Stacking Up

Libraries news tends to be bad news.  Closures mainly, accompanied by the snarling of those who think that in the Internet age all books should be burned, as useless relics of a barbarous past.  Little thought is given to the social role of libraries as places to meet and share, especially for the elderly and vulnerable, or their educational role in actively promoting literacy.

Some good news comes from the LibrariesWest consortium, which links Somerset and the four unitary authorities in what used to be Avon.  The public library services of Dorset and Poole will be joining the consortium in June.  As a result, users will be able to access over 150 libraries ‘coast to coast’, from the Bristol Channel to the English Channel, using a single library card.  Items can be reserved, borrowed, renewed and returned at any LibrariesWest library regardless of where borrowed from.  LibrariesWest is also introducing a shared computer system to manage loans and stock, offering online searches of a unified catalogue of 2.5 million items.

The London regime’s expectation is that councils will increasingly work together to reduce costs, including through pooling their buying power.  Financial pressures and technical changes mean that it’s happening across a wide range of services, from police and fire to archives and museums to smaller councils pooling back-office functions like audit, payroll, procurement and IT.

Costs could be reduced and effectiveness improved much more rapidly, and with much less pain, if Wessex had an elected assembly to co-ordinate all these ad hoc efforts.  For example, the Welsh Government’s National Procurement Service has led the commissioning of a single library management system for all 22 public library authorities in Wales.  This is but one of its many initiatives, designed to empower local economies as well as cut costs across the whole public sector.  An assembly in Wessex would have its own ‘invest-to-save’ budget to spend on driving forward regional priorities, which could be very different from those that London thinks best for us.  Wessex needs to be free of interference from Whitehall departments that, by imposing ideological solutions through institutional silos, only gets in the way of sensible answers to challenging questions.

History Made Here

G K Chesterton is often misquoted as saying that those who argue that 'you can’t put the clock back’ obviously know nothing about clocks.  It’s near enough to what he did write – that time only moves forwards but principles needn’t – to let stand.  What’s more, we’re seeing plenty of evidence of it just now.

At Bristol Temple Meads, the 1870s extension to Brunel’s original 1841 train-shed is to be brought back into use for the new electric trains to Paddington.  Maybe FirstGroup, one of our two Scottish rail-lords, will have a bloke in a stovepipe hat to wander about when it opens.  If so, he’s unlikely to admit how badly planned it’s all been, both track and trains.  The old train-shed has to be re-opened because the new carriages are too long (a means of economising on wheels) to fit the curved platforms of the current Temple Meads without scraping the sides.  No wonder the bold plans of the reckless engineer are proving to be a more inspiring legacy than anything that came between him and now.

Last month’s rebranding of First Great Western as Great Western Railway creates the opportunity to board a GWR train for the first time in 68 years.  (That’s not counting in this context the heritage experience of the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway.)  It is, according to FirstGroup, “using our history to create history”, capitalising on the past even as a major programme of investment for the future gets underway.  Nothing wrong with that, as an idea.  The SNP want to bring back an independent Scotland, last seen 308 years ago.  We want to bring back an autonomous Wessex, even after 949 years.

There’s plenty wrong though with the investment priorities.  Anyone riding in the standing-room-only sardine cans on the Wessex Main Line will know that if you’re not going to London you really don’t count.  Bristol could have a proper underground metro system for much less than the £25bn cost of London’s Crossrail 2 scheme, but it chooses not to.  The Somerset & Dorset line could be re-opened, re-connecting those counties’ centres to our two coasts, for a fraction of the £80bn being spent on HS2.  (In Scotland, thanks to the Scottish Parliament, the 35-mile Borders Railway was re-opened last month for £300 million and passenger numbers are already one-fifth of the predicted annual total.)  Instead, disused trackbed and station sites in Wessex are still being short-sightedly built over, to meet London’s inflated estimates of ‘housing need’.

Transport is one policy area where views set down by our founder, Alexander Thynn, in the 1979 ‘12-point programme’ as revised in 1992, remain as relevant as ever.  “Provision of a Wessex-orientated transport system to link our principal cities without having to depend largely on routes directed towards London, and with special emphasis on providing a satisfactory system of public transport”.  That’s what we said then and there can be no doubt that the coming decades will see ever-increasing expenditure on public transport as climate change and peak oil drive a transport revolution.  Away from the private car and back to a familiar model from the last century, less flexible but more sustainable and therefore the only viable option.  But if we don’t fight for Wessex and other regions to gain our fair share of that money, the London regime will as usual take much more than the lion’s share.

There’s more than one reason why FirstGroup would choose to bring back the Great Western.

One appears on the face of it to be simply fashion – there’s a 30-year cycle of centralist uniformity versus decentralist diversity that keeps on playing out in post-war public transport in the UK.  Is it just the preferences of successive generations of senior management and their marketing advisers, or something related to the investment cycle?  Either way, it’s not restricted to trains: some of FirstGroup’s bus interests now operate as ‘The Buses of Somerset’, and like the GWR there’s a new (and locally specific) green livery to replace the garish corporate one mocked as ‘Barbie’.

On the other hand, this could be a more permanent trend, like the worldwide revulsion against privatisation and corporate power.  Corporate transport conglomerates have a problem: the public doesn’t support them, with polls showing majority support for public ownership of trains, even among Conservative voters.  Going local and regional can be a logical corporate response to that, to build public support for NOT reversing Thatcherism and resuming the leftful course of history.  At the very heart of that is being allowed to bid for ever-longer franchises, frustrating any move towards rolling renationalisation.

Building brand loyalty therefore is an urgent defensive measure.  FirstGroup’s rebranding exercise aims to position the GWR as something bigger than an individual franchisee and something therefore to be cherished as an opportunity to do things differently.  Scotland provides a precedent.  The Scottish Government has decided that ScotRail is a publicly-owned brand, to be merely borrowed by the successful bidder that gets to run it for a limited time.  It’s a model with wider application, one that preserves a specific territorial identity against pressures for uniformity, whether they issue from corporate spin-doctors or from an Old Labour government.  It doesn’t necessarily prevent either pressure triumphing but digging-in is corporate rail’s best chance of remaining involved (though a publicly owned rail network doesn’t have to be uniform: the British Railways of the 1950s wasn’t).

