The Extravagance of Austerity

Good chancellor, bad chancellor.  George Osborne played a little double act with himself this week.  It started with lots of spending announcements.  A whopping £15.1 billion on roads and £2.3 billion on flood defences.  Oh, and Bicester is to be a new town.

Then there was the Autumn Statement, seized on with the claim that public spending as a share of GDP could be heading back to the levels of 80 years ago.  A golden age as far as the Tories are concerned.  Grinding poverty, plus all-round militarism.  The Jarrow March and the Blackshirts.  Plus the Greenshirts having a go at the bankers: sounds familiar?

How do we reconcile spend, spend, spend with a policy of downsizing that has no end in sight?

The spending announcements are real, but not all new.  Some just firm up details of spending already announced.  And at Bicester, many of the houses have already been built.  Smoke and mirrors then.  Just what you’d expect from a government with a former PR man at the helm.

The roads programme can be unpicked from many angles.  One is to point out that an opportunity to rebalance the national economy away from over-reliance on London has been under-played.  The self-fulfilling prophecy of ‘invest in success’ has triumphed again, with £250 million re-pledged for yet another Lower Thames Crossing near Dartford.  At least development at the estuary would take some of the pressure off the environment (and house prices) in eastern Wessex.  But not a lot.

Wessex gets at least £500 million for two miles of tunnel to by-pass Stonehenge.  Cornwall and Devon have been agitating for years to put the environment of Somerset and Wiltshire at their service, speeding up access to the London market.  Why is the London market so much more important than any other?  That’s where the money is.  And why do we allow that to happen?  Turning the A303 into a motorway in all but name won’t just increase accessibility to London.  It will increase accessibility FROM London, cutting precious minutes off the drive to the weekend cottage in Salcombe.

But for how long?  The strategic vision for roads spending does not include the words ‘Peak Oil’.  Instead it reassures us as follows:

“In the short to medium term, as domestic production declines, our dependence on imported oil and gas will grow and we will become increasingly exposed to the pressures and risks of global markets. Over the same period, global energy consumption is anticipated to increase significantly, implying increasing competition for available resources. Despite this, fuel costs are not projected to rise significantly over this time period.”

Apparently, that’s all down to increased fuel efficiency.  And wishful thinking.  And beyond the short to medium term?  Infrastructure is for the long term.  Are we planning for the next five years, or the next fifty?  Are we buying the wrong kind of infrastructure because no-one will admit to the necessity of a radical re-think?  We aren’t building a resilient future, because we can’t accept that the comfortable present is just an illusion.

So the spending plans are all part of hiding the harsh facts.  The real state of public finances ought to give real cause for concern.  An analysis of the background to the Autumn Statement done by The Independent (a London newspaper) shows that the plan to boost growth relies on boosting borrowing by the general public:

“According to the small print in the latest report from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the public is forecast to add to its pile of unsecured lending, which includes credit card debt and bank overdrafts, by £360bn over the next five years.  If the public fails to spend, then growth would collapse and the Government’s deficit would be likely to start increasing again.  The £360bn figure represents a £41bn increase on the OBR’s forecasts just nine months ago and would take households’ unsecured lending, as a share of total household incomes, to a record 55 per cent by 2020.  That would be well above even the pre-financial crisis unsecured debt ratio of 44 per cent.”

Add-in secured lending, like mortgages, and total household debt is projected to rise from £1.7trn to £2.6trn by the end of the decade.  With that figure rising faster than incomes, the ratio of total household debt to household incomes will rise from 169% to a new high of 184%.  But this has to happen if public spending is to be cut, because economies are sustained by spending and if the Government is unable or unwilling to run a big budget deficit, then someone else has to.  (Even though governments, as a lower risk, can borrow more cheaply than anyone else.)  Like all Ponzi schemes, it’s about using an imagined future to sustain the actual present.  And it’s a trick that only works so long as the population continues to grow and natural resources continue to come on-stream to support it.

One of the easiest ways to grow the economy, here and worldwide, is to spend more on armaments, things created for the sole purpose of being destroyed.  Civilian expenditure meets human needs, which are finite.  Military expenditure is not subject to any such limit.  At September’s NATO summit in Newport, the UK successfully lobbied for defence spending to be raised to 2% of GDP across the alliance.  Military budgets ought to have some relationship to expected outcomes but a budget expressed in terms of inputs – a percentage share of GDP – looks very suspicious.  A 2% share doesn’t automatically translate into a given level of security, not least because it fluctuates with the size of the economy.  All it does for sure is sustain or increase NATO orders placed with the arms trade.  DO panic, because panic is good for business.

With the NHS, schools and overseas aid budgets protected, defence now set to be protected too, and pensions politically unassailable, the Chancellor has little room for manoeuvre.  Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies said this week that voters would be justified in asking whether Osborne was planning “a fundamental reimagining of the role of the state”.

Others are planning a fundamental reimagining of the state too.  Not so much in terms of its role as in terms of its territory.  Scotland and perhaps Wales may yet see a future outside the UK as more attractive than one within.  England will not be so lucky.  Our political establishment is so entwined with the City financial establishment that we can only break free by reimagining both our constitution and our economy, dispersing power and wealth to the regions.  And on a scale beyond what it’s acceptable to contemplate in London. 

It has to be, because the cost of maintaining the status quo is unsustainable and this cannot be admitted.  If power is to remain centralised it cannot remain even nominally democratic because that would cost too much, and if it’s to become truly democratic it cannot remain centralised because that would cost too much as well.  The really big savings come from letting go, from setting areas free to do their own thing, precisely what the likes of Michael Gove or Eric Pickles, or any other champions of ‘British values’ handed down from above, are in politics to prevent.

Those who wish the grip to tighten really need no identification.  Those who wish it to end are to be found among nationalist and regionalist movements across Europe, each one sparklingly particular, but linked in solidarity against centralism.  The politics of change today is territorial.  The choice is between non-government – in the sense of a state whose will to intervene has shrunk back to defending the property of a global elite – and self-government – in the sense of a society organised for the benefit of the community.

The Labour Party sits uneasily between these two visions.  Miliband – with his call for ‘responsible capitalism’ – is as determined as Cameron to outsource the job of government but thinks asking for things nicely might help.  Having ditched Clause 4, what remains of Labour cannot be other than fraudulent, all sound-bites and cheesy grins.  The public appetite for taking back the commanding heights of the economy is huge but Labour no longer knows how to tell that story.  In the Celtic nations it’s losing ground to those who can.  The English regions will follow.

