Week 9 2113

Tendring Topics......on line

‘Arms and the Man’

            That is the title of one of George Bernard Shaw’s more light-hearted plays, but ‘the arms’ that I have in mind are the weapons of death that, even as I write, are killing men, women and children in Syria and elsewhere and during the past century have killed millions of men, women and children world-wide.  ‘The man’ is our Prime Minister, David Cameron.

            He has recently been in India, furthering trade with that rapidly growing potential consumer of the products of British industry.  It was his second visit there in the past three years, his earlier one having been in July 2010.  Since then he has paid similar visits to Egypt and Kuwait, Saudi Arabia (on two occasions), Indonesia, Japan, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Brazil, Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

            Furthering British trade relations is obviously a very worthy activity though some may wonder if affairs at home in Britain are really running so smoothly that our Prime Minister can afford frequent absences on trade missions.  What is concerning is the fact that much of the commercial activity that he is so eager to promote is that of the arms trade – a trade that many of us regard as being as undesirable as the slave trade and that, like the slave trade, is destined to become  one of the darker aspects of our nation’s history.  This interest of the Prime Minister was noted particularly during the ‘Arab spring’ when he toured the Middle East in the company of arms salesmen who regarded the turmoil in the region as a unique sales opportunity.  How those salesmen must have rejoiced earlier at the bloody break-up of the former Jugoslavia.  Quite apart from the deadly weapons required at the time, its outcome was the creation of five potential customers instead of just one!

            Howard Wheeldon, Director of Policy for ADS, a ‘defence’ trade organisation is reported as saying, ‘The PM has done a fantastic job.   He has picked up the value of defence to the national economy.  Other PMs haven’t necessarily’.  No doubt; but the promotion of arms sales surely can’t have a very high priority on the Prime Minister’s ‘job description’.

            In fact, the British arms trade does very well by global standards.  The USA is the world’s biggest arms exporter with 35 percent of the market share.  The UK comes next with a 15 percent share, narrowly in front of both Russia and France. It is not a statistic in which I take any pride.

            It may be argued that every country has a right to self-defence.  Trouble arises only when weapons fall into the wrong hands.  Much the same argument has been put forward in the USA about gun control.  ‘The only way to foil the activities of  bad guys with guns is to make sure that the good guys are well armed’.

 Internationally, how do we tell the ‘good guys’ from the bad?  And how do we ensure that they remain ‘good? I am sure that when the French sold Exocet Missiles to the Argentineans they hadn’t intended them to be used against the British in the Falklands.  When the USA and the UK covertly armed the Mojihadin in Afghanistan to support them in their guerrilla war against the USSR they hadn’t intended to put weapons into the hands of those who, a few decades later, would be using them to kill British and American troops.  It would surprise me if British made weapons are not being used by both sides in the current bloody conflict in Syria.

            I look forward to the day when the success of the arms trade is a distant memory and we are better known for our tractors, our dams, our bridges and our medical and surgical expertise than for our tanks and guns, our bombers, our jet fighters and our death-dealing missiles.

An elderly ‘Essex boy’!

          It might have been thought that someone who had had to serve only nine weeks of a nine months sentence for serious fraud, and had heard that there was to be no further investigation into his expensive activities as former Leader of Essex County Council, would have thanked his lucky stars for his good fortune and have kept a very low profile, at least for a year or two.

           

But that was not Lord Hanningfield’s way.  He sued Essex Police for wrongful arrest and trespass and has been awarded £3,500 in damages. Only a month or two ago we had learned that, as the fraud for which he had been convicted had been much greater than had originally been realized, he would have to pay back a further £37.000 under the Proceeds of Crime Act, or return to gaol for a further term.  We were told at the time that as he was by no means a wealthy man this might compel him  to sell his bungalow and ‘take up the tenancy of a Council House’. (Did he really imagine he'd qualify for one?)   Under the circumstances he might have been expected to add that £3,500 to his meagre savings, but not so.  He is ‘still working to raise that £37,000’ and is donating the £3,500 to a cancer charity!

            Lord Hanningfield (who was plain Paul White, an Essex pig farmer, before Tony Blair arranged for him to be ennobled on Margaret Thatcher’s recommendation) says that one chapter of his life is now over and he wants to get on serving the people of Essex.  ‘I’ll mainly be working in the House of Lords and I’m already taking up some issues’.