Where this strategy fails to inspire is in its assumption that Brunel’s GWR makes a sensible area for purposes other than getting folk to and from London.  It’s no criticism of Brunel’s genius as an engineer to say that this shouldn’t be the basis for defining our regional identity, now and in the future.  Posters telling passengers of the plan to ‘give the west its railway back’ and build our ‘great western region’ may make sense in Bristol but they mean much less in south Wales.  North-south journeys within Wessex, or north-west to south-east, will remain a low priority.  South Wales and ‘Western’ Wessex, instead of better integration with north Wales and ‘Southern’ Wessex respectively, will continue to draw together into some Greater Severnside.  The Welsh Assembly won’t go gentle into that scenario, and neither should we.

The Long And Winding Road

The vilification of Nicola Sturgeon in the London press is delightful, not because it is at all pleasant but because here at last is a phenomenon that ‘they’ can do nothing to stop.  No matter what their rage, no matter what their war chest, they cannot win, and the SNP cannot lose.  The only detail left to determine is whether any other party gets a Scottish seat.  It’s looking increasingly unlikely, which means a second referendum within 10 years is not just inevitable, it’s a huge waste of time and money.  Scotland has left.

Four weeks ago, the main parties started out more or less where they seem likely to end up.  What’s all that about then?  So long as David Cameron has no chance of achieving an overall majority, the outcome is pre-determined: Ed Miliband in power, even if he comes second.  Because the SNP were never going to renew Cameron’s tenure and the FibDems weren’t ever going to be numerous enough to out-vote them.  The real shifts come between elections: voting only confirms them.  Wessex had better get used to five more years of Labour control-freakery, five more years, that is, to think more deeply about the regional alternative that is now the only really worthwhile game in town.

A recent article points out that, with the end of the two-party system, hardly any MP south of the border will be returned with over 50% of the vote (let alone the backing of over 50% of the electorate).  Because of the SNP surge, the position north of the border will be the exact opposite.  It will be very ungentlemanly if anyone complains about Scottish nationalist influence over the government of the UK if the SNP turn out to be only ones with any democratic mandate at all.

If it’s ‘the economy, stupid’, then stupidity over the economy, putting all the eggs in the London basket, is about to deliver some very nasty shocks to an Anglo-British establishment that has been splendidly outmanoeuvred.  The SNP, with their special appeal to the young of a reborn nation, do think not tactically, nor even strategically, but transgenerationally.  We in Wessex must do the same, continually making the future of our own young people central to everything we do.  Those passing through our schools and universities today will be those to govern a free Wessex: make no mistake about that.

Next year marks the 60^th anniversary of a small book entitled Our Three Nations.  It was sponsored jointly by Plaid Cymru, the SNP and, from England, Common Wealth, each of the parties contributing three representatives to undertake the writing.  Gwynfor Evans from Plaid Cymru and Robert McIntyre from the SNP are well-known names, John Banks, Douglas Stuckey and Don Bannister from Common Wealth much less so.

John Banks later wrote Federal Britain?, the 1971 classic on regionalism, and served WR as both President and Secretary-General, drafting our 1982 constitutional policy document, The Statute of Wessex.  Douglas Stuckey, now in his 90s, is another long-standing WR office-holder.  Today he offered the view that instead of flying into a constitutional panic, those in charge might just re-read O3N, 79 pages of advice that has dated remarkably little.

O3N proposed that the UK be replaced by a “confraternity” of free and equal nations; of Common Wealth it said that “Not the least of its tasks is that of making the programmes of the two National Parties as acceptable to ‘progressive’ circles in England as Irish Home Rule was in the early part of the century.  As Dr McIntyre has said, Nationalism in the British Isles is an English rather than a Scottish, Welsh or Irish problem.  Let England replace the conception of Empire with that of Commonwealth, within these islands as well as beyond the seas, and the problem is solved… 

The Imperial power wielded by England over centuries would receive a mortal blow.  The proof of this will be the bitter opposition of all who believe that imperialism, colonialism and playing a part in Power Politics is still a desirable policy for the people of the British Isles to follow.  Only those who believe that the future for the English people lies along the road of freely accepted co-operation between friendly but independent peoples at home and abroad will welcome these developments and will seek to re-orientate English political life and institutions accordingly…

Under the new conditions brought about by Confraternity, the impact of new ideas about politics will relax the grip of the two-party system.  With Welsh and Scottish examples before them, workers in English industries will start talking about a share in running their own show…  Paradoxically, there may even be a resurgence of English patriotism and national consciousness to take the place of the lost sense of Empire…  Under the pressure of these accumulative influences we would expect to see a fairer system of election at last introduced into Parliamentary contests and a considerable measure of devolution to new Provincial Assemblies…  On a small scale the experience of the Isle of Man and of the Channel Islands can be very instructive, and may provide the model for the future administration of such highly individualistic areas of England as Cornwall.”

No cavilling please.  This was five years after the formation of Mebyon Kernow put Cornish nationalism in the spotlight.  It was on the basis of that fact that John Banks insisted that the reference to Cornwall go in.  And not without some scepticism from the Scots and the Welsh.  Transgenerational thinking, by its very nature, takes time to reach fruition.  It often seems as if no fruit will ever be forthcoming.  Persevere though, and the bountiful harvest will be a most memorable occasion.

Only the Desperate

Today in 1320 the Scottish nobility issued the Declaration of Arbroath, with its ringing line about fighting not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

And the contemporary response is Frenchgate.  Nicola Sturgeon says she didn’t say it.  The French Ambassador says she didn’t hear it.  The French Consul-General says he didn’t report it.  And the irony is that if Sturgeon had said that Ed Miliband isn’t prime ministerial material, no-one, except possibly Miliband himself, would have any reason to disagree.

Miliband – the same goes for Cameron, his equal in competence – is one of the last generation of old-style Westminster politicians, unable to understand why the political world no longer revolves around them.  They push the buttons and pull the levers that used to deliver power, only to find that the wires have been cut.

