Week 22 2013

Tendring Topics……on line

‘God hears the embattled nations sing and shout –

‘Gott Straffe England!’ and ‘God save the King!’

God this, God that, and God the other thing!

‘Good God’, says God, ‘I’ve got my work cut out!

            This mildly irreverent rhyme was written by Sir John Squire, early twentieth century satirist, in 1916 the year of the Battle of the Somme in World War I.   ‘Gott straffe England! (God punish England!) was the refrain of a ‘Hymn of Hate’ widely – though not universally – popular in Germany during those war years. It declared England, rather than Russia or France, to be Germany’s principal foe   Both Britain and Germany were nominally Christian countries and both claimed God to be ‘on their side’.  Both armies had military padres to offer their troops spiritual comfort and perhaps to assure them that their cause was the one that had divine blessing and approval. Throughout World War II the belt buckle of every German soldier was inscribed with the words ‘Gott mit uns’ or ‘God with us’?

           The now virtually unknown words of the second verse of our National Anthem were once sung with gusto.   I remember them. They told God exactly what was expected of him!

O Lord our God arise!

Scatter her enemies, and make them fall.

Confound their politics, 

Frustrate their knavish tricks,

On thee our hopes we fix.

God save us all.

            This attitude persists today. The brutal murderers of that British soldier outside the army barracks in Woolwich last week declared the Muslim refrain Allah Akbar (God is Great) as they waited for martyrdom, or the opportunity for yet more killing, with the arrival of the police.  Every suicide bomber believes himself to be giving his own life as a worthy sacrifice to God if, at the same time, he manages to kill a few infidels.

            Nor is this attitude, if not its practice, completely eliminated among Christians.  Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was reported to have been outraged when Archbishop Runcie prayed for the Argentine as well as the British victims of the Falklands War.  Only last week correspondents to the local daily Gazette proclaimed that God had intervened on the side of the western allies in World War II – by calming the sea to enable the remnants of our army to escape via Dunkirk and, on at least one occasion, preventing enemy bombers from taking off to bomb England!  Can those correspondents possibly believe that God was supporting the British and American bomber crews who incinerated thousands of innocent civilians in the bombing raids on Dresden on 13^th and 14^th February 1945?

            The God revealed to us in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ is the loving father of all mankind.   To suggest that he wills any act of violence by one of his children against another is the ultimate blasphemy, the ‘unforgiveable sin’.  Jesus told his followers to love their enemies, bless those that curse them, and do good to those who are spiteful towards them.  To those who rummage through the Old Testament  for justification of this, that or the other act of violence, he said that the whole of the moral teaching of the Old Testament  is encapsulated in the one commandment, to treat other people as you would like them to treat you. I understand that other world religious faiths include the same or a similar injunction.

            Can you imagine Jesus Christ, as we know him from the four Gospels, giving his blessing to suicide bombers, improvised explosive devices, cluster bombs, land mines, unmanned drones controlled from a distant country assassinating those deemed to be enemies of that country, or submarines roaming the oceans armed with weapons capable of destroying whole cities? 

There will, I suppose, always be those who are so consumed with hatred,  fear or envy that they will resort to violence, or plan to resort to violence against their fellow men and women.  Those who do so should not delude themselves that their thoughts and actions have the approval of God!

Some Afterthoughts

          One of the men believed to be involved in the killing of that young soldier in Woolwich  told a bystander that he was hoping to ‘bring war onto the streets of Woolwich’.  Those who have attacked mosques and Islamic Centres in reprisal for the murder are behaving exactly as the murderers had hoped.  Almost equally stupid was our Prime Minister’s assertion that the actions of these cold-blooded murderers ‘had nothing to do with religion’.  Of course they were to do with religion – a false religion that most of us are quite prepared to accept is as contrary to the tenets of Islam as the reaction of those who attack Islamic centres is contrary to Christianity.

            However, when asked why the murder suspects had not been more closely watched by the security forces since their radical views were well-known, an official spokesman replied that there were thousands who held similar views and it was impossible to monitor them all.

             That I do consider a very alarming piece of information.

‘

Clacton’s ‘Benefit Ghettos’

          When my wife and I were house-hunting in Clacton for our small family way back in 1956 we quickly realised that we couldn’t afford to buy a home near to the seafront.  The properties  within a few minutes walk of the sea, mostly large Edwardian houses offering holiday accommodation during the summer months, were well beyond our means.  We settled for the modest bungalow in Dudley Road (once described in Clacton Town Hall’s Council Chamber as ‘working class residential’) where, fifty-seven years later, I am writing these words.

