Week 4 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

The Prime Minister’s Choice

          In last week’s blog I said that the Prime Minister’s reaction to the increasingly clear evidence of global catastrophe resulting from accelerating world-wide climate change would tell us whether he really was a far-sighted statesman determined to pull his country, and lead the world, back from the abyss – or whether he is just another  politician whose vision doesn’t extend beyond the next general election..

            I fully expected to have to wait a few weeks for the answer – but it was made clear even before my blog had been posted on the internet!   No – the Prime Minister isn’t going to redouble efforts to reduce our national dependence on the fossil fuels that are producing catastrophic weather conditions across the globe, and to set an example to other industrialised nations to do the same.  On the contrary, he is proposing to bribe local authorities into permitting ‘fracking’ in their areas, and is telling us that these operations will result in the creation of thousands of jobs, cheaper gas and oil and less dependence on our  obtaining these fuels from the world’s political  trouble spots.

            Those local authorities that accept the bribe won’t have to cut their budgets as severely as they had expected and we can, so the Prime Minister claims, all hope for less expensive fuel and a marked further reduction in the number of unemployed.   That should be worth a few thousand votes in the next election.  When Mr Cameron decided to opt for the political alternative he certainly did so in style!

            Will fracking threaten our water supplies and produce the mini-earthquakes that its opponents prophecy?  Possibly not, if the operators carefully follow every recommended safety precaution.  However  since the products of successful fracking are fossil fuels, one thing that their use certainly will do is increase the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and thus accelerate even further the climatic change that is threatening us all.

            A feature of the fracking operation about which I heard for the first time on the tv news this (13^th January) evening is that profitable production from a ‘fracking well’ lasts only four years.   It then becomes necessary to sink another well elsewhere.  That no doubt accounts for the fact that I have seen aerial photographs of considerable areas of the USA reduced to an industrial desert by fracking operations.  That – as well as the possibility of cheap fuel, a reduction in the unemployment figures, and increasingly extreme weather – is something to which we can look forward in ‘England’s green and pleasant land’.   That’s the kind of prospect that makes me feel quite glad that my ninety-third birthday approaches!

Gove’s War

          I have to confess that Michael Gove is one member of the government for whom I have, on occasion, felt just a little sympathy.  I think, as he evidently does, that there is something wrong with our educational system and it seems to me that some of his ideas, although they are greeted with derision by most of the teaching profession, have merit in them. 

            However I have often been glad that Mr Gove is not concerned with foreign affairs or with the armed forces.   He must surely be one of the few people in the UK/in Europe/in the world, who can look at the Middle East and still believe that the invasion of Iraq (for which the infamous Bush/Blair axis secured parliamentary approval only by deception) was a ‘good thing’ and has resulted in a better and more peaceful world.   Tell that to any member of Iraq’s Christian community. They were tolerated and influential in Saddam Hussein’s time, but now, like most Christians in Muslim-majority countries, they are living constantly under threat and seeking refuge elsewhere when they can.  Tell that too, to Shia Muslims living in Sunni areas and vice versa.  El Qaida, which prior to our ill-conceived and illegal invasion, scarcely had a foothold in Iraq, now flourishes!

This war memorial, to the fallen of the American ‘Rainbow Division’ catches something of the pathos and tragedy of World War I    

Now, during the centenary year of the outbreak of World War I, Michael Gove urges us to ‘celebrate’ what used to be called ‘the Great War’ and to ignore the ‘left wing intellectuals’ who claim that it was a flagrant and appalling squandering of human life engineered by scheming politicians and made worse by incompetent military commanders driving (but never leading!) masses of unwilling soldiery like sheep to the slaughter.  One doesn’t have to be left-wing or particularly intellectual to accept the remembered testimony of those, now no longer with us, who fought in and survived that war – and the evidence of the World War I cemeteries and war memorials in northern France  and Flanders.

