05 April 2015

5th April 2015 (Easter Day!)

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Voices of the People?

            I am interested in politics. That’s why they’re a recurring topic in this blog.  But I’m not really interested in politicians’ speeches, and in interviews with politicians.     They’re all too often a masterly demonstration of how to avoid giving a straight answer to a straight question; ‘What we should really be asking ourselves is…………………’ and so on! Then again what, at the time, seemed to be a firm promise turns out to have been no more than an ‘aspiration’.  I’m much more interested in what they do than in what they say!

            Even as recently as a week ago if someone had told me that for two whole hours I would listen to politicians arguing with each other on tv, I’d have thought they must have confused me with someone else.  Yet that’s precisely what happened during the evening of Maundy Thursday, 2nd April.  A debate took place on ITV between seven prominent politicians, each the leader of a political party with candidates in the General Election on 7th May.   There was David Cameron, Conservative; Ed Miliband, Labour: Nick Clegg, Liberal; Nigel Farage, UKIP; Natalie Bennett, Green Party; Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish National Party; and Leanne Wood, Welsh National Party.

            I started to watch when the debate began at 8.00 pm, telling myself that I could always turn it off or switch to another channel if it became really boring.  But it didn’t and I watched till the end at 10.00 p.m. Mind you I was sitting in a very comfortable armchair with a generous double-scotch (well watered down!) at hand. I really think that the ITV authorities who organised the event, and the presenter, who kept the participants in order, deserve to be congratulated.  It could have developed into disorganised pandemonium and threatened to do so on a couple of occasions.  However the presenter was polite but firm and order prevailed.

             I suspect that watchers heard what they wanted to hear from the debate.  The headlines of at least one newspaper reported that David Cameron had clearly triumphed, while an immediate post-debate opinion poll commissioned by another newspaper indicated victory for Ed Miliband.   Personally, I thought that Cameron and Miliband trotted out all the predictable arguments that we have heard from them before.  Nick Clegg remains confident that Lib.Dems. will help either Labour or Conservatives to form a government and will steer that government’s actions towards the ‘middle ground’.  He could, of course, be right – but I doubt it.  Nick Clegg also took pride in the fact that the coalition government had raised the threshold of liability for income tax thereby, so he claimed, lifting thousands of people ‘out of the tax system altogether’.  That is simply untrue.  It has raised them out of the ‘income tax’ system but they still pay the indirect taxes and customs duties like VAT and duties on petrol, alcohol and tobacco that Conservatives much prefer.  It also perpetuates the myth that there is an under-class of non-taxpayers supported by tax-payers who have lifted themselves out of poverty by hard work and thrift.  I wonder how many of Britain’s thriving billionaires acquired their millions by their own ‘hard work and thrift’?   

            Nigel Farage was his usual obnoxious self, pouring scorn on the EU and suggesting that ‘Health Tourism’ is a serious problem and that a majority of folk diagnosed as HIV positive were immigrants.  Nick Clegg pointed out that not all foreigners in this country were malign.  Both he, and Nigel Farage, were married to ‘foreigners’!   Farage also claimed that all the other parties represented at the debate were the same, since they all supported EU membership. Only Ukip, he claimed, represented the will of the British people.  I continue to see in Nigel Farage’s progress parallels with the early political career of Adolf Hitler in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s.  He too assured a disillusioned-with-politicians electorate that his Party (the NSDAP or Nazis) was ‘different’ – and so it was!   

            I was impressed with the three women representing the Green Party, the SNP and the Welsh Nationalists but am quite ready to concede that my judgement is largely founded on the fact that the policies they promoted are the ones that I believe are needed today.   The most impressive, confident and articulate was Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party.  She was the only debater who had the courage to refer to the UKs folly in its insistence on possession of nuclear weapons.  ‘The scarce resources of our country should be invested in the future of our children, not on new nuclear weapons’.  A comment on ‘I’ daily newspaper says that she gave an impressive performance and that ‘it is possible that some English voters watching might have been tempted to switch from Labour to SNP if the Party was standing outside Scotland’. I remarked in this blog a few weeks ago that Ms. Sturgeon was a worthy successor of Alex Salmond.  She certainly is! It is a pity that those three women party leaders with so much in common, didn’t get together to agree who was to say what at the debate!   Leanne Wood (Welsh Nationalist) and Natalie Bennett (Green Party) covered much the same ground as Nicola Sturgeon but less confidently and forcefully.  I’d have liked to have heard from Natalie Bennett rather more about the Green Party’s environmental policies – the importance of combating the effects of climate change world-wide; of finding and developing  clean and renewable sources of energy, and of urgently reducing our dependence on fossil fuels;  and, of course, of the utter folly of encouraging ‘fracking’.

            Voting in the General Election will be taking place the day before the 70th anniversary of VE Day, the day on which in Europe World War II ended.   It comes as something of a shock to me to realize that you really have to be at least eightyish to remember anything at all about World War II, six years that were such an important part of my life..  On that fateful day in 1945 I was with a group of British prisoners of war being marched south-westward into Czechoslovakia, away from the inexorably approaching battle front.  Half-way through the morning our guards announced that they had heard on the radio that the war was over, and left us to our own devices.  We thereupon liberated ourselves – though with grateful thanks to the Soviet Red Army.  I walked through the front door of my home in Ipswich just ten days later – on 18th May, which happened to be my 24th birthday!

            I little thought on that day that seventy years later the world would be threatened by climate change; that Christians would be massacred in parts of Africa and the Middle East for no other reason than that they were Christian; that the Christian faith was in danger of being eradicated from the region that saw its birth; and that the world’s rulers believed that nuclear weapons, whose use could erase humanity, were needed to maintain a precarious world peace.  

Finally

Let's end this somewhat gloomy blog with a message of hope on an Easter Morning on which the daffodils in my garden announce that Spring is here.  Here is the traditional Easter salutation of the Universal Church of Christ and the response.



'Christ is risen - Alleluia!'    'He is risen indeed, Amen!'  

           













   


            

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