13th January 2015

Tendring Topics…….on Line

The Jihad goes on!

          I don’t think that anyone who has read my previous blogs will accuse me of being indifferent to, or tolerant of, the murderous activities of Islamic extremists or jihadists, holy warriors as they think themselves. On the contrary, I think these activities are the biggest man-made peril facing civilisation today, and one of the most difficult to combat.  Our efforts so far, aimed at confronting the extremists in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, only encourage undecided Muslims to rally to the jihadist cause. I remain convinced that only a movement from within Islam itself, authoritatively denouncing terrorist outrages as blasphemous and wholly evil, will lead to its downfall.

            The latest outrages in France have really stirred up public anger.  Millions, so the newspapers say, have marched and demonstrated in protest at the killings and in defence of ‘free speech’. Scores of the world’s political leaders have linked arms to demonstrate their unity in the face of the jihadist assassins.

            I wonder how many among those demanding ‘free speech’ have during the past few months, demanded the immediate resignation of an MP, or a local councillor, or a tv presenter because, in a moment of thoughtlessness, he or she has used a word or an expression that was perfectly acceptable during my childhood and early adulthood, but is nowadays pounced upon by self-appointed verbal vigilantes and denounced as either racist, antisemitic or homophobic. Are all of us really all that keen on unrestricted ‘free speech’ at all times for everyone?

  I wonder too how many of the political leaders who have denounced the jihadist assassins, have used, or acquiesced with the use of unmanned drones operated from a place of safety, to assassinate anyone they consider to be a threat to their country (and, of course anyone who happens to be in the immediate vicinity at the time!)   Are all our leaders totally opposed to assassination, including that of those whom (without due process of law) they decide is dangerous.

It doesn’t in any way excuse or minimise the guilt and enormity of the actions of the jihadist terrorists, for us and our leaders to ask ourselves whether we too are  without blemish

Four Months of Name Calling

          We’ve only just moved into the New Year and the Parliamentary General Election isn’t until early May. Already though, the first salvos have been fired by the major contestants in the political battle that will decide which of them will form the next government.   It is surely significant that neither Labour nor the Conservatives are promising us a bright future if we’ll only vote for them.  So far they’ve done no more than tell us what a disaster it will be if that ‘other lot’ achieve a majority in the House of Commons.

            Labour says that if the Conservatives are returned to power they will completely wreck the NHS.  Well – the Conservatives have been the dominant force in a coalition government for the past five years and, as I write, many hospitals are in crisis and, at least in the Clacton area where I live, it has become increasingly difficult to get an urgent (or even a non-urgent) appointment with the doctor of your choice. I certainly have less confidence in the NHS than I had five years ago. 

The Conservatives, on the other hand, say that they’re the only party that can be trusted with the economy.  If Labour were to be elected Britain’s finances would soon be in utter chaos.   They might even forget to try to reduce ‘the deficit’. As they’ll gleefully point out, Labour Leader Ed Miliband had forgotten all about it in his final stirring speech at the 2014 Labour Party Conference!

            As for the Liberal Democrats – the best they can hope for is a ‘hung parliament’ in which they’ll be asked to help form a coalition government.  I think they’d be prepared to coalesce with either the Conservatives or Labour.  They’re happy to attack both and claim that, in another coalition government, they would curb the excesses of either party.  The results of European election and recent parliamentary by-elections suggest to me that they won’t get that opportunity.  I voted Lib.Dem in the last General Election but I’ll never do so again.  I am sure that I’m not alone in that.

            Both of the main parties (and the Lib Dems will string along with any policy that will bring in a few votes) have, in fact, the reduction and eventual elimination of the deficit – the gap between government expenditure and government income – as one of their main objectives.   Both seem to imagine though that the only way to do this is to cut government expenditure.  During the past five years the Conservative led coalition has done this relentlessly.  Hence, our pot holed roads, failing educational, health and social services and growing queues at the Food Banks.  They have cut expenditure on our armed services too – but instead of going for the obviously wasteful and totally ineffective Trident Submarine fleet (if it ever does go into action it’ll be ‘goodbye civilisation and goodbye us!) they have depleted the army that even in peacetime can help us out when some private enterprise fails to provide the public service that it promised. The government still hasn’t learned that we’re distrusted and disliked throughout the Middle East and that we should keep our, now depleted, armed forces out of that area.

