Review of 2013

Every year when we submit our accounts to the Electoral Commission we are also required to provide a ‘Review of Political Activities’ covering the year just gone.

The 2013 Review has recently been agreed and here is what it says:

“The Eastleigh by-election in February provided an unplanned but welcome opportunity to raise the Party’s profile.  This was fully taken up, despite the attempts of pro-establishment groups such as 38 Degrees to deny us a legitimate share of the platform.  Our candidate, Colin Bex, canvassed voters, attended hustings and gave interviews, one of the highlights of the campaign being an appearance on BBC2’s Newsnight in which he exchanged jibes with Paddy Ashdown of the FibDems.

The wyvern flag of Wessex appeared in some shots and was given an added, official boost in May when the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, arranged for it to be flown outside his London headquarters to mark St Ealdhelm’s Day.  ‘Today,’ announced his press release, ‘the only way is Wessex’.  We agree, and look forward to these cultural concessions being backed up by solidly political ones.

Paradoxically, our vote at Eastleigh – the Thinking Thirty – was much less spectacular than the publicity.  Like all the smaller parties, we were squeezed by a well-oiled UKIP effort to mop up the protest vote.  In the long-term, the publicity gained will matter more, since media interest has been sustained through the course of the year that followed.  This has since borne fruit in the form of several interviews with the BBC, including two local radio stations, focused mainly on the implications for England of the Scottish referendum on independence.

There is a well-founded perception that ‘politics-as-usual’ is no longer an option in Scotland, whatever the outcome of the referendum.  The fact of holding the referendum has changed the nature of Scottish politics.  It has also begun a debate over whether other parts of the UK can also benefit from a tide that is now moving towards radical constitutional change.

For the first time in perhaps a decade, the national debate about England’s future is not just about the merits of an English Parliament.  With London’s wealth and influence continuing to massively outstrip those of the ‘provinces’, a self-governing England that lacks a regional tier is being exposed as an idea offering ‘more of the same’.  We expect the idea of regional assemblies to be revisited and will be doing all we can to prevent Labour once again imposing their ill-considered vision of an ‘Iron Curtain’ between eastern and western Wessex.

Colin Bex has continued to manage our London bureau, attending meetings on our behalf on matters such as the HS2 railway, which we oppose.  He has also raised concerns that London’s Mayor, Boris Johnson, is seeking to pioneer repressive methods, such as the use of water cannon by the Metropolitan Police, that may then be extended to other areas.

Along with the Secretary-General, David Robins, Colin attended the Annual Conference of Mebyon Kernow – The Party for Cornwall, at Truro in November.  It is always good to be able to cheer on those further up the political ladder and learn from their achievements.  We have also continued to develop our online presence, with visits to our blog again breaking records.”

Love the Land, Live the Life

It would make such a great slogan for our Wessex.  It is in fact already taken, as the English-language slogan of the Normandy Tourist Board.

There is such a thing, based not in one of the great cities – Caen or Rouen – but in a much smaller place, Evreux.  It exists despite the fact that officially Normandy doesn’t exist.  Officially, it is two separate regions, Lower Normandy, based in Caen, and Upper Normandy, based in Rouen.

Although there is a long-standing campaign to re-unite the two half-Normandies, there are also deep-rooted Jacobin desires to magnify, not lessen the harm to regional identity.  Both half-Normandies live under the constant threat of reorganisation by a centralist State that regards regional geography as malleable in the interests of its own survival.  There is the recurrent possibility that one will be merged with its Celtic neighbour to the west and the other with the area round the national capital.  Sounds familiar?  Can we learn from Norman regionalist resistance to this?  The WR Secretary-General, David Robins, recently made a brief visit to investigate.

French vehicle registration plates are wonderfully colourful, including besides the actual number an area code for the département and the regional logo.  You can buy stick-on labels for the département and region of your choice.  And, for once in France, choice means choice.  At Carrefour in Ouistreham you can buy stickers with the Lower or Upper Normandy logos.  Or you can be a true Norman patriot and prefer a sticker that displays the ancient ducal banner of two gold leopards on red.

