William Shepherd

I am now embarked upon the final third of my Blogging Odyssey. I have more to say about Global Warming and have yet to complete my blogging of the Anna Lindh Dossier. There are also more to be gleaned from earlier writings from The Canterbury Papers, The Wealth of Villagers, The Little EuroBook and England’s Economic Politics for A New Century. So I do not find myself short of non-fiction material.

However…unless events intervene…I also plan to introduce into this Shop Window of mine a number of Creative Writing Projects…The Return of the Ancient Mariner; The Little Prince; The Private Letters of Crocodile Uppsala; 2034; Creaky Tales and The King of Buen Consejo.

But William of Salisbury may yet take up much of my attention. The first of his two parchments…Letter to King Charles III…appeared in last Saturday’s Blog and his Eight Points Local Programme two days ago. But this local programme was the second and last part of his Second Parchment. The first part contained the Marching Orders for the Five Transition Years between the Election of the Royalist Party and the Abolition of Centralised Government.

The idea that a thousand years of English History can be turned upside down in 350-words may seem quite absurd. William of Salisbury would agree...as long as business carries on as usual. But this is a radical programme designed for a situation where business is anything but normal and the alternatives are Chaos, Tyranny or Military Rule.

Five years ago Kirkpatrick Sale predicted that we would be in just such a situation within 20 years. It is also 15 years since John Seymour conceived Retrieved From The Future set in Suffolk in the years after the Oil Tankers failed to arrive and England’s City Dwellers froze to death after two devastating winters. The War on Terror, Global Warming and the other products of the Fear Factories are distractions from Reality.

Western Europe and the USA are about to go the way of Eastern Europe…and to do so at the same speed. Collapse will not be gradual but sudden. We are living in a Golden Age which is rapidly drawing to a close. The only form of planning that makes any sense in times like these are plans for the reconstruction of Civilisation After The Crash. This is the message coming from John Seymour and Kirkpatrick Sale. William of Salisbury is a contributor to this debate.

One of the great Strengths of Diversity is Redundancy of Institutions. This is what the Uniformers & Harmonisers of the World fail to understand. England is blessed with three parallel Structures of Governance…Monarchy, Parliament and Church.

The collapse of Parliamentary Governance provides an opportunity for The Church or The Monarchy to take on the Power of Governance. William of Salisbury reasons that with Parliamentary Governance discredited the Sensible English Thing To Do will be for Charles Windsor and Rowan Williams to put their heads together. Their task…ahead of Crash…is to design the ways to bring the English people safely through the difficult times ahead.

Much of William of Salisbury’s 20-point Programme of Transition will be rightly seen as a savage assault against Private Banking and Big Business. This will come as no surprise to anyone with Historical Consciousness. These are the forces that have abetted the rise of Parliamentary Governance and instrumental in its fall. Even a cursory reading of the rise of the Property Owners’ & Merchants’ Parliament in the 17th Century will banish any doubts about this. Here is William of Salisbury’s 20-Point Transition Programme…the alternative to Chaos, Tyranny or Military Rule.

1. Issue a Guaranteed Income of £ 100 per person per week of public issue and establish a programme for Issuing Authority to be at Village and Urban Parish level by Year Five;
2. Establish Common Property Commission;
3. Establish Debt & Usury Commission;
4. Establish Trusts & Corporations Commission;
5. Establish Farm & Food Commission;
6. Repeal every Legislative Act of all Parliaments;
7. Abolish all Rights other than Personal Property Rights and Common Law Rights;
8. Register all Private Property as Personal Property within 12 months;
9. Establish programme for election of Common Property, Debt & Usury and Equity Commissioners in each constituency after 12 months;
10. Establish programme for the reconstruction or abolition of all Corporations, Trusts and other Joint Private Enterprises by Year Five;
11. Increase bank deposit ratio to 20% and issue public money to replace private bank deposit money at 20% per year until 100% Money Economy by Year Five;
12. Abolish Central Government Taxation after 12 months;
13. Remove Central Government Control of Military Regiments after 12 months;
14. Common Property Commission to dispose of one fifth of Common Property to Competent Receivers each year and to be operating on a County basis by Year Five;
15. Establish Home & Rent Commission in each village and urban parish and transfer all un-dwelled residential dwellings to them as Competent Receivers from the Common Property, Debt & Usury and Equity Commissions after 12 months;
16. Issue Gold and Silver Coinage to replace the National Debt and introduce a Wealth Tax levied in a way that exempts nine out of ten households from taxation at all times;
17. Debt & Usury Commissioners to treat as ‘fully paid up’ all loans for which repayment has exceeded ‘principal plus thirty percent’ issuing public money to clear surplus indebtedness;
18. On reaching their 18th birthday each woman to be given a Home without Encumbrance from existing housing stock;
19. On reaching their 18th birthday each man to be given Five Acres and a Cow and freedom to build upon their land;
20. Establish a Royal Order of Master Gardeners.

It is half past nine and I am tapping away at a computer terminal in Rye Library next to Rye Parish Church on Lion Street. Opposite me at the other computer station sits Gill Harvey furiously typing away in anticipation of her last contact with Digital Humanity before disappearing behind the Great Wall of China for four weeks.

Gill and Paddy fly out the day after tomorrow. China is no longer the Land of the Starving Millions of our childhood…suburban mothers would threaten to send uneaten meals there if their offspring refused to eat up their greens leaving many of us with a life-long trauma of soggy envelopes overflowing with brown gravy being delivered to hoards of dying Chinamen.

Today I woke at half past seven; enjoyed a Weetabix breakfast; glanced at last night’s washing-up…and ignored it; reorganised my sheet music in preparation for my next concert…a repeat of the Mozart Concert at St Mary’s Church in Rye earlier in the summer on Saturday week across the county line at St Leonard’s in Hythe; locked up the boat...which means putting in the boards; turned off the Calor Gas; frightened away a flock of the infernal starlings that sit on the rigging in the morning despoiling the deck; then took myself off the boat along the catwalk to the electricity hut…two foot high by two foot square…to pull out the plug and disconnect from the National Grid.

With infilling James Joyce could spin this to 600-pages…but for me 900-words will suffice...as a reminder that my focus is what I do all day. A cheery wave from the Chair Doctor as I passed his workshop opposite The Salts; up the Ypres Steps; through the Gungardens; crunch crunch on the shingle behind the church; and down Lion Street to The Mint and the hole in the wall outside Barclays Bank. Glad tidings. Friday’s PayPal transfer arrived overnight.

So I withdrew £20 of notes and converted them into coins by buying a comb at Boots The Chemist for a pound…and complaining about the absence of a GPS Homing Unit in my previous purchase…and then buying a Chilean apple for 25p from one of Rye’s two independent greengrocers. The best prices for Fruit & Veg are in the Budgens supermarket and at the Fruit & Veg Stall in the Thursday market…with a high-priced Farmers Market option on Wednesdays.

Like many Supermarket Objectors I disapprove of rows of identical products with different brand names and extravagant packaging filling up supermarket shelves and masquerading as choice. But small grocers are going the same way.

While apples from the local orchards in Peasmarsh are being ploughed into the ground local greengrocers are selling at identical prices four of five different types of apple imported from all over the world. So on principle I haggled the price down from 27p to 25p by offering a ten pound note as the alternative to my small change.

So in the space of 10 minutes £20 of Digital Credit was destroyed and replaced with Minted Coinage…shifting the distribution of purchasing power between the two from 30.1111111 to 1 to 30 to 1. This is unlikely to destroy the UK Economy but it does stop money being removed from my bank account without my say-so…an ever increasing general occurrence. Now I am only vulnerable to something I can understand like stealing money out of my pocket.

From The Mint to the High Street and down Market Road...passing the time of day with Martin Hutchings…who for once refrained from advising me on the absence of adequate boat maintenance aboard the good ship Vemara.

The mast should come out; half a dozen places need repairing to seal leaks; the bulkhead over the companionway should be replaced; everywhere should be varnished but the cockpit in particular…and not just another few layers but back to the bare wood; all the rigging should be renewed. All this is on my to-do list so I don’t need reminding.

Leaving Martin to take his Daily Mail back to his coffee and croissants at 42 Fishmarket Road I continued across Cinque Ports Street past Post Office Counters and turned in at Rye Royal Mail Sorting Office. What a day of wonders this is turning out to be. September finances transformed. Two Good Yacht Guide orders…a total of four guides worth £80 gross and £55 net.

Now I can say yes to the deal Tony Payne is offering…a desktop computer with a new case and a mix of new and recycled parts inside. One of the two orders was a cheque and there was still time before the library opened at 0930 to collect my Academic Inn Books Treasurer Account Passbook from the boat.

By a quarter past nine I was sitting in the end pew on the third row in the church and chatting to Clive the Verger. Along came three 8-year old girls. Do you work here? Yes I do? replied Clive. ‘We are giving all the money to the church,’ she added. ‘Thank you.’ Clive answered. ‘Yes’ butted in the second girl. ‘It’s at 12 West Street.’ The third girl thrust a piece of paper into Clive’s hand. Here is what it said.‘Shell Sale: Thurs & Fri: 9:00am-9.30am and 5.00pm-5.30pm. All money for St Mary’s Church. Shells under 50p. Sorry closes 12 on Fri.’ I added the vital piece of information to the poster that the sale was at 12 West Street and Clive put it up on the noticeboard.

Are local charities making a comeback? Five years ago the money would have gone to one of the big charities like Leukaemia Research or the Imperial Cancer Fund…to be spent giving the medical profession and drug company executives holidays in exotic places for two weeks after their one day conferences. ‘I’ll ask Ann if she knows who lives at 12 West Street.’ Clive remarked. Ann knows everybody. ‘Probably her grandchildren’ I responded.

One of Hilaire Belloc’s achievements was to add a new type to the popular concept of the Roman Catholic…one much more in the Irish than the Continental tradition…which is ironic given the Irish roots of Bernard Shaw’s Puritanism.

Before Belloc the Roman Catholic was synonymous with the Jesuit with its image of a sinister silent indoor figure in black forever intriguing against anyone and everything English.

This image lives on in much of the European debate…in part because it has lost none of its relevance…both on the side of the Europhiles who approve of the type and of the Eurosceptics who fear the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in all things English.

Hilaire Belloc showed the English the other side of the Roman Catholic coin…the burly man singing, shouting, arguing and drinking beer in the open air. His comic verses…particularly The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts and More Beasts for Worse Children have encouraged adults and children from five generations to share laughter together.

Another irony is that the best book to read about the Roman Catholic Conspiracy behind the European Superstate is by a gentleman who goes by the name of Laughland. What would William of Salisbury have made of all this?

William of Salisbury left me with two manuscripts in the spring of 1988. The first was his Letter to King Charles III which I assumed was never sent…being more by way of an introduction to the second manuscript…the Programme of Governance. This second manuscript was in two parts headed National Programme and Local Programme.

In his letter William of Salisbury established a 5-year timeframe for the transfer of power from Central Government to Real Local Government in England…although there is a sense of universality.

At the end of five years Central Government would cease to exist. So the National Programme provides marching orders for The Five Transition Years. Afterwards the governance of these Offshore Islands would be within the framework of the Local Programme.

William of Salisbury’s Local Programme consisted of eight points…clauses would be too grand a term as the plan was condensed into just One Hundred Words.

After each of the eight points William of Salisbury had written cryptically ‘see paper’…but failed to provide any hints as to whether such papers existed and if they did where they might be found.

I have concluded that his intention was for me to write these eight papers…something that I started in 2001 with a paper for the first Radical Consultation entitled The Wealth of Counties. Here are the eight points.

1. Right to the Seven Securities of Old Age; 2. Right to Celebrate at solstices & equinoxes; 3. Master Cowmen, Master Shepherds and Master Woodmen responsible to their guilds for the Welfare of Cows and Sheep and the Management of Woodlands in Rural Parishes; 4. Utilities Board to deliver Village and Urban Parish Self-Sufficiency in Water, Sewage, Rubbish, Heating and Electricity; 5. Bailiwick Bonds as the mechanism for Local Savings; 6. Agrarian Justice as the mechanism for Social Security; 7. Tithing…days per household per year…to meet Community, Harvest and Militia Duties; 8. Undwelled Farmland to be allotted to Foreigners.

This was all very fine…but for me just a trifle eerie.

Three dozen of my journals are in Jempson’s Store on the Old Winchelsea Road. Some notes scribbled in the back of one of them are entitled The Seven Securities of Old Age…not even my daughter has seen them. The complete essay had been worked out and could be written from them. Yet here was the name cropping up in a 1988 parchment from William of Salisbury. Coincidence of Synchronicity?

Bailiwick Bonds are also something I have mentioned to just a few very close associates like Chris Wright. The name will be found in these blogs as a chapter heading for England’s Economic Politics for a New Century. But what I have written has yet to be placed in the Public Domain. Coincidence or Syncronicity?

To the best of my knowledge I am the only modern Political Theorist to have noticed that Tom Paine’s Agrarian Justice offers an alternative approach to funding a Welfare State…through Inheritance Taxes. But at least England’s Landed Property has been available for downloading from the internet for a couple of years. Nonetheless here was the idea cropping up in a 1988 parchment from William of Salisbury. Coincidence of Synchronicity?

One of my Cocktail Party Pieces…both here in Rye and in Sweden…is the origin of the name of the neighbouring parish of Rye Foreign. It goes back to the European Religious Wars of the sixteenth centuries when Catholics and Calvinists were slaughtering each other at every opportunity.

During one of these European Massacres a wave of Flemish Weavers landed as refugees along the Suffolk and Kent Coasts…my mother’s Land family among them. Rye was an important port town at the time. Many families landed here or came here from Faversham, Tenterden and Canterbury.

The Rye Town Fathers had the good sense to see the economic potential of these migrants and determined to make them welcome. They did so by ceding a number of acres of unoccupied land on the outskirts of their parish a day’s walk from the town. Here the Dutch Huguenots set up shop. Local Rye-ers referred to this collection of Huguenot Households as Rye Foreign.

This type of creative approach Sweden, Ireland and England…the only members of the European Union who have yet to close their doors to economic migrants from elsewhere in Europe...might consider for the 21st century.

Unlike his contemporaries G.B.Shaw and H.G.Wells, Hilaire Belloc’s ideas have never been assimilated into current opinion. They are not taken-for-granted, axiomatic, anonymous presuppositions. They are external to it. They irritate the main body of our culture.

The vehemence with which Belloc’s political theories have been put forward by his small bands of followers has not helped...causing them to rebound from a general consciousness tightening itself to repel judgements that might bruise too seriously that collective self-esteem necessary to group survival.

Nevertheless as the vast structure of industrial capitalism crumbles and disintegrates it is time to remind ourselves that Belloc saw and detested as vividly as any Marxist the vast injustices and the advertising-slogan self-justifications of Financial and Industrial Capitalism. He put forward a remedy conceived in terms of constructive human happiness instead of one based upon the misery of mechanized mass revolution. Here is an outline of Belloc’s beliefs.

Widely distributed property is a condition of freedom that is necessary to the normal satisfaction of human nature. In the High Middle Ages an approach to such a life existed. Peasants had come to own and farm their land and manufacture and trade were organized by self-governing guilds dedicated to God. But it could only continue and flourish under a strong centralized monarchy holding and using its power to protect the small man.

The acquisition of monastery lands by a small number of powerful families after the Reformation began to sap the royal power which dwindled struggling until its temporary extinction during the Great Rebellion of the 17th century. It flared up again for two more reigns but was finally crushed out by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when rich men got rid of the last king to exert real power and installed a foreign puppet who would carry out their desires.

The industrial revolution was a morally neutral process. But because it occurred first in a country governed by an oligarchy intent upon the acquisition of abstract wealth and power rather than with the production and use of concrete objects it brought about an evil and inhuman oppression of the poor who had been cheated out of the lands they held by traditional tenure through Acts of Parliament that confiscated all holdings with no written proof of ownership.

What was called by historians ‘the glorious palladium of our liberties’ was in fact the glorious palladium of the liberty for the powerful to exploit the weak. In order to restore a fully human life to the vast majority of England’s twentieth century population it was necessary first to realize with humility in what miserable helplessness and frustration they lived and then to take strong measures completely to alter the structure of society.

