Week 24 2012 17.6.12

Tendring Topics......on Line

 ‘When will they ever learn*?

It isn’t very often that I find myself 'on the same side' as a feature writer in the Mail, but I have to admit reluctant agreement with at least some of the sentiments expressed by Peter Hitchins in the Mail on Sunday at Whitsun.

            ‘Why do William Hague and the BBC want to help Saudi Arabia set up a fanatical Islamist state in Syria?  Have we learned nothing from the failed hopes of Egypt and Libya?  Don’t we realise that the ‘activists’ we support are just as capable of conducting massacres as the pro-Assad militias.

            I had been shocked earlier when I had discovered that Saudi Arabia was among the most fervent supporters of Syria’s ‘freedom fighters’.   Surely we all know that, at least prior to the current uprising, Syria was an oasis of tolerance and liberalism compared with Saudi Arabia, with its subjugation of women, its medieval laws and punishments, and its total prohibition of any kind of religious worship other than its own extreme version of Islam.  Far from supporting ‘freedom fighters’, Saudi Arabia’s ruler had sent troops into neighbouring Bahrain to help the brutal efforts of the government there to suppress its own ‘Arab spring’ of rebellion.

            Had any other two countries been similarly involved in the suppression of popular rebellion, there would have been outrage in London and Washington. Both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain though, are not only sources of oil, they are also wealthy and reliable purchasers of armaments.   Plausible excuses can always be found for their excesses and their rulers welcomed as honoured guests when they deign to visit us.                             

Do you remember the high hopes when Saddam Hussein was overthrown in Iraq – and of their outcome?  Saddan Hussein was a cruel and ruthless dictator – but under his dictatorship Iraq was a united country in which terrorist groups like El Qaida scarcely had a foothold and in which there was a degree of religious freedom and tolerance unusual in the Middle East.  There was a thriving Christian community and well-attended Christian churches.  Our ‘victory’ (do you remember George Bush proclaiming it from the bridge of a US Aircraft Carrier?) has produced a divided country with a ruined infrastructure.  Kurds are seeking independence and Sunni and Shia Muslims are at each other’s throats. Christians are under constant attack and are emigrating as quickly as they are able to do so. There is a constant threat of terrorist bombs.

Then there was the Arab Spring first in Tunisia, then in Egypt and finally Libya.  It really seemed that parliamentary democracy would triumph, that these countries would throw off their ancient legacies of autocracy and embrace government of the people, for the people, and by the people.   I did, at the time, suggest in this blog that it was at least equally likely that a militantly Islamic government, comparable with that of the Taliban in Afghanistan, would emerge.  Currently the Egyptians have elected an Islamic parliament and are faced with the choice of an Islamic President or a representative, albeit a milder one, of the old regime.  My guess is that the Islamic candidate will win.  The moderate, liberal, secularist, and freedom-seeking Egyptians who had been the backbone of the Arab Spring have disappeared.  Their various factions had varying ultimate aims.  They were divided.  The Islamists and the Traditionalists had clear and understandable objectives and were united. It is they who have triumphed.

I am not surprised that the Coptic Christians, one of the oldest traditions of the Christian faith, established in Egypt long before the arrival of Islam, are full of foreboding.

As for Libya, where ‘the west’ played an active role, having secured a mandate from the United Nations on the dubious grounds of protecting civilians from  air strikes by the Libyan Government.  In Egypt there may have been some doubt, but in Libya we know perfectly well than among the ‘freedom fighters’ we have been supporting are terrorists trained in Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnia and  Pakistan.   At least some of them have proved themselves to be as competent as Colonel Gaddafi’s minions at torturing and murdering their captured and helpless opponents.

I have no idea when, or even if, a credible government will eventually emerge in Libya but I have little expectation or hope that it will be a freely elected, liberal and tolerant one.

Today (6^th June 2012) has been a bad one for Afghan civilians.  In Kandahar three Taliban suicide bombers have killed scores of civilians.  Elsewhere in that unhappy country, an American air strike (not for the first time) has accidentally managed to slaughter everyone at a wedding reception - collateral damage, innocent victims of our ‘war on terror’.  Can we wonder that ordinary Afghans hate us foreign infidels even more than most of them hate the Taliban?

History (the French Revolution of 1789, the Russian revolution of 1917, the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s) has shown that foreign intervention has the effect of increasing the bloodiness of civil conflict.   We should, I am quite sure, offer humanitarian aid where we can to alleviate the suffering of civilians on either side of the conflict, and mediate if and when asked to do so.  For God’s sake though (and I mean that reverently not blasphemously!) let us otherwise keep out of other people’s armed conflicts!

*’When will they ever learn?’ was the refrain of a popular protest song of the 1960s entitled ‘Where have all the flowers gone?

Secularism

         

          In the United Kingdom those of us who, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it, ‘­profess and call ourselves Christians’ have come to take it for granted that the greatest enemy of Christian faith and tradition in this country has been the apparently inexorable advance of secularism.  We no longer have a public holiday at Whitsun.  It has been replaced by a fixed-date secular late spring public holiday.  Christmas, the time at which we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, has been systematically secularised.   Happy Christmas! is being replaced on our greetings cards by Season’s Greetings or some such similarly meaningless phrase. Ask at a Post Office for the special stamps issued as Christmas draws near and you’ll be offered secular ones. However, as a rather patronising concession to a minority interest, there will be some ‘religious Christmas stamps’ kept ‘under the counter’ for those who specially ask for them! We are encouraged to speak of ‘the festive season’ or ‘the mid-winter holidays’ rather than of Christmas!   The most popular Christmas images are no longer a baby in a manger, a young mother lovingly holding her new-born child or wise men following a star, but of Santa Claus and his reindeer, holly and ivy, or young children playing in the snow.

            Easter has become a celebration of hot cross buns, cuddly bunnies, chocolate eggs and dancing daffodils, rather than of a suffering man on a cross and his glorious resurrection.

            We are encouraged to abandon referring to dates as BC (before Christ) or AD (Anno Domini or ‘Year of our Lord’) but as BCE (before Common Era) and CE (Common Era).  Determined secularists would like to see the abolition of prayers in schools or at public meetings and the departure from radio and tv of such popular religious programmes as Songs of Praise, Thought for the Day and Prayer for the Day.

            Yet, as an article in the Church Times reminded its readers a few weeks ago, while we in the UK deplore the advance of secularism, Christians in Egypt are fervently praying, probably in vain, that they may have a secular government in Cairo!

            I have listed above some of the things that proselytising secularisers have done and are doing.  It is only fair to add some of the things that even the most determined secularists, however misguided we may think them to be, don’t do.  They don’t throw bombs into religious gatherings or explode them fixed to themselves in public places, convinced that – if only they can take a few believers with them – they will be rewarded.   Nor do they persecute, ostracise, punish, or threaten to kill members of their families or communities who convert to one of the religious faiths available, or who marry into a believing family. 

            I am, of course, describing the activities of some Muslims. I know perfectly well that none of those things is compatible with ‘true Islam’ and that Jihad is really all about the struggle between good and evil within oneself.  A great many, probably a large majority, of Muslims in this country find the activities listed above as abhorrent as I do.  But some Muslims do believe they are an essential part of Islam and that jihad doesn’t mean an inner struggle but an outward war against the infidel.  When Britain and the USA covertly funded the ‘gallant mojihadin’ in Afghanistan, they hoped they would use our money to kill Russians, certainly not to conduct a struggle within themselves!  They are now realising that to the mojihadin, one lot of foreign infidels is much the same as another. 