The Big Two keep trying to convince us that this election is about which of them we’d prefer as PM.  It isn’t.  It’s not about them at all.  You can’t tell the difference, so it really doesn’t matter.  Either of them would be equally good or equally bad at heading up the next administration.  The important question is what kind of administration they will lead.  If you want the Blue Tories, vote Cameron.  If you want the Red Tories, vote Miliband.  If you want something else, vote for something else and see it in coalition, applying pressure where it hurts.  Never before have the smaller parties had logic so firmly on their side.  It’s so frighteningly true that a grand coalition of the Blues and the Reds still looks a definite possibility as the way to head off irreversible change for the better.  Proportional representation.  Real localism.  And real regionalism.

Sturgeon said that last week’s televised debate between seven of the party leaders illustrated that "two-party politics at Westminster is over".  A ripple of surprise ran through the commentariat that interesting things are being said outside the rigidly controlled London circle.  England wants to vote SNP/Plaid in its millions, and it can’t.  It’s so frustrating, isn’t it?  And all because the media have been so obsessed with Farage and his twilight band of empire-loyalists that they failed to spot where the future really lies, in a Europe not looking back to the 19th century but forward to the 21st.  Plaid Cymru have put out a splendid little poster bearing the slogan ‘Don’t vote Labour for your fathers’ sake; vote Plaid for your children’s’.

We would have liked to be there in Salford.  Our invitation was presumably lost in the post.  (So too was Mebyon Kernow’s; they haven’t even been invited to the BBC South West regional debate in Plymouth, despite fighting every seat in Cornwall.)  The Twittersphere may have been too busy swooning over Leanne Wood’s Welsh accent to notice her policies but Wessex has a lovely accent too, and lovely policies to match.  Next time, will the regionalists will be joining the nationalists on stage?  That depends on how fast the decentralist trend now accelerates.

Last week saw the launch of the Northern Party, a pan-Northumbrian movement that has grown out of the relaunched Campaign for the North.  Its claimed territory overlaps with those of Yorkshire First and the North East Party.  Is that good or bad?  Lack of agreement on areas and boundaries is surely bad if it slows down the debate, but not if it brings it to the fore.  If regionalists up north can afford the luxury of disagreement then they must be making very good progress indeed.  And, for this election at least, there will be no clashing candidacies.

The Northern Party’s top team includes Harold Elletson, former Conservative MP for Blackpool North.  Its registered Leader is Michael Dawson, nephew of Hilton Dawson, the former Labour MP for Lancaster & Wyre who leads the North East Party.  Yorkshire First is led by Richard Carter, ex-Labour, and its candidates at this election include a former FibDem MEP.  Across the political spectrum then, devolutionary aspirations are being unlocked.  Those who have devoted their political lives to the unresponsive London parties are emerging, blinking, into the light.  We watch, fascinated and vindicated, as northerners cast off time-wasting pressure groups buzzing around the London leaderships and make a bid for actual, unfettered control of what goes on in their areas.  If that’s a universal trend, we can look forward to a few defections in Wessex too.

What the desperate London parties simply cannot grasp is the extent to which their rule is increasingly hated as London takes more and more and gives less and less.  What we loathe above all is the way we’re expected to feel grateful that London thrives on our taxes, yet treats us as ignorant peasants who need to be told what to think, even about ourselves.  There are some real shocks to the system coming up.  The 7th of May marks the day they start, not end.

The Aye’ds of March

Et tu, Nicola?  It’s one thing to have Plaid Cymru singing the praises of an anti-Welsh Green Party but today we had the SNP join the chorus.  Nicola Sturgeon has urged folk in England to vote either for the Greens or for a Labour candidate that would challenge Ed Miliband from the left.

We would like to think that Plaid and the SNP are serious in their commitment to a Europe of small nations and historic regions.  (And if they have any influence in the next parliament that they might like to promote the idea, alongside a genuine brand of localism.)  They are both, after all, members of the European Free Alliance.  That’s not how it looks from here.  Or perhaps from Cornwall, where fellow EFA members Mebyon Kernow are similarly beneath recognition.  It doesn’t take much: all you have to say is, in Cornwall or in England, vote for your local party of self-government and if it’s not standing then, and only then, might you like to consider the second-rate option of voting Green.  Because in Scotland and Wales, the Greens are part of the opposition.  Why should it be any different anywhere else?

Nicola Sturgeon’s final suggestion, a vote for ‘progressive’ Labour candidates as part of keeping David Cameron and his (cross-party) ideology out of power, is similarly off-target.  There’s no ‘progressive’ Labour Party in Scotland: that’s the SNP’s winning card.  Why should it be any different anywhere else?  A vote for Labour is a vote for Jack Straw to imagine a ban on the SNP as a separatist menace.  Over-enthusiastic SNP evangelism on behalf of Labour risks a Labour majority government that could set about doing great damage to the nationalist cause.  Telling English voters that the Tories are worse than Labour is, sadly, an own goal.  The truth is we know they’re as bad as each other.  The more that leaders of the alternative act as if the terrible twins are an ineradicable fact of our politics, the more they help to keep things that way.

The Pecking Order

Irish nationalists have sometimes found the Scots and Welsh a bit puzzling.  Ireland, as a separate island, is clearly not British.  At best it’s one of the British Isles but even that’s controversial, with neutral commentators preferring something along the lines of ‘the North Atlantic archipelago’.  Great Britain though is one land mass, from Land’s End up to John o’ Groats.  Why would anyone try to divide it up?

So it’s no big surprise when Plaid Cymru, in a similar blindspot moment, advises voters in England (and Cornwall) to vote Green.  To their credit, the SNP and Mebyon Kernow have not, as far as we know, told English voters what to do.  We expect that regionalists living on the Celtic fringe would want to support their respective nationalist parties.  Even if they view separatism as a step too far, for them, personally, the strength of nationalism in the polls adds momentum to the debate on decentralisation generally.

