This time last month (30 May), there was a gathering at Glastonbury Town Hall to discuss the town’s ‘transition’ to a post-oil world. It began with a talk from a leading light in Transition Town Totnes (TTT), the pioneers of transition thinking in the UK. Sadly, amidst all the joyful envisioning of local self-sufficiency, there did seem to be a few basics missing. It was like the 1960’s all over again, a fantasy world where everything is possible. In truth, in the future, everything will not be possible and hard choices will be needed.
We were told to expect millions of ‘climate refugees’ and make plans to welcome them to our communities. It seemed not to have dawned on anyone that, since a post-oil economy will not support more than a fraction of our current population, we should most certainly not be trying to add to it. Among the key characteristics of the future brainstormed in workshops was the hope that this would be a world of ‘happy, smiling people’. From time to time they might well be that, if instructed to be. Just not while they’re busy killing each other for possession of productive land and its outputs.
TTT’s website carries Buckminster Fuller’s famous words, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” That’s partly true. It’s how successful nationalist groups have dismantled the empires from which they have struggled to free themselves. You defeat the enemy by systematically disregarding its authority. But those who make it sound all that simple are in for a shock.
Transition towns will find that when Tesco want to build in their midst, or there’s a new trunk road coming up the valley, the answer doesn’t lie in digging the allotment. Gandhi won because he was fighting the British. Gandhi versus Hitler or Stalin would have had a very different outcome. The planning system today is owned by the likes of Tesco and the Highways Agency. With every passing day, Labour makes it more so. The Tories’ only cavil is that the supermarkets and the motorways aren’t being built fast enough.
Local action, however twee, is not going to make the difference it needs to make until there is a region-wide reaction against Westminster diktat. A Wessex Parliament will do what local initiatives cannot. It will ensure that the price structures are in place to help local producers compete fairly. It will rebuild the region’s rural railways, renewably-run, to enable communities to exchange goods of the highest quality. It will protect productive land from crazed housebuilders by establishing an optimum population level and sticking to it. It will redefine the housing market to ensure that local people are not squeezed out as a result. It will counter any wider power that fails to place Wessex interests first. In short, it will work for our communities and not against them.
Or… we can go on kidding ourselves that acting locally is enough, that Westminster is full of thoroughly decent chaps and chapesses, that Whitehall too really is on our side, and that if all this isn’t so then there must be some absolutely sound reason for it that we’re just too dense to grasp. More flowers anyone?
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Monday, June 1, 2009
Note from Abruzzo
Guest contribution by Colin Bex, Wessex Regionalists' London Bureau
Staying near a village in Casoli, some eighty miles south-west of L'Aquila, I awoke at 3.30am on Monday 6 April, but was unaware of any particular reason other than as part of an irritating cycle of broken sleep to which have become accustomed for some time now.
Neighbours say they did feel a tremor at the time, and some English people a few miles away, said their cat jumped in through the window at the time although they also were not aware of anything unusual. This it appears forms part of the quarter of grade II 'seismic' territory which was not affected – this time anyway........!
Well now we know the extent of the death, injury and deracination, in addition to something of the building fabric damaged - reportedly 205 dead, several thousand homeless, 40,000 evacuated - not only failure and collapse of traditional masonry construction in churches and houses, but also of modern reinforced concrete structures including a school, a hospital, a student hostel and a road-bridge.
Buildings in some 84 Abruzze towns and cities are reported as having suffered damage of some kind - much of it to historic buildings of national importance. This gives some idea of the magnitude of this seismic disaster affecting nearly three-quarters of the region.
It seems that timber rather than masonry construction fares well in such circumstances, however, from what I have understood in the regional papers here (Il Tempo, Il Messaggiero and Il Centro), the Richter force of the 'terramoto' was 5.8 and one estimate of its effect is that L' Aquila has moved 15cm.
Incidentally, geologist and seismic specialist Antonio Moretti has been publicly condemned by establishment politicians here for warning on radio that on the evidence, within the next ten years another likely candidate could be Sulmona - a fine city I visited last year high up in the mountains with a splendid statue of Ovid in one of its squares.
At the very least it is ironic that this particular seismic event should have struck when the impact of its psychological, emotional and logistical effects were to be most greatly felt – springtime at Easter when religious, atheist and heathen alike expect to be able to sense relief from the rigors of winter and to experience hope from the new cycle of life.
On Good Friday, I attended part of one of the region-wide candle-lit religious processions held in sympathy of which two took place on successive evenings in Lanciano.
The turnout was impressive – probably several thousand people comprising four generations of families from babies to great grand-parents who lined the streets waiting patiently for the pallbearers to pass by. Also, I was deeply saddened to reflect on the passion and immeasurable suffering of the bereaved, so powerfully portrayed at the numerous public funeral gatherings held also in cities, towns and villages throughout Abruzzo on Easter Saturday.
Not surprisingly, at L'Aquila itself it is reported 5,000 people attended the funeral service for the 205 who died.
'Per Sempre Insieme, Dolore in tutto Paese, inno di speranza dalla Via Crucis del Papa' - so ran Il Messaggero's headline: 'For all together, Sadness throughout the country, hymn of hope through the Way of the Cross by the Pope'.
Laid out in seried ranks, flower-bedecked coffins provided copy for the press and the focus for the Requiem in L'Aquila's main square, but it was the substantially pervading silence of this grieving assembly, not the Papa's nor his cardinal's words, which testified more eloquently to the profundity of dismay which bound those present in an exemplary gathering of regional unity.
In my role as co-ordinator for external affairs for the Wessex Regionalists, the incident has been an object-lesson in the emergent power of latent cohesion of a regional people when confronted by the consequences of a natural event within a seismic zone.
Albeit purloined as part of a centralist Republic, how the Abruzzese survivors may be coping with the additional impact from the man-made financial fiasco, requires more research.
