2nd June 2015

Tendring Topics………on line

Dwellers in ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’?

The NHS.

          I sometimes wonder if I live in the same world as today’s top politicians.  Here in Clacton-on-Sea there is an acute shortage of general medical practitioners (family doctors).   I have been served by the same medical practice since my family and I moved to Clacton in 1956 fifty-eight years ago.  In those distant days there were just two doctors. They were Dr Craig and Dr Geddes, both Scotsmen and not dissimilar to the Dr Cameron and Dr Finlay of the tv soap ‘Dr Finlay’s casebook’.  They behaved similarly too.   I remember several occasions when one or other of them visited my home late at night or early in the morning when one of my two then-young sons, or my wife or I, needed urgent medical attention.   There were no appointments.  Patients just turned up at the surgery.  They might have a longish wait to see a doctor but see one of the two doctors they always did.  And that doctor was always familiar with their medical history and could refresh his memory from written notes.

            Lots of changes have taken place since 1956.  Clacton has almost doubled in size and my doctors’ surgery, now renamed a ‘medical centre’ has doubled in size too. There are several practice nurses and a practice manager.  Both Dr Craig and Dr Geddes died many years ago.  At one point there were as many as six medical practitioners, two of them women.  There were, I think, appointments but most people just turned up at the medical centre and saw either their preferred doctor or whichever doctor was available.

            Now, there are only three doctors and one of them is only part-time.  They see patients only by appointment and it’s very difficult to make an appointment. ‘Phone just after 8.00 am’, you’ll be told by the receptionist – but the line is always engaged.  By the time you manage to get through all the doctors are booked.  I have found from experience that the only way I can make almost sure of seeing the doctor of my choice is to turn up at the medical centre fifteen minutes before they open at 8.00 am and ask the receptionist for an appointment then.  There’s usually a queue so I may need to get there before 7.45 am to be at the right end of that queue!   As I am now 94 I rarely bother!  The service provided for patients by our local doctors (the ‘front line’ of the NHS) is clearly not nearly as good as it was as recently as five years ago.   If it were much better than it had been when the coalition government took over, I am quite sure that it would be trumpeted as one of the government’s successes.  As it is, I’m not quite so partisan as to proclaim that ‘It’s all the government’s fault’.  I don’t suppose that it is – but the government, with its continual ‘targets’ and its reorganisation of the NHS so as to increase the field of local GP responsibility, has certainly played a major role in this deterioration.

            We need to attract many more qualified doctors to the Tendring Area – and this can’t be done just by offering them more money.  For goodness sake – our coast has the lowest annual rainfall in the British Isles and more than the average amount of sunshine.   It’s a lovely place to bring up children (my late wife and I have done it and I write from personal experience!) and it’s only about an hour and a half from London by road or rail.  It really shouldn’t be difficult to attract young doctors here.

            Is the new all-Conservative government taking any steps to encourage this?  Not as far as I know but, of course, they’ve only been in office a few weeks.  During those few weeks though, Prime Minister David Cameron has found time to promise that within a couple of years we should be able to consult a doctor any day of the week and all hours of the day!  Can David Cameron really inhabit the world that I do?  I, and I suspect a great many other local people, would be happier if he were to concentrate his efforts on the – surely much more easily achieved – objective of making it possible for us to see the doctor of our choice between 8.00 am and 5.00 pm on Monday through to Friday in every week!  That surely shouldn’t be too much to ask

 Home Ownership

            So the Government plans to go ahead with its determination to ‘buy votes with other people’s money’ by extending their ‘right to buy’ scheme from council house tenants to the tenants of housing associations.  They justify this by the alleged fact that 86 percent of the public have aspirations (that’s the OK word just now) to become homeowners.  Presumably this claim follows a public opinion poll on the subject conducted among those not owning or buying their own home.  If they were just asked Would you like to own your own home? I’d have expected that even more than 86 percent would have answered positively.  No-one particularly likes paying rent, having to observe tenancy rules and never knowing when and why they may be given notice to quit.  Neither do adults, particularly with young children, like being homeless or having to share with ‘mum and dad’.   Of course they’d much prefer having their own home.

            But that’s not what they are being offered.  What they are being offered is the possibility of home ownership (you’re not ‘the owner’ till you hold the deeds of the home) after repaying a large loan month by month over a period of twenty years or more.  During that period you’ll be responsible for paying council tax and for carrying out all repairs and internal and external decoration.  If you default in making those regular monthly payments (and who knows what’s going to happen in twenty years?) you’ll run the risk of homelessness for yourself and family, and the loss of much – even perhaps all – of the money you’ve already paid. That prospect might, I think, considerably reduce the number of potential home buyers on whose aspirations the government claims to base its policies.

            As a former local government Housing Manager I have always objected to council tenants being treated as second class citizens.  But I don’t think they should be given special privileges or financial benefits either.  Most Council tenants were happy to remain as tenants until the possibility of buying their homes ‘on the cheap’ was offered them. Under former governments they enjoyed payable rents, security and reasonable tenancy conditions.  All structural repairs and maintenance was the council’s responsibility. I am sure that Housing Association tenants are the same.

            The sale to Housing Association tenants of their homes at discounted prices is  still only one of the 'intentions' of the government.  I think that they may find themselves facing a few expensive legal challenges on the way to its fulfilment.  To David Cameron and his pals in Westminster, Housing Associations and local authorities are much the same thing.  They both owned lots of rented houses in which not-well-off people enjoyed secure tenancies ‘for life’ or at least for as long as they paid their rent and observed their not-usually-very-onerous tenancy conditions.  Both provided ‘social housing’ which they had a responsibility to keep ‘fit for habitation’ and neither made a substantial profit from their house ownership.