            The other, and I think by far the best way to narrow that deficit is by means of taxation – not the indirect taxes like VAT and customs duties on, for instance, petrol, alcohol and tobacco.  These disproportionately penalise the less-well-off.  Income tax is the one tax levied in accordance with our ability to pay.  A penny on each band of income tax would have a tremendous effect on that deficit and would drive no-one into poverty.   The state retirement pension is subject to income tax and I can’t understand why other state benefits such as Winter Fuel Allowance for the elderly, children’s allowance, free tv licences for the elderly, attendance allowance (that I get because of my now very limited mobility) should be tax free.  Those whose income is so low that they pay no income tax would be unaffected. The rest of us would find ourselves paying a little, not more than we can afford, for those benefits.

            Instead of this, politicians take a perverse pride in raising the threshold at which income tax becomes payable thus, so they claim, taking thousands of people out of the tax system altogether.  It only takes them out of the income tax system.  They still have to pay those indirect taxes (VAT and Customs duties) that place a much bigger burden upon the poor than on the wealthy.  MPs never seem to grasp the fact that raising the threshold at which income becomes subject to tax helps all income tax payers but doesn’t give even a crumb of help to those with really low incomes who do not pay any income tax anyway.

            At the end of the financial year those Westminster financial geniuses announce that they’ll have to make more savage cuts in public services because income tax revenues are less than had been expected.   Of course they are – because all income tax payers have had their payments reduced!

            Income tax could – and should – be used to reduce and eventually eliminate that deficit.  It would also reduce that other, to my mind much more worrying, gap between the incomes of the wealthiest and those of the poorest of our fellow-citizens.  We have the widest such gap in Europe and it actually widened during the decade of New Labour rule.  Statistics demonstrate that when that gap is narrowed, it is not just the poorest people, but the whole of society, that benefits.

           

           

Week 6 2012 9.2.2012

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

 ‘Do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you’

            St. Matthew records in his Gospel that Jesus declared that single commandment summed up the whole of the moral teaching of the Old Testament.  I hope that I am not being too heretical in saying that I wish he had gone on to state the corollary, ‘Do not do anything to other people that you would hate them to do to you’.  Perhaps Jesus did say that too but it seemed too obvious to need recording.   It clearly needed to be said though, because Christians have flagrantly ignored it through the centuries.

            It could be argued that do not is even more important than the positive do. The things we like vary widely.  George Bernard Shaw wrote in his Maxims for Revolutionaries that we should not do to others what we would like for ourselves. Their tastes may be different.  I think though, that even Shaw would agree that while we may like many different things, there are dislikes that are shared by us all.  I am quite sure that every single one of us would hate the idea of being tortured or burnt to death.  We all would hate to be brought to a violent death, to be enslaved, starved, rendered homeless, or separated from those we love.

            Yet, as Lord Byron pointed out; ‘Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded that all the apostles would have done as they did’ and Thomas Hardy wrote in his poem Christmas 1924 ‘After two thousand years of mass, we’ve got as far as poison gas’.

            These thoughts came to me when I heard Barak Obama, an international leader whom I had greatly admired, defending the use of unmanned drones to find and kill in Pakistan individuals whom the CIA has decided are members of Al Quaida or some other similar terrorist organisation.   The killing of these people, he said, was justified because they were a threat to the people of the USA.  They were carefully targeted and ‘very few’ innocent civilians were accidentally killed at the same time!

            It isn’t so very long ago that convicted, not just suspected, IRA murderers could find sanctuary from British justice in the USA.  American courts refused to return them to Britain for trial and/or punishment. They were a threat to the people of the United Kingdom. What, I wonder, would have been the American reaction had British MI5 agents in the USA sought them out and assassinated them – even if they managed to do so without harming a single innocent civilian?

