rory stewart mp

Some policies seem destined to fail. Governments have tried to save our High Streets for decades. They have experimented with parking, and with rates, and with planning regulations. And the result has been catastrophe. We have gone from 43,000 butchers in 1950 to 10,000 fifty years later; from 41,000 greengrocers to 10,000. The number of bakers is now a quarter of what it used to be; the number of fishmongers, a fifth. And supermarkets now account for 93 per cent of groceries sold in the UK.

It reminds me of our policy against Somali pirates. We are told that it is vital for the national interest to stop piracy. There are seven UN resolutions calling for action, and three separate multilateral naval task forces sail out to fight them. And after all this work, there were more attacks, and we paid more ransom last year, than in any previous year. It seems that, for whatever reason, Somali pirates are too difficult for us – and High Streets sometimes seem the same. As with any such failure, it is partly because you are facing almost irresistible historical forces – and partly because there is a limit to what we are prepared to do to stop them.

The House of Commons debated how to save the British High Street again this week. It was not a party political debate – there were no whips, no party lines, not even a vote. And certainly no reporters in the gallery. But it was immensely popular: nearly sixty MPs put down to speak (I bobbed up and down for nearly five hours before I was called). My father, who often complains about “professional politicians, who have never done anything else”, would have been surprised by the speakers. Those from the new 2010 intake alone included shopkeepers, farmers, architectural planners, and GPs, and two MPs who were over sixty when first elected. The Minister described the problems of opening his own small print shop. The member for Fylde reflected on 15 years in high street retail and the problems posed by charity shops. The member for Cleethorpes explained – on the basis of 24 years of experience trying to lead urban regeneration - how grand phrases like "a visionary, strategic, and strong operational team" are dissolved in the realities of planning, traffic and parking. The debate was informed, and realistic. But also a depressing reminder of how little progress we are making in saving the High Streets.

It can seem an almost impossible fight, because the market pressures, which favour large out of town stores, are so powerful. Large retailers choose to be out of town because they can get better space for their products, better parking, and good night-time delivery. Customers often find large stores an easier and preferable shopping experience. And it is not simply about parking or price: out of town retailers often provide an enormous range of products, and display them very attractively. These near universal forces push aside the most determined resistance – they have undermined not just the markets of Penrith and Surrey but also the covered bazaars of Iran and the main streets of rural Massachusetts – and by almost exactly the same means. But they have also brought us a choice of goods unimaginable in any other context. When my neighbour’s American mother married a Cumbrian in the 1950s, she could only get olive oil in the chemist in Penrith in a miniature bottle, as medicine. Today, the Co-op seems to stock half a dozen varieties of ‘extra virgin’. (I’m not going to try to count the range in Booth’s).

If we are serious about defeating a force so powerful, so motivated, and so insidious, we need to make very difficult choices and sacrifices. It is not simply that councils would have to forego parking charges, or residents put up with night-time deliveries in the high street, or landlords be forced to let empty properties. Councils would have to be willing to turn down the huge sums offered by supermarkets, and to take the financial risk of being sued. We would need very determined local leaders (perhaps only directly elected mayors would have the status, the confidence, and the support). And Mary Portas, whose recent report is perhaps the most considered and provocative analysis of this problem, says that her instinct was to recommend, across the country, an "immediate moratorium" on any new out-of-town developments.

It is not easy to defend such a policy. All the arguments of price, market competition, choice, and money, favour the out-of-town retailers – against the "inconvenience and cost" of town centres. But however difficult a High Street is to defend, we should fight, because they matter to us in a way that Somali piracy does not. A High Street matters because it makes citizens. It offers, almost uniquely, somewhere quite different from the workplace and the home: a civic space, which is neither about business nor about privacy - a public space in which the individual rubs shoulders with fellow citizens, often half-known or unknown. From those innumerable miniature exchanges of advice and wisdom, on greens, or market squares, in the walk from the grocers to the newsagents, are woven the warp and weft of a community.

Some might think this is an old-fashioned rural view and that I have been mesmerised by the varied sandstone avenue that leads from Appleby castle to the market cross. But I’d say it may be even more important in places without a medieval centre. The reason that sixty colleagues from Dudley to Bracknell to Swindon pushed to speak this week is that they too sense how our High Streets create, and shape, a local identity, which is perhaps the most powerful and precious part of any identity.

