11th April 2015

Tendring Topics……..on line

Oh to be a Non.Dom – in a new Financial Year!

          After I took early retirement from Tendring Council’s service in 1980 I earned a considerable income from freelance writing.  I wrote and had published five commercially successful books on domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage.   I wrote the plumbing section of a number of d-i-y manuals including the ‘Readers Digest Householders’ Manual’.   I wrote and sold dozens of feature articles to magazines and periodicals on domestic hot water supply and drainage, on local government, on camping and caravanning in the UK and mainland Europe and on any other subject about which I had at least some knowledge and experience.  For several years I wrote Advertising Features for Essex County Newspapers, and for ‘Look East,’ a publication promoting commerce and industry in East Anglia.  I also wrote a weekly column, ‘Tendring Topics’ for the Coastal Express’ for twenty-three years.  

  Some of this work was for overseas publishers.  I remember writing about Dedham’s and Harwich’s association with the USA and about the historic village of Bosham near Chichester, one-time home  of both King Canute and the ill-fated King Harold killed at the Battle of Hastings, for a magazine for retired citizens of New England.  I had a lucrative arrangement with an Australian publisher who sought permission to print articles of mine that had already appeared in Do-it-Yourself Magazine in England.

I declared every penny I earned, including those from overseas, to Inland Revenue and I claimed reasonable expenses.  I paid quite a lot (by my standards) of income tax each year.  I didn’t complain.  I enjoyed what I was doing and the tax was only a fraction of my income.

I would have been a lot less happy had I realized that there was a privileged minority of very wealthy people who paid no income tax on money that they received from overseas.  They were the ‘non-doms’ whose ‘domicile’ was said to be elsewhere than in the UK.  It seems that ‘non-dom’ status can be inherited and that having a clever lawyer is much more important than where you or your parents actually live or may sometime have lived.

Now it’s one of the issues that may affect voting in the general election.  Ed Miliband says that if he becomes Prime Minister his government will abolish ‘non-dom’ status altogether.  Apparently though the shadow chancellor has said that to do so would bring in very little extra revenue, and Ed Miliband’s political opponents claim that it would lead to all these wealthy and talented ‘non-doms’ leaving the country and domiciling themselves elsewhere.

It is a sad reflection on the zeitgeist of our wonderful ‘free market’ society that discussion about ‘non-dom’ status has been solely concerned with whether or not the Treasury would benefit from its abolition.  I have heard no-one say that it is clearly wrong for a privileged minority of very wealthy individuals to be exempt from taxation to which ordinary ‘hard-working tax-payers’ (about whom David Cameron claims to be so concerned) are subject.  Morality, it seems, has nothing to do with it.

United Kingdom Independence………but from whom?

It is always interesting to hear what Nigel Farage has to say about any subject other than the European Union.  Recently he was discussing Britain’s defence policy and I was just a little surprised to hear him say that he was all for our spending two percent of our national wealth on ‘defence’, as requested by NATO.  It was the as requested by NATO that astonished me.  Mr Farage believes that the government should comply with ‘the will of the people’.  He’d like to see an immediate in/out referendum on the EU because he is quite sure that the Outs would win.  He’s certain that the British people don’t want to be ruled by ‘foreigners’.

He could be wrong about that but, in any case membership of the EU is one of the few matters about which the British electorate has been consulted in a referendum.  Surely there are several matters of national importance about which we have never been consulted.  One of them is membership of NATO and another, closely related, is our ‘special relationship’ with the USA.  I’d have thought Nigel would be demanding a referendum on these subjects before demanding yet another on EU membership.  Doesn’t NATO consist almost wholly of ‘foreigners’ and isn’t the special relationship a little one-sided? 

We blindly followed the USA into the invasion of Iraq, and the USA and NATO into an unwinnable conflict in Afghanistan.   The USA entered World War II against the Nazis only when Hitler declared war on the USA in accordance with Nazi Germany’s treaty with Japan.  We’ll never know if the USA would have engaged in war in Europe had he not done so.  I think it at least possible that the USA would have decided that their war was against the Japanese and in the Pacific.  They’d have thought about Hitler only after they had defeated the Japanese.

We do know that the USA gave us no support when the Falklands was invaded by Argentina, and actually led an armed and unprovoked invasion of Grenada (the island in the Caribbean, not the town in Spain!) then part of the Commonwealth, in order to force a regime change.

