5th February 2015

Tendring Topics……..on line

 Eye to Eye with ‘Private Eye’

           

On 24^th January I wrote critically  in this blog about the Westminster Abbey authorities flying our national flag at half-mast in mourning for the death of the King of Saudi Arabia, and of the Prime Minister and the Prince of Wales, a future Defender of the Faith (our Faith!) flying to that benighted country to present their condolences.  I asked if we really needed oil – and arms sales – so desperately that we were prepared to take as an ally a country whose ethos is the exact opposite of the ‘British values’ that our Prime Minister claims to be so keen to promote.

            I have just read the copy of Private Eye published on 23^rd January, just the day before I published that blog, in which they gave their view of the United Kingdom’s relationship with Saudi Arabia.  Here it is:

            While David Cameron stands shoulder to shoulder with world leaders protesting at extremist assaults on freedom of expression on the streets of Paris, his government continues to ignore such intolerance when practised by a government with which the UK wants to do business.

            As ‘Charlie Hebdo’ was attacked, Saudi Arabia was meeting out the first of 1,000 lashes to blogger Raif Madawi.  Yet so keen is Cameron to cultivate the despots in Riyadh that, not only did he not denounce the flogging, but his government continues to cover up the corruption that sustains the barbaric regime there.

            ‘Private Eye’ is currently engaged in a freedom of information battle with the Ministry of Defence for details of its complicity in corruption on a £2 billion defence contract.  The government refuses to provide it on the grounds that exposing such dirty secrets would harm relations with Saudi Arabia.

            Given that the oppressive state spawned the group that claims responsibility for the Paris attacks (not to mention the 9/11 bombers) al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, perhaps the ‘relations’ so highly valued by the British government would be better served by exposing the Saudi regime rather than covering up for it.

          
                King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died on 23^rd January, the day that Private Eye went on sale. In that issue it commented on the jihadist murders in Paris and on the world-wide demonstrations – led by the western world’s political leaders - supporting ‘free speech’.  It was unable though to comment in that issue on the obsequious haste with which some of those same leaders flew to Saudi Arabia to offer their condolences on the loss of the leader of a country that prohibits free speech, bans the practice of any religious faith other than its own fundamentalist version  of Islam, inflicts cruel and  barbarous punishments on it own people, holds democracy and human rights in contempt, and generally makes Saddam Husseins's Iraq, Colonel Gadafi's Libya and President Assad's Syria, seem by comparison to have been earthly paradises of liberty and tolerance.

          In view of this, the cover of the Private Eye of 23^rd January shown above, was remarkably prophetic. The  'speech bubble' shown emanating from the world's leaders is surely more accurate than 'Je suis Charlie', the slogan of the 'free speech' protesters!

‘Man’s inhumanity to man!’

            I can’t imagine a crime more heinous than that of IS (Islamic State) in burning alive, in a cage, the unfortunate Jordanian airman who fell into their hands.  The wickedness of the action was made worse by IS’ pretence of negotiating his release in exchange for a captured failed suicide bomber.   These ‘negotiations’ ensured IS the publicity for which they had hoped, and gave false hope to the victim and his friends and relatives.  I have little doubt that his fate was sealed from the moment of capture.

            The airman’s dreadful death brought to my mind another shameful incident almost exactly seventy years ago.  I was a prisoner of war at a ‘working camp’ in Zittau in eastern Germany.  Throughout the bitterly cold winter of 1944/’45 we had watched civilian refugees from the inexorably approaching Eastern Front pass through the town; old men, women and little children. Many were trudging through the snow pulling little carts with all their belongings.  They were making for Dresden, 60 or 70 miles to the west where they’d be sorted out by the German Red Cross and sent to relatively safe areas for refuge.  It was obvious to all that Germany was defeated and World War II coming to an end.

            On the night of 13^th February 1945 Dresden was flattened by high explosive and incendiary bombs dropped by hundreds of RAF bombers.  The centre of the town – not the railways and factories on the outskirts – was the bombers’ target and it was crowded with hapless refugees. The RAF bombers departed before the dawn but bombers from the USA continued during the following day. The number of dead is estimated to have been between 22,000 and 25,000.  Many of them were killed by collapsing buildings, others were asphyxiated by smoke.  They were the lucky ones.  A substantial number, men, women and little children will have been burnt alive – just like that unfortunate Jordanian airman.

