Cut Off The Boles

What a ridiculous creature is Nicholas Boles, lately Director of the proven forgers’ den that is Policy Exchange, a trading name of Michael Gove’s office, and also signed up to the Henry Jackson Society with its call for a single EU defence “capability” under day-to-day German (or, in the Sarkozy days, possibly French) command but under overall American control as a proxy for Israel. Israel, whence hails Boles’s civil partner, the better to communicate with whom he has been learning Modern Hebrew and charging it to parliamentary expenses.

Instead of whatever has been proposed by this thieving, warmongering buffoon, there must be a tax on the productive value of land per acre, other than that occupied by the homes of the less well off, perhaps making possible the abolition of stamp duty, and in any event establishing and enforcing the principle that no one should own land other than in order to make use of it; this was proposed by Andy Burnham when he was a candidate for Leader of the Labour Party. There must also be a statutory requirement of planning permission for change of use if it is proposed to turn a primary dwelling into a secondary dwelling, a working family home into a weekend or holiday home.

Pat Glass, of this Parish, has been taking on the Government’s failure to create the promised Supermarkets Ombudsman. Beyond that, we need to make the supermarkets fund investment in agriculture and small business, determined in close consultation with the National Farmers’ Union and the Federation of Small Businesses, by means of a windfall tax, to be followed if necessary by a permanently higher flat rate of corporation tax, and in either case accompanied by strict regulation to ensure that the costs were not passed on to suppliers, workers, consumers, communities or the environment.

There is the most pressing need to revive the movement of those who have resisted enclosure, clearances, exorbitant rents, absentee landlordism, and a whole host of other abuses of the rural population down to the present day. Those who obtained, and who continue to defend, rural amenities such as schools, medical facilities, Post Offices, and so on. Those who opposed the destruction of the national rail and bus networks, and who continue to demand that those services be reinstated.

Those who have fought, and who continue to fight, for affordable housing in the countryside, and for planning laws and procedures that take proper account of rural needs. Those who object in principle to government without the clear electoral mandate of rural as well as of urban and suburban areas. Those who have been and who are concerned that any electoral reform be sensitive to the need for effective rural representation. Distributism and the related tendencies. And those who are conservationist rather than environmentalist.

Farm labourers, smallholders, crofters and others organised in order to secure radical reforms. County divisions predominated among safe Labour seats when such first became identifiable in the 1920s, while the Labour Party and the urban working class remained profoundly wary of each other throughout the period that both could realistically be said to exist at all, with several cities proving far less receptive to Labour than much of the nearby countryside.

Working farmers sat as Labour MPs between the Wars and subsequently. The Attlee Government created the Green Belt and the National Parks, which no party or politician committed to neoliberal economics could possibly be expected to do anything other than destroy utterly. Step forward, Boles.

Real agriculture is the mainstay of strong communities, environmental responsibility and animal welfare (leading to safe, healthy and inexpensive food) as against “factory farming”, and it is a clear example of the importance of central and local government action in safeguarding and delivering social, cultural, political and environmental goods against the ravages of the “free” market. Farm subsidies, which this country had for 30 years before going into what was really always the EU, are a thoroughly excellent idea. Provided that we run them ourselves, and provided that, as set out above, we establish and enforce the principle that no one should own land other than in order to make use of it.

The President of the Countryside Alliance is a Labour peer, Baroness Mallalieu, and its Chairman is a Labour MP, Kate Hoey. For at least three consecutive General Elections until 2010, few or no Conservative MPs were returned by the hunting heartlands of Wales, Yorkshire, the Midlands, Devon and Cornwall.

The present Coalition means, either that Labour is now the only electoral option for the age-old rural Radicalism of the West Country and Hampshire, and for the combination of that with Unionism (or, at least, with a strong suspicion of rule from the Scottish Central Belt or from South Wales) in the North and South of Scotland and in Mid Wales, or else that the Labour Party now demands to be replaced with something that can indeed meet this profoundly pressing and electorally opportune need.

