Valentine for S

Love,
Where do you travel?
It seems you have settled
For years, at least
Physically, where do you travel
Now. My heart has moved
Many millions of miles
Around the mass of a word
A singular definition of a word
Amongst the trillions
Across the darkened sky.

Some have tried
To change my compass
Show me maps
Thrust ill formed modern usage
Crass into my lap
A luckless crop
I till
Still like a rock
In a vacuum without manumission
I travel the orbit of one definition.

Raindrops

Raindrops in spring
Still smell the same
Although among the scents of things
I have come to know some names
Of flowers and soils.
The emergence,
Curious in youth
Of Crocus, Hyacinth, and Sarcococa
Unknown comforts
Of Spring's breath
Is now a known wonder
In winter quite forgot
Liberated by raindrops
Telling my nose
That I must tend the roses.

She was classical

She was classical
The type to travel
To palaces in Crete
And finding string
Would ravel up the far end
Winding further in
Willingly where others dread
Lifeline spooled upon a bobbin
In a maze that monsters tread.
She would make a fate to speak of
With Theseus, the Bull
Or both
Live at least one more moment to the full
A flower in her youth.

Egg

Perfectly inert, outwardly
Hard I am
For how thin this armour is.
Eggshell vulnerable
One day myself
Will peck through.

Love is a long word

Call me to the campfire
When all sleep
And the great log in embers
Is a mirror of our love.
Know, as Buddhists do
Each flame
Never born nor dies the same
In dawn
We shall gather fuel.

Lion I would go with you
As we have through so many doorways
So many stairways and clouds
Tented heart a circus hidden
Just for us amid the crowds.

Those grounds we played
And shaped our thoughts
Those hallowed eaves
Where hopes were wrought
With talk uncorked
By hop and grape
Have been erased
Signs sallowed
And been replaced
All covered by the pace of change
But nothing is completely strange
When seen beside your eyes again.
Though the City's race makes brick but chalk
We share an archaeology
In the places and the streets we walk.

Walk with me
Unto the sea
Stand with me on sand once more
And let the waves lap at our toes
Then in a vessel let us go
Out beyond these balmy shores
Row together past the bay
To explore endless today.

So give us today
Words laughed over
After we have authored shopping lists
And unenunciated epics
Tailored favours worn implicit
And abandoned asking why
Our separate souls grow to arches
That hold a church roof high.

Give us then this promise
Vows for mouths of innocents
So that we too might smile
At the constants
Cast starlight
Into ink dark future
Sow our own conspiracy in sonar
Echo-locate in laughter
Values
And the outlines of tomorrow's you.

The bed weighs balanced
My other wing
Self-fulfilling Oracle
I trust this love
Like hot taps and light switches
My normal miracle.

Old friend

I met a saxophonist
Teeth like the old brass
She once blew
Dull, battered, dirty and lost.
Bewildered in well made rags
At the bus station
She begged

With time to spare
To listen and talk of nowhere
And where the roads lead
To walk local streets
And remind her of the tomorrows
She still has.

However long December runs
Some August dawns are yet to come
Of tomorrows planned when we were young
There will be some,
The simple ones.

I met a saxophonist
I gave her what change I had
She bought me a coffee.

I only want you for one thing

And she said
"You only want me for one thing".
I, dumbfounded on one heel
Plans, images and ideals
Falling over each other like a panicked crowd
And then she turned on her heel
And left.
To keep it real
I said, yes
I ain't in it
For the way we move to music
That never made the charts
Or wining and dining
Or pretty galleries of art.
It ain't the quality time I'm interested in
It's what it leads to
I only want you for one thing.

I just want you to touch me
Where others don't
We don't have to be lovers
I want to fill blank spaces
Exploring all of your gifts
Lay down my passions
Press, express, lift
Press, express, lift.
I want feet to find me
And draw me in
The way it should be
I only want you for one thing.

I just want to use
You for the tight
Concentration of the muse
Find rhythms to ride
Make lines fuse and glide
And I want it
To come from deep inside
I want those sleepless nights
Bleary eyed
Stretching to access
Every nuance express
Turning it over and over and over
Until sheets are crumpled and cast aside
Till my pen dries
And skies lighten
I don't even have to like you
Don't be frightened
Just inspire a Haiku
One piece of writing
I be honest,
I ain't even thinking as far as a fling
It's these moments
I only want you for one thing.