            The crews of the RAF and American bombers were ‘just obeying orders’.  They didn’t know on whom their bombs were falling and anyway, the Germans had done much more dreadful things.  The bombing of Dresden took place just a few days after the Soviet Army had liberated the Auschwitz death camp in Poland and had told the world of the horrors they had discovered there.   Those aircrews were quite different from the killers of IS who had allowed their victim to hope for release and had then murdered him in the cruellest way that they could devise – a way that was guaranteed to torture not only their victim but those who loved him.

            Those aircrews were quite different from the cold-blooded torturers and murderers of IS. But their victims, whose bodies were found among the still smouldering ruins of Dresden, suffered exactly the same agonies as that Jordanian airman. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the events of that February night almost exactly 70 years ago set my mind on a course that ended with my repudiating all acts of violence and, just three years later, joining the religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and embracing the Quaker testimony against all wars.

Late Note.  The action of the Jordanian Government in hanging two jihadist prisoners (including the woman whom the government had been prepared to exchange for that airman) was understandable but regrettable.  It is only by breaking the cycle of vengeance that we can hope to achieve peace.

           

Week 9 2014

Tendring Topics......on Line

Spring is on the way!

            Yes, it really is.  Last Sunday (15^th February) here in ‘sunny Clacton’ we had sunshine from dawn till sunset.  It was a weak sun with barely enough heat in it to temper the chilly breeze.  Nevertheless, shining all day on the solar panel on the roof of my bungalow, it managed to raise the temperature of the water in my storage cylinder to sixty degrees Celcius, quite high enough to provide all my hot water needs for the next twenty-four hours!*  And it was only half-way through February and officially still ‘winter’.  Mind you, I still needed to have the boiler going for space heating from mid-afternoon!

`In Southern East Anglia at least, this chilly (but not really cold), very wet and very windy winter really does seem to be coming to an end.   I have daffodils naturalised under the long grass surrounding the eating-apple tree in my back garden.  They have been evident as green shoots for some weeks but yesterday some of them were in full bloom – and here they are.  Known in some parts of the country as ‘Easter lilies’, they are true harbingers of spring.

    

        Nor is it only in the garden that new life has been burgeoning.   On 1^st February I became a great-great uncle when my great-niece Catherine gave birth to a baby boy, Jay Luke Beard.  Here he is with his great-great uncle. Between us Jay and I span four generations and almost a century.  I was born in 1921, within the first quarter of the twentieth century, and Jay first saw the light of day in the first quarter of the twenty-first century – the second decade of the new millennium!

            Jay's life will undoubtedly be very different from mine, but whether better or worse - only time will tell!

*It did the same thing on Saturday 22nd February - we really do  get
more than the average amount of sunshine in Clacton-on-Sea!

           

 

 ‘A Plague on both your Houses’

          Three paragraphs in the latest issue of Private Eye explain why I have no confidence whatsoever in either of the political parties likely to form a government after the next General Election:

            No matter how loudly Ed Miliband proclaims that “those with the broadest backs should bear the greatest burden” the party has no plans for some of those with the deepest pockets to do their bit.

            These are the non-domiciled elite who claim allegiance to somewhere abroad while remaining resident in the UK (often, as in the case of Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere*, for their whole life) and pay the not exactly burden-sharing rate of, er, 0 percent of offshore earnings if they can find an easy way of getting them back into the UK (which they easily do).

            At this stage before the 1997 election, even in the midst of a City charm offensive, New Labour promised to end the non-dom tax break.   That was before, in office, the Party back-tracked as non-doms such as Lakshmi Mittal and private equity broncho Sir Ronald Cohen bankrolled it through subsequent elections with seven-figure donations.  Such plutocrats can look forward to tax haven Britain not loading much on their shoulders, whoever wins in 2015. 

            I really don’t want the United Kingdom to have the very best government that money can buy!

           I am disillusioned with both the Conservative and the Labour Parties and I am sure that I am one of thousands who feel the same.  Nor am I alone in feeling betrayed by Nick Clegg after having voted Lib-Dem. in the last General Election.  The danger is that some – perhaps many – voters, disillusioned with the traditional parties, will vote for UKIP.   Nigel Farage, the Party Leader, wants to sweep away party politics and put Britain first – and what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except that thousands of Germans thought in much the same way about Hitler in the 1930s.  The fact that, unlike  Adolf Hitler, Nigel Farage is a socially likeable chap who enjoys a drink and a smoke  possibly makes him all the more dangerous.