            Probably the most famous war memorial in mainland Europe is the Menin Gate outside Ypres, the only Belgian town that was never under German control during World War I, where some of the bloodiest battles of that war were fought.  Completed in 1927 the Memorial was intended to bear the names of the British and Commonwealth soldiers who were known to have been killed in those battles but whose bodies had  never been found. There were 55,000 such soldiers and, huge as the Menin Gate memorial is, there was found to be insufficient space for 55,000 names. Consequently the Menin Gate has the names of only some 35,000 names and the others are memorialised elsewhere!

            Poet, author and war hero Siegfried Sassoon* (he was awarded the M.C. Military Cross* for his conspicuous gallantry) wrote of the Menin Gate,

Well may the dead, who struggled in the slime,

Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

            I reckon that if Siegfried Sassoon were alive today he would say much the same about the  ‘celebration’ of the centenary of the outbreak of World War I.  I and other ex-servicemen survived World War II because military commanders in that war were less careless of human life than their predecessors had been just over two decades earlier.

           

I hope that we will remember the outbreak of World War I with repentance for human folly and wickedness and determination never again to be deceived by scheming politicians into the wholesale slaughter of our fellow men and women. As for Michael Gove – a Biggles Omnibus and a few ancient copies of The Boys own Paper should keep him happy.   Let us hope that he is never in a position to realize his dreams of military glory.

            *Siegfried Sassoon was a volunteer infantry officer who became aware of the criminal waste of human life in World War I and subsequently became a peace campaigner.  His paternal ancestors had been Iraqi Jews and he owed his German Christian name to his gentile mother’s love of Wagner’s music. He was undoubtedly recklessly courageous and was known as ‘Mad Jack’ as a result.  It has been said that OBE sometimes stands for ‘Other B………. Efforts’.  No-one has ever been awarded an M.C. for any efforts other than his or her own.

           

Calling all (or any!) local blog readers

            Such are the wonders of modern technology that I can be pretty confident that there are over 2,000 regular readers of this blog world-wide.  I know that I have many readers in the USA and in Russia as well as in the UK, readers in Germany, Poland, Bosnia and the Ukraine and even a few in India, in mainland China and Vietnam. What I don’t know is whether I have many local readers, from southern East Anglia – in particular from north-east Essex and southern Suffolk.

            I know that I have one or two because they have contacted me – but perhaps that’s the lot.  We have it on the very best of authority that a prophet it less likely to be honoured in his own neighbourhood and among his own people than further afield!  This particular item is especially for all – or any – local blog readers.

            On Sunday 12^th January, BBC tv’s Countryfile programme invited viewers to contact them if they felt that a Countryfile programme might possibly be made in their particular area.  These programmes cover local farming but also most other rural activities and interests – particularly where there is local controversy,  such as the tourist development of Dedham Vale for instance.

Bridge Cottage, Flatford Mill         

I have emailed them suggesting the Suffolk/Essex border area; the countryside that inspired Constable and Gainsborough, from Sudbury through Dedham, Flatford Mill and Manningtree to historic Harwich, home of the Mayflower.  Then there’s the rich agricultural land of the almost-an-island Tendring Peninsula, with Walton Backwaters – scene of one of Arthur Ransome’s children’s novels and, on the outskirts, Colchester, England’s oldest recorded town as well as, on the Essex 'sunshine coast', no less than five coastal holiday resorts, each with its own character but all having safe, clean, sandy beaches, ‘all the fun of the fair’ for those who want it and the lowest average annual rainfall in the British Isles;  all easily accessible from London!

                                   The home of the Master of the Mayflower in Harwich        

  I am quite sure that a visit from the Countryfile team and a programme featuring the Essex/Suffolk border would enhance the economy of the whole area and bring us welcome holiday visitors.  Why not respond to the Countryfile appeal and suggest a visit to our region?  Emails should go to countryfile@bbc.co.uk   If you have any photographs of the area send them as attachments.   To my own email I attached a photo of Bridge Cottage, Flatford Mill, and one of the Harwich home of the Master of the Mayflower. Here they are!

           

           

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.

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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.