            I am not selecting Muslims for condemnation.  Christians have been as bad, if not worse. I know that the Christian faith is one of love and compassion, of forgiveness and reconciliation.  In the 16^th century though, when Christians were torturing each other and burning each other alive in the name of Christ – who would have believed that?

            Similarly in the 17th and 18th centuries pious Puritans in New England as well as in Britain imprisoned, tortured and hanged unfortunate women denounced as witches. They would have quoted Biblical chapter and verse against any who protested.  ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ was, so they believed, the Word of the Lord.  Even today there are those who proclaim themselves to be fundamentalist or Bible Christians, who eagerly hunt through obscure passages in Leviticus or Deuteronomy to justify their fierce opposition to practices or attitudes with which they disagree

In their enthusiasm for the small print of the Old Testament they seem to have missed the words of Jesus Christ. He told us that the whole of the moral teaching of the Old Testament is encapsulated in just two simple commandments – Love God with all your being and love your neighbour as much as you love yourself.  Jesus clarified that second commandment by explaining that we should treat other people in exactly the same way as we would like them to treat us.  When he reminded his listeners that they should not attempt to pour new wine into old bottles or sew new cloth onto an old garment,  he was surely referring to the many rules and regulations  of the Old Testament

How strange that some Christians prefer to live by the multitudinous prohibitions and demands of the old dispensation rather than by the two straightforward and simple commands of the new!

 Like Egypt’s Coptic Christians, I would not wish to be ruled by an ostentatiously religious government, whether Muslim or Christian (no, not even Quaker!).  I am happier with a secular government, that may well include individual Christians or Muslims;  one that is tolerant of all religions whose followers are prepared to comply with the law of the land; a Government that is always prepared to listen to and take seriously the advice of religious leaders.  Its members, religious, agnostic and atheist, should act in accordance with the reason that God has given them and in the light of the dictates of their conscience, which, as a Quaker, I believe to be inspired and enlightened by the Inward Light of Christ,  God’s gift to every man, woman and child on this earth.

‘Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven’

            I am afraid that there has been nothing very cheering or uplifting in anything that I have so far written in this week's blog.  I thought therefore that I would end it with the latest picture of my ‘honorary German niece' Maja.   Isn’t she a truly beautiful child?  Although not yet six years old her eyes seem to be full of intelligence, love and trust.  It was surely such a child as this that Jesus set in the midst of his disciples and told them that this was the example they needed to follow if they wished to enter God's kingdom.

            Maja’s great grandfather was a lieutenant in the German Army in World War II.   He was killed on the Eastern Front at the same time that I and my comrades in the British Eighth Army and his compatriots in the German Afrikakorps were trying to kill each other in Libya.  My greatest hope for the .future is of lasting peace in Europe spreading throughout the world so that such circumstances may never arise again.  

           

         

   

Week 23 2012

Tendring Topics......on line

 ‘Time, like an ever-rolling stream..........'

            During the past few weeks two events have conspired to give me salutary reminders (as though I need them!) of my advancing years.

There was my ninety-first birthday on 18^th May.   Obviously it was never going to be as exciting as my ninetieth when the whole immediate family, eight of us altogether, travelled to Zittau to join my German friends in celebration.  I was very glad of that because I am increasingly conscious of the fact that I am a year older, a little feebler, a little less steady on my feet, a little more forgetful and a little more easily tired than I was then.  

We didn’t have a family photo this year but here we all are celebrating my 90^th Birthday in Zittau last year.  Younger son Andy isn’t in the picture – he was behind the camera

         

This year all the family, except grandson Chris in Taiwan, joined me for a celebratory meal and exchange of family news at The Bowling Green at Weeley. The following day Ingrid my longest standing German friend, who had been unable to be with us the previous year, came to see me with a friend.  We again lunched at The Bowling Green and came back for a chat to my home in Dudley Road afterwards.  I was pleased to learn that her family are all well and that her nephew and niece (my ‘honorary’ nephew and niece!) two year old Tom and his six year old sister Maja, are thriving.

     In addition I received 35 posted birthday cards plus email and text greetings from friends and relatives in England and Germany (and one in Australia!). 

With Ingrid on 20^th May – I think I look very tired (which I was!)             

 Then, of course, another reminder of my age came with the Queen’s Jubilee and the realisation that, despite the fact that she has been our Queen for sixty years, I have actually seen the reign of no less than three other British monarchs!  During my childhood there was George V.   He seemed very grand, very distant and very worthy, deserving our respect and loyalty but hardly our affection.  That was until, years later, I learned what are said to have been his last words (no, not the official ones – I never did believe that he said How goes the Empire?)  before dying. When I learned what he really said I realized that he had been very human and ‘one of us’, after all.

  His successor Edward VIII had a very short reign.  He abdicated to marry twice-divorced American socialite Mrs Wallis Simpson. The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Cosmo Lang and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin were strongly criticised at the time for forcing the abdication. I really think that they were right though.  It had been difficult to imagine a Queen Wallis! Quite apart from her earlier broken marriages she had been much too friendly with some of Germany’s top Nazis. Not everyone took the situation desperately seriously and there was a lot of back-street humour at the situation.  One printable witticism was, ‘He could have been Admiral of the Fleet but chose to be third mate to a Yankee drifter.’

            I was in the fifth form of Ipswich’s Northgate School for Boys at the time of the abdication crisis.  In Ipswich we had something of a grandstand view of the crisis as the divorce making the royal marriage legally (if not ecclesiastically) possible was granted in an Ipswich Court. After the abdication, we fifth formers were given a couple of hours off school and encouraged to cycle down to Ipswich’s Cornhill to hear the proclamation of the accession of the new king – George VI – publicly made by the Mayor on the steps of the Town Hall.

            When, over two years later, I volunteered for the Territorial Army it was to King George VI ‘and all his lawful heirs and successors’ that I swore my allegiance and loyalty.  I have known quite a few avowed republicans in my time but have never heard a word of personal criticism either of King George or of his consort the Queen Elizabeth.  She is best remembered today as the indomitable Queen Mother with a passion for race horses and salmon fishing.   People of my generation  remember when she and the king were a youngish middle-aged couple with two endearing little girls, the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose. They stayed in London throughout the blitz, though they could have easily gone to Canada for safety.  Viewers of ‘The King’s Speech’ will know of the struggle the King had with his speech impediment.  I heard on ‘the wireless’ (that’s what we called the radio in those days!) the speech – the climax of the film – that the King made on the outbreak of World War II, and remember thinking that the King’s impediment was not nearly as bad as the popular press had suggested.  I now realize what an ordeal making that speech must have been.

            I remember being told of King George VI’s death.  I was Housing Manager to Gipping Rural District in Suffolk at the time and someone told me the news as I visited a Council House in the village of Haughley.  It came as a complete surprise.  I hadn’t even known that he was ill.  I think that it must have come as a surprise to our top politicians and to members of the Royal family as well.  Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip would surely never have embarked on a Commonwealth tour had they imagined for a moment that the King’s death was imminent.

