18th January 2015

Tendring Topics……….on line

The Parliamentary General Election

          There was a time when political parties existed to promote specific policies – the Conservative Party on retaining the status quo and, in general, observing the sage advice, ‘If it ain’t bust, don’t fix it’.  They were naturally the party of the ‘haves’ rather than the ‘have nots’.  The Labour Party on the other hand, was the party of change.  They wanted a fairer, more equal Britain, a Britain without nuclear weapons and without imperial pretensions or ambitions.  They argued that these objectives could best be achieved if most or all public services were owned and run by the public.   They were the party of the ‘have nots’.  Both parties tried to persuade a majority of the electorate to support them.

            Now both main parties, and what’s left of the Liberals, claim to serve the interests of the whole country.  In reality they all have just one overriding policy. It’s the same policy; to win elections, gain political power – and keep it.  To this end the Conservatives under Mrs Thatcher became a party of revolutionary change; among other things selling off most public services to private enterprise and compelling local authorities, who had built houses to rid their districts of overcrowding and homelessness, to sell them to sitting tenants at bargain basement prices; thus very cleverly buying votes with other people’s money.

            New Labour, ‘to make itself electable’, sold its own soul by going along with the retention of a nuclear ‘deterrent’, accepting the revolutionary changes that had been introduced by Mrs Thatcher and erasing ‘Clause 4’ from its own constitution.  I have little doubt that many party members voted for the removal of Clause 4 imagining that they were simply acknowledging that some activities were best carried out by private enterprise.  If fact they were accepting the wholesale privatisation of every public service.  In addition, they allowed our country to become the puppet of the most reactionary American president in living memory.  This resulted in our engagement in two ‘colonial’ wars – one illegal and the other unwinnable – resulting in the loss of billions of pounds and the sacrifice of hundreds of British lives

            Party policies are decided nowadays, not by principles or by the exercise of reason and compassion, but by the findings of the latest opinion polls.  And influencing opinion polls is the popular press, owned largely by foreign billionaires who owe no loyalty to the United Kingdom and care only about ‘circulation and profit’. I don’t find it in the least surprising that thousands of electors are now disillusioned with the traditional political parties.  It is upon the way that they react to that disillusion that the future of our country depends.

Don’t bother to vote

            Probably the commonest reaction is to decline to vote.  What’s the point?  They’re all the same – feathering their own nests.  If voting changed anything they’d ban it. Our first-past-the-post electoral system makes sure that the voice of those who can’t bring themselves to vote for any of the main parties, is never heard. The Chartists of the nineteenth and the Suffragettes of the twentieth century must be turning in their graves.  They suffered and died to make sure that everyone had a vote – and they really believed that universal suffrage would change the world.

           

Those who don’t bother to vote have no right to complain when they find themselves represented by someone whose views they thoroughly detest.  Those who can’t bring themselves to vote for any of the candidates must surely be able to select one of them whose policies and attitudes they detest more than those of the others. Vote for the candidate most likely to defeat him or her.  For the much-publicised recent Clacton-on-Sea by-election I voted Conservative for the first (and probably only) time of my life.  Although I disliked the Conservative candidate’s policies, he seemed to be a nice enough chap and I thought he was the candidate most likely to defeat Douglas Carswell who had defected to UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party).   He didn’t do so and Clacton had the dubious honour of returning the very first UKIP MP to Westminster!  Still – I did my best. 

Vote for one of the ‘minority’ candidates

            We don’t yet know how many candidates there will be for our own constituencies in next May’s General Election. In every English constituency there will certainly be representatives of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal-Democrat Party.  There will almost certainly be a Ukipper (in my Clacton constituency he’ll be the sitting MP) and a Green Party Candidate.  Also there’s likely to be a variety of fringe party and special-interest candidates ranging from the Official Raving Loony Party to those eager to publicise local or special concerns like ‘saving a hospital from closure’, ‘building a new bypass’ or, as we had for the Clacton by-election, a lady who wanted to raise the status and ensure the safety of ‘sex workers’.   