Why then is the favour not returned?  The nationalists could have said, vote for the Greens or for the regionalists, both are causes we recognise as travelling the same road as us.  But no.  If a choice has to be made then the consistent one would have been to back the regionalist parties.  There’s no conflict with the nationalist cause in that case.  Regionalists do not put up candidates against the nationalist parties and never would have reason to, because our territories do not overlap.  The Greens do it all the time.  If Plaid or the SNP fail to scrape through in some marginal seats it may well be because of anti-nationalist Green candidates splitting the vote.  If the Greens are all that’s deemed good enough for the voters of England, why are they not good enough for the voters of Scotland and Wales?

When Nicola, Leanne and Natalie get together, does Natalie ever ask why the Greens are being set up as an ersatz English nationalist party?  No doubt they’re all genuine in their desire to work together but they do not do so as equals because the Greens are every bit as much rivals as allies.  For all the talk of solidarity, electoral reality has to intervene, but to what extent?  And at what price in integrity?

In Wales, the Greens are notoriously anti-Welsh, with a classic ‘white settler’ mentality towards the society they inhabit.  Coincidentally, they share some peripheral policies with Plaid.  The core outlook that Plaid shares with regionalist parties – a real commitment to decentralisation and the rebuilding of identities shattered by centuries of micro-management from London – is not a coincidence but deep philosophical common ground.

No-one in politics wants to be part of a coalition of cripples if they can sprint for the finishing line under their own steam.  The point is not that they should hold back for others to catch up – that would be familiar Westminster federalist thinking.  It is that those lower down the pecking order will remember how they’re treated by those who today are – and we hope can continue to be – a shining inspiration.

The War on Identity

“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory.  Destroy its books, its culture, its history.  Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history.  Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.  The world around it will forget even faster.”

Milan Hübl (1927-1989)

History is written by the victors.  Just now, it’s the centralists who are winning across much of Europe.  They have spied their opportunity and seized it.  But history hasn’t finished with them yet.

There are three reasons why we take an interest in regionalism on the mainland, and in the regions of France in particular.  One is that a Wessex-centred world must view Brittany and Normandy as a more meaningful ‘next-door’ than Northumbria or Scotland, separated from us by Mercia.  That’s an illustration of how seeing things from the perspective of the imperial states creates a bloc mentality that really does block out other aspects of geographical reality.  A second reason is practical solidarity, because the Jacobin mindset is something that gets passed around Europe like a virus, finding new strength from new victims.  When Alsatians, Catalans or Tyroleans suffer at the hands of control-freak states, we know very well that we could be next.  The third reason is ideological solidarity, because English regionalism can be part of a trans-European ideal, the Europe of a Hundred Flags.  If it fails to see itself in those terms, then it will fail to achieve its potential to engage and enthuse.

How fares the Europe of a Hundred Flags today?  Very poorly, as one imperial state after another starts to roll back the gains made since the Second World War.  Europe is being restructured in ways that threaten to undo all its achievements in terms of economic (and even political) democracy, social welfare, environmental protection and cultural autonomy.  All these things need to be defended on a secure territorial basis, the basis provided by regional identity.  Our assets.  Our institutions.  Our neighbours.  Our land.  Our way of life.  London parties not welcome.  Amazingly, the mainstream Left can’t even begin to understand the importance of this.  Labour puts up candidates against the nationalist parties in Scotland, Wales and Cornwall.  What good can possibly come of that?  Labour ekes out its existence as a parasite on the system, having no views on how to change it for the better.  In some ways, it’s set to make matters worse.  As its continental allies already are doing.

France has now definitively redrawn its regional map.  The partly German-speaking region of Alsace has come off worst, merged with two French-speaking regions to create ‘ALCA’ – Alsace-Lorraine-Champagne-Ardenne, an area bigger than Belgium.  It’s one of several such combinations, doomed to be known by their initials, just like, as one French MP put it, cattle-brands.  Alsace heads a long list of regions to be abolished as their number is reduced from 22 to 13.  Others include such historic names as Aquitaine, Auvergne, Burgundy, Limousin and Picardy.  The one group who can celebrate are the Mouvement Normand, since the re-unification of Normandy is one feature of the plan.  Wessex looks out at what will now be officially the coast of Brittany and Normandy; it’s only further inland that the chaos becomes evident!  They can, as always, look back at Cornwall, with Wessex waiting to take its place alongside.

So have the Normans been good garcons and filles?  It might seem so to the Alsatians and the Bretons.  These two peoples are ones whose loyalty to the French State has often been regarded as suspect, as if loyalty isn’t something that has to be earned.  Now they’re the two peoples most bitterly disappointed and with good reason to ask why they should remain part of a State that won’t even recognise their existence.  Brittany remains truncated, while Alsace will be wiped off the map.  A challenge has been launched in the Constitutional Council, alleging inadequate consultation, but for now the plan is to implement the cull on 1st January 2016.

During the debates it was made clear that the restoration of traditional provinces is not something that will be tolerated.  Sometimes, as in the case of Normandy, it happens by accident, but accidents do happen.  Reorganisation is about improving the efficient, functional operation of the French national territory, as viewed from Paris.  Substitute ‘English’ for ‘French’ and ‘London’ for ‘Paris’ and it becomes a familiar story.  Indeed, an article in The Regionalist in 1991 stated that “By introducing its own definition of Brittany, excluding Nantes, France has been able to sow confusion and to re-assure itself that Brittany is, after all, only a French region that France can make and unmake at will.”  Before long the phrase was taken up by Silesian autonomists arguing that the division of Poland into artificial voivodeships is likewise a project to supplant historic provinces with regions that Poland can make and unmake at will.  Napoleon is as much a hero to the Poles as to the French, having briefly liberated their country from the surrounding empires.  Yet in both France and Poland, notions of national liberty are built upon the ruins of regional identity.

Cross the Alps and we find that the ruling party in Italy has introduced a Bill to reorganise the Italian regions, a cut from 20 to 12, replacing historic names like Piedmont and Tuscany with Jacobin-style geographical labels – Regione Alpina, Regione Appenninica, Regione Adriatica.  The message is the same as in France, or England, or Poland: regions exist to help the centre manage its territory; they do not deserve to exist as something worthwhile in their own right or to be an inspiration to those challenging the centre’s monopoly of real power.