            The accession of our new young Queen in 1952 was hailed as the beginning of a New Elizabethan Age in which our country would recapture some of the splendour of the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth.  It hasn’t worked out quite like that.  Few of us then could have imagined that during the course of the next 60 years we would see the systematic denigration and dismantling of the Welfare State  created by the generation that had won World War II; that in the first decade of the new millennium a spectacular failure of the capitalist free market economy world-wide had meant that Britain’s public services, of which we had been so proud, would be run down, that all of us (except the very rich) would be facing years of hardship; that more young British lives would have been lost and were still being lost in warfare, and that in the  Diamond Jubilee year the gap between rich and poor would have become wider than it had ever been.

            Don’t blame the Queen – blame the politicians and the financiers!  The Queen too has had cause for sadness.  Those sixty years have seen the Empire disappear and the Commonwealth shrink.  She has seen one of her most historic homes – Windsor Castle – threatened with destruction by fire.  She has seen the first marriages of three of her four children end in divorce.  She has said farewell to her Royal Yacht.  Yet she has remained apparently serene, a worthy representative of all her people.  She is just four years younger than I am and I have seen her, in the press and on tv, develop from engaging child to outwardly imperturbable matriarch.  My late wife and I appreciated the card of congratulation that was sent us on her behalf on the occasion of our own Diamond Wedding Anniversary six years ago. 

Heather and I, with our extended family, celebrating our Diamond Wedding Anniversary in Clacton's Quaker Meeting House in April 2006.  Three months after that happy event, Heather’s life came to an end.     

I offer her every good wish, and hope that her lawful heirs and successors, to whom I swore allegiance and loyalty in 1939, profit from her example.  I have been asked how I reconcile my belief that a constitutional monarchy is best for our country with my fervent desire that our country should become a more ‘equal’ society.  There really is no contradiction.  Norway, Sweden and Denmark are all constitutional monarchies.   The USA is a republic.  Yet, I don’t think that anyone would question the assertion that the USA is a far less equal society than every one of those three Scandinavian countries.  In the British Utopia of which I sometimes dream, the principal source of government revenue would be the Citizenship Tax, levied proportionately as the first charge, without exception, on the income of every single citizen, from the wealthiest and most powerful to the very poorest.  The monarch and members of his or her family would be subject to that tax in the same way as the humblest citizen. That, I think, would level off society far more effectively than toppling the monarchy and replacing our hereditary ‘head of state’ with an elected president.

            May God save the Queen and, as the never-used-nowadays second verse of the National Anthem puts it in its final line, may God save us all!’

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…….’

            That’s how, in the silent movies of my childhood, the scene shifted from the menfolk gallantly combating marauding rustlers or Indian warbands, to the ranch-house where the dastardly villain (you could tell him by his twirly moustache and –‘city slicker’ clothes) was threatening the virtue of the rancher’s beautiful daughter.

            At the end of May 2012, as Britain prepared for a four-day Jubilee holiday weekend, life was going on, in Europe, in the Middle East, in Afghanistan – and at the Leveson Enquiry.

            Tony Blair, not one of my favourite people, was disarmingly honest when he explained that politicians simply couldn’t afford to get on the wrong side of powerful press magnates.  That’s why he had pursued Rupert Murdoch half-way across the world to get into his good books.  No, of course there was no kind of formal agreement between himself and the American (formerly Australian) multi-millionaire.  There didn’t need to be.  Mr Blair was well aware of Murdoch’s policy preferences.

            If there is one thing that is worse than a government-controlled press, it’s a press-controlled government!

            The theme continued with the long awaited appearance before the enquiry of Jeremy Hunt, Culture Minister, who had been given the responsibility of deciding whether or not News International (the Murdoch media empire) should have total control of BSkyB tv.  Mr Hunt explained that he had held, and did hold, a personal view favouring News International’s case but, in the quasi-judicial role to which he had been appointed, he had put his personal views on one side and had acted strictly ‘according to the book’.  He had done nothing wrong.  Why on earth should he resign? 

            I am quite sure that he had done nothing wrong.  He had consulted all the right people and had been able to put affirming ticks in all the right boxes.  When the time came he would be in a position to make his own quasi-judicial decision – and who could possibly doubt what that decision would have been? However Mr Murdoch, evidently more shaken by the phone hacking and police bribing scandal than Mr Hunt had been, withdrew his application for full control of BSkyB.  Mr Hunt, who had done nothing wrong, was off the quasi-judicial hook.

            Prime Minister David Cameron is to appear before Lord Leveson in the near future.  I look forward to hearing his explanation of his sacking Vince Cable from the post of adjudicator for having been tricked into declaring his personal opposition to the BSkyB takeover, and on the same day, appointing Jeremy Hunt, who had equally emphatically declared his support for the takeover, to the same post.  Email evidence suggests that Chancellor George Osborne had also been involved in those decisions. Those two posh boys who don’t know the price of milk (both of whom had close contacts with the Murdoch Empire) had been at it again!

           

           

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Week 22 2012 31.5.2012

Tendring Topic.......on Line

Recycling

           Tendring Council has a major problem in attempting to reconcile a sceptical public to a recyclable refuse collection scheme that was introduced after little if any consultation and is proving to be almost unbelievably unpopular. For week after week the correspondence pages of the weekly Clacton Gazette and its sister weekly the Frinton and Walton Gazette have been filled with letters overwhelmingly critical of the new scheme.  This correspondence has overflowed into the corresponding pages of the daily Gazette, which covers the Colchester area as well as the Tendring District.

            When the scheme was first introduced, my own principal criticism was of the fact that no lid had been provided for the red plastic boxes intended for the reception of paper and cardboard for recycling.  I pointed out that rain falling while the filled boxes awaited collection would reduce the contents to a soggy mess, while high winds would be likely to scatter the contents far and wide.  I understand that that particular defect is to be remedied and that we will all receive lids (costing the council £1 per lid!) for those red boxes.  

            I fear that it is a concession that may prove to be too little and too late. Our existing green boxes (that we have been using for all recyclables), are now to be used only for plastic bottles (please remove caps and stoppers before putting in box!) and metal cans of all kind.  All other plastics, including those that have been collected for recycling in the past, are now to be put into the black plastic sacks for unrecyclable refuse destined for land-fill. The red and green boxes have to be put out for collection on alternate weeks, and we have been issued with a chart showing which week for each colour box.  In the past, if we had more recyclable material than would go into our green box, we were able to put it in a white or transparent plastic bag and put it on top of the filled green box for collection.  That is no longer possible.  Any overflow has to go into landfill.

We also now have two extra smaller green plastic boxes with hinged lids for kitchen and food waste.  This is a service said to have been introduced by popular demand – well, I didn’t demand it, neither did anyone I know!   The smaller box or ‘caddy’ is to be kept in the kitchen to be emptied when full into the larger one kept outside.  This has to be put out every week, with the black plastic bag and either the red or the green box, by the property boundary for collection.   I do try to co-operate.  Every week on the appropriate day my kitchen waste (in my case mostly tea bags, egg shells, banana skins and a few lettuce leaves), and either my green or my red box, and my black bag of unrecyclable waste, are ready for collection.  I find though that at age 91, I just can’t carry them to the boundary of my property. I know that the Council would arrange for them to be collected from by my back door if asked but, as the collectors arrive in my street shortly after 7.00 am, that would mean leaving my side gate open all night; something that I am not inclined to do.  However, I am very fortunate in having a neighbour who is prepared to take my boxes and black plastic sack out for me, and bring the empties back again.  Others are not so lucky!       Complying with the Council’s instructions and putting out the appropriate boxes on the right day is a bit complicated and time-consuming, but it can be done.  The scheme could work if sufficient householders were prepared to co-operate.  My observations suggest that this isn’t happening.