Nigel Farage is righteously indignant about the cost of our membership of the EU.  Perhaps the BBC’s Radio 4 ‘More or Less’ team could discover if our membership of NATO and the Special Relationship have cost us more in cash than our membership of the EU.  Without a shadow of doubt our participation in those two USA-led ‘colonial wars’ in the Middle East have cost us much more in dead and wounded!

All of this simply confirms in my own mind that Farage has no objection to British foreign and defence policy being dictated from the other side of the Atlantic but he dislikes our co-operating with our European cousins and developing into a federal super-power able to co-operate (or compete) on equal terms with the USA, the Russian Federation and China.

 The Fruits of Desperation

            Do you remember how the coalition government, supported in this instance by New Labour, offered concession after concession short of complete independence, to the Scottish nationalists in a successful attempt to secure a majority NO vote in the recent referendum?  Desperate measures were needed because opinion polls suggested that the YES voters might be successful.   It was a tactic that they may now be regretting.  A number of English towns and regions are demanding autonomy comparable with that of the Scots.  At the same time it seems likely that SNP candidates will triumph in the forthcoming General Election and, since Scotland remains part of the UK, may prevent the Conservatives forming a government with a comfortable majority in the House of Commons.

            The leaders of the main political parties are now taking desperate measures to gain, or retain, a few votes.  I mentioned David Cameron’s promise to would-be home buyers of thousands of homes ‘on the cheap’ a blog or so ago.  They’ll be cheap because the developers won’t be required to build any ‘social housing’ or contribute to the provision of public services in the area.  Now there’s the idea of lending would-be tenants the few weeks rent-in-advance that nowadays landlords demand.  It’ll certainly add to the burden of debt that most people have to carry these days.

            There’s a promise to freeze rail-fares (though a BBC analyst says that it’ll actually mean a fare rise!), to pay large firms and public authorities to allow some of their employees a few days off to do voluntary work, to make more apprenticeships and so on, and on, and on!  They make wild promises about what they’ll do – but they’re even better at rubbishing the claims of their opponents.  The SNP threatens to rob the Labour Party of what were once ‘safe parliamentary seats’ in Scotland.   So ED Miliband has toured Scotland today  telling electors that the SNP’s proposed programme can only be carried out by raising taxes and making even deeper austerity cuts than  the Tories have.  Mind you, Ed Miliband has recently been at the receiving end of just such a ‘rubbish your opponent’ campaign.  It’s a bit complicated and depends on lots of ‘mights’, but I’ll do my best to explain.

            It is just possible that Labour might win enough seats in the election to have more parliamentary seats than any other party, but not have an overall majority.  It is also just possible that the SNP might gain enough seats to make up an overall majority and might be prepared to support a minority Labour government.   They would obviously expect a quid pro quo for this – and it is possible that the price they might demand for that support might be that the Labour Government does not renew the Trident Nuclear submarine fleet with its ‘ultimate independent nuclear deterrent’.  If they did so then Ed. Miliband, in order to become Prime Minister, might accept that condition.  According to the Conservative Defence Minister he has already ‘stabbed his brother in the back’ to become leader of the Labour Party so he’d have no hesitation in ‘stabbing his country in the back’ to become Prime Minister..  David Cameron says he supports his Defence Minister in this assertion and proudly announces that only the Conservative Party will present the electorate with four brand-new state-of-the-art Trident submarines.  Goodness, is that a threat or a promise?  It's certainly as good a reason as I know for not voting Conservative.

    

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Week 13 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

‘The paths of glory………’

          Last week in this blog I discussed the approaching referendum on the future of Scotland.  All residents in Scotland over the age of sixteen (now that is a revolutionary change in electoral law!) will be given the opportunity to declare whether they want their country to remain part of the United Kingdom or become an independent sovereign nation-state.  The UK government has stated that the majority decision will be accepted and acted upon, whatever it may be.

            Just over a week ago a rather similar referendum was taking place in the Crimea about the future of that peninsula.  Crimea is a federal state of the Ukraine and voters were invited to declare whether they wished to remain part of the Ukraine or to become part of the Russian Federation.  That was certainly not an option that they were given in 1954 when Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Government had decided, presumably on the grounds of administrative convenience, that Crimea would no longer be part of Russia as it had been from the days of the Tsar, but of the Ukraine.  It had made little difference then, because both Russia and the Ukraine were constituent republics of the USSR.

