Blog date 32

Tendring Topics……..on line

‘Now is the hour…..

                          …….for me to say goodbye’

 

            Those were the opening words of a popular song of the wartime years when there were so many goodbyes, many of them for ever.   I am afraid, dear Blog readers, that time has come for what was my weekly blog.  Google informs me that I have been writing and publishing it for seven and a half years and that I have written and published 390 blogs in that time.   For the first three or four years I wrote an average of about 2,000 words per blog.  More recently I have reduced that to about 1,000.  I reckon that I averaged about 1,200 words a week for seven and a half years.  That’s 7.5 x 1,200 x 52.  No, I’m not going to work it out but it certainly comes to quite a lot of words.

            Also thanks to Google, I learn that my blog has a world-wide readership.  There are twice as many regular readers in the USA as there are in the UK.  I have regular readers in Germany, France and Russia, and occasional readers in virtually every European country and in such countries as China, India, Sri Lanka, and Japan.  Thank you all, dear readers, for your interest and encouragement.

            I used always to enjoy writing my blog and was proud of it. Lately though I feel that I have become stale and repetitive.  I find myself forgetting how to spell simple, straight-forward words.  I often have to refer to Google for facts that should be – and once were! – engraved in my memory.  It is, I think, just old age. Now that I am 94, it seems better to depart from the internet stage before I publish something that is obviously total rubbish.

            The causes that I have supported throughout those seven and a half years remain the same.  I can only hope that others will keep them alive.

Nuclear Disarmament

I believe in unilateral nuclear disarmament.  Our own nuclear arms are concentrated in the Trident Submarine Fleet wrongly described as ‘our independent nuclear deterrent’.   It is anything but independent (can you imagine our government even threatening to use a nuclear weapon without the OK of the USA?).  It hasn’t deterred any one of the many acts of violence and aggression that have taken place since the end o0f World War II.  Did those nuclear submarines deter the Argentines from invading the Falklands?

It might persuade other governments relying on nuclear defence to refrain from using their weapons because of the certainty of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD!)  It would not deter the jihadists of the Islamic State from using such a weapon if they ever got hold of one. They are quite certain that they’ll be assured a ‘front seat’ in Heaven if they kill themselves while precipitating a satisfactory number of infidels and apostates (every-one who doesn’t share their noxious beliefs) to the ‘other place’!

 A country relying on a nuclear weapon ‘as a deterrent’ has a government as stupid and as irresponsible as a fifteen year old adolescent who carries a sheath-knife into the classroom with precisely the same motive!     

Working for World Peace

            I do not believe that the best way to secure world peace is to ring Russia around with members of Nato – inevitably seen by the Russians as a hostile alliance.  We complain of the ‘provocative action’ of the Russians in flying a couple of bombers round Britain keeping just outside British air space.  What are the Russians to think of NATO military manoeuvres in Poland, just beyond Russia’s frontiers?  We know the Russians have an enormous army and air-force.  They know that NATO has too!  For goodness sake, let’s stop trying to prove that ‘mine is bigger than yours!’   They’re both big enough to reduce our wonderful world to ruins if their top politicians are daft enough to let them. And I fear that some of them may be. For goodness sake let us talk peace and join together to think of how best to counter the acts of the jihadists – the real enemies of both Russia and ‘the West’.

Working for a more equal economy

            The top ‘at home’ priority of any responsible British government should be to narrow that yawning, and ever widening, gap between the incomes of the very poorest and very wealthiest of our citizens. Shamefully this gap actually widened during the decade of New Labour rule.  A way in which any government could narrow that gap would be the radical reform of the income tax system and making a reformed income tax the principal source of government revenue. Every adult, rich or poor, should be required to pay the same percentage of his or her gross income as their annual subscription for the very-considerable privilege of living and working in the UK.   Benefits to the very poorest of us would need to be raised to prevent this tax reducing anyone to homelessness or malnutrition.  I think that 20 percent of every adult’s gross income (before there’s a chance to salt it away overseas or in a charitable trust!) would probably be sufficient.  We would then all have an interest in Britain’s economic future and really would ‘all be in this together’

The European Union

Forty years ago I voted no to the European Common Market in that famous referendum. I had the rather romantic idea that we could seek closer economic and political union with the countries of the Commonwealth and what was left of the British Empire, to create a political and economic bloc capable of co-operating or competing with the USA and the  world’s emerging powers.

If I’m still around when we have the opportunity to vote either to stay in or depart from what is now the European Union, I shall vote to stay in, and I will hope that we achieve an even closer economic and political union with our European partners. I believe that the UK can make its voice heard and its opinions respected better as an active member of a federal Europe than as a non-voting protectorate of the USA.

We are part of Europe by geography, history and culture.  Nowadays it isn’t politically correct to say so but over the centuries the Christian faith has been the background in front of which the ancestors of all we Europeans have lived, worked and died.  As was repeated over and over again in the Scottish referendum campaign;  ‘We’re better together’!

I’d have a little more respect for Ukip if they really stood for an independent United Kingdom as they claim. They don’t. Their venom is reserved for our neighbours and friends in Europe.  You’d think that the EU was another hostile country determined to weaken and destroy the UK instead of a union of Nations in which we have exactly the same influence as anyone else. Remember the Ukip members of the European Parliament rising and turning their backs at the playing of the European Anthem.  I don’t believe that even the most fervent Republicans would be so ill-mannered as to turn their backs when others were standing and singing ‘God save the Queen’.

Ukippers seem to be quite happy with our membership of NATO (on which we Britons have never had the opportunity of expressing an opinion) and our one-sided ‘special relationship’ with the USA.    NATO and the ‘special relationship’ have cost us far more that the EU in both blood and money.  They involved us in two ‘colonial wars’, one illegal and the other unwinnable.  In every country where we have interfered the result has been disastrous. In Iraq Islamic State forces are slowly but surely taking over.  I’d be very surprised if there are not Iraqis today who look back on the rule of Saddam Hussein as a golden age! In Afghanistan the Taliban attacks ever more boldly, and the even-more-bloodthirsty jihadists of Islamic State have also put in an appearance.  Libya is now ungoverned and ungovernable – thanks to our helping in the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi!  Gaddafi’s rule was awful but the current anarchy (of which Islamic State is already taking advantage) is surely worse.