It is easy to see Cumbria as the North-West frontier. Our land seems marked by frontiers. Even Rome, which merged and melted what is now most of the European Union, and the Arab League, had its border here. You could ride from modern Iraq, through Romania and Belgium, on fine roads, using a single language, in a single state, until, half-way between Brampton and Longtown, Rome stopped. Through the middle ages, Cumbrians held our land in a border tenancy, were ruled with a border law, and were ravaged by a border war. And even today, the frontiers exist in more than motorway signs. When I gave a talk in Penton last month I was speaking to farmers from a five mile radius, and yet you could identify every Scot in the room, because 200 yards across the border the accent changed completely.  Little wonder that our constituency is the only one in Britain with Border in its name.

And yet for seven hundred years, what is now the border, was not a border but the centre of a single kingdom, half in modern England, half in modern Scotland, independent of both, and belonging to neither. We were not in William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, and our patron saints - Mungo, Kentigern, even Ninian – were not English saints. But nor were we  – despite the pretensions of King David (who mined his silver in Alston) -  part of Scotland either. We were an independent Kingdom, sometimes Rheged, Strathclyde, the old North, Yr Hen Ogledd, but always Cumbria. A nation with its own language, spoken long before the Roman conquest: before the sea-borne Irish Gaelic speaking invaders of Scotland, or the sea-borne Anglo-Saxon speaking invaders of England. And with our own line of Kings, with their bards and genealogists: so confident that long after the Romans left, they still led their warriors into the Highlands, to Tyneside, and to the edge of Wales. So legitimate, that even when their kingdom had been reduced to a narrow stretch between Carlisle and the Clyde, Owen of Cumbria was still treated as a brother-King, alongside Athelstan of England and Constantine of Scotland, at the treaty, signed on our land at Eamont bridge.

But stand in the central lobby in Parliament and you will see the arms and saints of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, but of our old, central kingdom, no trace. Where did the nation of Cumbria go? Why did we not reappear? The United Nations has many artificial confections, some of which we have invented and invaded, from Iraq to Libya. The scattered islands, Christian and Hindu, Animist and Muslim, of South-East Asia, have been reconfigured as Indonesia. Beside the Adriatic Sea, even mountainous Montenegro has become a nation. But Cumbria, independent for longer, larger and more populous, has not.

Our neighbour, Alex Salmond, is concocting his own independent nation, partially through denying an older Cumbrian identity. Just as highland bagpipes and highland kilts are imposed on the Lowlands that had nothing to do with either, so too from Gretna, North, there are now road-signs in a language that was never spoken between Edinburgh and Dumfries at any time in human history. ‘Failte gu alba’ is a jingle in a dialect of Irish Gaelic, placed in the centre of a land which, when it spoke Celtic at all, spoke Cumbric.

No nation, even Cumbria, is inevitable and eternal. Like the Phillipines or El Salvador, Cumbria grew out of an artificial colony: the backbone of our kingdom was that extravagant exercise in imperial megalomania called Hadrian’s Wall, that planted 14 forts, 80 castles, 240 towers, and subsidised and paid tens of thousands of men for three hundred years. Like them, too, our nation was not a single people but a land of immigrants of many faiths: the Romano-British Cumbrians mixed with descendants of the Anglians, who built the cross at Bewcastle, the Norse worshippers of Odin at Oddendale, and the Syrian archers whose god lay at Kirkby Thore.  And the modern reinvention of Cumbria that destroyed our precious counties in 1974 excluded our older hinterland in Dumfries and Clydeside.

But something more than lines on a map sustained our kingdom for seven hundred years after the Romans left, and made it the last Celtic-speaking part of England. When the ancient Britons had been driven from everywhere else, something drew them here: still counting their sheep in the old language, in places still named in Cumbric: Lyvennet, Blencathra, Penrith. Some aspect of our sea-fringed moors and fells, of our city: the culture of King Urien of Rheged, Urien “city-born”, “Urien Y Eochydd, “Lord of the Rip-tide”, then and now, gave us an identity quite distinct, and almost national.