            How astonishing therefore to find that those once ‘posh’ roads near the seafront in Clacton’s Pier Ward are now a ‘Benefits Ghetto’ with a staggering fifty-four percent of residents living on state benefit.  It is claimed to have the fifth highest number of folk-on-benefit in the country. Even in the town’s Golf Green Ward which includes Jaywick, Britain’s most deprived area, only forty-eight percent of residents of working age are living on state benefits. Douglas Carswell, Clacton’s Conservative MP says that, ‘this just shows the need for welfare reform.  I don’t think that William Beveridge and Clement Attlee when setting up the welfare state all those years ago, wanted to see half the people living in Pier Ward to be living at someone else’s expense.  There are government changes coming in which will see people who are on jobseekers allowance expected to look for a job.  Frankly that hasn’t been happening.  People who are young and fit and able to work will be expected to work’.  Perhaps Mr Carswell can suggest where those job-seekers should look for work in an area where jobs are notoriously scarce and where there are at least a dozen applicants for every vacancy.

            William Beveridge and Clem Attlee, were they alive today, certainly wouldn’t have expected to see two and a half million unemployed in Britain sixty-five years after the end of World War II.   Clem Attlee would have been horrified at the way in which the aspirations of those who had fought and won the war have been treated with contempt by successive governments.  In particular he would have had difficulty in believing that after ten years of New Labour government the gap between the incomes of the richest and poorest in our land was wider than it had been at any time in the twentieth century.

            The fact is that the decline of Clacton as a holiday resort, largely as a result of cheap air travel, has meant that there is no longer the demand that there once was for boarding house holiday accommodation.  The owners of buildings that had been used for this purpose found that they could manage quite nicely by letting out single rooms cheaply all the year round as bed-sitters for those who could afford nothing better.  It became known that there is usually cheap bed-sit accommodation available in Clacton – and homeless and jobless people from all over the country found their way here; just another example of the functioning of 'market forces'.  

            Government Cuts in the public services and the attempt to persuade ‘the big society’ to do for nothing some of the tasks formerly undertaken by paid labour, have played their part in reducing the number of jobs available for both skilled and unskilled workers.  Public and private enterprises alike are cutting the number of their employees to the bare minimum – and below!  Recently I noticed that the Public Conveniences on Clacton Station were locked because of vandalism and misuse.  Those who needed to use the Convenience were advised to get a key from one of the station staff. They'll be lucky to find one!  It isn’t so long ago that the constant presence of uniformed station staff acted as a deterrent to miscreants of all kinds.  But Profitability, Productivity and Cost Effectiveness (the unholy trinity driving market forces!) demand that employees must be profitably occupied every minute of their working day. No wonder hospital emergency departments are unable to cope with the demand put upon them, public property is constantly vandalised, public buildings defaced by graffiti, litter blows about our streets, there are potholes in our roads and broken paving makes our pavements dangerous to pedestrians.

            In the coming months we can confidently expect even more refugees from the imposition of the Housing Benefit Ceiling and the Bedroom Tax in London, to arrive among us.  Many of them will hope, almost certainly in vain, to find work as well as cheap accommodation. A few will be content to exist on ‘benefit’.  It is about those that we’ll read in the tabloid press.  There is little point in castigating them.  They are the product of our wonderful ‘free market economy’ that encourages everybody  (billionaire tax-dodgers, Bank Executives with their bonuses and miss-sold insurances, money lenders, expenses fiddling Councillors, MPs and Noble Lords, slum landlords, loan sharks and, right at the bottom of the pile, lowly benefit scroungers), to grab as much as they can for as little as they can get away with.

  

  

           

             

           

            

Week 21 2013

Tendring Topics…….on Line

‘It wasn’t your fault – Someone else was to blame!’

            That’s the message that we all like to hear when catastrophe strikes, whether it affects us alone or a whole community. It’s a principle that makes the fortunes of the ambulance chasing lawyers whose no win/no pay adverts fund day-time commercial tv. When such a catastrophe or a series of catastrophes affect a whole nation, astute politicians make certain that we hear it. They can usually find someone else, a convenient scapegoat, to take the blame.

            Thus it was in Germany in the 1920s and ‘30s. Defeat in World War I had been followed by the world-wide ‘flu epidemic that claimed more victims than had the recent conflict.  The German Empire had collapsed, the Kaiser had abdicated and fled into exile, politically the country was in chaos, and economically in ruin.  There was uncontrolled inflation, widespread unemployment, homelessness and starvation. Folk were totally disillusioned by the apparent impotence of the government and the traditional political parties.

            There was just one rising politician who gave the German people a message of hope.  Germany’s intellectual élite thought that Adolf Hitler, the posturing little Austrian painter with his Charlie Chaplin moustache, was just a joke and his followers nothing but ‘fruitcakes’ (or the German equivalent).  The country’s leading businessmen helped finance him. Their fortunes were threatened by the revolt of the common people. They believed that they could control him and that he and his followers could defeat the socialists and communists whom they saw as their principal enemies.

