Another gorgeous day on this sliver of land between the English Channel and the North Atlantic Ocean. This could be the reason Europeans are gung-ho for the Carbonista Nonsense while Americans regard Kyoto as a lot of hooey. Summer on America’s East Coast has been wet and miserable with New England suffering its worst flooding in decades after it non-stop rain in May and June. Last week New Jersey and Maryland were deluged by some slow-moving thunder storms and on Sunday a foot of rain fell on Washington. Flash floods and mudslides closed roads, railways and the underground while floods swamped basements and caused power cuts. The US National Archives and Smithsonian Museums had to close and the storm knocked down a large tree in front of the White House.

The rains came from a long weather front draped down the eastern states as a steady stream of very moist tropical air from the Bahamas met cooler drier air to the west. The weather front stalled as it ran parallel to the jet stream... the ribbon of air sweeping overhead several miles high...and so the storms inched forward painfully slowly. It is no wonder the Climate Changelings shifted tack from Global Warming to Abrupt Climate Change. Even PT Barnum would have been hard-pressed to sell Global Warming to folks with flood waters lapping round their feet.

My library session was booked for 1030-1130 which gave me a five hour session after getting up with the sun at five. I devoted the time to Cultura’s accounts. I keep a pretty good tally in my head but with five weeks in Sweden ahead and £300 of translator payables coming due while away an accurate count of the State of the Kitty was called for.

A hundred pounds of Good Yacht Guide orders...from New South Wales and Mid-Lothian...came in this week to keep matters on an even keel. And I can set my clock by NCAB who pay on 30-days to the minute which is nice in a customer. We never got off the hook with our Norwegian midsummer problem...NCAB Sweden even picked up some flak from NCAB Norway...but we got the OK to send in our £250 invoice today. So all’s well that ends well.

PCHut has been down to three computers for the past week. Today for the first time capacity shortages caught up with le propiéteur. Sandra was at my computer when I arrived to clock on at a quarter to twelve. So I jumped at the excuse to treat myself to egg & chips at Strand Cafe. At midday the customers at PCHut indulged in some musical chairs so by a quarter past...or ‘after’ as the Americans say...I was in business posting blogs and deleting junk mail.

Yesterday I sent Dele Oguntimoju a paper for the Real Nations Forum entitled States, Nations & Diasporas. Today I followed it up with another entitled Village Trusts for Angela Bates’ Real Communities Forum. John Papworth emailed back an enthusiastic endorsement of the first paper which puts him back in my good books. The two papers started life as the Rye’s Own article that ran into a Coleridge Moment. This article was then recycled into a couple of this week’s weblogs before re-emerging as the Ugly Sisters. I would like to think they improved as they matured.

I am having another go at the Scots in these articles of mine. But I have good reason. Not even Horatio Nelson is immune to their stealthy takeover of English public life. After all what could be less Scottish than Nelson...despite his dalliances with a lady by the name of Hamilton. It now transpires that the man at the top of the column in Trafalgar Square overlooking the goings-on in Whitehall is Scottish. Nelson’s statue is made from Scottish Craigleith stone. A large supply has just been sent south for use in renovating the column. Och ‘n aye ‘n Auld Land Syne.

Down south at Southwark Crown Court two customs officers have been jailed for their part in an alcohol and tobacco smuggling scam. Their job was to wave smugglers through dockside controls at Dover. Meanwhile up in the north-east Newcastle City Council has been rapped on the knuckles for flying the European Flag without planning permission…technically it’s an advert. You couldn’t make it up. By the laws of the land only National Flags can be hoisted up the country’s flagpoles without planning permission. With World Cup fever at a pitch before England’s quarter-final match against Portugal on Saturday perhaps some Europhile might like to test the law by challenging the flying of the Flag of St George. There must a million on them south of the Tyne and east of the Severn.

