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.    

           

Week 17.10

Tendring Topics……….on Line

A Once-sleeping Volcano

That Icelandic volcano with an unpronounceable name, situated hundreds of miles north-west of the British Isles and mainland Europe, achieved something that had proved well beyond the power of either Hitler’s Luftwaffe or the murderous fanatics of Al Quaida. It grounded the whole of Britain’s Royal Air Force and civil aircraft fleet and the equivalent air fleets of the greater part of the rest of Europe. It demonstrated conclusively how puny is all the might and all the technology of humankind in the face of forces that nature is capable of unleashing.

As recently as a century ago, that volcanic eruption would have caused no concern to anyone in the British Isles or on mainland Europe. It would have attracted little, if any, attention beyond its immediate vicinity in Iceland. Its devastating effects in 2010 result entirely from mankind’s reliance upon the technological advances made in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first.

It has been the plight of the thousands of holidaymakers and would-be holidaymakers unable to get to their destinations that has caught the public’s attention. The effect on trade and commerce worldwide has been at least as important though. Rapid airborne travel and transport were among the greatest achievements of the late twentieth century. Now, we find that we simply can’t manage without them.

The crisis might perhaps have been expected to have instilled into us humans a certain degree of humility, possibly even a renewed realization that, ‘The fear (or awe) of the Lord, is the beginning of wisdom’.

But it hasn’t, has it? In our litigious society the first reaction is to look round for someone to blame, someone from whom we can claim compensation. General Election campaigns are in full swing. Party organisers immediately seek ways in which electoral advantage – a few thousand extra votes – can be squeezed from the situation.

Why isn’t the government taking immediate steps to help those stranded Brits to get home? asked the tabloids. When a warship was deployed to help, an armada of rescue boats was urged by the press. We were given visions of a new Dunkirk with stranded Britons being snatched from European beaches. Meanwhile a retired Colonel Blimp wrote to one of the papers to thunder that this wasn’t a proper use of the Royal Navy. I could imagine him pontificating in his club, ‘Dammit man, this could be just the time that the Ruskies decide to attack!’

Perhaps the scientific advisers were over-cautious. As an occasional air traveller (though I think that my flying days are now over) I am glad that they were. It is much better that they should be over-cautious than that they should not be cautious enough. The unnecessary grounding of aircraft is regrettable; but not half as regrettable as allowing them to fly prematurely……and having them crash! Imagine what the headlines would have been like then!

Let us be thankful that Europe has survived a major crisis without, as far as I know, the loss of a single life. That surely is a matter for congratulation and celebration. Compensation for the airlines for the millions of pounds they claim to have lost? Much more deserving are the stranded passengers who have had to spend the last few hundred pounds in their bank accounts trying to get home, and who in some cases were denied the support from their airline to which they were legally entitled.

Clacton’s Parliamentary Hopefuls

The final day for the receipt of candidatures for the Clacton-on-Sea Constituency revealed that there are two new contestants in the field, both standing as ‘Independent’. They’re not actually all that ‘new’. There’s Terry Allen of Frinton-on-Sea, a former leader of Tendring Council and founder-member of ‘Tendring First’, who lost his Council seat in the 2007 local elections. His policies, I quote the Clacton Gazette are ‘to bring health, fire and police services under more local control, boost vocational education, give better equipment to frontline troops, hold a referendum on Europe and introduce a quota system for immigration’.

Hardly, I would have thought, sufficiently different from the policies of our sitting Conservative MP (or even of the BNP candidate) to make it worth hazarding the £500 deposit. Still, it was his £500, not mine.

Then there’s Clactonian Chris Humphrey, whom I have known from a long time ago but who seems to have dropped out of my orbit (or perhaps it’s just that I’ve dropped out of his) in recent years. I knew him as a very earnest and well-meaning young man – well he was young when I first knew him – with very strong views on a number of subjects. I hope he’ll reveal his current election manifesto soon. There’s one thing of which I’m pretty certain. It won’t be a carbon copy of that of any other candidate!

I have little doubt that both these Independent candidates will lose their deposits. I wish them all success though – any votes that they may attract are likely to be at the expense of candidates whom I would not wish to see elected.

‘Get Nick Clegg!’

This was clearly the message that went out to the editors of most of the popular press when, last week, a surge of support for the Lib.Dems. became apparent from opinion poll after opinion poll. Needless to say, the party’s opponents didn’t imagine for one moment that this could be because an increasing number of people had become aware of the Liberal Democrat Party’s policies and decided that they much preferred them to those of New Labour and of the Tories.