Staying near a village in Casoli, some eighty miles south-west of L'Aquila, I awoke at 3.30am on Monday 6 April, but was unaware of any particular reason other than as part of an irritating cycle of broken sleep to which have become accustomed for some time now.
Neighbours say they did feel a tremor at the time, and some English people a few miles away, said their cat jumped in through the window at the time although they also were not aware of anything unusual. This it appears forms part of the quarter of grade II 'seismic' territory which was not affected – this time anyway........!
Well now we know the extent of the death, injury and deracination, in addition to something of the building fabric damaged - reportedly 205 dead, several thousand homeless, 40,000 evacuated - not only failure and collapse of traditional masonry construction in churches and houses, but also of modern reinforced concrete structures including a school, a hospital, a student hostel and a road-bridge.
Buildings in some 84 Abruzze towns and cities are reported as having suffered damage of some kind - much of it to historic buildings of national importance. This gives some idea of the magnitude of this seismic disaster affecting nearly three-quarters of the region.
It seems that timber rather than masonry construction fares well in such circumstances, however, from what I have understood in the regional papers here (Il Tempo, Il Messaggiero and Il Centro), the Richter force of the 'terramoto' was 5.8 and one estimate of its effect is that L' Aquila has moved 15cm.
Incidentally, geologist and seismic specialist Antonio Moretti has been publicly condemned by establishment politicians here for warning on radio that on the evidence, within the next ten years another likely candidate could be Sulmona - a fine city I visited last year high up in the mountains with a splendid statue of Ovid in one of its squares.
At the very least it is ironic that this particular seismic event should have struck when the impact of its psychological, emotional and logistical effects were to be most greatly felt – springtime at Easter when religious, atheist and heathen alike expect to be able to sense relief from the rigors of winter and to experience hope from the new cycle of life.
On Good Friday, I attended part of one of the region-wide candle-lit religious processions held in sympathy of which two took place on successive evenings in Lanciano.
The turnout was impressive – probably several thousand people comprising four generations of families from babies to great grand-parents who lined the streets waiting patiently for the pallbearers to pass by. Also, I was deeply saddened to reflect on the passion and immeasurable suffering of the bereaved, so powerfully portrayed at the numerous public funeral gatherings held also in cities, towns and villages throughout Abruzzo on Easter Saturday.
Not surprisingly, at L'Aquila itself it is reported 5,000 people attended the funeral service for the 205 who died.
'Per Sempre Insieme, Dolore in tutto Paese, inno di speranza dalla Via Crucis del Papa' - so ran Il Messaggero's headline: 'For all together, Sadness throughout the country, hymn of hope through the Way of the Cross by the Pope'.
Laid out in seried ranks, flower-bedecked coffins provided copy for the press and the focus for the Requiem in L'Aquila's main square, but it was the substantially pervading silence of this grieving assembly, not the Papa's nor his cardinal's words, which testified more eloquently to the profundity of dismay which bound those present in an exemplary gathering of regional unity.
In my role as co-ordinator for external affairs for the Wessex Regionalists, the incident has been an object-lesson in the emergent power of latent cohesion of a regional people when confronted by the consequences of a natural event within a seismic zone.
Albeit purloined as part of a centralist Republic, how the Abruzzese survivors may be coping with the additional impact from the man-made financial fiasco, requires more research.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Never Ever Land
Thomas Hardy, in 1912, wrote of Wessex as “a partly real, partly dream-country” that “has become more and more popular as a practical provincial definition”; “the dream country has, by degrees, solidified into a utilitarian region which people can go to, take a house in, and write to the papers from”. Hardy disapproved, which is just as well, since it shows Wessex to be something bigger and more democratic than one man’s fancy would allow.
The language of tourism marketing speaks often of a 'dream holiday', so where is the 'dream country' in the brochures and on the posters? Nowhere to be seen. The Prescott zones, imposed for reasons of administrative convenience, have been harnessed to the task of pulling in the tourists. And are unfit for purpose.
In 2002 the Wessex Tourism Association stated that “Wessex is a name that is widely known and one that conjures up strong positive images. It is used by companies and organisations in many fields.” The research report underpinning its work, Wessex – building a heritage destination, noted:
“Wessex is widely used within Britain and abroad as a brand name for promoting products and services. As is evident from a glance in phone directories, it is very widely used within Wessex itself. Yet it is little used for promoting travel… to succeed overseas, the area needs an identity, a brand of its own. It needs to make itself a destination that is known widely, as widely, for instance, as the Lake District or Cornwall… Based on the responses, it does seem that the industry agrees that Wessex can be marketed and that this needs to be done to help seasonality and business levels. There is, however, concern that efforts to market Wessex could prove difficult, unless co-operation throughout the region was better.”
Among the key weaknesses to be addressed the report identified the following:
Last night, ITV’s The West Country at Westminster turned its attention to tourism. It reported that South West Tourism receives much less Government funding than its counterpart in Yorkshire: just £1.5 million a year as against £10 million. Poor old ‘South West’, punished for not voting Labour.
That was the story’s high water mark. After that, it unravelled spectacularly. It turned out that the Government money was money channelled through the Regional Devastation Agencies and that in Yorkshire it went to just one body, in ‘the South West’ to several, South West Tourism being just one beneficiary. So its protests started to seem a trifle peevish.
A panel of MPs was convened and quizzed. Andrew George from St Ives, a Liberal Democrat with an eye to the Cornish nationalist vote, took the view that Cornwall had its own strong brand, with ‘the South West’ adding nothing and in fact getting in the way. Mark Harper from the Forest of Dean banged the drum for English nationalism and ignored altogether the competition that exists for the domestic market. It was a brilliant performance, illustrating just what a menace the Tories will be if ever returned to power, determined to ignore regional realities in politics, economics and culture.
