Back to Somerset
Richard West
Weston-super-Mare T f 1832 was 'the Year of Birmingham' I that city led the campaign for the Reform Bill, then 1983 deserves to be called 'the Year of Weston-super-Mare' because this seaside resort has begun a campaign to restore the ancient counties, mutilated and rearranged by the infamous Heath/Walker regime. Last week, polls were held in Weston and the surrounding villages to ask if people wished to remain in 'Avon', the Heath/Walker entity centred on Bristol, or to revert to the county of Somerset, which had existed for more than a thousand years till 1974. In Weston itself (there were similar figures in the surrounding villages) 51 per cent of electors voted, a higher number than do in local elections, and voted by 98.6 per cent to return to Somerset, by 22,512 votes to 329 against staying in 'Avon'. The chairman of the Back to Somerset campaign, Tim Kelly, a local doctor, was pleased by the poll result, Considering it was run by amateurs. The ballot papers were scrutinised and checked with the names on Weston's electoral register,
A person called Andy Pott, the Labour leader of 'Avon' County Council, has of course denounced the referendum: `As far as I can see the whole thing is quite irrele- vant because government ministers have already made it clear they have no intention of changing the boundaries of Avon or any of the shire counties. Avon is the most sen- sible economic unit in the country, and to take out parts of the jigsaw would involve a great deal of planning and considerable ex- pense.' It would also threaten the wretched Pott's power and position. As Omar Khayyam reflected: 'Who is the Potter, Pray, and who the Pot?'
Perhaps Andy Pott would, in private, write off Weston-super-Mare as Tory, reac- tionary and old-fashioned. It is certainly old. A recent survey showed that 65 per Cent of the town was over 65 years in age. I got Into conversation in a pub with a half- dozen people, all of them drawing pen- sions, most of them former military or col- onial. 'Those who think the dead don't come alive again should be here at quitting time', said the sign at another pub. The landlady said that at this time of year Weston was mostly full of disabled people, the crippled and blind: 'We had the blind in here on Friday night and how they managed
to fight their way to the bar defeats me.' At one of the few pubs attracting the young idea, the disco generation, the juke box blared out a song of maudlin horror but one, I seem to remember, that must be at least 25 years old: 'Sometimes I ask the stars up above, Why must I be a teenager in love?'
Those listening were on average 50 years old.
Some of the strength of the Back to Somerset campaign comes from the present very high rates exacted by 'Avon'. That en- tity is almost as spendthrift as Ken Liv- ingstone's Greater London Council, or Sheffield, or Liverpool.
The editorial columnist 'Rambler' in the Weston Mercury, suggests that the town has 'for better or worse ... become linked with the Greater Bristol concept ... I am not a parent with children at school, or an old person, or a bus user, or a rail user. Anybody who fits into those categories could do well to think about what Avon provides in those contexts and compare it to Somerset's provision'. But `Rambler', who was rightly castigated by most of his readers, fails to explain why anyone should support a 'Greater Bristol project', when Bristol, like most of our old industrial towns, is shrinking every year in wealth and industry, its port closed down by the Transport and General Workers Union, its poisonous smelter transferred to Australia,
its useless Concorde aircraft unloved by anyone but the useless, unloved former Bristol MP, Anthony Wedgwood Benn.
Why should any parent of children wish to send them to one Bristol's hooligan- ravaged, quite illiterate schools? In 'Avon', as in most of the country, the new middle class of lawyers, doctors, council and quango officials, now send their children to schools in the wealthy suburbs that exclude the working class and still more the im- migrants. Or they send their children to private schools, or give them private tui- tion. The available public education in 'Avon' is far, far worse than it was in an- cient Bristol, Gloucestershire and Somerset. So is public transport worse, and the police, and housing. The Heath/Walker rearrange- ments have ruined local government.
The creation of 'Avon' has also produced a fervour, indeed a chauvinism, of county feeling for Somerset. The Somerset cricket supporters have pioneered cricket hooliganism, swigging cider and howling Somerset songs. As someone said to me here: 'Weston had six coaches, 300 people to go up to London to support a county they don't even live in. If the telly comes and you hear a lot of noise, it's Somerset.'
The 'Rambler' in the Weston Mercury, the Member of Parliament for the absurdly named 'Woodspring' constituency and the abominable Pott all argue that there is no point in discussing a change in local govern- ment boundaries because neither the Westminster nor the regional government plans to discuss any changes. Are we powerless? No, of course not. We have the power to make these loathsome politicians hear us, by refusing to pay the rates, and if necessary the income tax. We could put them out of their jobs, their homes and their offices. We could exact revenge on what Coibbett called the tax-eaters.
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