Climate Change

            I have left climate change till the last despite the fact that this is the threat that is capable of making the other causes that I have supported seem to be trivial irrelevances.  The reason it comes last is that effective countering of climate change demands the support and action of the government of every country in the world, and there are powerful forces trying to prevent this.

I took this photo of the Rhone Glacier on the pass between Italy and Switzerland in 1980.   I was told that last year 2014 there was no ice visible from that vantage point 

            
We don’t need a university degree to note that in recent years there have been more extreme weather conditions than even folk of my age can remember.  There have been extreme heat waves destroying rain-starved food crops.  There have been typhoons and hurricanes, devastating floods, prolonged droughts, occasional unseasonable spells of arctic weather. All of these have brought loss of life and destruction of property world-wide. The polar ice-caps are melting at an accelerating rate as are the mountain glaciers.

            The overwhelming conclusion of the world’s most eminent scientists has been that global warming is taking place and that this has caused those extreme weather conditions world-wide.  Furthermore, they are equally certain that most of that warming is due to human activity – to humankind’s relentless exploitation of the world’s natural resources, in particular to the profligate burning of fossil fuels (coal, gas and oil) for space and water heating in the home, in industry, for travel, and for any other activity needing an energy supply.  The remedy seems simple and straightforward enough; reduce and eventually eliminate the use of fossil fuels and replace them with sources of clean, renewable energy such as can be supplied by wind turbines, solar panels, the sea’s waves, the flow of the rivers, the ebb and flow of the tide. There may be others. The UK, with its enormous coastline, is well suited for the use of tidal energy.

            Voices demanding urgent international action to combat man-made climate change include virtually the whole of the scientific community and, surprisingly but very, very gratifyingly, the Pope.  The present Pope has won the admiration of many non-Roman Catholics  and will, I hope, have persuaded thousands over to the ‘Green cause’.  Lined against them are the many thousands of people who work in, or profit from, the fossil fuel industries.  These include some very wealthy and influential men.

            Our new government which once, just before an election, urged the electorate ‘if you want Green. Vote Blue’, seems to have joined the forces of Mammon.  They are abolishing grants toward the production of wind turbines, giving local councils the final word over whether they should permit wind turbines in their areas (of course there will always be lots of local Nimbys who will oppose them) and are encouraging fracking – exploiting yet another source of fossil fuel as well as despoiling our  countryside.  In an earlier blog I said that if either the Conservative or the Labour Party won the election outright the results wouldn’t be as good as supporters had hoped but, on the other hand, they wouldn’t be as bad as their opponents had feared, I was wrong.  On the climate change front at least, the Conservative government’s action is even worse than their opponents had feared. Shortly there’s to be an international conference on climate change  My guess is that there will be lots of good intentions expressed but precious little urgent action promised.

            Perhaps I’ll conclude with a couple of verses from a poem by Arthur Clough, a 19^th century poet.  It has cheered me on occasion:

Say not the struggle naught availeth,

The labour and the wounds are vain

The enemy faints not, nor faileth,

And as things have been, they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars.

Perhaps by yonder smoke concealed

Your comrades chase e’en now the flyers

And, but for you, possess the field.

Although the tired waves, vainly breaking.

Seem here no painful inch to gain;

Far back, through creek and inlet making,

Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And that, dear blog readers, is the end of my final blog.  I’m sorry I couldn’t contrive a happy ending – but it is, at least, a hopeful one.

.

           

  

    

           

             

             

26th April 2015

Tendring Topics………on line

Humankind’s Priorities

          The appalling earthquake in Nepal reminds us of the potential destructive power of nature.  In a few minutes thousands of human lives were lost and hundreds of buildings flattened.  The power of the quake shook houses and caused panic in Calcutta hundreds of miles away.  It also shook Everest the world’s highest mountain causing avalanches that cost yet more human lives.

            In Western Europe, including the United Kingdom, we may feel free of danger from earthquakes but the warnings of the world’s scientists about the effects of global warming are becoming more and more urgent.  Instead of recognising that climate change is largely the result of mankind’s misuse of the bounties of nature we blindly continue draining existent oilfields and finding new ones. Now ‘market forces’ demand that we. turn ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ into an industrial wilderness by fracking for oil and gas in subterranean beds of shale.   We have been warned that governments should take immediate action to seek out and develop sustainable and non-polluting sources of energy – the use of wind, sun, the waves and the tides – and phase out the use of fossil fuels.  The evidence of the effects of global warming are all around us -  unprecedented typhoons and hurricanes, floods, bush fires, droughts and periods of unseasonal extreme weather conditions.  The arctic ice is thawing every year, the glaciers are retreating and the world is facing climatic catastrophe.  The general election is now less than a fortnight away.   No-one would have guessed from the televised debates between the political party leaders that our country (and the world) is threatened by the inexorable and accelerating progress of climatic change.  Most are much too busy scoring political points against their political opponents, and earning the votes of the gullible, by making impossible promises that will turn out to be no more than aspirations.  David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg all accept the reality of global warming and its consequences – but all are prepared to ignore the warnings, at least until after the election, because ‘there are no votes to be obtained by banging on about climate change’.

            Nigel Farage is at least honest in his intentions.  Denying the warnings of the world’s scientists, he doesn’t believe in the reality of global warming or – if it is taking place – that it is anything to do with human activity.  He’d drag the last barrel of oil and cubic foot of gas out of existing wells and encourage the frackers. He’d withdraw financial support from wind and solar farms. 