               Me? I shall definitely vote Green in the European Parliamentary Elections later this year.   That election is being held by proportional representation and every vote really will count.  If I’m still around for the General Election I’d like to vote Green again, but under our first-past-the-post electoral system a Green vote is likely to be a wasted vote.  Our present Conservative MP’s views are virtually indistinguishable from those of UKIP so I shall probably vote for whoever is most likely to defeat him unless, of course, his most dangerous rival is the UKIP candidate! I think it likely though that the local Ukippers will consider Mr Carswell to be ‘one of us’ and won’t oppose him.

* I had always thought (when I gave any thought at all to the matter) that Lord Rothermere was as British as the Union Jack. Intrigued by the comment in parenthesis in the second paragraph of the Private Eye article, I consulted Google and found that that his father had lived in France and had taken up French nationality. The present Lord Rothermere has inherited the nationality as well as his title and the Daily Mail.

The Expert

‘The bloated and bureaucratic’ Common Agricultural Policy, that hands out over a billion pounds every year to Europe’s farmers and land owners, is a favourite target of such Europhobic dailies as the Sun, Express and Mail. Who am I, knowing virtually nothing about farming and rural estate management to say whether or not these payments are justified?  I was though interested to learn from Private Eye that an increasingly large share of that billion-plus subsidy is paid not for agricultural production but to land-owners who improve the environment or diversify the local economy by providing and overseeing rural activities.

Private Eye records that the Langwell Estate near Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands has attracted £248,000 (nearly a quarter of a million pounds) in such subsidies.  It offers grouse shooting, deer stalking and other similar activities and rents lodges for £4,250 a week during the high season - a sum larger than the total that my family and I spent on half a dozen annual camping holidays in the Scottish Highlands, the Welsh Mountains and mainland Europe!

I was astonished to learn, again from Private Eye, that the owner of the Langwell Estate is Paul Dacre editor of the Daily Mail.  I have to concede that when leading articles in the Daily Mail rage against the huge handouts of ‘our money’ made by the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels who operate the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, the author – quite unlike me – undeniably has direct personal knowledge of his subject.

NHS National Database

          Every household in the country is supposed to have had an official leaflet delivered to them explaining that a national NHS database is being prepared, giving the medical details of each of us held on the computer files of every medical practice nationwide. It also said that we could ‘opt out’ of the scheme if we wished, and told us how to do so.  The scheme had been supposed to come into operation this April but as thousands of people claim that they have never received the leaflet and knew nothing about the database, the launch has been put back to the autumn.

            I do remember receiving the leaflet.  I glanced at it briefly and it occurred to me that there might be some people with medical conditions that they didn’t want to be made available for instance, to friends or relatives, to employers, or to an insurance company. That didn’t apply to me. At 92 no-one is going to offer me life insurance and my afflictions are boringly common – high blood pressure, osteo-arthritis, failing strength, vision and hearing, and other conditions of old age.  I really don't care who knows about them and I didn’t for one moment seriously consider ‘opting out’.

            I think it likely that a great many people who honestly don’t remember receiving the leaflet, did in fact do so, but just thought it was a piece of the junk mail that we all receive every day (special offers at local supermarkets, begging letters from worthy charities, catalogues from mail order firms and leaflets from local entrepreneurs eager to clean windows, tidy up the garden or clean out the roof gutters) I’m sure I’m not alone in consigning most of them  the recycling bin with no more than a cursory glance. It was pure chance that made me decide to read right through the NHS leaflet when it arrived.

Week 13 2013

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Happy Easter to all Blog readers!

          This week is an important one for all of us.  There has been – at last – agreement among politicians on the way in which the press should be regulated following the publication of the Leveson Report.  We will have had time to digest the effects of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Budget, which was presented to Parliament last Wednesday the day after last week’s blog was published, and it is the final week of the 2012/2013 Financial Year.  The main force of the government’s austerity programme will begin to be felt a few days into the following week.

A depiction of Christ’s Resurrection in St James C of E Church in Clacton-on-Sea.  The risen Christ is asking weeping Mary Magdalene ‘Why weepest thou?  Who seekest thou?’