            Assassination, without even the semblance of a trial, is abhorrent whether carried out by Al Quaida, by Mossad, the CIA or MI5.  In human society there can be no licence to kill

Do not do to other people what you would hate being done to yourself!

 ‘In the bleak midwinter’

  

The sudden change in the weather from milder-than-normal to sub-arctic has come as an unpleasant surprise.  Old people like me are warned to wrap up well and to keep at least one room in our homes warm at all times. I am very sorry for the increasing number of people, not necessarily all old, who have to decide whether to heat or eat.  It was a choice that the unseasonably warm autumn and early winter had led us all to imagine no-one would have to make this winter.

            My mind goes back to cold winters of the past, to the winter of 1962/1963 when the sea froze over.  I was a Public Health Inspector at the time and took these two photographs near Clacton Pier.  It was a bitter winter and a cold spring.  I remember the cemetery staff complaining that when they dug graves, the frost followed them down, freezing the soil beneath their feet as they worked!

We were dressed for the Libyan Winter! No 4 Gun of B Troop, 231^st Medium Battery RA at Wadi Halfaya (Hellfire Pass) on the Egyptian Libyan border, early January 1942.  I am the one on the right – with a woolly hat!

           

                During World War II I spent one winter in the Egyptian/Libyan frontier region, one in a PoW Camp in northern Italy and two in a small working camp (Arbeitskommando) in Germany.  In North Africa it could be bitterly cold when the north wind blew in from the sea.  Some South African troops experienced snow for the first time – a light dusting over the surface of the desert that disappeared as the sun rose.

            The winter in a prison camp in Italy is one that I would prefer to forget.  We were housed in unheated jerry-built huts, wearing totally inadequate Italian army uniforms (most of us had been wearing just shorts and shirt when captured) in which we tried to sleep, pulling our overcoats and two thin blankets over our heads to try to conserve what little warmth we had.  We were permanently hungry, louse infested and bored out of our minds.  Every day in winter we shivered on parade while Italian guards counted us – often miscounting and having to start again from the beginning.  As a result I can still count in Italian uno, due, tre, quarto, cinque and so on as quickly as I can count in English!  There were between 2,000 and 3,000 of us in the camp and deaths from cold-and-starvation related conditions were a daily occurrence.                                                                             

Zittau Rathaus (Town Hall).

One of my more back-aching jobs was to carry filled sandbags to the roof of the town hall as a fire precaution!

My memories of the two winters in Zittau, eastern Germany are far less negative.  We were wearing British army uniform and greatcoats (presumably supplied by the Red Cross) as our louse-infested Italian uniforms had been burnt on arrival.  I was in a small working ‘camp’ (Arbeitskommando) of just 30 British PoWs.  Our living quarters were palatial compared with those in Italy.  We had a separate living room and dormitory with double glazed (as well as barred!) windows.  There was a tortoise stove in the bedroom and a solid fuel cooker in the living room.   We were very often unloading coal trucks on the local railway sidings – so we were never short of fuel, even if it was only inferior lignite (‘brown coal’) briquettes! We were never cold.  Working every day (with just one ‘rest day’ in three weeks) we had no time to be bored and, from mid-winter 1944/1945 we could hear the gradually increasing thunder of artillery fire as the Soviet Army advanced inexorably across Poland and into Germany, and a constant stream of refugees from the battle front trudged wearily westward through the snow-covered streets of Zittau.   Our time of captivity was hastening to an end.

           

A New Danish Invasion!

            If any one had told me a year ago that I would get hooked on a tv serial in a foreign language about high level politics in a foreign country, with dialogue subtitled in English as in the silent movies, I would have thought that they were crazy.  Goodness knows I find news reports  of English party-political point scoring tedious enough! I can though at least understand what it is all about. Political manoeuvres in a foreign land and in a foreign language would surely be much worse.