            In fact there is one crucial difference between Council Houses and those owned by Housing Associations.   Council Houses were built with public money – from the rates and from central government grants.  It could be claimed that a more than usually stupid government had every right to require local authorities to sell them off at bargain-basement prices.  A similar case can not be made for the compulsory sale of Housing Association property. Those homes were not provided from the rates and taxes of earlier, more responsible, governments and local councils.  They were provided by charitable giving, mainly from the generosity of very wealthy and benevolent 19^th century business men, for the purpose of providing the ‘working classes’ with comfortable, secure and healthy homes at affordable rents.

            George Cadbury and George Peabody must be among many wealthy Victorian philanthropists who are turning in their graves at the thought that, for electoral advantage, the homes that they provided for the poor may be compulsorily sold off at bargain basement prices.  They probably would have had sufficient foresight to see that such homes would eventually fall into the hands of profiteering landlords – and be let at ridiculously high rents to tenants who would only be able to pay them by means of Housing Benefit from their local authority!

            If, of course, it is found that the government can legally compel Housing Associations to sell off their properties with a substantial discount, there can be no reason why they should not extend the ‘right to buy’ to many thousands of tenants who are charged unreasonably high rents, have no security of tenure, and who fear that asking the landlord to carry out repairs will only lead to their losing their homes.  They are the tenants of private landlords.  Surely the ‘right to buy at a discount’ should be extended to them to them before it is offered to Housing Association tenants who are already satisfactorily housed?

30th April 2015

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Day of Reckoning

          When this blog is published the General Election will be only a few days away.   It is possible that by the time I prepare another blog we will know the composition of the next government.   Do you remember the situation just before last year’s Scottish referendum?  Scottish public opinion polls showed the YES and NO campaigns to be very close. There was a distinct possibility that the YES vote would triumph.  That, decided the leaders of the three main political parties, had to be prevented at all costs.  In a rare spirit of co-operation they published  a joint promise that if the NO voters comprised a majority the Scots would be offered virtually everything they asked for short of complete independence and the break-up of the United Kingdom.   And of course, the NO campaign was successful.

            I think that we have reached a similar point in the General Election campaign. Opinion polls show that the Labour and Conservative Parties are neck and neck and the leaders are resorting to desperate measures to attract voters.   David Cameron has promised that if a Conservative Government is elected, there will be no increase in either the standard or the higher rate of income tax, or in the rate of VAT, or in National Insurance contributions (three principal sources of Government finance) for the government’s period of office – the next five years.  To make certain that that promise is honoured the government will introduce a bill to Parliament giving that promise the force of law.  The only possible reason why a government should introduce and support a law limiting its own powers must surely be that top politicians now realize the electorate doesn’t believe a word that any of them say.   David Cameron imagines that enshrining it in law will assure electors that that particular promise will be kept.  It still may not be, of course.  Parliament can pass a law and parliament can repeal that same law if it wishes to do so.  I have no doubt that if circumstances demanded, the government would break that promise quickly enough, as it has others.

            This generosity of the government to those of us fortunate enough to be liable for income tax will be funded by further cuts in government grants to local authorities and to welfare and public services.   David Cameron and George Osborne have so far declined to tell us who will suffer.  I am always amused when David Cameron speaks of the wealthy having worked hard and saved to acquire their millions for the purchase of their yachts, their British football teams and their stately homes.  Can you imagine Russian oligarchs, made rich by President Yeltzin generosity to his pals, carefully putting their roubles into a saving bank until they had saved up enough to go to England and buy a thoroughly modernised castle and a professional football team?   I reckon that most, if not all, of Britain’s growing army of billionaires should put OBE (Other B………..s’ Efforts) after their names.

            The current big worry of English politicians is the intentions of the Scottish Nationalist MPs.  To their consternation the SNP didn’t wither and die when they lost that famous referendum.  On the contrary they grew in both membership and supporters so that, although the Liberal Democrats are regarded as the third ‘major party’ in UK politics, their place has in reality been taken by the SNP, despite the fact that their appeal is only to one region of the United Kingdom.  Their former leader Alex Salmond is now leader of the SNP members of the Westminster Parliament while his place as Leader of the party has been taken by Nicola Sturgeon – in my opinion the most articulate, confident and charismatic political leader in the United Kingdom today. 

            In Scotland the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Ukippers barely have a foothold.   It is expected that the SNP will take the place of Labour in dominating the Scottish political scene.  It is by no means impossible that there will be sufficient SNP MPs elected to prop up a minority Labour Government.  It’s a possibility that terrifies all the other party leaders including Ed Miliband, who has repeatedly declared that he would not enter into any kind of coalition or other voting pact with Alex Salmond and his merry men – and women!  A columnist in The Sun declared that a Labour pact with the SNP would be the first step on the path to a Communist Dictatorship! Goodness, I thought that I’d better check on what the SNP really does stand for - beyond independence for Scotland.  I have always found the web’s Wikipedia a very reliable source of information.  Here’s what they have to say about the SNP’s policies

The SNP's policy base is mostly in the mainstream European social democratic tradition. Among its policies are commitments to same-sex marriage, reducing the voting age to 16, unilateral nuclear disarmament,progressive personal taxation, the eradication of poverty, the building of affordable social housing, free higher education, opposition to the building of new nuclear power plants, investment in renewable energy, the abolition of Air Passenger Duty, and a pay increase for nurses

Apart from ‘same sex marriage and reducing the voting age to 16’ (public opinion has changed a great deal in the past seventy years!) those are much the same policies that I, and thousands of other ex-servicemen returning from World War II, thought we were voting for when we rejected the Conservatives and elected the Attlee Government in 1945.   I find it quite refreshing that the Scots have retained – or perhaps rediscovered – the idealism of the old Labour Party.  There’s certainly no sign of a communist dictatorship there.  I think that an alliance between the SNP and Labour would do nothing but good.

