User:Colonial

I wrote the first entry on Merry England before I had actually registered as part of this project. My inspiration was my interest when I was led as a much younger person to the writings of G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton led me to the radical conservative mind-set and this tied in with the outlook of my generation - the first generation of those who nowadays are called neo-conservatives (in one area or another of life anyway). I was the sort of person interested in Chesterton anyway and it was not surprising that I converted to Catholicism and was involved in some of the aspects of the radical conservative reaction to the fruits of the 1960's (so to speak) that took place in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

I was led during the mid to late 1980's and into the early 1990's to mix with more liberal minded people- people you could say were on the alternative community based side of things. This had led me to believe that the old division between left and right needs to go and a new 'majority' ideology or political programme horn of both extreme right-wing fascism and domination by left-wing ideological dictators needs to be developed.

I see it as beyond ideology and more of a concerted political -platform which at the very least forgets aboout Thtacherite obsessions with totally free-market approaches. Free market approaches are always in fact 4-10 'market leaders who inevitably end up becomming 2-3 'survivors who eventually become one survivor or one acting together cabal doing what they think they can assisted by a paternalistic government anyway)

I see a return to a more paternalistic approach to government but this time not targeting everyone with massive global schemes but several scheems about greening the countryside up alittle bit, reintroducing decent and modern public transport and force-feeding via a mixture of focused town and country planning policies, and an admixture of public housing and private housing.

Overall this policy would be deliberatley designed to add about 10 million people currently living in the major cities or who would have lived in them if we did nothing for the next 20 years who willend up living in semi-suburban high denisty rural small holdings and in properly plalned augmentation to exsitng and to new villages -perhaps even reviving some of the old villages that people like Cobbett said used to be there anyway. It would probably enviage about 2 million part-time and necessarily 400,000 or so fulltime more jobs paid for by the State but as about one third of the money that this would cost would have had to have been paid to theses people as dole and other tax transfers I dont sdee it as being an impossible fiscal target. This is especially so as most of the jobs would make things easier for the rst of us who would continue in employmenjt to get in and out fot ehc ities tansport ourseleves around and have cleaner streest and less vandalised and falling about infrastructure anyway.

I forsee this as being something achievable by way of an additional political belief system which will be attached to some of those MPs still associated with the major parties.

Dont laugh! Think of a slightly more intelligent and just a little more old fashioned and concerend with the social fabric Ian Duncan-Smith. Someone prepared to throw away neo-con economic thinking and actually raise taxes sufficiently to say increase overall expenditure by about 25 to 30% of todays total.

Then think of 50 or so other conservative Mps thinking this way and 30 to 40 Lib Dems and 50-80 Labor MPs who then decide to spend this on publicly financed or partly public financed reopendings of many closed railway lines - and the introduction of more long tram and rail routes leading out of smaller cities like Bristol and Nottingham into the bits of suitable countryside that remain for these Prince Charles style developments.

This new political force or rather political sentiment would also have to force through a wholseasle and quite radical programme of Prince Charles like developments. There would have to be perhaps one to three thousand such small village precints identified and the land rezoned, sometimes bought and then resold to private buyers. In about half the cases the land or village houses would be leased possibly by lottery to people otherwise eligible for public housing.

An integral part of these developments would be that attached to every one of theses one to three thousand additions to existing villages or new villages inbetween existing ones would be at least several hundred two to five acre housing plots (with covenants requiring the keeping of animalsand/or orchards and/or vegetable gardens).

All of this would be along existing and the newly opened public tansport routes. This would be augmented by increasing employment in those occupations where things (like schools, public toilet blocks,locval roads etc., local counicl facilities, and transport infastructure gets cleaned, maintained, swept, inspected and maintained. I would also see a whole new public sector of people engaged in keeping up wild areas like woods, riverbanks, coastal areas etc.,

This increase in public sector employment is necessary so that most currently unemployed ot given up searching for jobs older men and most young men and women who want to could get the sort of boring, repetitive but socially connected jobs they really need and really want. Currently and for evermore they are being kept in reserve to keep wages down in those areas where the market can afford to employ people.

