Infra Digging

Public opinion remains divided over the wisdom of bombing Syria.  Much less so than the House of Commons, which this week allowed the red mist of ‘hitting evil hard’ to out-vote reasonable doubts over what military action can achieve without a lasting political solution in sight.  Who benefits, besides the suppliers of Brimstone missiles at £183,000 apiece and those who eventually win the contracts to rebuild a country’s shattered infrastructure?

There’s something quaintly 20th century about the UK joining the aerial posse over Syria when the evidence is that the Paris attacks were planned from within Europe.  And funded from where?  It could be anywhere.  Which means that foreign policy alone cannot guarantee home security.  BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday broadcast a documentary on the threats posed by growing reliance on the Internet.  With hackers becoming ever more sophisticated, cyber war is joining nuclear war in the thinking of those whose job it is to predict and avoid catastrophes.  Hackers who gain even temporary control of a national power grid could do real damage by overloading critical equipment that can take two years or more to repair.  And where there is chaos there are casualties too.

Austerity and resilience make bad bedfellows.  Cost pressures are driving the transition to ‘digital-by-default’.  But digital-by-default is a fair weather system.  Rip out the back-up, rely on microwave signals, not copper wire, computer programs, not manual valves and paper manuals.  Then cope with a real crisis.  It’s not just about the back-up technology.  It’s about retaining the skills you need to operate it.  From the floods of 2014 to Fukushima, it’s still knowing what levers to pull when the screens go dark that makes all the difference.

Britain has a great deal of ageing infrastructure.  There’s a real drive on right now to upgrade it.  But it’s not just about running to stand still.  UK population is still rocketing, while the increasing frequency of extreme weather events means that previous standards of protection simply aren’t good enough.  So far, not so good.  The UK, the world’s fifth largest economy, was this year ranked 27th by the World Economic Forum when it comes to delivering quality infrastructure.  So critical is this problem that governments stripped bare by privatisation are turning to global investors to fund it, even ones about whom there are entirely reasonable security concerns.  That’s a measure of how far governments of all parties have abandoned their primary responsibility to uphold our way of life.  The investment being sought is competing for cash with other parts of Europe.  Is there scope for better co-ordination?  Much of the continent thinks so and while the UK is agonising over Brexit, they’re pushing ahead.

Let’s assume that the UK gets the investment it wants.  Now, who gets that investment next?  Where does the Middle Eastern and East Asian capital all end up?  What are the new national priorities?  The Conservatives have set up the National Infrastructure Commission, headed by ex-Labour man Andrew Adonis, to answer those questions.  We can be sure of two things.

One is that London will receive vastly more than its fair share.  We’ve shown before the extent to which this happens.  The reason it happens is that the nations and regions outside London fail to elect sufficient nationalist and regionalist MPs to stop it.  It’s that simple.  Any provincial representative of the London parties can be easily bullied into voting more cash for the capital.  Because we all benefit from London’s prosperity, don’t we?  Because the ‘experts’ tell us it’s the best possible value for money, don’t they?  Because we’re all in it together, aren’t we?  As long as it’s public spending, Labour can’t think of a single reason to fault it.

The other certainty is that any regional dimension will be skewed in London’s favour.  This is a well-established principle seen in other centralised European countries.  In France, spending on motorways and high-speed railways has been designed to reinforce the Parisian view of France, linking cities deemed to be within the same official region, while ignoring links across those boundaries.  Brittany’s historic capital, Nantes is tied more tightly to other cities within the artificial ‘Loire Country’ region than it is to the rest of historic Brittany.  Rennes, capital of the administrative region of Brittany, has better links to Paris than it does to Nantes.  (Those who understand French can read more in a book called Bretagne et Grand Ouest by Pierre-Yves Le Rhun.)

Within the confines of still-inadequate devolution, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales have all developed national plans with a significant infrastructure component.  With devolution bedded-in, each has now reached at least its third round of plan-making.  England has no equivalent, national or regional, though the UK Government has what it calls a National Infrastructure Plan, in fact just a list of big projects taken out of context.  Powerful interests insist that only local clubs of councils, in theory equal partners in city ‘deals’ with the London regime but in practice wholly under its thumb, can plug the gap.  This is plain wrong, for three reasons.

Firstly, because its approach to place is wrong.  The emphasis on functional economic areas, the cities-first agenda of combined authorities and metro mayors, flies on the rhetoric of globalisation and the irrelevance of broad territory.  Equally though, it flies in the face of the fact that cities are not islands but depend for much of their life-support on those broad territories that the anti-regionalist consensus would like to ignore.  The places where you’ll find the water-gathering grounds, the power stations and the landfill sites.  Mayors-for-all is a timid retreat from real devolution, failing to provide joined-up government at the regional scale, the scale at which meaningful links can be made between the major infrastructure providers.  Highways England plan roads.  Network Rail plan railways.  So who’s planning transport?  No-one knows how much wealth is wasted by the silo mentality prevalent among the utilities.  These are companies set up to milk public services for private profit.  Poorly equipped regulators make matters worse because their remit is protecting the consumer from exploitation by natural monopolies.  It isn’t the wider public interest, so utilities are, for example, prevented from funding investment ahead of demand (but are allowed to use their own, unco-ordinated projections of what it will be).  Different aspects of a single scheme – like the new reservoir at Cheddar – get split between different control periods and held up accordingly.  None of this would be necessary if powerful regional assemblies ran the public utilities and decided their own priorities.