One of the lies that Thatcher got away with all too easily was that the State doesn’t have any money.  All the money it has is money taken from taxpayers.  Not true.  That’s the kind of state that has sold off or given away every other source of revenue, from land, from minerals, from trading services and from sovereign monopolies.  And done so because it’s clear to the politicians responsible that a state dependent solely on taxation will be a precarious state.  It’s a state left without those assets that could have given it a high degree of practical independence (and which therefore now need to be repossessed).  The Thatcherite State, designed to be economically crippled, cannot avoid becoming politically crippled.  It’s a state with a death-wish, clinging to an exalted imperial vision it can no longer fund, digging an ever deeper hole for itself.

If that’s truly the state of the UK, then we need to imagine its replacements and work to bring them into being.  We must defend our local services, and link them regionally.  If the London regime won’t do these things for us then we need to do them ourselves.  Or it will take us down with it.

Scared As A Bully

On 9th November 2014, Catalonia voted 4 to 1 for independence from Spain.  Madrid isn’t ready to begin talks on separation.  Instead, it’s determined to prosecute Catalonia’s leading nationalists for organising the vote.  Will David Cameron protest?  Will there be airstrikes?

On 20th November 2014, the French Parliament voted to abolish many of the historic regions of France through forced mergers, against the wishes of those affected.  An amendment calling for the reunification of Brittany – split since the Vichy era between two regions, one predominantly non-Breton – was haughtily rejected.  Will David Cameron protest?  Will there be airstrikes?

In both these states, the full force of the law is being used to crush democratic feeling.  All in defence of the outdated primacy of ‘France’ and ‘Spain’, and of the power of centralist politicians to glorify a long-dead past and view other, more human-scale loyalties as a threat.  This is what happens when the Europe of a Hundred Flags steps up from bookish theory to impassioned practice.  There are those who really don’t like the idea one bit.  Warmongers, austerity-merchants and lovers of technocracy.  David Cameron is among them, so watch this space.

Let’s step back to 14th November for an insight into the true depth of establishment paranoia.  Cornelius Adebahr’s article for the Carnegie Endowment explores the problems facing a fragmenting Europe, from the perspective that fragmentation is somehow a ‘bad thing’.  Xenophobic hatred certainly is, but that isn’t the subject matter of debate among Europeans seeking greater autonomy.  All we want is genuine subsidiarity free from centralist manipulation.

Including the power to judge for ourselves what functions we’re capable of exercising.  Europe is in crisis because it has become a project of elite dominance, the preserve of a managerialist class that denies the right – or even the ability – of ordinary folk to shape their own governance.  Adebahr sneers at what he terms ‘populism’ because it’s too democratic.  He sneers at nationalism because it isn’t driven by a narrowly economic conception of rationality.  Because it rejects that ‘rationality’ in which economic power rests not with democratic states but with anonymous global ‘investors’ shopping around for the choicest bargain.

The Europe of the Investors is an integrated economic space in which barriers to the movement of capital do not exist and democratic ownership of key economic assets is repeatedly eroded.  Together, these two things make it easy for markets to punish policy-makers who dare to be different.  (UK governments make things more than usually hard for themselves – and for us – for contorted ideological reasons that stem from City overlordship of our political system.)  Populism is labelled as bad because it’s the opposite of what we might call investism.  TTIP and the Lisbon Treaty are part of the process of declaring democracy illegal worldwide because it cannot be guaranteed to put investor interests first.  And we now see in France and Spain on which side of the argument nationalists and regionalists are judged to stand.  Voting is the way to change everything, or it is nothing.  OK, nothing it is then.

We’ve made clear our own view that vital industries, utilities and public services must be owned and controlled locally and regionally – not bought and sold by the multi-nationals.  Common ownership is a widely held ideal, even among Conservatives.  The consensus now needs to be put into effect.  Obviously, not through Labour or its continental equivalents, all tainted beyond recognition, but through radical nationalist and regionalist alternatives.

How radical?  Should compensation be paid to the present owners?  And if so, how much?  If the aim is to achieve common ownership, in the public interest, can the private (or foreign public) interests represented by compensation claims be viewed as anything but self-centred trivia, irrelevant to the core issue of achieving economic democracy?  Or should those who invested in good faith be reimbursed, it being no fault of theirs if they sank money into a politically sensitive industry?  In short, is the current set-up a crime against society or just a mistake?  Have the investment giants earned our rage or our pity?

Any such theories of ‘fairness’ can be laboured so as to slow down necessary progress.  Even to visualise the issue as a transaction is to bow to a hostile point of view.  Why not decouple progress from that which retards it?  Why not take back now, and pay back later (if at all)?  Our thinking has been so polluted by investism – even governments claim to be 'investing' in roads or a better NHS when what they mean is they're devoting more resources to transport or healthcare – that we miss the most obvious, direct answers to our problems.  Cut the Gordian knot.  Or perhaps, in the case of PFI, the Gordon knot.

Bear in mind (a) that many of our nationalised industries were created by seizing municipal assets without compensation (and this sort of thing still goes on, quite shamelessly), (b) that they were then privatised at an average 30% discount on the market price, (c) that as natural monopolies they have continued to be cash cows ever since, and (d) that corporations spent – and spend – millions on subverting the democratic debate, belying the idea that they exist only to serve.  False title.  False value.  False benefit.  False intent.  It would be entirely reasonable to conclude that the owners are worth rather less to us than they claim.  Moreover, the owners aren't the ones who know how to run buses, trains, power plants or treatment works in Wessex.  Their only expertise is in financial engineering, which any sane society would be better off without.  So how do we value their contribution?  On balance, negatively.  THEY should be paying US.  At the very least, let's start the negotiations at nil and work upwards EVER so reluctantly.  We can't increase taxes or borrowing, so the third option it has to be.

What we need is not so much ‘UK plc’ as ‘Wessex Common Estate’, our resources managed for this and for future generations.  Public assets belong to everyone, born and unborn, and should only ever be leased, never sold, let alone given away.  We need a politics of stewardship, not a politics of trading.  Friends are motivated by love to share, willingly, within the restraints of a common bond.  Enemies are motivated by fear to trade, suspiciously, without the restraints of a common bond.  It’s true for us, it’s true for Europe, and it’s true for the world.  You share with your friends and you trade with your enemies.  What does that say about those who want global trade to grow?