(You can even buy a sticker that has the number 44 – for Loire Atlantique – beneath the Breton ‘gwenn-ha-du’ flag.  Even though, in the eyes of France’s leaders, Loire Atlantique isn’t in Brittany, because they say it isn’t.  In Wessex terms, ‘région Bretagne’, without Loire Atlantique, is like ‘the South West’, without Hampshire, since in both cases the historic capital is excluded.)

That Norman flag gets everywhere.  In Ouistreham it flies over one of the largest hotels, and over the wartime German blockhouse that towers above the port.  Even where you don’t spot the flag, you see not-so-subtle references to it in red-and-gold colour schemes, on buildings, in furnishings and on road signs.

Yes, the road signs.  Tourists are welcome in Normandy and their needs aren’t neglected as they are in Wessex.  The authorities know what they’ve come to see and are pleased to remind them.  Drive along the main roads to and from Caen and you’ll see the signs.  Images from the Bayeux Tapestry or from Norman architecture, done in pastel shades of pink and yellow.  Pointing out Caen – the city of Guillaume le Conquérant, Falaise – the birthplace of Guillaume le Conquérant, Bayeux – the tapestry of Guillaume le Conquérant.

Now imagine something similar on the A34 or the A303 – Winchester, the city of Alfred the Great, Wantage – the birthplace of Alfred the Great, Athelney – the refuge of Alfred the Great.  You have to imagine them because they don’t exist.  We don’t want tourists to come to Wessex, because there’s nothing to see here, right?  Because there’s no such place.  There’s the London commuter belt, and beyond that there’s the deckchairs and donkey rides.  And nothing more.  A Wessex Tourist Board?  Perish the thought.  The next thing we know the locals will be saying they want to cast off the London yoke.  Queue for the Brittany Ferries service at Portsmouth and you can watch the attractions of Normandy unroll slickly on the big TV screen.  What do we offer our visitors queuing on the Ouistreham side?  ‘South West England’.  They’re not even there when they disembark, but in the other ‘region’ next door, ‘The South East’.

So what impressions remain of Normandy?  Devastated after D-Day, Caen today is largely a modern, practical city, with, like many cities of the European mainland, an entirely new tram system, opened in 2002.  Purists will call it an electrically-powered guided bus and it’s due to be replaced with a real light rail system rather shortly.  George Ferguson, Mayor of Bristol, was interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Costing the Earth last week.  He said he'd love to spend billions giving Bristol "a fantastic new tramway system" like the one in its sister city of Bordeaux – the regional capital of Aquitaine – but Bristol doesn't have that sort of money.  And why ever not?  Answer that one George and you could be on your way to becoming the first Wessex Regionalist mayor.

Then there’s Bayeux.  Which has a lot more to offer than just the Tapestry.  No reproduction of that can ever convey the impact of the original.  The final scenes are full of revealing detail, once you get up close to the stitching that shows the two wyvern standards, the first fallen, the second held up defiantly against the imminent victors.  The first is gold, the second is red with a gold underbelly.  And so the registered colours of the Wessex flag too are red and gold, echoing both the Tapestry and the chroniclers’ references to a golden dragon.

We share rather more than you might expect with the old enemy.  Just as Cornwall and Brittany share black and white as their flag colours, so we share red and gold with the Normans, as we share geology, climate, a love of apples and pork, cheese and cream (though our cooking lags a little behind), caution, and a justifiable distrust of the national capital’s intentions.  They invaded us once.  We invaded them many more times in return.

It’s a bit like Scots-and-English at times.  You emphasise the differences or the similarities according to the agenda.  For every unionist who reminds us of Britain’s shared cultural and political heritage there’ll be a nationalist reminder that Scots have a shared cultural and political heritage with France.  It’s one that’s arguably been much more important in defining Scottishness – in terms of distinctive architecture, law, a sense of being European that is still resisted in England, and so on.  In a European context, Wessex, bound by its ferry routes to the mainland, has at least as much reason to make common cause with Bretons and Normans as with Scots or Northumbrians hundreds of miles away, the other side of Mercia.

And Wessex has a lot to learn.  Ouistreham’s high street has a small shop devoted solely to all things Norman.  It sells flags, foods, drinks, books, badges… well, just explore the website.  It’s the sort of thing that might be found in Cardiff or Edinburgh, and these days possibly Truro too, commercially focused but with definitely a nationalist crust to the artisanal loaf.