             The referendum has been declared by Barak Obama to be ‘illegal’ (it may have been 'invalid', but how can establishing whether voters would prefer to be Russian or Ukrainian possibly be against any law?), William Hague, our verbally belligerent Foreign Minister described it as ‘a travesty of democracy’, and our Prime Minister has declared colourfully, but with no evidence whatsoever, that the result was obtained 'under the barrel of a Kalashnikov!'  I have seen no reports of ballot-rigging, multiple voting, or bullying of potential voters, as there have been after elections in Afghanistan and countries in the Middle East and Africa. We can be quite sure that any such reports would have been given full publicity by the Russo-sceptic press. The pro-Russian majority of 96 percent established what had already been made obvious  The way in which the Crimeans had welcomed Russian troops and had voluntarily displayed Russian flags; provided ample evidence that the population of Crimea preferred a future with Russia rather than Ukraine.    Since ethnic Russians are said to comprise only some 58 percent of the population of Crimea, that enormous majority suggests that quite a few ethnic Ukrainians and Tatars also voted for the Russian option.

            It would be that sort of majority we would expect to get if the inhabitants of Gibraltar were asked if they wanted to be citizens of the United Kingdom or of Spain  – and for much the same reason.

            Russia’s subsequent ‘annexation’ of the Ukraine has been described as an illegal ‘land-grab’. Perhaps it was, but it was surely unique in the fact that the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the land that was ‘grabbed’ had wanted it to happen. It has also been unique in the fact that so far (even, it seems, after the forceful Russian take-over of the Ukrainian naval base reported this, Monday 24th March morning)  has been achieved with remarkably little bloodshed – less bloodshed, in fact, than in the violent demonstrations in Kiev that had preceded the Russian action.

            I recall that when it was decided to support the separatists in Kosovo (where I doubt very much if a referendum would have revealed over 90 percent of inhabitants wanted to break away from Serbia) the campaign included the RAF's bombardment of Serbia’s capital, the City of Belgrade.  When the UK government, after deceiving parliament and the British public about Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, decided to join the USA in enforcing a regime-change in Iraq, the campaign began by inducing ‘shock and awe’ with terror air-raids on Baghdad.  As a direct result of that illegal invasion thousands of innocent lives were lost. Iraq is still a divided country in which terrorism flourishes; the same terrorism that perpetrated 9/11 and had been unknown in Iraq prior to our invasion.  I really don’t think that Crimea faces a remotely similar future.   I have referred in earlier blogs to the USA’s illegal blockade of Cuban ports, the use of chemical weapons in the Vietnam War and the totally unprovoked invasion of Grenada in the West Indies (then part of the British Commonwealth!)

            No doubt Russia has broken international rules by recovering its lost Crimean province without having first attempted negotiation, but ‘Let he who is without sin among you cast the first stone!’

            I was not impressed with Vladimir Putin’s triumphal announcement of Russia’s recovery of Crimea in the Russian Parliament. Painstakingly staged, it resembled too closely George Bush’s premature announcement of victory in Iraq from the bridge of a US aircraft carrier.  All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Successful leaders surround themselves with flatterers who feed their egos and lead them on into folly. To suggest that Putin is another Stalin is ridiculous, but I do think that he may see himself as ‘Vladimir the Great’, a worthy successor of the Romanov Tsars.

            He has promised ‘to put the glory back into Russia’. I can only hope and pray that the eight million Russian dead of World War II remind him that the paths of glory lead but to the grave.  The rest of the world's leaders, every one of whom is too young to have personal memories of World War II, also need to remember it.

The Budget

          I once would have described myself as a ‘democratic socialist’. I was for a short while a member of the Labour Party and was, in fact, accepted as a Labour candidate for a county council election.  How glad I am now that I withdrew my candidature, believing that I could do more for the causes that I support in my weekly Tendring Topics column in a local newspaper, than in the Council Chamber at Chelmsford, where I’d have been expected to toe the party line.

            One of those causes (regular blog readers will probably be all too familiar with some of the others!) arises from my conviction that many, perhaps most, of Britain’s problems arise from the enormous and ever-widening gap between the richest and the poorest in our society.  To the New Labour Party’s shame that gap widened during their ten years in office and has continued to widen ever since.   I think that I am well qualified to comment on this subject because my own income and possessions are sufficient for my life style. At 92 the opportunities for extravagant living become somewhat limited! I have no desire for more than I already possess – and I certainly wouldn’t be happy with much less.  I now describe myself, not as a socialist but as an egalitarian and I don’t much concern myself with how greater equality could best be achieved. In some fields public ownership (either national or local) would probably be the best way forward, but co-operative ownership and employer/employee partnerships may also have a valuable part to play.  I support – very modestly – the Equality Trust www.equalitytrust.org.uk  that works toward that end.