Europe stands at a crossroads.  A second Berlin Wall can come tumbling down, destroying the needless political centralism of old global empires AND, if the will is there, the needless economic centralism of new global corporations too.  These are two causes that can make common cause in delivering what folk clearly want to see happen.  Either that, or the military will be on the streets to make sure it doesn’t happen.  That’s how scared the bullies are.

Getting Our Own Back

Wessex Electricity, Wessex Trains, Wessex Water.  All run by managements located solely in Wessex.  All democratically accountable to a Wessex Witan.  Interfering London lawmakers and exploitative global finance just a fading memory of less pleasant times.

We can dream.  And why not?  A poll last autumn showed that two-thirds of the public – including some Tories – want to see public services taken back into public ownership.  One thing that transport and the utilities all have in common is a regional structure, so why not group them under regional assemblies?  There has always been a huge potential synergy between the case for devolution and the case for renewed public ownership.  The region – and its small nation equivalents – is the appropriate scale at which to rebuild our damaged democratic society.

What are the options?

Option 1 is a Labour government, scared of the City of London, that ignores public opinion, takes nothing into public ownership and – if past Labour governments are anything to go by – only speeds up the re-organisation of public services into foreign-owned profit centres.

Option 2 is a Labour government that attempts to re-run the 1940s, perhaps as part of a plan to re-invigorate 'the nation' in the aftermath of a 'No' vote in Scotland.  Services are re-nationalised but under monolithic British or Englandandwales corporations run from London.  Regional boards or offices, if they exist, are not really autonomous, their areas don’t match those used by other services and the folk they serve have no say over them except via Westminster and Whitehall.

Option 3 is a government, of any description, that devolves power to Wessex.  It’s the scenario described in the opening lines above.

Options 1 and 2 are real possibilities, 1 far more so than 2.  Option 3 is nothing but pure fantasy, if we expect Labour to deliver it.  Like it or not, the only way it will be delivered is through the Wessex Regionalist Party.  That will take time, of course, but no other way is possible.  (Prove us wrong!)

Serfs For Sale?

“Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor liberty to purchase power.”

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1738)

If you’re going to keep on repeating lies, the risk isn’t that others will start to believe them.  It’s that you’ll start to believe them yourself and end up trapped inside them.

Thatcherites are now in that position, confronted by realities they failed to anticipate, mainly because they were convinced that the rest of the world plays by the same demented rules that they do.

Let’s start by taking a look at two of her favourite ideas.

The first is that the private sector is good and the public sector bad.  Thatcher famously told a group of nationalised industry executives that if any of them were any use they’d be in the private sector.  It doesn’t take long to work out the corollary: that in her view public services should all be run by second rate managers to ensure that they fail.  The very services for which as Prime Minister she was responsible.

Today, many of those services are back in the public sector.  Owned by the Dutch, French and German governments, to name just a few.  And there’s the problem for Thatcher’s successor.  Either these nationalised firms are managed competently, which is impossible, since they’re State-owned, or they’re not managed competently, which ideologically would be much more comforting.  And if indeed they’re not, then David Cameron has just placed Britain’s energy future in the hands of incompetent State bureaucrats in Paris and Beijing.  Which means they’re doing a more competent job than he is.

Time for the second great idea.  The idea that the State doesn’t have any money of its own.  According to Thatcher, every penny it spends is wrung out of taxpayers, without whom it would be nothing.  It never was true, since at the core of every State is the common wealth, the rights of the community to things managed in common.  The air, the water, and in some cases still, even tiny little bits of a once-common heritage in land.  When publicly-owned industries make profits, those profits too flow into the common treasury.

Today they flow into other countries’ treasuries, allowing them to reduce taxation on their own folk.  In the case of railways, for example, our taxes go to pay operating subsidies to companies owned by the railway administrations of France, Germany and the Netherlands, allowing them to invest more in their own systems.  The case for public ownership of utilities is that these are natural monopolies, providing things we need in order to live and which, for various reasons, are impervious to competition.  The prices they’re allowed by regulators to charge are therefore little different from taxes.  And by allowing other governments to buy the right to make those charges, our own has in effect sold the right to tax us to foreign powers.  We are serfs for sale.

None of this was supposed to happen.  Nationalised industries were to be replaced by lots of little local companies all competing for business.  Not national and international conglomerates able to dictate terms to any government daft enough to let them.  Totalitarian liberalism is unrepentant, since if this is what the market produces then it cannot be questioned.  The problem never lies with the market.  It lies with the alternatives we champion, with our failure to understand the rationality of values far superior to the choices we are capable of making together.  For the liberals, we, the customers, are the problem when we unite in our refusal to play by the rules.

Public anger at the sell-off of Royal Mail and at the deal struck over Hinkley C with French imperialists and another foreign regime, one with an even worse record on human rights, will not abate easily.  Too many things are happening all at once for that.  The failure of even the Co-op to act responsibly, destroying a treasured institution, has folk of goodwill grasping at any straw that will re-assure them that the future is not one long dark night of corporate piracy without end.  In the process, they will clutch at many straws that will soon blow away in the wind.

The first thing we need to realise is that the UK, as it has long been understood, cannot form part of the solution.  It’s too late for that.  Attlee’s Britain no longer exists.  His model is not repeatable and it would be a ghastly mistake even to try.  It was always bound to be a betrayal of truly democratic principles, as our forebears in Common Wealth argued at the time.  The industries nationalised were managerialised, not democratised.  Yes, there was a Scottish Region of British Railways, but no Scottish Parliament to oversee it.  There was a Wales Gas Board, but no Welsh Assembly.  In England there were ultimately regions for electricity, gas and water, for railways, for hospitals, and for many other things.  But how many of them matched?  How many were designed around areas that made sense as the basis of future elected regional governments?  Few, if any.  No wonder it all ended so badly.  Thatcherism arose in the 1970s as the establishment response to demands for devolution-all-round.  It preserved London-based power by transferring the keys to Britain from Whitehall to the City, which is now in the process of handing them on to the Chinese.

The second thing is to beware any attempt by Labour to tap into the demand for re-nationalisation.  For Labour, the nation is Britain and the clamour is there to be manipulated in defence of a centralised union under its absolutist control.  There are better ways, ways offered by the nationalist and regionalist movements of these islands.  Labour, to misquote Aneurin Bevan, is simply the future refusing to be born.  It was revealed this week that London and the south-east of England continue to be the principal beneficiaries of the mess for others which those in power there have long sought to engineer.  With more to come.  Labour will equally continue to argue that the social distribution of power is everything, while its geographical distribution is irrelevant.  Despite centuries of evidence to the contrary, millions will go on believing it.