Belloc put forward the historical justification of these beliefs in a number of narratives and biographies. A statement of the current situation and of alternatives for the future is made in The Servile State (1912)…a remarkable prophecy of Economic Totalitarianism. Plans for the restoration of individual economic independence…the only solid basis for individual political liberty…are outlined in a number of pamphlets and articles and in several books.

Economics for Helen (1924) sets the claims of freedom and responsibility against those advantages of personal security and general stability which the servile state may give. An Essay on the Restoration of Property (1936) distinguishes between the Distributist and the Social Credit proposals. The ultimate end of Distributism is economic freedom and that of Social Credit is increased purchasing power. Belloc advocates various means of distributing ownership in land, shops and collective enterprises. Belloc did not believe there to be a middle way between general small ownership and general industrial slavery.

Some of these theories were already distastefully familiar to the safe comfortable educated England of the early 20th century as formulated from the Marxist point of view…the exploitation of the weak, the meaninglessness of political liberty without economic power and the complete inadequacy of the liberal tradition to handle industrial problems.

But it was an outrage when similar views were put forward from a fresh angle by a man brought up in the Christian tradition…and indeed appealing to it. The ruling classes of early 20th century England believed the notion that their country was the leader of mankind in its inevitable progress towards perfection. So Belloc’s theories and proposals were received with that thick muffling stifling silence which is the most potent and most infuriating of all defences against an unwelcome argument. But there was another problem…Belloc’s fiery brand of Roman Catholicism.

Belloc believed in a reborn European Cultural Unity and a new Medieval Roman Catholic Empire. This led him into fierce battles with any forces he believed might oppose it. There were the Moslems in North Africa who cut down the trees Rome planted and let in the desert…and the Moslems who fought the Crusaders.

There were the Puritans and the Jews forever harking back to a primitive Old Testament God who gave divine approval to financial success…and using this to justify replacing love and contemplation as the mainspring of living with work and money-making.

There was the Modern Banking System which transformed the creative relationship between men, work and trade into a mechanical, non-moral, non-just, non-human and automatic activity in the modern business world.

Among the ruling classes of England the romanticism of the early 19th century…with exquisite sensibilities, urgent religious feeling and a passion for social justice…had settled down by the end of Queen Victoria’s Reign into the state of a Dr. Pangloss with a stiff upper lip.

This concealed feelings to such an extent that it was indecent…not good form in the parlance of the day...to envisage the existence among their own kind of love, hunger, poverty, anxiety, anger or the desire for God. To those of other inferior sorts who exposed themselves to germs, emotions and insecurity their attitude was one either of condemnation or of domineering patronage.

This was the atmosphere which Bernard Shaw, H.G.Wells, Hilaire Belloc and G.K.Chesterton reacted fiercely against. These four men…of whom two inherited a French, one an Irish and one a Struggling-Small-Shopkeeper tradition…were united in the desire to shatter the complacency of the Wealthy…whether apathetic or bustling.

The Well-Off…it was not quite nice to call them the Rich so they invariably did so…existed in a kind of overstuffed innocence unspoiled by the economic world. The Rich took for granted that cleanliness was next to godliness and solvency to virtue. For them the respectability which gazed over earnest rationalism obliterated a multitude of sins.

With enormous vitality the instinct of all four writers was to shock…Shaw by rationalist and Chesterton by Christian paradox, Wells by angry comic compassionate fiction and Belloc by satire of what was assumed to be good by an exuberant boastfulness that deliberately outraged all the current canons of gentlemanly modesty.

Hilaire Belloc’s output can be grouped into seven categories: satire, literary criticism, essays, poetry, travel, history and politics. The satirical books are high spirited, genial, fierce or bitter…and written as fiction…The Green Overcoat and The Mercy of Allah; spoof biographies…Lambkin’s Remains…and comic verse…A Moral Alphabet, Cautionary Tales, Peers…More Peers and The Modern Traveller. Belloc’s Literary Criticism was what was expected from a Man of Letters.

There are many volumes of Belloc's Essays… stimulating, irritating, reminiscent…good talk and animated conversation. Belloc’s Poetry has an energy which enables it to reach into both the heart and the mind. To read Belloc’s essays is like dining with a great conversationalist. In them the richness and depth of the written word replace the golden geniality…the spiritual equivalent of candle-lit cigar-smoke and the lingering vibration of wine…which gives to its spoken counterpart a quality evaporated by print. Some are political and polemical…the products of his years in Parliament, of his unsuccessful struggle for the public auditing of Party funds and of the libel action in which his paper the New Witness was involved just before the first world war. Others discuss aspects of the main themes of his large-scale books…religion, history, social patterns, places, buildings and people.

Belloc’s Historical Studies were mainly concerned with England and France and meet Jane Austin’s criterion of perfection…passionate, partial and prejudiced…works of art rather than of scientific truth. Belloc’s Travel books…on foot and under sail…are marked by a keen sense both of history and of the immediacy of the present. The Four Men and The Voyage of the Nona are small masterpieces of this genre. But it is Belloc’s politics that will interest us.

Belloc’s Politics were summed up in his short masterpiece published in 1912 The Servile State. All developed states were organizing their workers into Slavery. This might be more or less comfortable but was always without roots and without power whether the label was Socialist or Capitalist.

To restore men to the happiness and dignity of responsible freedom it was necessary to organize the wide-spread distribution of small property and of shares in both the finance and the direction of communally-owned public services. In the England of 1912 such a theme…though foreshadowed in the papal encyclical De Rerum Novarum in 1881…was considered heretical, radical and reactionary.

Yesterday I spent ten pounds…and all afternoon…travelling across the county by train to return my Apple Mac Mini to Solutions Inc on the Old Shoreham Road beyond Brighton for repair. It was a wasted journey. ‘When did you purchase it sir?’ ‘April last year…but I haven’t used it much…four months total...and not for the past three months. But when I went to use it again it refused to boot up. Not a murmur. I even left it on overnight hoping it was something like an internal battery that needed to charge itself up before it would go. But not a dickie bird.’

‘Regrettably Sir the warranty period is twelve months. Did you take out an extended warranty.’ ‘Probably not. I was told Apple Mac Minis never go wrong. Can you check?’ ‘Part Number?…No Sir…Regrettably you are not coming up on the computer with a 3-year Extended Warranty.’ ‘Then I want it replaced I presume Apple doesn’t build their computers with six months obsolescence.’ ‘Regrettably I cannot authorise that, Sir. You will need to talk to Apple.’

‘But you are Apple’s Sussex representative.’ ‘Yes Sir. Exactly. We are not Apple. Here is the number you need to call.’ ‘So I’ve just wasted ten pounds coming to Brighton.’ ‘Regrettably yes Sir. But we will of course be happy to repair it. But our minimum charge is £150…for the computer engineer to take the cover off. And the only thing that can go wrong is the motherboard. So he would replace it. This would cost you another £150 for a new motherboard.’

‘But I only paid £339 for it…new. And I can get a new PC laptop for what it will cost me to have my Apple Mac Mini repaired.’ ‘True Sir.’ ‘So you recommend I throw it in the bin.’ ‘ That is not for me to say Sir. But recover the data first. And it is worth talking to Apple. They may approve a parts replacement under warranty for you Sir.’

‘Can I check the power pack.’ ‘Certainly Sir. But regrettably you must go back to Sales...just 100 yards round the corner. I don’t have the right connection. We never see Apple Mac Minis here because they never go wrong. Aah! Wait! Hear that...when I disconnect the PPU. So that’s not your problem.’ Pity...a new PPU would only set me back £40. At least insult was not added to injury with ‘Have A Nice Day Sir’. Back across the county. What to do?

Sunday 27th August 2006 was the day for this year’s annual Rye Raft Race. Once upon a time the race started at Strand Quay and ran downstream to The Conqueror in Rye Harbour. For some reason it was switched ten years ago and now runs upstream from the Fishmarket. But at least this meant that the rafts were launched 44 yards away from Vemara from the sheep pasture on the opposite side of the river giving me a grandstand view.

After devoting hundreds of hours to playing cricket in my younger days I can estimate cricket pitch multiples very accurately…to within an inch or two. A cricket pitch is 22 yards from wicket to wicket…the Old English measure of One Chain. Hence my confident claim that launching took place two cricket pitches away from Vemara’s cockpit.

It was the best turn-out for many years with eleven rafts competing. It has been storm showers every hour or so for the past two weeks. But today the weather stayed fine until mid-afternoon. As the rafts disappeared round the bend and out of sight I must wait until the Rye Observer comes out on Friday to find out who were this year’s winners.

It was a very sociable day for me. The previous evening a black-leathered and black-helmeted figure had appeared on the river bank at the end of Vemara’s catwalk and stood there for some minutes gazing at the boat. This is not that unusual an occurrence as Rye is the destination of choice for bikers from all over the south-eastern suburbs of London who gather at Strand Café most weekends…and on bank holiday weekends in particular.

But this was no ordinary biker. These black leathers were riding a bike with a German number plates. All the way from Germany just to see me? Well perhaps not. But it was my elder brother John…last seen at Heidi’s house in Rye Harbour a year ago. I had received sixtieth birthday greetings by email last month and we had made an unsuccessful attempt to meet up at Christmas when John was in Leeds and I was in Llangolman. We arranged to meet up again before he left Rye on Bank Holiday Monday for his newly purchased Property Development Project in Bishop Stortford in Hertfordshire…a few miles away from the family home in the village of Braughing.

So after the Raft Race I was making my way to meet up with my brother and his wife Sue when I bumped into Martin returning to his house on Fishmarket Road after watching the race from the bridge so I took the opportunity to take my first guided tour. David was at home so I gave him the telephone number to Malcolm and Claire Wallace. Last week I had made arrangements with Claire that next week when Dynamic Events were back in town after a 400-person conference up north David could go round to their offices on South Undercliff and choose two of his mother’s large Rye Maritime Heritage watercolours held in store there to have on his wall at 42 Fishmarket Road.

Martin was in the middle of serving up the Sunday Roast so I did not linger but continued round to Regents Square …named after the old Regent Cinema that was bombed by Hitler’s Luftwaffe. I spent a very enjoyable few hours catching up on John, his family and the rest of the clan before returning to Vemara…and my research into the last time that the Monarchy and Parliament were at loggerheads…which means most of the 17th Century.

It was on May Day 1988 that a courier arrived at my lodgings on Stour Street in Canterbury and handed me a package containing two parchments under the seal of William of Salisbury. The first parchment was a letter addressed to King Charles III of England and the second was headed Programme of Governance. The identity of William of Salisbury was unknown so I placed the parchments in a bottom drawer intending to make a few discrete inquiries.

All this happened more than sixteen years ago. I have taken out the two parchments from time to time and perused them with the firm intention of making a decision about what was to be done with them. But William of Salisbury had given me nothing by way of a hint to assist me. So after their perusal the two documents were returned to the bottom drawer. From here they have followed me around between England and Sweden and back…and on one occasion even went with me to Bretagne for the opinion of my good friend Anton in Mael-Pestivien…although in the event the subject was not broached.

Earlier this week both of my computers broke down leaving me twiddling my thumbs wondering what to do with myself. It was pouring with rain and the boat was leaking so I got to moving around some files and papers and chanced across the two parchments once again. This time I determined that something must be done with them. They will finally see the light of day. The Governance Manuscript will be made public shortly. Meanwhile here is the text of the letter William of Salisbury had addressed to King Charles III of England on May Day 1988. Dear Charles...

In the first years of your reign, perhaps earlier, perhaps coincident with your coronation, the financial edifice upon which the prosperity of your realm now resides, will collapse thrusting your country and your subjects into chaos.

From this chaos will arise either a greater chaos allied with catastrophe, famine, plague and war or a revolution, from which some tyrant or a military junta will emerge. I wish you to have available a fourth option in addition to Chaos, Tyranny or Military Rule. The Royalist Party represents this fourth way; the truly radical way for a free people...the way of Aristocratic Populism.

Your first task will be to dissolve parliament and call a general election. The royalists will have ready a candidate to declare for you in each constituency. It is my hope that lords, bishops, mayors and those most respected in their local communities will join the royalist cause and volunteer for their country. This will not be the time for politics as usual. Exceptional wisdom will be called for.

Upon the election of a majority of royalist candidates to your lower house, you will make two announcements. First you will call upon a first lord of the treasury and a foreign secretary to serve with you in a cabinet.

Secondly you will announce the date of a second election to parliament and the manifesto of the royalists at that election. This will consist of just five words: 'We propose to abolish parliament'. The Royalist Manifesto for the first election is designed for a 5-year parliamentary term of transition. The programme could be carried out over a shorter period were you to deem this expedient.

The task of your Home Minister will be to implement the Royalist Manifesto and establish a culture of political independence throughout your realm ready to take upon itself the power returned to it from central government.

The task of your Foreign Minister will be to dispatch the wisest elders from your realm as ambassadors to foreign capitals to explain the Royalist Intentions and to appoint delegates to the various Hanseatic Royalist Confederations…for part of your royalist programme will be to establish our elected supporters among European Parliaments. That Power of Action and Being which is devolved must needs be balanced by other Power of Mind and Becoming that is dispersed about a wider perimeter.

Your task will be to carry out your Constitutional Duties; to support your Home & Foreign Ministers; to secure the loyalty of your men of arms; to exhort the highest virtues in your lords temporal in their administration of the king's justice; to direct your lords spiritual to works of charity and to the affairs of the human spirit; and to make ready your Privy Council for government upon the abolition of parliament.

You will carry upon your shoulders the heavy burden for engendering a sense of continuity and a mood of optimism among your subjects and an aura of competence and invincibility among those outside of your realm who might seek to exploit the turbulence of these troubled times.

Finally I would suggest that it is not necessary to await financial collapse or administrative chaos before implementing these proposals. Timing is of the essence. This only you should decide. We stand ready to do our duty and your bidding. Your loyal and obedient subject. William of Salisbury.

There has been a lack-lustre response to the September Conference so last week the Convenor pulled the plug on the whole caboodle…which leaves me with oodles of free time over the next few weeks. My intention had been to have a press conference on Monday 11th September 2006…five years on from 9-11...which would unveil something completely different to the War on Terror…currently the only game in town. My hope had been to emerge from the Radical Consultation with a 21-point plan for the 21st century. But now some other route needs to be found.

Here is the three-pronged strategy of a Real Nations Charter and a Real Communities Charter based on six Human Scale Principles:
(1) Relationships based on mutuality;
(2) Communities based on love and personal responsibility;
(3) Local food/local work/local exchange/local energy based on creativity;
(4) Identification with place based on oneness with nature;
(5) Local decision making based on consensus;
(6) Living with uncertainty based on spirituality.

Real Communities Charter: Every community has the right to its own governing council with powers:
(1) to ensure that local governance is responsive to local needs;
(2) to ensure representation on bodies providing local household services;
(3) to maintain law and order and be represented on bodies responsible over wider areas;
(4) to maintain and oversee educational services to ensure adequate provision and prevent outside interference;
(5) to maintain and oversee trading of goods and services and prevent public trading without permission;
(6) to license currencies and local mints, manage its own banking and credit arrangements and regulate local exchange;
(7) to provide broadcasting channels and prevent trespassing by outside interests into private households and public places;
(8) to use technology to ennoble the human spirit and enhance human well-being.

Real Nations Charter: Every nation has the right to join with other nations in a League of Real Nations with powers:
(1) to defend the integrity of members against states and federations of states;
(2) to support the autonomy of ethnic groups and bioregions;
(3) to empower rural and urban village communities to become self-reliant;
(4) to refuse to join military, political or economic alliances;
(5) to promote human scale principles;
(6) to promote the concept of dual nationality;
(7) to promote the concept of dual internationality.

At the conference I had planned to seek support for the Charter 2015 Project to revisit Magna Carta…so that the Real Communities Charter would be derived from the relevant clauses of Magna Carta. At the start of the year I also had ambitions to establish an Edward Goldsmith Institute for Human Scale Ecology at the conference which would take on the diplomatic task of spreading Human Scale Principles around the world. A sensible next step on the Real Nations Charter agenda would be an academic conference on Cantonisation.

