Open Letter on Cuts and working together.

[BAJR]

This is a distillation of the discussion and suggestions for ways forward. I have tried to cover as many of the technical issues we would need to consider as possible, please feel free to point out those I have missed. Thanks for bearing with us so far and I hope this is the last epic...

All the political speculation over the weekend is that George Osborne will announce the first changes to the planning regime in England in this week's budget. Coupled with the various comments from Eric Pickles about localism and giving more power to local communities, this might give us our first potential challenge/cue to respond, or ideally, opportunity to get our retaliation in first and equally our first major opportunity to build a base for campaigning on the big archaeological issues.

• PPS5 may tick some Government boxes, particularly as regards "localism," but the suggestion is we must be prepared to claim it as ours and fight for it on a non partisan, positive agenda of community engagement with the environment. i.e Archaeology is down there in the communities and, whatever else we are [we can argue about that one], we are a campaigning part of the environmental movement whichever is the party [s] of Government.
  

• A practical issue concerns many. The opposition to the current planning system often sees planning conditions and listing as either a Tax on growth, or "Red Tape" preventing growth and proper entrepreneurship. For example this from the Telegraph "Red Tape Britain."
  

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourb...dings.html

..so countering that myth must be a campaigning priority but we must not get bogged down in too much detail- that is for the specialist lobbying effort.

• Like the Forests' campaign there seems to be a feeling we must claim the past as being ours collectively [whatever the letter of the Law says about individual land ownership] and that with ownership comes both a desire for knowledge, and an individual and collective responsibility not to destroy or change unnecessarily the natural and historic environment and irreplaceable resources.
  

• The Forests campaign showed any government cannot ignore this view if it is articulated loudly and effectively. Therefore, at a practical level we must demonstrate and never shut up about, the fact that an archaeological condition is an environmental responsibility, on a par with ensuring your development is not going to evict some badgers or overload the local drains. This means we must attempt to build a base of support by highlighting projects where archaeologists have been involved in sensitive managed change of use, or environmental protection, i.e pipeline surveys, by-pass projects etc as well as promoting historical knowledge in the community. We must be seen as allies- not an obscure special interest group.
  

• Most importantly there is a feeling we must build partnerships across the environmental amenity societies, organisations and movements. Archaeology is "Green" and the Historic Environment and the Natural Environment are the same thing...the Environment and that belongs to all of us.
  

• There is a perception in the discussion that as far as effective lobbying and media goes we need one single voice, not voices. To that end we propose a national mouthpiece on-line, facebook and Twitter, backed up by an informal regional organisation of allies, based on the existing groups coming together and working with the broader memberships of groups with an environmental agenda as a lobbying alliance signed up to the broad principles of our campaign. i.e. An out of town store development will also effect wildlife, birds and plants. Why just wait until there is a direct threat to start campaigning. The idea is to have groups working together to promote the positive so that when Mr TESCO or whoever, does propose to trash the local Wild Wood, the links to media and local politics are already in place and the dialogue about sustainable development and respect for the environment has already begun on our agenda.
  

[Which is not to say that existing organisations should not continue to exploit their lobbying powers on particular issues. In particular we need to support CBA as it seeks to replace that dispreportionate cut by the British Academy at the behest of the Department of Business and Skills- thanks Vince. The idea is to offer more powerful back up, access to greater numbers than their own individual memberships and offer more flexibility in the kind of lobbying which is possible. After all 38 Degrees have not replaced the Woodland Trust, National Trust etc- they simply focussed a specific campaign which required a fast response in a way the other organisations could not].

To get up and running we need... see next post