            The only party leader who has tried to highlight the real and urgent problems arising from an over-exploited natural world is Natalie Bennett, Leader of the Green Party.   Below you’ll see a copy of an email that I have received from her that sets out her, and the Green Party’s priorities.  If you believe that The Greens are fighting for a cause in which you believe, don’t be persuaded that ‘a vote for the Greens is a vote wasted’    If everyone had said that about the fledgling Labour Party at the beginning of the 20^th century, Labour would not now be competing with the Conservatives for power.      ‘This above all, to thine own self be true’. ​

Hello Ernest,

This year the most important climate talks in history will take place in Paris.

Leaders from around the world will come together to decide the world’s course of action in addressing the most important issue of modern times.

​Yet, despite the looming threat of a climate crisis, during this election you could be forgiven for thinking that the threat had lifted.

The truth is, politicians from the other parties simply aren’t speaking about climate change. In fact I was the only party leader to raise the topic during the three and a half hours of Leaders debates.

You and I know both know that the science is unequivocal – fortunately we have the plan to tackle the crisis.

The Green Party is the only party calling for the urgent action required and at the heart of our pledge to protect the environment is our conviction that we must also reconfigure our world to work better for people.

We will cut public transport fares – because everyone should be able to afford to get to where they want to go – and because the air pollution caused by cars is a crisis that must be tackled.

We will invest in home insulation – because no one should fear family members getting ill or even dying from the cold – and because we want to cut carbon emissions.

We will generate 80% of our energy from renewable sources by 2030 – because we know we must leave four-fifths of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground.

We are using three times as many resources as our planet can sustain - we must change course, and we can.

I, like you, want to leave a better future for our children. I want the next generation to look back on what we did at this time and think  ‘my parents’ generation did something to protect our world’. I want them to be proud of us.

To keep climate change on the agenda and to continue our fight for social justice we must elect more Green MPs.

We can do this if we have a strong Green voice in parliament - but we need your help now more than ever with a Green vote on May 7th.

Thank you,

Natalie Bennett
Leader, Green Party of England and Wales

           

Well, I’m a postal voter and have already posted off my vote for Chris Howell, Clacton’s Green Party Candidate.  I hope that at least some regular readers of this blog will also vote Green!

                                          Ernest Hall

            

18th April, 2015

Tendring Topics……on line

Buying Votes…….with other people’s money!

          That’s how I described the ‘Right to Buy’ legislation introduced by then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the ‘avaricious 1980s’.  ‘Compel to sell’ legislation might have been a more appropriate name for it.

            For almost a century prior to the advent of Thatcherism, local authorities throughout the UK had built council houses to let, in order to combat homelessness and overcrowding in their areas and to rehouse families from individual unfit houses and properties in ‘clearance areas’ that were to be demolished.  They allocated tenancies according to housing need, without paying particular attention to whether housing applicants were poor or comfortably off.  I think that, on the whole, they were successful.  Slowly but surely, slums were demolished, overcrowding eradicated and substandard houses improved or demolished and replaced. I know that in the years before local government reorganisation in 1974, while I was Clacton-on-Sea’s Housing Manager, no-one was forced to ‘sleep rough’, under the Pier of instance, for want of a roof over their head; nor did we have to resort to providing bed-and-breakfast accommodation for homeless families.   The Council had a modest annual house building programme and this, together with casual vacancies resulting from a death or a tenant moving away, prevented even temporary homelessness.   

            All that was changed by ‘right to buy’.  Local authorities were compelled to sell homes to sitting tenants at bargain basement prices.   Many of the better off (and least troublesome) tenants took advantage of the legislation and bought their council provided homes.   Some of them took advantage and sold them on directly they were able to do so.  Some of those houses were bought by speculators and again let – but this time at a much higher ‘market dictated’ rent.  Councils were told not to let homes to people who could afford to buy or rent privately.  Tenants could not expect a home for life – tenancies were for a short fixed period, and were not renewed if the circumstances of the tenant had changed.  The government made clear that ‘social housing’ should be a temporary provision for the poor or, as Mrs Thatcher preferred to put it breathily, ‘for the genuinely needy’

Inevitably Council Estates deteriorated. Tenants had no incentive to tend their gardens, redecorate their rooms or take any pride in their homes.   Former tenants who had bought their homes sold them directly they were able to do so, taking advantage of accelerating house price inflation, and moved on to a better area.   Councils no longer had any incentive to build homes that they knew would have to be sold on ‘on the cheap’ after a few years.  Nationwide demand for homes vastly outstripped supply. Inevitably both rents and house prices rocketed and the housing situation that we have today developed.

            Those extra votes that ‘right to buy’ undoubtedly won were very dearly bought indeed.   But extra votes, from former tenants who had bought their homes ‘on the cheap’ at their Council’s expense, they certainly did buy.

            Now, with the general election only weeks away, the opinion polls indicating that the Conservatives and Labour are neck-to-neck, the Lib.Dems. nowhere in the polls, and Ukip and the Greens threatening both the main parties, the Conservatives are hoping that they can pull off the same trick a second time.

            Local authorities were not the only providers of ‘social housing’.  Housing Associations also housed thousands of folk who couldn’t aspire to home purchase (I say ‘home purchase’ rather than ‘home ownership’ because, as many home purchasers have discovered, no-one becomes a home owner until he or she has paid off the final instalment of the mortgage loan)   Prior to ‘right to buy’, Housing Associations provided a much smaller proportion of social housing than local authorities.  However during its decade of power New Labour did nothing to repeal the pernicious ‘right to buy’ legislation and Ed Miliband actually apologised for the fact that his party had opposed it!  Consequently Housing Associations have provided a steadily increasing proportion of the UKs social housing.