            There have always been some, probably a minority, of householders who have failed to support the Council’s recycling efforts.  They have put out several filled black plastic sacks every week but never a green box with recyclable waste.  I believe that minority has now expanded into a considerable majority.  Driving, in my mobility scooter up and down part of my road before and after collection, left me feeling that out of some 40 households, only ten or a dozen were fully co-operating with the Council's scheme.

          I can’t imagine how members of the Council will attempt to remedy the situation when they meet in emergency session to consider it. Attempt to bluff it out, hoping like Mr Micawber that ‘something will turn up’? Revert to the old system?  Abandon the food waste scheme and replace it with a glass collection that at least wouldn’t need a special vehicle?  One thing that they really must strive to do is regain the trust and confidence of the public, because without public support any voluntary recyclables collection scheme is doomed to failure.  The stick? The carrot?  I am not at all sure that either is available for use.  I await developments – and our next local government election – with interest!  

A Little Ray of Sunshine!

          In the midst of a double page in the Gazette for 25^th May, filled with the problems of Tendring’s Refuse and Recyclables collection scheme, is a picture of broadly smiling Councillor Nick Turner, Tendring Council's 'cabinet minister' for Public Health, with the announcement that the ‘new scheme will save taxpayers more than £450,000 a year as well as increasing recycling rates by approximately 5 percent in the first year of operation’.  He adds that, ’80 percent of residents are recycling’ and, ‘The new service is still being rolled out in some parts of the district but we are extremely pleased with the results so far and I thank everyone who is taking part.  Tendring Council is collecting, on average, ten tonnes of food waste per round each week from the eight rounds.  If this continues, the council will far exceed its estimate of 2,600 tonnes a year’.

            Isn’t that heartening news?  I wonder what all those bitter letters of complaint were about, why the council is going to the trouble and expense of getting and delivering lids to the red boxes, and is holding a special council meeting to discuss the problem.  ’80 percent of residents are recycling?’ It is clear that Councillor Turner doesn’t live in the same road as me.   I am beginning to wonder if he lives on the same planet!

The Art of Parenting

          I think that Prime Minister David Cameron was probably right when he suggested that ‘bad parenting’ played a part in the creation of those riots last summer  (though I believe, nothing like as large a part as poverty and long-term unemployment).  I have reservations though about the suggestion that parenting classes for expectant and new mums and dads will solve the problem.  They’ll be useful, of course.  Goodness knows some young mums and dads need them badly. I fear though that it may well be those who refuse to attend them! I doubt in any case if they’ll play a significant part in preventing future antisocial behaviour, vandalism and truancy.  Only time will tell.

Ipswich’s Public Health Department where I worked from 1937 to 1939.  The photo was taken some twenty years ago when most of the Health Department’s functions had been taken over by the NHS. The building remained unchanged.        

There is, of course, nothing new in teaching expectant mums and dads about parenting young children and steering them through the first few perilous years of their lives. Before World War II Ipswich’s Public Health Department, where I was a very junior employee from 1937 till 1939, housed a Maternity and Child Welfare Clinic and a School Clinic as well as Sanitary Inspectors (they’re now called Environmental Health Officers) Health Visitors, district nurses, school nurses and midwives.   Both of those clinics were presided over by a doctor experienced in that particular field of medicine, while the whole organisation was headed by the Medical Officer of Health, another highly qualified and widely experienced doctor.  

            The Maternity and Child Welfare Clinic looked after expectant mums and young children below school age, advising and helping.   The Midwives visited the expectant mums in their own homes giving advice and support on a one-to-one basis. In those days most births took place in the mother’s own home.  After the baby’s birth and the immediate post-natal period, the Health Visitor took over, visiting regular and keeping an eye on the progress of the child and the competence of the young mum. 

The joy of parenthood.  My wife Heather, with our firstborn son in 1953.         

Although by 1953, when my first son was born, the NHS – not the local authority – was responsible for all those functions, the situation was not greatly different.  My wife, who had opted to have her baby at home (this was by then less common than it had been) received regular visits from the midwife before, during and for a week or so after, the birth.  Then the Health Visitor took over but she soon came to the conclusion that we were unlikely to prove to be ‘problem parents’.  One local government service that was available – when the UK was still struggling with debt incurred in World War II but which the country ‘just can’t afford’ now – was that of a ‘home help’.  Because of my wife’s medical history (she had had pulmonary and laryngeal TB and had survived crippling major surgery) she was accorded, free of charge, a home help, a friendly lady who came to us once a week to help with the household chores.  My wife and I didn’t go to parenting classes but, looking at my two sons today and remembering their childhood and adolescence, I think that we must have been reasonably competent parents.

            In any case, I don’t believe that the kind of parental neglect that leads to antisocial behaviour and, in extreme cases, to riots, does have its roots in those early days that are the subject of parenting classes.  It is much more socially important during the child’s and adolescent’s schooldays.   Those are the years when the absence of a loving and caring parents at home to welcome, support and generally take an interest in them really can affect their whole future.

            During my schooldays in the 1920s and 1930s my Mum was always at home when I returned from school, always eager to find out what I had been doing and to encourage me to get on with my homework.  If I went out in the evening she wanted to know where I was off to and with whom.  It never occurred to me not to tell her!  I always came home lunchtime (though we called it dinner time!) and so did my Dad.  Our meals were family meals.  I had a three mile cycle ride home from my secondary school, but we did have a two-hour mid-day break and, although there were cheap school meals available, I preferred my Mum’s cooking.

            So did my sons!  They too, came home to dinner every day and I was fortunate in always being employed near enough to my home to make it possible for me to come home too.  My wife never worked outside the home after we were married.  This was partly because of her frail physical condition but also because she found home-making and bringing up a family a satisfying full-time occupation.

            Nowadays that seems to be unthinkable.  Women ‘liberated from the kitchen sink’ are enslaved by the cash till, the restaurant kitchen or the shop or factory floor. During pregnancy they remain at work till the last minute and resume work directly they can find an affordable child minding service. Many children say goodbye to their parents soon after 8.00 am and don’t see them again till 6.00 pm or later. As a result many couples may be better off financially than either my parents or my wife and I ever were.  They may be able to get ‘their feet on the home ownership ladder’, have a second car in the garage and take an annual holiday on the shores of the Caribbean or the Mediterranean.  But they cannot give their developing children the care and attention that they (and the society into which they will grow up) need.  It is a form of child neglect that results in gang culture, antisocial behaviour, teenage pregnancies and petty crime. I don’t believe that parenting classes, however good, can ever compensate for a parent who isn’t there when needed. 

