Privatisation is the social equivalent of selling a kidney to pay the mortgage. Except that, under current circumstances, it’s not even your mortgage you’re paying but that of some crook you’ve never met but whose well-being you’re assured is fundamental to economic stability.It was no accident that the real start of the privatisation drive co-incidedContinueContinue reading “The Hollow State”
Category Archives: Regionalism
When Will Wessex Flag Ban Cease?
We are the dispossessed. Dispossessed of our liberties by the Norman Conquest. Dispossessed of our livelihoods by the enclosures. And now dispossessed by the Coalition as it flogs our communities’ assets to pay bankers their bonuses. Bonuses then spent squeezing us out of our homeland to make way for commuter mansions and weekend cottages. TheContinueContinue reading “When Will Wessex Flag Ban Cease?”
We & They
Our website currently includes a page of links to movements for autonomy among our neighbours – the Cornish, the Welsh and, within England, the Mercians. Our southern neighbours the Bretons and, within France, the Normans, are not neglected either. In a Wessex-centred perspective, within the Europe of Regions, we have no false loyalties to widerContinueContinue reading “We & They”
The Infamous Five
In 1945, the Labour Party campaigned to destroy Beveridge’s ‘five giants’ of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. In 1997 and each subsequent election it tried the same trick, the latest pledges being to “secure the recovery”, “raise family living standards”, “build a high tech economy”, “protect frontline services”, and “strengthen fairness in communities”. AllContinueContinue reading “The Infamous Five”
Non Homo Insula Est
No man is an island. The famous words of John Donne, Dean of St Paul’s in London. Written in English, translated here into Latin.Why Latin? A cloud of celebrities ranging from Joanna Lumley, a native of Kashmir, to Boris Johnson, former MP for Henley-on Thames, has recently been gathered in support of the proposition thatContinueContinue reading “Non Homo Insula Est”
England. A.K.A. London?
We do not argue that Wessex is not English but we do argue that there is a debate to be had about the governance of England. A unified England is a centralised England – in many ways still a Norman England – and one that in practice is run largely for London’s benefit, not ours.TakeContinueContinue reading “England. A.K.A. London?”
No State To Be In?
Lord Deben – the former Tory MP John Selwyn Gummer – wrote approvingly this week of the Coalition’s decentralist agenda: “People who feel that they cannot influence big decisions in a globalised world are adamant that they should control the space around them. It doesn’t help to call it nimby. It is more ‘ideah’ –ContinueContinue reading “No State To Be In?”
Note from Abruzzo
Guest contribution by Colin Bex, Wessex Regionalists’ London BureauStaying 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.NeighboursContinueContinue reading “Note from Abruzzo”
Wessex Regionalists 