            Hitler told the German people what they wanted to hear.   They were in no way to blame for the mess in which they found themselves.   Their brave soldiers hadn’t really been defeated in the Great War.   They had been betrayed; stabbed in the back by Germany’s internal enemies – the international financiers, the politicians, and the Jews.  Vote for the NSDAP (the National Socialist German Workers Party or NAZIs).  He and his party’s gallant storm-troopers would curb the financiers, get rid of the parasitic politicians and the Jews, and create a great new German Empire (the Third Reich) that would dominate the world.

            Enough Germans believed that message to give the Nazis a majority in the Reichstag – and, having gained power, they made sure (or so they thought) of securing it ‘for a thousand years’.  The rest is history, in which I and millions of others played tiny and insignificant roles.

            There are parallels between Germany in the 1920s and ‘30s and the UK today.  We haven’t been defeated in war but military adventures in the Middle East have impoverished and weakened us.  Our economic and political situations are nothing like as dire as those of between-the-wars Germany.   They are serious though.   We have narrowly missed an unprecedented ‘triple dip’ recession. Our credit-worthiness has been down-graded. There are two and a half million unemployed, and the number of homeless people sleeping rough in the streets is rising, as is the number of families relying on charity hand-outs from ‘Food Banks’ to keep their families alive..  We are all, except for the very rich, feeling the pinch.

            Most significant of all, we have lost faith in our traditional politicians and in their political parties.  We don’t really think that the present millionaire-friendly government is going to solve Britain’s problems (their continual bleat about the terrible mess they inherited is beginning to wear a little thin as the months and years pass) and we very much doubt if New Labour would do much – or even any – better.  There was a time when Labour’s objectives were pretty clear; the creation of a classless democratic socialist society in which poverty and homelessness had been abolished and the gap between rich and poor narrowed. After ten years of New Labour rule in which the gap between rich and poor widened it has become clear that their only real objective is now much the same as that of their opponents – to get elected and to hang on to power at all costs.

            But now – just as in Germany in the ‘30s - we have an anti-politics political party with a charismatic leader who reaches  above the heads of more conventional politicians to their disillusioned former supporters; and to those who have never before taken any interest in politics.  Nigel Farage, leader of Ukip (United Kingdom Independence Party) has a very English charisma.  He’s that very likeable - and very persuasive – fellow that one might meet in a well-run pub. He is always ready to explain complex economic and political issues in plain language that anyone can understand.  He’s ‘one of us’, enjoying a pint and a fag, and having no time at all for those who claim to know better than we do, how we should live our lives.

            What’s more, he’s found foreign scapegoats who, so he claims, are responsible for all the UK's political and economic ills.   Brussels is the hub of a web of evil called the EU whose sole purpose is to ruin the UK and everything in which we true Brits believe.  No-one, listening to Nigel Farage or any other spokesperson of Ukip would imagine for a moment that the European Union is an organisation of which the United Kingdom is an influential member and that it has a democratically elected Parliament in which there are Ukip members. 

           

The other factor contributing to the UKs downfall is, according to Ukip, the thousands of foreign immigrants who pour into this country from Europe and every other part of the world taking our jobs and our houses and enjoying our social and health services.  Withdraw from the evil EU and stop all immigration, in the first instance for five years (Oh yes, and allow smoking again in pubs, stop building wind farms and scrap all that ‘health and safety’ nonsense)  and all Britain’s problems will be solved.

            I think that, like Hitler, Nigel Farage has found a recipe for electoral success.  I am glad that I am most unlikely to see and experience its outcome, and be able to say, I told you so!’  Being very old isn’t all loss!

‘

PS    I note that Nigel Farage’s magic doesn’t work in Scotland.  The rough reception he received there has led him to the conclusion that Scots Nationalists harbour a hatred of England and all things English.  I think it more likely that their antagonism is directed not at England but at Nigel Farage and his deluded disciples. If I were twenty or thirty years younger I’d be thinking of relocating north of the border!

Some birthdays!

          I have had some somewhat mixed experience of birthdays in the past.  My 20^th birthday, for instance, was spent on guard duty in Montreal Park, Sevenoaks, where 67^th Medium Regiment, R.A. was camped under canvas while waiting for orders to go overseas.

Twentieth birthday – a break from guard duty.

           

My 21^st was spent in the Libyan Desert waiting for Rommel’s Afrikakorps to attack, and the next two, which I prefer to forget, were spent as a PoW in Italy and Germany.  My 24^th birthday (on 18^th May 1945) was a very happy one though I received not a single birthday card or present.  It was the day, just ten days after the end of World War II in Europe, on which I stepped through the front door of my home in Kensington Road, Ipswich after having been overseas for four years and a PoW for three of them.