Secondly, because its approach to time is wrong.  There is much more to survival than economics, and getting cities fit to compete in a global economic system heavily dependent on oil.  In building sustainable regions it’s paramount that we build for the future, for how the world will be and not for how it is.  That means a process of infrastructure planning driven by long-term political campaigning, not short-term economic speculation.  It means building (or rebuilding) things like north-south rail links in Wales and Wessex, or improving those that run east-west across the Pennines.  These are schemes that struggle to pass any conventional cost-benefit test because that conventional analysis is weighted so as to reinforce the status quo.  One reason why such a huge amount of transport funding goes to London is that savings in travel time count as economic benefits of a scheme that can then be quantified in terms of the travellers’ incomes.  The more highly-paid the travellers, the greater the benefit assumed.  As taxpayers, we fund things like the London weighting allowance that drive up those incomes, and this in turn helps attract more public spending.  Low-wage areas are starved of transport investment because workers’ time is not valuable enough to tip the cost-benefit scales in their favour.  Decision-making needs to pay less attention to the biased outputs of computer modelling and get assertively political instead.

Finally, because its approach to people is wrong.  The devolution ‘deals’ are characterised by next-to-no public involvement.  The various closed-door Leaders’ Boards, Enterprise Partnerships and what-have-you that come and go exist in the legal shadows, inspiring no confidence either in their own permanence as entities of local governance or in the stability of the strategies they devise.  That’s no way to attract long-term investment or to act as the credible equal of the UK State.  And accountability?  The best you’ll get is to vote once every four years for a mayor you never asked to have.  The result is likely to be very low turnouts that undermine any claim to political legitimacy for the new single voice of the area.  It’s sad but true that the only reason to vote at all will be to keep out the candidate most likely to ignore the public and abuse the power to spend your money on his or her personal preferences.

With investment decisions now being planned that will shape our society for the next 30 to 50 years, strong regional voices are more important than ever.  We should remember that the regional dimension in England is closely related to questions of resilience.  In both world wars, regional structures were central to civil defence (and in between for organising the Government response to the 1926 General Strike).  The regions in use today – the boring zones still being touted as the only possible basis for elected assemblies – trace their administrative roots to the areas for which Regional Commissioners were appointed in 1939.  In the event of invasion, with London captured or destroyed, these men would have assumed all civil powers within their regions.  In Wessex, those men were, in the west, General Sir Hugh Elles, briefly replaced by Sir Geoffrey Peto, and in the east Harold Butler, later replaced by Sir Harry Haig.  Familiar names, no doubt, to those who needed to know.  An article in The Political Quarterly in 1941 commented that: “At last we have established regionalism, after much discussion and excessive delay.  But the experiment in regional government represented by the Regional Commissioners is utterly different from the kind of institution which was the subject of so much advocacy and controversy during the past three or four decades.”  It wasn’t the last time that principled regionalists would be disappointed by chronic imagination-failure in the corridors of power.

So it’s no surprise to see renewed calls for regions to take the lead in identifying their infrastructure needs.  In our previous post, we referred to Surveyor magazine’s coverage of local devolution.  Plans are already in place to develop Transport for the North into a statutory body by 2017.  The Midlands Connect Partnership is developing similar ambitions.  Andrew Pritchard of East Midlands Councils told Surveyor that the Government’s agenda is “having an impact on the way we do things.  We recognise if we are to compete for funding we have to take a more collaborative approach.”  This need not be limited to transport: Martin Tugwell of the Chartered Institution of Highways & Transport told the magazine that he welcomed the move to regional transport planning and said it should also extend to other infrastructure such as digital, energy supply and distribution and water networks.  Flood risk and waste management might be thought useful additions to that list.

With sufficiently determined regional leadership, this is an agenda that can be wrested out of the hands of the London regime.  If not, we shall see more London-oriented investment, packaged as ‘helping’ the regions plug in to what they need while in fact adding to what has colourfully been called London’s ‘vampiric suction’.  It can be done.  We just need a new set of MPs: they’re the obsolete infrastructure we really need to replace.

Unenlightening Europe

Quelle surprise!  As we noted in September, France was an easy target for terror.  So, ten days on from the Paris attacks, how’s the reaction unfolding?

Canadian blogger Vlad Tepes sums up the polarisation:

“The most important thing you can do when people you don’t know are murdered by Muslims in an act designed to promote the primacy of Islam, is show your moral superiority to people who would like to take meaningful action by demonstrating grief…  People tripping over themselves in self-sacrifice, trying to tell the people who want them dead or enslaved how there will be no ‘backlash’ instead of at the very very least going en masse to the mosques and screaming: ‘stop the hate’.”