Much more sinister and – sadly – I think rather more likely, is the possibility of an alliance between the Conservative Party and UKIP to form a coalition government of Tories and Ukippers.  A great many well-to-the-right-of-the-party Conservative MPs are crypto-Ukippers and have refrained from taking the same path as Clacton’s turn-coat MP Douglas Carswell either from loyalty or after weighing up where their personal advantage lay.  I think that they would find Nigel Farage a much more charismatic and confident leader than David Cameron, and that it wouldn’t be long before the two parties merged with Farage on top!  Then I think we really would be on the way to a right-wing dictatorship, supported ideologically by the Murdoch press and financially by reactionary Republican supporters from across the Atlantic.

Possibly all this speculation about coalitions is pointless and either the Conservatives or Labour will get an overall majority of MPs.   I do urge every blog reader with a vote to use it on Thursday. If you are fed up with both the Tories and the Labourites –  remember that UKIP is not the only, or the best, alternative.  There is, I think, a Green Candidate in every constituency!

11th April 2015

Tendring Topics……..on line

Oh to be a Non.Dom – in a new Financial Year!

          After I took early retirement from Tendring Council’s service in 1980 I earned a considerable income from freelance writing.  I wrote and had published five commercially successful books on domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage.   I wrote the plumbing section of a number of d-i-y manuals including the ‘Readers Digest Householders’ Manual’.   I wrote and sold dozens of feature articles to magazines and periodicals on domestic hot water supply and drainage, on local government, on camping and caravanning in the UK and mainland Europe and on any other subject about which I had at least some knowledge and experience.  For several years I wrote Advertising Features for Essex County Newspapers, and for ‘Look East,’ a publication promoting commerce and industry in East Anglia.  I also wrote a weekly column, ‘Tendring Topics’ for the Coastal Express’ for twenty-three years.  

  Some of this work was for overseas publishers.  I remember writing about Dedham’s and Harwich’s association with the USA and about the historic village of Bosham near Chichester, one-time home  of both King Canute and the ill-fated King Harold killed at the Battle of Hastings, for a magazine for retired citizens of New England.  I had a lucrative arrangement with an Australian publisher who sought permission to print articles of mine that had already appeared in Do-it-Yourself Magazine in England.

I declared every penny I earned, including those from overseas, to Inland Revenue and I claimed reasonable expenses.  I paid quite a lot (by my standards) of income tax each year.  I didn’t complain.  I enjoyed what I was doing and the tax was only a fraction of my income.

I would have been a lot less happy had I realized that there was a privileged minority of very wealthy people who paid no income tax on money that they received from overseas.  They were the ‘non-doms’ whose ‘domicile’ was said to be elsewhere than in the UK.  It seems that ‘non-dom’ status can be inherited and that having a clever lawyer is much more important than where you or your parents actually live or may sometime have lived.

Now it’s one of the issues that may affect voting in the general election.  Ed Miliband says that if he becomes Prime Minister his government will abolish ‘non-dom’ status altogether.  Apparently though the shadow chancellor has said that to do so would bring in very little extra revenue, and Ed Miliband’s political opponents claim that it would lead to all these wealthy and talented ‘non-doms’ leaving the country and domiciling themselves elsewhere.

It is a sad reflection on the zeitgeist of our wonderful ‘free market’ society that discussion about ‘non-dom’ status has been solely concerned with whether or not the Treasury would benefit from its abolition.  I have heard no-one say that it is clearly wrong for a privileged minority of very wealthy individuals to be exempt from taxation to which ordinary ‘hard-working tax-payers’ (about whom David Cameron claims to be so concerned) are subject.  Morality, it seems, has nothing to do with it.

United Kingdom Independence………but from whom?

It is always interesting to hear what Nigel Farage has to say about any subject other than the European Union.  Recently he was discussing Britain’s defence policy and I was just a little surprised to hear him say that he was all for our spending two percent of our national wealth on ‘defence’, as requested by NATO.  It was the as requested by NATO that astonished me.  Mr Farage believes that the government should comply with ‘the will of the people’.  He’d like to see an immediate in/out referendum on the EU because he is quite sure that the Outs would win.  He’s certain that the British people don’t want to be ruled by ‘foreigners’.

He could be wrong about that but, in any case membership of the EU is one of the few matters about which the British electorate has been consulted in a referendum.  Surely there are several matters of national importance about which we have never been consulted.  One of them is membership of NATO and another, closely related, is our ‘special relationship’ with the USA.  I’d have thought Nigel would be demanding a referendum on these subjects before demanding yet another on EU membership.  Doesn’t NATO consist almost wholly of ‘foreigners’ and isn’t the special relationship a little one-sided? 

We blindly followed the USA into the invasion of Iraq, and the USA and NATO into an unwinnable conflict in Afghanistan.   The USA entered World War II against the Nazis only when Hitler declared war on the USA in accordance with Nazi Germany’s treaty with Japan.  We’ll never know if the USA would have engaged in war in Europe had he not done so.  I think it at least possible that the USA would have decided that their war was against the Japanese and in the Pacific.  They’d have thought about Hitler only after they had defeated the Japanese.

We do know that the USA gave us no support when the Falklands was invaded by Argentina, and actually led an armed and unprovoked invasion of Grenada (the island in the Caribbean, not the town in Spain!) then part of the Commonwealth, in order to force a regime change.

Nigel Farage is righteously indignant about the cost of our membership of the EU.  Perhaps the BBC’s Radio 4 ‘More or Less’ team could discover if our membership of NATO and the Special Relationship have cost us more in cash than our membership of the EU.  Without a shadow of doubt our participation in those two USA-led ‘colonial wars’ in the Middle East have cost us much more in dead and wounded!

All of this simply confirms in my own mind that Farage has no objection to British foreign and defence policy being dictated from the other side of the Atlantic but he dislikes our co-operating with our European cousins and developing into a federal super-power able to co-operate (or compete) on equal terms with the USA, the Russian Federation and China.