It was now the middle of May. The year 1935. Tension increased in the village as the news from Madrid grew more threatening and vague. To the peasants of Castillo, the visionary promises of February seemed to have dried up in the heat. There were strikes, parades, shows of proletarian force, boys and girls marching in coloured shirts, arms raised in salute, clenched fists and slogans, painted banners and challenging speeches.

When there was a strike it was total, enforced by the police and the fishermen picketed the sea. Rich old women dragged their laundry to the river, or queued up at the village wells. At the hotel the chambermaids sat gossiping in the sun while the chef stayed home with his wife; the guests slept in unmade beds.

Each day more peasants came in from the country, massing in the square to be on hand for trouble. Many of them brought guns slung over their shoulder, sticking out of their waistbands, or tied to the saddles of donkeys...flintlocks, pistols, and old rusty muskets which might have been saved from the Peninsular War.

The split village now emerged in clearer focus and its two factions declared themselves, confronting each other at last in black and white...labelled for convenience Fascist or Communist. The Fascists seemed ready to accept the name, this being what they aspired to, with the Falange already organized as a fighting group, a swaggering spearhead of upper-class vengeance, whose crude fascist symbols...Italian-inspired...were now appearing on walls and doorways.

The Communist label on the other hand was too rough and ready, a clumsy reach-me-down which properly fitted no one. The farm labourers, fishermen and handful of industrial workers all had local but separate interests. Each considered his struggle to be far older than Communism, to be something exclusively Spanish, part of a social perversion which he alone could put right by reason of his roots in this particular landscape.

In fact I don’t remember meeting an official Communist in Castillo...though communism was a word in the bars. Manolo, who was a leader, had no political status at all, but was a Romantic Anarchist of his own invention. The local flag of revolution was the republican flag, the flag of the elected government. The peasants strung it like a banner across the Town Hall balcony and painted their allegiance beneath it in red: ‘We swear to defend this bandera with the last drop of our blood.’ Sombre and ominous words.

Yet the government they supported must have seemed remote to many, composed entirely of middle-class politicians...without a Communist, Anarchist, or a Socialist anywhere in its cabinet. The peasants looked to this government because their hopes lay with it, hopes they thought to realize for the first time in centuries, an opportunity to shift some of the balances which had so long weighed against them, more than anyone else in Europe.

Spain was a wasted country of neglected land...much of it held by a handful of men whose vast estates had scarcely been reduced or reshuffled since the days of the Roman Empire. Peasants could work this land for a shilling a day for a third of the year then go hungry. It was this simple incongruity they hoped to correct; this and a clearing of the air, perhaps some return of dignity, some razing of the barriers of ignorance which still stood as high as the Pyrenees.

A Spanish schoolmaster in 1935 knew less of the outside world than many a shepherd in the days of Columbus. Now it was hoped that there might be some lifting of this intolerable darkness, some freedom to read and write and talk.

Men hoped that their wives might be freed of the triple trivialities of the Church...credulity, guilt and confession; that their sons might be craftsmen rather than serfs, their daughters citizens rather than domestic whores, and that they might hear the children in the evening coming home from fresh-built schools to astonish them with new facts of learning. All this could be brought about now by an act of their government and the peaceful process of law. There was nothing to stop it. Except for the powerful minority who would rather the country first bled to death.

June came in full blast, with the heat bouncing off the sea as from a buckled sheet of tin. All day in the bars the radios spat and crackled...violence in Valencia, strikes and riots in Barcelona. That morning a group of Falangists in the neighbouring village walked into a bar and shot five fishermen. The murderers, wearing arm-bands, escaped in a car to Granada. Castillo lay silent, like a shuttered camp.

In the afternoon I walked out into the country with Jacobo. Daylight nightingales were singing by the river. The air was brassy, thunderous, and only a thread of brown water ran trickling down the river bed. Some girls we knew had been gathering poppies in the field, and now they came down the path towards us, walking slowly in the heat, the red flowers wilting at their breasts, looking as though their bodies had been raked by knives.

An hour or so later we returned by another path and found two children standing under the bridge. They stood stiffly, holding hands, staring at the figure of a man who lay sprawled on the river bank. We recognised him as a local Falangist, a boy of about twenty, whose father had once been mayor. he had been shot through the head, and lay staring back at the children, flies gathering around his mouth.

The posing of some global menace to curtail civil rights and justify repressive laws is the oldest game in the book. And no government plays the game better than New Labour. Already the English are the most-watched people in the world with 4 million CCTV cameras...one for every fourteen people...perched like steel crows above roads, towns and city centres.

By the end of the year all our car journeys will be monitored using a network of speed cameras and automatic number plate recognition technology. Processing capacity will be fifty million plates a day and even though the system was devised to catch drivers without tax and insurance all car movements will be stored for six years. No doubt it has been designed to read Chinese number plates so we can develop an export capability.

When the police started filming demonstrations ten years ago it caused outrage. Now it is routine...and nobody bats an eyelid. We don’t even wave and shout ‘Hello Mum!’ any more. Children stopped by the police can have their DNA taken and retained for life without being charged or cautioned.

When the National Identity Card Scheme is made law their parents will join them...after paying £300 each for compulsory cards that store biometric data and contain radio frequency chips to eventually enable authorities to scan crowds of demonstrators for names and addresses. It does not take a tyrannical government to deprive us of freedom.

The current demand is for anybody taken into custody to be charged. But this is being rendered meaningless by catch-all formulations that allow everybody to be charged with something. When the 82 years old Walter Wolfgang shouted ‘Nonsense!’ during a Labour Party Conference he was arrested and held under anti-terrorism legislation. Had he shouted it twice he could have been charged under the Protection from Harassment Act...designed to target stalkers.

The Stalker Legislation was used to arrest an animal rights protestor who sent two polite emails to a drug company executive; to prosecute two peace campaigners at Yorkshire’s Menwith Hill military intelligence base for causing harassment, alarm or distress to American servicemen with their ‘George W. Bush? Oh dear!’ placard; and to convict six Lancaster University students for aggravated trespass when they handed out leaflets to staff attending a seminar organised by Shell, GSK, BAE and DuPont on how to commercialise university research.

Under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 all criminal offences...no matter how minor...are arrestable. And residents now face fines of up to £100 for a range of misdemeanours including discarding cigarettes on the streets, tapping ash from the end of a cigarette....there was a case in the newspapers today...putting rubbish bins out on the wrong day and failing to stifle car alarms.

But Section 132 is probably the best of the bunch. While the Incitement to Religious Hatred clause was taking all the flak, Section 132 banning all spontaneous protests in any area designated by government slipped silently through under the radar.

Ironically when the police tried Section 132 on Peace Campaigner Brian Haw...living on a traffic island outside the Houses of Parliament for the past five years...it failed because his protest had preceded the new law...although it eventually went through on appeal.

The House of Lords probably felt sorry for his four eviction attempts, three broken noses...dished out by an English woman, a US Marine from the US Embassy and an Israeli Stupidity Operative...two arrests and one divorce and decided he deserved to join the partridge in her pear tree.

The Dutch-based retailer Spar has nine stores in India and is looking to sign up five franchise partners to expand across the country. It also hopes to expand in Russia where it has plans to increase its current 40 stores to 100 in two regions by the end of the year. In China the success of Carrefour has started a debate about the adverse impact on domestic retailers...particularly smaller family-run groceries...of the foreign invasion. But Spar claims to be different.

Spar projects an ethos of embracing small family-run grocery stores by inviting them to join the club by signing up for the national or provincial Spar franchise. Retailers like Wal-Mart or Tesco enter China, India or Russia when they see a fast-growing middle class with enough disposable income to start focusing on brand, safety, quality and taste and less on price. There will be a few vague attempts to talk about branding & productivity and the economies of scale as if there were no diminishing returns. But in essence the enterprise is a looting operation whose principal purpose is to take out ever higher prices and repatriate ever larger profits. Is Spar really any different?

State and provincial bureaucrats and politicians in China, India and Russia may have done their homework before inviting in the foreign food retailers. But local people are well advised to talk to people in Marlow...where Waitrose has been stopped from expanding...or Sheringham...where Tesco has been stopped dead in its tracks...before going along with it. A walk to the seaside with Mr Ghandi is a nice way to spend a week or so. And when food is in short supply it is nice...for some...to know that small local farmers will go to the wall and the poor will starve when food distribution is under the control of foreign food stores. But who actually invited Colonialism in by the back door?

It is the summer of 1935 and Laurie Lee has been told that street-fiddlers in the Spanish town of Vallodolid need a licence. So off he goes after breakfast to the city hall where soldiers with fixed bayonets sat around on the stairs and hungry dogs ran in and out like messengers while the usual motionless queues of silent peasants waited for officials who would never appear. Doubting that there would be a queue for fiddlers that morning he climbed the stairs and opened the first door he came to. Let the young English tramp take up the story.

The room inside was large and crowded with heavy presidential furniture. At a desk by the window sat a reed-thin man...or rather he inclined himself parallel to it, his feet on a cabinet, a cigar in his mouth, and a chessboard across his knees. I could see his long hooked profile and one pensive downcast eye. He moved a few pawns, hummed a little and then swung his chair towards me. I was aware of two raised eyebrows and an expression of courtly inquiry. ‘You are lost, perhaps?’ ‘I’d like to see the Mayor,’ I said. ‘So would I. So would all the world.’ ‘Is he away?’

The man giggled, and a convulsion ran up his body like an air-bubble up a spout. ‘Yes, he’s away. He’s gone to the madhouse.’ I said I was sorry, but he raised his hand. ‘Oh no. He is happy. Who wouldn’t be in such a place? Biscuits and chocolate at all hours of the day. Nuns to talk to, and coloured wool to play with...at least, so they say.’ he looked secretively at his cigar. ‘But you see me here. If I can help...’

When I told him what I wanted, he gave a musical squeak and his eyebrows jumped with pleasure. ‘How charming,’ he murmured. ‘But of course you shall. One moment - Manolo, please!’ A swarthy young man, dressed in trousers and pyjama-top, entered softly from another room. ‘Find me a licence, Manolito.’ ‘What kind of licence?’ ‘Oh, any kind. Only make it a nice one.’ ‘Then permit me, Don Ignacio.’ The young man grasped his chief by the legs, hoisted them from the cabinet, and searched the papers beneath them. Meanwhile Don Ignacio reclined indolently, his legs stuck in the air, beaming upon me and singing ‘rumpty-dum-diddle’.

‘To sell water,’ murmured the clerk. ‘To erect a small tomb...to beat gold...to press juniper berries...ah, here we have it. Don Ignacio, with your permission...’ He replaced his chief’s legs on the cabinet and handed him a kind of finely engraved cheque-book, together with pen and ink. Don Ignacio doubled up and began to write, rolling his tongue and grunting with effort. Delicate scrolls and decorations ran over the paper, feathery tendrils in violet ink; then the things was finished, dusted and sealed, and signed with a delicious flourish. ‘There,’ said Don Ignacio. ‘The city is yours. Rumpty-dum-diddle-de-ay.’ I studied my licence and was pleased with it. It looked like a Royal Charter.

Headed with an engraving of lions and a scarlet seal, it formally proclaimed: ‘That, by using the powers attributed to and conferred upon the Mayorality, and by virtue of the precepts of the Municipal Bye-laws and the appropriate tariffs due to the said most excellent Ayuntamiento; a licence is hereby granted to Don Lorenzo Le, that he may walk and offer concerts through the streets of this City, and the public squares of the same, provided always that he does not in any manner cause riot, demonstrations or prejudice the free movement of traffic and persons...’

‘That will be half a peseta,’ said Don Ignacio mildly, swinging his feet back on to the top of the desk. Then he invited me to join him in a game of chess, the question of the fee was forgotten.

The big four distributors of food and groceries to the people of the United Kingdom are Tesco, Wal-Mart, Sainsbury and Morrison. In China Wal-Mart already has 76 stores and 30 000 employees in 28 Chinese cities although it lies some way behind the French Carrefour Group which heads the list of foreigners in China with 100 stores, 8 superstores and 90 hypermarkets. But Carrefour does not even come close to the domestic Chinese supermarket leader Hualian with 2000 stores. Tesco only arrived in China two years ago with the purchase of a stake in Hymall.

Tesco plans to build a dozen new megastores a year in China and has a large store coming onstream on Beijing’s fourth ring road. Until now foreign investment has been in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and other large eastern cities but smaller cities are now being targeted. It is not easy making sense of any of this although Wal-Mart sources 80 % of its products worldwide from China which may be part of the reasoning. At its Haidian store in north-west Beijing the Budweiser beer was made in Wuhan, the Skippy peanut butter in the Shandong and the Coca-Cola in Beijing.

In small villages...Llangolman and Purton and on the Swedish Island of Gotland...I never see the big boys. Instead I find myself shopping at Spar...a franchise providing central buying for its privately-owned small shopkeepers. But this all adds up because Spar is nowadays one of the world’s largest food retailers with an annual turnover of £20 billion. Spar was founded in the Netherlands in 1932 and has 17 000 shops in 34 countries...2600 in the UK.

Spar also has big plans for China with 120 stores opening in three Chinese provinces in the next three years, plans to open in ten more Chinese provinces by 2010 and ambitions to be the biggest retailer in China...with the encouragement of the Chinese Government which has welcomed Spar as a counterweight to the big international retailers Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Tesco. All this is in sharp contrast to what has been going on in Cuba.

Almost five decades after Fidel Castro overthrew Fulgenicio Batista and seized power in Cuba another revolution has taken place unnoticed by the casual visitor. In the late 1980s Cuba relied on subsidies from the Soviet Union. Its agriculture was designed to produce as much sugar cane as possible which the Soviets bought at five times the market price in addition to purchasing 95 percent of Cuba’s citrus crop and three quarters of its nickel.

In exchange the Soviet Union provided Cuba with two thirds of its food imports and 90 percent of its petrol. With the implosion of the Soviet Union all these deals collapsed overnight. From the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s the daily calorie intake of the average Cuban fell from about 2500 calories a day to between 1000 and 1500.

The Cuban Government was compelled to take drastic steps to feed its people. The solution it chose was to establish a self-sustaining organic system of agriculture. Other countries in the region took the neo-liberal option but the Cubans went for food security...and a key part of their strategy was to prioritise small farmers.

Ceasing to organise its economy around the export of tropical products and the import of food it adopted a back to basics approach. With no Soviet oil for tractors it turned to oxen. With no Soviet oil for its fertiliser and pesticides it turned to natural compost and the production of natural pesticide and beneficial insects. More than 200 Biopesticide Centres produce 200 tons of Verticillium a year to control whitefly and 800 tons of Beaveria sprays to control beetles.

Cut banana stems baited with honey are placed in sweet potato fields to attract ants and have led to control of sweet potato weevil. There are 170 Vermicompost Centres, where annual production has grown from 3 to 9300 tons. Crop rotations, intercropping and soil conservation have all been incorporated into polyculture farming.

Cuba has more than 7000 urban allotments...Organoponicos...established on tiny plots of land in the centre of tower-block estates or between crumbling colonial homes that fill Havana. More than 200 gardens in Havana supply its citizens with more than 90 percent of their fruit and vegetables. One of the most successful is the Vivero Organoponico Alamar established 10 years ago and employing 25 people on a 0.7 hectare plot.

At the shop attached to the garden the hand-written blackboard lists mangoes at 2p per pound, black beans at 15p and plantains at 15p. There is a tomato shed that produced five tons in six months, a metal pyramid structure for focusing natural energy and benefiting both the plants and the gardeners, a worm farm wriggling with California Red Worms and at the end of each row of vegetables bright marigolds have been planted to attract bees and butterflies.

The economics of the Organoponicos vary. At the Metropolitana Organoponico in the city centre the land is owned by the government and everything grown there is split 50:50. At Alimar once the workers have grown their set quota of food and given it to the government the surplus is theirs to sell with the profits then divided among them.

In the past ten years calorie intake has returned to 2500 calories per day. Cuba’s infant mortality rate is lower than the US while life expectancy is the same at 77 years. This new approach is far more efficient than the previous Soviet model that stressed production at all costs...and took 10 or 15 units of energy to produce one unit of food energy.