            My guess (and you can’t exaggerate how much I’d like to be proved wrong!) is that in the Clacton-on-Sea Constituency Douglas Carswell (the sitting UKIP MP) will retain his seat though with a smaller majority, The Conservative Candidate will come next but with only a few more votes than  his Labour opponent, followed by the Green, the Lib.Dem. the Official Raving Loony Candidate and the various ‘special interest’ candidates who will get only a tiny handful of votes each.

UKIP versus GREEN

            In my constituency (Clacton-on-Sea) our sitting MP is a Ukipper.  That is true of only one other constituency in the United Kingdom.  In most other constituencies there will be a Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democrat MP who will be looking nervously over his or her shoulder at the UKIP contestant and wondering what effect this new and apparently growing party will have on the election result.

            UKIP and its leader Nigel Farage, remind me uncomfortably of the NAZI party and its leader, Adolf Hitler, in Germany in the 1920s and early ‘30s.   There too, the electorate was disillusioned and tired of the old political parties and their failing policies.  In Adolf Hitler they found someone who was a fervent German nationalist, just as Nigel Farage is a fervent British Nationalist, who disliked the ‘old politics’ and offered a new path for Germany of action rather than talk.  What’s more he assured the Germans that they weren’t to blame for their country’s problems – it was all the fault of ‘the Jews’.  At first most Germans thought that he was a bit of a joke,  Then the wealthy thought they could manipulate him for their own purposes.   One morning though they woke up to discover that he and his brown-shirted followers had taken over their country. – Hitler’s Third Reich had arrived.

            Nigel Farage also assures us that outside forces – the European Union (demonised as ‘Brussels’) and all those foreign immigrants for which the EU, so he says, was largely responsible – were the cause of Britain’s problems.  Shake off the European yoke and get rid of all those foreigners, and Britain would be great again!  At first everyone thought that Nigel Farage – usually seen holding ‘a fag and a pint’ to assure those who saw him that he was ‘one of us’ - was a bit of a joke.  Then, as with Hitler, the wealthy and powerful thought they could use him for their purposes. They have poured their spare thousands of pounds into his party’s coffers. The story is on-going……….. UKIP is essentially a ‘one-objective party’.   The EU and immigrants are its main target.  Other causes are taken up as seems opportune, but generally UKIP policies are those of the extreme right of the Conservative Party.  Abolish ‘green taxes’ and cease subsidising solar and wind power schemes.  Encourage ‘fracking’ for cheap oil and gas.  Ignore the warnings about climate change and global warming.  It either isn’t happening or, if it is, it’s got nothing to do with human activities so there’s nothing to be done about it.  Vote for UKIP and cheaper fuel oil!  I have little doubt that thousands will be short-sighted enough to do so.

            The Green Party is almost the exact opposite of UKIP.  Below is a brief account of their policies and intentions.

We live in unsettling times. Many of the securities that our parents and grandparents fought for – a functioning National Health Service, free education, and an affordable home – now look out of reach for most of us. Coupled with this, climate change is bringing unpredictable and threatening weather patterns. People feel let down by politicians, and yet there has been an explosion in political activism. People want to do things differently and aren’t afraid to be bold and challenging.

We believe that public services should be for the benefit of the public, not sold off in bits; we believe that education is worth investing in and not something that should mean a lifetime of debt; we believe in leaving behind a better world for our children and grandchildren. This is the only world we have and its welfare, above all things, should be the highest priority for us all.

Politics should work for the benefit of all, not just those who shout the loudest or have the deepest pockets.  We believe in “The Common Good”. A vote for the Green Party is a vote for The Common Good.

            Like UKIP, the Green Party is growing.   They have just one MP – in Brighton – but in the European Parliament elections and in recent by-elections (including that in Clacton) Green candidates received more votes than the Liberal Democrats. Currently there is controversy as to whether The Green Party’s President is to join with the leaders of the Conservative Party, Liberal-Democratic Party, Labour Party and UKIP in public televised debate before next May’s general election.  David Cameron is refusing to take part in the debate unless the Greens are also invited.  He is probably wise to do so.   Green arguments, persuasively presented, are far more likely to draw voters from Labour, Liberal Democrat, and even UKIP than they are from the Conservatives.