            Evidently hoping that his proposal will buy as many votes as Margaret Thatcher’s did back in the ‘80s David Cameron has  promised that, if the Conservatives form the next government, tenants of Housing Associations will enjoy the same ‘right to buy’ as council tenants.  The government’s costs will be recovered by compelling local authorities to sell off their most expensive housing when it becomes vacant and thereby, so they believe,  raising £4.5 billion a year.  (This is, of course, the same government that claims to believe in loosening the power of the state and putting local matters in the hands of local people!)

            Will it work for a second time?  Will this ploy be as successful in buying votes as Margaret Thatcher’s was in the 1980s?   Possibly not; prior to the 1980s central government did not dictate housing allocation policy to local authorities.  Many –perhaps most – authorities allocated tenancies on the basis of need for accommodation.  The applicants’ financial circumstances were a minor consideration. Certainly neither of the authorities for which I worked as Housing Manager in the 1950s, ‘60s and early ‘70s barred any applicant on the grounds that they could have found private rented accommodation or could have bought their own house.

            Consequently when Margaret Thatcher offered all council house tenants the ‘right to buy’ their home with a substantial discount on the actual value, there were hundreds of council tenants eager and able to become home buyers and take on the responsibilities, as well as  the privileges of ownership.   That was a long time ago.  Since then social housing has been allocated only to unemployed or low waged people with few resources and often large families.  A great many of them wouldn’t be able, or wouldn’t wish, to take on the responsibilities of home ownership no matter how large a discount they were offered.    I doubt if many will respond positively.

            Anyway if they’re wise they’ll remember that it will only happen if the Conservatives win an overall majority in the general election.  If I were a Housing Association tenant I wouldn’t be getting too excited about the prospect of home ownership just yet.  I wonder if David Cameron has ever thought of extending the ‘right to buy’ to tenants of privately owned properties?  Probably not; private landlords are almost certainly Conservative Party supporters.

Is ‘Ironic Fate’ waiting in the wings?

          I once had a colleague with a firm faith in what he called ‘Ironic Fate’ (or I.F. for short)     I.F. was continually on the look-out for humans who took the future for granted, and handed out an appropriate punishment.  He believed that the fate of the Titanic was sealed when the Captain declared that ‘God himself couldn’t sink this ship’.   Hitler did the same thing by promising Germans ‘a thousand year Reich’. My colleague took this conviction to extremes.  He would never, for instance, put up the new office calendar on 31^st December, because that would have been taking for granted that we’d survive into the New Year.

I don’t personally believe in an ironic fate waiting to catch us out but I have thought a lot about I.F. or Nemesis as the election campaign gathers pace.   There are all these politicians making firm commitments for the future.  One promises umpteen  million pounds for the NHS, or for Education, or for affordable homes.  Another says that there’s no way, except by taxation, borrowing or even more savage cuts than we have already experienced, that  that promise can be realized.  One politician is going to give us four brand-new state-of-the-art nuclear submarines (just what you've always wanted?), another a new airport for London, yet another a north/south rail link.

Is it just possible that, perhaps while the election results are still being evaluated, nature will demonstrate its supremacy over all things human and mortal with another tsunami, this one closer to home, a burning all-consuming drought like those recently experienced in Australia, a gale of the strength of the typhoon that recently devastated an island nation in the Pacific, or extreme weather such as they have experienced recently in the USA and elsewhere.

All the party leaders (except perhaps Nigel Farage) accept that climatic change is taking place and that human activity is its principal cause.   They all, again with the exception of Nigel Farage, accept that urgent action is needed – but, as far as they are concerned, not just yet.  They’ll oversee the extraction of the last barrel of oil from bowels of the earth and ruin the countryside by ‘Fracking’ for shale gas, before they take serious steps to find and develop renewable and clean sources of energy, and put combating climate change as the very first item on their manifestos.

I wonder if, when climatic catastrophe strikes, anyone of them will think. ‘That’s exactly what that Green woman, the one with an Aussie accent, what was her name, warned us about during the  election campaign – but at that time we all had much more important things on our minds.

.      

             

           

                   

4th January 2015

An Unofficial 'Cease-fire'

            The ‘Christmas Day Truce’ between the opposing armies in 1914 has, quite properly, been remembered and celebrated on this centenary year.  Nothing like it, so it is said, was even attempted in World War II.  The reason is, I think, because nowhere were the soldiers of the opposing armies quite so close to each other as they sometimes were in World War I.  However, something rather like that ceasefire was observed between the British prisoners of war in the little German town of Zittau and the local Germans, during the final eighteen months of the Second World War.  Prisoners of war are instructed to divulge only their army number, rank and name to their captors, to maintain their enmity, and to seize any opportunity of escaping.  Number, rank and name was all that was ever required of me. They could always discover our home town by noting the address on our out-going mail!

            It had been easy enough to maintain our enmity to the Italians in the large concentration camp in northern Italy in which I spent my first eighteen months of captivity.  We were half-starved, louse infested and bored out of our minds – frozen in the winter and roasted in the summer.   Transported to Germany on the collapse of Mussolini’s government, I found myself in a small Arbeitskommando (working camp) within the town of Zittau. There were only 30 of us. We were employed, in parties of two to six, on loading and unloading railway wagons, and any other work in the area that required brawn rather than brain.  While working we mixed and (when we had learned some basic German) chatted freely with the German civilians and the Russian and Ukrainian conscripted ‘slave labourers’ who were our companions.  It isn’t easy to maintain enmity with people you meet daily and whom you realize under other circumstances could have been good friends.  Our guards were neither the brutal bullies nor mindless morons of film and fiction. They were remarkably like ourselves, had served on the Eastern Front and had either been wounded or frost bitten to an extent that made them unfit for front line duty.  Their only ambition was to ‘keep their heads down’ and survive the war.  That, as it happened, was our ambition too.  It would have been easy enough to get away.  Usually only an elderly civilian wearing an official armband was ‘supervising us’.  I remember one occasion on which I cut my hand quite badly. I said to our civilian ‘boss’ that I needed to go back to our ‘lager’ (the building in which we lived) to have it washed and bandaged.  He said he couldn’t leave the truck that was being unloaded, so I said that he needn’t bother. I’d find my own way back.  And so I did, walking boldly through the streets of Zittau with no-one raising an eyebrow.  The guard, when I hammered on the door, was just a little surprised to see me unattended but he washed and bandaged my injured hand – and I took the rest of the day ‘off’.