Willie Whitelaw first stood in Penrith and the Border against William Brownrigg. Some of Mr. Brownrigg’s programme seems a little anachronistic: fair wages for mole-catchers, the reintroduction of cock-fighting, no clipping the tails of Clydesdales. Mr Brownrigg did not recognise Cumbria’s traditional territories of Dumfries and Westmorland, and he only received 368 votes. But he half-sensed something in us, which never existed in Wiltshire or Norfolk, when he demanded, in his 1955 election address, "Home Rule for Cumberland”.

This morning, I saw David Cameron on his way to negotiate the treaty on the bail-out of the Eurozone. He looked surprisingly calm, given the worries of the last fortnight:  Britain has announced its worst economic figures since the Second World War; Egypt’s economy is collapsing; Syria is approaching civil war; Iran has taken another step towards the bomb, and has sent a mob to ransack the British Embassy; and now the Prime Minister is drawn again into the European crisis. Britain is not in the Euro-zone, has no intention of joining, and is not a major contributor to the rescue package.  But Europe is our closest neighbour and trading partner. And the European Union has been, for decades, a phenomenon which has divided and traumatised the Conservative party. So while the Prime Minister’s priority in this treaty negotiation is to minimise damage to our own economy, he also hopes to get some powers back from Brussels.

How hard should he push for concessions? Might Merkel and Sarkozy understand the depth of British feeling about over-regulation, and make a gracious gesture? Or would they feel blackmailed at a vulnerable time and respond bitterly? Would they feel they need our support (to enforce their rules through the European court, for example)? Or would they feel they can do without us? And if they ignored us, and made the treaty as an inner group of seventeen, would this mean only a couple of amendments which affected the Euro-zone, but were irrelevant to Britain? Or might the seventeen impose budget rules, unify their labour laws, and financial laws, and create an inner bloc, which would undermine British services, without our influence? Are the French and Germans themselves divided over the European Commission, the nation state, and nations’ obligations to each other? And what will become of the Euro-zone? A group of sixteen countries, if Greece leaves? Or eighteen, if someone else joins? Or no-one, if the whole thing collapses? Would Greece’s departure make the zone more credible, or would it topple the rest of the system as it goes?

These, and a dozen other questions, including the views of his own back-benchers, haunt the Prime Minister’s strategy. None are a closed set of clear questions, with only two answers from which he has only to select a single combination, and derive a single policy. If he could say confidently, ‘the Treaty is an existential threat, we can stop it, and Europe won’t resent our attempt'; or conversely, ‘the Treaty isn’t a threat, we can’t stop it, and Europe would resent our attempt’, he would be certain whether or not to stop it. But, instead he may feel that the Treaty is a potential threat without being certain how severe; that Britain has some power to stop it but our leverage is weak; that Europe will resent it but it is not clear how seriously or how dangerously; and that there may be merit even in a veto that fails. Meanwhile, the global context in which he is working, continues to deteriorate.

After eighteen months of international conferences and policy papers, seminars and rescue packages, Europe has not stabilised. Greece is still unwilling to leave the Euro, and still unwilling to make the reforms to avoid leaving the Euro; Italy, our third largest economy, is struggling to borrow at affordable rates. The market continues to fret and lose and profit, and Germany continues to become every day more powerful than its neighbours. Day by day, the risks, not just for Portugal, but for Britain, and even the United States, increase. The price of failure now seems many times deeper and harsher than anything we have experienced in the last five years. But what is the magic formula which can reassure the markets now? Stability mechanisms, Euro-bonds, credit-easing, Chinese sovereign wealth support, and supply side reforms? Financial integration and budgetary supervision? And how much money is required now? One trillion? Three trillion?  Unlimited guarantees from the European Central Bank?

What will European governments and their tax-payers accept? What is the limit to their self-sacrifice, altruism, and commitment to the project? And can we even be sure what effect Europe has on the British economy? Is it simply a stifling restrictive environment which costs us eight billion pounds in lost competitiveness, and another eight billion pounds in membership fees, and which we could leave, while shedding regulations, and keeping our free access to markets? Or might Europe prevent us from following the Swiss lead of free trade without membership? And are we sunk so deep into the European economy (with three millions jobs and fifty per cent of our trade dependent on Europe) that Britain could hardly survive outside the Union?