Despite it all, despite the occasional insistence that Normans are not to be considered as French folk, Norman nationalism is not, yet, mainstream.  It may not need to be.  Reality could in fact run ahead of ideology if budgetary pressures upon France force Normandy’s re-unification.  If the broader-based regionalist campaign to achieve that goal succeeds, to whom does a Norman regional government then look for reciprocal arrangements on our side of the Channel?  Who will speak for Wessex?

If we want to 'think Wessex', we have to be willing to look beyond jingoistic Britain for issues that resonate in the context of an entirely Wessex-centred geography.  Today, while we’re all thinking our brains out about what Scottish independence might mean for us if it comes to pass, let us not forget the much older associations of Europe’s Atlantic and Channel facades that have shaped us too.  ‘Fog in Channel; Continent cut off’ is a misconception that can raise a smile; too often it seems a political fact of life that does us no good at all.

Housing Whom?

Oxford professor Danny Dorling is the rising star of radical sociology.  Some of us heard him speak in Witney during the 2010 election campaign.  He has his critics, but he has an impressive grasp of statistics and deploys them with devastating effect.

A review of his latest book, All That Is Solid: The Great Housing Disaster, appeared in Metro last week.  Did you know that in 2012 one in every four new jobs in Britain went to a new estate agent?

What’s that?  Yes, someone’s definitely doing alright.  And those who aren’t still hope to.  Dorling wants to challenge the idea of a home as something for which we incur titanic debts in the hope of profiting from buyers even more desperate than us further down the line.  For him, as for any sane person, homes are shelter first and assets second.  Yet we seem to have lost sight of the idea that they are something basic, like education or healthcare, whose provision public policy could address.  The loudest complaints are not about homelessness but about being unable to get on to the ‘property ladder’.  The London parties have no answer because they too are wrapped up in the idea that the job of government is to enrich competing individuals and families, rather than to enrich society and so spare them the trouble.

For Dorling, the solution isn’t to build more houses everywhere, at the expense of the environment and primarily for the benefit of landowners, developers and the banks.  His claim is that Britain has plenty of housing but doesn’t use it efficiently.  It’s a bold claim, undoubtedly over-stated given that the population really is growing and really is spreading out, with average household size declining.  But let’s examine his solution, which could make some inroads into the problem, however big it happens to be overall.

The answer isn’t the so-called ‘bedroom tax’ but heavier taxes on multiple properties.  Why is that politically a non-starter?  Dorling’s claim, reasonably enough, is that MPs won’t vote against practices that benefit them – and, we might add, benefit them probably more than any other group.  He brings up an interview in which David Cameron appeared to forget just how many homes he owned.  (Regional government, allowing almost all legislators to live within commuting distance of their assembly, would be a very much better bargain for the taxpayer than Westminster.)

The social problems caused by multiple home ownership don’t correlate with economic and political power, do they?  Where are the holiday second homes?  Largely on the peripheries: Cornwall, Wales, the Lake District, coastal East Anglia, and some parts of Wessex (the south coast, Exmoor and the Cotswolds).  And where do their owners live?  Largely in the south-eastern quadrant, we suggest.  The power certainly isn’t where the homes are, nor where the desperate, badly housed locals are.  So we need to take it back through meaningful devolution and start putting people before property.

As well as the homes that are empty for most of the time, there are the homes that are empty the whole of the time, the long-term vacant properties, some of which in Wessex have been empty for 30 years.  Why?  To free market theorists, such a waste of assets is inexplicable.  Their economics textbooks say it can’t happen.  The reasons why it happens are complex.  One can be that the owner has died and their estate hasn’t been sorted out, or there are family disagreements or joint ownerships where the owners no longer speak to each other.  The owner may be in prison.  Or aged or in poor health and just not bothered.  Sometimes there may be negative equity, and so difficulty in funding any necessary improvements.  Yet these are assets that could be providing shelter, without damaging the environment.  Why is more not done to fill the empties?  Why are we so tolerant, equally of so many wasted opportunities AND of the wholly needless destruction of farmland that results?