            None of us ever attempted to escape.  Take a look at a map of central Europe and you’ll see how far Zittau is from any then-neutral country.  The Eastern front was quite near as the war came to an end but none of us was sufficiently fool-hardy as to try to get through both the German and the Soviet front lines!  Furthermore we had neither the time, nor the opportunity to plan an escape.  We were usually exhausted when we returned from our day’s work and our guards lived almost ‘on top of us’. I think though that the main reason no-one attempted an escape was the knowledge that, whether or not successful, the lives of those who remained would have been changed for ever.  Our easygoing guards would have been sent to the Eastern Front and replaced by fanatical Nazis. Our every movement would have been observed by an armed guard.  There would have been no more bringing back from work coal for our stoves or potatoes to add to our rations; no more cosy chats with the guards about the stupidity of war!

            We maintained a friendly relationship with the troops stationed in the local barracks.  I once had a very painful rash round my waist.  I thought it was a sweat rash but it was obviously more than that.  A guard and I walked across the town to the ‘Kaserne’ (the barracks). The army medical officer was most interested in my condition and said I was suffering from ‘Girderose’ (I may have spelled it wrongly) which I  learned was shingles. He gave me some vitamin B Tablets and eventually my rash, and the pain departed.  He certainly treated me as effectively as any British Army MO would have. I did no work until the condition had been cleared. 

 

          During the winter of 1944/’45 in the middle of the night, one of our number was accidentally killed by a runaway truck on a railway siding.  I was with him at the time – only a foot or so away, and it was a traumatic experience.  No doubt there was an enquiry about it but I never heard the outcome.  I do know that he was given a full military funeral.  Looking as smart as we could manage, we slow-marched to the cemetery.  A Minister, presumably Lutheran, said a few words as the coffin was lowered into the grave.   We all walked round the grave throwing sprigs of yew that we had been given, onto the coffin.  A firing squad from the local barracks, fired a volley over his grave.  I don’t suppose that that funeral would have given much comfort to his parents and girl-friend but I think that we all found it very moving.  We also had a friendly football match with  German soldiers from the local barracks.  Folded jackets (khaki and field grey) served as goalposts and our biggest worry was of the ball getting kicked into the nearby fast flowing river Moldau.  They won (3 – 1) I think; but then they had a couple of hundred from whom to select their team.  We had just 30, and I wasn’t the only one who was useless at football!

            The most remarkable example of wartime Anglo/German co-operation was with the local branch of the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) whom we all thought of as being fanatical Nazis.  Their office was next door to our ‘lager’.  We had a gramophone and some records, mostly jazz, presumably from the Red Cross.   Hitler banned jazz as being decadent and the young men (mostly teenagers) listened to the sounds from our lager with envy.  Eventually they summoned up the courage to ask our guards and our ‘confidence man’ (official spokesman) if we’d agree to a swap – some of our jazz records for some of their officially approved folk songs and dance music.  To make sure that nothing about this arrangement became known to higher authority, only those who ‘needed to know’ were told of the swap.  I, for instance, knew that there had been some welcome additions to our record library – but it was years later that I learned how it had come about.  I think that we did the better out of the exchange.  I never missed the jazz records but several of the German ones were memorable and enjoyable.  I can remember the tune and much of the words of one of them – it was, I think, ‘top of the pops’ in Germany sometime in the 1930s : Regen Tropfen, die am dein Fenster klopfen, das merke dir, die sind ein Grüss von mir. (raindrops, falling on your window, seem to you to be a greeting from me.)   

            I now have good friends in Zittau and have been to see them on several occasions in recent years. In 2014 they all came to Clacton for my 93^rd birthday celebration.  It was the culmination of a friendship that began before any of them were born!

Impartial BBC?

          I have been – and to some extent still am – a strong supporter of the BBC.  I would hate it to have to depend on the whim of advertisers for its finance.  For over twenty years I wrote a weekly Tendring Topics column for a local newspaper.  Nobody told me what I could and couldn’t write – but I did know that the paper was dependent for its existence on advertisements for new or used cars and homes.  My survival instincts therefore ensured that I thought twice, and then again, before writing too strong a criticism of either estate agents or car salesmen!

            The BBC is pledged to impartiality on controversial topics and in some fields  leans over backwards to ensure that their viewers and listeners are presented with both sides of any argument.  For instance, the world’s leading scientists are all but unanimous on the urgent need to counter climate change (global warming) by phasing out fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) and seeking out and developing sustainable sources of energy.  However, whenever the BBC has an experienced meteorologist on a broadcast programme explaining the importance  and urgency of combating climate change you can bet your life that they’ll find some has-been politician with no knowledge of the subject, or  an ‘expert’ with interests in the oil, gas or coal industries, to give an opposing view.

            How very different is the BBC’s attitude with regard to foreign affairs.   With regard to the situation in the Ukraine for instance, you’d never guess that the overwhelming number of inhabitants of Crimea wanted to be part of Russia.  But I remember before Russia’s ‘annexation’ the difficulty that BBC’s and other reporters had in finding a single Crimean who wished to remain within Ukraine.  The impression is given that the pro-Russian rebels (urged on by Vladimir Putin) began the civil war.  But I remember seeing news shots of the men women and children of eastern Ukraine passively resisting the tanks of the Kiev government, before the fighting started.