Of course not! Political leaders and national newspaper proprietors don’t really believe that we electors are capable of that much rational thought. It must surely have been because we had all been bewitched by Nick Clegg’s performance in that first televised debate between the party leaders. He had skilfully learned all the ‘tricks of the trade’, the right body language, the most effective facial expressions, the telling phrase – and, of course he was young, handsome and clever. Goodness, was it imagined that David Cameron and Gordon Brown had not also had the very best and most experienced tutors to coach them in the best way to present themselves on tv? Wasn’t David Cameron at least equally young, handsome and clever? I don’t think that Gordon Brown would claim the first two of those attributes but he could surely claim to look more mature and experienced than his rivals.

So – Nick Clegg had to be smeared. The fruit of the muck-raking that ensued appeared on the front pages of most of the dailies last Thursday, 22nd April. ‘Four years ago Nick Clegg said this, or that ……and eight years ago wrote this, that and the other’. Then, of course, there had been money paid into his account. No need to mention that it had promptly been paid out again! I was reminded of a rather cruel little rhyme about my own former profession:

It’s true, you cannot bribe or twist,
Thank Heaven, the British journalist.
Considering what the chap will do
Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

They were at it again after the second debate. I felt that there was little to choose between the performances of the three candidates on this occasion. At one stage I was quite impressed by Gordon Brown. Certainly Nick Clegg didn’t suffer the humiliation joyfully predicted by some of his opponents. I think that Sun’s headline celebrating David Cameron’s ‘triumph’ must have been written before the debate.

And why not? Few Sun readers will have watched the debate and few will read much more than the headlines before hastening on to the sports news, the celebrity gossip and the glamour photo-shots.

Once again – Andy changes the subject!

Many years ago, it must have been in the early 1980s, I drove to Chelmsford to gather material for an advertising feature on Ridley’s, the brewers, for one of the Essex County Newspaper’s publications.

I was welcomed by the Managing Director, a Mr Ridley (I don’t remember his first name) with whom I had made an appointment. I was shown over the brewery and given a brief account of the brewing processes. We then repaired to his office for a cup of tea and a chat. I soon had sufficient material from which to produce what I hoped would be an interesting, informative and readable 1,000 words about our county’s own brewery and own beer.

During our chat I commented that I had noticed that the label on all bottles of Ridley’s ale have a head-and-shoulders picture of a man wearing the ‘Tudor style’ cap that I had seen on many a tv documentary and costume drama. Could it possibly be a picture of Nicholas Ridley, the Bishop of London who, together with his fellow Bishop, Hugh Latimer, had been burnt at the stake during the reign of Queen Mary I, elder daughter of Henry VIII? It was indeed, said my host, adding that his family were the direct descendants of the martyred Bishop.

This distinguished historical connection certainly added a little colour and interest to my article. I have no idea whether or not it had any effect on the sales of Ridley’s ale.
My memories of this little incident in my writing career came flooding back when I received another emailed photograph from my younger son and daughter-in-law Andy and Marilyn. They had been visiting Oxford and sent me a picture of the Martyrs Memorial erected on the spot where, on 16th October 1555, Bishops Latimer and Ridley had been cruelly burnt to death. It was on the same spot that, five months later, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, and author of the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, suffered the same horrendous fate.

The Tudors – Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I were the best educated and most cultured rulers that England had ever seen. I am not sure that they don’t remain to this day our best-educated and most cultured monarchs. It was a religious age in which the Bible was translated into half a dozen European languages and was studied meticulously by both the royal rulers and their advisers. A biblical justification for Henry VIII’s annulment of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon had been found in an obscure passage in the Old Testament Book of Leviticus!

Yet, despite the learning, despite the religious belief, acts of the most appalling cruelty took place – often in the name of religion - in their reigns.

What a pity those royal studies hadn’t concentrated on the New Testament, in particular on the Sermon on the Mount. In it, the founder of the faith in defence of which they claimed they were consigning their fellow men and women to the flames, had said: Treat other people exactly as you would like to be treated yourself. This summarises the whole of the Law of God. I don’t think that there is any possible interpretation of those words that would justify making a bonfire of a fellow human, whatever his or her offence.

How different the Tudor period could have been, and how different our own could be too, if only more people heeded that commandment!

Thanks very much Andy and Marilyn for a timely reminder that, great as our problems may be today, many of our forebears faced even bigger ones in the past.