  

Week 21 2012 24.5.2012

Tendring Topics......on Line

 ‘Where the body is………

           ……..There the vultures are gathered together’; so says St. Matthew’s Gospel – and the vultures are certainly gathering round Greece’s moribund economy.  While top politicians from other, more fortunate (so far!), European countries, deplore the reluctance of the ordinary people of Greece to accept austerity measures that result in 25 percent unemployment, abject poverty and semi-starvation for millions, and early death for babies and old people at the very bottom of the Greek social ladder, others are making a fortune out of their poverty

             Ordinary Greeks see nothing of the millions of Euros generously donated by other European countries to ‘bail them out’.  Most of that money goes straight back in interest payments to the European and trans-Atlantic money lenders whose loans got them into their current position.  These bail-outs are not even ‘buying the Greeks time’. They are just lending them a little more time in which to make the money changers even richer. I am once again reminded of a satirical poem by writer G.K. Chesterton about a Mr Higgins, who ‘drives a weary quill – to lend the poor that funny cash that makes them poorer still!’

            One lucky recipient of cash from the all-but-bankrupt Greek government is Mr Kenneth Dart whose family fortune was established from the manufacture and sale of the ubiquitous plastic cup.   Mr Dart is an American citizen who has lived on Cayman Islands for years.  The Cayman Islands are a tax-free British possession in the Caribbean Sea much favoured by multi-millionaires who prefer not to hand over even a small amount of their wealth to the taxman.  Mr Dart’s very considerable fortune has recently been augmented by a cheque for 400 million Euros (£320 million pounds sterling) from the Greek Government.  They bought him off while they still had a few millions with which to do so.

            I don’t pretend to know how to solve ‘the Western World’s’ financial crisis.  It seems to me to result largely from fear of what may happen.  The most inconsequential events can make ‘the markets’ go up or down.  I am reminded of the way in which our Prime Minister and his government managed to create a nation-wide fuel crisis simply by suggesting that there might be a strike of tanker drivers.  In fact, we now know that that particular fear was completely unjustified.   Conciliatory talks were going on even as the Prime Minister was stimulating panic buying. There has since been a settlement agreed by both sides in the dispute.  There was and is no strike!

            I don’t know of a better way to organise our financial affairs more fairly and more efficiently than our current deeply flawed free-market/capitalist system – but am quite sure that there is one. I am equally sure that those very wealthy and very influential people who are doing quite nicely out of the present system will fiercely resist any attempt to change it.

Old Before their Time?

          It has sometimes seemed to me that in my childhood and youth most of us were expected to grow up and take on adult responsibilities at a much earlier age than is the custom today.  Most kids left school at fourteen, found themselves a job in a shop or factory or, in rural areas, on the land, and began to contribute to the family income.   My wife and I were members of a privileged minority who stayed at school until we were sixteen and, for the most part, secured white collar jobs in local offices.  I found a job in the General Office of Ipswich’s Public Health Department.  My future wife, when she left school at sixteen, worked in the London office of Unwin Brothers, printers.

            We both expected to hand over the greater part of our pay to our Mums. As a Junior Clerk/Student Sanitary Inspector my pay was seventeen shillings and sixpence a week (about 80p, though with a purchasing power far greater than that today!)  I handed over ten shillings (50p) of it to my Mum, and kept the remaining seven-and-sixpence.  It was expected though that I would save at least two shillings and sixpence of that ‘for the future’.  By the time we were twenty we all expected to be self-supporting and most of us confidently expected to be able to marry and start a family in our early twenties.  When, at eighteen I was called up into the Army, my Mum and Dad received a generous ‘billeting allowance’ for providing bed-and-breakfast and, with my two shillings a day army pay, I was better off financially than I had ever been! Nowadays all kids have to stay at school until they are sixteen and a very considerable number stay till they are eighteen and then carry on in further education for a number of years. Some are dependent upon their parents till well into their twenties.

            Although economically children today grow up much more slowly than we did, emotionally, physically and – in particular – sexually they are expected to develop and mature at lightning speed.  ‘Sex’, a mystery to us till we were into our teens and it forced itself upon us, is now taught in primary school.  Contraception (something I had never even heard of till well into my teens!) is taught to mixed classes. ‘Progressive opinion’ is that it should be taught at an ever earlier age.  The press, tv and radio are flooded with sexual images and suggestions. Teenage sex and teenage pregnancies are taken for granted by the press and by tv scriptwriters.  I remember an episode of Waterloo Road, well before the 9.00 pm watershed, in which a sixteen year old lad, after a night of passion with a female classmate of the same age, was commended as being ‘responsible’ when he urged her to take a ‘morning after’ pill.

 Little girls are eager to ‘grow up’ and become attractive to the opposite sex. Fashion and cosmetic retailers pander to this urge.  It is little wonder that unhappy and disturbed children become prey to those who flatter them, ply them with gifts (and booze and drugs) and groom them for their own purposes.  As a regular blog reader colourfully put it, ‘Schoolgirls dress as prostitutes and prostitutes dress as schoolgirls!’.  I used to think that children of my generation were expected to grow up too quickly and that we were robbed of the best part of our youth by the war.  We were certainly not robbed of our childhood quite so blatantly, and with quite such potentially dreadful consequences, as are the children of today.    

 Faithful Shepherds of their Flocks

            2012 is proving a fateful year for Clacton’s Christian communities.  Rev Anthony Spooner (‘Father Anthony’ to his flock) of St James Anglican Church has already retired and Rev. Chris Wood of Christ Church, URC Church, is leaving this summer to take his ministry to Stowmarket and neighbourhood  (the part of Suffolk with which I am most familiar!).  The Vicar of St. Paul’s  Anglican Church is also leaving as, so I understand, is the current Minister of Trinity Methodist Church and the local Minister (Commanding Officer?) of the Salvation Army.

            I am sure that every one of them will be greatly missed.  I shall particularly miss Father Anthony of St James’ and Rev. Chris Wood of Christ Church, both of whom – I hope I can say without presumption – have become personal friends.  I first attended a Sunday 8.00 am Holy Communion service at St James twenty or more years ago.  I had been brought up as a High Church Anglican but had lost my Christian faith completely. However I had slowly recovered it in the silent Meetings for Worship of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), of which I  had been a member for over forty years.   Sometimes though, I yearned for the sonorous words of the three centuries old Anglican ‘Book of Common Prayer’; hence, my attendance at St James’ that morning.

The rather splendid interior of St. James’    

I wasn’t disappointed - but I was very pleasantly surprised when Father Anthony, who knew me as a Quaker but knew nothing of my Anglican background, invited me to take the consecrated bread and wine of Holy Communion with the members of his congregation.  Subsequently I was a very occasional attender at that early service, and after my wife’s death in 2006 I became a regular attender.  About six months later I revived and renewed my membership of the Church of England (strictly speaking I had never left it!) and am now in dual membership of St. James' Church and Clacton local Quaker Meeting..  I find that the liturgical and sacramental nature of the 8.00 am Mass (that’s what we members of St. James’ prefer to call it), and the silent waiting on God that is the basis of the Quaker Worship in which I take part at 10.30 am, complement each-other perfectly.  Always I have found Father Anthony friendly and welcoming.  We certainly don’t agree about everything  (I don't for instance, share his deeply held objection to the ordination of women to the priesthood, and I am quite sure that my blog – of which he is a regular reader – must sometimes raise his eyebrows!) but I don’t think that that has dimmed our feeling of friendship.  He has a great respect for the Quakers and has occasionally joined us at Meeting for Worship. Then, of course, he becomes for an hour, simply ‘our Friend Anthony Spooner’.  Rev Chris Wood also has a high regard for Quakers.  A recent leading article in his church newsletter about Quaker values and practice brought a blush to my cheek – I would like to think that we always live up to his expectations!  He too, has occasionally attended Quaker Meetings for Worship and I was very pleased and deeply moved when, in July 2006, both he and Father Anthony attended the Memorial Meeting for Worship held at the Quaker Meeting House, to give thanks for the Grace of God made evident in the life of our late Friend Heather Hall.