 My idea of a ‘good Budget’ is one that narrows the gap between rich and poor and a ‘bad Budget’ is one that widens it.  It follows that it is many years since I have seen a ‘good Budget’ and I despair of ever seeing one produced either by our present government or any currently conceivable successor.

Both parties in the coalition government are eager to claim the credit for taking ‘millions of low paid workers out of the tax system altogether’ by raising the personal allowance (the level at which income tax becomes payable) from £10,000 to £10,500 a year.  It does, of course, help low earners but it also helps everyone who pays income tax (including me!) right up to those on £100,000 or more a year.  What’s more it perpetuates the false idea that there’s a hard-working group of ‘tax payers’ whose labours subsidise an underclass of non-taxpayers.  It’s not true.   The non income-tax payer pays tax (VAT) every time he has his car, or his bike or his house repaired.  He pays tax every time he buys himself a pint, fills up the petrol tank of his car or motor bike, or is foolish enough to buy a lottery ticket or scratch card, to put a few bob on a horse, or to play commercial bingo!   He probably pays a higher proportion of his income in tax than bankers or stock brokers with their inflated salaries and bonuses! 

Regular blog readers will know that I believe that every adult citizen, from the poorest to the wealthiest, should pay the same percentage of his or her gross income in income tax as their annual membership fee as a citizen of the UK – and that those who go abroad to escape that responsibility should automatically forfeit that citizenship.

A somewhat controversial feature of the budget would permit those who are saving for a pension on retirement to withdraw all or part of that ‘pension pot’ without financial penalty, at any time.  Fears have been expressed that ‘live-for-the-day’ fifty-year olds might draw out the lot and spend it all on a cruise to the Caribbean or a glorious boozy party, rather than leave it to  mature for a meagre pension that they may never live to enjoy!  I think there’s a much greater danger that responsible middle-aged people faced with a domestic crisis, might draw out a smallish sum from the ‘pension pot’ to deal with it, rather than go to a payday loan firm – or a loan shark.  No-one would criticise them for doing so -  but it wouldn’t take many such crises to empty that ‘pot’! 

I don’t think Mr Osborne and his colleagues realize how their policies have brought so many families to the edge of a financial precipice – and how little it could take to render them jobless,  homeless and relying on the local food bank for their survival.  But then I don’t suppose that the members of a government of millionaires who spend much of their time with fellow-millionaires can be expected to know much about the struggles and the anxieties of the less well off.

Week 5 2013

Tendring Topics.......on Line

‘The Isle of Avalon’ – in north-east Essex?

          Viewers of the tv serial Merlin will recall the penultimate scene in which the apparently mortally wounded King Arthur was being transported across a lake to the Isle of Avalon where, according to legend, hail, rain and snow are unknown and the wind never blows coldly.

             The Tendring District, of which Clacton-on-Sea is the biggest town, is hardly a second Avalon on the southern East Anglian coast.  We’re certainly not free of cold winds, though we prefer to think of them as ‘bracing breezes’!  There’s no doubt though that we do escape most of the extreme weather conditions that regularly afflict other less fortunate regions of England.   We had much more rain than usual during last year’s summer and autumn – but we had no floods like those elsewhere.  We did endure something of the cold snap that brought much of England to a standstill at the beginning of last week but, once again, we didn’t have such a heavy snowfall as elsewhere, nor did the snow lie on the ground for so long.

            Snow – falling snow and lying snow – is the one circumstance guaranteed to keep my ‘iron horse’ (my mobility scooter) in its stable.  It did so on Sunday 20^th January and again on Monday and Tuesday, 21^st and 22^nd  but that (so far!) is all.   In Clacton the snowfall began at about noon on Sunday and carried on continuously for several hours.  On Monday morning about 2in of snow was lying on gardens, highways and footpaths but it was slowly beginning to thaw.  There was rain on Monday night that didn’t freeze as it hit the ground and on Tuesday the thaw continued.   Not bad – compared with the way in which snow caused havoc elsewhere.