The third thing to note is that restoring common ownership in a modernised form today has been made more difficult by the British State’s determined attempts to bankrupt itself.  How is it all to be paid for?  Even if assets are deprivatised at the same 30-40% discounts at which they were privatised, that is still a huge amount of money.  Surprisingly little is said about how easy it is to find the money to buy problem assets, like toxic banks, or failing airports in Scotland, Wales or Cornwall.  Politically too, it’s a smoother path to attend to precious lame ducks than to prise assets seriously worth having from the grip of more reluctant sellers.  It’s the profits, not the losses, that need diverting from the private to the public realm.  Marx and Engels are rarely read these days but they did wickedly point out that those who make such a fuss about the sacred character of property rights are the heirs of those who got rich by treating past property rights with contempt, say during the French Revolution, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, or the Norman Conquest.  A little less reverence where rights do more harm than good would be no bad thing.  In a real crisis, the City’s worldwide paper ‘assets’ will amount to nothing at all.  What’s on the ground is what will count.

Inevitably, such matters are ones of opportunity and pragmatism rather than a precise strategy to roll forward the State.  What we know is that the world is changing, and changing faster than we have been willing to notice.  The more successful countries of the future will be those already thinking long-term, say 30-50 years ahead.  Watch China’s moves in Africa, and now in Europe, and weep at our weakness in that regard.  Fortunately, we are not alone.  There are many, perhaps surprisingly many, parallel movements for change in small nations and historic regions right across Europe and beyond, opposed to dogmatic centralism in all its forms.  Wessex is one piece of a very big jigsaw.

So what are the basic tasks a self-governing Wessex should look to organise?  One list of ‘foundation occupations’ for any well-founded society that doesn’t wish to be occupied, economically any more than militarily, is as follows:

Category 1 – Occupations calling for the exercise of considerable professional skill, e.g. administration, justice, security, education, health.  To the extent that a society alienates these services it also alienates itself.  The identification of these professionals with the territory in which they work, its customs, its needs and its interests, is what gives a society its essential character.  Deprive them of the opportunity for loyalty to place and no-one else will feel any either.  There is room for unsubsidised, non-core private sector involvement in education, health and the law but public values are inevitably subverted if that involvement enters core services.

Category 2 – Occupations with duties where incentives are impractical, e.g. ambulance and fire services, post, prisons, traffic police, waste collection.  Target-setting is likely to be counter-productive if it ends up degrading the service provided.  There is therefore no substitute for managers sensitive to circumstances.  The private sector has nothing to offer that is not equally available to an adequately resourced public sector.

Category 3 – Occupations with specialist technical skills, e.g. electricity, telecommunications, water and sewerage.  These are areas where private sector involvement has often been the norm, but on a tight leash given how vital these services are to modern life.  It’s likely that we under-estimate the consequences of losing control over them.  It’s also likely that they’ll become ever more vital to our future and ever more vulnerable, e.g. to cyber-attack.

Category 4 – Occupations where productivity can be affected by the worker, and where worker co-operatives could therefore be organised, e.g. transport operation and maintenance.  The problems of worker co-operatives in these sectors do not relate to the organisation of work but to the funding of investment.  Every one of the transport co-operatives resulting from privatisation has since been bought out by corporate capital.  To guard against any repetition, that funding issue needs to be addressed.  Capital, according to William Barnes (in Views of Labour and Gold), is no more than that part of wealth that is rendered useful by labour.  Considered thus, there is therefore no reason why it should not be organised by means of a democratic process, though necessarily on whatever scale, or scales, is commensurate with the needs of a modern society.  Does a transport company with an ageing fleet always have to be bought out by those with the money to replace it, or are there other options such as asset leasing?

Category 5 – Occupations whose nature could change with circumstances.  This is where watching the signs really matters.  There are many services we normally entrust to the private sector, but what do we do when things are abnormal?  Where would we be without tanker drivers or those overseeing the logistics of supermarket deliveries?  To whom do they answer in a diplomatic crisis involving a foreign owner?  Let’s not panic. But let’s at least have the answers to hand in a self-governing Wessex region of the future that seeks to prosper in interesting times.

The age of scarcity into which self-government is born will require a range of ‘foundation projects’ as well as occupations, though these are less easy to predict from history.  Let’s not allow current prejudices to prevent us contemplating future solutions.  They not only can be radical but will need to be radical.  Today is the anniversary of the death, in 899, of King Alfred the Great, a Wessex hero, but also a warning to us.  Alfred took risks for the sake of Wessex, such as assuming responsibility for kingless Mercians and Northumbrians, that were soon to lead to the unification of England and, under the Normans, to the eclipse of Wessex for centuries to come.  All his investments of effort, in the physical infrastructure of military and naval defences, and in the defences of the mind provided by his revival of learning, were ultimately ineffective against the superior organisation and determined infiltration of hostile neighbours, despite their relatively small numbers.  High-tax, high-spend policies of the Alfredian kind, directed towards rebuilding and securing a worthwhile society, won’t always be effective, it’s true (a well-organised world actually makes a more tempting target for top-down takeover).  It's just that they're always better than not trying at all and succumbing to unintelligible chaos.

In the 1940s, Friedrich von Hayek wrote a famous critique of the State entitled The Road to Serfdom, yet still concluded that “In no system that could be rationally defended would the State just do nothing.”  The small, community-benefit State we envisage for Wessex is one that ought to do much more than nothing if it is to have a better chance of lifting the yoke from our necks than the blind pursuit of post-Thatcherite sell-out we endure today.

Fighting On The Beaches

Sussex isn’t Wessex.  We don’t claim it and the Saxon chronicles, read attentively, back up us on that.  Nevertheless, it’s fascinating to glance east at present.

At Balcombe, environmental protestors are making life difficult for Cuadrilla, the firm that wants to frack for oil and gas.  It’s been well described as ‘extreme energy’, a last desperate squeezing of the fossil fuel fruit that defers by a few years the real reckoning we need to undertake.  And all the while adding to climate change.  Cuadrilla’s response?  That they have complied with all relevant laws and regulations.  Which says a lot for the competence of our law-makers.  One of the exceptions is Caroline Lucas of the Green Party, who got dragged away by police yesterday.  Balcombe’s actual MP is Francis Maude, a Conservative, Paymaster-General and Minister for the Cabinet Office.  Now, watching him get arrested would be real fun.  Watching him lose his seat would be better still.