Regular blog readers will know that my 90^th birthday was a very special one. I went with members of my immediate family to celebrate it in Zittau, the small town in eastern Germany where I had once been a PoW but now had good friends .We were given a civic welcome and a champagne reception by Mayor Arnd Voight, treated to a special performance of a local piano-accordian orchestra and I hosted a celebratory evening meal to which my family and I  invited our German friends and the Mayor and his wife and other local notables.

 90^th birthday; Here is the Piano-accordian orchestra. I am on the left in the shadow. In the background on the right can be seen the Lenten Veil in the history of which I played a tiny part 

           

        As my 92^nd birthday loomed ahead it seemed that there was a distinct possibility (I will put it no stronger) that it might be my last.  I thought that I would like, on my birthday, to thank and express my appreciation to those who have helped and supported me since my wife’s death seven years ago.  There were my two sons and daughters-in-law, Pete and Arlene and Andy and Marilyn.  There were my grandchildren; Chris living and working in Taiwan, Nick, living mostly in Brussels and his Belgian girl-friend Romy, and granddaughter Jo, working as a social worker attached to the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield Hospital.  Then there was Ingrid Zeibig, originally from Zittau but now living in Bayreuth, a good friend  for some ten years, her English partner Ray and her Austrian god-daughter Jenny who spends a good deal of time with her.  There was Heather’s thirteen-years-younger sister Margaret, Dr Volker Dudeck, former Direktor of Zittau's town musem and his wife Julia, and two Clacton friends who had been a great support and help to me. I invited them all to a celebratory lunch at the Bowling Green Restaurant and pub at Weeley a few miles from Clacton, at 1.00 p.m. on Saturday 18^th May. My sister-in-law Margaret and Dr and Mrs Dudeck were already committed elsewhere but the others all accepted. 

            The Bowling Green is planned with a number of semi-private areas, some suitable for a party  like ours – or larger, and others offering a degree of privacy for just two or three.  It was almost as though we had a room and two tables to ourselves, though with no doors for the staff to negotiate between us and the kitchens.

The 'oldies'  -  Fortyish to ninetytwo

      It was a very successful occasion.  There was a wide á la carte menu.  The cooking was excellent and the service efficient and friendly.  Ingrid had arranged for members of her family and others who knew me, to record their birthday good wishes on a tape that we played on a tv screen provided for us.  The few words of Ingrid’s 101 years old grandma and her little nephew (aged 5) and niece (aged 7), were particularly moving.  She had also obtained  a message from Fritz Michel who in 1944 had manned the telephone of the Hitler Jugend headquarters next to our PoW barrack room.  A clandestine swap (of which I don’t think either Hitler or Churchill would have approved!) of some of our jazz records with some of the Hitler Youth members’ German folk and dance records had been arranged!  

Ingrid’s English partner Ray, played a guitar, and Ingrid a recorder to accompany sixteen year old Austrian Jenny singing  Lili Marlene, equally popular with both British and German forces in North Aftrica, and Regen Tropfen, die am dein Fenster klopfen  (raindrops that fall on your window) a popular German Tango of 1935 that had been one of the records we received in exchange from the Hitler Jugend way back in 1944.  It was a wonderful birthday celebration enjoyed equally by the British, Belgian, German and Austrian participants; a great pity some of the Europhobes of Ukip weren’t there to share the experience.!

The young'uns - sweet sixteen to thirtytwo 

                      (younger grandson Nick took the pictures so he doesn't appear on them)

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Week 20 2013

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Syrian Bloodbath.

            I know of no better validation of the Quaker testimony against all wars and physical violence than the current situation in Syria.   The Civil War there has cost the lives of thousands of men, women and little children, has inflicted disabling wounds on thousands more and has turned tens of thousands of innocent civilians into homeless and penniless refugees.

Let’s forget for a moment questions of morality and consider the current conflict from a purely materialistic and practical point of view. It is surely obvious that, however awful the Assad regime may have been, when the war comes to an end, whichever side is finally ‘triumphant’, life in Syria will be far, far worse than it was before the first shot was fired in anger. If the rebels win, as seems quite possible, we in ‘the west’ hope to see the emergence of a free and democratic Syria with equal rights for every Syrian,  male or female, and freedom of religious worship comparable with every country in Western Europe.  It is quite possible that that is the objective of some of the rebels.   It certainly isn’t the objective of all, or even most, of them.  I have little doubt that within months of the peace, Syria will be under the control of Islamist extremists, women will be relegated to the status of second class citizens, and all the freedoms that are so important to us will have been made illegal.  It happened in Iran after their popular revolution against the Shah.  It is happening in Iraq, in Egypt and in Libya.  It will certainly happen in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of  NATO troops.

            What is more, the extreme Islamist rebels, having become experienced in the art of killing their fellow-men and women, will look round for fresh worlds to conquer and destroy, and fresh targets on which to vent their hatred of everything we think of value.   They will find them in Western Europe, in the UK and in the USA.