            BBC bulletins have ignored the fact that the shelling by the Kiev government forces of the area of the Malayan airliner’s crash delayed the UN inspectors from carrying out their investigation.  Nor have we heard how the relentless shelling of residential areas occupied by the rebels, has destroyed hundreds of homes, killed a great many innocent civilians and caused thousands of eastern Ukrainians to become refugees in Russia.  No wonder elections held by the Kiev government produce comfortable majorities for the supporters of that government – tens of thousands who would have opposed them have been killed or driven from their homes.

            But there – the BBC depends on the government for its licence fee, and the government unquestioningly supports the Kiev Government.  He who pays the piper calls the tune.

17th December 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘Lord, make me chaste and celibate…….

          but not just yet!’

            This was said to have been a prayer of St Augustine of Hippo (no, not the St. Augustine who brought the Christian faith to the heathen English) and proves that saints are 'only human'!.

            I think of St Augustine’s prayer whenever I read, or hear on tv or radio, about yet another international conference on climate change resulting from global warming.  There’s always a remarkable unanimity about these conferences.  The leaders of almost every nation accept the reality of global warming resulting in extreme weather conditions throughout the world.  The northern polar ice-cap is shrinking as are glaciers world-wide. There have been killer typhoons in the South Pacific Ocean and unprecedented monsoon floods on the Indian sub-continent. North America has had searing heat and drought as well as floods and unseasonal arctic spells that have stretched most of the way from Canada to the Mexican border. 

The Rhone Glacier, photographed by me in 1979.  There is now no ice to be seen.

Africa has had prolonged droughts and Australia has had both floods and bush fires, laying waste to hundreds of square miles of land. 

Mainland Europe has had floods, mud-slides and avalanches. During the winter of 2013/2014 the UK’s weather was unseasonably mild but heavy storms battered and broke the sea defences on Britain East Coast while elsewhere – particularly on the Somerset Levels and the Thames Valley – hundreds of acres of land, together with farms and homes, were flooded for weeks as a result of continuous torrential rain.  Last month, our government produced plans for flood prevention to be carried out in the next two or three years.  If only nature proceeded at an equally leisurely pace!

            The latest international conference on climate change was in Lima.  The world’s leaders heard scientific experts explain that a major cause of climate change is the steady increase in ‘greenhouse gases’ produced by fossil fuels; coal and coal products and fuel oils used in industry, in road transport and for warming our homes.  We must, say the world’s scientists, urgently reduce the use of fossil fuels – leaving some reserves untouched – if we want to save our planet for our grandchildren and their grandchildren

            The world’s political leaders agree.  Reducing the use of fossils fuels must be a priority – but not just yet.  The Chinese want to wait until their industrialisation has caught up with that of the USA.  The UKs leaders have got a general election coming up.  They certainly don’t want to take any precipitate action that might cost them votes – or the support of those giving generous donations to the ruling party.  Beside in shale oil, another fossil fuel obtained by ‘fracking’, the Americans are sending us cheaper fuel – and encouraging us to wreck our own countryside by producing our own.  Producing a cheaper fuel (never mind that it produces greenhouse gases) is certainly a vote winner.  There are very few votes to be gained in the pursuit of clean and sustainable energy.

            The result of the International Conference in Lima?  Well, no worth-while action will take place this year.  Next year, perhaps something positive will be agreed – but I’m not holding my breath.

        We’ll never know whether the prayer of St Augustine to be made chaste and celibate – but not just yet, was answered.  Perhaps it was.  It is the nature of the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ to forgive sins of the flesh, particularly those who have acknowledged and confessed their fault.   ‘Perverse and foolish oft I strayed, But still in love he sought me. And on his shoulder gently laid, And home rejoicing brought me’   I think God may be a little less forgiving towards those who, from greed, national pride or fear of election defeat, ignore the warnings of the wise, and are prepared to sacrifice future generations to their own self-centred interests.

‘It’s not what is done……..it’s who it is does it’

       The American Senate’s report on the conduct of the CIA in the aftermath of ‘9/11’ has brought the whole policy of the USA at that time into the limelight.  As well as the torture of suspects under interrogation, there was their ‘rendition’ to countries, Libya for instance, where torture could take place without as much as raised eyebrow, and there was the establishment at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, of a concentration camp of which Himmler would have been proud!

        I find myself interested less in what the CIA and their political masters did, but what they didn’t even attempt to do.  The outrages of ‘9/11’ were planned and carried out by El Qaeda, the dominant jihadist terrorist organisation of the day. At the head of El Qaeda was Osama bin Laden whom the CIA tracked down and killed, without so it seems, making any attempt to capture him.  It certainly stopped him from revealing, in the dock, the support El Quaeda had from the CIA in their campaign of terror against soldiers and civilians of the Soviet Union.

          Osama Bin Laden was a Saudi Arabian, so were the overwhelming number of the terrorists who had successfully planned and carried out the destruction of New York’s ‘Twin Towers’ on ‘9/11’.   There was not an Iraqi or an Iranian or a Syrian among them.  Saudi Arabia practises and preaches the noxious perversion of Islam that has been taken up by El Quaeda and their successors IS or Islamic State.  Compared with Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and President Assad’s Syria were havens of freedom and tolerance.  Furthermore, it is known that prominent Saudi Arabians helped finance Islamic State in its early bloodthirsty progress in Syria and Iraq – and possibly continue to do so today.

       

            The USA, and the UK the USA’s ‘special relation’, invaded Iraq on the pretext that the Iraqi government had been involved in ‘9/11’ and that it possessed ‘weapons of mass destruction’, neither of which claims had even a scintilla of truth.  Hundreds of British and American service-men died as a result, together with thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.  Nor did we bring peace and prosperity to Iraq.  Since our departure Iraq has never been at peace and is currently under attack by Islamic State.  We have now sent in hundreds of British troops ‘to train Iraqi forces’.  How long will it be before those troops have to defend themselves against IS attack and we find ourselves dragged unwillingly into a third ‘Gulf War?’