At Newhaven, there’s a different issue.  The French, who own the West Beach, have sealed off public access and the locals want it back.  It’s a story with all the right ingredients.  (And the online comments are a hoot.)

Start with a populace who’ve woken up to the fact that if you want to protect your community’s rights, don’t allow them to be sold off.  Private corporations have no loyalty to place.  If you want to defend your heritage, keep it public.  Yes, Maggie, that means the STATE has to own it because no-one else can be trusted to do the job.  There shouldn’t need to be a debate about this, only about how locally the responsibility should rest.  If you put the government’s assets up for sale they’ll be bought by someone else’s government.  The French.  The Germans.  The Arabs.  The Chinese.  Do we own any of their assets?  Do they look that daft?  And it’s not only the governments.  Private companies from across the world now own huge swaths of what used to be our public sector.  The money raised from those sales?  Oh, we had SUCH a big party up in London.

Then there’s attitudes towards the French.  Always good for a WW2 joke at their expense.  Nothing like resting on our laurels to remind others of events before most of their parents were born.  The fact is, they DO own a lot of southern England now.  And in Newhaven’s case, who exactly are these French owners?  The Département of Seine Maritime, in Normandy.  Imagine East Sussex County Council owning the port of Dieppe.  It’s like that, only in reverse.

It’s well known that the Queen owns the foreshore here, all of it, so the froggies are clearly in the wrong.  You’d think so, reading the outpourings of patriotic internet bores.  But it ain’t necessarily so.  The Crown Estate Commissioners are responsible for only 55% of the foreshore around the UK, about 320,000 acres.  In Cornwall and Lancashire, the respective royal duchies stand in for the Crown.  In Orkney and Shetland, Norse udal law suggests that the foreshore rights go with the land, not the sea, so adjoining landowners usually have the sounder claim.  And elsewhere?  We’ll come to that.  The Crown certainly owns the seabed below mean low water mark, about 23.8 million acres.  Or does it?  Not all, especially where estuaries are concerned.  The Port of London Authority owns part of the tidal Thames river-bed.  Several river-beds in Devon belong to the Duchy of Cornwall, while the Beaulieu River in Hampshire is part of the Beaulieu Estate.  And a large slice of the Severn Estuary forms something called the Beaufort Royalty, owned by the Duke of Beaufort through his property company, Swangrove Estates Ltd, to which are paid the dues for sand dredged from the bed.  Never heard of the Beaufort Royalty?  Unless you need to know, you probably won’t.  Maybe with tidal energy now on the agenda, you’ll be hearing more.

Land with no other owner belongs by default to the Crown.  That is how the royal forests originated, as well as the ownership of upland commons like Dartmoor (granted away in 1337 to the Duchy of Cornwall and still owned by it today).  The Crown is assumed to own the seabed and things that come out of the sea, like whales and wreckage, and, except in Orkney and Shetland, the foreshore is treated as an ‘incident of the sea’ rather than an ‘incident of the land’.  That doesn’t mean that the Crown cannot part with its rights, and along half the coastline it has done just that.  In seaside resorts the beach often belongs to the council, ensuring that at least some of the money from the deckchairs and the ice creams stays local.

That still leaves a lot of the one-half in private ownership and even the other half can be exploited for profit, since the Crown Estate Commissioners have a money-raising job to do for central government.  Should they?  Or should all beaches be locally owned, turned over to the parish council to manage, in partnership with a wider authority if necessary?  Should the seabed off our coasts be plundered for London’s benefit, or conserved for ours?  These are the sort of questions we’d love to see a Wessex Witan debating in respect of our two coasts and the narrow seas we share with Wales, Brittany and Normandy.  Scotland’s recent experience of sweeping land reforms has shown that it will take a fresh constitutional settlement to inspire the fresh thinking needed.

Contesting The Legacy

“There are certainly parts of the country that are more anti-her than others, but I think they tend to be the parts that have become relatively less important.”
Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph

Moore spoke on the day that we saw the last of the Rt Hon the Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. At least he’s honest. We’re really seeing the UK establishment for what it is now, contemptuous of all outside the charmed circle of the M25 doughnut ring. So if the United Kingdom doesn’t work for us, why should we work to sustain it? Answers on a postage stamp please.

It’s been a fascinating week. The Thatcher funeral was history in the making. And the writing. And the re-writing. The victors get to do that. And more. They get to shout down anyone with a different point of view. ‘We’re all Thatcherites now’, according to Cameron. Speak for yourself. Ten million quid to give the most divisive PM ever a triumphalist send-off? Not in our name. Austerity? You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?

The London parties have taken to heart Orwell’s words, that whoever controls the past controls the future. And they’ve been every bit as passionate about possession of it as any of Thatcher’s victims.

You have NO right to remember. You can mourn the passing of a politician who in the realms of hagiography is fast overtaking Churchill. But you cannot mourn the communities she destroyed. You can feel for her grieving family and applaud her support, in theory, for the family as an institution. But you cannot point out the families she wrecked. The broken marriages. The suicides. The children who hardly saw their grandparents because their parents had to ‘get on their bikes’ and ‘move to where there is work’. As if work is something that grows randomly like a plant and is not the product of human thought and action.

You have NO right to a view on events from 30 years ago if you weren’t around at the time. Even if your own life has been harmed by them. Full employment has never been restored, even in the Blair/Brown years when boom-and-bust was abolished. A ‘flexible labour market’ has become the new normal. Complete with the huge additional cost that represents for public spending. And the incalculable cost of wasted lives.

You have NO right of respect for free expression. Download what you will, but the music charts will be censored to show official disapproval of the choices that you, the once-so-sovereign consumer, make in the market place.

You have NO right to party. Is that so? If YOU don’t want to party, then don’t. Spare a thought if you can though for those who endured Thatcher’s reign of economic terror. Empathise with the catharsis involved in celebrating the end of a woman whose rule was brutal, callous and heartless. To rejoice at outliving your worst nightmare is a natural human reaction, even 23 years late; those who uncomprehendingly objected merely prolonged the cruelty.  Spare a thought not just for the lame ducks Thatcher sent to the wall but for the small businesses that also expired as a consequence of her illiterate policies. Ironic that, for a grocer’s daughter.