            Was the Assad regime a cruel dictatorship?  Perhaps - but I have heard of no secret killings and no torture chambers such as we heard about from victims of the regimes in Iraq and Libya. Compared with Saudi Arabia, pre-civil-war Syria was an oasis of freedom and tolerance in a desert of autocracy and bigotry. Women enjoyed freedoms unknown in other Muslim countries and Christian and Muslim communities lived side by side in peace and tolerance. Now the Saudi Arabian government is backing the rebels!  I suspect that President Assad’s principal fault is that he is ‘the wrong kind of Muslim’, was probably too friendly with Iran and was giving positions of power and influence to his co-religionists.   Now, of course, we hear of mass killings carried out by government forces.  The reports are probably true.  Violence begets more violence.  It was Gandhi who said that if we all insisted on ‘an eye for an eye’ we would all end up blind.  If in a civil war both sides claim ‘a life for a life’ they will surely end with a country of the dead.

             Other nations are taking an unhealthy interest in the conflict.  Russia is supporting (or at least not opposing) the Assad Government.  The UK and the USA are supporting the rebels. As if there was not already death and destruction enough, the Israelis have launched lethal rockets into Syria, ostensibly to prevent arms from Syria reaching a pro-Iranian Islamic group operating from Lebanon.  Does anyone seriously imagine that a Syrian government, fighting for its very existence, would allow, much less encourage, arms to pass out of the country to any other armed group whatsoever?

            Britain is becoming steadily more and more involved.  It started highly commendably with humanitarian aid.  Our intervention in Libya began, you’ll recall, with the very moderate ‘enforcement of a no-fly zone’.   In Syria we have progressed to non-lethal military aid.  What next I wonder – supplying the rebels with weapons?   That would surely be almost as daft as the idea, currently held by some in the USA, that the best way to end gun crime is to make sure that all ‘the good guys’ are armed to the teeth!   The only winners in that particular arms race will be the arms manufacturers and dealers.

            The Syrian conflict is not of our making.  When it is all over I hope that we will help with the reconstruction and the establishment of peace.   In the meantime I do urge our rulers:  For God’s sake (and I do not mean that blasphemously) keep Britain OUT of it.

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good…….

          ……..and the cold wintry weather that plagued our holiday resorts during the Easter holiday seems to have done no harm at all to one outdoor leisure activity enjoyed along the Essex Sunshine Coast.  Sea angling has flourished and a report in the Clacton Gazette by John Popplewell carries the headline Cod and Thornbacks in plentiful supply.

            During my adolescence I was a keen fresh-water angler.  My home was on the outskirts of Ipswich and I fished regularly for pike, perch and roach along the River Gipping at weekends and during school holidays.  Occasionally, venturing further afield, I would cycle the ten or so miles to Flatford Mill to spend a day in the ‘Constable country’ angling along the River Stour between the lock gates at Flatford  and Dedham, a mile or two upstream.

            Only once have I been sea angling, and that was some twenty years ago when I was writing advertising features for Essex County Newspapers.   I went out on a charter boat from Harwich for a very enjoyable day’s fishing off the Gunfleet Sands and, with help and advice from the professionals, I caught several skate and a sea bass. I know that I later wrote a glowing report of the day that I hope brought the skipper of the boat some custom!

            John Popplewell reports catches from boats, from beaches, from kayaks operating just a few hundred yards offshore, and from piers all along our coastline.  Boats from Mersea and Brightlingsea have been catching more thornbacks than he can ever before remember, as well as fair-sized (one weighed ten pounds) cod.  From Walton-on-the-Naze, Frinton and Clacton there are similar reports, with bass, whiting, dogfish and skate also being caught.  

            Clacton Gazette readers are accustomed to reading angry criticisms in readers’ letters about the wind turbines proliferating off our shores – they’re inefficient, an intolerable blot on the seascape, unreliable, uneconomical, a danger to migrating birds, and so on.  It was quite refreshing to have quite a different point of view from John Popplewell.  ‘My personal opinion on why we have so many thornbacks now is to do with our wind farms.  We have two that we can see from our coastline – the Gunfleet Sands and a larger one further out on the Greater Gabbard.   They seem to be acting as man-made reefs, and are a safe haven and breeding ground for a lot of species, including lobsters, which are now breeding happily in these areas.

            It really is an ill wind that blows nobody any good!

‘The old grey widow maker’*

            The juxtaposition of the anniversary of VE Day (8^th May 1945) when the war in Europe ended, and the commemoration of the thousands of dead in the Arctic Convoys, and in the Battle of the Atlantic, brought flooding back memories of my own artillery regiment’s voyage to Egypt through submarine infested waters in the late summer of 1941.  At that time enemy air power and submarines closed the direct route to Egypt via the Mediterranean.  We sailed in the New Zealand Shipping Company liner The Rangitiki from Avonmouth, first to the mouth of the Clyde to join a large convoy.   From there we sailed north-west almost (so we were told) to Iceland to avoid the German submarine packs, then south and east down the West African coast to the Cape of Good Hope. We put in for a few days in Durban, and finally sailed up Africa’s east coast to the Red Sea and Port Tewfik at the southern end of the Suez Canal.