 The Fruits of Desperation

            Do you remember how the coalition government, supported in this instance by New Labour, offered concession after concession short of complete independence, to the Scottish nationalists in a successful attempt to secure a majority NO vote in the recent referendum?  Desperate measures were needed because opinion polls suggested that the YES voters might be successful.   It was a tactic that they may now be regretting.  A number of English towns and regions are demanding autonomy comparable with that of the Scots.  At the same time it seems likely that SNP candidates will triumph in the forthcoming General Election and, since Scotland remains part of the UK, may prevent the Conservatives forming a government with a comfortable majority in the House of Commons.

            The leaders of the main political parties are now taking desperate measures to gain, or retain, a few votes.  I mentioned David Cameron’s promise to would-be home buyers of thousands of homes ‘on the cheap’ a blog or so ago.  They’ll be cheap because the developers won’t be required to build any ‘social housing’ or contribute to the provision of public services in the area.  Now there’s the idea of lending would-be tenants the few weeks rent-in-advance that nowadays landlords demand.  It’ll certainly add to the burden of debt that most people have to carry these days.

            There’s a promise to freeze rail-fares (though a BBC analyst says that it’ll actually mean a fare rise!), to pay large firms and public authorities to allow some of their employees a few days off to do voluntary work, to make more apprenticeships and so on, and on, and on!  They make wild promises about what they’ll do – but they’re even better at rubbishing the claims of their opponents.  The SNP threatens to rob the Labour Party of what were once ‘safe parliamentary seats’ in Scotland.   So ED Miliband has toured Scotland today  telling electors that the SNP’s proposed programme can only be carried out by raising taxes and making even deeper austerity cuts than  the Tories have.  Mind you, Ed Miliband has recently been at the receiving end of just such a ‘rubbish your opponent’ campaign.  It’s a bit complicated and depends on lots of ‘mights’, but I’ll do my best to explain.

            It is just possible that Labour might win enough seats in the election to have more parliamentary seats than any other party, but not have an overall majority.  It is also just possible that the SNP might gain enough seats to make up an overall majority and might be prepared to support a minority Labour government.   They would obviously expect a quid pro quo for this – and it is possible that the price they might demand for that support might be that the Labour Government does not renew the Trident Nuclear submarine fleet with its ‘ultimate independent nuclear deterrent’.  If they did so then Ed. Miliband, in order to become Prime Minister, might accept that condition.  According to the Conservative Defence Minister he has already ‘stabbed his brother in the back’ to become leader of the Labour Party so he’d have no hesitation in ‘stabbing his country in the back’ to become Prime Minister..  David Cameron says he supports his Defence Minister in this assertion and proudly announces that only the Conservative Party will present the electorate with four brand-new state-of-the-art Trident submarines.  Goodness, is that a threat or a promise?  It's certainly as good a reason as I know for not voting Conservative.

    

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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, 2^nd 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 7^th 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 70^th 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 18^th May, which happened to be my 24^th 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!'  

           

   

            

27th February 2015

Tendring Topics……on line

Is our economy safe in their hands?

            One of the main points of the Conservative Party’s election campaign is that the country’s economy is safe in their hands.  Vote for any party other than the Conservatives, they say, and you’ll have Ed Miliband as Prime Minister. Our economy – your money – is safe with David Cameron.   Well, I’m not all that keen on Ed Miliband but I really don’t think his economic policies are materially different from those of David Cameron.  It doesn’t seem to occur to either of them (or perhaps they’re both too scared of well-off voters to mention it) that cutting essential public services is neither the only nor the best way of reducing that deficit. 

The deficit is the difference between the government’s income and its expenditure.  Why not try increasing its income?   A penny on income tax would hurt no-one (even with the skewed-in-favour-of-the-wealthy income tax system we have today) and would have an instant effect on the deficit.  Instead David Cameron is talking about cutting income tax!  Both he and the Liberal Democrats are convinced that they’re doing a tremendous service to the poor by raising the level at which income becomes liable, thereby taking some low-paid workers out of the income tax system altogether.  Sometimes they say, ‘Out of the tax system altogether’, as though income tax were the only tax we all pay.

In fact, by raising the  threshold at which income tax becomes payable, they are helping everyone who pays income tax – but they are not in the least helping those whose income is already too low to be subject to taxation.

 One way in which the Government has wasted our money is in the maintenance of our Trident Nuclear Submarine ‘independent Nuclear Deterrent’.  It is not independent (can you imagine us using it – or even threatening to use it – without the OK of Washington?) and it hasn’t deterred any of the many acts of aggression that have occurred in the post-war years.  When the Falklands were invaded by Argentina neither our ‘nuclear deterrent’ nor our ‘special relationship’ with the USA were the least help to us.  Nor does everyone think that the lavish cost of an all-but-a-state-funeral of a politician who deeply divided the country and whose flagship ‘right to buy’ legislation is responsible for our current housing crisis, was money well spent.

Perhaps though the most absurd and obviously crazy way in which the Conservative dominated coalition government has frittered away our money has been the replacement of area Police Committees with directly elected ‘Police and Crime Commissioners’ with power to appoint and sack Chief Constables and to determine the general direction of police work though operational control remains, thank goodness, with the Chief Constables.   The former Police Committees were, so the coalition claimed, ‘undemocratic’.   How can one man or woman, elected by a tiny fragment of the total electorate, possibly be ‘more democratic’ than a committee, at least some members of which had been elected locally?

The obvious way to make the police answerable to the local public was to make them the responsibility of the local county or unitary authority council. They would elect some of their members to serve on a ‘Police and Crime Committee’ with the same responsibilities as those of Police and Crime Commissioners.  These police committees would be more representative of their whole area than any single individual could hope to be.  They’d also be much better able to co-ordinate police activities with those of other local or regional services such as education, social services, highways, and parks and gardens, for which the County Council or Unitary Authority is responsible.  What’s more, they’d cost less, which I would have thought would have been a prime consideration of our Prime Minister and Chancellor.

