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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