Eloi turning on the Morlocks then?  But would that help or not?

And when the candles and the flowers and the teddy bears have been cleared away, what will remain?

There’s little serious anger that carries through.  From a position of strength, that would be good news.  From a position of weakness, it only underlines that weakness.  The silence is nervous.  It’s well-known that the ISIS strategy is to destabilise Europe, to make normal life unpredictable, to create the conditions in which submission to the gangsters’ will seems the safest option.  Part of that strategy is placing Europe’s leaders apart from the led.  They won’t be targeted.  They’re too useful as they are: mostly perceived as bumbling, incompetent, and lacking any will to defend their people.  Get rid of them and you only invite the more determined to replace them.

François Hollande ramps up the rhetoric but results will be another matter.  Pending anything better, la gloire is back.  France is bombing Raqqa, because France is now at war.  France was bombing Raqqa anyway, because that was just fooling around?  The tricolour has been much in evidence across the globe.  It’s forgotten, for now, that its history is no more glorious than the swastika’s.  Remember the Vendée, the génocide franco-français.  France’s politicians, gathering last week at Versailles, belted out their national anthem, as we’re all now encouraged to do.  ‘Do you hear, in the countryside, the roar of those ferocious soldiers?  Let's march, let's march!  Let an impure blood water our furrows!’  Yes, they still get away with that, but it’s not our Europe: it’s a gory theatre of the absurd, founded upon a lie (that France in 1792 was not the aggressor).

Hollande insists that he will defend the Republic.  Not so much France.  Not so much the French.  La République, a hate cult of hypocrisy, historic enemy of European regionalism, the proto-fascist State over which Hollande presides, one that despite his best efforts still cannot bring itself to legalise any indigenous language on its territory besides French.  (To quote Musa Anter, a Kurdish writer assassinated in 1992, "If my mother tongue is shaking the foundations of your state, it probably means that you built your state on my land.")  Republican values are the new Falklands factor – the art of war turned to domestic political advantage.  A false flag operation?  We’ve no evidence, but the motive is clear enough.

France likes to think it has a special relationship with the Mahometan world, one strangely informed by a millennium of conflict with it, real or imagined.  Charles Martel at Tours.  Roland at Roncevaux.  St Louis on Crusade.  Napoleon in Egypt.  Charles X seizing Algiers.  Charles de Gaulle letting it go.  It’s not actually the most promising basis for peaceful co-existence.

Nor is Britain’s record.  A century ago the UK made promises to the Arabs and the Jews.  It would be simplistic to say that the promises to the Jews were kept and those to the Arabs were not.  Neither got everything they expected.  But the Arabs, and the Kurds, got a lot more than they bargained for.  Promises of self-government if the Ottoman yoke were thrown off became the reality of a new colonial yoke.

In 1920 an insurgency broke out in Iraq against the British occupation.  RAF bombing of the area continued throughout the decade.  The Air Ministry considered it useful practice for other territories where “armed forces are required to give effect to British policy and uphold British prestige”.  Not least because it was so much cheaper than deploying ground troops.  Squadron Leader Arthur Harris reported after several such punitive raids that: "The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage.  Within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out, and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured, by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape."  At the time of the Arab revolt in Palestine in the late 1930s, Air Commodore Harris, as he then was, declared that "the only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand, and sooner or later it will have to be applied".  Ancient history this may now be, but the lands cursed with oil have a particular way of keeping the past in mind as they navigate the present.  The wonder is not that Europe suffers from terrorist atrocities.  It’s that patience proved so long-lasting.

What strikes westerners as not-quite-cricket is the worldwide extra-territorial jurisdiction that religious regimes claim, in defiance of international norms.  Killing cartoonists is the ever sharper expression of an idea that began in the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran and which the civilised world failed to challenge effectively.  In the UK we may tend to remember the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.  In France it’s more likely to be the murder in Paris of Shapour Bakhtiar, a remarkable man who was secular Iran’s last hope.  But all such incursions into European sovereignty pale into insignificance set against the western assumption that eastern regimes exist to be changed at will, whatever the locals think.  However tempting it is to bomb Syria without UN authority, the result will be more anti-western feeling, coupled with more European guilt for the collateral damage (damage that’s only terrorism by another name).  Or if nothing is done, an equal and opposite guilt for inaction.  If Europeans are to defend themselves, they must first question on what terms they think it proper to decide the fate of others.

Europe’s defence is bound to become more inward-looking because Europe is forming a smaller and smaller proportion of the world’s population.  (Its share is expected to halve between now and 2050.)  The ultimate triumph of universal human rights is no longer assured, because the expanding populations of the world may have no use for them.  They may view them with indifference, or with hostility.  Either way, Europeans need to be more watchful of what happens to their own rights and make that task their first priority, because it may be that no-one else will.  Europe is busy renouncing its enlightenment heritage because others find it offensive.  Since only those with something to hide are offended by the truth, it would be better not to retreat from the enlightenment but to shine the torch deeper, into our own society and into others’.  But that’s not what will happen.  On the contrary, we’ll continue to allow victims to be created by allowing others to use the value system of the victims’ own society against them.  Nice work for lawyers.