Three Haikus

I

Wishful thinking this
Black brush connects with pale page
How meaning is made.

II

Crow on flower branch
Bent under black brooding weight
A cry, petals fly

III

Dim, cluttered gutter
Mirrors of vanity rise
High office caught sun

Two-state solution is an oxymoron

Oxymoron
“A figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction”
OED

If I have a cup of tea
And stir in two sugars
Such that the substances are blended
One suspended in the other,
That is a solution.

If I were to separate
The sugar from the tea
That is a precipitate
In terms of chemistry.

Do you get me.

So to make the dividing line
Between Israel and Palestine
A wall, solves nothing at all.

A wall entrenches the problem
Creates boundaries between peoples
A wall does not dissolve them.
Not a solution,
But a Two-State Precipitate
Based on one of Europe’s great
Intellectual mistakes.

Herder and Fichte
Have a lot to answer for.
The idea that
People of a common culture
And field of communication
Should form a single polity
A territory called Nation
Is calamitously mistaken
In one critical assumption,
That people don’t move.

They do
And they take their culture with them
And mix and change and rearrange
You might complain or try contain
Or blame it all on immigration
But there’s a basic problem with mobility
For the geography of ethnic nations.

So the Two-State Precipitate
Proposes to erect a boundary
Name some ways as alien
Who say they’ve been there
Since way back when,
The others say you have to go
You can’t win
And you know
That’s when the bloodshed begins.
It’s the same in the Balkans, India
Rwanda, Ireland, Sudan,
Them is alien and it’s not their land
It’s made complications
Since the idea began
Because morality and trust
Only extend to Us.

In the 17th century
Europe left a third of its people dead
In disagreements over whether Jesus
Was present in communion bread.
And learnt to our prosperity,
That theocracies
Tend to be belligerent
And victimise minorities,
Righteously.

So as more burned at the stake
It became widely known
That one should always keep separate
The Church and the Throne.

So what do we bequeath
To post-war refugees,
Fiefdom over monotheists
And a poisoning creed,
Theocratic Ethnic Nationalism.

It was only ever going to end up
A magnet for zealous lunatics
With an imperfect appreciation
Of scripture,
Intuitions like Fichte
Steeped in persecution myths
And an Old Testament notion of power,
The picture looks dour.

Because the moderates will stay
Wherever they have spread
But fanatics will flock the motherland
Justify attacks on other clans
As part of a greater plan
To cleanse their god-given land
And create
The Two-State Precipitate.

Theocratic Ethnic Nationalism is the solution
To long term peace in the Middle East
If
Long term peace in the Middle East
Is a problem
And you want to get a war on
Otherwise
“Two-state solution” is an oxymoron.

Written: 2011

The Fraoch

Irish Legends

This world so full of high beauty
And cruel misunderstanding
Tracing the root, under peat
Where origins are found
At the tip,
Eye powerless.

The Fraoch

How did the fraoch catch
Blaze in fire, me to blame
I sought to tend
To wilderness
When gusts whipped
Dark unknowns to flame.

Men have hunted on these moors
They must
For furs, not honest folk
Who take the lot
For other mouths beside the pot
But those with ferrets yoked, dogs
Who come for sport
And leave a dozen gutted pelts
Athwart a stick
Thence to market to turn a trick
The flames would birth for them.

I came with canvas,
Palette and brush
For sense of place
And in no rush
To paint and sit at dusk.

Was it the cackle
Of a tattered crow, that fell
Hard as flint and sparked the grass.
No.
Was it the stone I threw
Without care
To chase the sagging silhouette
To air.
No.
Was it some unknown arsonist
While I had left my seat
That struck a spiteful match
To the heather ‘broidered heath
No.

The sketch was misunderstood
As light faded
Condemned as modernist
A poor impressionist
With hands of wood.
It was never my intent
I meant to paint as Constable
But unappointed to such skill
I didn’t reach to what I could.

I didn’t believe
In one evening I  could
Capture with a brush 
All essence of the Aos Si
Magic of this land
Beneath the peat
Which grain by grain, in time
The sea shall understand.
It was beyond my hand.

Ah, but there’s the rub
I cannot lie
Of my enchantment
Our star, who rises at dawn
Above all men, warm beyond
The horizon, pillowed on waves
I thought myself so wise.

