William Shepherd

The Global Warming Conspiracy is spilling over into the National Energy Agenda which is now marching off in quite the wrong direction. But my English Energy Agenda for a New Century and the Government’s proposals for Climate and Energy Management is quite revealing about the Who? Whom?

Here are the results of an analysis that reverses the 10-point programme inherent in my response to the official British Government's Climate & Energy Policy announced at this year’s Labour Party Conference. From this analysis real specific conspirators begin to emerge...and it is beginning to look like our usual suspects. The lines of battle are beginning to be drawn.

My first four policy recommendations for immediate action are to outlaw the use and development of Climate Weapons; withdraw from the Kyoto Treaty; decommission all Nuclear Power Plants and stop wasting electricity on space heating. Hence Enemy One is the Military Climate Weaponry Programmes in Russia, US, China and elsewhere; Enemy Two is the One World Government Conspirators; Enemy Three is the Nuclear Industry and Enemy Four is all those pulling the wool over our eyes by fraudulently claiming that Energy Need and Electricity Need are synonymous. They are not…electricity is essential for less than a tenth of our energy needs.

My next two policy recommendations were to adopt Zero Tolerance and Polluter Pays policies for emission of all substances into Landscape and Atmosphere. Hence Enemy Five is those who are using the fraudulent Carbonista Theology to limit Private Corporate Liability from their much wider responsibilities to eliminate all pollution and implement Closed Recovery & Recycling Systems throughout the Supply Production & Distribution Chain.

Enemy Six is the same as Enemy Five but the Looting Mechanism is different. Instead of avoiding paying the full public costs of their Commercial Operations the trick is to get the Public Purse to pick up the Capital Investment tab for staying in business and reaping future profits.

In my Energy Wars article I discuss Energy Chemistry in which our steady shift from Carbon Energy to Hydrogen Energy is explained. The Carbonista Theology allows the costs of this shift in raw feed material to be dumped on the public…enhancing the profits raked in for Private Gain.

Enemy Seven is the National, European and Global Economic & Political Forces intent on preserving the piping and metering mentality to energy distribution for oil, gas, hydrogen & electricity and Enemy Eight is all those centralising forces opposed to Real Subsidiarity.

National and International Piping Grids for energy, water, telephones, information…indeed for anything…are centralising and controlling devices. But to determine a policy response it is necessary to specify the Nexus of Power and to establish administrative structures at this level.

Dismantling the National Piped Energy Grids means closing the valves to the international grids, phasing out national piping infrastructures and building out local piping grids. During the transition access arrangements to the Channel Tunnel cables to France’s Nuclear Electricity and the North Sea pipelines to Norway’s gas fields would make sense.

The Peacetime equivalent of Wartime Mobilization will be needed…a task I would give to the English Counties…not by throwing money at County Councils but by empowering the Lord Lieutenants. Establishing a Lord Lieutenant’s Department with Cabinet status would be the best way…with Prince Charles as the Cabinet Minister heading up the department and doing the head-banging needed to set County Disconnection Dates. But there is another reason to set up a Parallel County Structure separated from all existing Administrative Channels.

Enemy Nine is the Money Power comprising the international network of 125 Central Banks, the Central Banking Debt-Usury Mechanism and the Commercial Banking System while Enemy Ten is the Merchants and their Poodle Parliaments. Existing National Power Structures will do everything in their power to sabotage this Energy Policy.

It is not because of any Ecclesiastic, Royalist or Republican Leanings that the Church and the Monarchy are being resurrected to mobilise the country and deliver a completely new 21st Century Energy Infrastructure but because it is the best way to introduce the Countervailing Power that will be needed. Existing structures are incapable of implementing the Energy Policy the country needs.

The only way We The People can outflank the Ten Public Enemies who will coalesce as Saboteurs and Conspirators to retain their Centrally-controlled Piped Energy Infrastructure…howbeit with ever decreasing carbon-content in their pipes paid for by the Public Purse…is to strip them of their power.