Cameron will do his best to bring Britain out of this particular Treaty negotiation, and protect us from this particular crisis. But Britain’s strategy and approach in Europe and the world, over the next decades, must ultimately be rooted in a public debate.  We, as citizens, need to drive the detailed, vigorous questioning, which alone can determine the balance of our dreams, our income, and our interests. It will not be easy to create or recreate such a political culture. But we cannot allow, indefinitely, our relationship to our closest neighbors to be reduced to the calculations of economists, the improvisations of statesmen, and a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on a referendum paper.

When I came back to London this week I found, in my cupboard, four jackets, each with a poppy in their lapel. On the day of the Penrith Remembrance service, the international football association banned the English football team from wearing poppies, on the grounds that they were ‘a nationalist symbol’. They are not. They are a response to the First World War: a war that we do not remember as a national victory, a war that in some ways we do not quite know how to remember. We all agree on the horror: the suppurating, machine-gun-riddled holocaust of the trenches; but not exactly on why we fought, or what we gained, or whether, to use the dangerous mantra, “soldiers died in vain”. Trafalgar Day or VE day are victory celebrations. But a poppy is a symbol of something still unbearable and incomprehensible.

We were not attacked in the First World War, and we were not defending British soil. And although we claimed we were fighting for human rights (against German “bestiality”) or for the honour of our alliances, or for the neutrality of Belgium, these were not fundamental reasons. In truth, many of the German atrocities were propaganda inventions, our alliances were recent and not authorised by parliament, and we had considered breaking the neutrality of Belgium ourselves. We crossed the channel and joined the French in their trenches simply because we wanted to preserve the ‘balance of power’ in Europe – a dream from the time of Napoleon. We were driven by a nightmare in which if we failed to act, Germany would occupy France, and then pose an existential threat to Britain and its Empire. Everything, it seemed, must be sacrificed to stop this.

Did Germany pose an existential threat to Britain? Would we have suffered as much as we feared from a German attack on France? I suspect not. What is indisputable, however, is that our attempt to fight them almost finished us as a civilization and a power. Germany had forty divisions in its army at the beginning of the war. We had six, so we were never strong enough, even with the French, to do more than tip the balance towards stale-mate. And that stale-mate continued until we had lost a million lives, bankrupted Europe, destroyed the prosperity and society of a continent, and introduced a suicidal peace settlement. We were at war again within twenty years.

Were we simply naïve, entering the war in a patriotic fervour, drunk on the poetry of Rupert Brooke, and believing it would be over by Christmas? Was it not until the Somme and 1916 that we realised what we had done? That was roughly what I learnt at school. But in fact many in Britain, and Cumbria, predicted what would happen from the beginning. The Carlisle Journal wrote on the 4^th of August 1914: “The worst has happened…[there is] little doubt the majority of Englishmen regard being dragged into this war with feelings of amazement and horror." Further south, the Manchester Guardian wrote, "It will be a war in which we risk everything of which we are proud, and in which we stand to gain nothing…Some day we will regret it.” Even the Times (which was the only major paper in Europe that argued for war) was writing in 1914: "Trenches and always trenches..day after day the butchery of the unknown by the unseen..." It was not only ‘neurasthenic’ war poets who grasped that our plan had not succeeded, was not succeeding, and would not succeed.

Yet, every season, a General produced a new plan, demanded more resources and promised victory. Every season, they were given their resources, and failed to deliver what they had promised. Critics decried the barrages that failed to destroy the German positions, or failed to cut the wire. But the real problem was more fundamental: it began with our decision to enter war. Once it began, no-one seemed to feel they could stop it.  Not a single senior General or cabinet minister exposed its folly at the time. Their memoirs imply that impersonal forces - arms manufacturing, technology, public opinion, finance - had left them with no option other than to sink ever deeper. And even when they could no longer believe that all this killing could be justified in the name of ‘the balance of power’, they found a deeper reason to continue: the fear that any withdrawal, after so much death, was impossible because it would mean the soldiers had died in vain. Thus hundreds of thousands more were sacrificed to justify those who had already died.

Since then war has often seemed less bad; the evil of Hitler and our eventual victory justified the Second World War; and the crisp casualty-free successes from Bosnia to Libya have made war appear – at times – as a moral and a prudent act. But the eleventh of November remembers a different phenomenon. It reminds us how a war can become so swollen with fear and guilt, and horror, that it develops – even when no-one believes in it anymore – a momentum of its own. And the reason we should be so reluctant to go to war, however attractive the cause, or promising the odds, lies in this irrational momentum. Because, in war, once you have begun, and begun to fail, we find it almost impossible to turn back.

