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.
have caused adults and children from five generations to roar with shared laughter.have caused adults and children from five generations to roar with shared laughter.

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. So 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 Europen 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 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.