            Yet I have just watched the tenth and final hour-long episode of Borgen, a Danish political drama on BBC 4 tv, with real regret that it had come to an end.  It was the third Danish tv drama with English-subtitles that BBC 4 had given us.  The first two were detective thrillers, both with the unpromising title of The Killing, featuring the unsmiling but strangely magnetic police detective Sarah Lundt.  I thought that the first, in which we were taken into the ‘real life’ of the family of the teenage murder victim, was the better of the two. I know that they were ‘only actors’ but it was difficult to believe that the grief, sorrow and anger of her parents and younger brothers were not real!  Surprisingly, the strong intertwined sub-plot, about the election of Copenhagen’s Mayor, was equally gripping.

            Borgen was quite different.  It followed the fortunes of Birgitte Christensen, fortyish, married, mother of two, and leader of one of Denmark’s political parties. Very likeable, she was clearly highly principled – sacking her Public Relations Consultant for unfairly discrediting the then Prime Minister, one of her political opponents. 

            As a result of political manoeuvring she found herself Prime Minister of a coalition government of a number of political parties.  At first we saw her clearly ‘on the side of the angels’.  She stopped the use of a Greenland air base by United States planes engaged in the ‘rendition’ of political prisoners, thereby  incurring the wrath of the White House and the cancellation  of a Presidential visit to Denmark.   She called the bluff of a Danish millionaire newspaper magnate who threatened to leave the country if she persisted with legislation promoting women's rights.   She secured a contract to supply wind turbines to a former Soviet Republic with an appalling human rights record, outwitting the country’s president who would have liked to have made the deal conditional on the extradition of a dissident refugee who had fled to Denmark.

            Then Birgitta’s halo began to slip. She allowed the use of a recorded remark made by a former friend many years earlier at a drunken party, to justify the bugging by the Danish Secret Service of the office of the political party which that former friend now led. Her friend’s reputation and political career were shattered.  To help cover up the Defence Minister’s corrupt acceptance of gifts and hospitality in connection with the purchase of fighter aircraft, Birgitta persuaded her husband to refuse a very satisfying and lucrative job that he had been offered.   She sacrificed the cabinet post of a trusted colleague and long-standing friend and adviser to keep the coalition government intact – and she agreed to a divorce and abandoned her marriage in the pursuit of her political ambition.  At the end of the final episode we saw her after she had made on tv the most eloquent speech of her career, extolling Danish nationalism and earning the applause even of her victims!   She was Denmark’s undisputed political leader – but she had lost everything that had made her the likeable, principled political leader that she once had been.   'What shall it profit a man (or woman) to gain the whole world and lose his/her soul?'

            I am looking forward to the next tv offering from the land of the Vikings!

             

           

           

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Week 18.2011 10.5.11

Tendring Topics…….on line


Justice…..or Vengeance?

It is said that at the beginning of the Battle of Waterloo, a British Artillery officer reported to the Duke of Wellington that he had spotted Napoleon within range of his cannons? Should he open fire? ‘Certainly not!’ Wellington is said to have replied. ‘We are soldiers, not assassins!’

Had those cannons opened fire and successfully ‘taken out’ Napoleon, the chances are that the death of their charismatic leader would have demoralised the French troops and the Battle of Waterloo would have been won by the British without the help of Blucher and his Prussian army, and with many, many fewer casualties. Wellington though, drew a sharp distinction between killing enemy troops in battle, and deliberately targeting and killing their leader.

Nowadays we are less squeamish. There is, I think, little doubt that the recent air attack on Colonel Gaddafi’s HQ in Tripoli was aimed at killing him, even though the building destroyed was probably a command point from which troops were being deployed and commanded. Not only did that attack fail to kill Gaddafi, but it did kill his son and two grandchildren. There has not yet been independent confirmation of this says a NATO spokesman. I think though that it is almost certainly true and that it will do much to strengthen the determination of Gaddafi’s supporters, and probably make at least a few of his opponents wonder about the justice of their cause. Whatever may be said about Gaddafi using members of his own family as human shields it was definitely an ‘own goal’ for NATO as well as a tragedy for the families of those killed.