           

It is also ‘Holy Week’ the final week of the season of Lent which comes to a climax on Good Friday with the remembrance of the rigged trial and cruel crucifixion of Jesus Christ whom we Christians believe to have been the incarnation of that true light of God that St John declares in verse 9 of the first chapter of his Gospel, 'enlightens everyone who comes into the world’. This is sometimes known as the Quaker Verse because it gives scriptural authority to the Quaker assertion that there is a divine spark, ‘that of God’, within every man, woman and child in the world, irrespective of                                                  their colour, race or creed.

            Fortunately for all humankind the agony and grief of Good Friday was overcome on that first Easter Sunday morning by Jesus’ resurrection and his appearance to the weeping Mary Magdalene.  Blinded by her tears she had imagined that it was the gardener who was sharing her pre-dawn vigil until Jesus made himself known with those kindly words ‘Why are you weeping? Who are you seeking?’ and with incredulous recognition her sorrow turned to joy.   That miraculous resurrection gives Christians the assurance that, in the end, good will triumph over evil.  Compassion, love and forgiveness will ultimately triumph over greed, hatred, selfishness, fear, and thoughts of vengeance, and the will of God ‘will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven’.

            I hope to join with others in giving thanks for that assurance on this Easter Sunday morning.

 Our ‘Free’ Press

          At the beginning of this blog I mentioned that, at long last, agreement had been reached by the political parties about regulation of the press.  Perhaps that statement should be qualified.  The politicians have indeed agreed, but membership of the group of newspapers to be subject to regulation is voluntary.  The editors (or would it be the owners who make the decision?) of one or two newspapers have reluctantly agreed to join ‘the club’ but others are strongly opposed to it.  Unless a clear majority decide to ‘sign on’ the whole elaborate arrangement could surely collapse.

            I was  interested in the comments of Ian Hislop, Editor of Private Eye a hard-hitting publication that I always enjoy reading, during the course of a BBC tv news programme on Tuesday 20^th May.   He pointed out that the press practices that have caused outrage among both celebrities and members of the general public – phone hacking, bribing or attempting to bribe the police or public officials, using recorded material in stolen mobile phones, unwarranted intrusion into the private concerns of members of the public by means of force or deception, were already criminal offences.  Why was it that they hadn’t been pursued before by the forces of the law?

            I think it likely that it was for the same reason that Jimmy Savile was allowed to get away with his activities for so long, and locally and on a much smaller scale, how Lord Hanningfield’s extravagant expense claims as a member of the House of Lords and Leader of Essex County Council, didn’t attract official attention for several years.  Those who knew or suspected wrongdoing had mortgages to pay and families to support.  The person they suspected had powerful friends who clearly had no such suspicions. They may though have had control of the future of any potential whistle-blower, whose promotion, job and whole future could be at risk. It would be best not to say a word without absolute, cast-iron proof.  Even then, it might be wiser to leave it to someone else to blow the whistle.

This brings me to the question of the ownership and control of our ‘free press’.  It is surely wrong for the means of influencing public opinion and swaying the mind of the electorate to be in the hands of wealthy individuals.   It is even worse if those individuals are not British – whether they be Russian oligarchs or American news media millionaires.  Such owners of the press wouldn’t dream of asking their editors and reporters to print anything that is untrue – but those employees know that their future careers will be enhanced if they select material that supports the newspaper owner’s preferences and prejudices as being newsworthy, and reject or put on a back page material that opposes them.  Meanwhile those owners, or their trusted lieutenants, seek the acquaintance and friendship of top politicians.  They don’t, of course, seek to bribe or bully them – but they leave them in no doubt about which policies and actions would ensure favourable headlines and news stories.

            This is not something that could happen.  It is something that has happened and I believe is still happening.  I don’t know the answer but I do know that a ‘free press’ tightly controlled by wealthy individuals isn’t free in any real sense of the word.  While I’d hate to see a government controlled press, I’d hate even more to live under a government controlled by the machinations of foreign media millionaires.       

‘It's all right for some!’

 On Wednesday 20^th March, most of us were trying to work out whether we would be better or worse off after George Osborne’s Budget.  Beer drinking motorists seeking daytime care for their children, who have been deterred from house purchase by the size of the deposit required, may well be better off – at least for the time being.  

