You couldn’t make it up. Today I received a letter addressed to The Occupier, P.O. Box 36, Rye. I sneaked out through the back door of my post office box and beat a hasty retreat to the far side of the kingdom. It was a beautiful day and the sun was beating down on the tourists in Trafalgar Square. After a coffee at St Martin in the Field I headed down Whitehall and through St. James Park to Victoria Coach Station.
A taxi collected me from Swindon Bus Station at a quarter past three and I was playing with Tempe on the lawn of 26 The Close in Purton when John Papworth eased himself off the garden bench at four o’clock to prepare himself for the 5 pm. meeting of the Radcon III Planning Group. I had not been followed. There were no police marksmen positioned outside the house.
There had been some sharp exchanges during the course of the previous two weeks as I accused John of highjacking the proceedings for his Charter of Real Nations agenda which I argued had very little to do with a conference on Making Local Government Local that was supposed to concentrate on the Real Communities Charter. He shot back that until local communities had the benefit of the newfound powers that the Real Nations Charter would give them there was very little they could do with the Real Communities Charter.
I didn’t bother to reply to this as my purpose had been to put a shot across the bows and slow down the Real Nations Juggernaut with its paraphernalia of a new 2006 Declaration of Independence and the 2001 Real Nations Charter worked through five years ago at radcon I…and deepened with practical action to place secession on national agendas at radcon II…to make more room for the Charter 2015 Project and some serious work at radcon III to work through a new Magna Carta.
Dr Aidan Rankin has been reading my weblogs because I notice the Tory Leader David Cameron is thinking in similar terms when he is calling for a British Bill of Rights steeped in English legal precedents instead of being swamped by the Napoleonic Code from Europe bedevilling the present set-up.
Nonetheless my thoughts had been turning to resignation from the Radcon III Conference Planning Group yet again so I thought I would fire off a memo to Anton Pinschof and the rest of the 2001 Radical Consultation Steering Group…Tom Greco, Aidan Rankin, Kirk Sale and Chris Wright…by way of a mid-term report in case the Saturday meeting failed to go my way. As it happened it did so I took upon myself the task of writing the background briefing paper for a meeting in London next month of patrons and officials for radcon III. Here is my pre-meeting memo.
Please regard the radcon flurry as my way of briefing the 2001 Radcon Continuity Group on how things stand midway towards the Five Years On Swindon Conference. My private opinion at the end of 2001 was that there would not be another radcon...without a radcon process...and no mechanisms were put in place in 2001 for this to happen...and the attempt to develop the idea of an Academic Inn Association to take on this task was sabotaged leading to my resignation from the London Academic Inn Committee and predictably to the collapse of the London Academic Inn a year later. The committee has been disbanded and there have been no events now for three years.
My private opinion at the end of 2005 was that what was going to happen at the Five Years On Gathering in September 2006 was another Fourth World Assembly…appropriately The Thirteenth…plus a Book Launch of Village Democracy. I did not believe this Five Years On Gathering would be part of any radcon process...and nor would the Middlebury Institute...dubbed radcon II to avoid a return to the Fourth World Assembly model in September 2006 and because it might have become part of a radcon process once there was a third point on the progress line.
My private opinion at mid-year 2006 is that the Five Years On Gathering seems to be acquiring a third pillar...the launch of an international organisation from Swindon with no understanding of the decades of diplomatic spade work required...while the focus on the Local Communities Charter...despite the imminent book launch...is being lost.
So unless there is an unprecedented change of heart over the next couple of weeks I am now slipping into damage limitation mode...in the hope of taking something useful back from the September Gathering to some future convening of the Radcon Continuity Group. The two best hopes at the midway mark look to be firm plans to set up an Edward Goldsmith Institute for Human Scale Ecology; firm support for the further development of the Magna Carta II Charter 2015 Project and the Resurgence Group of Institutes Development Plan.
The Radcon III Planning Group were also given the glad tidings that Heidi Foster had agreed to help me ensure that there was a bookshop facility from the opening night of the conference on the Thursday evening until the close of proceedings with the Final Plenary on Saturday afternoon. The Post-Meeting Prandials were different this weekend as Adam Crossland invited us all to The Commons just outside Purton where a party was in full swing to cheer off a local group of New Age Land Girls heading for the hills of Vietnam next week on a development aid mission.