Ben Bradshaw, the Minister for ‘the South West’, was left to explain why ‘the South West’ makes sense as a tourism region. He didn’t bother. Yet if ‘the South West’ cannot be defended, why prolong its misery? South West Tourism’s problems are not just financial; in Andrew George’s words, 'If the product isn’t right, no amount of marketing will save it'. Yorkshire is a unique place and readily marketable as such. ‘The South West’ could be anywhere on the planet. We want to see it give way to Wessex, as much for economic reasons as for any other.
Mr Bradshaw was in the news earlier this week too, when he told councillors in ‘the South West’ that they should face down opponents of Labour’s housebuilding plans. That’s right: ignore the people who voted them into office and dance to the thugs’ tune. One reader told the Bristol Evening Post: “Go back to Westminster, Mr Bradshaw, and tell the Government the people of the South West say no.” Quite so, we say, and take your ‘South West’ with you.
The language of tourism marketing speaks often of a 'dream holiday', so where is the 'dream country' in the brochures and on the posters? Nowhere to be seen. The Prescott zones, imposed for reasons of administrative convenience, have been harnessed to the task of pulling in the tourists. And are unfit for purpose.
In 2002 the Wessex Tourism Association stated that “Wessex is a name that is widely known and one that conjures up strong positive images. It is used by companies and organisations in many fields.” The research report underpinning its work, Wessex – building a heritage destination, noted:
“Wessex is widely used within Britain and abroad as a brand name for promoting products and services. As is evident from a glance in phone directories, it is very widely used within Wessex itself. Yet it is little used for promoting travel… to succeed overseas, the area needs an identity, a brand of its own. It needs to make itself a destination that is known widely, as widely, for instance, as the Lake District or Cornwall… Based on the responses, it does seem that the industry agrees that Wessex can be marketed and that this needs to be done to help seasonality and business levels. There is, however, concern that efforts to market Wessex could prove difficult, unless co-operation throughout the region was better.”
Among the key weaknesses to be addressed the report identified the following:
- The number of overseas visitors is below the UK average and well below what the attractions of Wessex suggest should be achievable.
- The South West region’s image and promotion is that of a seaside holiday destination for the domestic market.
- Tourism development is hampered by boundary divisions and under-funding.
Last night, ITV’s The West Country at Westminster turned its attention to tourism. It reported that South West Tourism receives much less Government funding than its counterpart in Yorkshire: just £1.5 million a year as against £10 million. Poor old ‘South West’, punished for not voting Labour.
That was the story’s high water mark. After that, it unravelled spectacularly. It turned out that the Government money was money channelled through the Regional Devastation Agencies and that in Yorkshire it went to just one body, in ‘the South West’ to several, South West Tourism being just one beneficiary. So its protests started to seem a trifle peevish.
A panel of MPs was convened and quizzed. Andrew George from St Ives, a Liberal Democrat with an eye to the Cornish nationalist vote, took the view that Cornwall had its own strong brand, with ‘the South West’ adding nothing and in fact getting in the way. Mark Harper from the Forest of Dean banged the drum for English nationalism and ignored altogether the competition that exists for the domestic market. It was a brilliant performance, illustrating just what a menace the Tories will be if ever returned to power, determined to ignore regional realities in politics, economics and culture.
Ben Bradshaw, the Minister for ‘the South West’, was left to explain why ‘the South West’ makes sense as a tourism region. He didn’t bother. Yet if ‘the South West’ cannot be defended, why prolong its misery? South West Tourism’s problems are not just financial; in Andrew George’s words, 'If the product isn’t right, no amount of marketing will save it'. Yorkshire is a unique place and readily marketable as such. ‘The South West’ could be anywhere on the planet. We want to see it give way to Wessex, as much for economic reasons as for any other.
Mr Bradshaw was in the news earlier this week too, when he told councillors in ‘the South West’ that they should face down opponents of Labour’s housebuilding plans. That’s right: ignore the people who voted them into office and dance to the thugs’ tune. One reader told the Bristol Evening Post: “Go back to Westminster, Mr Bradshaw, and tell the Government the people of the South West say no.” Quite so, we say, and take your ‘South West’ with you.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Elected Mayors – An Afterword
It’s been an interesting week for local democracy. Last Wednesday, Doncaster’s elected mayor, Martin Winter, was seen doing his best to avoid giving an interview to BBC2’s Newsnight. Then on Friday the elected mayor of Stoke-on-Trent, Mark Meredith, was arrested on suspicion of corruption. Stoke is the city that has already voted to scrap its directly elected mayor and go back to the older, more broadly based form of local governance.
We must, of course, presume Mr Meredith to be innocent, but the thing about justice, famously, is that it must not only be done but be seen to be done. How much easier that would be if all municipal decisions came before open meetings, to be voted upon by all councillors, and not as now, taken secretly by the chosen few or just by Il Duce himself.
The gist of Newsnight’s report was that Doncaster folk are fed up with their mayor. The Council has passed two motions of no confidence in him but he refuses to go. His successes were said to be a number of big urban property deals, his failures the core services, especially to the outlying villages, that are basically the reason residents pay their council tax.
It all provides interesting background to the Tories’ proposals for elected mayors contained in their Green Paper, Control Shift. The benefit of an elected mayor, they say, is the ability to “enhance the prestige” of a city. Code for “smooth the path of property developers”? Is this an aim to be pursued at the expense of getting the basics right? The social workers well-managed, the potholes filled, the schools teaching soundly? It’s these issues that ward councillors deal with in their surgeries and they expect to see action taken. No chance then, if the mayor won’t go when it’s clear he’s outstayed his welcome.
The Tories, instead of respecting local democracy, want to force major cities, including Bristol, to hold a referendum on moving to a mayoral system, with a presumption in favour of change. Who pays for this expense? Do the Tories not know that if enough local folk – just 5% – want an elected mayor they can force a referendum already?