       

                                                 Clacton Quaker Meeting house

I  have another personal reason for feeling warmly towards Chris Wood and his congregation.   Before his appointment and occasionally when, after his appointment, he was unable to be available at Christ Church, I was sometimes asked to lead the worship there.  It involved choosing the scripture readings and the hymns, leading the prayers, saying a few cheery words to the children (up to about a dozen of them!) before they departed to their Sunday School, and then preaching a sermon which, so the Church Secretary informed me, was expected to last for at least 25 minutes. It was a form of worship that was quite different both from that of the Church of England or of the Quakers, but I was prepared to do my best.  No one yawned or fell asleep, no-one stalked out of the church in a righteous huff – and I was invited to return and lead the worship again.  I can’t have been a total disaster.

Christ Church URC Church, Clacton

I enjoyed being ‘the Rev.’ for an hour – but it was exhausting and I certainly admire the stamina of those like Chris who have to do it as just one of their regular weekly tasks!  Nowadays a friend and I regularly attend the short service of ‘Celtic Prayer’ held every Thursday morning, and followed by ‘a cup of coffee, a bun and a chat’ in the church hall afterwards.  It is gratifying to find that a few of the older church members remember my  under-studying for Chris in the past. We also attend a brief mid-week mass held at St. James’ on Wednesday mornings.  This too is followed by tea or coffee, biscuits and a chat in the church hall.  The form of worship at St. James’ could hardly be more different from that at Christ Church URC – yet one thing that the members of their congregations have in common is the sincerity of the welcome given to strangers in their midst and the general atmosphere of warmth and friendliness that prevails in their presence.

            I have no doubt that much of this is the result of the encouragement and example of their spiritual leaders. My friend and I wish both Father Anthony and Rev Chris Wood happiness and fulfilment in whatever the future may hold for them

           

           

           

            

Week 20 2012 17.5.2012

Tendring Topics.......on Line

 Standing back…….and starting again!

          Everyone, I feel sure, is familiar with the story of the London police officer who, asked the best way to get to a destination on the other side of the capital, replied, ‘Well, if I wanted to get there I wouldn’t start from here!’   I think that neither the government, nor the main opposition, know how best to reach the country’s destination (a growing economy and a major reduction of the gap between national income and national expenditure) because their policies are based on false assumptions.  They need to stop tweaking at this or that detail, stop drawing attention to their opponents’ mistakes, and take a fresh look at the problem.

            What, for instance, is the point in the Queen’s speech to Parliament about supporting hard working families, when we know perfectly well that thousands of people, particularly young people, would desperately like to be hard at work.    Thanks largely to the government’s policies, they are jobless and unable to find work to do?  What is the point of congratulating oneself on having taken thousands of people ‘out of income tax liability altogether’ when there are thousands of others who would love to have incomes large enough to be liable for income tax?  What is the point of assuring us that ‘we’re all in this together’ when we know perfectly well that the government’s policies are impoverishing most of the population while permitting a very wealthy minority to get even wealthier?

            You may feel that our economy presents problems of such complexity that their solution is beyond the capacity of us ordinary mortals and is best left for the country’s most brilliant financial brains to solve. Perhaps, but it was  the best financial brains in the country that got us into this mess – and it could be that it is common sense and  natural justice that will get us out of it*. It doesn’t take a financial wizard to realize that there are two possible ways of reducing the gap between national income and expenditure; by cutting back on national expenditure or by increasing national income by means of taxation – or perhaps by a judicious mixture of both.   At the same time there is a desperate need to encourage the growth of the economy; to get the builders, the manufacturers and the retailers busy and productive again.   We need to reduce the number of unemployed, get people working again, off benefit (not by penalising them but by removing their need) and paying taxes again.

             The Government seems to believe that cutting back on national expenditure, cutting public services rather than increased taxation, is the answer.  Expansion of the private sector will, they think, compensate for inevitable job losses in the public sector.  No-one will miss all those bureaucrats who will lose their ‘well-paid jobs and gold-plated pensions’.  But ‘bureaucrats’ are only a small minority of public service employees.  These include doctors, nurses, other health workers, police officers, fire fighters, prison staff, teachers, university professors and scientists.

            Nor was it ever likely that the ‘private sector’ would provide work for those losing their jobs in the public service.   A substantial section of the ‘private sector’ depends for its livelihood on public service contracts.  Cutting public service expenditure means cutting back on those contracts too.  Building contractors, building and maintaining schools, hospitals and other public buildings are particularly hard hit.

            Public service cuts increase the number of unemployed who no longer contribute to the Treasury through taxation, and who become eligible for job seekers’ allowance and other state benefits. Their poverty means that they reduce their expenditure, hitting the retail businesses that had relied on their custom. Their lack of work adds to rather than reduces the gap between national expenditure and national income!   Meanwhile reduction of public services mean badly maintained highways, badly policed localities, an increase in crime rates, in vandalism and other antisocial behaviour, the evolution of what once were well-run council housing estates into unredeemable slums, and the gradual deterioration of the civilised environment in which the private sector is able to flourish.

             Where the government has increased taxes to help to narrow the deficit they have concentrated on indirect taxation – increased VAT and increased duty on petrol, alcohol and tobacco.  These penalise the less-well-off disproportionately and deal yet another blow to hard-pressed retailers!

            I think that we need to stand back, survey the situation – and then start again. To get the economy going I would suggest cutting the rate of VAT and cutting the duty on petrol and diesel oil. I no longer drive but the price of fuel oil, used for both long and short haul transport, affects the price of everything in the shops and of virtually every human activity. VAT is similar.  It is much more to the point to raise the income of poor and middle-class folk than to benefit the very wealthy.  We won’t use any increase in disposable income to buy a yacht, or a Premier League football club, or a palatial home on the shores of the Mediterranean.  We’ll use it to for shopping expeditions into the High Street, for maintenance to keep the family car on the road, or for giving our homes a fresh coat of paint.  Thus will the wheels of industry and commerce again begin to turn.

            I think too that taxation should play a much bigger part in reducing that deficit  – but it should be  fair taxation, based on no other factor than ability to pay.  I don’t believe it was a great achievement for the recent budget to have raised the lower limit of income tax liability to ‘take thousands of people out of the system altogether’

            I believe, on the contrary, that everyone with an income however small should repay a proportion of that income in tax.   Then everyone in the country would be able to claim a stake in the country’s common wealth.  Everyone, from the lowest to the very highest, should be required to pay that same proportion of his or her income.  The proportion would vary from year to year, according to the country’s needs.  For the very poor that proportion would be a very small sum indeed, for the very wealthy it would be a large sum – but for no-one  would it be a sum beyond his or her ability to pay.