Most of these jobs would be part-time and bring in maybe 30% to 50% more than they currently get on the dole but they would be tied to some scheme, probably a private tied long lease to a house in one of these new planned areas of development. Dont laughH it is possible for this sort of thing to occur and thats what Merry England would have to be if it was going to work.

Yes all of this is possible and will have to come unless we want to end up like the United States which I think we dont.

The real culprits are the middle classes who dont see any alternative. I dont blame them they have had 60 years of the left-right ideological division and all that has happened recently is that the left side has collapsed but this measn Im afraid that the right ideology while triumphant is also inadequate to the job of creating and maintaining a viable and humane society - it was never meant to be the ideology that provided all the answers.

Im not here advocating as Chesterton and others did before the Second World War that we try some sort of modified Catholic corporatist utopian vision. - Bascially Im saying that we shift by virtue of providing subsidised housing and jobs about 2-4 million people currently doing nothing and going nowhere in the main cities.

Also we necessarily make it possible for at least as many again mostly middle class people to do the same thing by giving them access to slightly subsidised planning control driven redevelopments of parts of the countryside. We must remember that much of the countryside I am talking about is likley to be swollowed up anyway by badly planned over dense urban developments anyway.

I do, however, see an element of not so much of stick (for that never works) but carrot seeing at least half of this new movement encouraged into parts of England which are not likely to see such major development without this intervention for at least another 50 -100 years. But if this occurs then the reat of the countryside that would have been effectively turned into suburban nighmares will be able to be saved and reamin much more rural like than it ever would have been otherwise.

What will the effect be on land and house prices of such a move?. I would envisage that state housing would increase again in the inner cities and that middle class fed demand for urban housing would be somewhat dampened and that overall house and land prices in the cities would stablise. I see living in this third alternative to inner city/suburban and actual rural living will create its own demand and in fact that those who gain possession of these subsidisde pices of land and village houses will ge hold of something thast itself willprobably very early on become comparable to existing prices in the areas for similar set ups. However there will be covenants that will require use of the large holdings even if this ends up in seeing losts of people employed as garderners - so what? Also much of the viillage housing stock will not be privatised and will be churned on to other people who meet eliginility for public housing criteria.

Also I see the initial aim of between 4-8-10 million as Stage 1 and that salutary planning and looking into the future might see at least as many plces again made available= If this ahppeens I see an overall end of the spiral in land and house prices in urban areas. Also if people end up realising that their farm can only be split up for intense village development or into small holdings on which real actual investment will have to be put in the new owner with hedges, fences, animal compunds, proper agricultral practice, purchase of certain amounts of seed per annum, and/or of planting of orchad trees etc., and showing evidence of genuine efforts to maintain all this then I see a change in culture a post-modern return to someting like the Merry England ideal.

I still see most people opting for urban life and I dont see why all of this should not be accompanied by equally interesting and public sector driven attempts to take the heat out of both inner city and higher density resdiential property market and the suburban property market. Not all of the realtively large increase in public spending I am envisaging would be spent on rural based infrastructure and housing. Providing between several hundred thousand additional to those already planned of decent units of public housing to people currently employed within a 20 km radius of London and about as many again for those employed within 10k radius of other major cities would probably help take the heat out of the urban property market.

So dont think Merry England is pie in the sky - it would be achievable if the so called conservatives who care stopped being in effect London Oratory conservatives prancing around in robes and saying the Popes philsophy is too modernist and then smiling and putting up with the neo-cons and their necessarily socially anarchic vision.

Also we need the children of the defucnt left-wing revoltion to come down to earth and stop pining at their dinner parties for ideologically pure obsessions about stopping rubber chickens, and stupid common people eating rubbish - they will always eat rubbish thats why their stupid and common. Even hunts might have to be allowed -(especially if the hunt is to end in eating what has been hunted otherwise it is just a sport and sports are for urban middle class people and not very bright gentry who have forgotten the difference and not for Merry England people). Will a critical mass develop around a popular political figure like Prince Charles might have once sort of been able to have become?