Of course they do. But where Labour leads, the Tories now follow. And that is towards a ‘managed democracy’ where we are asked loaded questions, about a filtered list of issues, within biased voting arrangements. The Swiss wouldn’t take it. They have direct democracy by referendum on issues raised by the public taking the initiative. And so should we.
Labour’s desperation shows in a document out for consultation until the end of this week. It aims to make it easier to get local governance structures changed, and harder to get them changed back again when, sure enough, they don’t work and folk are fed up with that fact. Wessex Regionalists are sick of Whitehall-knows-best, sick of being told what decisions are safe for us to make and which aren’t. And sick of the collusion between the London parties to keep the whole interfering nonsense chugging along.
By the way, happy birthday to the Earl. The Wessex Wyvern is flying over the Town Council offices in Weston-super-Mare to mark his festivities. Let this be the year he starts to earn his title and stops pretending there’s no such place as Wessex.
We must, of course, presume Mr Meredith to be innocent, but the thing about justice, famously, is that it must not only be done but be seen to be done. How much easier that would be if all municipal decisions came before open meetings, to be voted upon by all councillors, and not as now, taken secretly by the chosen few or just by Il Duce himself.
The gist of Newsnight’s report was that Doncaster folk are fed up with their mayor. The Council has passed two motions of no confidence in him but he refuses to go. His successes were said to be a number of big urban property deals, his failures the core services, especially to the outlying villages, that are basically the reason residents pay their council tax.
It all provides interesting background to the Tories’ proposals for elected mayors contained in their Green Paper, Control Shift. The benefit of an elected mayor, they say, is the ability to “enhance the prestige” of a city. Code for “smooth the path of property developers”? Is this an aim to be pursued at the expense of getting the basics right? The social workers well-managed, the potholes filled, the schools teaching soundly? It’s these issues that ward councillors deal with in their surgeries and they expect to see action taken. No chance then, if the mayor won’t go when it’s clear he’s outstayed his welcome.
The Tories, instead of respecting local democracy, want to force major cities, including Bristol, to hold a referendum on moving to a mayoral system, with a presumption in favour of change. Who pays for this expense? Do the Tories not know that if enough local folk – just 5% – want an elected mayor they can force a referendum already?
Of course they do. But where Labour leads, the Tories now follow. And that is towards a ‘managed democracy’ where we are asked loaded questions, about a filtered list of issues, within biased voting arrangements. The Swiss wouldn’t take it. They have direct democracy by referendum on issues raised by the public taking the initiative. And so should we.
Labour’s desperation shows in a document out for consultation until the end of this week. It aims to make it easier to get local governance structures changed, and harder to get them changed back again when, sure enough, they don’t work and folk are fed up with that fact. Wessex Regionalists are sick of Whitehall-knows-best, sick of being told what decisions are safe for us to make and which aren’t. And sick of the collusion between the London parties to keep the whole interfering nonsense chugging along.
By the way, happy birthday to the Earl. The Wessex Wyvern is flying over the Town Council offices in Weston-super-Mare to mark his festivities. Let this be the year he starts to earn his title and stops pretending there’s no such place as Wessex.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
The People’s Ponzi
We’ve been hearing quite a lot recently about Ponzi schemes, as the financial chickens come home to roost. A Ponzi scheme is an investment scam that promises investors a high rate of return but in fact is paying earlier entrants out of the money collected from later entrants. Eventually, for whatever reason, the scheme will be unable to go on expanding, at which point the game is up.
The United Kingdom has an ageing population, with Wessex, as the centre of the retirement industry, having a particular interest in the matter. Three out of the five ‘most aged’ local authority areas are in Wessex and the statistics reveal something of a ‘retirement belt’ stretching across the south of our region from Exmoor to the Isle of Wight and beyond.
It is generally asserted that immigration is needed to sustain a working age population capable of supporting this mass of greybeards. The problem is, of course, that everyone who survives long enough gets old, and immigrants are no exception. The population equivalent of a Ponzi scheme is the belief that you can deal with the economic consequences of ageing simply by having an ever-expanding population. The reality is that this is simply not sustainable in environmental terms. Once ecological capacity is exhausted, the result is collapse. To maintain the ratio of 15-64 year-olds at its current level, the UK population would need to rise from about 61 million today to 136 million by 2050. Pro rata, the figures for Wessex would see a rise from about 8 million to over 18 million. Bristol, for example, would need to become a city of over a million folk.
The available data suggests an almost totally misplaced concern about ageing, and that concern needs to be refocused elsewhere. The UK spends about 6.2% of GDP on State pensions, rising to 8.5% by 2050. But if the retirement age were to be raised proportionately in line with life expectancy, the rise is only to 7.75%. So a third of the problem simply disappears.
Low population growth actually brings massive economic, social and environmental benefits. Productive work can be aimed at improving the quality of life, instead of building ever more infrastructure and housing. Less money spent on rearing children and on education means more to spend on pensions. In the UK 43% of young folk go into higher education and can be dependents well into their twenties. Young folk are also disproportionately reflected in crime and unemployment statistics. Conversely, many retired folk remain active in developing the social capital of their communities, giving time to voluntary organisations, in effect free labour that might otherwise have to be paid for. In 2007/08 the UK spent £76 billion of public money on support costs for young folk, compared to £71.5 billion supporting the over-65s. Financial assistance is given down the generations – not up – on average until the age of 75.
Smaller families can mean that folk inherit more housing capital: two children each inherit half the parental home, three children only inherit a third. The potential importance of housing equity – which can be freed up to part-fund consumption in retirement – is huge. The value of housing assets in the UK, even after mortgage debt, is considerably larger than all pension funds combined. (How much of this money really exists is, of course, another matter!)