In my country nice people always apologise even when they are in the right. This is not the case in Sweden or in Germany but may be the case elsewhere in Europe...and I am thinking of Denmark, Spain, Italy, France, the Czech Republic or Poland. Unfortunately nasty people have used this against nice people in court. So I rejoiced to see that a clause had been inserted into the Compensation Act which received Royal Assent this summer that ‘an apology, offer of treatment or other redress shall not of itself amount to an admission of negligence or statutory duty’. Yo! It was of course the House of Lords that inserted this small victory for Common Courtesy...and the Government that tried to remove it but then surrendered. What the bill means with Brussels lurking beneath the Woolsack is another matter.

In his 1993 book The Engineer in the Garden the author Colin Tudge mentions that if we were really in command of the technologies that emerge from science we would not now be anticipating the greenhouse effect, there would not be a hole in the ozone in the sky growing bigger and we would not be wondering if the world can truly contain the projected ten billion population of the mid-21st century.

If we were truly in command we would not have created the world we have unless we were overwhelmingly perverse. Fair comment...and my paper on Real Science addresses this issue...but buried in the small print on the inside pages of today’s newspapers was the good news that the UN World Meteorological Organisation and the UN Environment Programme had just reported that the ozone layer over Europe, America, Africa and Australasia would be back to pre-1980 levels by 2049 while over Antarctica full recovery was expected by 2065. Now for the bad news.

At least four people died after stepping on Cluster Bombs dropped by the Israelis during the final days of the recent conflict on scores of villages surrounding the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh. There have been growing calls to outlaw cluster bombs which scatter hundreds of bomblets the size of an AA battery over a target area. Although designed to explode on impact they often fail to do so remaining a deadly threat to civilians who might tread on them.

Among the victims was Ali Turkiye (13) who was harvesting grapes in the village of Zawte when he accidentally dislodged a bomblet that had been caught in a vine. ‘It tore the top of his skull off,’ said Ali Haaj Ali the director-general of the Najde Hospital in Nabatieh. ‘We tried to save him but we could not.’ Yusuf Khalil died while helping the Lebanese army to clear the munitions. ‘He was close to one of the bomblets and a frog jumped from next to the device and set it off leaving him with fatal head injuries,’ said Mr Ali.

In a double tragedy an 11-year old boy Hadi Hatab was killed by a cluster bomb as he wandered out of the family home; his father Moussa (32) was killed by another bomb after he sprinted over to help him. ‘The Israelis dropped them when the fighting was nearly over,’ said Hussein Khatib a family friend. ‘They were dropped at night and landed in the rooftops, on the road, everywhere.

Chris Clark the head of the United Nations Weapons Clearance Team in Southern Lebanon said the cluster bombs found were contained in artillery shells and had not been dropped by aircraft. Sean Sutton of the Manchester-based charity the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) said Israel appeared to have used even more cluster bombs than America during the invasion of Iraq...tactics widely criticised by human rights groups.

‘The contamination is incredibly widespread. I have never seen anything like it. In Iraq they were used mainly in rural areas and in some villages but nothing like as much as they have been here. We have visited about 30 or 40 villages in the Nabatieh region and I would say that about 50 percent of them have been carpeted by cluster bombs often with one lying every few metres. We have found them on people’s doorsteps, in school playgrounds and even in the front room of an old lady’s house. Both American-made cluster bombs and Israeli-manufactured copies have been found. They are essentially anti-personnel devices and we think they have been aimed at areas where the Israeli army thought Hezbollah was firing rockets from.’

Israel says that all its munitions used in conflict comply with international law although the American-based campaign group Human Rights Watch (HRW) argues that their use in civilian areas breaks a legal ban on indiscriminate attacks. ‘Cluster munitions are unacceptably inaccurate and unreliable weapons when used around civilians,’ said Kenneth Roth, HRW’s executive director. ‘They should never be used in populated areas.’

Britain makes a great deal of money from selling weapons. Yesterday a deal to sell 72 Eurofighter planes to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was signed. The initial value of the deal is £6 billion pounds but it will be worth £30 billion over its lifetime. BAE Systems...Britain’s biggest defence contractor and a partner in the four-nation Eurofighter Consortium...estimates that the contract will provide 40000 jobs directly at BAE Systems and indirectly at companies in the supply chain. The Serious Fraud Office is investigating claims that bribes were paid by companies used by BAE Systems to win orders for equipment as part of the Saudi deal. Shares in BAE Systems rose 3 percent yesterday.

Coming into London by train from the South East today I looked across at Tower Bridge on the starboard bow a mile before coming into London Bridge Station. Then turning my gaze to the port side the London Eye appeared up ahead ...visible from quite a long way away. Once clear of Waterloo Station the train passes the London Eye on the south bank and crosses the River Thames by Hungerford Bridge...its two new pedestrian bridges flanking it on either side. This is the final leg of the journey which terminates at Charing Cross Station on the far side of the bridge.

Crossing the river at this point provides one of the best views in London with Big Ben over to port rising above the Gothic splendour of the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. On the starboard bow behind you is the South Bank...Festival Hall, National Theatre etc...and over to the right the relatively modern and elegant Waterloo Bridge. I always hope the train will be held on the bridge for a few minutes so I can linger awhile and enjoy the glorious view.

Passing out of Charing Cross Station to The Strand I noticed that Nelson’s Column was no longer adorned with advertisements…the latest way to wrap scaffolding in London…and was once again gleaming white in the midday sun. Standing in the corner of Trafalgar Square furthest from the fourth plinth…a monument to political correctness and quite ridiculous in context…I chanced upon a notice of the bylaws applicable to Trafalgar Square to which the Common Seal of the Greater London Authority had been duly affixed on the twenty fourth day of July 2000.

Bylaw Five caught my eye. Among the ‘acts within the square for which written permission is required unless acting in accordance with permission given in writing by the Mayor or any person authorised by the Mayor under Section 380 of the Act to give such permission’ was [Clause 4] ‘to play or cause to be played any musical instrument’.

The public were also enjoined [Clause 6] ‘to refrain from discharging any weapon which is a firearm within the meaning of Section 52 of the Firearm Act 1968’ and [Clause 18] ‘to desist from towing or leaving any caravans in the square’. But such is the tilt of my mind that this condition of music making put me in mind of the small town of Valladolid at the time of the Spanish Civil War where wandering musicians were required to obtain a licence.

Have you ever tried to obtain a Street Musician’s Licence? No I thought not. But as it has changed little and the saga is repeated thousands of times a day all over the world I thought I would let you know how to go about it in Spain...by citing from the fifth chapter of Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Five chapters later he is in Castillo where he finds he has walked into the start of the Spanish Civil War...extracts next week.

The closest I ever got to being a street fiddler was 2-years of violin lessons at school which left me capable of making a noise but without the ability to entertain or delight. I was reminded of my other encounter with violinism by the recent announcement that André Previn’s fifth marriage had ended. The apparent reason for the failure of the 4-year relationship was the 34-year age gap between the great conductor and his elegant violinist...Previn is 77 and Anne-Sophie Mutter is 43. But there is a problem.

In 1971 a few weeks before I left Stockholm for Johannesburg an Old Blues cricketing chum David Gowan phoned from the UK and asked me to help arrange a Scandinavian tour for a young violinist he was managing...you are there already...her name was Anne-Sophie Mutter. She was 17 at the time.

Earlier this week I set out the synopsis of the first three parts of The King of Buen Consejo…and indicated that I had worked out the fourth part…but was keeping the plot under wraps. I have relented. The Royalist Party comes to power with a Party Manifesto that I wrote several years ago but updated last year to include the immediate declaration upon taking office of an amargi...first used in Babylon 5000 years ago...to cancel debts and renew society.

The Republic Strikes Back will be the sequel. The Prime Minister is disgraced after an Audit Commission’s Report on corruption and is banished to Belgium...or the Spanish Netherlands as it was known after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648...and before Austria ousted Spain and claimed it. Here our new European bureaucrat persuades the Boys in Bruges to put up the money for a second English Civil War...which he wins thereby setting in motion another Changing of the Guard as Our Great Leader rides down The Mall at the head of his victorious Mercenary Army.

Meanwhile our king takes a leaf out of King James II’s book and does a runner...but heads for a Russian Orthodox Monastery in Kerelia instead of getting the Irish massacred by launching an invasion from Wexford. A decade later we will reinstate the monarchy with the king's daughter ascending the English throne. But I must find the right husband for her for which I have a fiendish plan...I need £ 3000 to get myself to Lund for the winter. Here’s the deal.

For £15000 I will write the book over the winter and in return you get some equity. What a wonderful opportunity for a Bollywood Costume Drama. For a further £10000 my partner(s) may write into the contract the specification for the queen's husband...Product Placement...just as long as he does not come from Athens or Alexandria...that’s been tried...but from somewhere like Bangalore or Chengdu. Offers on a postcard please to Box 36, Rye TN31 7WP.

In the days of Laffer Curves and Reaganomics our academic economists Tweedledee and Tweedledoubledee loved to talk of the Public Sector crowding out the Private Sector. You may have been a little hazy as to what this had to do with either the public or the private sector. You were not alone.

George Bernard Shaw refused to accept this dichotomy between public and private sectors, insisting instead on a threefold discrimination between Private Wealth, Common Wealth and Personal Possessions. Many of the economic views of the Founding Fabians...The Fabian Papers were published in 1884...were given academic respectability in the 1930s and 1940s by R.H.Tawney.

In the real world there are many forms of discrimination against the little firm. Money is misdirected away from small local investments by the power of Monetary Dispatronage. Crowding out is a trickle down phenomenon that strikes disproportionately at small microbusinesses within the private sector. When Commercial Banks cut back on loans and overdrafts thousands of little microbusinesses are sent to the wall so the bank can escape the spectacle of large corporate customers defaulting on their credit obligations.

These are the same large organisations who protect their own interests...in collusion with the private banks...by delaying payments to small businesses from 30 to 60 days and beyond thereby ensuring that microbusinesses are hit with the double whammy of credit restriction from the banks and balooning receivables because of non-payment by large companies.

If you are large enough to cause embarrassment to a bank's managing officers you can extend your overdraft to whatever level your accountants demand even though the extension of this one big overdraft might dissolve countless little ones. Here are other examples.

If you want to buy a car or a computer there will be financial intermediaries on hand to lend you money at zero interest rate with many months of payment holidays before the first repayment is due.

If you already own one property and want to invest in a Property Bubble by buying a second property and renting into a declining market borrowing a hundred thousand pounds for the privilege then you can get all the money you want at just a percent or two above the bank rate.

The explosion in property prices in England over the past few years has been driven by the Central Banking mechanism that compels their client Commercial Banks to issue money as a Debt at Interest mortgaged against Real Estate as Collateral. The end result is houses being built and property prices being driven up not by demand by householders for shelter but by the demands of the banking system for security against which to create money...and make profits for the bank's shareholders.

The stupidity of all this is that houses get built and countryside destroyed not because people need homes but because wages fail to put enough money into circulation and so individuals are forced back onto Equity Release as their only way to obtain money.

Residential and Commercial Property today has taken the place held by Gold in the Mercantile Era. But gold does not tarnish and is difficult to extract. Houses and office blocks are easy to build by comparison. And the only way to restrict supply is to ration the licensing of building...otherwise known as Planning Permission. But is it really necessary for half the buildings in the country to be occupied for one half of the day and the other half for the other half? Whither Property Prices when the Idiocy of Commuting is recognised and the habits of a lifetime changed as Ownwork increasingly displaces Jobwork...with a resulting doubling in the number of dwellable buildings?

You may well be charged much more to earn exorbitant profits for financial intermediaries but your failure to secure the best deal is part of a broader problem identified by the guru of self-sufficiency John Seymour in a brief aside in his 1961 classic The Fat of The Land. 'We never sell anything we produce,' he remarked. 'We discovered early that once you start trying to sell you enter a world of thieves and rogues and bounders in which you just cannot breathe. We wished to be included out of that world, please.' You might wish to be included out too.

But if you want ten thousand pounds to invest in a microbusiness with a three-year pay-back and a good healthy return over five years the best the banking fraternity will offer is Credit Card Debt at one and a half percent per month...many times the bank rate. Foregoing the money might be possible but some may have no other option.

These are all examples of Crowding-Out or the rather broader idea of Monetary Dispatronage. Money goes to the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time and in the wrong form and its distribution is only loosely related to risk & reward and almost completely unrelated to supply & demand.

Indeed if it relates to anything at all it relates to power and the misalignment of power between those who have spare money and those who are willing and able to use it...which brings us back to Tawney’s crucial distinction between Property and Improperty and between Working Capital & Idle Capital. To talk of Debt and Equity in these circumstances tends to obscure rather than enlighten. At the limit such talk is perverse.

Before Adam Smith economic thinking was closely connected with law and practical politics. The law dealt with property and practical politics was about people. So economic thinking could be said to be concerned with Money and Work.

Kings and priests spoke for their right to collect surplus production, Mercantilists spoke for the merchants and Physiocrats for the landowners. Then came Adam Smith and Classical Economics.

Since then the Historical School have spoken for the status quo, Classical Liberals for profits and capitalism and the followers of Marx for wages and socialism. A small linguistically isolated country like Sweden makes an interesting example.

In medieval times influences on Swedish Economic Thought came from Christian and Humanistic thinking in Southern Europe...transformed via German Hanseatic Towns and Denmark to suit a peasant economy with a weak feudal system. In the 16th century German Technology and Mercantilist Thinking were imported to suit the War Economy of the autocratic Vasa kings.

In the 17th century the Dutch took over from the Germans as chief ideologists when the small Swedish super-power tried to develop its trade. In the first half of the 18th century English Mercantile Thinking was imported to suit Swedish Merchants and the Mines, Mills and Factory Owners. In the second half of the 18th century a distorted version of the teachings of the French Physiocrats reached Sweden.

During the first part of the 19th century English and French influences...Smith, Say, Bastiat...competed for dominance when Economic Liberalism penetrated a country that lagged behind Europe in Capitalist Development by half a century. In the 1870s the German Language regained a leading position through schools of thought on both left and right of the political spectrum...interpreted to suit a relatively more rural, peaceful, democratic and pragmatic tradition.

In the 18th century scholars were fluent linguists who built extensive friendships and patronage networks throughout Europe and America and published their work in universal languages such as Latin while seeing it as one of their duties as a scholar to translate from this universal languages into the vernacular.

So when we are looking at the 18th century and the economic academic environment into which Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was launched, we find that everywhere there were scholars rooted in the practical economic traditions of their own town, province or country, but learned in other traditions and in continuous touch with the intellectual currents of their age.

The world-famous botanist Carl Linnaeus is typical of this universality of learning. Abroad Linnaeus is regarded as one of the few really well-known Swedes...a scientist of genius who inherited the general mood of optimism and belief in progress of the 18th century. But in Sweden Linnaeus is Swedish to a high degree. Perhaps only Carl-Michael Bellman and Carl Larsson have influenced the psyche of Swedish daily life as profoundly as Carl Linnaeus.

This trio mean to the Swede what Shakespeare, Newton and William Morris mean to the English. The feeling for nature, the sense of discovery inspired by the Swedish countryside and the clear literary style originated in Linnaeus' genius. They were not there before Linnaeus. But 250 years on they permeate the entire Swedish population.

Linnaeus campaigned vigorously for Practical Economics. With a sentiment that would not be out of place in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe Linnaeus wrote in his Oeconomica Naturae that it was the duty of human beings to extract natural resources 'otherwise God would not have deposited them in the earth'. What's more...this would have made a patriot such as Edmund Burke blush...'the natural resources of Sweden were superior to those of any other country'.

Linnaeus argued for new professorships to be established in Economics, Botany and Natural History as a means of preventing the penetration of the new secular Prussian Economics into the Swedish Universities. He lost the battle with the highly political appointment of Anders Berch as Professor of Economics at Uppsala University in 1741.

Linnaeus fought back on two fronts. He undertook Economic Journeys into the Swedish Provinces on behalf of the government...to Gotland, Öland and Dalarna. Ten years after Berch's appointment Linnaean Professors were appointed to newly established Linnaean Chairs in Economics, Botany and Natural History...Åbo in 1747 and Lund in 1750.

The writings of Swedish economists can be understood by ordinary people and deep ecology is the philosophy underlying much modern Swedish Economic Thought. It is no accident that ecology has pushed further into practical politics in Sweden than elsewhere. Linneaus was a first rate political economist and he had his foot in the door 250 years ago.