As terror attacks escalate, so the paradigm by which Europe’s rulers rule crumbles.  It survives only so long as it offers satisfying explanations of why the world is as it is.  European unity has been shaken by the migrant crisis, with one of its most unambiguous achievements – the borderless Schengen area – now in tatters.  Counter-terrorism demands closer co-operation across borders, better sharing of intelligence, perhaps a Europe where unity is enjoyed by the rulers even as it ceases to exist for the ruled.  It’s not a Europe that necessarily requires the EU, democratic or otherwise, which may be one reason why the EU is under political challenge.

Predictions of Mahometan conquest are far-fetched but only because they’re wrongly framed in military terms: a formal State structure can survive long after the internal reality of which active minority wields power in society has been utterly transformed.  One only has to look at Tower Hamlets under Mayor Lutfur Rahman to see how easily the corruption of Bangladesh can be reproduced wholesale in a London borough if standards are not upheld.  Given the London party consensus that elected mayors are better than open government, we can only expect to see more of this.  But even Europe, tolerant, self-loathing Europe, ever apologetic, ever happy to accept that two wrongs make a right, has a tipping point, a point of calling to account.

Expect far Right, anti-EU parties to fill at least part of the vacuum left by the collapsing paradigm of the politically correct.  Expect xenophobia to make no distinction between guilty and innocent: a presumption of innocence is essential for justice, but not for security.  It’s not impossible to imagine some countries taking things as far as mass expulsion of religious minorities deemed too troublesome to remain, especially once those countries are outside the EU.  It’s what happened in Spain in the 17th century, a move obviously considered worth it despite the economic damage it wrought.  Many of Spain’s moriscos ended up in north Africa, swelling the ranks of the Barbary pirates who took their revenge on Europe’s coastal communities, including those in Wessex.  Terrorism is nothing new and neither is the suite of possible responses.  About the only ‘self-evident truth’ is that the less Mahometanism there is in Europe, and in the world, the less terrorism there can be.  That calculation, that suspicion of the murky middle ground, that condemnation even of the fiercest fighters against the likes of ISIS, is the real tragedy.  Europeans aware of their history and confronted once again by an ideology that demands the death penalty for thought-crime may rather be safe than sorry.  It doesn’t lessen the tragedy.

If far Right parties fill part of the vacuum it’s also true that they can’t fill it all.  There are equal opportunities for other visions of Europe: most vitally a Europe of small nations and historic regions, decentralised, democratic, inclusive (of those willing to be included), yet passionately protective of traditional rights and committed to international justice rather than to the addictions of repression and war.  It’s a strong possibility in the longer term, but getting there could be a close-run thing.

All Washed Up

Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, told BBC Radio 4 listeners today that the service could do with new surveillance powers to tackle the terrorist threat.  That’s hardly surprising, according to the cynical view that you never let a good crisis go to waste.  If necessary, you create one.  We face a toxic combination.  On the one hand, the consequences of an aggressively interventionist foreign policy pursued for the benefit of US interests, not ours.  On the other, disaffected youth of south Asian heritage liable to identify strongly with at least some of the victims of that policy.  The Government is working on plans for ‘Extremism Disruption Orders’, to target not so much terrorists as anyone who exercises their supposed right of free speech in ways that this Government – or any of its successors – decides it doesn’t like.

We won’t let counter-terrorism measures interfere with our lifestyle.  Of course not: that would be letting the terrorists win.  Even though that’s precisely what’s happening, as the threats continue to proliferate and so too does the apparatus supposedly designed to contain them.  If we can feel that, on the outside of government, what’s the atmosphere like on the inside?

The Swiss Army has carried out two exercises in recent years related to migration and its consequences.  The first dealt with a stream of migrants that was out of control.  The second took things a step further.  It assumed a breakdown of public order in France, the fragmentation of authority into local fiefdoms and a consequent need to resist looting expeditions onto Swiss territory.

Why France?  France has a large population of North African and Middle Eastern extraction.  Religion is deemed irrelevant.  France’s secularism has moved on from being a policy to being a blindfold, so it doesn’t collect census information on religion.  For a true picture, consider that France’s top Mahometan official recently offered to take over the country’s redundant Catholic churches to meet a demand for 5,000 new mosques.  The problem facing the security services is not the proportion of his followers who may be terrorists.  That proportion may well be unchanged, year on year.  It’s that as the absolute number behind that proportion increases, so the strain on the security services also increases.  It’s a statistical certainty that militants with potential or actual Jihadi sympathies are entering Europe every day.  The security services now have far more potential Jihadis on French soil than they’re resourced to keep under surveillance.  Managing that risk is, well, risky.  It’s not polite to mention it, but it’s there nevertheless.  A spectacular 9/11-style attack on France is now regarded by some experts as inevitable.