Economist Phil Mullan, author of The Imaginary Time Bomb, has suggested that the obsession with a looming pensions deficit has less to do with demographic fact and more to do with a political agenda to cut back the welfare state. Countries with much older age structures have out-performed those with younger ones, while a report for the Institute of Public Policy Research confirmed that “there is little correlation between ageing and increased health care costs”.
In short, the way we relieve the ‘burden’ of an ageing population is that we draw upon the money that would otherwise have been spent on the extra housing, schools, hospitals, roads and other infrastructure needed to accommodate population growth. Energy infrastructure is one very significant part of that package. So too are the additional costs of growing a population through immigration, such as translation costs, along with those that stem from inter-communal tension and divided loyalties.
The alternative to population restraint is a planet confronting unsustainable trends, where each new child will likely produce more than 20 tonnes of greenhouse gases every year and where civilisation everywhere is in imminent peril as a result.
If we go on building, we are sure to find ourselves living in a house of cards, miserably waiting for the wind to blow.
The United Kingdom has an ageing population, with Wessex, as the centre of the retirement industry, having a particular interest in the matter. Three out of the five ‘most aged’ local authority areas are in Wessex and the statistics reveal something of a ‘retirement belt’ stretching across the south of our region from Exmoor to the Isle of Wight and beyond.
It is generally asserted that immigration is needed to sustain a working age population capable of supporting this mass of greybeards. The problem is, of course, that everyone who survives long enough gets old, and immigrants are no exception. The population equivalent of a Ponzi scheme is the belief that you can deal with the economic consequences of ageing simply by having an ever-expanding population. The reality is that this is simply not sustainable in environmental terms. Once ecological capacity is exhausted, the result is collapse. To maintain the ratio of 15-64 year-olds at its current level, the UK population would need to rise from about 61 million today to 136 million by 2050. Pro rata, the figures for Wessex would see a rise from about 8 million to over 18 million. Bristol, for example, would need to become a city of over a million folk.
The available data suggests an almost totally misplaced concern about ageing, and that concern needs to be refocused elsewhere. The UK spends about 6.2% of GDP on State pensions, rising to 8.5% by 2050. But if the retirement age were to be raised proportionately in line with life expectancy, the rise is only to 7.75%. So a third of the problem simply disappears.
Low population growth actually brings massive economic, social and environmental benefits. Productive work can be aimed at improving the quality of life, instead of building ever more infrastructure and housing. Less money spent on rearing children and on education means more to spend on pensions. In the UK 43% of young folk go into higher education and can be dependents well into their twenties. Young folk are also disproportionately reflected in crime and unemployment statistics. Conversely, many retired folk remain active in developing the social capital of their communities, giving time to voluntary organisations, in effect free labour that might otherwise have to be paid for. In 2007/08 the UK spent £76 billion of public money on support costs for young folk, compared to £71.5 billion supporting the over-65s. Financial assistance is given down the generations – not up – on average until the age of 75.
Smaller families can mean that folk inherit more housing capital: two children each inherit half the parental home, three children only inherit a third. The potential importance of housing equity – which can be freed up to part-fund consumption in retirement – is huge. The value of housing assets in the UK, even after mortgage debt, is considerably larger than all pension funds combined. (How much of this money really exists is, of course, another matter!)
Economist Phil Mullan, author of The Imaginary Time Bomb, has suggested that the obsession with a looming pensions deficit has less to do with demographic fact and more to do with a political agenda to cut back the welfare state. Countries with much older age structures have out-performed those with younger ones, while a report for the Institute of Public Policy Research confirmed that “there is little correlation between ageing and increased health care costs”.
In short, the way we relieve the ‘burden’ of an ageing population is that we draw upon the money that would otherwise have been spent on the extra housing, schools, hospitals, roads and other infrastructure needed to accommodate population growth. Energy infrastructure is one very significant part of that package. So too are the additional costs of growing a population through immigration, such as translation costs, along with those that stem from inter-communal tension and divided loyalties.
The alternative to population restraint is a planet confronting unsustainable trends, where each new child will likely produce more than 20 tonnes of greenhouse gases every year and where civilisation everywhere is in imminent peril as a result.
If we go on building, we are sure to find ourselves living in a house of cards, miserably waiting for the wind to blow.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Hands Off Our History!
On Monday a letter appeared in the Bristol Evening Post advocating a radical overhaul of local government in Wessex, linking this with the name of our Party. The proposal was to sweep away both districts and counties in favour of Jacobin-style ‘cantons’:
“the Canton of Oxford would include much of Berkshire, parts of Buckinghamshire and parts of Wiltshire. Kingswood and Long Ashton would come into the Canton of Bristol...”
Needless to say, the truth is that these views are not those of the Wessex Regionalists, a party that values our heritage most highly. We oppose the Prescott zones of ‘The South West’ and ‘The South East’ precisely because they are soulless, a dull denial of the richness that life in an old country offers. Wessex suffers economically, socially and environmentally because its identity lacks institutional, democratic expression. It is not animated by power, nor is power over the region reined-in by a deep sense of civic duty to it. It would be the height of caprice were we to take the very opposite view of local government. Anyone who has examined the evidence will see that where historic shires cease to be the focus of political power they wither away, largely because map-makers and the media then cease to make use of them. If we want our shires to live on, then we must use them.
And live on they must. We need to nail the lie that county government is an invention of the Victorians. Their achievement was to democratise what was already over a thousand years old. When the new unitary ‘Wiltshire Council’ comes into being it will be as the successor to Wiltshire County Council, which in 1889 took over the administrative powers of the county justices sitting in quarter sessions, themselves the successors to the mediaeval sheriff’s court. And so on back to Alfred and Ine. It was in Wessex that the first shires were created, around 1,300 years ago. Nowhere in the world can claim such a pattern of continuity. English county government is part of humanity’s common heritage, no less precious in its own way than the Pyramids of Giza or the Great Wall of China.