You have NO right even to question the now settled historical account of the 1980s. Move on. It’s 2013. It certainly is, and we still live by the assumptions imposed back then. They still go unchallenged by mainstream parties. Anyone who says ‘move on’ has something to hide from the piercing light of justice. Well, at least those mining communities have got closure now. (Pun intended.) They’ve had their bit of fun. Draw a line and return at once to your assigned prole sector. No chance of that. ‘Achieving closure’ is manipulative psycho-babble. In plain English, ‘accept defeat’. Accept the victors’ view.

The crackdown has been so over-the-top that it’s a fair bet that it has actually backfired rather spectacularly. No-one could have been the saint that Maggie was made out to be and more than a few who knew nothing of her policies will now be doing some digging for the truth. A watershed moment for British politics? Almost certainly. There is one person who has come out of the past week with a reputation genuinely enhanced. That person is Clement Attlee, who didn’t get a £10 million ceremonial funeral but did far more than Maggie to deserve one. Thatcher destroyed one half of his legacy, the nationalised industries, because she was too thick to examine how best to reform and modernise them without removing every last trace of democratic accountability. So she delegated the job to brighter folk in the commercial sector, who didn’t have a clue about democracy. Now her successors are destroying the other half, the welfare state, for precisely the same reason.

Dig for the truth and it will emerge. How many of our problems today are NOT part of the Thatcher legacy? Her manipulation of the unemployment figures, by parking the disabled and long-term sick on other benefits, underpins the furious debate over welfare reform. Complaints about rip-off utilities are the poisonous fruit of privatisation. And the shortage of social housing would not be what it is without Right-To-Buy.

Many voters did well out of Right-To-Buy and Thatcher knew they would reward her for making it possible to buy their council houses. Not just legally possible, but financially possible. With discounts that amounted to free money. Loads of it, stolen from ratepayers right across the land. Thatcher was a thief, pure and simple. She took what did not belong to her government – the property of local authorities answerable to their own electorates for its management – and gave it as a political bribe to a whole new social class. Duly noted. When private property is next taken into public ownership, no-one should expect to receive full compensation. Indeed, any at all might be viewed as needlessly excessive.  It certainly was when the water industry was privatised; its previous municipal owners were paid not a penny.

Make no mistake, the tide is turning back towards public ownership. Thatcher’s death, and the re-appraisal of the past that it has now unleashed, will speed that sea-change. Those who say ‘move on’ would like to remind us that history cannot be reversed. Indeed it cannot. But policy can. Thatcherism proves that it can. And so Thatcherism too can be undone. In the grand scheme of history, it may not even merit a mention.

The challenge now is to shape that undoing. The Left remains poorly placed to do it. The impotent rage of the Left during the 1980s was, sadly, all of its own making. How could it defend Labour-run councils, how could it uphold their right to make their own decisions, when it would have done the same sort of thing had it been in Thatcher’s shoes? What answer was there to the sell-off of council houses when a Labour government would have interfered as much if not more, for example to abolish grammar schools in areas that had repeatedly voted to keep them? It is that kind of contempt for local choice that places Labour and the Coalition equally in our sights. Neither is fit to preside over the rebuilding of the democratic sector that we so badly need. A rebuilding in which the region, as an area neither too large nor too small, ought to play a vital role. Labour, left to its own devices, will nationalise, centralise, and concentrate yet more power and talent in London at the expense of those areas deemed 'relatively less important'.

The Thatcher years saw some hard re-thinking on devolution. Many a Labour supporter came to rue the day that Scotland and Wales rejected the escape route from Thatcherism. A profound and vigorous regionalism throughout the UK would have had the effect of isolating the Thatcherite virus in its heartlands, depriving it of the resources – such as North Sea oil – that it needed to do its work, and creating in regions like Wessex a new politics that could have challenged the Tory hegemony here. Class division in Britain has a strong geographical dimension. Old Labour tried, and ultimately failed, to interpret geographical problems purely in class terms and to present control of the Westminster law-machine as the solution. It’s time now to try the alternative, to liberate the regions to find their own solutions.

Old Labour played by the old rules and it lost. It opposed proportional representation and the dispersal of power. And so allowed power to concentrate in the hands of an unrepresentative gang of free market thugs. Radicals in Wessex must be clear about what went wrong. And about what is now needed to put it right.

Kleptocracy UK

The MP for Maidenhead made a very interesting speech this weekend. Theresa May set out what some observers perceive to be her stall in a future contest for the Tory leadership. (Sad isn’t it, that the chatter is about what British politics can do for her career and not what she can do for British politics?) At the heart of her speech was a call for corporatism: still more private sector involvement in the provision of public services, coupled with, curiously, strategic industrial planning by the State. She denied, of course, that what she intends is anything like corporatism. (It’s always the best way to lay a false trail.)

Her recipe is more interesting for the hidden ingredients than for those listed. The ever-greater exposure of public services to market forces has long been presented as motivated solely by a desire for greater efficiency. (Because, of course, services run by the British State are inherently inefficient, whereas they miraculously become efficient when sold to the French State.) In fact, the rules are routinely distorted to prevent in-house, public sector bids from succeeding, even where they clearly represent better value for money. It’s not about efficiency at all but about shovelling taxpayers’ cash into the pockets of those very private companies that are the most enthusiastic donors to Tory funds. Or it could be LibDem funds. Or Labour’s. All three are equally receptive to stale old ‘new ideas’ with an unerringly familiar theme. None apparently has the wit to recognise that if the best managers are in the private sector then the answer is to recruit them for the public sector. It isn’t to dismantle what's left of democracy.

What are we to make of the sudden re-emergence of that very un-Thatcherite phrase, a ‘strategic role for the State in our economy’? Perhaps we are to make of it that the very richest in our society have decided that free enterprise isn’t making them rich enough. The banking ‘crisis’ has revealed the weakness at the heart of the market: that in a big, generous country like the UK, banks too big to fail are not too big to bail. State planning of the economy can produce returns that are less volatile but also inherently more profitable, mainly by favouring some sectors or scales of business at the expense of others. There is an appetite for this among those in public administration who see the banking scam as horrifically disruptive of the public finances, which it is. But there is also an appetite among politicians to diversify the UK economy away from its dependence on the City of London casino. Rising energy prices are already beginning to force a re-localisation of manufacturing away from the Far East. There are prizes to be won by countries that manage the transition well. And for those companies who can get the Government to do their marketing for them.

