Week 29 2014

Tendring Topics……on Line

First – the Bad News

            For years the UK has had nuclear Trident submarines roaming the world’s oceans as a so-called Independent Ultimate Deterrent to aggressors. Like NATO it is a relic of the cold war and of the ‘defence policy’ aptly described as Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD); ‘You dare to threaten me with your nuclear missiles – and I’ll threaten you with mine. If you dare to attack me with them, then I’ll attack you.  We’ll both be totally destroyed and (it's unfortunate about the collateral damage) large areas, perhaps the whole, of planet Earth will be made uninhabitable.

            Well, neither the Soviet Union nor NATO were stupid enough to use nuclear weapons.  The ‘cold war’ ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.  The UK ran down its full-time professional army, navy and air force in response to our economic situation – but Trident remained sacrosanct, untouchable.  In the meantime acts of aggression took place and it became abundantly clear that our ‘ultimate deterrent’ deterred no-one at all in the real world.  It didn’t deter Argentina from invading the Falklands.  It didn’t deter Turkey from invading Cyprus.  It didn’t deter the USA and its Caribbean allies from invading Grenada.  When, quite recently, Russia annexed and recovered its lost province of Crimea ‘the west’ blustered and threatened but – thanks to God and common sense – nobody even mentioned that ‘ultimate deterrent’.

            In the meantime the real threat to us all comes not from aggressive sovereign nations but from terrorists who have been inspired by a perversion of Islam to believe that they’re fighting God’s battles for him on earth.  They don’t yet possess nuclear weapons but the danger of their acquiring them is a natural consequence (or perhaps God’s punishment!) for our continuing to develop them, instead of banning their manufacture world-wide and destroying every single exiting nuclear weapon.  We have learned recently that chemical weapons can and have been banned world-wide.  It must be possible to do the same with nuclear weapons.

  I believe that much more dangerous than the possibility that Iran may develop a nuclear armoury, is the very real possibility that the nuclear weapons that we know Pakistan possesses should fall into the hands of terrorists.  NATO sent forces to Afghanistan to destroy the bases of Al Qaeda that had been protected by the Taliban government.   All they succeeded in doing was persuading Al Qaeda to move its bases elsewhere, notably the tribal areas of northern Pakistan, and Yemen in the Arabian peninsula. In those tribal areas of Pakistan, Al Qaeda, the Taliban and those who sympathise with them, are a considerable force possibly with a ‘fifth column’ in the Pakistan armed forces.  It is by no means impossible that they may one day overthrow the present Pakistani Government, acquire those nuclear weapons and threaten to use them

            Would our ‘independent ultimate deterrent’ then reveal its true value?  I doubt it.  Are people who tie explosives round their bodies and blow themselves up in crowded market places in the conviction that thereby they’ll go straight to Heaven as holy martyrs, likely to be deterred by the possibility that the victims of their nuclear weapon may respond in kind?

            And the bad news?  The independent cross-party Trident Commission, set up by the British American Security Information Council, has decided that there is no credible alternative to Trident.  I’m glad to note that British Quakers – but there are so few of us – are opposing this decision.  Here’s a copy of a report in The Friend, an independent Quaker weekly:

 The assertion that ‘these are weapons of mass destruction……….which have proved to be a poor deterrent against acts of terror or against recent political events’ must be an example of Quaker fear of making exaggerated statements.  They haven’t proved to be a poor deterrent, but have been no deterrent whatsoever!

…..and the not-quite-so-bad news!

          When I first heard it, in fact, I had thought that it was really good news.  It all began a few months ago when we learned that, to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, the Royal Mint was going to strike a memorial £2.00 coin with an image of Lord Kitchener on it.  The image was taken from an army recruiting poster in which the general (the hero of Corporal Jones in Dad's Army!) was assuring anyone viewing the poster that  Your Country needs YOU!

            I was one of thousands who felt that a war that had cost millions of British, French, Russian, Austrian and German lives, fought for reasons that were far from clear, and which had led to another bloody world-wide conflict  only twenty-one years later, was not best remembered by an image of a  luxuriously   moustached General urging young men to become cannon-fodder.  We petitioned the Royal Mint and the government to use instead an image of Nurse Edith Cavell.  The daughter of a Norfolk parson, she had been nursing the wounded of every country in a hospital in German-occupied Belgium.  She also helped two hundred wounded and captured British service-men escape to neutral Holland.  She was detected and arrested by the Germans, court-martialled and shot.