In August, Policy Exchange proposed that money from the sale of council houses be used to build up to 170,000 new social homes per year, the largest programme for the construction of social housing since the 1970s, which in turn would create as many as a third of a million jobs. The Coalition will never do it. It would entail the ultimate repudiation of Thatcherism, her assault on council housing being the one thing that her supporters still feel able to defend unconditionally.

In reality, it created the Housing Benefit racket and it used the gigantic gifting of capital assets by the State to enable the beneficiaries to enter the property market ahead of private tenants, or people still living at home, who had in either case saved for their deposits. What, exactly, was or is conservative or Tory about that? Or about moving in the characters from Shameless either alongside, or even in place of, the respectable working class?

And now, the doubts are being expressed even in the belly of the New Right beast. If Labour promised to build 170,000 new council homes per year, the largest programme for the construction of social housing since the 1970s, thereby creating a third of a million jobs, then what would the New Right think tanks, their in house newspapers, and their in house Newsnight, have to say? “Vote Labour”? If not, why not?

All in all, Ed Miliband, Jon Cruddas and Maurice Glasman, over to you.

Local Schools For Local People

Councils have not run schools in 30 years, since as long ago as the days when councils were run by Councillors rather than by Officers. And without very strong Local Education Authorities, there cannot be a bipartite or tripartite system of secondary schools. With them, though, such a system would be, as it used to be, perfectly simple.

That, even over and above central government's visceral hatred of local government since the former stopped being staffed by the products of the latter, is why Local Education Authorities have been actively persecuted by every Government since, under Ted Heath, Margaret Thatcher was butchering the grammar schools.

In the teeth of the strong opposition from the entirely Labour LEA in Durham for example. Labour Councillors were grammar school themselves. Or else they knew from experience how good Secondary Moderns could be, and they were therefore able to predict accurately that what was proposed in their place would be horrifically worse.

Whereas Thatcher was commercially educated. She sometimes pretended not to be, although without ever lying directly. But she was. And that made all the difference.

A Mari Usque Ad Mare

Coming just as Canada’s vast resources of fuel, fresh water, timber and other key commodities make her a coming superpower of the twenty-first century, the appointment of Mark Carney as Governor of the Bank of England seems especially fitting in the bicentenary year of the War of 1812, and when even the world’s biggest pop star is a Canadian. An outspokenly loyal Canadian, in fact, and that specifically by reference to socialised medicine.

Socialised medicine is one of the grounds on which the American Right pillories Canada as a proxy for pillorying Britain. That vulgar abuse is gleefully repeated in our Quisling pseudo-Tory press, which is loyal only to Israel and to an electorally defeated vision of the United States. Its proposed “Anglosphere” is the conformity of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to that model in everything from healthcare to constitutional structures.

Canada is the land of John G Diefenbaker, the morally and socially conservative rural populist who established the Canadian Bill of Rights, the Royal Commission on Health Services, the Agricultural Rehabilitation and Development Act, and the National Productivity Council (Economic Council of Canada), and who extended the franchise to all Aboriginal peoples. He campaigned to save the Canadian Red Ensign, with the Union Flag in the corner and thus making Canada a nation under the Cross. He opposed official bilingualism in the English-speaking provinces, a common cause between Irish Catholics and his own tribe, the Orangemen. He denounced apartheid, and blocked the Commonwealth readmission of the new Republic of South Africa. And he refused to have American nuclear weapons in Canada.

Tommy Douglas was voted the Greatest Canadian by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s viewers in 2004. Born in Falkirk, and therefore an embodied link between Canada and the United Kingdom, this Baptist minister led a party of unions, farmers and co-operators with that splendid name, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. He gave Saskatchewan the publicly owned Saskatchewan Power Corporation, its extension of electrical services to remote villages and farms, and the Saskatchewan Government Insurance Office. He gave Saskatchewan many Crown Corporations in competition with private sector interests, the unionisation of the public services, and Canada’s first programme of universal free hospital care. He delivered the Saskatchewan Bill of Rights, with its groundbreaking protections against private no less than government abuses. He laid the ground for the province’s Medicare programme, which soon afterwards became nationwide. And he became the first Leader of the New Democratic Party, Canada’s main party of the Left. Did I mention that he did all this while a Baptist minister?