Taxation is a relatively benign way of rebalancing the housing market in favour of local need.  It falls short of the outright confiscation that might appeal to some of the market’s most scarred victims.  But it would give them enough hope not to reach for the petrol can and the matches to make their views felt.  Dorling suggests removing the limit on council tax banding so that the wealthiest pay in line with the value of their multiple properties.  A land tax would address a whole range of problems, while higher inheritance tax would do something to tackle the huge accumulation of unearned wealth in London and its suburbs.

The next question is what to do with the money raised.  If local communities need affordable housing, why not provide some?  Not necessarily by building new houses, which often come at an environmental cost, remember.  But by buying up existing ones and letting them out to the sons and daughters of the parish.  It’s not beyond the wit of lawyers to devise a system of lettings, leases, covenants or parish council consent to guarantee that the recycling of such housing always prioritises those with a local connection.  Through such means it would be possible to build up a two-tier housing market of the kind that helps keep the Channel Islands as they are, relatively undeveloped, with enough housing for the locals, plus a few to spare, in their case for rich tax exiles.

Instead of doing what’s right for us in the round, we currently provide affordable homes by imposing them as a requirement on housebuilders.  And to sweeten the pill we let them build two market houses for every affordable one.  We need a new model that allows the affordable ones to be built, if suitable sites exist, without the market ones coming along as the ball-and-chain.  We could let local councils build them, and call them ‘council houses’.  That way, housing misery need never be a source of private profit ever again.  Which, of course, is exactly why a solution as obvious as that enjoys no mainstream political support.

It’s through formulating such policies that we can begin to envisage the ‘reconquest’ of Wessex assets from the London and global interests that have failed us.  We need to take back our housing, our water, our electricity, our trains, our land, in short, our future.  Can this be done without devolution, given the legal and financial screws that the London regime continually places on local expenditure?  No.  That is why we need devolution.

Punishing The Toys

Windsor Castle is home to more than a few of the 1,200 items of ivory in the Royal Collection.  The 1,200 items that Prince William would like to have destroyed as a gesture against poachers in Africa.  Never mind that he’s not above (legally) shooting the odd bit of wildlife himself.  The fact is that devastating the Wessex heritage won’t save a single living elephant.  Don’t they teach anything useful at Eton?  (And what about all those piano keys, in humbler homes across the land?)

Sadly, this isn’t the only case recently where those in the public eye have sought to 'make a point' or 'draw a line', punishing their toys instead of going after the real issue.  Our friends in Mercia have suffered a lot through the incompetence of the management at the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust.  The management clearly need to be replaced with others who are competent.  Instead, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, taking a short break from yet more power-grabbing, announced on Tuesday that the Trust is to be dissolved and many of its services redistributed to other facilities across a wide area.  So how do patients benefit from having to travel further for treatment?  Haven’t they suffered enough?

Isn’t this just a smokescreen for some dodgy accountancy, like the rest of the ‘marketisation’ of health care, where treatment seems to matter less than how PFI can transform the property portfolio, at a price?  And why too, incidentally, is there such a pervasive culture of fining public sector organisations when they get things wrong, leaving less money available for services, instead of pursuing the individuals who are culpable?

If there’s a problem, solve it.  Don’t go after inanimate objects or blameless geography, to the detriment of our heritage or our health. 

Expect the toy-punishing to increase, as London politicians look for excuses to merge poorly performing local authorities, or police, or fire services, with better-run ones.  (Why assume that good will thereby influence bad, rather than the other way round?)  Leaving things to the local ballot box wouldn’t satisfy their cravings to interfere.  In the NHS, there isn’t a local ballot box.  Just one reorganisation after another, with nothing to show for it unless you’re a management consultant.  Just one more fix and it’ll work.  Honest.

If this is what a national health service produces, micro-managed from London, why not try a regional one?  In the devolved nations, London already has no say, yet the inter-operability of the service remains in place.  The NHS in England was first set up on the basis of autonomous Regional Hospital Boards, so ‘back to the future’ may well be the way to go.  Although it never served the whole of Wessex, the Wessex Regional Hospital Board, which 40 years ago became the Wessex Regional Health Authority, lasted 35 years in total, from 1959 to 1994.  None of its successors has even lasted ten, being reorganised again in 1996, 2002, 2006 and 2013.  Better luck next time.

Anybody Listening?