That, and the fact that neither NATO nor the Libyan insurgents will even consider the possibility of peace talks while Gaddafi remains in control makes me feel that we may have already entered the next phase of our progress towards all-out war about which I warned a fortnight ago.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the USA made a deliberate – and this time successful – attempt to assassinate Osama Bin Laden when their special forces attacked the fortified compound in Pakistan in which he had been living. The Americans have certainly learnt a lot since their spectacular failure to free the Embassy hostages in Iran by force and the CIA’s comic opera attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro with explosive cigars! It seems that their special forces were told not to hesitate to kill Bin Laden rather than take him prisoner. This they did. He was unarmed but, so it was claimed, attempted resistance – so they shot him. The hundreds of people, men, women and children, whom Bin Laden had conspired to kill had also been unarmed, as The Sun was keen to point out. However, are we really happy that we, or our allies, should model our behaviour on his?

Has ‘Justice been done’? Is the world, ‘a safer place’ without Osama Bin Laden. I think that both are doubtful. If Bin Laden had been captured alive and put on trial, justice unmistakeably would have been done. What what was the advantage to the Americans of a dead Bin Laden, rather than a Bin Laden facing international justice? His death saved the vast expense and time taken by a trial in the international criminal court.  It prevented a long-drawn-out propaganda campaign claiming that Bin Laden was obeying the command of a higher power in his war on the USA.  Above all perhaps, it prevented him from being in a position to publicise worldwide the fact that the USA had launched him and supported him in his career of terrorism for so long as his murderous activities were directed only against the Russians?

Justice may not have been done but vengeance has certainly been satisfied – and it was clear that it was vengeance and not justice that those joyful, triumphal crowds in Washington celebrating the news of Bin Laden’s death, had wanted. Hitler caused worldwide death, destruction and human misery on a scale far beyond the wildest dreams of Bin Laden. Were there similar joyful and triumphal scenes in London, Washington and Moscow when his death was announced? I think not. Such spectacles, I had imagined, belonged to the distant past when defeated enemies’ heads, or their broken bodies, were displayed to a rejoicing mob.

Because it was vengeance rather than justice that was satisfied, the world is not a safer place than it was before Bin Laden’s death. There are those who will be determined to avenge him. The way in which he was killed will gain further recruits to their cause. Western governments are well aware of this and have stepped up their anti-terrorist activities, warning us all to be doubly vigilant. Quite possibly, despite all the precautions, in the USA or perhaps in the UK, there will be an act of terrorism that will give us something else to avenge! I am reminded of Gandhi’s chilling prophecy that if we all demanded ‘an eye for an eye’ we would end with a world full of blind people.

I hope that we will never entirely forget that, while we humans do our best to administer and dispense justice -‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord, ‘I will repay’

The Tale of a footpath

Immediately opposite my bungalow in Clacton’s Dudley Road, is a narrow footpath providing a short cut through to Agincourt Road. It was useful to me when I was a motorist. I could drive the car the long way round into Agincourt Road, leave it for servicing or whatever with the commercial garage there, and take the short walk home again via the footpath. Now that I rely on a mobility scooter for local journeys I save myself five minutes or so by taking a short cut through the passage when visiting a friend in Coppins Road. I notice women coming through it to reach shops in St Osyth Road or to take young children to school. It is in fairly regular use.

That is the positive side of the footpath. Sadly, there’s a negative side too.

The Footpath

It is a handy escape route for perpetrators of any kind of anti-social behaviour. They can run through the passage and, once on the other side, can scatter and disappear. It has been the venue of serious crime. I can recall – admittedly several years ago – two muggings taking place there after dark. I understand that it is used for drug dealing. A ‘customer’ loiters in the immediate vicinity. A car draws up. A quick exchange takes place. The car speeds away and the customer disappears down the passage.