When I was young
I would have chased
Blue over scarlet
Back and forth across the canvas
Vain siege on enchanted air
The changing moor
Eluding my brush
Till all was muddied
And I was lost in darkness.
I thought myself so wise

To paint the gathering at the gate
Rolling country, the step
Where the bar spills
Intoxicated mouths gape
At our star sinking through Fand’s rest.

And yet fire fanned behind
I didn’t know the land, the season
When so dry, small frictions
Can turn to fuse a tuft
And cinders wick through root
Just a whisper, it must have took
The scent passed missed
The dark peat blistered
And Cailleachan came
I turned to face as ambushed
A fraoch of linging flame.

I stood for all I could
What can one man do
But pat, stamp feet
And tip a glass in hope
On furnaced heath
Admit defeat and flee.
I left my easel
Which had but a crude sketch
I never should’ve left.

I had been distracted
When the fraoch lit
Ran and hid amid high rocks
Sketch left as sacrificial fuel
The Aos Si know me as some
Blocked Hockney, Hackneyed fool
Who would sculpt a crude Picasso
Slash masterpieces and call it art
I know not
How many ways to cry.

I am not one to take the sword
And cross the ford to win a prize
Not mine
I kept my brushes for the moor
Not to capture fair Fionnabhair
On canvas, she had tired
Of all those fallen for her
I was told.

Had I painted as my intent
Undistracted, thought
In watercolour
On perspective, all attention spent
The depth of picture
Would have been clear
The fraoch within my care
As the flames rose
I didn’t do that, not then
Not there.

When I was young
I would have dreamed
Of running back to the fraoch
After the flames were done
To live upon the heath
Under the gaze of the sun
Notwithstanding disbelief
But now feet know concrete
And nothing will grow till spring.

If I had the caught the fire
Before it lit the Sidhe
Oh if, if, only if
I cannot lie
I had a hope
That gossip by the gate
And a kinder hand of fate
Would see me tend a fire
Some year upon the moor.
That and nothing more
Than to place a pot upon a hearth
Open to all but cold wind
And long odds of rest of last
And to call the heath our kitchen.
That wasn’t how it happened.

The Canvas

Behind closed windows
On a studio canvas
Lit by electric light
The tip to this root
Is not so elusive
But who really knows
In the long run.
The season, friction, a whisper
I sat, back
Facing the setting sun.

Value

If this pool were not so placid
That one glance revealed your grace
Would it's bowered fishing banks
Be more your kind of place.

Could you get your favourite rush
Where one swipe will fill your net
From waters teeming generous
Leaving idle hours yet.

Would you think better what you sought
If it never took the bait
Or loosened it, off the hook
Like the one that got away.

If your line was taut
Braced heels, knuckles white
You struggled with the reel
Uncertain of the fight

Would that one that you caught
Catch your eye perhaps
Amongst the flailing silver full
Pen of writhing sprats.

I doubt that.

You would, on your way
Come again, back to these glades
One day, to cast your hook
If there was one that got away
If there was one that got away
You would
I guess
Love me a little more
If I loved you a little less.

Carnival

Viscous
As the sweet cast off of slavery's crop
Streets bloom
To the tap of taught skins
Traditions
Of summer's end. The flotsam
Of irregular masses
Jam through bottlenecks
Stone and brick
Set by empire's architects
Sun high and rich in sweat.

Amidst a deluge, rivulets push
Hard as roots
The crush, flesh dripping
Reverberates, knots and dissipates
To star-shaped, can-handed
Dancers at the break
Of Portobello, where peppered
Fluorescent yellow jackets
Are placed in shade
By rackets
And fountains of feathers
Lazarus winged,
Every colour of rainbows
And all those dug from the earth.

The grand terrace's embrace
Sprouts bromeliads of bass, apes
“Where's Anna” swing
From every fissure
With flags beyond three colours
“Portugeas?” The breeze
Howls of happiness
“Every year I” wafts
Of sweet bud, flourishing melody
“Going next door” caramelised
Meat, percussion and spice
Scale whitewash
Darwinian.