       Again, in support of the USA, we went to war in Afghanistan because their Taliban government was protecting the bases of El Qaeda.  Within months El Qaeda had moved those bases to Somalia and Yemen – but the Taliban fought on.  We have, after ten years and goodness knows how many deaths on both sides of the conflict, withdrawn all our combat troops.  They may not have been defeated but I am quite sure they wouldn’t claim to have gained a great victory.  My guess is that in six months time a fundamentalist Muslim government (it may not be called Taliban) will be ruling Afghanistan and all those mini-victories, for education, for women’s liberation and so on, will have been lost.

              Meanwhile Saudi-Arabia, the inspiration and (I believe) clandestine supporter of Islamic terrorists, remains unchallenged as one of our ‘trusted allies’.   We buy their oil and we sell them our armaments and don’t ask too many questions.  As I have said before, nowadays it isn’t ‘what is done’ but ‘who did it’ that is of greatest concern to our Government and that of our American allies.  What a pity that not even the combined efforts of the CIA and MI6 can manage to establish that Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein and President Assad, conspired together to carry out ‘9/11’!

Merry Christmas?

     This will be my last blog before Christmas, probably the last blog in 2014.  It’s the season of good will and I’d very much like to wish all humankind a Happy Christmas and  New Year.

       Sadly the news seems to get worse from day to day. World-wide no early effective action will be taken place to counter climate change.  On the other side of the world, in Sydney Australia, a jihadist fanatic has held the customers and staff of a busy café hostage – a situation that resulted in the death of the fanatic, of the café’s  manager and of one of the customers, a barrister in her thirties with two children.  Worst of all was the massacre by the Pakistan Taliban of 132 children, and nine members of the staff, at a school in Peshawar in north-western Pakistan – a crime even more heinous than that of  King Herod’s slaughter of the 'Holy Innocents’ in Bethlehem two thousand years ago!

     For ‘good news’ we are told about the new vessel –  half a kilometre long! – that is being built in South Korea to exploit new fields of (greenhouse gas producing) oil that lie beneath the ocean floor off the north of Australia. The production of similar enormous vessels to extract and process submarine oil fields is planned for the future!

     It’s the ‘season of good will’ and I have to  confess that I feel very little good will towards politicians who are prepared to sacrifice future generations in their pursuit of immediate economic or political advantage.  I feel even less good will towards those who torture or murder their fellow men and women in the blasphemous belief that their crimes will earn them the favour of God, and none at all towards those, whoever they may be and whatever their cause, pretext or excuse, who harm or kill innocent children.

     That said, I do wish a very Happy Christmas and a New Year of Peace and Hope to all readers of this blog and to all those who, with love for humanity in their hearts, are striving to make this sad world a happier place, and to work towards an answer to our prayer, Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven’.

                                                                                            t   

13th December 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

The World’s most polluted spot!

          A few weeks ago I quoted, at some length, my elder son’s concerns about air pollution, particularly in London.  Now air pollution – from motor vehicles – has become a matter of national concern. Even towns in our largely agricultural East Anglian Region are seriously affected.  It has, so it is reported, become almost as serious a killer as tobacco smoking.   Last year in the UK air pollution was responsible for nearly 20,000 preventable deaths.  In some towns pedestrians are being advised to walk along the footpaths as far as possible away from the carriageway, not because of the danger of being struck by a vehicle mounting the pavement – but because a distance of even a few feet further away from the vehicle exhausts can reduce the risk of lung damage.

            Where, do you think, is the most polluted air in the whole world?  My guess would have been somewhere in Beijing – or possibly in Rio de Janeiro or Chicago.   I’d have been wrong.  It is, in fact, London’s Oxford Street – the home of Harrods and of other quality retailers where the seriously rich do their shopping.  In Oxford Street the high-rise (by British standards) buildings create an artificial canyon to retain the polluted air while continual starting and stopping of the diesel engines of buses and taxis inexorably add to the pollution.  

            The first reaction of Mayor Boris Johnson was to question the findings of the scientists who had revealed that Oxford Street’s air was the most polluted on earth.  He now accepts the report’s validity – but hasn’t so far done anything about it.   Sadly, it’s one of those issues like climate change.  Hardly anyone now doubts that climate change is taking place, and scientific evidence overwhelmingly indicates that it is largely a result of human activity - but to take effective action would cost money, and possibly lose votes!  So would taking effective action against vehicular air pollution.

            In our free market society where everything and almost everybody has a price, short-term profit will always triumph over long-term benefit.   So polluting motor vehicles will not be banned from city centres in the near (or middle-distant) future, and we’ll carry on – and speed up - fracking!

The Consequences

          On Monday 8^th December the local Daily Gazette had the front-page headline We’ve got to build 21,000 homes by 2032.  The headline didn’t relate to the Gazette’s complete circulation area but simply to the borough of Colchester.  The adjacent authority of Tendring District – comprising the coastal towns of Clacton-on-Sea (where I live) Brightlingsea, Walton-on-the-Naze, Frinton-on-Sea, Dovercourt and Harwich and the rural hinterland of the Tendring Peninsula, has a similarly ambitious building programme with one substantial housing estate to be built immediately adjacent to the boundary with Colchester.

            Wonderful news for those of the homeless who are willing and able to buy their own homes.  I suspect though that very few of those dwellings will be ‘social housing’ – owned by the local authority or a Housing Association and available for letting at a reasonable rent.   Good news too for workers in the building industry who will have the promise of work for nearly two decades – and I have little doubt that the major supermarket chains will increase their stake in the area, providing new branch retail outlets to meet almost every need of the new home buyers and their families.

            But it will only be almost every need.  We have so far heard nothing of the provision of other essential services that do not yield an early profit for the provider, such as education and the Health Service.   21,000 new homes in Colchester and a similar number in the Tending district suggest that there may be as many as 30,000 extra children all needing education in the next decade and a half.  Are there any plans to build new schools for them?