The following extract from the current issue of Population Matters Magazine is written by its editor, Norman Pasley:

“There is great concern in Fareham about plans for a new town called Welbourne to be built on farmland north of the M27 motorway.  The debate is giving rise to many letters in the local paper, The News, from irate residents who don’t want it.

The choice is either building Welbourne or filling in the green gaps in Fareham between the motorway and the Solent.  There is no ‘do-nothing’ option – the population keeps rising.  In November, the Leader of Fareham Borough Council was quoted as confirming that Welbourne is needed.  Cllr Woodward mentioned various issues: the need for new affordable homes; Fareham’s rising population; growth in the local economy attracting new workers who need homes; existing residents trading up to larger homes; and our ageing population.  Between 1951 and 2011, Fareham’s numbers have more than doubled from 43,000 to 112,000.  If the same growth rate continues into the future, Fareham’s population will double again by about 2061 – to 224,000.  Has anyone thought about the consequences of such growth?

In December, The News interviewed the Leader of Portsmouth City Council.  Under the headline ‘Leader warns about uncertainty brought by population boom’, Cllr Vernon-Jackson provided population data supplied by the Office for National Statistics.  ‘It’s a national issue and the Government will have to work out how we are going to cope if it happens,’ Cllr Vernon-Jackson said.  In my view, he’s right about government getting involved.  ‘If it happens’?  It is happening – quietly, out of sight, every day, everywhere.  Portsmouth’s population is expected to rise by 9,000 people by 2021.  Almost entirely surrounded by water, the additional people can only be accommodated by constructing higher buildings in the city, thus increasing population density, or by building elsewhere.

A sum of £5m has been allocated for additional school places in Portsmouth to 2021.  The article didn’t mention the additional costs for: college places; social services; affordable housing; GP and hospital services; more and larger supermarkets; and relieving road and rail congestion.  Have these costs been estimated?  Who will pay?  Won’t we need higher local taxes and higher utility, food and transport prices?  The News article also states that the other six districts in [and adjoining] south east Hampshire: Fareham, Chichester, East Hampshire, Winchester, Havant, and Gosport could have an extra 46,000 people by 2021.  That’s an increase of nearly seven percent.  But I think we need to look farther into the future to see the true population growth picture – say to 2061 when today’s 17-year-olds will reach 65.  The present population of Portsmouth, and the six districts above, is 882,000.  If this grew by seven percent per decade, by 2061 the population would reach 1,228,000.  The extra 346,000 new people would need about 150,000 homes built on perhaps 6,000 hectares of land.  At what cost in taxes, natural resources, and loss of countryside, and so on?

I welcome these Councillors talking about population…  In my view, it’s high time national and local government found their voice and became outspoken about this most serious problem.  Starting today, they need to work in partnership with the people to do the right thing – plan for growth reduction.  Today’s young people have the most to gain by enjoying a less crowded and less damaged planet.  A friend of mine sent me this: ‘With increasing concerns about overpopulation, climate change and environmental degradation, a few of the passengers and crew are becoming increasingly concerned, but the winners are on the bridge and this ship will take some turning’.  It’s high time all the passengers and crew signalled the bridge to turn the ship!”

Clearly a man who asks the right questions.  But not one familiar with the right answers.  The existing political system has, whether by accident or by design, caused the problem and cannot admit it, let alone solve it.  So there’s no point whatsoever in trying to gain the captain’s ear.  The way forward – the only way forward – is to insist that the captain walks the plank.  The despotic, Norman-imposed Parlement at Westminster, dancing, as ever, to the tune of City swindlers, must be cast aside and replaced with a Wessex Witan that responds to the will of Wessex folk.

Identity Censorship Rules!

The Kernow Branch of the Celtic League is to be thanked for posting on Facebook the following cautionary tale:

“Heritage Kernow – a study in ‘English’ Heritage sabotage

European Objective One funding was awarded to Cornwall some years ago.  Its Single Programming Document was supposedly legally binding and its Priority 5 identified Celtic affinities, heritage, language and identity to be beneficiaries of the funding.  This did not sit well with UK officialdom (national and local), which has tended to trivialise and diminish Cornish culture as the Eden Project and Trebah Gardens.  As John Angarrack remarked, this is like defining French culture as being represented by Disneyland, Paris.