Linnaeus' confrontations with Berch and his Prussian Economics at Uppsala University were the first skirmishes in a war that has raged now through three centuries and has engulfed the whole world. Only now as this war of ideas at the heart of economics enters its fourth century, do we find Linnaeus' ideas once again in the ascendancy. Our age is finally catching up with Linnaeus. After three hundred years of Anders Berch's School of Quantity & Dead Matter...econometrics...Linnaeus is making a comeback as the Founder of a School of Quality & Living Beings.

The Bank of England’s charter was quite a normal affair for 1694. Europe's kings and queens were merrily handing out charters and monopolies over other people’s assets at the time. It is rather like going along to your neighbourhood Estate Agent and asking her to sell your next-door neighbour’s house.

But unless you held a gun to your neighbour’s head selling his house might be difficult. There was a Scotsman called John Law for instance who once sold a French King a fiendish plan of this type. It made some people rich - those who got out before the Crash - and it helped America pick up Louisiana for a song a few years later. But it didn’t do the French King much good.

In the days between Brigandage and Empire holding guns to heads was much in vogue. One particularly large gun...a 17th century supergun...was the English Navy with its rule of thumb of having always twice the tonnage on the high seas as everybody else in the world. This big gun is called the US Marines, Shock and Awe or Democracy nowadays.

In the winter of 1795 one hundred years after the pretty piece of rascality that gave birth to the Bank of England Company Tom Paine wrote The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance which attacked the economic system of the English Government.

Paine predicted that within twenty years the National Currency of England would fail. Paine was well versed in monetary matters having published several essays on money and finance in America while editing American Crisis. He was also able to draw on the expertise of his banker friend Robert Smyth.

At the time of writing, England’s foreign debt was in excess of £400 million...£50 billion at current prices...while the cash holdings of the Bank of England amounted to £1 million.‘Bank notes,’ Paine wrote, ‘were not worth the paper on which they were printed’...adding for good measure that ‘the pound sterling would become ever more overstretched.’

The reason was the ‘iron law’ that ‘the national debt was set to rise annually in continual progression.’ Paine had understood the workings of what Thomas Greco refers to as The Growth Imperative. The prediction came true the following year when the Bank of England suspended convertibility of bank notes.

On 27th April 1796 Tom Paine presented copies of The Decline and Fall of The English System of Finance ‘to the French people’ and to both the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Elders. A member of the Council of Elders enthusiastically proclaimed that the work should be placed under the eyes of everyone concerned with financial matters...prompting a majority of the Council to vote for its official printing and distribution.

The Directory ordered one thousand copies and took the view that Paine’s work was ‘the most combustible weapon which France could at this moment employ to overthrow and destroy the English government.’ It swiftly despatched these copies to the major financial centres of Europe with the intention of persuading investors to unload their English funds thereby reducing England ‘to the nakedness and abandonment to which she must inevitably descend’.

A few weeks later, the Directory arranged the printing of a German-language edition to influence the financiers of Holland, Switzerland, and Germany, ‘whose interests are essentially linked to those of the Bank of London.’ The Directory sent a hundred copies of this German edition to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to be distributed by French agents in foreign countries.

Meanwhile more than a dozen editions...as well as five refutations...appeared in London, several editions came out in America, with translations into Italian and other languages, and two German authors published refutations in French. One particular writer, Mr. Joersson, himself in the pay of the English, accused the ‘writer attached to the opposition’ of plotting to reduce ‘an amiable and enlightened people’ to French ‘barbarism.

A hundred and fifty years later in 1932 Winston Churchill started work on his History of the English Speaking Peoples...completed a quarter of a century later. His writings also show a familiarity with money, banking and finance. He writes with authority about the Whigs and their Bank of England Company and makes mention of John Harvey’s Land Bank...the failed Tory attempt to smother the Dutch coup d’état at birth. Once upon a time cabinet ministers understood the treacherous ways of the Money Power and their Clever Clerks. These days are no more.

The current crop of Career Politicians from England’s Celtic Fringes...hijackers of the Labour Party of John Smith and Tony Benn...are ignorant of Financial History and in awe to the financiers who fund their private offices. In their ignorance they believe their thrones to be seats of power...comprehending little of the power behind these thrones. Clause Four of the Labour Party Constitution represents a fundamental pillar of Socialist Thought.

The clause...drafted by Sidney Webb in the house where Tony Benn grew up...brilliantly encapsulates large swathes of Socialist Scholarship. It was brushed aside by the New Labour Cabal in a matter of weeks with no mention of the significance of the party’s intent to control the Means of Exchange...vital to Socialists who believe that Socialism is Equal Money.

Instead a phoney debate was launched on the irrelevance of any reference in the constitution of a New Labour Party to such outdated Marxist Nostrums as Controlling the Means of Production in this modern age of knowledge work and automated factories. Has the new Tory Leader David Cameron been better briefed?

The Tale of Two Willies continues...

And so it went on for almost a year. The merry band of bankers enjoyed themselves immensely. Every few months a few more guineas for the king who paid a few more of the queen’s bills. Every few months a few more details settled to their satisfaction...small details like the written promise that the merry band would pay no tax on their winnings and inconsequential matters like a novel new definition of usury. It would now come in two flavours referred to privately as Major and Minor Usury. But at last it was done.

In 1694 Parliament passed the Charter for the Bank of England. Over the next few decades things carried on much as before. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer. War and Taxes increased by leaps and bounds. Eventually even the English Imperial System started to crumble when the American Colonies had the audacity to declare independence and refuse to pay their taxes. A hundred years later a few Freethinkers began to question the Bank’s Charter mumbling darkly of a National Malaise...even hinting that this Central Banking Monopoly might be the cause.

The Germans have a literary genre they call a Staatsroman - a state novel. These are exercises in literary fiction for the purpose of illuminating the implications of a social theory. This is one reason they were much more receptive to John Seymour's Retrieved from the Future than the English. But we can do it too. G.K. Chesterton did it with The Napoleon of Notting Hill for instance and nobody come more English than the Chester-Bellocs and Distributism.

For the past 15 years I have had a dream of devoting a third of each year writing, another third microbusinessing...I used to call it money-making but this is more realistic...and the other third doing whatever else takes my fancy which before Connie died was sailing the ocean blue. High on my writing agenda is The King of Buen Consejo by William Shepherd. I rather like this king of mine so rather than abandon him I thought I would tell his full life story.

My tale will be in four parts. In the first part I will change the ending to Shaw’s Apple Cart. The election goes ahead, ballots are rigged, the king loses, a republic is declared and the king is sent to St. Anne’s at the head of a company of the King’s Cavalry...his gaolers...to put down the Alderney insurgency. This is a temporary expedient as you cannot have an ex-king and his pretty young queen...complete with a social conscience and charity work among the downtrodden...running around all over the place. They become pretenders and ferment Roalst Rebellion.

Unfortunately for the English Government the king takes a leaf out of Mark Twain’s book about the Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur, goes among his people in disguise, joins the rebels and is bought off by some splendid titles and the promise of independence for the Confederation of Channel Island States.

After their victory the king will be given a year or two to be footloose and fancy-free among the idle rich while conditions back home deteriorate...republics normally last a decade before imploding. They will appear in popular pamphlets like Tassler and OY!! in a before and after story, go to fashion shows and hobnob with celebrities in Paris and Boston. The second part of the books ends with our queen having a passionate love affair and leaving the king.

As a man I will really go to town in the third part showing that men can be hurt too...even big men cry. In the first part a daughter will have been invented doing good deeds in undeveloped foreign parts...a Priestley character from Festival in Farbridge campaigning against the Arms Race. She returns home, finds Daddy moping around the house, tells him to pull himself together and get a life and drags him off to British Imperial India. Here she leaves him to his own devices to make the best of it...without any money. From time to time he bumps into his old cronies and is almost rumbled but keeps his promise to himself and his daughter to stay disguised for three years.

Meanwhile the reader will be given the first inkling that lust is lapsing and all is not well with the queen. She will need a good friend to help her know herself better...Hetty Clarkson in Edwina Curry's novel Chasing Men is the type I have in mind. In the third part the king is gradually acquire a social conscience and gather the facts upon which his social conscience can go to work. Meanwhile the queen's world falls apart. She retreats back into her rural retreat, goes organic and starts to read books...something that was alien to her before.

Her daughter...the real Jane Austen heroine of the story...now turns her counselling skills onto her mother. She takes her out to see George Bernard Shaw's plays...in particular The Apple Cart...and gets her reading political tracts like The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism and J.B.Priestley's plays and novels. Gradually the queen begins getting ideas better suited to her husband's former station...and to the king’s own improving consciousness. So we have a Bildnungsroman within a Staatsroman here...value for money if ever I saw it. Buy one get one free.

At the end of the third part of the book the queen's daughter contrives a reconciliation between her mother and father...and together they sketch out a fiendish plan to enable the king to reclaim his throne. I'm not going to tell you the fourth part. But I have it all worked out. I believe in happy endings...and I have my Queen-in-Waiting.

In 1693 a gentleman by the name of William Paterson was invited to a private audience with King William III of England. Here is a long-lost transcript of the meeting. After some polite preliminaries about the effect of cannons and gunpowder on the climate Mister Paterson broached the subject on both their minds...sovereigns.

“Look,” said he, “You need money. You’ve no chance of getting any from Parliament. But I have several rich Dutch contacts and they have expressed an interest in helping out. Don’t worry. We’ll sort out the details and tell you what to say. Here’s how the scam…whoops what a giveaway…how the scheme works. It’s up and running in the Netherlands as we speak. And we hear everyone’s pleased with the way it’s working out. So have a chat with the Dutch and get back to us. Same time and same place two weeks from now? Good. This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

The King didn’t have to think for long. He knew about the transformation of the Dutch king’s fortune. Soon he would find out what was behind it. And so it was that six weeks later - on his own initiative of course - the King invited the leader of the merry band of brothers that were to form the Bank of England Joint Stock Company to bring two or three of his trusted business colleagues to a specially convened meeting of the Privy Council four weeks hence.

Four weeks later with the meeting duly convened the King opened the proceedings. “Now look here, young fellows. We’ve brought you here to discuss a proposal that will be good for this great country of ours. We appeal to you as patriots. Do not dismiss it out of hand. But take it away with you and think carefully upon it. These are difficult and dangerous times. Your country needs you. The crux of the matter is that Progress requires this country to have a Central Bank. The Netherlands has got one. So we must have one. What will our position be if France and Spain get one and we are left in the lurch? But it must have the support of the Merchant Community. Your task is to gather this support. Do this and I will ask you to run the bank for the benefit of your fellow countrymen. What d’you say?”

“We are intrigued, Your Majesty. Pray tell us the nature of the charter you propose. How will the bank sustain its legal monopoly over the issue of notes of credit? Everybody writes notes. And what are the precise conditions you are proposing for our Royal Charter?”

“Well, my loyal subjects,” the King continued in his most pompous manner, “I have given this matter some thought and have consulted widely in Europe. This is the idea. You supply me with the money I want. And in return I’ll give you a royal monopoly. Only your notes will be legal tender within my realm. How much you print is your business. The only condition is that you print the same amount of money for me. That way we’ll both be happy. Got to stick together, after all? Agitators. Deists and Atheists. Mobs. Eh what?”

“Well, you could blow me down with a feather,” replied the leader of the merry band of brothers. “What a truly brilliant idea. How noble, intelligent and wise are the ways of kings. How truly fortunate we simple businessmen are to have a King with so astute a mind and one so versed in the ways of finance. For peace of mind we will back our notes with gold. But don’t worry. You won’t have to pay for the gold. We will issue some of our legal tender and buy the gold with that. Best to get it for nothing.”

“Yes, yes. Very pretty,” replied the King. “I’ll give that to my Minister without Portfolio Lord Alistair of Campbell to put in the newspapers. I’m a big picture man. I’ll leave you young lads to sort out the details. Good. That’s agreed then. Meeting adjourned.”

After the meeting was over, the King took the leader of the merry band aside. “Went well, don’t you think? Just one question. When do I get my money? Wife’s spending money like there’s no tomorrow. And I’m starting to get discrete enquiries from her shopkeepers. So undignified. Still if they know just a quarter of what I know about my financial situation I can hardly blame them.”

“Here are a few guineas to be getting on with. Mustn’t rush this. Must be seen to haggle. We’ll go around looking uneasy. Slip the word out to those agitators in Parliament that this outrageous proposal will bring us bankers to our knees. Tell the old die-hards in the house that this is our only chance. Some Emperor - any emperor - will be in the City of London ravishing the Flower of English Maidenhood in forty-five minutes unless we sign up. And so on and so forth. Must be statesmanlike about these things.”

“Few details to attend to. Some of your privy counsellors are being difficult. Plenty of side deals needed with Lord Here and the Marquis of Somewhere Else over the next few weeks. And there’s the scoundrel Harvey and his pyramid selling. Land Banks indeed! Must be exposed. Agent for the Vatican they say. All takes time. Companies to register. Shareholders to appoint. No rest for the wicked. Let me know if you need any directorships for your people.”

“Well, thank you. I’ll do that. But we have other ways. Let me have the names of those Privy Counsellors...refer to them in future as teepees...code for Turbulent Priests...then I’ll have my wife have a discrete word with their wives. Normally does the trick. The parliamentary session after next, you say. Nine months, eh? Best you can do? Well if that’s what it takes. Now down to the small print. The price of hats in London beggars belief…” to be continued

Eleven hundred million Indians and a eleven hundred million Chinese are getting their individul economic acts together and are busy with Economic Development by Central Banking ( EDCB ). There is nothing three hundred million Europeans can do to change this...and it would be foolish wasting time and money trying. The scientific knowledge is there, technology has been transferred, the genie is out of the bottle and Pandora’s Box is wide open.

Only a few deluded fools isolated in intellectual backwaters like America’s Mid-West truly believe that it is possible to amass enough firepower to shut the lid and stop up the bottle. The economic problem has been solved in principle. Practice has pushed aside theory and got on with it. Nothing that has happened in India and China over the past decade was even hinted at in the Development Economics Textbooks of the 1970s and 1980s.

Milton Friedman was half right all along...though he preached the wrong half about Inflation instead of the right half about Output. Money does indeed work wonders. Make it available and everything goes five times as fast. Such a pity that two decades were lost...and millions of lives destroyed...because Reagan and Thatcher got the wrong end of the stick and never understood Hayek’s advice nor the implications of Ludwig von Mises scholarly tome Human Action.

Central Banking as a development mechanism can solve the money problem. Unfortunately it has a number of rather nasty side effects. Regrettably these have been neither addressed in theory nor mitigated in practice. Their presence remains invisible to those who administer the banking mechanism. And their impact is misinterpreted by the victims. Ignorance is bliss for the winners and sows confusion among the losers. It all began with a pretty piece of rascality...Thomas Robertson in The Facade of Finance...when the intrigues and secret manoeuvrings of the Whigs created a cunning plan that culminated with the formation of the Bank of England by the Bank Charter Act of 1694.

It started with William III claiming to be short of money. Big surprise! A king short of money! Kings were always short of money. It is in the nature of kingship to be short of money because they are always spending it on making war and buying off pretenders by marrying off their daughters…suitably endowed with a dowry.

This has the desirable effect...desirable for some...of recycling the golden lucre out of the Royal Coffers. Every time the money passes GO the Moneychangers grab a few ingots and trinkets and smuggle them away to safe offshore havens. To the Moneychanger the purpose of kings is to recycle money at a profit to themselves. How it was done was not their concern. Wars were as good a way as any. The important thing was to spend it...not how it was spent.

After the political upheavals of Cromwell’s Commonwealth in the 1640s there were new players entering the Banking Field. The Public...as we know it today...were not one of them. They had no money and no credit and were already being taxed to death. But there were an ever increasing number of private trading fortunes looking for safe placement.

As the 17th century drew to a close there was a twist to the everyday story of Royal Moneylending when William Paterson put together a cabal of financial adventurers after getting wind of some hanky-panky in Sweden surrounding a company called Stockholm Banco. The Swedish Court were less impressed and shut the operation down. But the wheeze popped up again in the Dutch Court so our happy band of brothers gave themselves the name of The Governor and Company of the Bank of England and came to try their hand at the Court of King William in England.