            A few privileged employees of Barclays Bank had no such worries.  For them – despite the banking scandals of the past year – Christmas had come early!  On the same day that Mr Osborne was making his annual Budget Speech, Barclays were announcing that they were paying a total of £38.5 million in bonuses to their top employees.   At the top of the hand-out tree was their Head of Investment Banking who was given shares worth £17.5 million!  He may have had a few personal cash-flow problems – or perhaps he knew something about Barclays that we don’t – because he promptly cashed the lot.

            Barclays Chief Executive didn’t do quite so well.  He pocketed a mere £5.3 million worth of shares of which he cashed only half.

            It’s nice to know that these two gentlemen will also be getting a hand-out from a grateful government next week when the income tax on their take-home pay above £150,000 will be reduced.  Who was it said, ‘We’re all in this together’?

Talking about income tax reminds me………

          …….that one feature of the Chancellor’s Budget will benefit me if I’m still around to take advantage of it in April 2014, when it comes into force.  The first £10,000 of my income will be tax-free.   I’d rather that it wasn’t though.  I don’t think that those whose income is less than £10,000 a year should be ‘freed from the burden of income tax’

            Income tax is the only form of taxation that is levied directly in accordance with our ability to pay it.  VAT and taxes on petrol, alcohol, the lottery and the like are the same for wealthy and poor alike.  Consequently they hit the poor the hardest. Income tax could be properly graded so that it has the same impact on us all.  I’d like to see the same percentage of every adult’s gross income be their first and most important tax demand – an ‘annual membership fee’ for the very considerable privilege of being a British citizen.

            Levied on everyone, from the very wealthiest to those on minimum wage or ‘benefit’, it would of course mean that a much larger sum was collected from the wealthy than from the poor.  But we would all part with the same proportion of our income.  No one would starve or be rendered homeless by having to pay it – and I believe that quite a low percentage of gross income (30 percent perhaps) levied on every adult without exception would make it possible for the minimum wage and unemployment and similar benefits to be higher.   We would all have a stake in the country’s prosperity.  We would truly, ‘all be in this together’.

England’s most deprived area

                                                                         

 An Avenue on the Brooklands Estate taken by a ‘ Guardian’ photographer.  

The Guardian newspaper sent a reporter, Ms. Amelia Gentleman, to Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate  on Budget Day to discover how England’s most deprived area would be likely to fare under Chancellor George Osborne’s Budget.  In her report Ms Gentleman described the Brooklands Estate as consisting, ‘of small houses, some barely bigger than beach huts, packed together along potholed lanes’. Many of the residents were, ‘entirely dependent on the welfare system which the Chancellor described as “bloated”.  With 51 percent of adults receiving benefit, the Brooklands Estate acts as a test zone for the impact of government welfare reform.   Residents here will experience the changes in great numbers as they roll out later this year.  They are already feeling the effects of tightened eligibility to some benefits…………As well as being named the most deprived place in England and Wales in 2011, the area was found last year to have the highest number of young people not in employment or training, with a third of 16 to 24 year olds claiming jobseeker’s allowance, more than five times the national average of 6 percent.

Later in her report she comments that, ‘Brooklands’ population has always been transient but recently officials have noticed a bigger influx of families from London – possibly as a result of housing benefit changes in the capital, which are forcing families to search for cheaper housing elsewhere’.  A house price survey had revealed that Brooklands is one of the easiest areas in the country to buy a house.  Bungalows there are on sale for around £20,000.

            She reported that many people living in the area , ‘would like to sign up to Osborne’s vision of an aspiration nation, and become hard-working home-owning taxpayers’ but that there simply aren’t the jobs in the area to make it possible for them to fulfil that dream. ‘There are 3,500 unemployed people in the surrounding Tendring District competing for just 500 jobs currently being advertised’.

Making the most of the Budget!

A economics expert on BBC Breakfast tv on 21^st March pointed out that, thanks to the Budget, if we drank 10,000 pints of beer – we would save £10!

           

  

Week 12 2012 22..2012

Tendring Topics.........on line

 That ‘Special Relationship’

            Benjamin Disraeli, founder of the modern Conservative Party, was a very shrewd observer of his fellow men and women.  ‘Everybody,’ he once remarked, ‘likes flattery – and with Royalty one should lay it on with a trowel. Today, even in a country like ours with a constitutional monarchy, top politicians have largely taken the place held by royalty in Disraeli’s Victorian age.