By the end of this century Village States will have learned how to protect them and theirs from Commercial, Administrative and Personal Interests. They must also learn to differentiate between personal possessions, private property and common wealth. This is where Civic Wisdom starts. R.H.Tawney sought to persuade the Labour Party to adopt the idea of Improperty. He almost succeeded. The Atlee and Wilson governments discriminated between Earned and Unearned Income...squeezing the latter until the pips squeaked. But they never took onboard the theories of Henry George that lay behind the thinking Tawney’s thinking. Real Property escaped and no liens were lain against the profits derived from public licensing of development...and the unearned windfall profits...and local corruption...that followed in its wake. But the concept of Improperty is crucial in dealing with Personal Outsiders.

The retired desk officer from the Stupidity Services or the Merchant Banker day-trading in government-commissioned lethal weaponry from their homes in Islington or Chelsea might like a second home in a quaint historic country town but why should they be allowed to let it stand empty? Tawney discriminated between Working Capital and Idle Capital. Ownership of a second home involves the legalised theft of a Village State’s housing stock from the Common Wealth of local families. It is a problem the world over and getting worse as the fat cats lap up the cream so that real property in prime locations becomes the speculation of choice for the rich...and the collateral desired by the bankers in their never-ending quest for risk-free placements of their credit creating commercial banking mechanism.

In fact this is part of a much broader mechanism that sanctions the theft of personally managed Common Wealth by means of the maldistribution of money and credit. But locality has the means to fight back against this legally- sanctioned looting by Outside Interests. The Norwegian Parliament has responded to their second home problem by applying the Tawney Criteria. In tiny fishing villages along the Norwegian coast from Bergen to Tromsö good tenants are like gold dust to the property owning class hundreds of miles away in Oslo...and local rents are extremely reasonable. The reason? Second homes are forfeited if they are not occupied. An empty house represents Idle Capital.

A Village State’s Common Wealth is by its nature unlikely to sit idle. But it has problems of its own. Over the years philosophers and radicals have remarked on the problem of the Competent Receiver. It is the same problem for the trustees of the Church Commissioners and the National Trust as it is for a political party intent on reclaiming private property for We The People. Eventually the Labour Party settled for the British National State as the Competent Receiver for the Common Wealth of the United Kingdom. It came to be known as Nationalisation.

This solution might have been suitable for the dying days of empire. But there is little reason to assume it is right for all times. Future generations might choose to legislate for a Programme of Localisation. Some day there might be sound arguments for King Charles III to instruct the National Trust, the Church Commissioners and the Ministry of Defence to settle their property on Local Village Trusts. Each generation makes its own choices. There were some within the Labour Movement who agreed with Francis Bacon that ‘wealth be like manure...best if it be spread’.

Internationalists believe that power should be drained away from Nation States into some world governing body. Trade Unionists want the power nexus to be in a place where it can do battle with the Money Power. Anarchists seek for power to return to the individual citizen. Syndicalists want individual power held in common. Party Politicians in Westminster and Central Bankers in Threadneedle Street have the quaint belief that the nexus of power resides with them and wish for this power to continue to accrue to them and theirs...while the flows to rival centres be stopped up.

In recent years political debate about the Nexus of Power has been stifled. Attempts to discuss derivative subjects like Secession and Cantonisation, Property and Money or Livingry and Killingry have been sidetracked and trivialised by the private agendas of Commercial, Administrative or Personal Interests seeking to control the power flow. So Feminism is deployed to thwart a new generation’s attempt to fight for Global Justice. So a War on Terror is created and Global Warming invented to remove the threat to Piped Energy of a pipe-free energy infrastructure. So it goes on.

Structure determines behaviour and power flows only one way at a time. The structure of power relationships determines the direction of the power flow within an organisation. The struggle to control power has obscured the purpose of wielding that power and the effects of the scale and pace of the power flow on an organism.

One day subjects like Social Morphology and Structural Sociology will be on the agendas of Curriculum Committees. Conferences about Making Local Government Local will be reported in the media. Books will be published on Village Democracy and The Wealth of Villagers. Scale and pace will take centre stage as academics and politicians deconstruct such long-abandoned orthodoxies as Big is Best...for Capital...and Small is Beautiful...for People. Better policies and recipes will emerge from the structural rearrangement of human affairs. But until then Real Progress will splutter to a halt and the Adventure of Civilisation will be subverted by the forces of Death and Destruction.