            Considering the fairly limited amount of snow that fell in our area, it does seem extraordinary that 14 schools in the Colchester area and 10 in the Tendring District closed on Monday 21^st January and others opened late on that day.  Iain Wicks, Essex Development Manager for the Federation of Small Businesses felt that these schools had let parents down.  He is quoted as saying ‘It seems after the first flake of snow, some schools hit the self-destruct button’.  In my own-school days in Ipswich in the 1930s I don’t recall my school ever closing because of snow.  Nor do I recall my sons’ schools in Clacton during the 1960s ever closing for that cause, though there were some pretty severe winters during those decades.

            It is suggested that circumstances are different now because many children live further from their schools.  That may be so – but between 1931 and 1937 when I was at secondary school, I used to cycle three miles each way to and from school daily.  The reason most frequently cited for school closure is ‘health and safety’, giving the impression that some bureaucrat (probably in Brussels!) sends out a directive demanding school closure if there is snow on the ground.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The decision to close a school or to keep it open is that of the head teacher. A possible reason for closure can be the head teacher’s not unreasonable fear that if a child falls and suffers an injury in a frozen playground, the parents will sue for damages and if a teacher does the same thing he or she will also sue!

        
               In my day it was accepted that accidents did sometimes happen, and that if anyone was to blame it was the victim, who should have taken more care.  This isn’t so today.  Watch daytime commercial tv.  You won’t have to wait long before a benign gentleman (or lady) will appear on the screen to advise anyone who has ‘had an accident that wasn’t their fault’ to contact so-and-so specialist solicitors who will pursue their claim for damages. Furthermore, they assure affected viewers, ‘you’ll receive every penny of the damages awarded, because the person or organisation from whom you are claiming will have to the pay the legal costs’.   The implication is that there is no such thing as a genuine accident.  Someone or some organisation is always to blame and they are going to have to pay damages.  No wonder some head teachers decide to play safe and close the school rather than risk an accident and an expensive damages claim!

            A less worthy – and perhaps more probable – reason why a head teacher might decide to close a school is the dreaded School League Table.  A snowy day will mean that some children will genuinely find it difficult to get to school.  Others will welcome the snow as an excuse for playing truant.  Genuine and non-genuine absentees will all be regarded as truants – and the number of truancies is an important factor in determining a school’s position on that Table. A school that is closed can have no truancies!

            It is possible to understand the motives of head teachers who close their schools when there is snow.   It is rather less easy to understand the Railway Company’s action in cancelling trains running to and from Clacton for no other reason than the threat of snow!  On Monday 14^th January, six days before Clacton had its snowfall, a 30 mph speed limit was imposed on a number of trains leaving the station and others were cancelled, leaving commuters in the lurch. This was because although there was no snow in Clacton there was snowfall in other areas through which trains might have to pass. ‘There were flurries of snow in Colchester and Norwich had several inches’.

            It seems that these measures were taken ‘to reduce the risk of snow being sucked into the trains electric motors and damaging them’.  Is cancelling train journeys or slowing them to a snail’s pace really the best or only way to prevent this?   Perhaps the now-privately-run railway companies should consult those who run the Trans-Siberian Railway. This carries passengers and goods across part of northern Europe and the whole width of the continent of Asia from Moscow to the Pacific coast, summer and winter alike.   Electrification began in the early days of the USSR in the 1920s and the last steam engine was pensioned off in the mid-1980s.  I can’t believe that a little snow on that line brings their trains to a halt!

'The Shape of Things to Come'*

            No-one spelt out to me my duties and objectives when I was appointed as Tendring District Council’s first Public Relations Officer in 1973.   It was clear to me though that I should endeavour to persuade the general public to identify themselves with the new Council.   They, the electorate, had voted for the council’s members to be their representatives.  It followed that the council’s successes (and no doubt occasional failures) were their own successes and failures, not those of some remote and alien body, known to them chiefly as a sender of rate demands! 

        
            Although, during the seven years that I was the Council’s PRO I had my small successes and managed, on the whole, to present a positive  picture of the Council and its activities to the local and regional press  radio and tv, I can’t really claim  to have succeeded in gaining that objective. Despite my efforts the electorate continued to regard the council with suspicion – as ‘them and us’.

            Magnify that situation a few hundred  times and you have something like the way in which much of the public regards the European Union.  From most of the national press you would never dream that the United Kingdom was actually a substantial and very influential member of the EU and that this membership had been confirmed by a referendum in the 1970s.  The United Kingdom is represented at every level in the Union and our representatives’ opinions are respected even on matters concerning the Eurozone of which, by our own government’s choice, we are not members.