So what’s our view on industrial planning? The first thing to point out is that the private sector plans all the time. If it doesn’t look ahead, it doesn’t survive. We believe in co-operation, not competition, so we have no ideological objection to industries considering needs as a whole and organising production accordingly. If the result is not to be a cartel put together to exploit the consumer, then industrial planning is something that needs to be done under the full glare of public scrutiny. It will be found that you cannot plan what you do not control, and that very often you cannot control what you do not own. A large public sector is not something to be ashamed of, any more than democratic accountability is something to be ashamed of. It is in fact the only effective way to ensure that economic interests do not elbow environmental and social/cultural ones out of the picture. What’s more, a decision not to plan is still a decision, and so still, unavoidably, a plan. Whether the captain of the ship of state steers it onto the rocks or lets the waves take it there unaided, he or she still bears responsibility for the consequences.

The past century has revealed both the strengths and the weaknesses of State planning of industry, which is another way of acknowledging that the phrase encompasses a wide range of possibilities. To start with, is it ‘bottom-up’ or is it ‘top-down’? On that, all else depends. Is it about enabling our transition to a more ecologically conscious, decentralised society, or a final desperate attempt to preserve the opposite? Is it about strengthening the regions by winding-down their links to London, or is it, like HS2, about shackling them all the more tightly to their exploiter? Between the 1930s and the 1970s, successive UK governments practised a travesty of regional economic planning that zoned heavy industry in the peripheries, research and development in the Home Counties and the top management and financial functions in London. Much of Wessex got designated as the tourist and retirement zone. We can do without any more of that. It wasn’t just that centralist controls were ineffective in shaping regional economies for the long-term; it was also that they were far too effective in suppressing any local initiative that might actually have worked. Powerful elected assemblies in the regions would have pointed that out straight away. If we'd had them.

It isn’t only actions that get suppressed; values and visions get smothered too. We are proud to be a nimbyist party, with genuine concerns about the urbanisation of Wessex. We stand with those communities slandered as ‘irresponsible’ for not accepting London’s surplus population into their midst. We fear for their future once Theresa May’s State planners seek to draw media attention away from London’s chronic inability to act sustainably. We fear for their future once she points the magic wand of power at sites for a rash of new towns right across eastern Wessex. It WILL happen, if we have correctly interpreted what the London regime – us first, old chap – unfailingly understands by State planning.

Does the community benefit from its own destruction? Clearly not, but the community will never have a real say in any planning system designed primarily for private benefit (as all in the UK are). We know precisely who does though. Planning of all kinds, carried out in the public interest, depends upon absolute probity. Yet we seem to be sliding further and further away from that ideal as private enterprise becomes ever more pushy, public servants ever more corruptible, and the media ever more lax in its duty to scrutinise. The Daily Telegraph has been a shining exception to the rule and led yesterday with a story about a Tory councillor in Devon caught offering his services as a planning consultant, as one who knows what strings to pull to get that lucrative permission. It seems it’s not illegal to take money for insider information in this way. But perhaps the voters will judge him more harshly than the law will?

David Cameron yesterday responded to the jailing of Chris Huhne by trotting out the usual platitude about no-one being above the law. Another one we often hear is that those who make the law shouldn’t break the law. The real problem comes when those who make the law know where the loopholes are. They can frame legislation and other processes from which they can ultimately derive personal benefit. The crooks have always done that. What should especially worry us is when they become increasingly open about it and start drawing lines that the State may cross but democracy may not. Mrs May’s big corporate society is looming over the horizon. And one old definition of corporatism, from the 1970s, remains true today. It is ‘fascism with a human face’.

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.)

On Track

You can buy electricity from the gas company nowadays. And gas from the electricity company. Confused? Then what are we to make of the West Coast rail franchise, where the bearded boss of an airline is displeased that the Department for Transport so nearly awarded the contract to a bus company? Is it really so old-fashioned to suggest that railways might perhaps best be run by railwaymen?

Not so old-fashioned at all, as One-Nation Labour inches towards renationalisation. Others have been through this cycle before. Free markets, it is said, have got us where we are today. Along with the abuse of free markets by those with the means to use the political system to rob us when the going gets tough. All in the good cause of ‘financial stability’. That renationalisation is happening elsewhere is a sign of coming times here, as commercial elites lose their way and other interests start to move in on the vacuum left behind. Banks and railways are two examples of market failure, where the private sector is increasingly throwing itself into the arms of the State and saying, in effect, ‘we’re stuffed, now you sort it out’. It’s not as if the railways cost less now that the subsidies are paid to private companies. They cost more.

We watch with trepidation. A debate over the future of public services, and especially over their democratic control, is one we welcome, but not one with a predetermined outcome. Common ownership is not a problem in itself; centralised control, however, is.

We want to see railways owned and managed by those who care about them, those who use them and those for whom they are an integral part of the local community and its functioning. We don’t want them run by multi-national conglomerates, passed around like Monopoly cards and subjected to permanent revolution in the form of franchises too short for long-term investment planning and too long for meaningful accountability.

But neither do we want a return to the black hole of British Rail, or any part of the managerialist nightmare that was nationalisation, where the management was above accountability and the politicians practised keyhole interference but displayed no sense of vision or responsibility towards a vital public asset.

We have two specific reasons for trepidation, one economic, the other constitutional.

Labour wants renationalisation because it is a party of grands projets. It wants the white elephant of HS2, just like the other London parties, as a virility symbol and won’t be dissuaded by sober analysis of the facts. That commercially the project doesn’t stack up. And that integrating the far-flung provinces with the London market will ruin them further. We need WORSE connections to the capital, not BETTER, if we are to protect our own local economies from evisceration.

Renationalisation of the railways is set to become a core belief for One-Nation Labour because it provides a means of re-imagining a united, non-devolved Britain. No more rail powers for Scotland and Wales then, let alone the English regions. Whitehall must prioritise, for the good of all. The spirit of 1945 and all that.

We have a very different set of priorities. No grands projets at all. Just the infinitely more useful policy of re-opening lines and stations to provide the fundamental infrastructure of a post-oil world. And for that, Wessex doesn’t need Whitehall poking its nose in. It’s great that attractive new thinking is underway on the railways. It’s a shame that it’s not really that new or really that attractive. Wessex can do much better. Yes, we’re on track, but keep watching those signals.

Responsibility Without Power

We are grateful to an MK blogger in Penzance for a careful analysis of what the Coalition’s pseudo-localism means in practice. It amounts to devolving the running of services, and the making of cuts to them, without devolving the money that used to pay for them. Local politicians get the blame for the consequences, while central government lies back, puts its feet up, and passes the money saved to the bankers as interest on imaginary debts.