Last Monday was the first revolt I have seen in Parliament. It broke almost without warning. Things had seemed calm until then: three and a half years to the election, the conference tranquil, the Prime Minister popular, Gaddafi dead, the Foreign Secretary on his way to the  Commonwealth meeting in Australia. Then the back-bench business committee proposed a referendum for leaving the European Union.

This committee has been newly created to give more power to Parliament. I had used it in the summer to challenge government policy on mobile phone coverage. It hadn’t been easy: I had to justify myself repeatedly to whips and ministers - a three-line whip was threatened before being dropped, and it had been hard to persuade colleagues to vote. But when we won the vote, policy seemed to change. The regulator reconsidered their coverage obligation – particularly in rural areas - and the Chancellor found over £100 million for mobile masts. But the government could see the benefits of enhanced mobile coverage. A referendum on Europe was different.

100,000 people had signed a petition calling for a debate, and the back-bench business committee introduced a motion to force the government to hold a referendum in the next session, asking whether to leave the European Union, stay, or renegotiate powers. The government fought back with a three-line whip. And, almost immediately, dozens of MPs rebelled. Ten telephoned me to discuss the vote: I spent almost the entire train-ride from Penrith to London talking to them from the gap between the carriages. Many would only stay in the Union if Britain could opt-out of all the terms of the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties, or become a version of Norway or Switzerland, engaged with nothing except free trade.

I spent three days preparing my speech for the debate. We didn’t need a referendum to know that many people had been uncomfortable with the European Union for forty years. Britain had joined a club whose fees it came to dislike, and whose rules and restrictions it resented.  Many continental Europeans say that the EU has made it unthinkable for Germany or France to go to war again. Few in the United Kingdom seem even aware that anyone could see the EU in that way. Continental Europeans feel that Europe has increased their pride and reputation; the British fear it has diminished ours. They feel it has saved them from a troubling history; the British that it has taken us away from a distinguished history.  They feel economically prosperous because of Europe; the British feel economically prosperous despite Europe.

I wanted to argue that the government should acknowledge this discomfort, tell people what it planned to do about it, and act. But I felt the motion was wrong. Europe is immersed in the greatest crisis that they have faced, and in the middle of the Greek bail-out negotiations. We were choosing the moment of their greatest fragility to shout ‘I know you have a lot on your plate, but by the way we’re considering leaving you.’ We needed to recognize these were our closest trading partners, and would always be our closest neighbours. If we are about to rip up a forty-year relationship, we need to do so with dignity.

But I wasn’t sure how this speech would go down in the chamber. The green benches were dominated by almost a hundred rebels against the government. Many had just entered Parliament. They attacked the government position openly, talking sentimentally about their pride in having been elected, about sacrificing their careers for the truth, putting their constituents in front of their party, and their country in front of everything, and were met with continual cheers. Almost no speech passed without a couple of long interventions. When a few MPs tried, towards the end of the evening, to support the government, they were drowned by a chorus of mocking voices accusing them of cowardice and careerism.

I wanted to defend the government but although I got to my feet again and again, the speaker never called me. When the house voted at ten, I had been in my seat for six and a half hours, and the three days of speech-writing was scattered all over the bench beside me. The result was one of the largest rebellions in recorded history. 81 of my Conservative colleagues voted against the government, another 15 publicly abstained: almost precisely half the back-bench party, pitted against the other half.

The tone of the debate and its timing - so aggressively indifferent to everything that was happening outside the chamber - reflected more than simply genuine concerns about European regulations. It suggested anger, frustration, and insecurity. I did not sleep well that night. Something is broken. It is in part our relationship to Europe: we can no longer avoid clarifying what changes we want, and whether we are prepared to leave if we don’t get them. But there was something unsettling and fractured also in the way the motion was pressed, the way the government responded, and the way those tensions were exposed in that chamber. Despite all our references to the economy and Europe, I did not feel we were engaging responsibly with either. Despite all the claims about democracy and patriotism, I did not feel we knew anymore quite how to balance our loyalties to voters or nation; or quite what we expected our Parliament or government to be.