            How strange that the government and members of the House of Commons should be so strongly opposed to convicted criminals being permitted to vote in elections for those who make our laws – but are apparently quite happy for a convicted criminal, who has not yet ‘paid his debt to Society’ (he still owes us £37,000 or a further spell in gaol!) and as far as I know has uttered not a single word of apology or contrition, to play a part in the House of Lords in making those laws!

            We used to hear a great deal about ‘Essex girls’ and their characteristics.  Lord Hanningfield is surely an elderly ‘Essex boy’ to match any of them!

           

              The Assassins

          It is said that at the beginning of the Battle of Waterloo it was reported to the Duke of Wellington that the commander of one of the British cannon had Napoleon himself squarely in his sights.   Should he give the order to fire?  ‘Certainly not’, replied Wellington, ‘We are soldiers – not assassins’.  Yet had he given the order to fire it is at least possible that thousands of British and French lives would have been spared.

            That, I suppose, is always the justification advanced for assassination.  A particular individual is the enemy of the State/the Party/Democracy/the Faith/ the Revolution, or whatever else is considered most important at that time and in that place.  The violent erasure of just one life, it may be claimed, would save thousands of others.  In the nineteenth century a Russian nobleman said of his country that its system of government was ‘despotism tempered by assassination’.

            The present Russian government may well have been responsible for the assassination in London in 2006 of Alexander Litvinenko, a former member of the KGB and of its successor, who had defected to MI6, becoming a double agent working for British Intelligence. It wouldn’t be particularly surprising if he were regarded as a threat to his former employers (much as Burgess and Maclean, who defected to Russia, were regarded in Britain) and orders given for his elimination.  It was an assassination that has soured Anglo-Russian relations to this day.

            British-Israeli relations were similarly soured by the assassination of Mahmoud al Mabhooh, a Hamas activist, in Dubai in 2010 by agents of Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service.  The assassins used forged British passports to get near to their victim, again provoking British official condemnation.  Such assassinations, we may think, are the sort of conduct that we expect from Russians and folk from the Middle East – but are far below the standard of the United Kingdom and our allies.

            But are they? Whoever murdered Alexander Litvinenko and those who murdered Mahmoud al Mabhooh at least put their own lives at risk and in danger when they carried out their criminal actions.   We can hardly say the same about those in the USA who control drones (unmanned aircraft) to fly over enemy – or sometimes nominally allied – countries, seeking out individuals considered to be a threat to the USA as targets for the launch of their death-dealing missiles.  ‘Smart’ as these drones and their deadly cargo undoubtedly are, they are not quite smart enough to distinguish between individual friends and foes. From 2006 to 2009 between 750 and 1,000 people were assassinated by drones in Pakistan, of whom it is reckoned that 66 to 68 percent were Taliban activists and between 31 and 33 percent innocent civilians.

            I understand that the UK also uses drones but that, at present, their use is restricted to military targets in Afghanistan.  We do, of course, support the activities of our American allies.   There was a time, not so very long ago, when American courts refused to extradite suspected, and in some cases tried and sentenced, IRA murderers to the UK.  There’s no doubt what the American reaction would have been had we then sent drones to pick out and ‘neutralise’ those enemies of our country and its people - especially if a few innocent American civilian deaths occurred as ‘collateral damage!'    Do not do unto others what you would hate them - or anyone else - to do unto you!

           

           

             

            

Week 10 2012 8.3.2012

Tendring Topics..........on Line

 ‘The best that money can buy!’

            The Leveson Enquiry into the conduct of the press, having been absent from the front headline news recently, came back with a vengeance early last week. On the Monday we had learned of the successful launch the previous day of News International’s latest venture, the Sunday edition of the Sun. Over three million copies of the new publication had been sold and Mr Rupert Murdoch, who had launched it in person, was said to be delighted.

On the following day he may have been a little less happy. A high ranking police official revealed to Lord Leveson that bribery of the police and other public officials had been endemic among the staff of the Sun and that this corruption had been condoned at the very highest level.  It was believed that one public official had been paid as much as £80,000 to reveal confidential information!  Furthermore, this activity had been carried out despite the knowledge that it was against the law and that the jobs, pensions and liberty of those involved were at risk. Various devious schemes had been devised to conceal it.

No wonder the recent widespread arrests of Sun journalists, that aroused so much indignation among media pundits, had taken place simultaneously, at dawn, and by surprise.   This had clearly been intended to remove the possibility of evidence being tampered with or destroyed.  