Their power originates in two crucial Social Mechanisms...money and people. Issuing money in England must be removed from the Central and Commercial Banks and retuned to County Banks and Local Mints.

Handled creatively at the county level recruiting people for the task offers opportunities for creative Public Policy. Direct Barter without Money Middling of A Good Day’s Work for a Good Day’s Pay could take the form of a Home Free & Clear after a certain number of days work on the County Energy Agenda. At a stroke such a policy at county level would remove much of the Financial Shenanigans from the Residential Housing Markets and provide a means of outmanoeuvring the key mechanism used in England to control work and job choices.

At the beginning of 1999 I wrote an essay entitled The Future for Large Organisations during a week working on my Master’s Thesis at Stockholm University’s School of Business. At the time I believed it to be 25-years ahead of its time as I found no one with whom I could discuss the ideas. Five years ago I included the paper in my Radical Consultation Workshop on Work and Human Fulfilment. It was again ignored. But on this occasion I assumed that although it may have been 25-years ahead of the Perception of Reality it was only 5-years ahead of Reality Itself.

Two years ago I associated the essay with Schumacher’s thinking on Organisation & Size and submitted the 2500-word article to Fourth World Review. But it was outside the editor’s 19th century frame of reference and so it remains unpublished and undiscussed. I will be returning to this Old Research on Diasporas & Jigsaws in my Thursday 7th December blog. But for the moment here is my concluding paragraph…with its deferential nod to E.F. Schumacher.

‘There is much more work to be done before this Rise & Fall of Large Organisations can be defended academically, but this is the hypothesis I am muddling ahead with for the time being. And I would argue that the five principles expounded by Schumacher in his essay on the theory of large scale organisations will be relevant to a theory of large-scale organisation whichever form that large organisation might take because they seek to address that most neglected factor of the theoretician the factor of scale. The practical man can never ignore it of course because nothing works unless it is taken into account. This is how Schumacher ended his essay.

‘Many of us have been struggling for years with the problems presented by large-scale organisation, problems which are becoming ever more acute. To struggle more successfully, we need a theory, built up from principles. But from where do the principles come? They come from observation and practical understanding. The best formulation of the necessary interplay of theory and practice that I know of comes from Mao Tse-tung. Go to the practical people, he says, and learn from them: then synthesise their experience into principles and theories; and then return to the practical people and call upon them to put these principles and methods into practice so as to solve their problems and achieve freedom and happiness.’

Recorded Remittances between families and within clans are running at $250 billion per year…equal to Foreign Direct Investment and double Official Government Aid. Unrecorded Remittances are in the same range. No wonder the banks are looking to service this money flow. Global Statisticians have no idea how to count this and produce Diaspora Accounts…although Multinational Companies have accounting practices to avoid double counting.

The Real World is one where webs of personal, family, ethnic and religious bonds are being woven across the Earth’s oceans…between the Old Communities in the Old Land World and the New Pioneer Townships and Cities Dwellers in the New World that grew up at the end of the Water Ocean Trade Routes. This complex lacework animates and inspires the invisible…but immensely strong…personal bonds and tribal loyalties between the various parts of each clan in each of the cities around their ocean. Until very recently this web was primarily a support system for the new migrant or for the old or the returning triumphant migrant of an earlier migration. But not any more.

The world is moving once more into a period of relative geo-stability on a new and expanded scale and at a new and expanded pace. The Nation State within the World Empires was never a sustainable myth. It was too far divorced from Real Life. But the Local Life within the Tribal Community and the experience over a lifetime of a number of local lives within the same tribal community geographically dispersed around your own Ocean World and located in a number of city regions around that world. This is no myth.

In Birmingham as Number One I predicted that the next thirty years would see a return to ‘the personal in business’. ‘The Personal Business,’ I explained, ‘will not be Local Business it will be Ocean Business conducted on the basis of trust and Personal Ties between friends and family in their tribal communities in their City Regions. Business will return to the Personal Style of the Mercantile Era. The way of Business will be the way of the Merchant Adventurers of a former age. The Commercial Empires of the Seven Ocean World of Tomorrow will be Ethnic Businesses and their purpose will not be unending profit but civilisation for them and theirs.’