It is regularly a site of minor and not-so-minor nuisance. Litter of all kinds is regularly discarded there (the Council does have it cleared from time to time) and it is often used as a toilet. There was an open space half-way along the footpath that was used as a dumping place for larger items of refuse, until one of the neighbouring residents recently took unilateral action and blocked it off! Users are likely to find the footpath litter-strewn and smelly.

For those living on each side of the passage the final straw came over Easter weekend when someone set fire to a mattress and started a fire there! This seriously damaged fences and put properties and lives at risk.

What is the solution? Closing the footpath is the only effective one that those directly affected can see, It is not an ancient ‘right of way’. When my family moved into Dudley Road in 1956 there was a wide driveway opposite my bungalow, giving access to what had been a Carter Patterson depot. It became a similar depot for British Road Service. Huge lorries regularly came and went (damaging the paved footpath immediately outside my bungalow!) My sons, who in the early sixties were in their pre-teens and great local ‘explorers’ assure me that there was, at that time, no way that it was possible to use that route to get to Agincourt Road, without trespassing onto BRS property. The developer who built on what had once been the depot presumably created the footpath and is its owner today.

I am sure that there are a number of local people, including myself, who would suffer minor inconvenience if the footpath were to be closed. I think though that this is an instance in which, unless some other satisfactory answer can be found, the wishes of those directly affected should prevail.

Election Fever

I can’t honestly say that I am sorry about the defeats of the Liberal Democrats in the local elections. I voted for their candidate in the General Election but I certainly didn’t vote for the policies to which they have agreed with their coalition partners. It may be that we are being unfair to them. Perhaps Nick Clegg and his government colleagues really have modified David Cameron’s policies. We’ll never know how awful those policies might have been without a Lib.Dem. contribution!

But it is hardly surprising that faithful members of the party should regard the acquiescence of their leadership to increases in tuition fees at universities when they had specifically pledged to oppose these increases as a blatant betrayal. Since they had lied over that issue why should anyone believe anything that they say or anything that they promise in the future?

I am moderately pleased about Labour’s very moderate successes. I am sick of hearing Lib.Dems. and Conservatives complaining about the mess that they inherited from the previous Labour Government. The financial mess that the country is in was, as the Governor of the Bank of England has made clear on a number of occasions, the result of the greed and incompetence of ‘the Financial Sector’ from which the Conservative Party gets a great deal of its funds. New Labour’s fault lay in not having taken firm action to curb their excesses. Lord Mendelson said that he ‘didn’t have any problem with billionaires’. Well, he should have. The trouble with New Labour was that, just as Ramsey Macdonald had been dazzled by duchesses and had betrayed the party that had brought him to power, so Tony Blair and his New Labour colleagues had been blinded by billionaires! I am hoping, though without a great deal of confidence, that under Ed Milliband the party will rediscover the idealism that brought it into existence.

I am sorry that the Conservatives have consolidated their control of Tendring Council because I felt that their ‘Tendring First’ predecessors had done a pretty good job. However, these days the main function of district councils, whatever their political complexion, is to take the blame for cuts forced upon them by central government policy. It really doesn’t matter much which lot are in office!

I am sorry too – though not all that sorry – about the overwhelming NO vote in the referendum about the ‘Alternative Vote’. I voted YES because I felt, and still feel, that it would have been an improvement on the ‘first past the post’ system. It was no more than second-best though and Nick Clegg was foolish to make the referendum a condition of his recruitment into the governing coalition. One day, though certainly not in my lifetime, Britain will have true proportional representation and our 1,000 year long evolution from autocracy to true ‘rule by the people’ will be complete .

I have no connection whatsoever with Scotland but I am pleased about the SNP’s resounding victory despite an electoral system that made it very difficult for any party to secure an overall majority! I have never understood why a Scottish national party should be ‘left of centre’, reformist and redistributive, whereas any similar party in England would almost certainly be ultra-conservative and neo-fascist.

My main worry about the possibility of Scotland gaining its independence is the risk that it could leave England with permanently right-wing governments!