            Furthermore, the European Union has its own parliament which, since it is elected by a system of proportional representation, is more truly representative of the electorate than our national parliament.  It even has members from Britain’s UKIP whose main, if not sole, policy is to abolish all European Union institutions!  It is surely extraordinary that those who protest most strongly about the activities of the European Commission, because it is not directly elected and is therefore ‘undemocratic’, are also the most determined to deny additional power to the European Parliament that unquestionably is a democratic institution.

            Over and over again we see the EU being presented as an alien and hostile organisation with which we are eternally in a state of ‘cold war’, instead of as respected international organisation of which we are an influential member.

            Now the whole matter is to be settled – at some time in the future!   If the Conservative Party wins the next election and David Cameron is still leader, he will negotiate with other members of the EU to try to ‘repatriate’ to the United Kingdom some of the powers currently vested in the EU (I hope that they won’t prove to be powers that curb the money-manipulators who brought the world into its current sorry state, and the powers that protect the jobs and safety of working people!)   Having successfully done that, he will invite the British public to vote whether to stay in or get out of the EU.  He himself will then support continued membership of the emasculated EU that he will have created.

It is unlikely that I shall still be around to see Mr Cameron face that very first hurdle; winning the election. I certainly don’t expect – or hope – to live to see the fruition of his plans.  What I would like to happen is really of no interest because there is no way in which I can affect the outcome.  I am happy though to place on record what I think could happen as the future unfolds.

            During the next few decades countries of the European Union are likely to draw closer together both economically and politically. They will eventually become a Federation like the USA, with clearly defined Federal Functions and State Functions – saving millions of Euros by transferring many of the present powers and functions of the various national governments to democratically elected local authoriries (real localisation in fact) and transferring others (overall economic planning, foreign affairs and defence for instance) to the new Federal Government formed from a proportionately elected European Parliament.  These will be among the factors that hasten European economic recovery.   The Euro will recover its value (already at the end of January 2013 it was  gaining in value against the pound sterling) and all members of the EU will adopt the Euro as their currency.  The EU (renamed the European Federation or EUROFA) will then be able to co-operate, negotiate and, where appropriate, compete with the USA and the world’s emerging economies on equal terms, and without the dead hand of the UK continually impeding progress.

            In the UK a triumphant Conservative/UKIP coalition will hold an in/out referendum on membership of the EU and will decide to withdraw its membership. Scenes of widespread national rejoicing in England will be followed by Scotland’s declaration of independence from the UK and its application for membership of the by-then-established EUROFA.  The USA will transfer its ‘special relationship’ from the now-reduced UK to EUROFA.  World markets – China, India, the USA, Latin America – will find trading with a united Europe having a single currency and a unified economic policy simpler and more straightforward than with the previous proliferation of nation-states and currencies.  They probably won’t even notice that there is another once-powerful country that has voluntarily put itself outside Federal Europe’s frontiers, clamouring for their attention.

In Britain our great-great grandchildren will live to regret the way that their parents and grandparents voted in that second referendum – and a movement urging yet another referendum (‘Why should we suffer as a result of a stupid referendum held way back in 2018 – or whenever’) would be launched.

            It’s not a very enticing prospect for us Brits.  Never mind.  I am sure that the leader writers of the Express, Mail and Sun would offer quite different possible futures.  Only time will reveal which of us was right.  It is quite likely that none of us will be.  It is a far from remote possibility that accelerating climate change, still denied by some, will make nonsense of all our current hopes and fears.   In any case, who in 1921 the year in which I was born, or indeed in 1945 at the end of World War II, could possibly have foreseen what our country, Europe and the world would be like in AD 2013?

* 'The Shape of Things to Come' was a work of Science Fiction, written by H.G.Wells and published in the early 1930s..  It purported to forecast the history of the world from the late 1930s to the beginning of the 21st Century.  Parts of it were remarkably accurate.  He forecast the outbreak of World War II in 1940 over a border dispute between Germany and Poland about Danzig and the Polish Corridor, but was wildly out in many of his later surmises.  Fortunately perhaps, although we travel forward in space we travel backwards through time and can only see what is already behind us.  I don't suppose that my, or anyone else's, attempted glance into the future is any more accurate than that of H.G.Wells.