You’ll recall that the public showed its contempt for the whole idea of directly elected Commissioners (an idea imported from the USA) by failing to turn up at the polling booths.  Nationwide the percentage of those bothering to register their vote was the lowest recorded in any election – and Essex set a splendid example by having the lowest turn-out of the lot!

Of course there has always been the possibility that those of us who were convinced that the appointment of Police and Crime Commissioners was a costly mistake were quite wrong. There could have been a dramatic fall in crime and rise in the detection rate, and we might have all been sleeping easier in our beds in the knowledge that we had a Commissioner looking after our interests.  Essex’s own Commissioner – Nick Alston - seemed a pleasant enough chap.  Perhaps he could work miracles.

Headlines in the local Daily Gazette suggest that he can’t; It’s official……crime is rising in Essex.   In fact, that is only partly true.  The number of domestic abuse cases rose from 9,222 to 10,825 in 2013 and there was 35 percent rise in prosecutions against Class A drug dealers. The solved crime rate fell to 27.63 percent.   On the other hand there was an 11.6 percent drop in the number of burglaries and there were 900 fewer incidents of rural crime.

 While the government exercises tight control of the purse strings there is little that either the Crime Commissioner or a Police Committee can do to reduce crime.  Mark Smith, chairman of the Essex Police Federation is quite sure that the politicians are to blame:

 It is quite clear that what we are being told by the politicians is not true.  They say crime is down.  It is not and we are not even recording new crimes like cyber crime and ‘grooming’.

We have already had cuts of £72.5 million and have heard that in the next five years we are going to have to save another £80 million. We will probably lose 200 officers this year, so we will have gone down from 3,600 to 3,000. In five years there will only be about 2,000 if the cuts go ahead.

I’m not a great Ed Miliband fan and intend to vote Green in the General Election. However I’d support Ed Miliband’s promise that a future Labour Government would put more coppers on the beat and pay for the change by scrapping those expensive and largely impotent Police and Crime Commissioners.

Yet another NHS reorganisation?

In this blog I have again and again criticised the action of successive governments – both Conservative and Labour – of stripping local authorities of the powers and responsibilities that were theirs in the 1930s.   When in 1937 and aged sixteen, I stepped onto the very lowest rung of the staff ladder of Ipswich Corporation’s Public Health Department in 1937 the Department was responsible for a General Hospital, an Isolation Hospital (infectious diseases like diphtheria and scarlet fever were much more common, and deadlier, in those days), a Maternity Home and a Tuberculosis Sanatorium. The department was also responsible for the domiciliary midwives and district nurses and the school medical service, as well as the environmental health services for which it is responsible today.  There may well have been other services of which I was not aware.  I was very young, on the very lowest staff level – and my local government career was interrupted after just two years by the outbreak of World War II!

After the war I was older and, I hope, wiser than I had been.  I was one of the returning servicemen who voted for Clem Attlee’s Labour Government – but I was a little dismayed when all those local health and medical services were taken over by the NHS.  However I thought that the advantages of a truly National Health Service outweighed the disadvantages, and – until the last year or so – I have had no reason to think otherwise.   I wasn’t impressed with the Government’s last NHS reorganisation.  It sounds wonderful to make GPs responsible for all their patients needs – seeing a consultant, getting a bed in a hospital and so on.  But GPs are fully occupied examining patients, treating them and passing them on to consultants when necessary.  They really didn’t have the time for administrative work.   I wrote in this blog that they were getting rid of one layer of bureaucracy and replacing it with dozens of smaller layers as GP practices took on extra staff or formed consortiums to deal with this work.  Now it seems the Government is really trying to localise the Health Service in at least one part of the UK.  They are making the local authorities that comprise Greater Manchester a single comprehensive Health and Welfare Authority, responsible for both Health and Social Services.  It sounds a brilliant idea but there are several matters on which I’d like further clarification.

The government will fund this new authority.  This government isn’t famous for its lavish support of public services.  Will there be adequate funding?

He who pays the piper calls the tune.  Are we quite sure that this new authority will not find itself directly under the thumb of bureaucrats in Whitehall?

Just now the new authority will be under democratic control by elected councillors.  But I understand that within a few years the area will have an all-powerful ‘Mayor’.  Will a Mancunian equivalent of Boris Johnson dictate Health Service policy?

   Services inside the new authorities’ area will inevitably be different (not necessarily either better or worse) that those outside.  What will happen when someone complains that ‘That woman over the road got into hospital immediately.  I’ve been told I’ll have  to wait two months – it’s just a post code lottery?'

      

           

Week 18 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

Bravo David Cameron!

            It isn’t very often that I find myself leaping to defend David Cameron our Prime Minister from his critics. In fact, I don’t think that it has ever happened before and it may well never happen again.  I do however wholeheartedly agree with him that Britain is a Christian country and we should celebrate that fact.  I would qualify that declaration though (and I think that Mr Cameron would agree with me on this point) by asserting that Britain is not only a Christian country; but it is a Christian country in which adherents of other faiths or of no faith at all, are not just tolerated but welcomed. They are given exactly the same rights and privileges as Christians to practise their faith, to build places of worship and religious teaching, to bring up children in that faith, and to encourage and accept converts from any other religious tradition or from none. 

            That is surely one of the reasons why the fact that we are a Christian country should be celebrated.  At least during the past 1,000 years it is only in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and in countries with a Christian tradition, that people of all religious faiths have been able to worship, teach and proselytise on equal terms, and  can expect to enjoy the protection of the state in doing so..