            If (and it’s quite a big ‘if’) I’m still around in May, I shall vote for the Green Candidate.  I hope that a great many other people will do the same.    

           

24th November 2014

Tendring Topics…..on Line

Bankers Bonuses

          The previous Governor of the Bank of England said publicly on several occasions that the financial crisis in the UK and world-wide was not due, as Messrs. Osborne and Cameron would have us believe, to the policies of the previous government, over-generous welfare benefits, nor even the activities of immigrants and the machinations of ‘Brussels’.  Fairly and squarely to blame were the activities and incompetence of ‘the Bankers’, obviously not the management and staff of your local Barclays, Lloyds or what-have-you (they’re as much victims as we are), but the ‘super-brains’ at the top – and the Governor of the Bank of England really should know.

   Mind you, I think that a considerable measure of blame does lie with the previous New Labour government – not because they were too eager to spend money on social services, but because, blinded by billionaires, they were just as keen to seek the favour of the bankers, the money lenders and the financial fiddlers as the present lot at Westminster.   They should have spotted what was happening and curbed it.  I don’t recall that the present Bank of England Governor has ever publicly blamed the banking fraternity as had his predecessor – but then he has never suggested that his predecessor was wrong.

            What is particularly infuriating to the ordinary British citizen – the ordinary voter – is that throughout the period of recession top bankers have shed a few hundred junior staff; carried out mergers; effectively reduced the value of savings (including mine!) by paying savers an interest rate below the rate of inflation - and have continued to draw eye-wateringly high salaries for just turning up at their offices.   For actually doing their best at the job for which they are paid those enormous salaries, they expect to receive even more gargantuan bonuses!

            Quite apart from causing the world-wide financial crisis there have more recently been the muck-ups and illegal fiddles in which some of them have been involved.  Millions of pounds had to be repaid to bank customers who had wrongly been sold insurance.  For weeks I had regular phone calls from ‘ambulance chasing’ lawyers assuring me that they’d get my money back for me despite my assurances that, as far as I knew, none of my money had been involved!   Then there was the fiddle with interest rates that led to huge fines – all passed on to customers I have little doubt.  Yesterday we learned that one of the biggest banking groups had been heavily fined for having a faulty IT system that resulted in customers being unable to access their own money for several days.    Rents, mortgage repayments and direct debit payments were not paid!  No doubt this was the fault of someone well down the line in the banking hierarchy – but the top people claim the credit for success, so they should also be prepared to accept the blame for disaster.

            Something should really be done to cut those huge salaries and abolish those enormous bonuses  but, so we are assured, market forces demand that we offer those rewards if we want the ‘best’ brains.  If we don’t they’ll just go elsewhere.  Well, we’ve seen the disasters that ‘the best brains’ can cause.  Who knows?  The ‘second best’ might be less successful – or they might just be less disastrous!

            One way that ‘the best brains’ could be discouraged from migrating in pursuit of a few extra millions would be to limit or reduce the number of places to which they could migrate.   The European Union probably had this in mind when they decided to put a legal limit on Bankers Bonuses.  Throughout the EU, they suggested, no banker should receive a bonus in excess of his or her annual salary.  They then added a rider to the effect that the bonus could be up to double the recipient’s annual salary if the Bank’s shareholders agreed.

            It doesn’t take a financial genius to see how utterly feeble that is.  It means that a banker with an annual salary of £500,000 (common enough among top bankers though at least ten times more than a salary that most of us would consider very high) he would be able to receive another £500,000 as a bonus.  He’d be receiving a million pounds for his year’s work!   But that’s not all.   If he could persuade a majority of the bank’s shareholders to agree, that bonus of £500,000 could be doubled, making his total pay for the year  £1.5 million. That’s nearly £29,000 a week!  You could hire quite a few doctors and nurses for that.