Government-by-advertising is starting to fail.  The idea that well-placed words and pictures can get us out of the domain of reflection and into that of sentiment has worked in every previous crisis, but…  An increasing number of people are now questioning whether their ruling elites are taking care of their best interests, and whether the taxes they collect are legitimate.  Psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe described the legacy of the failed 2009 Copenhagen summit on climate change as the realisation that our "leaders are not looking after us... we are not cared for at the level of our very survival".  No, you guessed right there and don't sound so shocked.  So do we want a State that from Brussels downwards regulates everything but the fundamentals, neglecting the real issues of movement and resources and ideology that underpin our security?  A lot is written about the accumulating critical mass of terrorists in Europe but much less about the accumulating critical mass of ordinary folk who are asking such questions.  Once it forms, things could get perhaps too interesting.

Military exercises cost money.  Even if your priority is to spend the budget rather than ensure it’s spent well – and that’s an insider criticism of the Swiss military – you’ll still pick exercises that usefully focus minds over ones that don’t.  So if the Swiss think a scenario in which France falls to pieces is worth considering, so should we.  (It’s an off-the-shelf scenario, by the way, which anyone can read in Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age.)  In which case, while we’ve been pondering the fate of boat people with names like Yusuf or Maryam, we may be failing to spot the longer-term possibility.  Which is that communities on the south coast of Wessex should get ready for boat people with names like Joseph and Marie.

Jeux Sans Frontières

Events in Paris this week have exposed Europe’s anxieties to the full.  Let’s consider some of the possible reactions.

On the far Right, and among the not-for-prophet movement generally, this is I-told-you-so time.  Even those who disagree with the politics must find recent analysis strikingly prescient.  And at least it’s an opportunity to highlight some double standards.

Then again, cui bono?  Who benefits?  Will Le Pen prove mightier than the sword, deepening the backlash?  About the only certainty is that there will now be further restrictions on civil liberty in order to intensify the ‘war on terror’.  Threats to national security will be enumerated, movements for autonomy doubtless among them.  Those who like the theory of a false-flag operation – a few fanatics supplied with guns and training by the security services and then shown the direction to go – will point to other conspiracy theories that turned out to be at least partially true.  The humanitarian catastrophes that have resulted from intervention across North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia are too systematic and repetitive to be put down to incompetence.  Those in charge know what they’re about.  The challenge for anyone else is to say what that is, though for starters what do the letters O.I.L. spell?

That sense that there isn’t a trustworthy narrative is bound to be destabilising.  Its consequence is fear and more fear, coupled with appeasement as a means to restore breathing space.  Freedom of expression will not be defended (if anything, the pressure will be to remove freedom of non-expression in the hunt for the non-conforming).  Liberals and anyone to the left of them will certainly not defend it, because it’s a fixed principle and liberal power depends on being able to manipulate a debate and steer its unfolding, contradictory development.  Power, for them, depends on the ability to set, and to arbitrate on the setting of, social and cultural boundaries.  An uncompromising defence of free expression is a nuance-free zone in which born control-freaks can make neither mischief nor money.  There can be no political correctness where nothing’s incorrect.

Migrants, and perceptions of migrants, play a relatively small part in what’s essentially a struggle for hegemony between the elites of Left and Right.  That being so, we cannot expect measured but steadfast leadership from either side.

The closing of the European mind is a mark of Europe’s lost place in the world.  You don’t annoy the oil sheikhs.  You rant against the terrorists, not their funders in the Gulf, whose wealth you court.  Does the Royal Navy’s new base in Bahrain serve any credible military purpose, or is it a taxpayer-funded shop window for the UK arms trade?  The BBC’s Robert Peston last month suggested that the dramatic slide in the oil price has been deliberately engineered to put high-cost oil extraction – fracking, deep sea, etc. – out of business.  And after that, the price will again rise.  It’s all a game, mes amis, c’est tout un jeu.

Nuking Weymouth

According to financial analyst David Malone today, “2012 is going to be the year of unrest and repression.”

A London establishment that has spent the last decade, and more, treading heavily on the world has now invited the world round for a spot of sport. And is getting worried. It might be a very good idea not to be in southern Dorset next summer, in view of some of the scenarios now being modelled.

Of course, nothing at all may happen. But a lot of useful experience in crowd control and the like will have been gained...

The Infamous Five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read All About It?

Candidates' leaflets for the Witney constituency are now viewable here. As of today, two candidates - Aaron Barschak (Independent) and Howling Laud Hope (Monster Raving Loony) - seem not to have distributed any so how they plan to get votes is a mystery.

These two, along with Joe Goldberg (Labour) and Nikolai Tolstoy (UKIP), are also shy of telling us their addresses, hiding behind new rules that allow actual and prospective elected representatives to lock themselves away from the public gaze. Are they afraid of terrorists? Then why any of these four gentlemen should flatter themselves that they might be a target is another mystery. If the other six candidates have nothing to hide, why do they? At least a party candidate can be contacted via the party to seek information on his or her views. An Independent who won't declare his address might as well be on the moon.