To attack this heritage as so many ‘relics’ or ‘fossils’ is empty cant. The antiquity of the counties is actually neutral as a fact. It is the interpretation placed on their survival that is crucial. To the ideological moderniser, it is self-evidently time to sweep them away. To other minds, their very resilience points to something worth a closer look. If the counties have already survived a millennium of social upheaval and technological change it is important to understand their strengths and at least to demand the proof that radical change is now, suddenly, justified. The ‘experts’ have their own agenda and their claims should never be taken at face value.
The metaphor of ‘sweeping away’ is always revealing, because it suggests something unhygienic about the status quo, something untidy, something that gets in the way of doing some other, unstated thing. It is no accident that demands for the reorganisation of local government on the lines of ‘city-regions’ or ‘metropolitan areas’ emerge at times of development stress. One such period was the late Sixties, when so much of our heritage was ‘swept away’ unthinkingly, leaving us to regret its loss at our leisure, bewailing the short-lived bag of beans we received in return. ‘City-regions’ are always a developer’s charter because they place the land around cities under the political control of city-based authorities, allowing the destruction of the countryside to accelerate. They are singularly inappropriate in Wessex. We are a rural region where cities know their place. And it is not lording it over the rest of us.
Like counties, cities, as we have known them, are under attack. Both major parties are enthusiastic about elected mayors. We are not. Our aim is a widening of local democracy, not its contraction, and Mafia-style ‘boss’ politics is no part of our vision. Democratic debate and voting in open meetings should not give way to dodgy deals in the privacy of the mayor’s parlour. The eclipse of our once-vigorous civic life by new, secretive models borrowed from business is one of the great tragedies of our time and must be reversed if local democracy is to be renewed. Advocates of these ‘Mafia mayors’ tell us that the powers of local councils need to be concentrated if they are to be effective. That, it must be pointed out, is because there are now so few powers. The job of a local politician is no longer to help make decisions but to talk to other people, elsewhere, who wield the real power. That is why the ‘new Caesarism’ is rampant and folk have stupidly let it happen by voting for one or other of the London parties.
Hand-in-glove with the structural turmoil has gone a new vocabulary. Emblematic of this was the creation of ‘De-clog’, the Department for Communities and Local Government, currently headed up by Bleary Hazel. Its remit is to promote ‘community cohesion’. Since real communities cohere naturally – by definition – it is clear that the control freaks have been exceedingly busy on this one. First, destroy real, stable communities. Then create new, unstable ones by decree, like the Prescott zones or local city-regions. Then help yourself to a job for life using State coercion to hold them together.
Our solution is simply to put right the damage. Our Party’s policy is to restore traditional local government areas and status, including Berkshire County Council (abolished by the so-called Conservatives), the traditional county boundaries, and borough status to charter towns. Structures should be accountable for the use of their powers at the smallest practical level, with nothing done by a wider area that a more local area feels it can do for itself. We demand committees, not cabinets. We seek the formation of new, smaller districts, based on the old, ecologically-sound hundreds and run by parish delegates. We oppose area boards that deny voting rights for the communities being ‘done to’. We have a wonderful tradition of local self-government that is slipping through our fingers. It is time to seize it back, to make it truly local – and to ensure that it really is all about government and not the costly smoke-and-mirrors act we endure today.
“the Canton of Oxford would include much of Berkshire, parts of Buckinghamshire and parts of Wiltshire. Kingswood and Long Ashton would come into the Canton of Bristol...”
Needless to say, the truth is that these views are not those of the Wessex Regionalists, a party that values our heritage most highly. We oppose the Prescott zones of ‘The South West’ and ‘The South East’ precisely because they are soulless, a dull denial of the richness that life in an old country offers. Wessex suffers economically, socially and environmentally because its identity lacks institutional, democratic expression. It is not animated by power, nor is power over the region reined-in by a deep sense of civic duty to it. It would be the height of caprice were we to take the very opposite view of local government. Anyone who has examined the evidence will see that where historic shires cease to be the focus of political power they wither away, largely because map-makers and the media then cease to make use of them. If we want our shires to live on, then we must use them.
And live on they must. We need to nail the lie that county government is an invention of the Victorians. Their achievement was to democratise what was already over a thousand years old. When the new unitary ‘Wiltshire Council’ comes into being it will be as the successor to Wiltshire County Council, which in 1889 took over the administrative powers of the county justices sitting in quarter sessions, themselves the successors to the mediaeval sheriff’s court. And so on back to Alfred and Ine. It was in Wessex that the first shires were created, around 1,300 years ago. Nowhere in the world can claim such a pattern of continuity. English county government is part of humanity’s common heritage, no less precious in its own way than the Pyramids of Giza or the Great Wall of China.
To attack this heritage as so many ‘relics’ or ‘fossils’ is empty cant. The antiquity of the counties is actually neutral as a fact. It is the interpretation placed on their survival that is crucial. To the ideological moderniser, it is self-evidently time to sweep them away. To other minds, their very resilience points to something worth a closer look. If the counties have already survived a millennium of social upheaval and technological change it is important to understand their strengths and at least to demand the proof that radical change is now, suddenly, justified. The ‘experts’ have their own agenda and their claims should never be taken at face value.
The metaphor of ‘sweeping away’ is always revealing, because it suggests something unhygienic about the status quo, something untidy, something that gets in the way of doing some other, unstated thing. It is no accident that demands for the reorganisation of local government on the lines of ‘city-regions’ or ‘metropolitan areas’ emerge at times of development stress. One such period was the late Sixties, when so much of our heritage was ‘swept away’ unthinkingly, leaving us to regret its loss at our leisure, bewailing the short-lived bag of beans we received in return. ‘City-regions’ are always a developer’s charter because they place the land around cities under the political control of city-based authorities, allowing the destruction of the countryside to accelerate. They are singularly inappropriate in Wessex. We are a rural region where cities know their place. And it is not lording it over the rest of us.