            In 1947 I worked briefly as a Public Health Inspector for the city of Westminster.  Quite near the office was a statue of Edith Cavell.  It bore the words for which she is best remembered.  ‘Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone’, which she said to the pastor who visited and prayed with her on the eve of her execution.    She was obviously a much more appropriate image for a memorial coin than that of a past-his-best general beckoning other men to their deaths.

            Last week I was elated when I learned that there would be a Nurse Edith Cavell coin struck in commemoration of the World War I centenary.  We had won!   Or so I thought until I read the ‘small print’ of the news item.   The Nurse Cavell coin is not to be struck instead of, but as well as, the Lord Kitchener one.   What’s more the Kitchener coin is to be a £2.00 one for general use – apart from the image it’ll be exactly like the £2.00 coins in use today.  The Nurse Cavell coin, on the other hand, will have a nominal value of £5.00 and is intended for coin collectors.  Unlike the Kitchener coin, they won't be in daily use.  Most of us will probably never see one.

             

                                                           

 Here are enlarged pictures of the two coins.  It is likely to be all that most of us will ever see of the Nurse Edith Cavell coin!

                                                                          

Week 5 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

 The Blame Game

 

            I find it painful even to imagine what it must have been like over Christmas for the families whose electricity supply was cut off for day after day.  It made me realize how very much my life relies upon a dependable electricity supply.  I have a gas central heating and hot water supply system but they have electric controls.  My water heating is supplemented by a solar panel that has its own photo-electric cell to operate the circulating pump – but there’s little enough sunshine for water heating or for the solar pump on a succession of dark and dismal winter days!   I need electricity for lighting, for cooking, even for heating a kettle for a cup of tea; for charging the batteries of my mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) without which I would be completely housebound, for operating my tv and radio, and for keeping this laptop  (on which I write my weekly blog and communicate with my far-flung family and friends)  operational!  At 92, without electricity I would just have to climb into bed, pile blankets on top of me and hope to hibernate until the lights and the power came on again.

 

                 I can remember a time when we were not as dependent upon electricity as we are today.  In 1926, when I was five years old, my mum, dad and I moved into a newly-built terraced house in Ipswich with no electricity.  Space heating was by coal fires, lighting was by gas and there was a gas cooker (with a wonderful new gadget, a ‘regulo’ thermostat, to control the heat of the oven!) and a copper gas-fired boiler provided hot water for the weekly ‘washing day’ and ‘bath night’!  We had a battery operated ‘wireless set’ with a ‘dry battery’ and a ‘wet battery’ or ‘accumulator’ that had to be charged, at a local garage, weekly.  A few years after we moved in, mains electricity was installed – but for a few lighting points only.  My mother used to speak enviously about wealthier acquaintances with ‘all electric’ homes.

 

            No – I don’t yearn for the ‘good old days’ – but in the ‘20s and ‘30s we certainly didn’t have to worry about power cuts!   Nowadays most of us don’t have to worry about them very often, but they are devastating when they do occur – and when they happen over the Christmas period they are that much the worse.  I’m not surprised that our Prime Minister had a less than friendly reception when he visited a much-flooded and power-cut-stricken area in the New Year.

 

            Why was it that so many households were without power for several days?  This is what the power company bosses were asked when they faced a committee of hostile MPs a week or so ago.  It was hardly surprising.  No doubt the memory of those days is already beginning to fade, but at the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014 Britain was buffeted by storm after damaging storm and drenched by heavy rain day after day, for weeks at a time. The engineers who had to restore electricity supplies to those cut-off homes had to work round the clock in appalling and often dangerous conditions.  It shouldn’t be forgotten either, that power supplies and their maintenance are now the responsibility of private firms, driven by market forces.  Their first responsibility is not serving the public but satisfying the shareholders – many of whom don’t even live in the UK.  Like all private enterprises they have been forced to cut their workforce to make it cost-effective under normal circumstances – which inevitably means it is inadequate to deal effectively with abnormal circumstances such as we have experienced in recent weeks.