Here is how the scam worked. The company would collect from Public Subscribers the sum of £1,200,000 in cash which they would then lend to the King’s Government at 8% per annum...keeping £4,000 per annum for their own expenses. In return the Bank of England was to receive a number of privileges of which the chief was the right to issue notes equivalent in total amount to the £1,200,000 lent to the King’s Government. Notice that deception is afoot.

The Public Subscribers were anything but public. They were super rich private foreigners...who apart from a few token Englishmen...were of Dutch Huguenot stock. Three of them were brothers from the Houblon Family and cronies of the Chief Secretary of the Admiralty Samuel Pepys. The purpose of Pepys Diaries was not to illuminate but to obscure. They are not accurate accounts but disinformation. Like Pravda during the Cold War what is omitted is every bit as significant as what is included.

Thus the Bank of England was founded with the sanction of The King in Parliament...the new formula...to lend Cash to the King to spend on war while creating an equivalent sum of Financial Credit...funny money...for a private company to circulate behind a Royal Monopoly as legal tender. This is the origin of the banknotes that once promised to pay the bearer a constant amount of gold...until the promise was rescinded. The Act of 1694 effectively placed The Bank of England outside the law. The Bank of England acquired further powers by the Act of 1819 which rendered all Governments impotent and by the Act of 1844 which rendered the Joint Stock Banks impotent against the Bank of England. My instinct would be to repeal the Bank Acts of 1694, 1819 and 1844...and reopen the Local Mints.

After an assassination you can follow the Motive, the Man or the Money...and with enough resources you can run all three investigations in parallel. The methodology for the Motive Investigation is to begin with a Who? Whom? Analysis (WWA) to establish who wins and loses by removal of the turbulent priest. The best people for this are insiders intimate with the work flowing across their desk, the phone calls made and the meetings scheduled.

Anna Lindh may have been Sweden’s Foreign Minister but she was also a long-standing Social Democrat Party Member. It is easy to look the wrong way. As one example Anna Lindh understood Stockholm and would have realised that replacing the long-established Tenancy System with a Bostadsrätt System would further impoverish the poor and benefit only the rich...many of them from outside Sweden in Germany, Russia and elsewhere.

Anna may have set herself against allowing local residents to work four days a week to pay mortgage interest to the banks when they could continue working just one day a week to pay rent to their Housing Association. Most Social Democrats would have opposed a Clearance Policy in Stockholm’s inner suburbs. Anna Lindh with leadership ambitions may have made this issue her rallying point for the Party Faithful. Hers would have been a powerful voice.

Stockholm Property Mafias with billions of kronor at speculation would have no qualms in paying for her removal. They might threaten her children first. Perhaps they did? Who would she tell? Perhaps the modern way is to kill first to avoid questions later. It would be a bonus that investigators would be looking elsewhere for her killers. After the assassin is back under your control the next task is to lay false trails across the path of your pursuers. Investigative websites spring up after most assassinations...some may be disinformation sites. Scepticism is required.

This example is not intended as a subtle hint...there are no whistleblowers whispering in my ear...but as a way to explain and illustrate the Motive Search Process (MSP). In practice this particular Suspect Scenario is on my C-List...an ABC Analysis being an extension of the Pareto Principle where list allocation criteria is action-oriented.

A common policy would be applied to investigating C-List Suspects. A fully resourced team would be set to work investigating each A-List Suspect while the investigative focus for B-List Suspects would be to assess whether to treat them as A-List or C-List. These Desk Studies are similar to the Profiling Approach used by Terrorism Prevention and are unlikely to overlap with Police Investigations. In general the police can be thought of as being interested in the greasy rag while the Who? Whom? Analysis is looking for the engineer...and the command structure behind him.

A cursary glance at Conspiracy Theory Websites suggests that the Usual Suspects in any high profile assassination are Mossad and the CIA. But I tend not to put the American and Israeli Governments very high on my list. They both appear to have Assassination Procedures in place. Israel may hunt down the Munich killers of their Olympic Athletes and go after the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas for instance. And the Wiesenthal Centre pursues Nazi Holocaust Perpetrators to the ends of the earth.

But in general my sympathies are with the Israelis. I believe they weigh these steps carefully. But the notion that an Israeli Government Committee should sit around a polished cherry-wood conference table in Tel Aviv and approve the assassination of Anna Lindh because she was in the habit of criticising Israel and siding with the Palestinians seems rather far-fetched. So neither the CIA nor Mossad are on my Anna Lindh A-List or B-List.

I tend to put the Supra-Government Groups (SGG)...those who anoint governments...and Global Interest Groups (GIG) much higher on my list. Governments are just one of many potential assassins. The Moscow or Washington Governments may come under suspicion when their interests are threatened. And Black-Ops seem to be something that Stupidity Services delight in telling us they carry out. But I suspect much of this is posturing to bolster their own flagging self-esteem. The world according to Grahame Greene and John Le Carré rings true...with cock-ups galore.

My Anna Lindh A- and B-Lists consist of seven Supra-Government Groups and three Global Interest Groups. Top of the A-List is One World Order followed by Guns, Gold, US Imperialists and Austro-Hungarian Supremecists. On the B-List are the Fear Factory (Politico-Legal-Media Complex & Bank-Industry-Government Complex), TransNational Corporations (Drugs, Chemicals, Energy etc), Zionists, European Union and the EuroBankers.

Nowadays the Hollywood Studio System...not its Rogue Actor-Directors like Robert Redford, Oliver Stone, Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner etc...is doing good Conspiracy Genre films. Obviously for them the bottom line is good. But they are not pulling punches and directors are not being leaned on to take a party line. Lord of War with Nicholas Cage and John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener with Ralph Fiennes are good examples of this genre...and I would expect Michael Crichton’s State of Fear to get fair treatment. In each case Global Interest Groups are portrayed as the Bad Guys...Global Arms Trade, Global Drug Companies and Environmental Groups respectively.

On my last evening in Totnes my daughter and I watched Lord of War. The film highlights the enormity of the task of eliminating war...Yes Virginia, eliminating. Very very few ordinary people want war...and those tiny minorities that do can be educated to see the errors of their ways. Democratically war should be a complete non-starter.

Vested interests are vast. The world is awash with hundreds of Military Industrial Complexes consuming more manpower...mind workers & manual workers...more mined & manufactured resources and more piped energy than most small non-belligerent nation-states like Sweden, Switzerland or New Zealand. The challenge could overwhelm the small-minded and mean-spirited. Yet the job must be tackled. It is the next great Adventure of Civilisation.

The top five global gunrunners are the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. Yet only three reforms are needed at the United Nations...although a second body like a League of Real Nations will be needed to make it happen. The first United Nations Reform should be to agree a name swap with the United States of America.

Secondly a ceiling of twenty million should be placed on the population of each member of the renamed United States...previously the United Nations. Ten million would be better but we want Californians and Texans on our side. Weightings could be devised to encourage members to maximise the voting power of existing confederations...China, India, the rebranded United Nations of America, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia...by minimising the size of each applicant.

Thirdly a Disarmament Treaty should be drawn up...with time frames...for removing from the UN Security Council any member state with Weaponry Inventories indicating Warlike and not Peaceful Intent. Drawing up permitted target inventories for each Weapon of Mass Destruction category...missiles, warheads, kalashnikovs etc...would be the first step in this third reform. After that Killingry Factories Quotas KFQs) can be handed out...and traded.

At the national level Simultaneous Policies can be put in place...simultaneous with International Action. The English for instance have their own very special international responsibilities in the Abolition of Militarism. The Axis of Evil does not run through Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the One World Order Conspiracy Theorists would have us believe but through Wall Street and Threadneedle Street and the Armaments Manufacturers wherever located.

The Newnham Common Women and the G8 Protesters have shown us how to challenge the overweening might of militarism. You do not write to your Member of Parliament and delude yourself that you are getting involved. Instead you engage in direct action against an identifiable enemy. And you go into battle base by base, factory by factory, arms fair by arms fair, official junket by official junket, bank account by bank account, mind worker by mind worker.

But you do not stop there. In this the Animal Rights Activists have shown the way...which is why their effectiveness has spread such panic and fear. What if their tactics were applied to something that really mattered...to missiles instead of lipstick? You go for those who give the orders too by following the money...stock exchange by stock exchange, company director by company director, shareholder by shareholder.

The first modern English Political Party will be the one that recognises England’s failure to abandon her 19th Century imperial pretensions and sets about breaking England up into Swiss-style cantons. We could do worse than start with the country’s 17th century county structure before the East India Company and the Bank of England Company set up its own Poodle Parliament in Westminster to do its bidding and abolished Magna Carta...by stealth.

The economic goal of each canton should be Economic Self-Sufficiency. This will entail a major restructuring of its work and employment base as it disengages from imperial activities and refocuses its economic energies on the wealth of its villagers, the purpose of its port towns, market towns and other urban villages and the manner whereby dwellers throughout the canton can meaningfully pursue happiness. This might take a decade. Why let it take longer?

During the Decade of Transition subsidies will be needed from the Confederation of Cantons...the residual English National Body charged with redistributing national assets and liabilities to the cantons...to encourage particularly devastated regions like London and the South-East to restructure their economies and diversify away from the English 20th Century obsession with Global Money Laundering, Weaponry Development and Killingry Exports.

The Labour Party of Kier Hardy and the Fabian Society of Sidney & Beatrice Webb with their roots deep in doctrinal disputes with scholarly Liberals, Communists, Syndicalists, Anarchists and Social Democrats...and with university professors of the calibre of R.H.Tawney and deep socialist thinkers like G.B.Shaw and J.B.Priestley to advise them...understood the immensity of their task. By comparison our modern Career Socialists...schooled in the Inns of Court (created for the Merchants of London) instead of the Taverns of the Real World...and devoid of any sense of Real History... as they act their parts in their fake 1066 and All That historical world...are frighteningly ignorant.

Ford Madox Ford is one of four Romney Marsh writers that Meads Books will focus on…the others are E.F.Benson, Russell Thorndike and Vita Sackville-West. For a while the group included H.G.Wells over in Hythe and Jósef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Winchelsea. Meads Books will also specialise in Rudyard Kipling from higher up the Rother in Burwash.

Ford Madox Ford’s German-born parents were naturalised as British subjects after he was born. So he was able to claim German Citizenship for his divorce proceedings in a German court. When the First World War broke out he denounced Germany in When Blood Is Their Argument…subtitled an analysis of Prussian Culture. He also put his life on the line for what he believed…something I’m not willing to do as I might be wrong...and though over 40 and not obliged to do military service he still took a commission in the British Army.

The question of dual citizenship came up over the weekend when I suggested including a concept of Dual Internationality in the draft Charter of Real Nations. John Papworth had drafted the charter so I left the wording to him. But he came up with something completely different about Homelands instead.

So I brought us back to what we had talked about by breaking his clause down into his clause 6 ‘to promote the concept of dual nationality so people dwelling in a homeland will bear passports to homeland and nation state’ and my clause 7 ‘to promote the concept of dual internationality to enable homelands, nations or states to be a member both of the League of Real Nations and of the United Nations Organisation’…this being a key agreement of the Real Nations Forum five years ago.

I then got an e-mail telling me that the dual nationality clause was meaningless and accusing me of messing up his wording…which I thought was pretty rich. So I wrote back that I agreed the homeland clause was very poorly worded but that it was not possible to produce anything better without a lengthy preamble on the meaning of states and nations and homelands and this was better left to the lawyers. For good measure I added that Leopold Kohr’s The Breakdown of Nations and the United Nations both misused the word nation and should be using the word state.

Yesterday 24 people were arrested in Walthamstow, Birmingham and High Wycombe. For some peculiar reason…known only to the Stupidity Services and their political minders…even though all the suspects had been rounded up it was still necessary to cause as much havoc as possible by cancelling and delaying hundreds of flights from 20 different airfields around the country. It would be nice if someone gets charged with a real offence this time.

In High Wycombe close to the M4 west of London, arrests were made at three different addresses…Walton Drive, Plover Green Avenue and Micklefield Road. The Times managed to get its reporters out to interview neighbours in High Wycombe before their evening deadlines.

After the killing of Charles de Menezes on the London Underground police reports were cover-ups so the assumption has to be that the only reliable reports are anecdotal…from family and neighbours. These only appear in the immediate aftermath of an incident or a swoop. Within a day or two the official line takes over and anecdotal evidence disappears unless it bolsters the official line. So here are a few.

Neighbours described the arrests at Walton Drive to be from a ‘foreign family including two brothers’. Another neighbour told the Times’ reporter that the person arrested was ‘a male who converted to Islam a year ago’. From 41 Micklefield Road came reports of ‘an Asian family with a constant stream of visitors’ who ‘were building an extension at the back of their house’.

Then there were the goings-on at Number 48 where the Times carried a report from the Neighbourhood Watch that ‘there were people coming to the house at night time around midnight almost every night who left a few hours after they arrived’. Meanwhile the woman across the street spoke of ‘cars coming and going’ and ‘big white vans pulling up in the middle of the night’.

A mile away in Chipping Woods dog walkers were reporting ‘vehicles that weren’t normally seen in the area…some staying for hours and others leaving after twenty minutes’. For good measure the Times added a remark from one of the dog walkers that ‘the drivers and passengers were men, mostly in their 20s and 30s. None of them Asian.’ The evidence for this latest War on Terror incident seems to come from Lahore where two men have been arrested.

I left Bowden House at 0730 and walked into town to catch my 0900 National Express coach to London. It was all downhill and I had sent the heavy stuff off by post…figuring that with postage at £8 and the taxi fare at £4 I would not be much out of pocket. This busy Devon to London route warrants a double-decker which does the journey in six hours so I was delivered to Victoria Coach Station shortly after 1500 in the afternoon.

In the seat in front of me was a 40-something Swedish woman and a 30-something Hungarian woman. The Swede was looking to board a flight to Stockholm from Heathrow while the Hungarian…an English teacher in Budapest visiting her sister…was bound for Luton Airport after her first visit to England in eight years. I did not envy them their hours of pointless waiting. Interestingly Heathrow was operating perfectly normally...on the outside…with traffic lighter than usual.

My parents were born and grew up in London. The leafy south-eastern suburbs my mother knew as a young girl in the 1920s were something quite new. But in the countryside little had changed…except an awareness of towns and cities and the steady migration to them.

For hundreds of years the world of the village was a world of silence; a world of hard work and necessary patience, of backs bent to the ground, hands massaging the crops, of waiting on weather and growth; of villages like ships in the empty landscapes with long walking distances between them; of white narrow roads, rutted by hooves and cartwheels, innocent of oil and petrol, down which people passed rarely…and never for pleasure.

The horse was the fastest thing moving in this rural world. Man and horse were all the power people had…abetted by levers and pulleys. The horse was king and almost everything grew around him…fodder, smithies, stables, paddocks, distances, and the rhythm of people’s days. His eight miles an hour was the limit of movements as it had been since the days of the Romans. That eight miles an hour was life and death, the size of the world, the people’s prison.

There are still those alive today for whom this was the world they were born into and the only world they knew. Then, to the scream of the horse, the change began. The brass-lamped motor-car came coughing up the road, followed by the clamorous charabanc and the solid-tyred bus climbed the dusty hills.

People came and went. Chickens and dogs were the early sacrifices falling demented beneath the wheels. The old folks too had strokes and seizures faced by speeds beyond comprehension. Then scarlet motor-bikes…the size of five-barred gates…began to appear in the village, on which youths roared like rockets up the two-minute hills then spent weeks making repairs and adjustments.

These appearances did not immediately alter anybody’s life. Cars were freaks and rarely seen, the motor bikes mostly in pieces, the charabancs a once-a-year adventure and buses just experiments. Meanwhile Hugo Jeakes wearing a bowler hat would run his wagonette to the nearest town twice a week. The carriage would hold six and the fare was tuppence. But most people preferred to walk.

Mr. Weston from the neighbouring village ran a cart every day and would carry your parcels for a penny. But most people still did the journey on foot, heads down into the wet westerly winds, ignoring the carters…and their extortionate fares…and spending a long hard day shopping.