From the passage between
The Groves
Teeming like Victoria
Grow great, twice transplanted boughs
Towering Teaks, Ziggurats and Baobabs
Old as Saxon, proud
Keystones of a lively sea, glittering
And painted. An Amazon

Then shadows wake on rooftops.
Beats have blended bars into hours
Sychronised strangers to friends
Pots bubble thick and
The prowling yellow coated pride
Amongst anonymous affection
Begins to stalk.
Keystones creak and stutter
Each stillness
Shows the undergrowth of voices
Naked. The skittish herd paws tarmac
From confusion
To purpose with each rebirth
Pitched. Horns ask questions
Rally whistles, the glowering cats
Pause, lick lips and slink 
As they summon to dare, pushing
The revelling West, the herd
And the rest into musical chairs.

Berimbao
Coagulates. Day blurs and lights
Make up the throng
Scraping steaming pots
Of song. Echoes in silhouette
Sway long after Elephants
Have drifted, one leg after the other,
The final leg back.
Jetsam of polystyrene, blue plastic
Spent rounds
Paper, fluorescent jackets rest in blind
Roads. Incandescents hum
Under canopies
Still standing. The shilling, curried secrets
Barrels cradled, somewhere
In the triangle, retread, hollowing
Till the last drop
Desert sand returns, faces from the night, arid stones. Shrinking
Springs succour Bedouin, long through blackness to daylight.

The streets will wake, forgetful and washed
Plus no one got killed in West London I hear
This year was a good year.

Looking back

Across the dale the woollen hills
Are ambered from the sinking sun
Sky, peach sweet and summer ripe
Pours a blush upon all that's done.

I trod this morn, the trail I watch
The spun hill soft with dusk
The loud cavalcade to supper settled
A life away from long day's rush.

The trail's trials, the slaver sun
The noisome cage of knotted oak
Are drenched and glassy distant now
All errors seem a joke.

The sweat stung scratch that branches cut
The scorched cast chest and threats of flies
Leave seasoned, loosened skin
Downy limbs and lidded sighs.

The boot that caught the twisted root
The kilns of fire beaten feet
Yawn lace agape in yard soaked gold
Like two hounds lying sound asleep.

Spent, the echo of curse and cry
Now lies in feathered forest
As sediment with songthrush calls
Below the breezy crest

For all the struggle along the track
The rasp as treads rake spitting dust,
The path dry, treacherous is in relief
An undulating bed of hush

A loosened thread, minor yarn
Sub-plot in a play of light
Shadow-steeping, the dyer's hand
Folds land slow till left to sight
Are keeping scenes mind kens worthy
In the shallows of the night.

What if they hadn't shot King?*

"In the end the struggle is not between people at all, but a tension between justice and injustice. Nonviolent resistance is aimed not against oppressors but against oppression"
Stride Toward Freedom. Dr. Martin Luther King

What if the dark depths of prejudice
Hadn't spat a bullet, bloodstained
The single garment of destiny.

What had Dr.King lived
Counselor to schizophrenic America
Great beacon light of hope
Through ominous clouds of inferiority
Through the deep fog of misunderstanding
Moving towards the goal of justice
with calm reasonableness and wise restraint.

What if King still led
Veterans of creative suffering
Still encouraged the disinherited children of God
to sit at lunch counters
Unafraid of the word "tension"
Make bridal suites of jail cells
And love the perpetrators of the unjust system
Deluging "I-it" relationships
In his mighty stream.

Would he succumb to the tranquilising drug of gradualism,
Acquiesce and thus become as evil as the oppressor
His legacy an endless reign of meaningless chaos
A desolate night of bitterness.

Would he be a victim of interposition and nullification
In the storms of persecution
And flames of withering injustice
Such that his cup of endurance could not overflow.

What would he dramatise that it can no longer be ignored
What just and unjust laws
How long the conscience of the oppressor sleep deprived
By the legitimate and unavoidable impatience
Of non-violent gadflies,
Roused with not threats, but facts of history,
This indescribably important destiny.

To what noble heights
Could he have risen, an American Solon
With the natural medicines of air and light
Moving men from mental ruts
Unshackling brothers smothering in the airtight cage of poverty
Opening funtown to coloured children
This extremist 
Working as if it were a possibility next morning
To lift the inescapable network of mutuality
To the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood

And in winning freedom
so appeal to your heart and conscience
that he won you in the process.

"Possibly the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremeists"Letter from Birmingham City Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King

*The words in italics are those of Dr. Martin Luther King

Carcino-colonialism

Guns, germs and steel
And missionary zeal
Once raised our flag
In foreign fields.