Two proposed casualties are the small regions of Valle d’Aosta and Trentino-Alte Adige, home to Italy’s French-speaking and German-speaking minorities respectively.  Both these areas have a special regional status that was introduced following the defeat of fascism, in recompense for persecution under Mussolini.  The German-speakers of south Tyrol feel particularly betrayed, with counter-demands now being made for greater autonomy, independence and/or re-union with the rest of Tyrol, from which this area south of the Brenner Pass was separated after the First World War.

With France and Italy deracinated, Spain can expect to be next.  One of the happy peculiarities of regionalisation there was that the boundaries were left largely to the locals to decide.  And one result of that was a relatively large number of single-province regions that saw no need to link up with their neighbours.  These account for 6 of the 15 mainland regions.  So while there are some large regions with a similar population to Wessex – Andalucia and Catalonia for example – there are others about the size of Cornwall – Cantabria and La Rioja.  Both these smaller regions are required in their devolution statutes to allow for the possibility of merger with their big neighbour Castilla-Leon and no doubt will come under pressure to do the deed.  It’s interesting that Spain is tightening up its anti-protest laws.  Clearly, those in charge are expecting trouble.

Across Europe, the 2008 financial crisis has spawned new, happy-clappy parties and movements of the Left.  Their leaders talk a lot about greater public ‘involvement’ in decision-making but are (un)surprisingly cagey about who will actually take the final, unappealable decisions.  Spain’s Podemos is an example, opposing Catalan independence in favour of having some undefined wider ‘influence’.  Moves to get the SNP into formal coalition with Labour are part of the same outflanking manoeuvre that tries to tempt with fleeting political concessions instead of agreeing the need for lasting constitutional changes.  (Though getting to look at the real UK accounts certainly WILL be tempting for Salmond and Sturgeon!)

Among the large continental states, that just leaves Germany, where the possibility of re-drawing regional boundaries has come to the surface several times since 1949.  So far, the democratic Germans have always put firm proposals to the vote and not since 1952 have the voters decided to agree a regional merger.  (Even that was largely about re-uniting an area that had been split by the zones of occupation.)  Germany is often quoted as the model for other continental countries.  In France the debate was driven – or poisoned – by the idea that France needs regions of ‘European scale’.  Yet Germany is actually marked by huge diversity.  There are regions like Bavaria, almost as big as Ireland, but also tiny city-states like Bremen and Hamburg.

So what is a region of ‘European scale’?  Does the EU have a view?  The EU, sensibly, doesn’t.  European statistics are kept on the basis of regional and local units that ultimately are determined by the Member States’ own legislation.  Sometimes that works in favour of identity, as when Cornwall obtained Objective 1 regional aid status, for which it would not have qualified as part of a slightly more prosperous Devonwall area.  Sometimes it can result in a kind of statistical apartheid.  Welsh local government is planned to be reorganised again (for the third time in 50 years).  The Williams Commission that looked into the matter disappointed any nationalist who might have longed for the reconstitution of Morgannwg or Gwent.  The reason?  That west-east split, linking depressed coalfield areas to their respective, wealthier coasts, would endanger European aid.  So the poor coalfield has to stick together, separate from the coast.  In terms of the infrastructure European aid might fund, it’s nonsense, as transport largely radiates from Cardiff and Newport, following the valleys from south to north.

So much for a Europe that works for its peoples.  Instead we have inflexible funding rules – the Europe of the figures – re-shaping our very constitution, for good or ill.  The most sensible boundaries – in terms of community geography – may be ruled out in favour of much less sensible arrangements in order to save the funding.

Who are the EU’s real masters then, if not us?  A generation ago there was the fervent hope that an alliance of europeanists and regionalists might be the twin millstones that would grind away the imperial states, dividing up their powers between them.  If the EU hasn’t been the most active of allies, it’s perhaps because the European ideal has been much more easily co-opted by the centralists, by those who wish to write the imperial-state idea wider still.  And that shouldn’t surprise us.  The EU is the creature of the treaties that establish it and those treaties are written by the Member States.  They may concede consultative institutions like the Committee of the Regions but they aren’t going to sign their own death warrant.  Rather than meet the financial crisis by cutting their own wasteful spending and devolving power, they look to save money by cutting out somebody else’s tier and centralising power instead.  Money has to be saved now, urgently, if the centre itself is to be saved.  Attacking any identity lucky enough to have been respected this far is the quickest win.  The promise in ‘The Vow’ to not abolish the Scottish Parliament some time down the road is significant not because it was said but because it was thought necessary to say it.

More recently, the EU bureaucracy itself has realised the importance of keeping its national paymasters sweet.  Barroso could have opened up a debate on internal enlargement, about the further treaty changes needed to avoid any ambiguity over what happens when part of a Member State secedes.  His neutrality was just too Pilate-like for the EU’s own good.  It came across not as neutrality but as change-weariness.  Not more treaty negotiations.  Just to please the Scots and the Catalans.  Do they really think their national freedom should matter that much?  Juncker has already set the tone of his presidency, sceptical about environmental and social protections that hinder Europe’s bid to join the race to the bottom.  His warning to Greek voters about the kind of government they should or shouldn’t elect is further proof that the ‘post-democratic’ Europe advocated by Peter Mandelson is firmly taking shape.

Regionalists have always been wary of Europhile claims, while equally distancing ourselves from Eurosceptic adoration of the imperial states.  There is a genuinely third way that is not about those states, nor about a Jacobin map of Europe where identity is to be erased as a barrier to ever closer union.  Actions produce reactions and the current war on identity will produce a renewed determination to resist.  A determinaton to build a different Europe, the Europe of a Hundred Flags, in place of the worthless regimes in London, Paris, Rome and Madrid – and of their Brussels puppet.  (That so many assume Brussels to be the puppet-master just shows how well the imperial states know their work.)

We should increasingly expect to see nationalist and regionalist parties succeed at the polls, making inroads into the dead thinking of Europe’s indistinguishably conservative / socialist establishment, while seeing off those equally indistinguishable challengers who are just more of the same.