 

            Then again, the government has received warning after warning from scientists world-wide about climatic change, largely the result of human activity, producing extreme weather conditions throughout the world. This isn’t just something that may happen in the near future.  It is happening now – and, thanks to tv and modern information technology – we are seeing it happen. Still the political response is half-hearted and inadequate.  I am not an unqualified admirer of modern China, which seems to me to exhibit some of the nastier features of both communist and capitalist societies.  The Chinese government though, does seem to have appreciated the reality and importance of climate change, and of humankind’s responsibility for it. They are seeking and exploiting renewable sources of energy and are, for instance, building hundreds of wind turbines throughout their vast territories.

 

            Our government’s response so far has been to impose cuts on the Environment Agency, cut back on its ‘green’ programme, and encourage ‘fracking’!  I wish that I thought that any probable alternative government would be materially better – or even materially different.  What Britain needs is not reform – but a revolution of ideas and values; not more competition but more co-operation, an end to the ‘bonus culture’ (ultimately far more noxious than the 'benefit culture' that worries members of the government so much!) and to the notion that humans are motivated only by greed and fear.

 

The Face on a Coin

 

              Almost daily my laptop brings me messages urging me to support this, that or the other campaign by joining with others in ‘signing’ a petition, writing a protest letter or passing on the appeal to a friend.

   Some I simply ignore – like the one I received asking me to urge that some councillor, a member of UKIP, should be sacked because he had announced his conviction that the recent storms and floods were a divine punishment for the government’s recent approval of ‘gay marriages’.  Well, daft as that idea is – I don’t find it much, if any, dafter than the idea that UKIP will solve all, or even any, of Britain’s problems.

 

           A campaign that I do wholeheartedly support is that of commemorating the centenary of the outbreak of World War I by issuing  a £2.00 coin bearing a replica of the bust of Nurse Edith Cavell, a true heroine of the ‘Great War’. She was a British nurse (a Norfolk girl as it happens) working in a hospital treating the wounded of all nationalities in German-occupied Belgium. She was arrested, court-martialled and summarily shot in 1915 for helping wounded allied POWs to escape to neutral Holland.  The official intention is to issue such a coin with a replica of a recruiting poster used in World War I with a bust of General Lord Kitchener with pointing finger urging potential recruits that Your Country needs you!

 

Edith Cavell’s best remembered words are ‘I realize that patriotism is not enough.  I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone’.  Surely in the centenary year of the outbreak of ‘The Great War’ this is a much more appropriate message to the world than that of a General urging others to sacrifice themselves on the killing-fields of Flanders..

 

 

 

 

More or Less

 

We are now over three weeks into the New Year and I have realized that something is missing from the news-media scene!   Whatever happened to all those planes and coaches full of Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants whom we were told would be flooding into Britain to demand our homes and jobs and to take advantage of our health and social services directly the barriers came down on 1^st January?   I am sure that the Sun the Express and the Mail would have told us all about them had they arrived.  One or two did turn up by air on New Year’s Day and received a VIP welcome, including a hand-shake from a concerned MP.

 

 We have since learned that not only has there been no flood of east European immigrants but there were no applicants for jobs in Britain that had been advertised in Romania and Bulgaria. A Romanian spokesman said that Germany and not the UK was the favoured destination of those of his compatriots who wanted to move to other parts of the EU.  I hesitate to say I told you so because my guess was no better informed than that of the editors of the Europhobic press. I was right though and I do feel justified in saying that I’m not surprised.

 

Not being brilliant at mathematics, I listen with fascinated admiration to More or Less on BBC Radio 4 from 4.30 pm till 5.00 pm on Friday afternoons.   Researchers for this programme check figures about pay, unemployment, crime, hospital appointments and so on, made by politicians or in popular newspapers and sent in by Radio 4 listeners..  They usually prove the claims to be false or exaggerated and I have never yet heard the accuracy of the findings of the More or Less researchers questioned.

 

Last week they investigated claims that immigrants to this country were an added financial strain on our economy, and counter-claims that they brought more to our finances than they claimed back.  One or the other had to be right!   More or Less discovered that migrants from other EU countries (those are the ones to whom we cannot bar entry and about whom the UKIP-friendly press gets so indignant!) do pay more to us in tax and other charges than they withdraw in ‘benefits’. Clearly we should welcome them.