            There have, of course, been a number of countries in which folk of different faiths have lived together in peace in the past – in Moorish Spain for example, or Bosnia under Turkish rule – but always the adherents of a minority faith were second-class citizens. Those wonderful examples of Moorish architecture you may have seen in southern Spain were almost certainly built by Christian slaves.  In 1980 my wife and I toured what was then still a united Jugoslavia.  In Sarajevo we visited a Mosque and a Serb Orthodox Church.  Both were open to tourists and worshippers.  The latter though was behind a high wall so that during the period of Turkish rule the Muslim majority need not be visibly conscious of the infidels in their midst.  It took Marshal Tito’s godless (but springing from a Christian tradition) communist government to give tolerance and equal state recognition to followers of the Serb Orthodox and Croat Catholic traditions and to Muslims.

            In the Middle East there were countries, among them Iraq, Syria and Egypt, which although predominantly Muslim, at one time had considerable Christian minorities. They were prohibited from making converts from among their Muslim neighbours, but otherwise thrived and prospered.  All of that ended as a result of Britain’s blundering foreign policy, particularly with Tony Blair’s and George Bush’s disastrous – and illegal – invasion of Iraq.  Now, throughout the Middle East, Pakistan and much of Africa, Christians survive in fear for their livelihoods and their lives – emigrating where they are able to do so, and adding to the growing number of asylum seekers.  In Saudi-Arabia, Christian faith and practice are banned absolutely, only the most extreme Muslim worship and practice being permitted.  But Saudi Arabia buys our weaponry and we buy their oil – so their intolerance and contempt for human rights are tolerated, and visiting Saudi royalty are treated as honoured guests!   That is not something of which we should be proud!

            It is true that in Britain Christians have done terrible things both to each other and to others in the past.  I don’t think that we need to reproach ourselves too much about the medieval crusades.  Muslim armies had invaded Christendom (in Spain)  before those crusades and, advancing from Constantinople (Istanbul) to the outskirts of Vienna, long after them. The Crusades had, at least in the first instance, the surely laudable objective of ensuring that Christian pilgrims could visit in safety the holy places in Palestine. 

            The same cannot be said about the torture and burning alive of heretics in medieval Britain, about which the godless Lord Byron wrote, ‘Christians have burned each other, quite persuaded, that all the apostles would have done as they did’.  Nor about the witch hunts and witch hangings of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, and of Christian involvement in the slave trade.  None of those practices can possibly be excused though it must be said that it is quite a long time since a heretic was burned or a witch hanged in the UK, and Christian Britain was among the first countries to ban slavery and to use its navy to stamp out the slave trade.

            In the recent census only just over half those who responded declared themselves to be ‘Christian’. That was a majority, if only a small one – but I know of people who certainly hold Christian values and Christian beliefs but hesitate to describe themselves as ‘Christian’ because they fear that that would associate them with the inquisition, witch hunts and over-eager fundamentalist doorstep evangelists today!  

            But today’s numbers of professed Christians are only one of the reasons why we may claim that Britain is a Christian country.  Christianity has shaped our history over the past 1,000 years.  It has enriched our language.  We all know what is meant by ‘A Judas’, ‘a Good Samaritan’, ‘a Job’s comforter’, ‘a Delilah’,  ‘Petering out’, ‘David and Goliath’, ‘Adam’s ale’, ‘Old as Methuselah’, ‘Antediluvian’, ‘a Martha or a Mary’, ‘a voice crying in the wilderness’  - there are many more, all directly linked to the Old or New Testaments of the Christian Bible with which during my childhood and youth almost everyone was, at least to some extent, familiar.

            Nowadays the Christian Church sometimes acts as the prophets of the Old Testament did and points our rulers, concerned only with worldly values, towards compliance with the will of God.  Archbishop Runcie incurred the wrath of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher when his service of thanksgiving after the Falklands War remembered the Argentine as well as the British dead, wounded and bereaved. ‘It was like a Quaker Meeting’ she is said to have complained.  That suggests to me that the Archbishop had got the service about right!

            It says much for David Cameron that he continues to proclaim his Christian faith despite the fact that in recent months his government’s policies towards the poor and disadvantaged have been strongly criticised by the leaders of all Christian traditions. I disagree with virtually every other statement he has made and almost every policy of his government.  But - like him, I believe that we live in a Christian, but uniquely tolerant and welcoming, country – and that this is something that we should celebrate, and for which we should thank God.‘

Hier stehe ich.  Ich kann nicht anders!’

            ‘Here I stand.  There is nothing else that I can do’.  Thus spoke Martin Luther, the ‘father of Protestantism’ as he expounded his reformist doctrines.  Writing, for the first time ever, in support of David Cameron as he declared his Christian faith, I found myself wondering where I really stand on the burning political issues of the 21^st Century. I know that I am an opinionated old man, but what do those opinions amount to?  Am I a really a closet revolutionary, a well-meaning but somewhat woolly-minded liberal, or could I possibly be at-heart a true-blue Tory?  Where do I stand on the political spectrum?  Well, here are some of my deeply-held convictions:

             I believe that there should be a steady reduction of the income gap between the wealthiest and poorest of our countrymen, and that our government should work towards a society in which no-one’s income is more than ten times that of anyone else’s. Steps towards this would be a shift from indirect taxation (VAT and Excise duties) to direct taxation (Income tax and death duties), and a revision of the income tax system to ensure that we all pay the same percentage of our income in tax. I believe that those who move to tax havens overseas to avoid paying income tax in this country, should automatically forfeit their British nationality and their right to a British passport. I’d also like everyone to have a fair wage and to give of their best without a ‘target' and without a promised bonus as a bribe!  I'd like to put behind us a system in which the poor are forced to work hard by the threat of starvation and homelessness; and the very wealthy are persuaded to work by the promise of an enormous bribe. We must get rid of this 'expecting an enormous bonus', culture.  It is infinitely more damaging both to individuals and to society than the 'benefit culture' that members of the government are so keen to eradicate.  