We might ask what our society is coming to when those running for public office even have the right not to tell us any longer where they live, let alone exercise it. Transparency is a fundamental part of our democratic inheritance from the Victorians, an inheritance that is poorly understood and appreciated, with the result that electoral reforms since 1997 have arguably created more problems than they have solved. The failure to recognise that extending postal voting would magnify opportunities for fraud is one such example.

We understand New Labour's motivation for secrecy but we do not therefore respect it: politicians should be protected by the normal civil and criminal law and deserve no special protection simply because they are politicians. Those who are determined to find out where someone lives will do so anyway and such knowledge is not in itself objectionable. Rather than accepting the growth of a culture of intimidation and adapting to it, efforts should focus on deterring crime of all kinds, but especially that directed against the democratic process of free debate and decision.

If some of our politicians live in fear, they should examine their consciences. Thomas Jefferson observed that when the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty. When it comes to striking a balance, things are a whole lot safer under the second scenario than under the first.

Organising Murder

"War is organised murder, and nothing else."
Harry Patch

And so the extraordinary life of Harry Patch, the last Tommy of the First World War, has ended at his home in Wells. His years as a centenarian were spent as an eloquent spokesman for the Lost Generation of 1914-18, imparting what he could of experiences beyond the comprehension of his listeners. There were no illusions: the war was "a family row", Remembrance Day "just show business".

The terrible irony is that as Patch’s past is laid to rest, so lives are still being lost in wars of choice. As the coffins pass through Wiltshire’s streets, Brown, Cameron & Co. conspire to whip up war fever, like music hall acts applauding ‘the soldiers of the Queen’. There is talk of ‘a 30-year haul’ in Afghanistan, in this, the 30th anniversary year of the Soviet invasion. The more soldiers die or are wounded, the greater the emotional investment at stake, the lesser the chance of a rational answer to the question, why?

The argument that blowing other countries apart protects us from terrorism is too silly for comment. And while the main party leaders drag us back to the days of Empire, when the Union flag was earning its nickname of ‘the Butcher’s Apron’, they might consider the record of all who have messed with Afghanistan before. The British lost the First Afghan War. They withdrew after the Second. And the Third, tactically a British victory, was strategically a lasting win for the Afghans. The Soviet Union too left humiliated, its whole empire imploding. Not the most encouraging set of precedents. On the first occasion, in 1842, Britain's expeditionary force was all but wiped out. Supposing himself the sole survivor, Dr William Brydon finally made it back to the gates of Jalalabad, he and his horse exhausted. The scene is depicted in Lady Butler’s great canvas, The Remnants of an Army, which hangs in the regimental museum of the Somersets at Taunton Castle.

The prospects of an oil pipeline from central Asia to the coast? Now that’s more like it. A far more convincing explanation of why lives are being laid down for ‘freedom’. Such is the curse geology has laid throughout the Mahometan lands. And as the oil runs out, so instability will worsen. Still more lives will be lost or shattered until we embrace the principle of economic subsidiarity: that nothing should be produced further away from the user than is absolutely necessary. The key to peace does not lie in a global economy micro-managed by totalitarian liberals but in living within environmental limits, regionally and locally. We can have prosperity without growth. But we cannot have growth without conflict.

Meanwhile Brown, Cameron and the rest of them responsible for organising murder in the 21st century must stand trial for their crimes.

Minding Our Own Business

"Peace is a coin which has two sides – one is the avoidance of the use of force and the other is the creation of conditions of justice. In the long run you cannot expect one without the other."
John Foster Dulles, 1956

Dulles was not a man whose actions lived up to his words. Nor can anything better be said of the world’s rulers today. Five years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Iraq remains in turmoil and for those countries involved in its conquest it is the spectre that will haunt a generation. Not simply because there is no peace but ultimately because there is no justice. So long as Bush, Blair and Brown are free to strut upon the world stage, fêted as statesmen, anger will continue to fester and resolution will remain elusive.

Our Party’s policy is clear. It is for judges to decide the legality of war, not politicians or their pocket lawyers. The context for such a ruling must be the indictment of those who orchestrated the invasion, those who, in the formula of the Nuremberg Tribunal, formed part of the common plan or conspiracy to wage aggressive war.

That means, in the United Kingdom context, both Blair and Brown, along with their respective cabinets and the majority of Labour backbenchers. It remains an enigma that the Labour Party continues to exist at all. How can people of goodwill continue to devote their political lives to so vile and valueless an organisation?

But the Conservatives are no less liable to stand trial for war crimes. All but 16 of their MPs present voted for war, an even worse record than Labour’s. (The rebels included three from Wessex.) Apparently they did it because they believed the Prime Minister. The job of Her Majesty’s Opposition is always to do precisely the opposite of that. By failing to do their job they too have forfeited all moral authority. One needn’t think the LibDems are off the hook either. It’s true that they voted against, so no charges stick there, but they gave the war their total support once declared, arguably the least principled position imaginable. Our chaps deserve support, the reasoning goes, because they’re only obeying orders. Now, where did we last hear that excuse?