We can see this scenario developing as follows. Public services are increasingly channelled through local councils, co-operating sub-regionally for economies of scale. Safeguards will be put in place against communities interpreting localism literally. One is to privatise and outsource actual provision to the multi-nationals, to break any link between the services provided and a sense of local identity. (Welcome to McSchool.) Another is to prevent sub-regional co-operation going regional, that is to say, accumulating at a geographical scale large enough to threaten those in power. You do that by insisting that, while the Thames Valley or the South Coast Metropole may be real enough, ‘obviously’ Berkshire has nothing at all in common with Dorset. (But identifying with England is OK, despite it being five times bigger than Wessex, because TPTB have that one sewn up.)

Meanwhile, we continue to pay our taxes to London but get fewer and fewer services in return. In short, we prop up an insolvent regime. Until the happy day we choose to repudiate it and all its works.

Tax – and Spend Better

“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes

What defines a community? Among other things, it requires trust. It requires it because it calls for a lowering of the barriers that separate the private from the public. At whatever level, it’s about sharing. Time. Money. Identity.

One reason for believing that corporate capitalism is NOT compatible with democracy is that a permanent state of competition requires permanent distancing from others, and a pervasive culture of secrecy. What the Government does can be prised open, at least at the margins, under the Freedom of Information Act. In contrast, whatever the private sector does, even if it has huge consequences for the community, is ‘commercially confidential’. That is not a distinction compatible with any genuine democracy. Among other things it implies is that whenever there is a conflict between public interest and private interest, the latter is given a substantial advantage in access to the relevant information.

Nevertheless, we are witnessing a long-term trend towards a more open society (despite strenuous efforts to curtail it, especially in the realm of judicial process). In the age of the memory stick, even the best kept secrets can be all round the world at the click of a mouse. It makes resistance to openness all the more bizarre. For nearly 130 years, the Land Registry was a government department that guaranteed title to privately owned land but whose records were not publicly accessible. Now they are, and no-one can see what harm it ever did to release them. We are having a great debate in Britain about whether politicians’ tax returns should be made public for all to view online. Why just politicians? In Sweden, the law is that everyone’s tax returns are public documents. There is nowhere to hide. Taxation is a transaction with the State, so not to publish tax returns is to protect private interests at the expense of full accountability for the exercise of the public interest. HMRC have come in for justifiable criticism of the deals they have done over corporate taxation. Transparency is the way to end that. If it drives a few top bankers to a less scrupulous tax domain, then great. We’ve tolerated them, even venerated them, long enough.

Transparency sounds like a good idea. But can it be abused? That’s partly what’s under discussion at the Leveson Inquiry, where the right to invade privacy is defending itself from attack by the right to avoid harassment. Politicians are increasingly resorting to moralising – whether over press freedom or over tax avoidance – to condemn practices that are legal but which they see a need to question. That’s a bad road to go down, because it’s an admission that the legislation needed to eliminate these practices is too complicated to draft. (Though actually it isn’t, if the nettle is grasped.) And so applying social pressure is said to be the only way to get things changed. It’s a bad road because members of society should know, in black and white, what the limits are on both sides, both what the State demands, and what they are free to do beyond that. Grey areas are where persecution flourishes.

We’re a party that believes in the community and so we’re necessarily a party that believes in high taxation, while still enabling all individuals to have the means to support a comfortable level of discretionary spending. Community cannot thrive under the fashionable feudal arrangement whereby it exists at the whim of super-rich philanthropists (those with more money than friends). It has to have the financial security that comes from common wealth.

Does that mean that avoiding paying tax is wrong? No. If it’s that wrong then it needs to be made illegal, and if it’s not illegal then either it can’t be that wrong, or somebody has leant on the politicians and we need to straighten them out. Resistance to taxation has many motivations. Greed is one. But so is morality. Is it more immoral to avoid paying taxes, or to pay them, knowing that they will be used to fund terror bombing in Asia? Much of the money raised in taxes is wasted. It’s wasted because there is no real, detailed accountability for how it’s spent. There aren’t enough elected representatives with real, detailed control over budgets to be able to carry out the necessary scrutiny. Councillors and MPs have been marginalised by the managers. That’s why we need regional devolution, to break Whitehall down into manageable chunks, and why parishes need real power, including the ability to veto local spending they consider of no benefit to themselves. The political pyramid needs to be turned the right way up, so that instead of communities going cap in hand to Whitehall to plead for their money back, Whitehall has to justify every penny it spends to them.

Talk of plugging loopholes suggests that the tax system requires nothing more than a little fine-tuning. In fact, it could do with a major overhaul. A Land Value Tax to deter speculation and prevent derelict land lying idle, for the first time integrating planning policy, land ownership policy and revenue-raising across the board. Or taxation of the increase in value of housing on re-sale (at 100%, allowing for inflation and improvements), to stabilise house prices and divert speculative funds into more productive activity. High taxation of empty and second homes, to finance the repurchase of privatised council houses, avoiding the need for new housebuilding. The current Inheritance Tax threshold lowered to capture the huge wealth built up in the London suburbs by families who have done nothing more active than enjoy rising house prices brought about by the over-heated economy of the capital. And is not David Cameron’s refusal, against the wishes of most other EU countries, to impose a financial transaction tax, which would ‘hurt’ his friends and supporters in the mainly London-based financial sector, also ‘tax avoidance’ of a sort? Finally, we learned last week that, over the past two years, HMRC has written off £10 billion in unpaid tax. Is it really that difficult to extract or does HMRC just need a good shaking?

Property taxes are among the easiest to collect and the hardest to avoid. HM Treasury allows billions in potential revenue to slip through its hands every year because of ideological obsession, and desperate fear of the Daily Mail. Not only that, but property taxes can be used as policy tools in their own right to steer events in a beneficial direction. Sometimes, they can be regressive in their impact. But that means that they need to be carefully designed, and integrated with the welfare system, not that they should be shunned.

We’ve had 30 years of ‘no tax please, we’re British’ and know too well the signs of public squalor for all that are the flip side of private affluence for the few. Higher taxes, well-targeted, can transform that situation. They won’t happen without radical decentralisation because folk rightly suspect that their hard-earned money will otherwise be squandered by murderous scoundrels. Allowing communities the power to decide their own priorities is not just the only way to reconcile taxpayers to tax. It’s also through local debate about what those priorities should be that we might start to rebuild a sense of community and the fabric of a functioning civil society. The first priority for any ‘Big Society’ then, locally, is to demand a refund of the taxes so wrongly paid to London.