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.

Another Fine Miss

“The slightly eccentric Wessex regionalists have been around for a while but tend to be backward-looking and potentially reactionary.”

So writes Professor Paul Salveson in his online newsletter, Salvo.  It’s always good to see regionalism recognised, but it’s simply sloppy to misrepresent us.

We’d prefer to describe ourselves as more than usually different, and refreshingly so.  Has the prof read any of our recent stuff?  Pro-rail, conscious of Peak Oil, with no time for any of the London-obsessed dinosaur parties.  Far more forward-looking in fact than any of the alternatives.  Wessex is about the future; it’s the UK – with its silly wartime compass-point regions and utter paranoia about any identity but its own – that is stuck in the past.  All politics is ‘potentially reactionary’ – we don’t listen to lectures from New Labour on that – but it’s up to those of goodwill to work together to ensure it stays true to sound ideals.

Should we post the above response on the prof’s page perhaps?  Already done.

Terror Incognita

Channel 4’s Jon Snow is back from Scotland with his eyes opened: see his blog on the subject, and the many comments it’s attracted.  To sum up, London is loathed from Land’s End to John O’Groats.  Westminster politicians are vicious and corrupt; City slickers are the downfall of a decent society; the meejah couldn’t care less about anything beyond the M25.

It’s a narrative that is gaining traction and hurrah for that.  While England ponders whether to use UKIP to hit back at the disappointers, Scottish voters are wondering if Salmond might just triumph this September.  It would be such a way to make a point.  What’s more, it’s one we could all share in.  Scotland’s freedom is something to be celebrated wildly by everyone who hates the London system.  The rest-of-the-UK would self-evidently be on Death Row, presenting unprecedented opportunities for all who have even a partly articulated vision of how their own nations and regions should be governed once the Augean stables have been cleansed.  Dangerous times perhaps, but perhaps immensely rewarding ones too.

Then there’s the possibility of a ‘No’ vote.  No-one knows what it means.  Is it a vote for the status quo or not?  What might be promised in the run-up to the poll as a sweetener, if independence takes the lead?  Which is more the leap into the unknown, ‘Yes’ or ‘No’?

Either way, enjoy what could be the last few months of normal British politics.  You’d never believe there’s a UK-wide general election due twelve months on from today; think that one through and the West Lothian Question is child's play in comparison.

Leccy Goes Local

Until 1948, the electricity supply in Bristol, as in many towns, was run as a council department, with its own power stations at Temple Back, Avonbank and Portishead.  In that year it was effectively confiscated by the London regime, without payment of full compensation, only to be sold on in 1990 as part of South Western Electricity, which is now owned by the French Government.

Now it emerges that Bristol is one of a group of cities looking to re-enter the energy market, working alongside the Bristol-based Ovo Energy, one of the smaller suppliers offering an alternative to the Big Six.  This is precisely what is needed in a world where so many alternatives to shameless profiteering have been closed off by the totalitarian liberals who dominate all three main London parties.

Does it go far enough?  Not yet.  Locally-managed power can be a real boost to more sustainable cities, integrated with urban heat networks, micro-renewables, smart metering and energy-from-waste.  And certainly not forgetting everything that needs doing to reduce demand through improved energy saving.  City and borough councils are as well placed today as in the 19th century to organise a more efficient energy distribution system.  The reason they got involved in securing local monopolies – in electricity, gas, trams, water, and even telephones – was because all these things involve digging up the streets; a little co-ordination avoids a great deal of inconvenience.  As we move inevitably towards an energy-poor economy, a well thought out strategy for making the most of what we have will make the difference between those cities that have a future and those that don’t.

Masters & Servants

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hold That Door

Last week, the London regime finally bowed to pressure to recognise the Cornish as a national minority under the relevant Council of Europe agreement.  Or tried to, not very hard.  The official press release talks about having to ‘modify’ the application of the European convention to accommodate the idea of a national minority – the Cornish – existing, on their home ground, within some other nation’s territory – England.  It’s an unsustainable solution that defies the logic of language – the cornu-wealas are the Welsh of the far west and thus their land of Cornwall, by definition, cannot be part of a modern England that doesn’t invite itself to be denounced as imperialist.