Only in Canada, within and under the British Empire, and under the Crown to this day, was the old France, “the Eldest Daughter of Holy Mother Church”, able to survive. The fleur-de-lys, on the Royal Arms of England and then of Great Britain from 1340 to 1800, remains the symbol to this day, and the Assembly quite recently voted without dissent to retain the Crucifix between the Speaker’s Chair and the Royal Coat of Arms. The Crucifix between the Speaker’s Chair and the Royal Coat of Arms. Perfect. Utterly, utterly, utterly perfect.

Complete with the Queen and the Westminster model, a few retained British variations on the English language, and a British-style social democracy. Yet sharing with the United States a continent and the longest land frontier between any two countries. How dare they? Who do they think they are? They are indicating exactly who they are by withdrawing from Afghanistan. We should be right behind them. As we should be in defending secure jobs, proper wages, travel opportunities and a full diet for everyone. Canadians have a particularly important understanding of the necessity of government economic action to the maintenance of national sovereignty: “It’s either the State or the States”. Thus is defined all specifically Canadian patriotism, rather than the separatism of Quebec or the West.

Now, there is a special relationship.

Polly's Peers

Polly Toynbee has only herself to blame. With her CV and her referees, she could have a peerage any time that she wanted one.

That could be said of and to any grand Establishment columnist: you could be inside the parliamentary process if you wanted to be, and your comments need to be read in the light of the fact that you would obviously find that far too much like hard work.

However, if we are to have "around 100 new peers", then Ed Miliband should seize the initiative and demand that they be created by the following means.

In Great Britain, each of the 11 areas already used to elect Members of the European Parliament would elect seven. The shortlists of two from each of the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats would be put to a determinative ballot of the entire electorate.

Two more would be elected from other parties, with each of us voting for one candidate and the top five declared elected at the end. In the same way would be elected two Crossbenchers. In Northern Ireland, that means would elect five party candidates and two Crossbenchers.

A further 12 peers would be elected by the entire United Kingdom, the six highest scoring losers from the smaller parties, and six Crossbenchers. I the latter case, again, each of us would vote for one candidate and the top six would be declared elected.

That would give an overall total of 96, each whom would be given a peerage. The exercise could be repeated every 20 or 25 years, with the general creation of peerages carrying on in the meantime.

The price of this might be the abolition of the 92 elected hereditaries. There might also be calls for quotas for women and for ethnic minorities. In that event, or indeed otherwise, all should be required to come from the social categories C2DE, and those in all areas except London, though perhaps not in the national elections, to come from the most rural third, or possibly quarter, of wards in the area.

It need hardly be insisted that they all have been registered voters in the area throughout the previous 10, or possibly 15, years; as much as anything else, they would therefore have to be at least 28, if not 33. Their socioeconomic backgrounds would entitle these peers, even if uniquely, to the same remuneration as members of the House of Commons.

If, and only if, all of these conditions were met, then it might be possible to consider that all candidates be women, and that all area candidates for London have defined themselves as non-white at the previous census. But those remain the answers to entirely the wrong questions, if to any question at all.

The non-white requirement in London might reasonably be said to balance the rural requirement everywhere else. But such are now the devices employed to secure seats down the corridor for women that, if anything, these seats ought to be reserved for men, as 26 in the House of Lords already are and always will be.

In the three main parties alone, it would not be hard to find 33 men who had been passed over for less qualified women in recent years (would you like some names?), and the broadly working-class requirement would make that very easy indeed in the Labour case, at least. As would the rural requirement in the other two, at least. And as would the residency requirement across the board.

Ed Miliband, over to you.