            As for the health services in the Clacton/Colchester area; the currently available services are already proving woefully inadequate for the existing population.  They are quite incapable of dealing with perhaps an influx of perhaps 60,000 new residents.  Colchester General Hospital is under ‘special measures’.  Appointments for diagnostic examination of serious medical conditions are postponed and then delayed indefinitely because of a failure of the medical staff to be present when promised and of the administrative staff to find a locum.  Less medically serious but affecting a great many patients and their friends and relatives, is the inadequacy of the car parking facilities at the Colchester General, whether for keeping appointments at out-patient clinics or for visiting in-patients.  This has been made worse by the transfer of services from the Essex County Hospital which is to be demolished and the site used for bungalow building (more potential patients!) in the future.

            In the ‘front line’ of our health services are the many medical practices throughout the district.  It seems that the situation is much more serious in Clacton, Frinton and Walton than it is in Colchester.   I have been with the same medical practice in Clacton since my family and I moved here in 1956.  There were then two doctors (both Scots and astonishingly similar to the Dr Finlay and Dr Cameron of tv’s Dr. Finlay’s Casebook!).  Since those days the practice has doubled the size of its premises and had many changes of doctors. I have been very pleased and happy with the service that my family and I have received from them.  They have seen my two sons through their childhood illnesses.  They cared for my wife who had recurring ill-health.  I particularly appreciated the doctor who called every day as my wife’s life was ending, and (against the advice of the district nurse) supported my determination to keep her at home and to care for her to the end.   They have patiently and professionally looked after me through the health problems of old age.  

However I have seen the number of doctors grow from two to, at one time, six and then decline to the three that it is today.  I am quite sure that if I had a serious medical condition one of those three doctors would see me without delay but it is becoming increasingly difficult to get an appointment with the doctor of my choice. They badly need at least one more – preferably two more – doctors.  They are obviously quite incapable of dealing with an added influx of patients. It’ll be wonderful for there to be a home for everyone who needs one – but I hope that some thought has been given to the inevitable consequences.

The Ukraine

            The conflict in eastern Ukraine isn’t the bloodiest or the most devastating war in today’s sad world (though it has the potential of developing into World War III, if the world’s political leaders are even stupider than I think they are), but it is of particular interest and concern to me.  That’s because it is possible that  some of those on both  sides of the conflict, could be the grandchildren of the friendly ‘Ostarbeiters’ (men and women from Russia and the Ukraine) who, as 'forced labourers' were often my fellow workers when I was a prisoner of war at a small working camp in Germany from 1943 till 1945.  We shared our labours and we shared our work-breaks. Often, in broken non-grammatical German, we shared parts of our life-stories too.  We were all good friends and good comrades against our Nazi bosses.

            An uneasy cease-fire currently exists over eastern Ukraine but my interest was revived when I heard a tv commentator remark that the ill-fated Malaysian air liner, shot down with the death of all its crew and passengers, had been a victim of the ‘cross-fire’ between the warring factions. ‘Crossfire’?   It was surely flying several thousand feet above that!  The black boxes, examined by international experts revealed that  the plane had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile but that there was no way of telling which side had fired that missile.  One thing is quite certain.  Neither side deliberately shot down a Malaysian passenger air-liner.  Whoever did so had wrongly imagined they were targeting a high level enemy bomber.

            Most people in ‘the west’ probably believe that the eastern rebels (aided and encouraged by Russia) were responsible.  One snag about that idea is that the rebels possessed no ground-to-air missiles or the means of projecting them to their targets.   There were unconfirmed reports from the Kiev government that a Russian missile launcher had been seen passing surreptitiously into Ukraine. However, the American CIA found no evidence that Russia had been involved in the plane’s destruction. Had there been any such evidence I have little doubt that the CIA, with very few scruples and spies in every country, would have found it!

 The rebels are also said to have delayed the United Nations inspectors in their examination of the wreckage, mostly in rebel-held territory.  The fact is that the rebels didn’t delay the UN inspectors – it was the Kiev government’s continued shelling of the search area that did that.  The rebels found and handed the plane’s ‘black boxes’ over to the UN authorities (they could easily have ‘lost them’ had they thought they might establish their guilt).  Immediately the ‘black boxes’ had been despatched to Britain for opening and examination, a spokesman for the Kiev Government announced that they had established the rebels’ guilt.  At that stage they hadn’t even been opened!  It is clear that the Kiev Government was desperately eager to persuade the world that the rebels were guilty.    

            Suppose though that that  government, knowing that the rebels had no air force of their own to respond to their  continual air attacks, had expected them to seek Russian help.  They may well have possessed ground-to-air missiles, the means of firing them, and the skill needed to do so  As a ‘sovereign state’ they could purchase any weapons that they chose to, and train their soldiers to use them.  Those in charge of their air defences might well have been ordered to look out for high-flying Russian bomber aircraft – and have been told that any large unidentified aircraft flying in Ukrainian air space was likely to be Russian.  So – it is surely at least as likely that it was Kiev Government forces as the the pro-Russian rebels, who brought down that Malaysian air liner, believing it to be a Russian bomber. Their eagerness to blame the rebels with little or no evidence, adds credence to this idea.

              Most responsibility though for that tragic accident must surely be borne by those in Malaysia who had routed a vulnerable passenger air liner directly over a conflict zone.  Only a month or two earlier another Malaysian air-liner had been lost without a trace – and still nothing has been discovered about the cause of that air liner’s disappearance.   Nor do we know, even approximately, where the disappearance took place.  I don’t think that Malaysian Airlines would be my first choice were I to be considering long-distance air travel!  

            For the sake of Ukraine, of Russia, and of the whole world, I hope and pray that those who may be the grandchildren of my friends from long ago, will come to an agreement acceptable by both sides, stop killing each-other, and co-operate to maintain the peace and increase the prosperity of the whole region.  I wish them all a very Happy Christmas and a New Year of Peace and Hope.