Then the baton passed to banks,
Then MTV,
Now they tell people
That they can be free.

The new game in town,
The brand new vision,
Dupe people into thinking
They make the decisions.

No need to fox them
With broadcast Television,
Sow seeds in the feeds
And reap the fruits of division.

Studied terror and chaos,
Now cold cowards envision
A new type of conquest,
Carcino-colonialism.

II.

A complex recipe

Take a culture
And bombard it with free radicals
Till they corrupt the machinery
Connect the cells and feed them energy
Nourish with blood, till the host society
Multiplies tumour cells indefinitely.

Start with the lethargic,
Sclerotically corrupt
Despot the world forgot.
Mix fictitious avatars, amateur journalists
Food prices, camera phones
And a call to resist.
Inflate.
Serve on web space, backed by hackers
Fuel hate
Till there are visible cracks
Add special ops, sanctions and air drops,
A consensus course
For diplomats to plot.
Level the playing field
Wait,
Till flavours of global hegemony permeate.
Garnish with a representation of Democracy
Reserve a complicit military
For reasons of economy
Slake the thirst of your company
With tap broke state.

III.

Carcino-colonialism.

A virulent mutation of the imperial dream
Bastard offspring of Howard Dein's method
And Donald Rumsfeld's schemes.
So there's a Twitter account
For every thirty Tunisians
And US Air Force veterans
Blog as arrested
Damascus lesbians.
Masked men in Misrata
Are still going out after
Dark for closed courts
While NATO pumps Chinese investments
In East Libyan ports.

Now we're told of Friday Prayers in Homs
Played the thud of heavy guns
Told to worry about Iran
Not where free Syrian arms come from
Not who's connecting the comms.
As wrong, as it is murky
Slice the pie for the strong
And they might not find four and twenty
Thanks giving Turkeys.

IV.

The end of Bo Xilai days
Were always going to play
Out in public one way
Or the other.
Now it couldn't be easier
To circumvent state media
Once you've got a police chief,
Debriefed about the beef in the fiefdom
Put the facts in bytes
To they release or do you leak them.

There's a new game in Town
I hope everyone's listened
Don't go missing the tricks
Of Carcino-colonialism.

Canada Geese

The streets are heaped with grey snow
Some days ago
It settled in a shower of innocent smiles
And childhood passtimes
Delicate, joyful and soft.
That snow is lost.
A few walk the rocks
Swaddled in slow nervousness,
Beneath the Gull's screech,
Life is on hold
In brown scaffolds
And frozen ground.

Months ago
When the flames came to the trees
And nights turned from steam to wind
I watched the geese circle
A flotilla of foghorns
Bellow beating the air
Tugging to adventure
Far, more bracing climes.

Face upturned and feet earthbound
I watched them flock and go
And as the grey sets in the snow
I would that I had followed.

Speak not of roses

Speak not of roses when you talk of my love
For she is kinder than a flower of thorns
She carries no barbs to wound in your hug
Nor sits as winter sticks forlorn.

My love ne'er spites with clapsed closed buds
Her petals proud and face forever blooms
Her wise roots tap not the blood rich mud
Evercoloured beyond one sweated June

There is no sickly scent to suffocate
A curious close pressed nose
She lies not idle in staid estates
Oh name her not a common rose.

Gather all the flowers upon this earth
They make not half of my love's worth.

Valentine for A

Heron,
My summer lover
And memory of youth
Sing me a second's harmony
From your tuned strings
Resonate
For just a slowed half step
A shutter snap remembrance
Lest we forget
The romance,
The wind from the thoroughfare
Lifting your hair
An embrace by
Empire's memorial gates
The high August skies
And the cliffs of brick we fled
For the Queen's gardens
Which you lit
Like some piece of fallen heaven
As we rolled woll bail bodies
Through short fused freedom.

Democratise Taxation, the short web version

There is a crisis, a crisis in the way politicians spend our taxes. A crisis made from making the super-rich richer and waging war for US interests.

Our government misleads us, Mr Blair over Iraq, Mr Cameron over the NHS.

One simple reform could address this, participatory budgeting, the involvement of citizens in spending decisions. We all pay tax, and if we pay tax we should have a say in spending.

We have the means to restrain our government from Trojan horse policies and using legislation and subsidies to pay back political donations - a democratisation of taxation.