Twenty-four days to Christmas, twenty days to the Winter Solstice and 20 000 words to the end of my Blogging Odyssey. Snow has yet to cloak our Ancient Towne but here is Rye bedecked in snowy mantles at Christmastime.

Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth in Pride & Prejudice and Hugh Grant & Andie MacDowell in Four Weddings and a Funeral are the most watched films in my small Maritime Household over the past few months…getting on for a dozen helpings of each. There are three weddings in Jane Austen’s film…Lydia, Jane and Elizabeth…but Aficionados will remember the wedding number seven when the priest’s fateful words ‘If anyone knows of any just cause or impediment why these two should not be joined in Holy Matrimony let him speak now or forever hold his peace'...elicited a response from the midst of the congregation assembled to witness the happy event.

Richard Curtis had set things up for an ‘I do’ from Charles by Carrie’s remark before the ceremony that weddings were really quite easy. ‘You just say ‘I do!’ whenever anyone asks you a question.’ Unfortunately for the bride-to-be-no-more after a public intervention, the Vicar’s question was ‘Do you really love someone else, Charles? Do you?’

Today I was witness to just such a Liturgical Interruption…but in a Funeral. Hugh Moseley our Local Vicar who conducted the service declared afterwards at The Standard Inn that he had never had it happen before But Clifford Jordan tells me of an occasion when he was playing the organ at a funeral and a fight broke out in the front pews with cries of ‘Hussy!’ and ‘Trollop!’ echoing through the vestry.

Rye is not Brighton but over the past few years it has acquired a significant Gay Community of which David was part…as are several others involved with Ryesingers. Ian Potter was giving the tribute to David Peart and was in the midst of a slightly risqué story about a deep secret David had kept hidden all his life when he was interrupted from the pews.

Most of us had guessed that the punchline would not be David’s homosexuality. But a former boyfriend…and Gay Activist… jumped to a different conclusion and duly lectured the assembled congregation about David’s homosexuality, the pride he took in it and his active involvement in the Gay Movement. Wonderful Theatre. Richard Curtis could not have scripted it better. Fortunately this public intervention defused the issue…which was a Good Thing. Like any small town the subject has only become mentionable on such an occasion in the last few years.

I am always impressed by the courage it takes to break the Mould of Convention so I shook the chap’s hand at the end of the service. After sitting through a few dozen Quaker Meetings in Cambridge Massachusetts in 1980 and 1981 I am used to God’s mysterious way of moving people to speak out. Ian is a former mayor and a barrister, so he was quite unfazed by the interruption. He waited patiently for the fellow to get it off his chest, mentioned that it was not his homosexuality being alluded to and carried on where he had left off. It turned out that David’s father had worn a toupée…a shocking thing in Hartlepool in the sixties and deeply embarrassing for a young boy at Primary School.

One of the hardest things about living on the water is keeping your clothes in a presentable state…clothes and computers…so I minimalise, acquire frequently from Charity Shops and throw shirts and jeans away more often than I would otherwise. Currently I have one Dinner Jacket for Ryesingers concerts…and a light grey lounge suit that has to serve for all other occasions...including funerals. Ties get worn with The Suit…and keep me warm in the winter.

Strolling down the High Street after the funeral with my white shirt, sombre tie and lounge suit, I was accosted by a woman who rushed up to me expressing great consternation that I had not been to look through her four boxes of books in Camber. In a small town like Rye you know everybody...at least by sight or reputation. I had last seen this particular woman at Camber Church in the summer when her son married a Greek girl and a few Ryesingers provided Backing Vocals. Before I could get a word in edgeways she was off. Mistaken identity…but for whom?

The Greek Wedding was memorable as the bride’s family…in four People Carriers…had driven past the church and ended up in Folkéstoné…four syllables. Chaos ensued in mid-service when the Church Doors were flung open. The Bride’s Side was overwhelmed so I shared my chair with a charming young female Greek cousin…Christian charity.