The car-shying horses with their rolling eyes gave signs of the hysteria to come. Soon the villages started to break, dissolve and scatter, to become no more than a place for pensioners. It had a few years left, the last of its thousand, and they passed almost without notice. They passed quickly painlessly in motor-bike jaunts, in the shadows of the new picture-palace, in quick trips to bigger towns beyond the Market Town…once a foreign city…to gape at the jazzy shops. Yet right to the end…like the false strength that precedes death…the old life seemed as lusty as ever.

The death of the squire was the final nail in the coffin of the village. He died and the big house was sold by auction and became a home for invalids. The lake silted up, the swans flew away, and the great pike choked in the reeds. With the Squire’s hand removed the village fell apart…though it was doing so anyway. His servants dispersed and went into factories. His nephew broke up the estate.

Fragmentation, free thought and new excitements came now to intrigue and perplex. The first young couple to get married in a registry office were roundly denounced from the pulpit. ‘They who play with fire shall be consumed by fire!’ stormed the vicar. ‘Ye mark my words!’ Later if he caught anyone reading Sons and Lovers he would snatch it away from them and destroy it as his last authoritative gesture. He would be succeeded by a young apologist.

Meanwhile the old people would just drop away…the white-whiskered, gaitered, booted and bonneted ancient-tongued last of their world, who thee’d and thou’d both man and beast, called young girls ‘damsels’, young boys ‘squires’, old men ‘masters’, the Squire himself ‘He’, and who remembered the Dover stagecoach. Kicker Harris, the old coachman, with his top-hat and leggings, blown away like a torn-out page. Lottie Southerden curled up in her relics and died. Others departed with hardly a sound.

There was always an old Mrs Crissold calling the young boys for errands: ‘Thee come up our court a minute squire; I want thee to do I a mission.’ They would run to the shop to buy her a packet of bull’s eyes and be rewarded in the customary way. Bull’s-eyes in cheek, she’d sink back in her chair and dismiss the young lad with a sleepy nod. ‘I ain’t nurn a aypence about I just now…but Mrs Crissole’ll recollect ‘ee…’ They would write it off as the day’s good deed…and she would die still recollecting them.

Bowden House is a centuries-old manor house on the outskirts of Totnes with a splendid Queen Anne façade. Totnes is ten miles upstream from Dartmouth and is accessible from the sea. Apart from the main house there are a couple of cottages, a row of half a dozen servants’ quarters and ten acres of grounds with lawns and bushes and trees, Victorian walled gardens, fox-free chicken run, poly-tunnels for food-growing…and laundry-drying, orchards…in fact very Pride & Prejudice and Tapeley Park…Hector Christie’s manor house in the north of the county where Dmitri Pinschof spent several happy months earlier this year and where my daughter has interned from time to time.

It is here I have been staying since leaving Purton on Monday morning for this is where my daughter has taken up residence for a few months between leaving Y Beudy in Llangolman and taking up a 3-month residency at Gaia House in Newton Abbot a 20-minute bus ride away. Until the end of 2002 the estate was owned by the Petersen Family who had a photographic museum and let the public in for car boot sales. Then it was bought by the Naylors after they had sold their Paington-based CSS Electronics to a Canadian company for a few million pounds.

Like many people with more money than sense the Naylors had a plenty of dreams but very little clue. An 18-bedroom hotel with pool and spa was the idea with rooms for mainstream alternative therapy. Totnes was described to me by the taxi-driver as ‘a few dozen acres surrounded by reality’ so there is a market. The scheme foundered which allowed an altogether more together group…with relevant development experience from Findhorn…to take over at the end of last year after coughing up £1.7 million pounds for the Naylors and their bankers.

So here in South Devon another of the ecosteries Kirkpatrick Sale has been calling for will start to grow and flourish. I question Kirk’s apocalyptic reasoning but strongly support his proposals for the alternative movement to get real and start seeding the countryside with these 21st century Benedictine Monastery Gardens. And if cries of ‘Ye are all doomed!’ and ‘Abandon hope!’ gets things moving then why not. Besides he might be right.

English Property Law is all over the place at present…like most New Labour legislation which meddles around with little understanding of social or legal history…there are new laws and directives coming off the statute books every five minutes with only the vested interests keeping their eye on the ball and ensuring they gain from any changes.

The latest bunch of regulations came a few months ago causing considerable confusion among the judiciary and putting projects like this on hold until the lawyers can figure out the implications. Nobody seems to have mentioned to this gaggle of Scottish Lawyers presuming to rule us that it is English and not Scottish Law that applies south of Hadrian’s Wall…and that we have a tradition of Courts of Equity and strange English ideas like the Good Old Law and Precedence and Royal Prerogatives to take into consideration.

The new owners plan to put in place a Common Ownership Company structure rather like the one that Fritz Schumacher was so keen on for the Scott-Bader Commonwealth. But unfortunately Property Law is rather more complicated then Company Law…not for nothing is it called Real Property…because of centuries of clearances and enclosures and bitter disputes between Landlords and Tenants…with laws to protect the tenants being reversed a decade later whn the other side gets in and introduces other laws…often contradictory…to give license to landlords to kick out their tenants under the guise of free markets and economic progress.

The English are regarded by the rest of the world as dull, stuffy, unimaginative and unromantic. But if this is a fair then where did the literature come from? J.B. Priestley is one of several men of letters born at the turn of the century who worried about the image, the reality…and the discrepancies…which he sought to understand and explain.

This would eventually lead him down many fascinating avenues…English humour, literature, the strangeness of time and social history. One of his conclusions was eerily similar to that of Laurie Lee in Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. The world they knew was vanishing and Englishness was going with it.

Jack Priestley survived the First World War and on his return to Civvy Street he worked as a journalist in London, writing for various newspapers and periodicals…including the New Statesman…and turning out an essay per week for his first few working years. ‘To learn how to do anything…do it!’ was Aristotle’s advice and there is no better advice for the budding writer.

In the mid-1920s Priestley turned his hand to novels…culminating with the runaway success of The Good Companions which set him up as a Man of Letters for the rest of his long life. His second novel Angel Pavement is a tour de force but failed to impress critics looking for more of the high jinks of his first novel.

Once Priestley had started to write fiction he worked as a fulltime writer disciplining himself to a rigid daily writing schedule that produced two or three books a year. But public acclaim did not really arrive until late middle age when the BBC made the quirky decision to employ him as a radio broadcaster.

In 1940 after the debacle of Dunkerque, the part Priestley played was as important as that of Churchill in turning this devastating defeat into future victories. Priestley established himself in the short space of three months as the real voice of the common people. But Priestley's patriotism had no military edge. It sprang from love of his homeland and not from hate of the foreigner.

By the 1940s Priestley was well known as a playwright but regarded as a lightweight by the Bloomsbury Set and their literary hinterland. But this set had a tendency to dismiss anyone who was not one of them as boring. Priestley took a very different attitude. He saw mystery and wonder in everything and was enraptured by the sheer diversity of humanity.

Unlike Virginia Woolf and Jean-Paul Sartre and their disciples, Priestley was in the Checkov camp that delighted in people…warts and all. Besides his preference for working at his craft rather than posing for his contemporaries was part of the reason. But his unapologetic insistence on addressing what he had to say to the common man and woman would always set him apart. And it seems that the critics have won.

In the 1950s Priestley immediately understood the significance of the Atomic Bomb and played an important role in the establishment of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. By his sixties Priestley’s writing and thinking had matured to such a degree that there is little penned between 1960 and 1984 that is without insight and wisdom.

During the course of his lifetime Priestley became world famous as an essayist, playwright, novelist, social critic and historian. He also wrote an opera libretto…The Olympians…a television screen play, poetry and short stories. But today his books are mostly out of print and his name is all but forgotten except in the dusty forgotten stacks of university libraries and used book dealers…a most undeserved fate for one of the deepest thinkers and most influential essayists and playwrights of the twentieth century. But he will rise again.

In a 15-year period after his 70th birthday Priestley published twenty-one books. He had that rare ability to see deeper and further than his contemporaries. He also held the conviction that his work should be accessible to the common people and not just to the professors. Ordinary people did not take a delight in abstract arguments. Indeed they neither understand them nor care to know about them.

In The Magicians for instance Priestley uses Ouspensky’s time-recurrence theory to argue that we should take seriously our time on earth. It may be all the time we have…and we may have it for an eternity. He used the novel form so that this idea might be shared with ordinary people.

Priestley was offered a knighthood and a peerage as a token of his homeland's esteem for his work but he refused them both…eventually settline for the Order of Merit in 1977. Priestley was an energetic essay writer in his early years and returned to the genre in later life when at the height of his powers with knowledge, experience and literary skills.

Right up to the end of his life he would deliver astonishing little masterpieces. Each carried a sense of purpose and great depth of meaning. Delights would make an excellent Book of The Day for some enterprising publisher while his biographical essays like Over the Long, High Wall and Journey over the Rainbow…written with Jaquetta Hawkes…are literary masterpieces. Literature and Western Man and his forgotten and underrated political tract Topside are superbly crafted examples of their type.

Priestley was a man with something to say. But he also knew how to say it well so as to command attention. The political and cultural establishments were always wary of him. He was seldom on message. He disapproved of most of them and much of what they did…and he was not afraid to say so.

The two charters for the Radical Consultation were hammered out over the weekend and are now up on the website. I am gradually adding content but for the time being only the Conference Bookshop, Who’s Who and Papers have been placed in the public domain.

My daughter remarked that the brochure we sent out with The Ecologist last month was weak on what the conference is about. In fact she has identified a broader weakness…the abandonment of our original intention to focus on youth recruitment. So a second flyer is now needed targeted at a younger audience.

Adam Crosland is working on a flyer for the Any Real Questions Show but another is needed with Ms Leviathan on one side and the two charters on the other. This should include a call for lyrics and MP3 files and act as a recruiting poster for the Knights of Gaia…who could set up their own Fringe Meeting at the conference.

On Friday night the British Broadcasting Corporation descended from on high and dwelt among us for sixty fun-filled minutes in the heart of Swindon. ‘Tonight Any Questions comes to you from the Pilgrim Centre in Swindon in the lovely county of Wiltshire. On tonight’s panel are Colin Blakemore of the Medical Research Council, Jackie Ballard from the RSPCA, the columnist Sir Max Hastings and Roger Scruton who has written lots of clever books. I am your host Jonathan Dimbleby. The first question please.’ Listen to us clapping…courtesy of the BBC.

I submitted a question about the abuse of parliamentary time by the Labour Government to force through their ban on fox hunting and John Papworth wanted the panel to bedazzle us with their thoughts on toxic waste dumping in their own backyard…Purton P & Qs is trying to stop the one in the village importing more muck. But we missed the cut.

A factotum from the BBC News Department was brought along to do the Warm-up Routine and duly assured us that Gilligan Moments in news broadcasting were the norm when asked why the BBC routinely uses different language to describe similar acts by Israel, Hamas or Hezbollah.

John Papworth…not one to be kept down…got in a question at the tail-end of the warm-up session while the Great and Good were trooping onto the stage. He wanted to know why the BBC puts police reports and other trivia in their news bulletins when listeners want to know what is really going on in the world? The response was along the lines of 'We do our best. Nobody's perfect. It is not easy to please all the people all the time.' Factotum was cut short by the eight o’clock news…which duly confirmed John's point.

My impression was of conversations at an Islington dinner party with its rather sophisticated posing...at least by the standards of a Wine & Cheese Party in Rye…and typical of much Radio 4 intellectual chatter. Newspaper columns talking at each other. The role allotted to the audience by the BBC was to deliver dutiful applause at the drop of the clever one-liner so I am left with the memory of a chimpanzee' tea party. The panellists were neither politicians nor stand-up comics so witty aphorisms were rather thin on the ground. The BBC could have stayed in London and faked the local audience. The age of the Instant Applause Machine is nigh. Abandon hope all ye who love live broadcasts.

All this is a little unfair to the BBC because Any Questions is the first half of a two-part programme with the sequel Any Answers giving the Great Unwashed the chance to challenge the panelists and their conventional wisdoms with their own uninformed prejudices. But there was not much atmosphere in the hall and sensing this Jonathan Dimbleby wound up the show several minutes early and tried to get the Swindon ordeal over as soon as he could. This confused Max Hastings…wise in the ways of the Beeb…who asked whether they were still on air. Nobody seemed to know.

It is four weeks since Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers prompting a ground and air assault on Lebanon by the Israeli Army. In that time 932 people have been killed in Lebanon with 75 missing presumed dead. 29 Lebanese Army soldiers have been killed. 3293 Lebanese have been wounded…half of them children. 913000 Lebanese have been displaced…a third of them children. A hundred Israelis have been killed and at least two thousand wounded. Ten thousand Israeli soldiers are currently fighting Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon.

Three thousand rockets have been fired at Israel by Hezbollah…the daily average is 90 rising to 169 over the past five days. Israel has flown 8700 bombing sorties, destroying 146 bridges and 72 roads. Up to thirty thousand tons of oil have spilled into the Mediterranean since an Israeli air strike on Jieh Power Station. Every country except the USA and the UK is calling for an immediate cease-fire. No UN Resolutions have been passed about the conflict.

After the Any Questions Show at the Pilgrim Centre in Swindon Duncan Butler boldly organised the distribution of conference brochures as the audience left the hall. These were surprisingly well received. The good news was the absence of small heaps of discarded brochures at the foot of the stairs. The bad news was that the only person who refused one was The Mayor of Swindon.

While I have been researching Escalator Down Times (EDT) and Mobile Phone Habits (MPH) in Stockholm my son has been investigating local life from Cape Town to the Tanzanian Border. On Thursday evening we got together in Stockholm to compare notes and concluded that Sweden needs more explaining than Malawi or Mozambique...double click below...you need a media player open and loud speakers switched on...and you may be asked to run an Internet Explorer Active X control to view.

Two facts stood out. I rode a thousand escalators in Stockholm…and not one of them was out of action. Kindergarten Children are the fellow passengers of choice on the Stockholm Subway because everyone else chatters incessantly on their mobile phones…which in the land of Ericsson work deep underground. Rambo Police Gunslingers are unlikely to blame communications failures when slaying innocent Brazilian Catholics going about their Lawful Occasions.

Conspiracy Theorists do a rather poor job of discriminating between the State of Israel, American Jewry, the Jewish Diaspora, The Zionists and International Jewish Finance when cobbling together their accusations. So I sympathise with Jewish exasperations and share their concerns about the consequences of such faulty renditions of reality.

I have come across some intriguing conspiracy theories in my time and a Zionist one found its way into the appendix of my manuscript The Jewish Question compiled in Boston in 1986. The theory explained all manner of odd facts like the presence of Mossad advisers in African Courts and the strange fascination of the African Diamond Trade.

The theory is that Zionists have conspired to link the large Jewish Communities in Johannesburg and Tel Aviv by delivering on the British Imperial Dream of a single civilization from Cape to Cairo. The argument is that Africa is the only continent still up for grabs so let the slaughter of the indigenous aboriginal population commence…in the time-honoured imperial tradition of moving yourselves in by moving the present inhabitants out.

In Wednesday’s weblog I suggested that killing the killer is off the agenda…but maybe not. Last week Mijailo Mijailović…convicted of the murder of Anna Lindh…attacked a fellow intern in his Swedish Psychiatric Clinic in Sundsvall supposedly to get himself into the safety of the clinic’s hospital wards. Apparently a local newspaper ran a story that a warden had been bribed to smuggle a gun into the clinic to be used to kill Mijailović. The story is apparently untrue but confirmed Mijailović’s suspicions that he is a target for assassination. Strange times indeed.

Another Swedish news item last week is that half the country’s nuclear reactors have been shut down. But the story is not that a country that can run thousands of escalators with impeccable efficiency cannot operate its nuclear power plants safely but that politicians of all stripes…with the exception of the Swedish Green Party…are scrambling to avoid debating Nuclear Power in the run-up to next month’s parliamentary elections. Why are they so scared?

Managing complexity is no simple matter. To get myself to Wiltshire yesterday a large number of very complex systems had to work…and these systems continue to do so day in and day out. Ordinary people take all this for granted and believe it to be the most natural thing in the world. But the overall complexity is mind-boggling and the threats of disruption innumerable. Yet nobody bats an eyelid.