We already have the tools to enact this reform. The internet.

For each to be sure their taxes are spent in line with their values and the views of all voters count; election manifestos should contain budgets and voters should have the right to adjust their share of the budget that goes to each policy.

We can mandate individual policies through participatory budgeting. We can democratically fund policies and end the incitement to profligacy in the civil service that stems from having to spend or hand back a budget within the year.

We can make public services more responsive and efficienct by using information from the consumers of those services, from voters.

Consent for taxation is the most ancient cornerstone of British Democracy. It is a right signed into the Magna Carta in 1215.

It is time to replace our spluttering, steam driven democracy with a more responsive, finely tuned, digital democracy.

We now have inexpensive ways to get consent from taxpayers directly. We do not have to be “represented” by politicians, or accept their manifestoes a la carte, or tolerate their broken promises. We should call out “no taxation without allocation”

We should write a modern Magna Carta, for 800th anniversary of the original, use particpatory budgeting to make our government more true to the title ‘Democracy’.

And stop politicians squandering our taxes on wars and bankers.

A democratisation of taxation

EXTRACTS

In 1215 the British Crown signed the Magna Carta and committed that taxes would not be raised for war without the consent of those who pay. In the last ten years the nation has been led into war on a fictional pretence and there is a crisis in the direction of our collective resources.

800 years on we need to reapply the principles of democracy in the context of a profound change in information processing and distribution so that we can refocus our politicians on the interests of citizens, rather than the demands of the global elite.

We can do this through participatory budgeting, through involving citizens in the spending decisions of government, and with this reap the benefits of incorporating the local knowledge, expertise and values of citizens to make government more responsive and efficient.

We can remake the Magna Carta for the wider group of citizens in modern, digital society and unleash a new age of progress.
..................................

With all the possibilities to inform, include and interact with citizens, is it right the government enforces compulsory taxation in exchange for the this pallid pretence at representation. Are we not being sold short. If there is some social contract with the people, is it not about time we revisited the wording; examined whether the state was making good its obligations given the possibilities of today.

When tax was collected in metal and Hansard a work of arcane glyphs the government could be forgiven not consulting every voice, not making plain its business across the whole nation. But today, is publishing Hansard on the internet a sufficient response to the opportunities presented by the digital age. Could we not do more to use these now ubiquitous technologies to reshape government of and for the people.

Just as the Barons of the realm understood the natural belligerence of power hungry and with the Magna Carta forced King John to consult when raising taxes for war, and just as the Americans called no taxation without representation, asking whether they should pay for English sons to drink blood on foreign soil, we are faced again with a Crown that misleads the nation into war and coddles vested interests. We are again forced to question whether the state is abusing it’s tax raising powers. Whether some are whispering seductions in the ears of our leaders and causing them to exploit their subjects.

But thanks to the efforts of our forefathers we are citizens not subjects. And when we as citizens ask these questions and faced with the evidence, look for remedies; we can see decisive new tools unavailable to the Barons of King John. The people of those times understood that the way to rein in a state galloping towards despotism is through control of resources and now in our time we can refashion the bit and bridle not with paper and steel, but with copper, coltan and silicon.
.........
~Illegal wars on fictional pretences require our taxes to wage, the orangeries of moral hazard in which we house finance require that trillions are burnt to maintain their climate. And I ask, would our governments have behaved differently if we had a say in the spending. Would the war in Iraq have been fought if, rather than shifting around pots of cash in the black box of the Treasury, Mr Blair actually had to ask those who pay taxes to fund it? Quite possibly not. This is what the Barons knew when they forced King John to sit at the table with quill and ink and sign the Magna Carta.

Now almost eight hundred years on we need a modern Magna Carta. For wars are fought without the consent of those who pay for them and this is a violation of the most ancient element of British Democracy. A right signed onto paper in 1215. The time has come to free these rights from paper, from their prison in the archives, find them again where they have been mislaid in the corners of our mind. Each of us should call upon this right again, so that we can remake our government. Replace the rusting mechanics of our spluttering steam driven democracy with a more responsive, digitally controlled, budgetary democracy. Make a Magna Carta fit for the digital age, for mass society and economy. That states, just as the original, that if government seeks to wage war it must first have the consent of those who pay.
........




VII.