            I believe too that we should scrap our nuclear weapons and nuclear submarine fleet and that the role of the armed forces should increasingly be that of dealing with the results of civil and natural disasters (earthquakes, fires, floods, civil conflicts, failure of private enterprise contractors, and so on) and the evacuation or rescue of their victims.

 I’m clearly a ‘loony lefty’ – well to the left even of ‘Old Labour’!

            I am though also convinced of the reality and threat of Global Warming, and of humankind’s responsibility for it. Accepting this and attempting to respond positively to it over-rides all other political concerns.  I think we should redouble our efforts to explore and exploit renewable energy sources and believe that wave and tidal power, surely much more dependable than that of the sun or the wind, have yet to be fully exploited.  We should be working towards the total ending of the use of fossil fuels. Fracking should be made illegal throughout the UK.  Those convictions surely put me squarely among the ‘Greens’.

The Scandinavian model – Queen Margrethe II of Denmark disembarks from her Royal Yacht in London Docks, as she visits and encourages the Danish athletes at the 2012 Olympics.  Photo by my elder son Pete.   

           

But..........I also believe in the merits of our constitutional monarchy (though I’d prefer the informality of the Scandinavian model) and I am certainly not a republican.   I think that there is a lot to be said for the selective education that made it possible for folk like me to climb out of the ‘aspiring working class’ into the lowest levels of the ‘middle class’.There clearly is something the matter with our educational system.  Michael Gove, Education Minister, seems desperately eager to put it right and I wish him well in that task - but he really has a knack of upsetting everybody from the NUT to his own 'old Etonian' colleagues!

 Although I think that women should be able to aspire to any job in the United Kingdom (even those of Archbishop of Canterbury or York if they’re the best candidates for the job) I also think that making a comfortable and happy home, and bringing up children ‘in the way that they should go’, can be a perfectly satisfying and fulfilling career for some women. It is a career that they should be encouraged to follow if they wish to do so. I have no doubt that the best person to guide and guard a child from infancy to adolescence is not a child minder or a nursery school but the child’s mum.

Children are bound to be neglected if both parents are in  full-time work.  Mum and dad will  be away from home all day and when they get home there'll be a meal to be prepared, housework to be done and private mail to attend to..   They are really very fortunate if they can find the time and energy to listen to their children's concerns and help them with their homework.

 In the 'bad old days' when I grew from childhood through adolescence to adult life, folk married before they lived together, and didn't marry until the potential husband's income was sufficient to support a wife and family.  I really wouldn't wish to return to those days.  Then though, there would always be either dad or mum (all right - so it would most likely be mum!) at home when a child or young adolescent came home from school . Consequently there was much less juvenile crime, and schoolchild pregnancies, juvenile 'social diseases' and juvenile drug-taking were virtually unknown.

Some of my thoughts on these issues are probably 'to the right'  of those of many Conservatives! 

         Oh yes – and I’m an unashamed Europhile and a Federalist!  Every political party (except of course UKIP) has a few of us. Can you wonder that, in ‘first past the post’ elections, I no longer seek for a candidate I’d like to see win. There won't be one.   I look instead for the candidate I most want to be rejected and vote for the candidate most likely to defeat him or her!

           

         

           

           

           

         

Week 16 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

Maria Miller

            When I learned that Prime Minister David Cameron was giving his full support to Ms Maria Miller in her defence of her job as Culture Minister, despite clamour from the press and some MPs for her resignation, I wondered if it might be the kiss of death.  She wouldn’t be the first to have been forced into resignation within days of the Prime Minister offering similar support.  Her case had been considered by the independent Commissioner appointed to investigate alleged fraudulent claims for expenses by some MPs.  He had ruled that there was no evidence of deliberate fraud but that she should apologise to the House of Commons and pay back £46,000 that she had been paid to her but to which she hadn’t been entitled.  He also commented that she had been less than co-operative during the course of the investigation.

            It was though, not the commissioner but the Parliamentary Standards Committee consisting of fellow-MPs, who made the final decision.   They agreed that Mrs Miller should make a public apology but they reduced the amount she would have to repay  from £46.000 to just over £5,000!   Isn’t it the members of that committee rather than Ms Miller who should have been considering resignation!

            It was this remarkable reduction in the sum that Ms. Miller had to pay back, plus her very half-hearted and perfunctory apology to the House of Commons, that caused the outcry – not least from members of her own Conservative Party – and ultimately led to her resignation from her Cabinet post.

            My interest in the case is that it draws attention, once again, to the very different standard of behaviour expected of MPs of all political persuasions, and that of other professional servants of the public in central and local government, and the very different code of discipline that rules their behaviour. I know very little about the Civil Service but I do know that local government employees who had been revealed to have fiddled expenses or claimed allowances to which they were not entitled, to the extent of thousands of pounds, would be lucky if their penalty was only the loss of their job – more likely they would be prosecuted, face a possible prison sentence, the loss of their pension entitlement and the probability that they would never work again in a responsible job.  They would certainly never have been given the soft option of returning the money they had fraudulently obtained and making an apology.  How nice it must be to be able to do as Mr Cameron suggested, and ‘draw a line under the past’.  No doubt every arrested burglar, confidence trickster and rapist would like the same! Why shouldn’t erring MPs be treated exactly the same as erring civil servants and local government officials?

How about genuine mistakes and misunderstandings?  For goodness sake!  MPs make the laws that we have to obey.  We can surely expect them to understand their own rules – and to know the difference between right and wrong!  How strange that ‘mistakes and misunderstandings’ are always in one direction.  Has there ever been a case of an MP accidentally or mistakenly paying a substantial un-owed sum of money back to the government?