I personally think it is possible, especially if the conservative side of the 'I like the country' and the non-conservative side can find a genuine common ground. Perhaps over something like my 4-8 million people to the countryside and 30% in public spending on increases in public sector infrastructure and housing spending plan.

Where I come from....

Since the mid 1990's I have tended to withdraw into my married life and to confine the majority of external life (outside employment) to the day to day contacts with people in my local area and to a generally much more reflective existence. I had lived in inner cities but for the last seven years we have lived and even taken our holidays on the rural fringe around great cities. This is why I felt compelled to start writing off the article about that most typical of English versions of the bucolic utopian vision - the idea of Merry England.

My sincerest hope is that a genuine and workable alliance will develop between the best and most flexible of the pro-hunting types and the best and most flexible of the lest try and make England green - not keep it green it never has been green ij that fanatic sense- unless you count the period in 2000BC when 50,000 pre Celtic people lived here!.

I do not hope that an alliance will develop between the sort of people who use to run the Countryside Alliance I mean before the fightened Thatcetgite elite decided to take it over in case it became agenuinely conservative movement and that is what they are alwys most afraid of believe me.

Nor so I think that any broad based political alliance should have extremes of right ot left- cerainly not the sad football thugs and other intellectually challemged scum of the ultra right movement -God forbid. Nor with the pathetic and self-defeating radicals among the animal liberationists and by-pass campiagners.

Merry England will become abroad political movements when it links up sincere but broad minded country tories and a few old fashioned Liberals (not Lib-Dem social engineers) with a broader group of peo-ple - the sort who spend their weekends picking up other peoples rubbish on nature trails in public land or who clean up local brooks and plant rushes dontaed by the local hypermarket. Together such an alliance can checkmate the nasty little pseuds from the New Labour end of the spectrum with their desire to become multi millionaires before they turn 48 along with the domination of the other two major parties with more overtly conservative versions of these.

Its sad that the aristrocracy and the Royal Family have imploded and have failed to see that they will only still be around in a few generations if they become the focal point for a new third way. A real third way which is based on cooperative revdevelopment of large parts of our rural lands and resources which will otherwise become the venue for Amercian style factory farming and pointless, souless urbanisation.

Something like the Merry England vision, which I think most English people share, especially those who hail from reently arrived immigrant groups.- The idea of England that drew them here is more along Merry England lines than anything else. A happy mix of green and pavement is what will keep most people happy not left-wing or right-wing obsesions with creating some sort of new England. The newer arrived groups wanted most the sort of England that had a supposedly contented lower middle class as well as a contented with their lot not that well off middle class. This is essentially a suburban but also aprovincal and rural petit-bourgeois idea of what makes the owrld apleasnt place to live in day to day- failry stable, fairly claose to symbols and reminders of the rural ideal as tansformed in the 18th century into the ideal of the 'park'. -That is what people whose grnadparents were loyal colinual police in Trinada or the Punjib want here - not just the dream that only 10-20% of them can ever hope to otain anyway of access into the elite and/or 4 million obtained from selling three corner sites in Hounslow.

This spread-out, locally focused, genuinely stable lower middlec class and not that well off middle classwill only be achieved by encouraging semi-suburban density resettlement of large areas of rural England. Here people who just will never raise the 400,000 pounds to buy a semi-datched in a leafy suburb will still find a place to live where they just have to spend eight to ten hours a week clearing out ditches, helping their neighbours prune their hedges after a storm etc.,

Plus such a focused effort of town and county redevelopment will also necessarily create things for bored and underemployed youth and older men gto do by way of cleaning public facilities, maintaining fences, planting forests, fixing roads, keeping train lines safe and cleanand then coming home tired to their outer suburban or rural cottage. If they wish to aspire to something more then it may be possible to work their way up to a middle class type cottage on its four or five acres or perhaps try and obtain by a swap or a direct purchase a cottage with half an acre or quarter of an acre garden on the outskirts of a less closely settled village.