Mr Murdoch is reported as saying that although those activities may have taken place in the past all News International employees would have clean hands in the future. Perhaps so – but it will be remembered that throughout this sorry ongoing saga News International has admitted wrong-doing only when compelled to do so by irrefutable evidence.  In the first instance it was claimed that just one lone culprit had resorted to ‘phone hacking’, and he was a freelance private investigator, not a News International employee.  Then it was just the one publication, the News of the World that was culpable.  Mr Murdoch closed it down, throwing it to the wolves to protect the rest of his media empire.  Now the Sun, News International’s flagship enterprise in the UK, is accused of being a centre of bribery and corruption.  In a tv interview singer Charlotte Church, who, with her parents, has been the victims of phone hacking and harassment, pointed out that when News International says ‘sorry’ it doesn’t mean that they are sorry about their wrong-doing – only that that they are sorry to have been caught out! 

Serious as is the systematic bribery and corruption of members of the Police Force and other public officials, it is the evil influence of News International at the very highest level that most concerns me – and should concern us all.  If the Police were, as is admitted, much too close to the Murdoch Empire – what are we to say of successive Prime Ministers who have enjoyed the close friendship of Rupert Murdoch and his lieutenants?  It began with Mrs Thatcher but was closely followed by Tony Blair and by David Cameron, our present Prime Minister. There was the video shown on tv of Tony Blair greeting Rebekah Brooks, Rupert Murdoch’s ‘viceroy’, with an affectionate kiss. There was David Cameron and family spending part of Christmas 2010 with the same lady, and David Cameron appointing Andy Coulson, a former News of the World editor, as his personal spin-doctor.  More recently we have had the cosy mental image of David Cameron enjoying  a brisk canter – on a horse ‘loaned’ to Rebekah Brooks by the Metropolitan Police! 

No wonder News International employees imagined that, with ‘friends at the top’ they could get away with anything.   Now I notice that, as a result of an internal enquiry, News International is handing to the Police evidence of the wrong-doing of some of its employees.  I am reminded of the German farmer who in 1946, when asked what he had been doing that morning, replied, ‘I’ve been de-Nazifying my carrot field – pulling out the little ones so that the big ones can flourish!’

No-one would dream of suggesting that our top politicians could be bribed – or that even the brashest of cosmopolitan media billionaires would be foolish enough to attempt to bribe them.  The former though, are well aware of the fragility of their electoral success and of the power of the rulers of the press to manipulate public opinion for or against them.  This power was impressively demonstrated when, to make New Labour ‘electable’ Tony Blair swung his party’s policies sufficiently to the right to secure Rupert Murdoch’s approbation, and the support of the Sun in the next General Election campaign - which New Labour then won.  Before the latest General Election the Sun returned to its support of the Conservatives, and the Conservatives emerged as the strongest party.  Rupert Murdoch must have been well satisfied with this exhibition of his power.

 The billionaire owners of most of the national press are able to exert far too powerful an influence on our political leaders – an influence that the revelations of the Leveson Enquiry may give us an opportunity to curb.  We boast of our ‘Free Press’ . It isn’t free.  It isn’t even cheap.  It is just the very best that money can buy!

‘When I hear the word “culture”……. I reach for my revolver!’

          Thus in the late 1930s, allegedly spake the late and unlamented Air-Marshal Hermann Goering, the most colourful of Hitler’s entourage.

            We haven’t yet reached that state in this country as we progress in the second decade of the twenty-first century.  There’s no doubt though that in our schools, lessons on what I think of as cultural subjects – history, geography, English literature – come a poor second to those which prepare the young to be employable human resource units supplying the needs of the global market economy; the ‘proles’ of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ .

             A basic knowledge of British and World History and Geography (where we are in both time and space, how we got there, and the direction in which we are heading!) is surely essential for us all in a parliamentary democracy.  How could we hope to exercise the vote intelligently and effectively without that background knowledge?  As for English literature – quite apart from the great pleasure that is to be derived from the magnificent prose and poetry of the past, it teaches us to express our thoughts clearly and concisely (without the constantly reiterated ‘know what I mean? that we hear so often today) and how those in the past have met and tried to resolve the problems that confront us daily.

