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.