By no means do I advocate destroying the great majority of even the large rural estates or most of the existing 100 to 2000 acre private farms nor depopulating the cities. - I just want to allow people who 20 kilomtres or more form a large town to be able to really live as if they really do live in the country.

I was never much convinced by the Kingsley Amis novel with its so called called debunking of Merry England nor by left-wing inspired critiques who feigned toral rejection and scornful disdain at the radical conservative critique of unfettered capitalism. The left-wing critique often still seems to me to see as a necessary Darwinian stage the ineescpability of the unfettered capitalism that destroyed too much of the traditional aspects of life that really had made England a better place to live (for most but the poorest 5-10%) in 1740 than it had become by 1840.

Where do we go from here? Well personally I'm hoping for a revival of the sort of outlook of Atlee's Labour Party counterbalanced by some sort of One Nation Toryism from the Tories. Out of this possible shift might come a conceren for making England a decent place to live which is now absent and even if one tenth of what I have outlined gets introduced then this would turn the tide towards this happening.

I cannot see the politically correct Lib Dems going anywhere or the alternative post-left - Greens etc., getting anywhere. Also I mistrust those supposed conservative defencderd of taste, feeling, decent emotions and good syntax (eg the Spectactor crowd). These dupes of the neo-cons rabbit on about the end of life as we know it just because one third of the population sits in an illegally shared Council flat smoking cheap crack cocaine or downing Ales while watching US day time televison. So what? Thats nothing like the sort of mess we had in the early industrial revolution when even if you didnt live in a slum most people in the country lived in conditions that were hardly better than the farm animals anyway.

I live in Australia but consider myself reasonably interested in life in Britain - indeed I was the last generation who could have jumped on a plane, and within 16 hours have been registered to vote in a British general election. I didn't do that but a good friend of mine did and I regret that - although he lives back here now.

I am not silly enough to think that life in Britain is better than in Australia - at almost any level this is not so - but Britian is another country as is Guatamala and I would still rather not throw away the fact that a good part of my childhood education was spent being taught about Britain as if that country was somehow and in some way my country too. I have a heritage and a focus of interest and it certainly extends to being as passionate about Merry England as anyone who might happen to live in the actual and mot mythical) England.

I would be interested in any comments and I hope that this background paper will convince you that given a 20-30% increase in the British budget something like a workable Merry Enlgand type agenda could be introduced. Remember they said in the 1920's and 1930's that it was pie in the sky that such an increase could never take place except perhaps for military spending. We found the money then.

So one day one generation will find the money agin to make Britian as it should be the envy of the rest of Europe- a small garden where English civility is used to forge solutions to crowding, overly-marketised solutions to problems, under-employment of men and etc., Despite what some feminists say (some are now sensible) underemployed men just cause hell if not doing some sort of actual work - they cant ever be civilised down with activity clubs and educational circles doewn at the civic centre. We have 200 years of US history to show us what sort of effects being a flexible pool of labour has had on most US African Americans.

The saddest thing for me today is seeing the erstwhile Catholic radical conservatives sell out to neo-con and Amercian driven solutions. Yes, they get good jobs, they become millionaires and they are not blacklisted by the conservative networks as I have effectively become (more by not bothering than by standing on street corners handing out photocopies of 1928 editions of GK's Weekly). One of the sell-out neo-cons I am referring to is a senior Cabinet Minister in this country and I know you have several such people in the conservative shadow Cabinet. As for those of similar background in the Labour and Lib-Dems - I supose Im harsher on them becasue they still sit in parties which theoretically do not rule out using the public sector to make lifetolerable and not become nasty. I don't blame Non-Conformists in politics or evangelicals of any strope becasue they were always too immured with the mythos of individuals undergoing life-changing experiences to realise that very dull, very boring, but necessarily very beery solutions handed out to ordinary people are often just what they were looking for!