Cornwall’s achievement attracted huge goodwill from many quarters, tinged with sadness that several of those who fought most tenaciously for it died in recent months without seeing their life’s work crowned with success.  Others, for some reason, seemed aggrieved, as if their own lives are diminished by joys they do not comprehend.  ‘Cornwall is NOT a country.  End of.’  Well, no, start of, actually.  Recognition will now be the thin end of a wedge to be driven as a stake into the centralist heart.

Are we next in line?  Cornwall now joins Scotland as evidence that the tectonic plates of UK constitutional politics are on the move.  The idea that recognising the Cornish is some clever gambit to see off Scottish independence, showing how a multi-nation UK can exist successfully, is one that spectacularly misses the point.  Concessions are accumulating precisely because the UK doesn't work and because that fact is being grasped ever more widely.  Channel 4 even produced a map, with a bizarre interpretation of Wessex that managed to exclude both Wantage and Winchester.  The Southern Daily Echo grabbed a few quotes, then took them out of context to fit the already-written headline.  For now, the hacks are getting it a bit muddled, in a sometimes comical way.  It's all new to them, this freedom thing.  Come to this blog if you want a proper explanation.

Wessex is a region.  It’s not a nation and so cannot benefit directly from ideas about national minority status.  That’s not to say though that we can’t manage our own affairs as well as any Celtic nation can manage theirs.  Better government is better government, whatever you call the area governed.  So in that sense, we hope very much that Cornwall will hold the door open, first for the recognition from above that we exist and that our existence entitles us to fair treatment, then for the recognition from below that, at the end of the day, we need recognition from no-one, just the self-will to cast off the deadening London yoke.

Digital Devastation

As the implications of the Heartbleed bug continue to be revealed, it becomes clear that while a digital society, including a digital economy and digital government, delivers many benefits, many of these are exceedingly fragile.  Two items from the press last month further illustrate the point.

The first is from Metro, which reported on the launch of the London regime’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UK), tasked with fighting cyber attacks of national significance.  Cyber-security doesn’t come cheap and is never 100% guaranteed.  Scenario-writers are increasingly highlighting the threat that hackers pose to the operation of vital infrastructure, particularly where manual back-up has been scaled-down for reasons of cost-cutting.

On the same day as the Metro story, the London Evening Standard ran with a report on HFT – high-frequency trading – in short, the use of computer algorithms to drive stock markets.  So intense is the competition that even the use of microwave radio rather than cables to send the signal can shave off the crucial nanoseconds needed to close a deal.  Machines don’t think, so while the alternating euphoria and panic of the market are self-correcting with human intervention, they can easily get out of control in its absence.

The article was written by James Rickards, author of The Death of Money – The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System.  It takes the form of a review of work by another financial journalist, Michael Lewis, author of Flash Boys.  Rickards is no optimist:

“The gross notional value of derivatives of all kinds owed by banks is already greater than 100 per cent of global GDP.  Complexity theory tells us that the worst catastrophe that can occur in a system is an exponential function of the scale of the system.  This means that when you double the system scale, you increase systemic risk by a factor of 10 or more…  The collapse is already on its way but HFT will make it bigger, faster and impossible to stop.  The solution is to ban HFT and most other derivatives.  Don’t expect that to happen.  Instead, get ready for the avalanche.”

So, what does this mean for Wessex?

Firstly, that the free market is about to eat itself.  All that deregulation, explained away as promoting beneficial economies of scale, is revealed as the piling-up of system instability through removing barriers to growth.  Barriers to growth are an essential part of a sane, self-governing society that is not at the mercy of unaccountable forces.  They are unfair only in the sense that having a skin is unfair to diseases.

Secondly, that, since the UK is, politically-speaking, owned by the City of London and regularly robbed by it, reform driven from above is impossible.  Only the building of a resilient regional alternative makes any sense.

Thirdly, that progress towards building such an alternative needs to be stepped up.  That includes demanding, ceaselessly, the return of our taxes from London, to be spent in future on local and regional priorities.  In Sweden, 36% of the tax take is raised and spent locally and regionally.  In federal Germany, the figure is 29%.  The OECD average is 26%.  The UK figure?  5%.  Our paranoid Norman rulers still don’t allow us even to have a regional tier in the first place.