It is an odd situation in which we find ourselves. In 2003 the majority of the House of Commons became composed of alleged war criminals; an election later, many of them are still there. But that is what happens when the electorate fails to punish politicians for their bad deeds and leaves the meting-out of a harsher and less discriminate justice to the murderous rage of suicide bombers.

We are not the government of Wessex and so, at this juncture, can only take the longer-term view. We cannot magically undo the present mess. We cannot rescue the electorate from the consequences of its folly. What we can do is suggest how the longer-term view should shape a future worth struggling for.

One of the recurrent themes of the past five years has been the extent to which British troops have been sent into combat inadequately equipped. Of course, any sympathy for the troops must be tempered by the fact that no-one forced them to join in the first place; from now on, a boycott of Labour’s armed forces by all principled men and women would do a power of good. Nevertheless, there is undoubtedly a gap between what the armed forces are capable of doing and what they are currently expected to do. It should surprise no-one that the military would close the gap by spending more on defence. A better way would be to spend less. The smaller the armed forces, the weaker the temptation for politicians to play games with soldiers’ lives, to stake their own legacy upon foolish foreign adventures of no conceivable relevance to the defence of the realm. To lecture others on the evils of WMDs, while continuing to stockpile our own, is the depth of hollowness and hypocrisy. If we would be heard, let us rid our own country of them first.

We say this in full knowledge of the importance of defence and allied industries to the economic well-being of Wessex. Preparation for war has dominated our region for centuries. Defence procurement provides Bristol with one of its largest sources of office employment. Hampshire is ‘home’ to both the Royal Navy, at Portsmouth, and the Army, at Aldershot. Further north, air bases at Greenham Common and Upper Heyford became by-words for Cold War fear. Huge areas of Wiltshire and Dorset remain today fenced off as military establishments and training grounds. The villages of Imber in Wiltshire and Tyneham in Dorset, requisitioned ‘temporarily’ for the Second World War, have never been returned to their former inhabitants.

Defence underpins much of the region’s economy, directly or through purchases in the aerospace and electronics sectors. So reduced defence spending must be matched by increased spending on the creation of alternative employment in sustainable industries for those displaced. MoD land is an asset in more than the financial sense. While armoured vehicles have done damage to the archaeology of Wessex it is also true that the exclusion of modern development and agricultural practices has done much for the landscape and wildlife in areas like Tyneham. The future use of redundant defence sites poses huge issues for the planning system. Sites need to be made over to local communities who will cherish them as their environment, not developed, as so often happens, to accommodate the on-going irresponsibility of London overspill.

The world’s nations with the highest quality of life have achieved their enviable position by eschewing the craze for glory. Opponents of the British Empire used to be called ‘Little Englanders’. If we are now judged ‘Little Wessexers’, so much the better. There are so many things to be done around our home, things that centralist governments have put off indefinitely, pleading poverty. So many public service improvements that are needed. So much new infrastructure to prepare Wessex for the post-oil world. Yet sadly, much of the wealth that could fund our future is currently being wasted.

The United Kingdom spends nearly £30 billion every year on defence, £1 billion of it specifically on Iraq. It is also the fifth largest arms exporter in the world and subsidies of arms exports cost taxpayers around £900 million a year. Wessex has a share in this too. Wessex Regionalists condemn the arms trade, whose consequences for global security cannot be limited to the countries to which arms are sold. What hope for peace is there when the ten largest arms exporting countries include all five permanent members of the Security Council?

Another £7.5 billion annually is spent on our behalf on overseas aid. That includes £825 million for India over the next three years. The UK provides one-third of all world aid to that country, one rich enough to have developed its own nuclear bomb in 1974 (grotesquely named ‘Smiling Buddha’). To question these priorities of our government is not to criticise the goal of lifting poorer countries than our own out of grinding poverty. But as well as demanding some responsibility on their own part it is worth remembering that many of these countries were better off when they did not ‘benefit’ from being part of the global money economy, burdened with debts they can never repay. If we would help them now there are better ways than recycling our money through them on its way back to us. Supporting their right to decide their own futures and not suffer the one imposed by the ideologues of the World Trade Organisation might be a good place to start. To buy local, not global, is another. Fair trade is better than free trade. But why trade at all, if we can make it ourselves? If we must give money to other countries, let it be through voluntary contributions, ethically organised, not through the tax and spend policies of governments with murkier agendas of their own.

We have always said that folk on the spot know best what money should be spent on. So let’s be putting that principle into effect, in Wessex, and throughout the world. By all means let us co-operate, more so than today, in the promotion of world peace and justice. But let us also be clear what is primarily our business and what is emphatically not.

All the World’s a Picnic

It was, of course, insensitive to allow a teddy bear to be named Mahomet. What self-respecting teddy would want to bear a name that remains mired in such controversy? But if Sudanese folk want to make themselves and their religion the world’s laughing-stock by over-reacting, then that’s their business.

The questions which the Gillian Gibbons case raise for us are questions about the organisation of our own society and the terms on which peoples co-exist, without the involuntary surrender of one to another.