And all this can be bought about with some simple changes. Just by publishing the government’s budget on the HMRC website and adding an interface with a way to toggle allocations up and down. But while the technical changes are straightforward, the political changes are complex. For those who lust for power are seldom motivated to give away their prize once they have consummated their lust. Rather they would, if left alone seek an ever greater grip on power. And this of course, is why we periodically refresh our leadership before they become absolutely corrupted.

But now we are faced with the task of rebalancing the distribution of power, a task in which we must be successful or our children’s children will walk bent backed under the enduring weight of the greed of the current elite. Thankfully, participatory budgeting is a transparent reform. An obvious measure to anyone who appreciates the possibilities of the web. A change in step with the zeitgeist. But it is likely that those in power will be horrified, see the change as a threat and do their best to remain as blind to the possibilities; talk as turkeys do in November.

But we should shine the spotlight on participatory budgeting. Give it centre stage in the twenty first century enlightenment. Emblazon it’s successes across all areas of public debate. Make obvious its affinity with the ancient principles of our democracy, with the Magna Carta, with universal suffrage and with the efficiency of consumer led resource allocation.

We should demand participatory budgeting as an obvious natural right. We should appeal to the straightforward common sense of every man and woman that they pay tax, so they should have a say in spending. Make the obvious point that consent for taxation has been the cornerstone our democracy since its foundation and that we now have straightforward and inexpensive ways to get this consent directly. We should demand that we are not forced to live with nineteenth century governance in twenty-first century society. Demand the spirit of the Magna Carta is applied and our democratic rights recognized in a modern context. And make good these demands in the reorganisation of our government.

And the prize would be a step change in the deployment of our collective resources comparable to the original restraint of monarchies. The prize would be a government for the people, a government where our leaders must show competence and integrity in their endeavors, and are restrained from showering their courtiers with favours. A government in which all voices are heard and weighed equally. And we have the tools to make such a government at hand, and it is necessary that we use them.

For there is an enormous crisis in the direction of our collective resources, in the imperial agrandisement of foreign powers and the enrichment of the super-rich. And the current means we have of controlling our collective resources have quite clearly been inadequate. There are few alternatives within our democracy, and it is structured in a way that makes our representatives more accessible to lobbyists than the people who vote for them. So while we need to make changes in response to our new economy and society, the changes that are made favour the few, the precious few. And rather than the great majority benefiting from the huge increases in productivity and accessibility brought about by the information revolution, the gains are falling to a global elite that have captured the minds and levers of power.

But we have some ancient principles to guide us forward. We have principles that the state should be beholden unto its citizens and that there should be consent for taxation. We have an understanding of the effect of power upon those who wield it. And we have new means with which to apply these principles and understandings.

We have the means to gather local knowledge, distributed expertise, individual preference and use these in combination to more efficiently direct our collective resources. The means to re-enfranchise all those whose loosing votes are cast away. The means to curtail misrepresentation, Trojan horse policies and use to the state to pay back political donors; to make state spending a better reflection of our individual wills in combination, to make our government more true to its title of Democracy.

This could be done through participatory budgeting, through a recognition of the natural rights of citizens in a modern context. It could be done on the HMRC website, in time for the next general election, in 2015, on the eight-hundredth anniversary of the Magna Carta. Let us make a such a modern Magna Carta, fit for a new millennium, so that our children’s children, rather than cursing our greed, will laud our wisdom, just as we today laud the Barons of King John, the course that their actions set in motion and all that it has done for us. Let us not leave as our legacy the decaying relics of once great nations, buried empires, a derelict democracy, sclerotic and spluttering, fit only for enrichment of private and foreign powers.

Let us instead reawaken the principles led us first to enable the capabilities of all our citizens and seize our taxes from the greed of monarchies and mercantilists. Let us reawaken the genius of western governance that is our inheritance, let us apply this genius afresh with modern tools, with computer, the internet, with video and data-warehousing. Evolve our governance so that it is fit for our times, for the pace of change, for the integrated world.

And I can see no better measure. No change so simple and accessible and yet so profound. Nothing so straightforward that would make the state more efficient and responsive. No measure that reflects the principles of democratic government in a digital age better than a democratisation of taxation, better than online participatory budgeting. And if you agree, then let us take our voices to the halls of power and make them ring with a remade cry, no taxation without allocation, those that pay should have a say, and make a modern Magna Carta fit for our age.