            I heard a cocksure fifteen year old asserting on tv that Shakespeare is irrelevant these days.  Irrelevant, really?  Romeo and Juliet deals with gang warfare between the Montagues and Capulets,  the dangers of carrying knives (the gang members had long ones called swords!) for ‘protection’, the perils of teenage sex and of ignoring parental advice, and the dangers of meddling by well-meaning busybodies (Brother Lawrence).   And that’s just one of the plays!  Aspiring modern politicians could do worse than study Macbeth ­and Julius Caesar and those tempted to try to make a fortune on the stock exchange might try The Merchant of Venice. 

           

Watching University Challenge on tv can be a humbling experience.  I don’t really understand most of the questions, never mind know the answers.  However I do occasionally know the answers to questions on English history or world geography, and I quite often know more about some aspects of English Literature than any of the contestants.  I have been astonished to observe young men and women who know things about physics, chemistry, zoology, and mathematics that are a complete mystery to me, but who seem never to have heard of such poems as Milton’s sonnet On his Blindness, Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, Keats’  La belle Dame sans Merci, and John Betjeman’s Subaltern’s Love Song.   Betjeman’s poetry I have come to know and enjoy fairly recently (well, in the past half-century)  but the others, and the Shakespeare plays I have mentioned, were just part of the English syllabus for the London University General Schools Certificate that I took and passed before leaving school in 1937 at the age of 16.

            I can’t say that the maths and science subjects that I was taught at school have been of no value to me. I have always had enough Maths to cope with my income tax returns and to work out royalties due to me from book sales.  My knowledge of General Physics was a help to me when, in my 50s and 60s, I wrote half a dozen commercially successful books about domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage.  It is though, from my study of English Literature that I have gained my ability to string words together into a readable narrative, and from my knowledge of history and geography that I have the temerity to write and publish this blog every week. I wish I knew more about other cultural subjects such as classical music and art. 

            In Great Britain culture isn’t yet the target of a revolver – but it is being slowly strangled in the service of Mammon!

‘Bad News for Home Owners?’

          When the news reader announced that there was ‘bad news for home owners’ at breakfast time this (3^rd March) morning, I wondered what was coming next.  I needn’t have worried.  It was home buyers, not home owners that had reason to be anxious.  Interest rates on mortgages were set to increase, in some cases by as much as fourteen percent.  Some home buyers will shortly discover – when they find themselves unable to make their mortgage repayments – that it is the bank or Building Society, not themselves, who is the true owner of their home.

            I feel very sorry for those who may lose their homes, but not for the politicians who have lured them into a debt that they won’t be able to repay.  Remember David Cameron saying how proud the new householder was when handed the key of his own home?  Just imagine how that same householder will feel when his home is repossessed and he has to hand it back again!

’‘Essex Works!'

            Yes, as far as I am concerned it certainly does.  You’ll recall that a fortnight or so ago I recounted my experience of trying to get a hand-rail fitted to help me get safely from the threshold of my front door to the concrete front path.  A wooden ramp had been provided (by a friendly neighbour) over the two steep steps, but I still felt the need to descend that ramp with extreme care, never venturing upon it without my trusty walking stick!

            The biggest hurdle that I had to deal with was that of getting through to a human voice at the County Hall.  I gave it up one day and rang off while a mechanical voice was assuring me that my call was valued and that I was moving up the queue.  The next day I was more determined (and possibly a little more patient!) and eventually a human voice, of a very helpful young lady greeted me.  I was ‘assessed’ over the phone.  It became clear to me that despite my age there were not a great many things that I might want to do but was unable.  I could get out of bed, wash, shower and shave, do my own shopping, visit friends, cook my own meals and do the washing with the aid of a washing machine.   I had already arranged help with cleaning and with the garden.  No, I definitely wasn’t top priority.

            However, someone would visit me in due course to see about a hand-rail and to see if there were any other hazards about the house were capable of being remedied.  It took about three weeks but ultimately some-one did call.  He agreed that I needed a handrail but thought that otherwise I was coping well with the effects of old age.  Someone would phone and make an appointment to fix the handrail.  And so they did.  A very helpful operative phoned and said that, if it was OK with me, he would call and fix the handrail at about lunchtime today, 3rd March..

            And so he did, quickly and efficiently.  See for yourself.

            It will take a long while to erase from my memory the County Council’s former political leader, Lord Hanningfield.  But in the meantime I am happy to confirm that Essex Works – and worked effectively for me!

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