That the ‘legally binding’ part was to be ignored came first from the unelected South West Regional Development Agency who stated: ‘It doesn't particularly help this (the Government's) building of a regional identity from Cornwall up to Gloucestershire and across to Dorset to have the European Union recognising Cornwall as a separate region’.  The Government Office for the South West also urged an avoiding of Priority 5 because: ‘it will encourage the separatists’.

Nonetheless, and after the European Court of Auditors had visited Truro, the Objective One Heritage Task Force employed consultants to look at the Cornish heritage and culture issue.  In October 2001, they recommended setting up an organisation to be called Heritage Kernow, which would develop a Cornwall Heritage at Risk Programme, to conserve and protect key elements of Cornish culture, with an initial budget of £1,400,000.

Two months later, 100 guests were invited to a conference in Truro where Heritage Kernow was officially launched, with its operations to commence in April 2002.

It never happened.

Objective One officials eventually confessed to giving way to pressure from ‘English’ Heritage. ‘English Heritage was not happy (with the proposal)’, they said. ‘English Heritage felt that Heritage Kernow would not be able to deliver much more in the historic environment sector than was already being delivered, or could be delivered, by existing bodies’.”

Or, to put it explicitly, by EH themselves, who know best how to tell the State-approved lies in place of the truth.  Any excuse will do if it slows down the building of a Europe of real regions, and substitutes a load of impractical nonsense about ‘The South West’ that dates from the days of Dad’s Army.  And why mention this now, 12 years later?  Because a lot of folk have short memories.  Some of them would like to see Ed Miliband sitting in No 10.  And his bureaucratic hellhounds sent west once more to sneer and belittle and suppress, Wessex no less than Cornwall in their grip as they roll out London's new imperial project yet again.

The Plantation of Wessex

Last April, one of Eric Pickles’ Planning Inspectors opened a public inquiry in the Oxfordshire village of Bloxham.  The Coalition promised localism – local decisions made by local folk, without interference from London – but – as we have mentioned many times – their localism is a lie.  Under real localism, there would be no such thing as a Planning Inspector because there would be no such thing as a right of appeal against a local decision.

At the inquiry, local residents gave their views on a proposal to build up to 85 more houses on farmland east of the village.  One argued that: “There has been a remarkable expansion of Bloxham in the last fifty years.  Recent developments have been on agricultural land and have clearly put further strain on the village infrastructure…  Six farms within the village boundaries have been lost and due consideration should be given to future demand for agricultural land for food production and our future food security.”  A local councillor added that: “The village is already bursting at the seams with traffic and flooding problems, power outages and surgeries and schools that are at capacity.”

The Inspector, if he recognised the arguments at all, gave them short shrift in his report: “I accept that Bloxham has seen a considerable amount of development since 2001 and note that residents consider it to be now ‘full’.  However, … I cannot accept that the quantum of development can be a determining factor in this appeal…  Government policy is strongly directed towards an increase in housing designed to stimulate the economy.  Nowhere is there guidance that requires the retention of agricultural land per se for future food security.  This is not therefore a matter that can weigh against the proposed development.”

Pickles duly concurred.  His assistant issued a grant of planning permission, noting that: “The Secretary of State agrees with the Inspector that there are no grounds for weighing the loss of agricultural land per se for future food security against the appeal proposal.”  The Government’s view then is not that food security matters generally, but that other factors outweighed it in this particular case.  It is far more stark than that: it simply won’t acknowledge the problem at all.  And so the fantasy continues: Britain will build houses to accommodate a bigger workforce that will do stuff in ‘financial services‘ to pay the bills, enabling us to buy whatever food we need on world markets.  Until one day the food isn’t there, because the growers have kept it to feed their own growing families.  One does have to wonder if there isn’t a grand plan by self-loathing loons (Pickles included) to create the conditions for starvation in that old imperial power off the north-west coast of Europe.

So who is standing up for our farmland?  Farmers?  Landowners?  Certainly not.  Watch the food security card being played for all it’s worth in defence of subsidies, to go on farming marginal land that might be better used for wildlife or forestry.  But go on watching and the card magically disappears if good, productive land on the edges of towns and villages can be generously contributed towards solving the nation’s housing “crisis”.