Like counties, cities, as we have known them, are under attack. Both major parties are enthusiastic about elected mayors. We are not. Our aim is a widening of local democracy, not its contraction, and Mafia-style ‘boss’ politics is no part of our vision. Democratic debate and voting in open meetings should not give way to dodgy deals in the privacy of the mayor’s parlour. The eclipse of our once-vigorous civic life by new, secretive models borrowed from business is one of the great tragedies of our time and must be reversed if local democracy is to be renewed. Advocates of these ‘Mafia mayors’ tell us that the powers of local councils need to be concentrated if they are to be effective. That, it must be pointed out, is because there are now so few powers. The job of a local politician is no longer to help make decisions but to talk to other people, elsewhere, who wield the real power. That is why the ‘new Caesarism’ is rampant and folk have stupidly let it happen by voting for one or other of the London parties.
Hand-in-glove with the structural turmoil has gone a new vocabulary. Emblematic of this was the creation of ‘De-clog’, the Department for Communities and Local Government, currently headed up by Bleary Hazel. Its remit is to promote ‘community cohesion’. Since real communities cohere naturally – by definition – it is clear that the control freaks have been exceedingly busy on this one. First, destroy real, stable communities. Then create new, unstable ones by decree, like the Prescott zones or local city-regions. Then help yourself to a job for life using State coercion to hold them together.
Our solution is simply to put right the damage. Our Party’s policy is to restore traditional local government areas and status, including Berkshire County Council (abolished by the so-called Conservatives), the traditional county boundaries, and borough status to charter towns. Structures should be accountable for the use of their powers at the smallest practical level, with nothing done by a wider area that a more local area feels it can do for itself. We demand committees, not cabinets. We seek the formation of new, smaller districts, based on the old, ecologically-sound hundreds and run by parish delegates. We oppose area boards that deny voting rights for the communities being ‘done to’. We have a wonderful tradition of local self-government that is slipping through our fingers. It is time to seize it back, to make it truly local – and to ensure that it really is all about government and not the costly smoke-and-mirrors act we endure today.
Friday, February 20, 2009
A Smaller World, Please
Think globally, act locally. The sentiment is sound but the first instruction requires a lot less effort than the second. A lot less effort, because successive centralist governments at Westminster have made the second instruction well nigh impossible to carry out.
Take the example of planning, where local discretion has now been all but abolished. When the 2004 ‘reforms’ were pushed through at the behest of the power of money, community groups naively fell in behind them. The package included a requirement that councils bind themselves to a ‘Statement of Community Involvement’. Community groups thought that Christmas had come early. At last, councils would be forced to do as they told them, and not as elected local politicians wished. The reality is – and always was – that this was a smokescreen behind which decisions were taken away from the locality altogether. Now unelected civil servants decide everything of any importance in the planning world and matters are getting progressively worse. The Campaign to Protect Rural England had the true measure of ‘community involvement’ all along. As their poster proclaimed, “Your new airport goes here. What colour would you like the fence?”
When Labour politicians – and the Tory ones are no better – speak of empowering communities, the rhetoric translates into reality with so many caveats as to be deeply deceitful. A new generation of environmental protestors is now coming to the fore, one that will not be content with sit-ins and stunts that simply delay the bulldozers by days. Westminster diktat may find itself met with a more resolute denial of authority and legitimacy. We should not be surprised to see big developers and their pocket decision-makers vilified very personally as the public enemies they clearly are. No moral individual could defend those who are busily wrecking Wessex in the name of a despotic Parliament whose right to rule is nothing but self-proclamation backed up with tanks. When road protestors set fire to the contractors’ plant, can we say that that was a crime? And that what that machinery was doing to our land was a lawful act, advancing truth, beauty and goodness? We shall have to think again very thoroughly about what we mean by the law. The only certainty is that Westminster has no claim to be making it.
One pressing reason why power needs to be radically decentralised is that the planet needs this. World government is not the answer to the world’s problems. Small is beautiful not because it allows good things to happen, although it does, but because it prevents big, bad things being allowed to happen. Those who have to live with the consequences don’t willingly foul their own nest.
So a philosophy that puts Wessex first is not one that denies our interdependence with the rest of the world. Quite the reverse. We seek to contribute to a sustainable, equitable world where the health, security and liberty of all is paramount, regardless of race or creed. But we do that from our own land, by showing solidarity, morally and economically, not by gung-ho intervention where we’re not wanted. Humanitarian aid – well-organised by charities – is best kept quite distinct from political meddling. ‘Foreign policy’ is a fancy term for not minding our own business. It could be a very attractive as well as unique selling point for the Wessex Regionalists to be the only party whose foreign policy is not to have one. Globalisation is on the defensive – protectionism is making a comeback – and internationalism is up for redefinition.
Watching the television news it is hard to resist the feeling that anywhere and everywhere matters except home. Recent events in Gaza were tragic. But did they justify top billing night after night after night after night after night after night after night? Let us examine why foreign news has such a fascination for broadcasters.
There are the superficial reasons. One is that foreign correspondents cost money. If you have them, you use them. Not using them would only get you into trouble with the accountants. Another is that editorial control is in the hands of a generation whose background leads them to embrace the foreign and despise the domestic. Hippies who spent the 60’s out east don’t care much what happens in Easton or Eastleigh. The Middle East is ‘cool’, whichever side you take. And so it’s assumed that everyone else would want to give it the same gravity.
But there is a deeper agenda. George Orwell’s proles and his ‘outer party’ won’t have spotted it but the ‘inner party’ will have thought it through carefully.