The Rangitiki

           

 I volunteered to man a Breda machine-gun on the Rangitiki’s bridge, doing a four hours on and eight hours off ‘watch’ throughout the voyage. This was not out of heroism (my fervent hope was that there would be no air attack!) but because I was and am, as I mentioned in last week’s blog, mildly claustrophobic. We machine-gunners slept with members of the crew in the fo'c'sle on an upper deck, and not in hammocks on those crowded mess-decks at or below the waterline!

            There was a submarine alert while we were in mid-Atlantic.  We were warned to be ready to go to our lifeboat stations. I had been allocated a place on a raft with ropes round its side to which, if we found ourselves in the water and still alive, we could cling until rescued – or not, as the case might be.  The destroyers (or were they corvettes? I have no idea) circled round the convoy. Then their paths converged. We saw depth charges being launched and felt, rather than heard, the shock of the explosions on the Rangitiki’s hull.  I really wouldn’t have wanted to be a submariner!   The danger was declared to be over.  We relaxed and the convoy sailed on.

            There was one more, even more alarming, episode off the West African coast – in the vicinity of a reputed U-boat base.  The Rangitiki’s engines failed and our progress stopped.  The convoy, and its escort, sailed on. The escort had a whole convoy to worry about. They couldn’t stop for just one ship.  It was a clear night with a full moon.   To add to our disquiet there were thunderous banging, rattling and drilling noises emanating from below as the ship’s engineers strove to repair the engines.  We must have been clearly visible and audible to the crew of any U-boat within twenty miles! At last, after several anxious hours, there was silence, and then a scarcely audible hum.  We could feel a vibration in the deck and a white wake appeared in the rear of the vessel as the engines sprang into life.  We were moving again.  Soon after dawn the convoy came into sight.  We took our place in it and the journey continued uneventfully.

‘Ferret’ (left) and I in Durban.  The chap with the splendid head-dress never pulled that rickshaw. He just stood there having his photo taken with soldiers off the convoys

We put in, but didn’t go ashore, at Freetown.  It poured with rain. Local boys came alongside in their canoes and dived for pennies that we dropped into the murky water.  They always managed to retrieve them!  The seas were turbulent as we rounded the Cape of Good Hope.  The heavily loaded vessels of our convoy were tossed about as though they were match boxes.   At Durban we put in for five days and were allowed to go ashore if off-duty.  We machine gunners had no other duties and there was no risk of an air raid in Durban.  ‘Ferret’ Hawes (I don’t think I ever knew his first name), a fellow machine-gunner, and I went ashore each day.  Local residents were very welcoming.  Notices announced in English and Afrikaans that this, that or the other facility was ‘for whites only’.  I can’t pretend that this bothered us, though it probably would have if there had been any non-whites in the regiment.

It wasn’t till we left Durban that we were sure of our destination.  The convoy split up, half sailing eastward towards Singapore while we continued up the East African coast to the Red Sea and finally to Port Tewfik for our destination on the Egyptian/Libyan frontier.  As we went ashore, thankful for having had a relatively uneventful voyage, we little dreamed that just over a year later, fifty of our number would be crammed with 150 other prisoners of war into the hold of the Scillin, an Italian merchant ship, to be transported to a prison camp in Italy – and that they would meet their deaths in the Mediterranean, torpedoed by a British submarine!

Most of the 200 victims of the sinking of the Scillin were young unmarried men, but Kipling's old, grey widow-maker (Nicholas Monserrat's 'Cruel Sea) made a few more widows that night.

*What is a woman that you forsake her, and the hearth fire, and the home acre, To go with the old grey widow-maker?   ‘First verse of ‘The Harp-Song of the Danish Women’ by Rudyard Kipling.

             

           

           

Week 19 2013

Tendring Topics……on line

The Global Market

 I am mildly claustrophobic. I am never very happy in an enclosed space and the thought of being buried alive in the ruins of a collapsed building is the stuff of my very worst nightmares!  That’s just one of the reasons why news of the collapse of an eight storey building in Bangladesh in which some two thousand people, mostly women, were employed in the manufacture of cheap clothing for the European and American Markets, filled me with horror.  More than 600 of those employed in the building have died, many after having been trapped for several days.  Over 1,000 have been injured, some seriously.  All are human sacrifices to Mammon – the god of greed and selfishness or, if you prefer, of the entrepreneur and the ‘free market’.

