Tendring Topics……..on line
I’m not alone!
I
had begun to think that I was a solitary voice crying in the wilderness in my
dislike of ‘right to buy' and, if the Conservatives win the general election,
its progression from the tenants of local authorities to those of Housing
Associations. However I was pleased to
read in the Church Times that Dr. David Walker, Bishop of Manchester,
has condemned it as making economic
nonsense and being morally indefensible.
David Orr, Chief Executive
Officer of the National Housing Federation also describes the extension of
‘right to buy’ to tenants of Housing Associations as fundamentally the wrong
answer to our country’s housing problems since it involves the transfer of
large sums of money to private individuals who are already some of the best and
most cheaply housed people in the country.
Furthermore, he says that it is completely unfair to the tens of
thousands of tenants of private landlords who haven’t the remotest possible of
ever becoming home owners.
With
the general election coming ever nearer I might be asked, and I have indeed
asked myself, why – since I am so strongly opposed to the present coalition
government – I don’t wholeheartedly support the Labour Party, which is the only
political force with a realistic possibility of replacing them.
The
reason is that there are a few political objectives about which I feel
strongly. My support, little and feeble
as it may be, goes to any party that shares those objectives.
I believe very strongly that the enormous
gap between the incomes of the very wealthiest and the poorest in our country
is scandalous – the largest in Europe and one
of the largest in the developed world.
Its narrowing should be a government priority.
During the decade
of Labour rule that gap widened and Ed Miliband’s Labour Party has no plans to
use income tax, or any other effective means, to narrow it.
Compelling local authorities and/or Housing
Associations to sell dwellings to sitting tenants at discounted prices is a
betrayal of earlier and wiser generations who provided those homes for letting
to eliminate homelessness, overcrowding and sub-standard housing. ‘Right to buy’ should be repealed as a major
cause of our present housing crisis.
New Labour failed
to repeal ‘right to buy’ when it had the opportunity to do so and Ed Miliband
has actually apologised for the Labour Party’s earlier opposition to its
introduction.
The possession of weapons of mass
destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, does not protect our country from
attack any more than carrying a knife protects an individual. It might encourage any ill-disposed country,
or terrorist group, possessing similar weapons to use them against us before we
had a chance to use ours. The threat of using nuclear weapons is only effective
if we are in fact prepared to use them.
If we ever did so we would be guilty of mass murder and possibly
responsible for a chain of events that could result in the extinction of the
human race. We should cease our reliance
on nuclear weapons as an ‘ultimate deterrent’ and disarm our Trident Nuclear
Submarine fleet. Reliance on Nuclear
Defence has been rightly described as Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD!
Meanwhile, the coalition government has run
down our regular army which can be used for genuine ‘defence’ as distinct from
acts of vengeance, for peacekeeping, and for replacing ‘outsourced’ private
enterprises, when they fail to fulfil the public services for which they have
been contracted. Where would we have
been had the army not been available to replace the firm that had contracted to
provide security for the Olympics and had failed to do so?
David Cameron
has announced that a future Conservative Government would replace the existing
ageing Trident Submarine fleet with four new state-of-the-art nuclear
submarines costing billions of pounds.
Ed Miliband has been at pains to assure the electorate that he would not
oppose this.
I believe that a responsible government
needs to carry out a thorough review of Britain ’s
foreign policy, beginning with referendums on our membership of NATO and our
‘special relationship’ with the USA USA , particularly
in the recovery of the Falklands from invasion by Argentina
More recently, while our EU partners are
struggling with the Kiev government, the Russian government and the Ukrainian
rebels to secure a lasting peace in Ukraine, our coalition government has given,
and is giving, military support to the Kiev government – a government that has
lied repeatedly to obtain NATO support, has ruthlessly shelled its own people,
and has driven over a million Ukrainians into seeking refuge in Russia.
It might have
been expected that UKIP, claiming to be fighting for the UK ’s independence, would have agreed with my
ideas for a radical revision of Britain ’s
foreign policy.. It seems though that
they’re happy enough having our foreign and defence policies dictated by
foreigners from across the Atlantic .
I have never trusted Nigel Farage whose
meteoric rise to fame reminds me too much of Adolf Hitler’s rise in Germany in the
late 1920s and early ‘30s. I hadn’t
realized though until the election campaigns got into their stride that he was
campaigning under false colours. Ukip,
under Nigel Farage, isn’t battling for UK Independence. He and his disciples just want to sever our
connection with Europe to which we are linked by geography, history and culture, and to the European Union in which Britain has an equal and
influential voice.. If they were honest
they’d just describe themselves as Europhobes.
Finally, and perhaps most important of all,
I’d like the new government to accept the need for early and decisive action to
combat and alleviate the effects of the global climate change that is taking
place before our eyes. Already we have seen unprecedented drought and bush
fires in Australia and parts
of the USA USA and a period of unseasonably arctic
conditions extending from Canada
almost as far as Florida UK there are many households
still suffering from the effects of last year’s floods in Somerset
and in the Thames valley.
Nigel Farage
denies that unprecedented climate change is taking place or – if it is - that
human activity has any responsibility for causing it. Given the opportunity he’d stop all
government financial support for wind farms and solar farms. He’d encourage the extraction of every last
ton of coal from British coalfields and the last barrel of oil from our inland
and off-shore oil reserves. He’d tear up
the British countryside by ‘fracking’ gas or oil from the beds of shale deep
below our feet.
The other
party leaders have more respect for the urgent warnings of scientists
world-wide and for the need to take urgent action in the face of otherwise
inevitable catastrophe. Both David
Cameron and Ed Miliband, on one or other of whom prompt action surely depends,
are aware of this. Both are fully
determined to take resolute action…….but not just yet. Only in the Green Party’s election literature
has the threat of climate change featured prominently. Only the Green Party shares the concerns
that are important to me. In Clacton ’s
by-election I voted tactically for the Conservative Candidate because I thought
he had the best chance of defeating the turn-coat former Conservative now
Ukipper, Douglas Carswell, who was in fact elected. For the General Election I shall follow the
advice that I quoted in this blog a week or so ago, given by Polonius to his
son Laertes in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet,
‘This above all, to thine own self be true and it must follow, as the night the
day, thou canst not then be false to any
man’.
I shall vote
for Chris Southall , the Green
candidate. He is a local man, living
with his family in Burrs Road He is a trained engineer and has been
self-employed for most of his life, working as a potter, computer engineer,
drummer and with people with special needs.
He has been both a school governor and a parish councillor. Chris practises what he preaches. He and his family live in an ‘Eco house’ with
a Permaculture Land Centre that is sometimes open to the public.
He may be
unlikely to win the election but a vote for him is not a vote wasted. My vote, together with those of
all who vote Green at the General Election, will give national politicians an
idea of the growing number of folk in the UK who care passionately about world
peace, fairness and justice, and the future of the world in which we live.
Voting
for the whole of Tendring District Council will take place on the same day as
the General Election. In my (Alton Park
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