It’s been said, and not wholly in jest, that a nationalist is a regionalist who means it.  One who isn’t fooled by the Labour Party or the Parti Socialiste into backing change that isn’t really there.  Many regionalists, who’ve been deliberately moderate to win concessions from the centre that are now being torn up in scorn and suspicion, will be asking whether separatism is such a dirty word after all.  States with a more authoritarian tradition will be turning up the heat.  States with a less authoritarian tradition will be trading clunking old chains for sleek new wires.  Either way, advocates of autonomy will need to be careful who and what they trust.

Reasons to be Regional

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.         Moving government out of London cuts costs

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

2.         Integrating the region manages costs better

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

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

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

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

3.         A democratic region delivers better value for money

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

4.         A strong region can defend its budget

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

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

5.         A region understands its businesses better

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

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

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

A Voice in Europe?

Postal ballot papers for the Euros have started to arrive, allowing some of us to see what ‘choice’, if any, the 'democratic' process has thrown up this time.

Although WR has contested European elections in the past, this was when the constituencies were smaller, single-member ones that did less damage to regional identity.  We have no candidates this time, having been systematically disadvantaged both geographically and financially.

The geography doesn’t help because the ‘regions’ used for the regional constituencies are still the (supposedly abolished) Prescott zones, not real regions with historic identities.  Wessex is split between two, the west added to Cornwall, the east embraced by the outer Londonian belt.

To contest two ‘regions’ would cost £10,000 in deposits before even a single leaflet could roll off the presses.  The election deposit is essentially a tax on smaller parties.  You get the money back if you poll more than 2.5% – but while you’re building up that support you’re repeatedly punished for having the nerve to challenge the established cartel.

Surely it would be worth it to get a party election broadcast though?  If only.  Stand in Scotland or Wales and you get your airtime even if you stand nowhere else.  Stand in one English ‘region’, or even two, and you don’t get a thing.  To qualify, you have to stand in all nine English ‘regions’.

That’s nonsense, of course.  It dismisses the whole point of a regional party.  Our audience is in Wessex, not Northumbria or East Anglia.  As Scotland and Wales show, there’s no technical reason why it can’t be done, since broadcasting in England still has a regional basis.  It’s pure ideological spite on the part of the London regime: a refusal to facilitate debate about the future of England, insisting that we are One – and that THEY are that One.

It would be possible to get round the rules by having some sort of ‘English regionalist list’, but why should it come to that?  It’s clearly not our business to stir up other parts of England that aren’t interested in rousing themselves.  And there’s no ‘Celtic nationalist list’, for good reason: the Celtic nations are all different, with different priorities.  And so are the English regions.  One thing we don’t want to do is play down our differences at the very point where proper constitutional accommodation of those differences is coming to be recognised as the real alternative to a dysfunctional UK dominated by London.

So you’re a Wessex Regionalist.  There’s no WR candidate.  Can you vote for any of the others?  Last time, in 2009, there was a Mebyon Kernow list in ‘The South West’, but that was a one-off.  MK were fortunate enough to find the funds to fight.  Despite polling 6.8% in Cornwall, they still lost their deposit because they weren’t so popular outside Cornwall.  Hardly surprising.  But hardly fair.  In the absence of both WR and MK, what about the Greens then?  Well, what about the Greens?

The Greens are not regionalists.  They may talk about ‘small is beautiful’ but they don’t practise it, preferring to remain organised as ‘the Green Party of England & Wales’ and putting up candidates against nationalists and regionalists whose policies are actually far more green than the Green Party’s.  (The Greens, for example, favour renationalisation of the railways, not the decentralised common ownership that is needed but simply a return to the catastrophe of micro-management from London, meaning London’s demands get priority treatment every time.)

Recently, the Green Party leader, Natalie Bennett, was spotted in Cornwall lending support to the campaign for an assembly there (rather as the FibDems did, long ago).  The Greens’ No 2 candidate for ‘The South West’, Emily McIvor, has a positive record on devolutionary issues.  But if you do vote Green, you won’t get Emily.

If the Greens are lucky, they will win one seat in ‘The South West’.  It would take a landslide to win two.  Which means that a vote for the Greens is not a vote for Emily but for the No 1 candidate, Molly Scott Cato, who currently leads the Green Group on Stroud District Council (but works in London).  And has a past.

In 1992, Cynog Dafis was elected as Plaid Cymru MP for Ceredigion & Pembroke North, with Green Party support.  The deal worked well enough for most members in both local parties, the Greens recognising that half an MP is better than no representation.  Not so Molly Scott Cato, who was one of the pact saboteurs who worked to break it.  An exasperated Dafis eventually withdrew from the deal, leaving the Greens with no presence in the House of Commons until the election of Caroline Lucas in 2010.

On his own website, Cato’s former partner, Chris Busby, explains the anti-pact campaign as motivated by a belief that the Blaid as a whole wasn’t green enough, on issues such as nuclear power or travellers’ rights.  However, a pamphlet co-authored by Busby, Cato and others in 1995, Nationalism in Wales, exposed the real agenda as one hostile to any way of thinking that failed to match their arrogant metropolitan prejudices.  (An example: they defined nationalism in Wales not empirically but by reference to selected dictionary definitions that enabled them to conflate it with Nazism.  Facts were not allowed to spoil their argument: the nationalists, obviously, were just concealing their true nature.)  Cato, settling in a community where Welsh was the normal medium of communication (and had been for many, many centuries), refused to learn the language and then complained of being lonely.  Given this track record, it is difficult to see her championing the cause of regional autonomy or cultural identity.  More a case of ‘save the world but sod the locals’.

Greens and regionalists share much in policy terms – and sit together in the European Parliament.  But they come to the same policies from very different starting points that must influence how those policies are understood and applied. 

Greens appear to have no concept of history, of being one part of a continuing local or regional story set in linear time and from which it is possible to learn useful things about the nature of the area.  Including its ecological nature.  According to Simon Schama, “Green politics is sited in the present and the future, with only the very remote past (at least in Europe) invoked as a sacred ancestor.”  This fits well the tired, post-war narrative of suppression that views all Europeans as incapable of making healthy use of their heritage.  (Interestingly, the intervening millennia of experience judged illegitimate are those not shared with the USA.)  The Greens, given their oft-alleged far-Right origins, are more sensitive than most to such accusations and therefore all the more keen to throw mud proactively.

