessex tail wag the world dog? Obviously not, but we can align ourselves with wider causes that benefit us, that help spread the values of political, economic and cultural decentralisation.

One such is the idea of the optimised, steady-state economy, which we have mentioned before, and which is the subject of the second link. The table there is a real call to action for those dissatisfied with the status quo. We need to take the crisis element out of economics, because – don’t panic – as everyone from Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four to Klein in The Shock Doctrine has indicated, the engineering of perpetual crisis is how social control is maintained.

Ultimately, however, we must not lose sight of our primary goal. It is very easy to be taken in by those who insist that everyone, everywhere, has to sink their particularisms in a unified campaign to topple the global power elite. And do we get our particularisms back afterwards? Not if history is any guide.

So there’s a balance to be struck between putting Wessex first and acknowledging the impact the wider context has. Between minding our own business (as much as possible) and showing solidarity (where we can be sure our understanding and empathy really are well-directed). Thinking globally, acting locally, but above all planning (and organising) regionally. Wessex: 95% of the effort, all the other causes: 5%. That sounds about right. But we do need to add that spice to life, if only to have the tools with which to paint a picture of a better Wessex than the one we inhabit today.