            It seems that the building should have been limited to five storeys and that three were added illegally (no doubt to ‘maximise profits’).   Furthermore when warning cracks appeared in the walls of the building the workers were told to ignore them and carry on with their work, instead of being urged to get out while there was time to do so.

          The manufacture of cheap ready-made garments for export is a principal industry of Bangladesh, employing some 3 million people on an average monthly salary of £40. (Try living on that for a day or two!)  Industrial accidents are a frequent and regular occurrence and not a single manufacturer has been prosecuted in connection with them. Similar incidents would occur in this country had it not been for the activities of the Trade Unions and the Parliamentary Reformers of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries whose Public Health Acts and Factories Acts (fiercely contested by the political friends of the Factory Owners) created the relatively tolerable and safe working environments that most of us enjoy in this country today*. We joke about ‘health and safety’ but the Bangladeshi experience could be repeated here if there were no health and safety regulations and no ‘snooping bureaucrats’ enforcing them.

            But, of course, the safe environment and tolerable working conditions that are enjoyed in the UK and in most of Europe render us ‘uncompetitive in the Global Market’ that politicians of all parties seem to find so attractive. So retailers get the supplies of the cheap clothing that their customers demand from such places as Bangladesh where few safety regulations exist. Those that do are ignored by officials so poorly paid that they are easy targets for those who wish to corrupt them. I suspect that at least some of the powers that our Prime Minister and UKIP are  determined to ‘repatriate’ from ‘Brussels’ are the regulations that protect the health, safety and well-being of workers throughout Europe.

            We can only become truly competitive in a market that includes countries like Bangladesh by replicating their slums, their public services, their working conditions, their health services, their education, their low wages.  Is that really what we want? A much better alternative would be for the people of Bangladesh to raise the level of their environment and public services to that of Europe. While I am sure we should help and support them in such efforts it is something that we can’t do for them.  

*The Song of a Shirt

An example of the way in which workers in clothing manufacture in the UK did suffer working conditions comparable with those in Bangladesh today is found in Thomas Hood’s poem, The Song of the Shirt’ published in 1843. Below is the first verse and one of the subsequent verses:

WITH fingers weary and worn,

With eyelids heavy and red,

A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,

Plying her needle and thread--

Stitch! stitch! stitch!

In poverty, hunger, and dirt,

And still with a voice of dolorous pitch

She sang the "Song of the Shirt”

Work—work—work!

My labour never flags:

And what are its wages? A bed of straw,

A crust of bread--and rags.

That shatter'd roof--and this naked floor--

A table--a broken chair--

And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank

For sometimes falling there

 Its origins, according to Wikipedia, are as below:

'It was written in honour of a Mrs. Biddell, a Lambeth widow and seamstress living in wretched conditions. In what was, at that time, common practice, Mrs. Biddell sewed trousers and shirts in her home using materials given to her by her employer for which she was forced to give a £2 deposit. In a desperate attempt to feed her starving infants, Mrs. Biddell pawned the clothing she had made, thus accruing a debt she could not pay. Mrs. Biddell, whose first name has not been recorded, was sent to a workhouse, and her ultimate fate is unknown; however, her story became a catalyst for those who actively opposed the wretched conditions of England’s working poor, who often spent seven days a week labouring under inhuman conditions, barely managing to survive and with no prospect for relief.

The poem was published anonymously in the Christmas edition of Punch in 1843 and quickly became a phenomenon, centering people’s attention not only on Mrs. Biddell's case, but on the conditions of workers in general. Though Hood was not politically radical, his work, like that of Charles Dickens, contributed to the general awareness of the condition of the working class which fed the popularity of trade unionism and the push for stricter labour laws'.

Universal Benefits

            It seems that the government’s Work and Pensions Secretary Mr Ian Duncan-Smith has noticed that there is something a little incongruous about elderly millionaires being able to take advantage of the concessions intended to make the lives of us less affluent oldies a little more comfortable.  It is surely surprising that a septuagenarian with an ocean-going yacht, a second home in the Caribbean, and a chauffeur-driven Rolls, can claim the winter fuel allowance, free tv licence, free NHS prescriptions and free bus pass, just like you (if you’re a pensioner)  and me.

            Mr Duncan-Smith appeared to suggest that it might be a good idea if such people handed benefits that they didn’t need back to the government, but he now stresses that he didn’t mean that at all.   Like all members of this government of the wealthy for the wealthy he seems desperately eager not to cause the very least offence to anyone even richer than himself, and he has made it clear that millionaires are at liberty to keep their benefit, hand it back, or give it to charity, just as they please.   He would express no preference on the matter at all.

            I am a long, long way from being a millionaire but, unlike many pensioners, I am not entirely dependent upon the state pension and any benefits that I can squeeze out of the government.  I have a modest public service pension for which I paid six percent of my salary throughout the many years that I was working.