Molly Scott Cato remains a fervent advocate of bio-regionalism, a neo-Jacobin project to erase all historic human communities and replace them with new identities defined solely by objective geographical resources.  For the Greens, ordinary humans are the problem, so their varied cultures obviously cannot be allowed to shape the universal solution.  Regionalism it may be, but not as we know it.  The question of power remains absent, especially the question of power projected from without.  Greens can be easily caricatured as those who have come to a community with the deliberate aim of undermining the sense of difference that attracted them in the first place, once that sense of difference demands anything of them in return.  Sometimes the caricature is really quite fair.

We have to conclude that there is no party standing in the Euro-elections in Wessex that we can support sufficiently to recommend a vote in its favour.  All to some extent oppose Wessex and desire its continued destruction by the London regime.  There is nothing concrete to suggest otherwise and therefore nothing to be gained by voting.

So you’re a Wessex Regionalist.  What do you do?  What you can do is the following (modified as necessary if yours is a postal vote).  Take a thick felt pen to the polling station.  Spread out the ballot paper.  Write WESSEX REGIONALIST across it.  Fold it, and place it in the ballot box.  Those supervising the count will notice such things: the papers end up in a separate pile.  Let’s aim for a record number of spoilt papers.  A wasted vote?  No.  A negative action?  Far from it.  Under the current electoral system, anti-democratic and centralist to the core, it is the only positive step we are allowed to take.

Wales: A Way And A Warning

In 2012 we noted the Welsh Government’s plans to create a powerful, integrated environmental body.  Those plans took effect in April 2013 with the launch of Natural Resources Wales.

NRW is the end result of a long process of bringing together powers that were once spread very thinly.  Forty years ago, those powers belonged to no fewer than seven different authorities or types of authority:

• the Countryside Commission (based in London) dealt with landscape and recreation

• the Forestry Commission (based in London) dealt with forestry 

• HM Factory Inspectorate (based in London) dealt with air pollution

• local councils dealt with waste disposal

• the Nature Conservancy (based in London) dealt with wildlife

• river authorities dealt with fisheries, land drainage and water pollution (Wales had seven)

• the Welsh Office (based in Cardiff, but actually run from London) dealt with the farmed environment

Now, for the first time, one organisation can look at the environment in Wales as a whole, in a joined-up way.  It still has to deal with cross-border issues, but it has no single English equivalent.  It will go on dealing with four separate bodies (the Environment Agency, the Forestry Commission, Natural England, and parts of DEFRA).  Could they be similarly unified?  Well, yes, and it has been talked about, but given the size of England the resulting organisation would be a nightmare of administrative complexity.  It could only work effectively through a network of regional offices, in touch with events on the ground, and this Coalition really doesn’t like doing regions.  The Welsh example isn’t exactly replicable for England.  It is replicable for Wessex.

The Welsh environment is a precious heritage, pivotal to defining what Wales is culturally.  For us, the Wessex environment should be viewed as no less precious and pivotal.  Yet under the London regime it isn’t deemed worthy of the same integrated approach to ensuring its protection.  Given the pressure from London for endless overspill housing, that’s a catastrophe in the making.

Wales then is worthy of study, and often emulation.  But let’s not jump to the conclusion that all’s well west of the Severn.  Some of the devolved choices made haven’t worked out, with education and health policies in Wales coming in for some sustained criticism.

Most importantly, Wales, unlike Scotland, has failed to grasp what an opportunity devolution is to really do politics differently.  It remains governed by a Labour Party that ultimately answers not to Wales but to Ed Miliband in London.  Plaid Cymru, having led the campaign for self-government over the past century, can only sit and watch the opportunity slip away.

It is when Labour implements policies that are no different from the Coalition’s that you see how the promise of devolution has been subverted.  Take the Planning Bill, published in December.  Launching the Bill, housing and regeneration minister Carl Sargeant said that the Welsh planning system needs to be repositioned from regulating development to enabling appropriate development.  He could have been quoting Osborne or Pickles.  Regulatory capture again: forcing the regulators to act as cheerleaders for the industry and to ask no questions.  In a typical piece of Labour nonsense, detailed rules are to be prescribed for delegating decisions to council officers, to avoid ‘inconsistency’ (as Labour describes local democratic choice).  The Welsh Government also wants to regulate the size of planning committees (no fewer than 11 nor more than 21 members) and the procedures they follow.  Has it really nothing better to do?  Does it understand decentralisation and localism any better than the Coalition?  It appears to understand them less.

Last month, just to demonstrate how far the plot has been lost, the Welsh Government revealed plans to plunge local government in Wales into its third comprehensive reorganisation in 40 years.  County councils like Anglesey and Pembrokeshire, restored in 1996 after a 22-year gap, are now set to vanish again after little more than 17.  Cutting the number of councils in Wales by half or more will also mean fewer councillors, less scrutiny of decision-making and more power for the bureaucracy.  Meanwhile, since key services like police remain non-devolved in Wales, any talk of a better integrated public sector will continue to come up against constraints imposed by the London regime.  You can blame the Tories under John Redwood for the 1996 reorganisation - and its failure to ask how, if at all, this would fit a devolved Wales - but you can blame all three main London parties for still not answering the question of what shape devolution will ultimately obtain.

Wales shows how devolution can mean better governance.  It also shows how, left in the hands of Labour, devolution can fail to deliver its full potential.  Constitutional change is a necessary step towards political change but it is not a sufficient step.  Real change comes only with a willingness to reject the London parties at the ballot box.