            There should be no loopholes for tax avoidance or tax evasion.  That proportionate income tax would be the first call on everyone’s income.  Paying it should be a matter of duty and a matter of pride.  What the taxpayer did with the remainder of his or her income would be up to them – give some of it to charity, put it in an offshore account, buy a football club – it would all be nothing to do with the rest of us.  But we all, multi-millionaire, farm labourer, refuse-collector would be able to claim.  ‘This is my country – and every year I renew my claim on its ownership when I pay my income tax!’

            It won’t happen.  Human selfishness and human greed, from which few of us can claim to be wholly free, will make sure of that.  Still – a very old man can surely be allowed to dream!

*I have just heard on the news (11.5.2012) that the financial experts employed by one of the USA’s largest and most prestigious banks – surely the very best of the very best, have managed to lose two billion dollars.  It doesn’t inspire  confidence in the wisdom and skill of ‘financial experts’!

The Enormity of the Problem!

          A week or two ago I mentioned in this blog that The Times ‘Rich List’, then just published, made it clear that while most of us have become poorer in the past year, the seriously wealthy have become even wealthier.  I mentioned it again above – but I hadn’t really appreciated the scale of the problem until I was referred to a blog of Michael Meacher MP that I wholeheartedly commend to readers.  You can find it as I did by means of a somewhat complex link: http://www.michaelmeacher.info/weblog/2012/04/britains-1000-richest-persons-made-gains-of-155bn-in-last-3-years/   or you can type ‘Michael Meacher MP’ into Google and you’ll quickly find it there.

                However It definitely comes into the category of ‘things I wish I had written’ and I am sure that Mr Meacher won’t mind my quoting this particular blog in its entirety below:

Times Rich List, published today and compulsory reading for anybody who wants to understand Britain’s power structure today, holds three extremely significant conclusions.   One is that the 1,000 richest persons in the UK have increased their wealth by so much in the last 3 years – £155bn – that they themselves alone could pay off the entire UK budget deficit and still leave themselves with £30bn to spare which should be enough to keep the wolf from the door.   The second, even more staggering, is that whilst the rest of the country is being crippled by the biggest public expenditure and benefits squeeze for a century, these 1,000 persons, containing many of the bankers and hedge fund and private equity operators who caused the financial crash in the first place, have not been made subject to any tax payback whatever commensurate to their gains.   This is truly a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.

The third is that despite the biggest slump for nearly a century, the slowest and most anaemic recovery, and prolonged austerity stretching to a decade or more, this ultra-rich clique are now sitting on wealth even greater than what they had amassed at the height of the boom just before the crash.   Their combined wealth is now estimated at more than £414bn, equivalent to more than a third of Britain’s entire GDP.    They include 77 billionaires and 23 others whose wealth exceeds £750m.  

Despite these massive repositories of wealth, these are some of the very people to whom Osborne gifted £3bn in his recent budget by cutting the 50p tax rate.   That measure alone gave 40,000 UK millionaires an extra average £14,000 a week, at the same time as those on very low incomes in receipt of working tax credits who couldn’t find an employer to increase their hours of work from 16 to  24 a week were being deprived in the same budget of £77 a week, around a third of their income, through their tax credits being withdrawn.

In 1997 the wealth of the richest 1,000 amounted to £99bn.   The increase in their wealth over the last 15 years has therefore been £315bn.   If this increase in wealth were subject to capital gains tax at the current 28% rate, it would yield £88bn, and that alone would pay off more than 70% of the total budget deficit.   However Osborne seems to share the notorious view of the New York heiress, Leonora Helmsley: “taxes are only for the little people”. 

Thanks Mr Meacher.  There’s really nothing I could possibly add to that.

‘With LOL (lots of love) from…….

Somehow that doesn’t seem quite the way in which we expect our Prime Minister to end text messages to the head in the UK of an international media organisation with its headquarters in a foreign country, even if that head is a highly intelligent, very astute and very personable business woman.

            Nor do we really expect present and past  prime ministers and other leading politicians to bid fond and regretful farewells to that same lady when, as a result of a phone hacking scandal, she gives up her job.

            Everything that we are hearing at the Leveson Enquiry confirms my recently expressed opinion that Rupert Murdoch and his entourage have never bothered to seek favours from our top politicians.  They just sat back and waited for our politicians to come seeking their favour.  And when they lose that favour, as Prime Minister Gordon Brown did, how very cross and petulant (according to Rebekah Brooks) they become!

            How demeaning!  How shaming!    We’re told in the Scriptures that it profits a man nothing to gain the whole world if, in doing so, he loses his soul.  But to lose it for the sake of a few favourable headlines in The Sun - really!

         

           

             

            

Week 19 2012

Tendring Topics.........on Line

 ‘Deja vu’

             As I get older and older I find that practically everything that happens around me reminds me of an incident in the distant past. ‘There is nothing new under the sun’, as the author of the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes remarks.  A few weeks ago the government’s crass handling of a possible petrol shortage included the potentially lethal advice to motorists to have a jerrican or two of petrol stored in the garage.  This triggered a memory of the coining of the word ‘jerrycan’ during the winter of 1941/1942 to refer to portable steel petrol containers captured from the German Army in the Libyan Desert.

            The current heavy rain and flooding in the midst of a serious drought might have been thought to be a unique occurrence.  It again took me back in memory to the Libyan desert; this time a few months after the naming of the jerrycan.  There can be few places on earth more arid and barren than the Libyan desert in the area of Tobruk.  A wilderness of rock and sand extends for mile after desolate mile.  Through it,  from the barren desert in the south to the sea in the north, run a number of deep valleys or ‘wadies’, carved out centuries earlier by now-dried-up rivers at a time when Libya’s climate was very different from that today.

            In one such wadi the 231^st Medium Battery RA was stationed in the spring of 1942 to oppose the advance into Egypt of General Rommel’s re-equipped and reinvigorated Afrikakorps.  Our eight 6in howitzers, pointing westwards, were in protective gunpits dug into the valley floor.  Round them were the bivvy tents of the crew, erected over widened slit trenches that afforded a measure of protection from bombardment and made them relatively comfortable sleeping quarters. From time to time one or other of the two troops of four guns would be ordered out into no-mans-land (officially it was called ‘the operational area’) for a day, to shell and exchange fire with unseen enemy gun positions or troop concentrations a few miles to our west.   Both sides were testing the other’s strengths and weaknesses in preparation for a major offensive.

A flooded gunpit near Gazala, Libya, March 1942. The gun barrel is almost concealed by camouflage netting swathing the whole gunpit.           

We were sure that it never rained in the Libyan desert. Very occasionally though, it does! One night, I think it must have been in March, black storm clouds blew in from the Mediterranean.  Amid flashing lightning and the crash and rumble of thunder the heavens opened and rain bucketed down, perhaps for a couple of hours, perhaps longer.   It was long enough to transform our wadi from a long-dried-up river bed, to an active fast-flowing river.  The gunpits quickly filled with water which rose to above the wheel axles of the guns.  The trenches over which our bivvy tents were erected were inundated, soaking our bedding and spare clothing. 