            How very heart-warming was the welcome given by the USA to David Cameron and his wife! And how inspiring were the speeches made by the two leaders! Our relationship with the USA, over whose policies we have no influence whatsoever (why should we?) is obviously much more important to our Prime Minister than our membership of the European Union whose policies we can help to shape.

            ‘Britain and the USA have stood together and bled together’, it was said.   Sometimes we certainly have, though not always (in 1810 for instance!) on the same side.   On the basis of lies (Saddam Hussein had ‘weapons of mass destruction that were threatening us …….Iraq was involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack on the USA’) Tony Blair, our then Prime Minister, persuaded Parliament to ignore the million-plus British protesters (I’m proud that my sons and their families  were among them) who believed otherwise. Parliament voted for an illegal war that cost Britain millions of pounds and hundreds of lives. 

            The war in Afghanistan was a little more justifiable.  I have no doubt that the Taliban Government was sheltering El Qaida and similar terrorist organisations threatening ‘the West’.  That is why other NATO countries joined in.  However El Qaida has now simply moved its bases across the border into the tribal areas of Pakistan, and to the Yemen and East Africa.

             

            Those were the times when Britain’s special relationship led us to the support of the USA.  There was one occasion on which it didn’t.  Prime Minister Harold Wilson did not send troops to ‘stand and bleed’ beside the American troops in Vietnam fighting the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong rebels, as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair undoubtedly would have.  Does anyone in Britain today regret that the United Kingdom was not part of the USA’s war which ended in defeat and ignominious withdrawal – or the fact that there are no British names on Vietnamese war memorials?

            Incidentally, we were told at the time of the Vietnam War that if the Vietcong won it would be the end of civilisation as we knew it.  Stalinism would prevail over the Far East.  Well – the Vietcong did win.  I really have no idea what kind of government there now is in Vietnam.  I do know though that Vietnam has become a popular holiday destination for western tourists who, despite the lasting damage done by the USA, are made welcome.

            How about the USA’s response in Britain’s hours of need?   They didn’t help in any way when in 1974 Turkey invaded Cyprus, then part of the Commonwealth. In the 1980s they actually organised and took part in the invasion of Grenada, another Commonwealth country in the West Indies; an illegal act of aggression that was condemned by the United Nations.   They didn’t help when Argentina flagrantly invaded the Falklands – an occasion when American intervention really would have made a difference.  The USA’s mining of the approaches to Cuban ports in the furtherance of an illegal blockade, endangered British shipping.  During Britain’s struggle with the IRA, United States law-courts repeatedly refused to extradite IRA terrorists – even those who had been convicted but had escaped – to face British justice.

.

18^th May, 1941. My twentieth birthday and, watched by a hungry dog, I am taking a break from sentry duty. 

The UK had been at war for over eighteen months.

France had fallen.  The USA and the USSR were both still neutral.

 Britain and the Commonwealth stood alone against Hitler    

The Americans came into World War II to save to us from defeat?  That really is a myth than needs to be debunked.  The USA, like the Soviet Union, came into the war only when they themselves were attacked.  In 1941 the Japanese attacked the American fleet in Pearl Harbour.  The USA declared war on Japan. Hitler, in accordance with Germany’s treaty obligations, immediately declared war on the USA.  We shall never know whether, had Hitler not made that fatal mistake, the USA would have engaged Hitler at that time.  Perhaps, wisely from their point of view, they would have said they would deal with the Japanese threat and leave the UK, the Commonwealth and the Soviet Union to deal with the Nazis.

            Right now, I believe that David Cameron is being softened up to support (or at least not to oppose) the USA and Israel in a ‘pre-emptive’ strike on Iran’s nuclear installations, because of their conviction that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.  I wonder if the intelligence sources that have led to this conviction are the same as those that, just a few years ago, confidently asserted that Iraq had ‘weapons of mass destruction’.

           

            I fear that, thanks to the flattering star-spangled manner of his reception in the USA, David Cameron may have already pledged his unquestioning support.

Tendring is doubly fortunate!

          The village of St. Osyth, just two or three miles from Clacton-on-Sea is said to be the driest spot in the United Kingdom.  It follows that the Tendring peninsula’s  coastal towns from Harwich to Brightlingsea are the British holiday resorts in which visitors are least likely to have their holiday ruined by rain.