            I cannot take advantage of a bus pass or concessions on rail travel, because physically I am no longer able to walk to the railway station or even to the nearest bus stop.   The winter fuel allowance though has meant that I had no qualms about keeping my central heating on continuously during the icy weather of February and March this year! I am glad too that my NHS prescriptions are free as it seems to take an increasing amount of medication to keep me going. 

I also very much appreciate my free tv licence, and the lower rate of ‘Attendance Allowance’ that I receive because of my steadily diminishing mobility. This frees me from being housebound and has made it possible for me to buy and maintain the electric mobility scooter that I use to go to Church and the Quaker Meeting, as well as for shopping and visiting friends.  The blue disabled parking badge that I use when, very occasionally, I am driven in a friend or relative’s car has been free too. It is due for renewal in a month or two and I understand that it will now cost me £10.   As far as I am concerned that won’t break the bank.  For some disabled people though it could prove to be the final straw that breaks the camel's back..

            I am certainly not proposing to give any of my benefits back to the government – they’d probably fritter them away on nuclear deterrents that don't deter anybody, expensive funerals for former politicians, or arming ‘freedom fighters opposed to tyranny’ who, before you can say jihad, are liable to become ‘dastardly terrorists trying to murder us!’

           
           Nor would I welcome the idea of any of those benefits being means-tested. It would be expensive and time-wasting to administer.  Many needy but proud pensioners would feel that submitting details of their income and expenditure to a faceless official was intrusive, demeaning, and a form of ‘begging’ in which they were not prepared to engage.  Others would seek means of ‘fiddling the system!'

           

There is just one way, that would I believe be acceptable to most pensioners, in which the government could make the ‘old age benefit system' fairer than it is at present  That is, to make all those currently tax-free benefits subject to income tax. All old people would continue to get their age-related benefits in full as at present.  Pensioners who have no source of income other than the state pension would be completely unaffected by the change. Those, like me, who have another modest source of income and are currently paying income tax would have the appropriate proportion added to their income tax demand, and really wealthy pensioners, with incomes in excess of £150,000 a year, would have an increase in their income tax equivalent to 45 percent of the value of the benefits to which they were entitled.  It would, of course, have been 50 percent had it not been for the Chancellor’s recent generous hand-out to the very wealthy!

            This system would work very well so far as winter fuel allowance, free tv licence and attendance allowance are concerned but would present difficulties with bus passes and prescriptions as the financial benefit from these varies from person to person and from time to time.   It should though be possible to work out an average benefit, a notional sum that could be added to the taxable income of every income-tax paying pensioner.  Thus, I would be helping to pay for bus passes that I can’t use but others can, while those who don’t need as much medication as I do, would be helping to pay for mine.

            Many of us would pay rather more income tax than we do at the moment but we would all receive our full benefits and, unlike any other kind of taxation, it is the nature of income tax that no-one is ever asked for more than they can afford to pay. The system would, of course, be much simpler and fairer if the whole income tax system were to be overhauled and restructured so that all adults paid an equal proportion of their gross income as their annual ‘membership fee’ for British citizenship.  The annual income tax assessment would then be a ‘means test’ to which everyone would have to submit – but it would be the only means test ever needed.

             But there – regular readers of this blog will know that that is a hobby horse of mine.

I told you so……..

          …….but very much wish I had been wrong.   Below is an extract from a blog that I published in March, forecasting UKIP’s likely performance in last week’s county council elections.

 Nigel Farage seems also to have acquired the knack of attracting the serial non-voter, the kind of man or woman who dislikes politics and will never trust politicians.  He gives the impression that he feels just the same as they do; that he is an anti-politics politician. Such people comprise a considerable slice of the electorate.   If he can persuade them to vote, his Party will do very well in the forthcoming County Council elections and, even more importantly, in the European Parliament Elections next year.

  My forecast proved all too accurate.  Although UKIP does not have any county councils under its control it has massively increased its representation on these councils throughout the country – mainly at the expense of the Conservatives but both Labour and the Liberals have also suffered.   In my own North Clacton electoral division Conservative Andy Wood was elected with a total vote of 929 thanks to our ‘first past the post’ method of election. He was the choice of less than one third of those who voted.  Second came Samatha Atkinson, the Labour candidate, for whom I voted, with 790 votes, followed by UKIP Anne Poonian with just one vote less. Mark Stephenson of ‘Tendring First’ had 396 votes, Lib Dem. Harry Shearing 191 and James Horsler Green Party 75.  Anne Poonian's relative success is all the more remarkable in that she doesn't live in Clacton and that she was the only candidate from whom I - and presumably others - received no election literature.

            I view the future with foreboding – not least because Nigel Farage’s Party’s success will mean a swerve to the political right in Conservative policies in an attempt, that will probably prove to be fruitless,  to avoid being outflanked  by the UKIP.