To get to Stockholm’s Skavsta to catch my 0640 Ryanair Flight 051 to London Stansted I needed the Night Bus 595 from Sundbyberg to Cityterminalen to connect to Flygbussarna’s coach to the airport south of the city. On arrival in England I had to organise online credit card payments to National Express to get myself from the airport to Central London, from Victoria Coach Station to Swindon Coach Station and then to Totnes and back next week.

The complexity of the systems that keep the world going round beggars belief. One of them made available £400 in the Hole-in-the-Wall upon my arrival in England. How would the Germans cope today with another Hyperinflation like the one Ernest Hemingway wrote dispatches about as a cub reporter. ‘The first panacea for a mismanaged nation,’ he wrote, ‘is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.’

Yesterday was my last full day in Stockholm…perhaps for a while…and I had a few errands left to do so I took the Orient Express to Kungsträdgården…the scene of one of the world’s first Green Protests in the late sixties over an old gnarled elm tree that the authorities planned to pull down to make way for a subway exit. Sverigehuset used to be the place to go for Things Swedish…like Carl Larsson’s books My Home, My Family and My Farm. My Swedish Monarchy book also sold well from the best bookshop in Sweden for Scandinavian Literature in Foreign Languages.

Carl Larsson was on my list once again. But topping the list this time round was a DVD of Ingmar Bergman’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute which is well-nigh impossible to get in England. Somewhat miffed by the disappearance of Sweden House I crossed over the road to Nordiska Kompaniet. The last time I was here with intent was for a Jan Guillou Book Launch in 1980. I bought his book and gave him a free copy of The Rise & Fall of the Swedish Green Party (1982-1997) which he probably threw away when he got home…assuming he kept it that long.

In NK’s Music Department on the top floor an assistant found me a US edition…and format…by The Criterion Collection for 399 kronor (£30). This was progress of a sort but I noticed that the copyright was with Sveriges Radio 1975 which gave me another avenue of investigation. So I noted the reference and left it at that. Once upon a time back in the Days of Vinyl I had a rather nice presentation pack but must have given it away…and of course there is Google. But it was turning out to be a frustrating morning so I switched to my Research Mode. Anna Lindh had been knifed to death a few floors below me so I wandered around among the lady’s lingerie to get myself on camera.

Nordiska Kompaniet on Stockholm’s Kungsgatan is the most elegant department store in Sweden. And Ladieswear on the first floor is where you go to rub shoulders with B-List Celebs and admire Sweden’s Rich & Famous. Magdalena’s mother Dagmar was Chief Buyer here after her husband died and in 1960s Sweden this would have been one of the top jobs in the business. So we are talking Tiffany’s of New York or Harvey Nicholls of Oxford Street. In the normal course of events NK is not the place a lone assassin goes to knife to death Sweden’s Foreign Minister.

Three other things struck me. Firstly baseball caps are not de rigour at NK. I saw just one in the whole time I was there...on the head of an American Tourist who had either wandered in by accident or was hanging about waiting for his wife. Secondly there were almost no surveillance cameras in evidence on the first floor…just one at the top of the escalator and a couple to prevent shoplifting pointing at the clothes racks. Perhaps they are hidden?

The public was told that the baseball-cap photos that got Per-Olof Svensson arrested produced two days after the stabbing came from surveillance cameras above the first floor. This would mean the attack taking place fairly close to the central atrium. Based on floor space and lay-out the chances of that were about 1 in 15…and I failed to spot any cameras anyway.

Thirdly…and perhaps I am being naïve expecting this of a business…but I thought I would find some mark of respect or some recognition of the events of the day before Nine Eleven…a plaque or a display collecting for the Anna Lindh Memorial Fund. But there is nothing there at all. NK seems to have airbrushed out the incident from their corporate psyche. I was tempted to interview a shop assistant but it was Ladieswear and I was unsure just how my morbid curiosity would be received so discretion won the day. But it was surreal. And I left the store bewildered.

Jan Guillou was in the newspapers this morning after giving a Keynote Speech at Stockholm’s Pride Festival. It was a bold choice as he is his own man and not one to take the easy Politically Correct option if it doesn’t suit him. The Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson has been criticised for staying away from the festival. But my sympathies are with Persson. My blogs could be labelled homophobic because they fail to discuss Gay Issues.

I am not a fan of The Gay Movement or a supporter of Gay Rights. As a wordsmith I object to the hijacking of the word gay and if you want to be accepted as a person whatever your sexual orientation then forming a special interest group to point out how different you are to everybody else seems perverse. I also find the idea of sticking Dicks up other men’s Arses fairly unpleasant…nor do I want to be confronted with words like Incest and Cock when checking my e-mail. The best portrayal of a man in public life wrestling with the consequences of his homosexuality comes from Edwina Currie in This Honourable House. The Ambassadors and Chasing Men also deserve better reviews than they have received. Edwina is underrated as a person and a politician…and discriminated against as a writer.

I have less racism, sexism, ageism or any other -ism than others of my acquaintance. I treat everybody as a person first and karlman or wyfman second. After that I seek to discover whether they have a good heart and a keen mind…and how they are choosing to use them. In other words my approach is that of Jane Austen and Ayn Rand. Creating private clubs to administer spurious claims for similarities and act as a homogeneous group wielding bogus collective rights against people who are not prepared to…or permitted to…join the club is not the right road to travel.

Today on my way to check out the new Science City at Kista I hopped off at Hallonbergen…one stop before…and took a quick 20-minute tour to see how the place was looking 35 years after I built it. There were trees for a start…which makes a big difference…and the feeling of a mature urban environment. So much so that I was not sure I had the right place. Perhaps my memory had failed me? So I took the lift down a few floors to my little bit of the action. Everything was fine…just as I had left it. So I took a few photos on my mobile phone to convince myself.

My last job as a Civil Engineer in Sweden was all Panic & Crisis. It was 1970. New suburbs were shooting up all over Stockholm as the Swedish Construction Industry moved their cranes from site to site. I caught the tail-end of Tensta and Rinkeby and the full brunt of the southward expansion towards Södertälje.

I was working for the Stockholm office of A-Betong with head office in Växjö Småland. The firm had started life selling concrete railway sleepers to the Swedish Railways and then diversified into apartment building. My boss Roger Everett…a Cambridge man…persuaded the Swedish Government that I was essential to the National Economy as we were agents for some black gooey stuff called Synthaprufe produced by the British Coal Board and used to waterproof concrete floors.

Stockholm sits on granite so the way construction works is that Alfred Nobel goes in first and blows the building site to smithereens. This takes some blasting. Next comes the contractor who puts in the foundations and the pipe work. Then it’s our turn. Our closest factory was an hour away in Strängnäs. From here 30-metre long reinforced concrete floor sections…state of the art…were sent on low loaders to the building site for craning into position.

Our job was to put up a sturdy concrete box for the five-story apartment building to sit on…and for cars to be stored in later. Our main rival in prefabricated housing was Strängbetong…although in situ construction often gave us a run for our money. But it was boom time and the era of Keynesian Special Investment Funds so factories were working flat out.

Production problems at the factory were always a nightmare. They happen because concrete is more art than science and because we were always on tight schedules to get on site, crane the concrete into place, bolt the slabs together, clean up and get away before the next gang of contractors came on site. Winter construction in Sweden is an art-form.

Then two things happened. A-System…A-Betong’s Stockholm Sales Office…took home a contract they expected Strängbetong to get. I think they shared contracts out over lunch but don’t quote me. It was tight but with an extra production line and some juggling of shifts it could be done. The job was between Solna and Sundbyberg on a green field site called Hallonbergen…Berry Hill…which it was until we poured concrete over all the blueberries.

So far so good…but on the back burner was a massive project in the centre of Stockholm to give the Swedish Riksdag a new home. This project was big enough to exhaust Sweden’s reinforced concrete factory capacity requiring low loaders coming in from Denmark. Moreover it was a political hot potato. The members wanted more space but they also liked it where they were. The debate looked set to run and run.

But then suddenly the MPs decided to go for a completely new building…and of course they wanted it up and running yesterday. A-Betong and Strängbetong were encouraged to make their collusion official. So they did…and came up with a plan. It quickly got the go-ahead.

Murphy had been watching all this from the sidelines with some amusement. He timed his run well. With Hallonbergen at Peak Delivery and with First Deliveries in place for the Parliament Building several consignments of floor sections from Strängbetong‘s factory failed their Strength Tests. You can’t re-melt concrete and re-cycle it. It is only good for hardcore. We got very little sleep that week. The plan we came up with meant stripping units from Hallonbergen, sending them to Sergels Torg and reworking them on site to fit a completely different set of blueprints.

Both contracts were completed on schedule…though we were scrambling. But the irony is that the new parliament building was never used. The Riksdag stayed put…and built another floor instead. My building became Stockholm’s equivalent of The London Dome…before Anna Lindh and Elisabet Spens had it re-branded as Kulturhuset.

There will be two very sad boys next summer at their mother’s 50th birthday…for she will not be there. She was murdered three years ago. When she was their age she wanted to be a librarian…so she could read books all day. But her life changed dramatically in 1969 when at the age of 12 she wrote to the Uppsala MP Birgitta Dahl…chair of Olof Palme’s Vietnam Committee…telling her of the Vietnam War Display she was planning for her Local School.

Her sons’ interests might have been better served if Birgitta Dahl had advised their mother to work hard, play hard…and take to heart John Keats’ Ode on Indolence. Had Anna Lindh received and heeded this advice her grandchildren might be celebrating Farmor’s 80th birthday on 19th June 2037 by which time she would have become a Local Hero idolised by several generations of local children who had loved her and been loved by her.

At the first Radical Consultation five years ago I convened the Work and Human Fulfilment Workshop. In the first session we recorded each key point made in the course of the discussion. After two hours the number of key points had reached one hundred so we adjourned for lunch. After lunch a rating of 1 (irrelevant) to 5 (crucial) was attributed to them. Our workshop’s presentation to the Full Plenary Session is in the Conference Proceedings.

On the issue of Vocation and Toil we took the view that one of the aims of society should be to liberate people from toil. But the purpose of doing so was not to turn them into Leisure Consumers but to direct their attention towards Good Work…by which we meant work that was socially useful, ecologically acceptable and humanly fulfilling.

In our summary of the discussion we remarked that Schooling was indoctrinating young people with the Career Mentality rather than instilling in them the idea of Good Work; that School Career Fairs were dominated by Big Business…Price Waterhouse instead of Purton Farm…and that Big Problems were perceived as requiring Global Organisations…which is where all the really Big Jobs were to be found. We believed this was wrong.

Instead we suggested the encouragement of the idea that a myriad of little local personal responses might be a better approach; that Food Work should be an integral part of everyone’s Annual Round and that work needed to become Personal and Proximate...rather than Impersonal and serving Distant Needs. We recommended more Own Work and wider circulation of books like Future Work and Future Wealth by James Robertson.

I do not intend to speculate about Anna Lindh’s killers. I have no Insider Knowledge, no Deep Throat to point me in the right direction and no Investigative Resources to call upon. But it is quite wrong to dismiss people as Assassination Freaks…arguing the improbable complexity of any Conspiracy Theory…just because they believe there was a reason for getting rid of Anna Lindh. I accept the argument. But the Random Lone Assassin Scenario shares this complexity. On the face of it both explanations are wildly improbable. Yet one of them is correct.

My own position is that the more you weigh the improbabilities the more implausible suicides…Petra and David Kelly…become and the more a pattern seems to be emerging where turbulent priests whatever their persuasion are removed by Lone Assassins and Violent Accidental Death…John Lennon, Princess Diana, Olof Palme.

Killing the killers is no longer necessary…Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan…it is enough to effect the assassin’s escape and delay his capture until the Men In White Coats get to work to wipe clean the mental slate…or neuro-linguistically cover up previous traces. At John Grinder’s NLP and Hypnosis seminar in Provincetown in 1982 he mentioned sitting in on Therapy Sessions and counting the number of times therapists unwittingly implanted NLP triggers…and then removed them a little while later. Then you must avoid cross-examination and control the enquiry.

And just how difficult is it to plant a sleeper at a hospital or gain access to the patient during the chaos of an emergency? If the blood sample from Princess Diana’s chauffeur can be replaced…and this appears increasingly likely…then how improbable is it that blood for transfusions can be poisoned and switched? Hospitals are Dangerous Places at the best of time…and security is never at the top of their agenda. Even in Sweden the precaution of a Castro Strategy would seem now to make sense. Why make it possible to predict the destination hospital for high ARIs?

Everything is relative as Albert Einstein delighted in telling posterity…to the horror of those theologians who like to place their faith in such absolutes as Good ‘n Evil, Right ‘n Wrong and God on My Side…and not yours. In this the Priesthoods and Webmaster Guilds are as one because Hyperlinks can be both absolute and relative…like our ethics.

This was causing me problems over the weekend because of the way I am cobbling together the radcon III website by modifying a lot of radcon I files. Here is a short tutorial for when you run into this problem.

The two big website-makers…Macromedia’s Dreamweaver and Microsoft’s FrontPage…can get too clever so you end up with links to local hard drives or servers. Here they are without their related Hyper Text Mark-Up Language (HTML):

"file:\\\C:\windows\desktop\document.html"
"www.server\people\someone\document.html".

When you post your page to the server, open your browser and click on the hyperlink everything is hunky-dory…and up pops the webpage you want to link to. Unfortunately you are the only person on the planet who accomplishes this feat because nobody else has the file document.html on their desktop or has your user privileges on the server.

Realising this is the first step towards sorting it…or debugging it in NerdSpeak. You need either "http://www.server/people/someone/document.html" or "document.html".

Relative links are more elegant as your website is relatively self-contained with the minimum of endogenous links…to use GordonBrownSpeak. But with today’s fast broadband, browser loading speed is not an argument for relative links as absolute links are instantaneous…when pointing at the right address. One day you will thank me for enlightening you….although changing wrong links can be a slog...but a once off slog and not eternally recurring.

Just before the turn of the century I talked Toni Pinschof into setting up a Lets Team in Brittany to translate Tom Greco’s New Money for Healthy Communities into French. Toni did his usual class organising act. And the team did an excellent job with the translating…for which they are now receiving…in principle…a life-time’s supply of vegetables from Kegroaz-Vraz...Toni’s organic farm in the Parish of Mael-Pestivien 45 minutes drive from Morlaix.

I use the term in principle advisedly because the Lets Scheme has gone the way of many…if not most…Lets Schemes and folded after the waning of initial enthusiasm…much of it generated by Toni’s persuasions. However I take part of the blame for its demise…these schemes go with a whimper not with a bang…because I promoted the Monnaies Locales Project as an Investment whereas with hindsight Monnaies Locales has turned out to be a Speculation.

One day the project may be a Successful Speculation but as time goes by that enigmatic lady…Ted Hughes’ Goddess of Complete Being…has taken her toll. Silvio Gesell believed everything should be biodegradable by nature or by human design and not by stealth. He saw differing decay rates as the cause of many inequalities. Money Deflation…incorrectly labelled Inflation…does Gesell’s Job much better than any Stamp ‘n Coupon system but it has undesirable side effects rooted in the Debt/Usury Central Banking mechanisms that misappropriate the rewards.

However the odds of project success are declining for two reasons…Obsolescence of Knowledge and Progress in Understanding. Not all knowledge becomes obsolete but much technical knowledge does while Tom Greco’s progress has led to the publication of a better book entitled Money: Creating an Alternative to Legal Tender.

Nonetheless the real problem lies with the Lets Protocols and their inability to cope with The Long-term or Risk. They work best as barter schemes…extended to triangular trade and beyond involving three or more exchanges coordinated by a Lets Administrator. Tom Greco recommends bringing outstanding trades to a close after two years.

Ours is a classic failure. We thought we had a publisher lined up but he withdrew. Toni was to have Euros as well as Vegetables…both show high demand and short supply in Lets Schemes…to exchange for Car Maintenance and Indian Massage. Guilt did its thing and I organised the French Manuscript as an e-book from cesc publications. But this is just piling speculation upon speculation and it has yet to deliver any euros or cybercash to remonetarise Toni’s local currency scheme. But hope springs eternal...our free downloads of Monnaies Locales shot up last month.