Mutual cultural respect is independent of religion. One does not have to worship Allah to appreciate the Alhambra, the Dome of the Rock, Persian poetry or Bengali cooking. Any more than one has to be a devotee of Amun-Ra to comprehend the Pyramids, the Valley of the Kings or the temple complex of Karnak. Culture is not compulsory; you take it or leave it and if you leave it the consequences are not usually fatal. It is inclusive, and because it forms part of the outer life it hangs lightly, like sand over the bedrock of being.

Mutual religious respect is another matter. Religion essentially deals with the inner life and, with few exceptions, is exclusive. Sometimes there are penalties for rejecting it, which can even mean being killed by those you have left behind. Or even by those you never agreed with in the first place. The more fervent the religious belief, the less respect for other beliefs is possible. For the devout Christian, Islam is at best the Mahometan heresy, at worst the work of the Anti-Christ. And the feeling can be mutual. The only alternative to mutual hostility politically is a rigorously secular state that takes no cognisance of belief. Thoughtful religions will appreciate that conversion by force of law is no conversion.

The distinction between culture and religion is therefore one of the most important distinctions of all, yet is increasingly neglected. Universal human rights are being exposed as a sham, determined less and less by objective principles, more and more by fear of those who shout loudest, those with the touchiest feelings and the most extreme forms of self-expression. Terrorism shows that the threats are real enough, though any target country with a long history of self-interested and often violent meddling in the affairs of other states might be judged to be getting no more than its just deserts.

Labour’s cowardice in the face of threats is obvious and understandable. Its power depends on appeasement because, within its heartlands, power depends on not losing the Mahometan vote. So it is with the issue of ritual slaughter. It wouldn’t be such a one-sided issue if the English truly were a nation of animal lovers. If fox hunting was banned for animal welfare reasons, as stated (and that’s a very big ‘if’), then ritual slaughter cannot be tolerated either. If it’s against the law for atheists, Christians and pagans to do it, then Jews and Mahometans should be treated no differently, where they do not form the majority. Different regions could have different laws, according to regional preference, but Wessex, with a tiny Mahometan population, would be unlikely to maintain the exemption. Those who dissent can, if necessary, be either vegetarians or emigrants. At the very least, proper labelling should be mandatory so that everyone eats what they think they are eating.

In multi-cultural Britain, the one culture conspicuous by its absence is ours. It’s not one of which we should be ashamed in any way. If it cannot thrive in its homeland, where can it thrive? By ‘ours’ is not meant just English culture in the round but our specific Wessex dimension, still looked down upon by the London media as the butt of ‘West Country’ jokes. Substitute blacks or Irish and see if the jokes are still politically correct. (Wessex folk, it must be said, can be every bit as bad about the Cornish, just as the Irish joke about those from Kerry, and Kerrymen in their turn about the folk of West Kerry.) That’s not to say that we want to take up the standard assigned role as victims. Political correctness – politicheskaya pravil’nost – was invented under Lenin, so we know where that’s taking us. It shouldn’t be necessary to kick up a fuss in the first place and life would indeed be better without ever-more intrusive legislation criminalising thought and choice. Common sense and common respect is all we ask for, not bureaucratised bullying to take the place of every other kind, nor the idea that those who don’t live in London are intellectually and morally retarded by lack of exposure to the big wide world.

We can take care of ourselves, thank you. And so can the world. A common reaction to events in Sudan has been ‘no more aid for ungrateful Africa’. It’s been over 50 years since independence and it’s true that Africans should by now be able to stand on their own two feet. Believing otherwise may be good for a sense of post-colonial guilt but it does Africa no favours at all. Simply contrast what little the decades of aid have done for that continent with China’s runaway success almost entirely from its own efforts.

It’s inexplicable that any teacher from Britain should give priority to teaching Sudanese children over ‘charity begins at home’. Children here are leaving primary school unable to read. One might question whether they should even be going to school until they can, always assuming that their parents are literate enough to give them that start in life. Our education system is in meltdown and centralist attempts to save it have only made matters worse. The National Curriculum was supposed to raise standards, not lower them. But that’s what happens when schools are taken out of the hands of the community and subjected to patronising interference by Whitehall-knows-best. Thanks to the National Curriculum, all schools now teach at the level of the worst and all initiative has been throttled. Transmission of culture has given way to novelty for its own sake. Labour, instead of confronting the teaching profession’s abdication of responsibility constructively, is throwing billions at unnecessary new school buildings. A huge waste of money, accompanied by school re-foundations that wipe out any continuity of ethos. The oldest of the buildings at Eton College is from the 15th century; the fact doesn’t seem to deter parents who can from sending their children to be taught there, nor stunt the pupils’ careers.

The mess created by centuries of centralism will not be put right overnight but the principles are easy to define. We all of us start from where we are and work outwards. Our local community comes first, then our region, and we help the rest of the world with what’s left over. All those who wish to join us in the task of repair are welcome; those who come to sneer, whinge or exploit are not. We mean others no harm and we expect no less of them.