A Not-Unhappy Ending

            Those who have been concerned about Ms. Miller’s financial situation now that she is no longer a Minister of the Crown will be relieved to know that I have just heard on the tv news that as a former member of the Cabinet she’ll get a £70,000 golden handshake on her departure

Suffering from Depression?   Or just depressed?

Almost every week we get new, and often conflicting ‘health advice’ or ‘health warnings’ from this, that or the other ‘expert’, on the front pages of the popular press.  Any alcohol intake is harmful. A glass of red wine every day will guard against heart disease and will halt the progress of macular degeneration of the retina of the eye. All smoking is harmful and inadvertently inhaling some-one else’s second-hand smoke is no less dangerous. The whole nation is suffering from obesity as a result of eating too much and exercising too little.  Eat too little and you’ll become anorexic. Over-exercise could give you a stroke or a heart attack.  Try to eat at least five portions of fruit or vegetables every day. Eat more fruit or vegetables every day – seven is better than five and vegetables are better than fruit!

The latest health scare – though it claims to be stating a fact rather than issuing a warning – is that most elderly people are suffering from depression and that the NHS ought to do something about it.  Well, I am 92 and, God willing, I shall be 93 in about six weeks time. I just don’t believe that many of my contemporaries are suffering from clinical depression. Depression is a serious and very unpleasant mental illness.  Some years ago I was acquainted with someone with what we then called manic-depression (now I believe bi-polar disorder is the pc expression). When that person was in her depressive phase she was quite incapable of doing anything at all but sit and weep, totally convinced – whatever her actual circumstances at the time – that all the world was against her and that she faced a future of total misery.  Very unpleasant as it undoubtedly is - clinical depression is a definite medical condition that can be treated.

There may, for all I know, be some old people today like that – but I am sure they are a  small minority  Most of us oldies are depressed from time to time, but that’s not the same thing at all.  We are depressed because many of us have plenty to be depressed about.  Imagine what it must be like to be old, helpless and housebound, with no family left and few if any friends. You’re living on the state pension and any benefits you can get hold of.  You’ve really got nothing to do all day, no purpose in life, and you speak only to occasional tradesmen, perhaps to a welfare worker or a meals-on-wheels deliverer. To be depressed in such a situation is not a condition  that can be remedied by anything the NHS can offer. Goodness – anyone who isn’t depressed under those circumstances must surely be suffering from some other mental illness!

I’m glad to be able to say that my circumstances are not a bit like that.  I’ve a comfortable if modest home and an adequate income (when you’re in your nineties the opportunities for extravagant living become a little limited!)  I have concerned neighbours and reliable friends whom I see regularly.  No member of my family lives nearby and some live and work overseas – but I see some of them regularly and all are in touch by phone or email. I would be housebound if it were not for my electric mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) on which I visit local friends, do my shopping, and go to church and to our local Quaker Meeting.  I receive and answer emails, and I write this blog and try to publish it every week!   I think that, for a nonagenarian – I lead a pretty full life.

I know that I have a great deal to be thankful for.  I am sincerely grateful - but I can’t pretend that I don’t sometimes feel depressed and dispirited.  I miss my former physical strength and dexterity.  Every movement that I make is now an effort and everything I do takes three times as long as it once did. I can’t climb a step-ladder and stairs are very difficult for me.  It takes me a long time to cross a room to answer a phone or to go the front door for a caller.  I am clumsy.  I accidentally knock things onto the floor and find it increasingly difficult to pick them up again.  My short-term memory (particularly for people’s names) is bad and getting worse.   I’m truly grateful when people are extra kind and helpful towards me (as most people certainly are) but I resent my frailty that prompts their kindness!  In old age it really is more blessed to give than to receive.

I’m often told what a host of happy memories I must have to fall back on.   It’s true and, in the past I have enjoyed sharing them with my wife who featured in most of them.  Sadly her life came to an end nearly eight years ago – just three months after we had celebrated our 60^th wedding anniversary.  Now I find that it is the very happiest memories of the past that are most likely to bring tears to my eyes.

I don’t think that very many of us oldies suffer from clinical depression.   Most of us would much rather be known as ‘Cheerful Charlies’ rather than ‘Moaning Minnies’. Even those like me though, blessed with steadfast and caring friends and loving relatives, a purpose in life, and all the material things that we really need, are sometimes depressed. This is simply because living through very old age can be a depressing experience. There's no denying it and I really don't see what the NHS - or anyone else - can do about it!

Happy Easter!

Yesterday (13th April) was Palm Sunday, when Christians remember that Jesus Christ rode on a donkey in triumph into Jerusalem, cheered on by the same crowd that a few days later would be howling for his death.  Next weekend comes Good Friday when we remember his sham trial, torture and cruel execution – followed on Easter Sunday by his glorious return from death.  I sometimes lose patience (another symptom of old age perhaps!) with those, usually very well-meaning and reasonable people, who say, ‘Of course I’m sure that we should all try to follow the example and teaching of Jesus, but I really can’t accept all that supernatural stuff, and as for his return from the dead – I ask you!’

I prefer ‘miraculous’ to ‘supernatural’.  Jesus was brought up in a remote and insignificant part of the Roman Empire.  In early adult life he preached and healed the sick for no more than about two years.  He was then arrested, publicly humiliated and tortured to death by crucifixion – a word so familiar to us that we may not appreciate what a cruel and agonising method of execution a first-century crucifixion was.  Does anyone imagine that this unsuccessful preacher and healer, judicially murdered in his early thirties, would have featured even as a footnote in the pages of history, had not a handful of very ordinary down-to-earth people been quite convinced that he had walked with them, talked with them and shared meals with them, days after his cruel execution - and were prepared to die for that conviction?

Had there been no Resurrection there would have been no teaching to hear, no example to follow. Christ is risen!   He is risen indeed, Alleluia!