Firstly, for every foreign story that dominates the headlines there is a domestic story that has been spiked. So what is the bad news that this is a good day to bury? Corruption in high places? Another piece of repressive legislation waved through Westminster without the public’s knowledge? Revelations about a failed Government policy? The squandering of public money? Your guess is as good as mine.
Secondly, foreign news fosters a sense of powerlessness. Domestic news makes folk angry and there is plenty they can do about it. They can change the government. Even change the system. But foreign affairs are by definition immune to the outcome of a British general election. Whether Brown, Cameron or Clegg sits in Number 10 makes no real difference to the sufferings of others thousands of miles away (unless British troops are involved). So when foreign news makes people angry, that is all it does. And belief in politicians drains away all the faster. And if politicians can’t change anything, why have them? When pundits now talk about a ‘post-democratic Europe’, its handmaidens are easily identified. They are the sirens wailing their song nightly upon our screens.
When cuts fall on the broadcast media, it is not the foreign correspondents who suffer. The first casualty is always regional news. Understandably so, since it often amounts to little more than ‘cat stuck in tree in Chippenham’. One of our key tasks in the years ahead will be to change the media organisations, so that they speak to us primarily about ourselves. Together we can then make that story interesting as local action increasingly challenges our oppressors. Yes, folks. The revolution WILL be televised.
Take the example of planning, where local discretion has now been all but abolished. When the 2004 ‘reforms’ were pushed through at the behest of the power of money, community groups naively fell in behind them. The package included a requirement that councils bind themselves to a ‘Statement of Community Involvement’. Community groups thought that Christmas had come early. At last, councils would be forced to do as they told them, and not as elected local politicians wished. The reality is – and always was – that this was a smokescreen behind which decisions were taken away from the locality altogether. Now unelected civil servants decide everything of any importance in the planning world and matters are getting progressively worse. The Campaign to Protect Rural England had the true measure of ‘community involvement’ all along. As their poster proclaimed, “Your new airport goes here. What colour would you like the fence?”
When Labour politicians – and the Tory ones are no better – speak of empowering communities, the rhetoric translates into reality with so many caveats as to be deeply deceitful. A new generation of environmental protestors is now coming to the fore, one that will not be content with sit-ins and stunts that simply delay the bulldozers by days. Westminster diktat may find itself met with a more resolute denial of authority and legitimacy. We should not be surprised to see big developers and their pocket decision-makers vilified very personally as the public enemies they clearly are. No moral individual could defend those who are busily wrecking Wessex in the name of a despotic Parliament whose right to rule is nothing but self-proclamation backed up with tanks. When road protestors set fire to the contractors’ plant, can we say that that was a crime? And that what that machinery was doing to our land was a lawful act, advancing truth, beauty and goodness? We shall have to think again very thoroughly about what we mean by the law. The only certainty is that Westminster has no claim to be making it.
One pressing reason why power needs to be radically decentralised is that the planet needs this. World government is not the answer to the world’s problems. Small is beautiful not because it allows good things to happen, although it does, but because it prevents big, bad things being allowed to happen. Those who have to live with the consequences don’t willingly foul their own nest.
So a philosophy that puts Wessex first is not one that denies our interdependence with the rest of the world. Quite the reverse. We seek to contribute to a sustainable, equitable world where the health, security and liberty of all is paramount, regardless of race or creed. But we do that from our own land, by showing solidarity, morally and economically, not by gung-ho intervention where we’re not wanted. Humanitarian aid – well-organised by charities – is best kept quite distinct from political meddling. ‘Foreign policy’ is a fancy term for not minding our own business. It could be a very attractive as well as unique selling point for the Wessex Regionalists to be the only party whose foreign policy is not to have one. Globalisation is on the defensive – protectionism is making a comeback – and internationalism is up for redefinition.
Watching the television news it is hard to resist the feeling that anywhere and everywhere matters except home. Recent events in Gaza were tragic. But did they justify top billing night after night after night after night after night after night after night? Let us examine why foreign news has such a fascination for broadcasters.
There are the superficial reasons. One is that foreign correspondents cost money. If you have them, you use them. Not using them would only get you into trouble with the accountants. Another is that editorial control is in the hands of a generation whose background leads them to embrace the foreign and despise the domestic. Hippies who spent the 60’s out east don’t care much what happens in Easton or Eastleigh. The Middle East is ‘cool’, whichever side you take. And so it’s assumed that everyone else would want to give it the same gravity.
But there is a deeper agenda. George Orwell’s proles and his ‘outer party’ won’t have spotted it but the ‘inner party’ will have thought it through carefully.
Firstly, for every foreign story that dominates the headlines there is a domestic story that has been spiked. So what is the bad news that this is a good day to bury? Corruption in high places? Another piece of repressive legislation waved through Westminster without the public’s knowledge? Revelations about a failed Government policy? The squandering of public money? Your guess is as good as mine.
Secondly, foreign news fosters a sense of powerlessness. Domestic news makes folk angry and there is plenty they can do about it. They can change the government. Even change the system. But foreign affairs are by definition immune to the outcome of a British general election. Whether Brown, Cameron or Clegg sits in Number 10 makes no real difference to the sufferings of others thousands of miles away (unless British troops are involved). So when foreign news makes people angry, that is all it does. And belief in politicians drains away all the faster. And if politicians can’t change anything, why have them? When pundits now talk about a ‘post-democratic Europe’, its handmaidens are easily identified. They are the sirens wailing their song nightly upon our screens.
When cuts fall on the broadcast media, it is not the foreign correspondents who suffer. The first casualty is always regional news. Understandably so, since it often amounts to little more than ‘cat stuck in tree in Chippenham’. One of our key tasks in the years ahead will be to change the media organisations, so that they speak to us primarily about ourselves. Together we can then make that story interesting as local action increasingly challenges our oppressors. Yes, folks. The revolution WILL be televised.
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