Two quotes from Peter Clery’s recent polemic, Green Gold: A Thousand Years of English Land illustrate the point.  On one page he tells us that: “In a time of pending world shortages of food and fuel, a nation which relies too much on others to feed it is unwise to say the least.  The next war, when our land will again be crucial to survival, may not be military but a creeping economic attack.  Others, who work harder or more efficiently than we do, may outbid us for food on world markets leaving us even more dependent on what we can produce at home.  In any case, food issues will become more important and food will cost more.  The interests of bats and badgers will take second place in the public mind if there is insufficient bread in the shops.”

Yet on the very same page he also tells us that: “There are few landowners in England who would not be willing to release perhaps one per cent of their land for intelligent well designed housing or light industry and offices.  One per cent of farmland is some 220,000 acres – more than enough to meet the perceived housing need with increasing supply reducing the price to a more sensible relationship between plot cost and building cost.”  That’ll be 1% now, 1% later, 1% after that, and so on bit by bit to the crack of ecological doom.  Elsewhere, Clery is good enough to point out that 100,000 acres – roughly the area lost to motorways since 1945 – is 300,000 tons of wheat foregone every year, forever.

Such confused thinking is not at all unusual among those with a vested interest in making the most money from land.  We need to rethink not only the planning laws but also laws on the ownership, tenure and taxation of land if we are to remove the huge incentives for farmers to destroy the most basic tool of their trade.  Old Labour tried three times to establish a betterment tax to capture the unearned increase in land value upon change of use; three times their work was undone by the Tories.  New Labour, a perfect poodle of the propertarians, never bothered.

So if those most directly affected are not defending our land, who is?  If you’re a Tory, appalled at the development frenzy that Cameron’s gung-ho City yobs are now getting away with, where do you turn?  The LibDems?  The Chair of that party’s backbench housing committee is Annette Brooke, MP for Mid-Dorset and North Poole.  Her solution to the housing “crisis” is a wave of ‘garden communities’ of around 10,000 homes.  Where promoted by local councils and enjoying local support.  (As if.)  But according to Brooke, “local people will need to understand why they are needed”.  Classic London-speak.  It’s now the common currency of all three main London parties, this patronising tone that politicians use when they talk down to the implicitly thick electorate, whose views they’re supposed to be representing, not manipulating.

For as long as voters think they have only three choices, the only alternative to the Coalition parties is to re-elect the last lot of rogues who were unseated in 2010.  According to design consultant Andy von Bradsky, who has his finger on the Labour pulse, that party is more comfortable with top-down approaches.  It has no need to justify itself to a Wessex electorate that, thanks to the voters of the rest of the UK, can be safely ignored.  Labour’s housing review, led by Sir Michael Lyons, is looking at “how the pace of development might be forced”, according to von Bradsky.  Shadow housing minister Emma Reynolds, who sits for Wolverhampton, has suggested that up to five new towns could be created under a future Labour government.  Not all necessarily in Wessex, but who knows for sure?  The means envisaged aren’t at all subtle.  Either imposition through national legislation, or an unbeatable offer to exhausted councils desperate for an alternative to the salami-slicing of treasured environments that goes on daily thanks to the appeals system.

The best that can be said about the prospective plantation of Wessex with new towns is that it will concentrate the environmental damage in a few places instead of spreading it thinly.  Which is not a great recommendation.  It isn’t the fault of Wessex if London cannot manage its population and so casts envious eyes on our broad acres for overspill.  The Wessex dialect and the customs, traditions and memories that make Wessex special are in retreat across much of the east of our region.  It‘s not so much because of cockneyisation in principle that this happens – anyone is capable of adopting a mix of identities – but because we lack the political institutions – and even the cultural ones – to defend our regional differences and encourage native and settler alike to value them.  London sets the tone for us all and whatever London doesn’t value is trampled underfoot and ridiculed.

Suggest five new towns in Cornwall or mid-Wales and watch the active reaction take hold.  Suggest them in Wessex and the reactions will range from indifference to resignation.  What can we do?  What can you do?  Rip up that membership card from the party of self-annihilation: whether Cameron’s, Clegg’s or Miliband’s, or Farage’s too for that matter.  And join the party of the Wessex resistance instead.