            During the 1970s when I was the Tendring District Council’s Public Relations and Press Officer, I used to make the most of this fact.  Our rainfall, I would say, was comparable with that of the fringes of southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert!  When my family and I had moved to Clacton some two decades earlier, the then Council had the holiday publicity slogan ‘Champagne Air – Rainfall rare!’  It was hardly the most brilliant example of the use of the English language, but it made its point.

            Though, as the district’s official Spin Doctor I loved our low rainfall, as an enthusiastic amateur gardener I detested it.  Why did my garden have to be just a couple of miles, as the crow flies, from the driest spot in the United Kingdom!  No wonder that during the summer months I had to spend an hour or so every evening with the hose pipe watering my thirsty runner beans, sweet peas, tomatoes and courgettes.

            Nowadays I cultivate my garden no longer. I was still pleasantly surprised though to discover that the Tendring District – Britain’s driest area – is the one district in our region that isn’t having to endure a hose-pipe ban from the beginning of April; this despite the fact that water level in the region’s reservoirs is even lower than it was during the scorchingly hot and dry summer of 1976.

            The reason so I understand, is that Veolia East, supplier of our water, obtains it from giant natural reservoirs or aquifers deep underground.  Thus they are not so dependent on seasonal rainfall and surface reservoirs as, for instance Anglian Water,   Colchester’s supplier.

            Our supply is still finite.  We should all use water as sparingly as we can – if only to keep our water bills within the household budget!   It does mean though that I’ll be able to continue to enjoy my daily morning shower without twinges of conscience!

Will Private Enterprise ‘Breathe new life’ into the NHS’?

            Those (there must surely be some!) who are looking forward to the Government’s  NHS Reform Bill sweeping away bureaucratic cobwebs and bringing the fresh air of the private enterprise and the market place into the NHS may be interested in this story brought to light by ever-vigilant Private Eye:

            Four years ago the Camden Road Medical Centre, serving 4,700 patients in North London, was acquired by the American health giant United Health who undercut a bid by local GPs by twenty-five percent.  Within a month there were complaints about inferior service and, in particular, about the loss of two locum doctors, one of whom had been based at the practice for eighteen years.

            A year ago, quietly and without consulting or even informing patients, United Health        sold the practice franchise to a company called The Practice plc.  Now The Practice plc has failed to renew its lease on the premises that have been used by doctors for almost a century.  The Centre is closing, staff will lose their jobs and the 4,700 patients will have to find other GPs – miles away!

            It must never be forgotten that privately owned businesses are run primarily to make money for the shareholders – not for the benefit of those it claims to ‘serve’.

Salute to Slovenia!

          Since last November, when I changed the means by which I gain access to my weekly blog to Google, I have been able to keep a check on how many people view it and the countries in which it is most popular.  For some time the greatest number were in India – the United Kingdom coming a poor second!  In the New Year my Indian viewers almost disappeared but there has been a welcome increase in viewers from Britain, the USA, Germany and Russia.

            Some smaller and/or less populous countries came and went – Sri Lanka, Israel, Belgium, Australia, United Arab Emirates and so on.  One small country though remained constant.  I haven’t many Slovenian viewers – usually between six and twelve – but then it is a small country, and those viewers are loyal.  There has never, so far, been a day on which I have checked my ‘readership’ and found none at all from that small but beautiful country.

And beautiful it certainly is.  When my wife Heather and I toured what was then a united Jugoslavia in 1980 in our motor-caravan our first, and very happy, experience was of crossing the frontier from Austria into Slovenia and driving to the shores of Lake Bled where we parked our van and spent our first night .  We spent the last day and night of our tour there too.  It was there that I first tasted Slivovice!

Many years later, after Slovenia had gained its independence, my elder son, daughter in law and younger grandson Nick also visited – in the winter – and found it, and its capital Ljubljana, to be a true winter wonderland.  Nick incidentally, became an expert on European travel and is currently Acting Executive Director of the European Travel Commission, encouraging folk from all over the world to spend their holidays in beautiful and historic Europe (see, www.visiteurope.com)

Our motor-caravan at sunset in an olive grove

            So, may I say thank you to my Slovenian viewers.  I very much hope that you will continue to find my blog interesting.  I am not sure whether or not this picture, of sunset in a lakeside olive grove, was taken in Slovenia. Then there were no national boundaries within Jugoslavia.   If not in Slovenia it was certainly taken not far away and it typifies the memories that I have of a very happy holiday; memories that are specially precious because they are of the last overseas holiday that my wife and I were to enjoy together.