Distant Thunder

"We have just received a document which has been given to the world under the title of a ‘Statement of Certain Scottish Grievances’…  The two most important heads of complaint are, that a revenue of £5,764,804, raised in Scotland, is transmitted to England and disbursed for Imperial purposes, and that the representation of Scotland is unfairly small as compared with that of England…  We would venture to suggest to the consideration of our Scotch friends the following two points:–  1.  Does Scotland contribute more than her fair share of the public revenue?  2.  Is the revenue disbursed in the wisest way for the general advantage of all portions of the empire?  If this be not so, no doubt it is the duty of every member – be he Scotch, English, or Irish – to raise the question in Parliament.  So, again, with regard to Parliamentary representation – the Scotch are dissatisfied with the present arrangement.  We share their dissatisfaction.  We are of opinion that the representation on this side of the Tweed is in an unsound condition, and it is our full intention to endeavour, by constitutional means, to get the inequalities redressed.  But does this constitute a reason for threatening to resolve ourselves once more into the kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, and what not?...  A politician who recommended such a course for the adoption of a minority would be justly deemed a fit subject for Bedlam; and yet, here we find a number of our Scotch friends – who are old enough to know better – affixing their signatures to a parcel of trash about Bannockburn and sticks of sulphur of which a schoolboy in his calmer moments might feel ashamed."

It’s an editorial from The Times (a London newspaper).  It could have been written yesterday.  Or even tomorrow.  It’s actually from the issue dated 7th July 1853.

Here’s another item from that newspaper, this time reporting a Commons debate on Irish Home Rule, held on 2nd July 1874.  J.A. Roebuck was first elected to Parliament for Bath, in 1832, when he was among the most radical of the radicals, even leading the campaign in 1834 to free the Tolpuddle Martyrs.  By 1874, now representing Sheffield, he was among the most reactionary of the reactionaries:

“Mr Roebuck said he wanted before he left the House to express his opinions upon this great question…  He had to ask himself whether this proposition to give a limited Parliament to Ireland was for the benefit of the whole United Kingdom.  The arguments that had been used in support of this motion were arguments which, if carried to their natural and logical conclusion, would call back the kingdom of Wessex and re-establish the Heptarchy.  That was the real effect of the arguments of hon. gentlemen who had talked about Nationality... he called upon hon. gentlemen who represented Ireland to desist from talking about a fantastic Irish Nationality and calmly to consider this question in the large and generous spirit in which he wished to address himself to it.”

The point common to Roebuck and the editor of The Times is that constitutional change produces a domino effect.  Before you start, it helps to know where you’ll end up.  The Irish Home Rule debates inspired the first faint movements for Home Rule in Scotland and Wales.  It was the breakthroughs by Scottish and Welsh nationalists in the 1960s and 1970s that inspired our own founding.  Suppose England does become an independent state, shorn of its Celtic dependencies.  What sort of England should it be?  A mini-UK, continually sucking power, wealth and talent to London?  Or an England with strong regional institutions to hold that trend in check?

The frequent response from those in England is that events among our neighbours have no effect upon us.  It’s all put down to being part of the English character, which it is, but only in the sense that the English seem to have given up on politics in the belief that in our top-down society we have no ability to change anything.  (We don’t, which is why we need to build our own.)  A history of our future might reveal that our surroundings mattered quite a lot.  Joining the EU has been hugely beneficial in exposing English thought to ideas previously judged unsound by the London regime, ideas like popular sovereignty and subsidiarity.  That the EU itself does little to honour these ideas is not the point; the point is that our own thoughts now have other tracks to follow than those laid down by ever-suspicious Normans and Tudors.  Devolution, or even independence, will go on surprising us too.  Without leaving our own island, we can go and see things being done differently, then come home and ask ourselves why we can’t equally be constructing a new society.

One recurrent theme in politics is the divide between the revolutionaries and the gradualists, between those who believe that nothing will change until everything changes and those who believe that concessions can be wrung, and wrung to the point where a real transformation is clearly visible.  In one sense, it’s a false distinction, since only a movement that has gradually built itself up is in a position to launch revolutionary change.  The real distinction is perhaps between those who push on to the goal and those who pause half way.  Always bearing in mind, of course, that the goal itself may be changing over time as the context for your community’s life also changes.

Reading the Scottish Government’s White Paper on independence, it’s not hard to see it as a claim that, while everything is capable of changing, nothing will actually change very much.  Many more decisions will be made in Scotland, but a host of cross-border arrangements will remain in place.  Scots will still be able to watch EastEnders and Doctor Who.  Independence will deliver all of the positives that are claimed for it, while the cross-border arrangements will mitigate all of the negatives to the point that no-one will think them worth noticing.  It all sounds so reasonable that you wonder why it hasn’t happened already.

It very well might be as reasonable as it sounds, a simplification of our constitutional architecture that will benefit both sides of the border.  A long-overdue unbundling that will turn the anomaly that is Scotland within the Union into one part of a grown-up family of nations with enduring social ties.  No-one outside the far Right will argue today that the Republic of Ireland should re-join the UK.  One reason for that is not its treasured independence but the continued diluting of it where this makes sense: all those cross-border arrangements that allow life to go on without unnecessary hassle.  Some are quite unexpected: the Department for Transport in London remains partly responsible for lighthouses around the whole of Ireland, 91 years after the south left the UK.  Attempts to alter this following the Good Friday Agreement have been abandoned; the legal complexities are just too great.  Transitional arrangements for Scottish independence may be equally complex, and equally not as transitional as they first appear.

Independence then is NOT the final step if what you seek is total separation.  But why would you seek that extreme solution, if you can make your own decisions as a sovereign entity but still be on good terms with the neighbours?  It’s not just a question for the Scots.  It’s a question for us too.  It’s a question for those who say that England can’t be regionalised, nor can local self-government be constitutionally guaranteed, because the fruits of sovereignty are indivisible.  It’s centralism or nothing; London power or nationalist revolution.  Only if you insist.

In 1956, the party that we (among others) can claim as our predecessor, Common Wealth, published Our Three Nations jointly with Plaid Cymru and the SNP.  Besides names familiar to WR members, like John Banks and Douglas Stuckey, the authors included names familiar on a wider stage such as Gwynfor Evans and Robert McIntyre.  (Despite the title, O3N is one of the first books to acknowledge the possibility of autonomy for Cornwall, as well as for the English regions.)  We can hardly fail to wish Scotland luck as it first debates, then judges how much autonomy it currently requires.

The Victorians were often a far-sighted lot.  They recognised that the dispersal of decision-making would alter the character of these islands irrevocably.  They were right to predict that, but quite wrong to fear it.  The post-imperial era will only truly begin when power returns to where the story began.  When it returns to Wessex.