            Would you believe it? – pathetic as the EU’s decision is, Cameron and Osborne were determined to  oppose any limit to bankers’ bonuses on the grounds that it would only lead to their being offered even higher salaries!   I understand that they have now withdrawn their opposition, having been told they haven’t a leg to stand on.

            No wonder the UK electorate is sick of all the existing political parties!

UKIP triumphant?

          I concluded my comments about Bankers’ bonuses by saying that the UK electorate is sick of all existing political parties.  Their members in Kent demonstrated that distrust last week when they followed the ‘Clacton example’ and, in a by-election in Rochester, returned another defecting former Conservative  to the House of Commons as a Ukipper.

         Once again I see parallels between the situation in the UK today and that in Germany in the late 1920s, early 1930s.  In Germany too a dynamic and charismatic leader, first thought of as ‘a bit of a joke’, transformed a struggling political party into a dynamic, powerful and all-conquering force that struggled into shared power and then became a ‘cuckoo in the nest’, turning out members of all other parties and establishing the Nazi one-party state. ‘One People, One United Kingdom, one Leader!’  I can just imagine Nigel Farage acknowledging that Nazi acclamation when he and his party finally acquire the power they covet!

             A month or two ago, during the run-up to the Scottish referendum, I wrote in this blog that the worst-case possibility in the event of there being a majority YES vote, could be the creation of a Conservative/UKIP coalition government after the May 2015 general election; a coalition that the more ruthless and determined Ukippers would quickly dominate.   Well, there was a NO vote majority and the United Kingdom remains united.

            I now think though that, despite that NO vote, Ukips’s continuing success means that a very dangerous Conservative/UKIP coalition could emerge from the general election (I can’t tell you how fervently I hope that I am wrong!) and that Ukip members, with their vigour and ruthlessness  could dominate the coalition, so that the situation could end with Nigel Farage as a 21^st century Oliver Cromwell.  Conservatives proclaim that a vote for any party other than the Conservatives makes it possible that Ed Miliband will be the next Prime Minister.  I very much fear that a vote either for the Conservatives or Ukip will make it possible that, sooner or later, our government will be headed by Nigel Farage.

            However, another – to me more cheering – future seems possible.  An  unexpected result of the Scottish NO vote has been the increasing popularity of the Scottish National Party that has, since the referendum, more than doubled its membership.  Alex Salmond, a dynamic and charismatic leader  has retired and has been followed by a forthright and politically experienced still-young woman who promises to be a worthy successor. She has taken his place both as Party Leader and as Scotland’s First Minister.

            Conservatives and Lib Dems. have been all but eliminated from the Scottish scene.   Ukip has never gained a foothold there – and the machinations of New Labour have little appeal.  It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Scotland, still part of the UK thanks to that No vote, returns a solid block of Scottish National Party MPs in the new Westminster Parliament.   It is possible that they might make common cause with MPs from Wales and Northern Ireland and join with Labour to create a formidable coalition that could well outnumber the combined Conservative and Ukip forces.  Who knows – the fervour of the Scots might inspire Ed Miliband at least to attempt to narrow that yawning gap (no, not the deficit) between the wealthy and the poor and induce the wealthy to carry their fair share of the burden of taxation.

            There's another quite different matter about the Rochester and Clacton by-elections that’s worth bearing in mind. In both by-elections (and in the earlier European Parliament elections) the Green Party Candidates received more votes than the Lib-Dems.   Nick Clegg in his urge to become Deputy Prime Minister has effectively finished off his once-great Liberal Party.  Gladstone and Lloyd-George must be turning in their graves.  Yet the BBC and other  tv channels are still inviting Nick Clegg, and not the leader of the Green Party, to take part in televised debates before the General Election.  The only conclusion that I can come to is that the BBC and whoever funds the independent tv channels doesn’t want Green Party policies to be considered by the public because the Greens are the only party working towards real change.  He who pays the piper calls the tune.

             

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)

 .