NEW GOVERNANCE REQUIRED
"The United Kingdom should be broken up, and Scotland and England set free
as independent nations, according to a huge number of voters on both sides
of the border." From "England wants its independence", Patrick Hennessy and
Melissa Kite, Sunday Telegraph (26 November 2006)
Cultural differences are not be sneezed at. When I came to live in Bath 25
years ago after having lived in Coventry for all my previous life I
discovered a whole new cultural scene. Of course, I knew this before I
settled here. When I decided to leave my home town, I wanted to find
somewhere with a lot more cultural vitality. How I decided on Bath was by
inventing a "bookshop test" -- that is, I assumed that towns or cities that
are likely to be more interesting than others, and particularly Coventry,
would also contain more than the average number of bookshops.
Coventry had one decent bookshop at the time (coincidentally called
Hudsons), apart from a good second-hand bookshop and Smiths -- which I
don't consider a bookshop, then or now -- for over 350,000 people. After
sampling several towns and cities down here in the (warmer) South-West I
decided on Bath which then had 11 bookshops for 80,000 people. I also
discovered a little later that Bath had retained one of the glories of the
Victorian era -- a Royal Literary and Scientific Society -- which Coventry
didn't have, several orchestras (Coventry had one) and well over 20 secular
choirs (Coventry had one, perhaps two). Incidentally, although Coventry,
like Bath, had a university within its boundary, those who were involved in
setting it up had to brand it with the name of "Warwick" for fear of
downgrading it before it ever got started.
But what shook me rather was a trivial event. Soon after I had arrived in
Bath I was chatting with a couple of plasterers in the apartment building
where I then lived. We chatted and chatted for maybe 15 minutes, then we
were joined by another workman and continued chatting for another 15
minutes . By this time I was feeling quite uneasy and said: "Hey, I'd
better leave you. Your boss will be coming along and ticking you off." The
last workman who'd arrived replied: "I am the boss." Wow! This was a shock.
I was a "Coventry kid", a cultural product of a long tradition of
piece-rate payments in factories -- stretching back long before the car
industry, the watch industry, and the silk weaving industry and, very
possibly, the former woollen textile industry of the Middle Ages. People
worked hard in Coventry; people took it easy in Bath. They still do. "Do a
bit and leave a bit" is the motto. Recently, a couple of workmen took a
fortnight to build a wooden garden gate for a neighbour of mine. It was a
very fine garden gate, but it was something that I could have done all by
myself in a couple of days -- though maybe not as fine!
As well as still being a Coventrian who happens to be living in Bath, I
also consider myself a Warwickshireman and an Englishman, a product of all
sorts of subtle things such as, as a kid, burrowing through a hole in a
fence with my pals at the Courtaulds cricket ground and spending an idyllic
day there watching Warwickshire cricket team knocking hell out of another
county side (which Warwickshire was doing in those days), or being a
score-boy at the Coundon rugger ground where the Coventry team played (and
when we supplied 11 of the English rugger team -- and my later school
supplied 9 of those). Then, there's Shakespeare and his deer-poaching not
far from Coventry, and Josiah Wedgewood and Matthew Boulton a little
further away -- and many and much more making up the total amalgam of
Englishness.
This is why I feel slightly a foreigner when I visit Wales or Scotland and
I sense that they consider me a foreigner too -- and more than slightly on
their home ground. Despite the fact that England amalgamated with Wales
hundreds of years ago (I'm not sure when) or that the Act of Union with
Scotland is 300 years old in a few months' time, the English are still
English, the Welsh Welsh and the Scottish Scottish. English political
commentators occasionally give vent to talking about the "Scottish Mafia"
-- that is the majority of Scots who comprise Tony Blair's Cabinet. The
reason for this is that Blair is himself a born, bred and educated Scot
though he never draws attention to it and has Anglicised his voice so well
that most people don't realise it.
A recent ICM poll commissioned by the Sunday Telegraph reveals the fact
that 59% of English voters would like Scotland to go completely independent
and 68% also want England itself to become independent from Scotland and
Wales. So, despite hundreds of years of "union" the cultural differences
remain. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, constantly prates on
about the glories of the United Kingdom. He needs to, of course, because,
while he wants to become the next Prime Minister of the UK, he is himself a
Scot.
Devolution into smaller entities is in the air everywhere around the world.
As well as Empires that have broken up in previous times, modern
nation-states -- after a century of togetherness brought about by artillery
regiments and huge bouts of warfare -- are still too large to be kept
together comfortably. Besides the break-up of the USSR a decade ago there
are increasing signs of fracture in Belgium, France, Germany and even
America and many more countries besides the UK.
The fact of the matter is that, for millions of years, our genes have
accommodated themselves to the behaviour of living in quite small groups.
As groups became tribes, and then cities, regions, countries and
nation-states (which usually criminalise everything but the champion
language and culture) then competent governance has become less and less
attainable. Loyalties become suspect; corruption spreads. The primary
allegiance of individuals is still towards their own locality or profession
or class or religion despite worldwide consumer goodies. We have still not
managed to marry our genes with our modernity. There's an awful long way to
go before we have anything approaching satisfactory forms of governance.
Keith Hudson
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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