            Had Rommel attacked that night there would have been little resistance. The weather though is non-partisan.   Rommel’s troops were rendered impotent by that same storm.  The Afrikakorps was as incapable of attacking as we were of defending.

            That morning there was not the usual, ‘Stand to on the guns!  at first light, with every gun crew ready for action.  Dawn broke.   The rain stopped, the flood subsided, draining away into the desert sand.  The guns, our bivvies and – eventually – our clothes and bedding, dried out in hot North African sunshine.

            By sunset we were more-or-less back to normal.  The evening ‘Stand to!’ took place without incident.  Much worse things than that were to happen to us before we saw England again. It was just an unexpected incident, with no harm done.   It was an incident that has been brought to the forefront of my memory by recent floods on our own thirsty land.

Legacies!

          Spokesmen for the Coalition Government complain ad nauseum about the terrible financial legacy left them by their predecessors.   It’s true that they took over at a time of financial crisis; thugh it was not one created by the previous Government, but by the greed and incompetence of the bankers.  I remember that in the last months of the Labour Government, Britain’s economy was showing signs of the green shoots of economic recovery. We were beginning to pull out of recession. I wouldn’t suggest that that Government deserved any special credit for those signs of recovery – but their successors certainly bear some responsibility for destroying them with their blindly applied brake on public expenditure.

            I wonder if the members of today’s government ever give thought to the legacy that they will leave their successors.    They hope that they will have reduced substantially the national deficit, the gap between government expenditure and government income from taxation. Whether they will succeed is uncertain – I think it unlikely until the seriously wealthy can be persuaded (or coerced) into carrying their fair share of the burden.

            What is certain is that we shall have become a nation of debtors, with every university graduate carrying a lifelong burden.  Joining them, from the other end of the social scale, will be the former council tenants persuaded to take out mortgages in pursuit of the dream of ‘home ownership for all’ and to ensure that, with council tenancies being now on a temporary basis only, they secure for themselves a home for life..   

 Already evident is the creation of a disillusioned and disheartened population, including a vast army of young, bored and impoverished unemployed people, rapidly becoming unemployable and completely alienated from society. Their only legal hope of escape from a life of poverty is the very remote possibility of ‘coming up on the lottery!’  It will need only the spark of unjustified police violence for them to explode into the kind of rioting that we experienced last year.

            Other legacies will be a run-down public service with depleted and embittered staff, shabby and neglected public buildings, parks and gardens, council housing estates degenerating into slums, vandalised properties, graffiti polluted walls and badly policed town centres resulting in a wave of petty, and not-so-petty crime. The neglect of our roads and footpaths is an example of the public squalor that is already making itself  apparent.

            I have referred before to Clacton-on-Sea’s potholed roads and broken and dangerous pavements.  Last week in the Clacton Gazette there were two angry readers’ letters on the same subject.

            One drew attention to a ‘very large and deep pothole’ in the middle of the road at Clacton’s busy St. John’s roundabout. The writer says that if a motorcyclist, unaware of its existence rode over it, the rider would be thrown into the road and into the path of oncoming traffic.  The letter-writer reported the pothole on the County Council’s website on 11^th April and received an automatic acknowledgement – but there’s no sign of action.  The other letter was from a St Osyth motorist warning of an unexpected pothole that took his car off the road and into a telegraph pole. He was not seriously injured but his car was a write-off.  The telegraph pole has since been replaced – but the pothole is still there!  Tendring District isn’t unique.  Similar circumstances must exist nation-wide

            Highways are, of course, a county council, not a central government responsibility.   But central government has cut grants to local authorities, demanded that they make economies and urged them not to raise council tax.  I’d like to see more money spent on highways but I am well aware that, if it is, there will be less to spend on the care of the elderly or of the very young.   

            Oh – to be absolutely fair to the government it must be added that a tiny minority really have benefited from their policies.  While most of us have become poorer the seriously wealthy have become even wealthier!

            It takes only two or three years for communities to degenerate into lawless slums.  It could take decades to get them back onto their feet again and to restore their civic pride.  I don’t envy the government, whatever its political complexion that has the task of dealing with the legacy likely to be left by the ‘arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of milk’

‘If you want to know the time – ask a policeman’

          Thus advised a popular Edwardian Music Hall song, adding in explanation, ‘every member of the force has a watch and chain of course, so, if you want to know the time – ask a policeman’.  Nowadays most of us wear wristwatches day and night, taking them off only in the shower.  At work if we aren’t wearing a watch someone else within shouting distance certainly will be.  There’s at least an even chance that there will be a radio-controlled watch or clock available giving accurate time to the second.

This apparently is not so in County Hall, Chelmsford.  Perhaps I was over-generous to Essex County Council in suggesting above that they might only be able to give our roads and pavements the maintenance they need by cutting down on other vital services.  According to the daily Gazette a Freedom of Information request has revealed that between April 2011 and January 2012 county council employees dialled the Speaking Clock 1,349 times, clocking up a bill of £566! This was not a vast sum of money compared with those that, a few years ago during the reign of Council Leader Lord Hanningfield, some county councillors were claiming in unaudited expenses, but it was surely completely unjustified. In over thirty years in the local government service I certainly never dialled the Speaking Clock myself, nor do I recall anyone else ever doing so.

            Possibly more justifiable was the sum spent on calling directory enquiries. During that same period there were 5,705 calls made to ‘118 numbers’ (a few would have been reasonable enough – but nearly 6,000?). The cost of these – with the £566 for time enquiries – came to a total of £22,768!  I reckon that would have paid for filling in several potholes!   A ‘council spokesman’ is reported as saying, ‘We strive to keep all costs at a minimum and do not endorse the use of the talking clock, and we actively encourage our staff not to use it’.  So that’s all right then.

Last week’s local elections

          Last week’s local elections (in which our own Tendring District was not involved) confirmed my belief that more people vote to keep one or other of the candidates out than to get their own preferred candidate in.  The strong Labour vote was, I think, the result of disillusionment with the coalition government rather than a conviction that Labour can cure all the nation’s ills.

            I was glad that the Green Party did relatively well, their candidate coming third in the London Mayoralty election, in front of the Liberal Democrat candidate. I am delighted that the British National Party was virtually wiped off the political map, but am sorry to see UKIP flourishing.  I am sorrier that Boris Johnson won than I am that Ken Livingstone lost.   It seems that Boris has ambitions to be Party Leader and made a not-too-heavily-veiled criticism of David Cameron in his victory speech.

            I was unreservedly glad that seven out of the eight local authorities that had a referendum on whether or not they wanted a Mayor, rejected the idea decisively.  They will continue with their ‘cabinet style’ administration.  I am only sorry that members of the public were never offered a referendum on the central government’s decision to insist that all local authorities should either have an all-powerful Mayor or adopt ‘cabinet government’, copying Westminster in having policy decided by a tiny clique of the ruling majority party, to which all party member on the Council are expected to give their unqualified support. I believe that if public opinion had been tested in referendums, a substantial majority would have opted for a continuation of the old ‘committee’ based local administration, in which every issue was discussed openly in committee before being presented to the Council for further debate and a decision.

            The old system may have been more cumbersome and time consuming – but it certainly came closer to expressing the will of the electorate.