Week 33 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

It wasn’t ‘too good to be true’

          Regular blog readers will know that I have been concerned about the fate of Meriem Ibrahim, the young North Sudanese mother who had been convicted of the ‘heinous crime’ of abandoning Islam for Christianity (she had, in fact, been brought up by her Christian mother and had never been a Muslim) and sentenced to death by hanging.  Before being hanged she was to be flogged with 100 lashes for marrying a Christian and having a child by him.  Such marriages are forbidden by Sharia law and are condemned as ‘adulterous’! At the time of her condemnation she was heavily pregnant with her second child – a baby girl who was born while her mother was shackled to the floor of her cell.

            Following world-wide protests an appeal against the sentence was successful but she was prevented from flying with her family to her husband’s home in the USA on the pretext of a faulty passport. A fortnight ago a report on BBC tv announced that the whole family had been allowed to fly to Italy where they had met the Pope who had congratulated Meriem on her steadfast refusal to abandon her Christian faith, a course of action that could have earned her freedom.  Sadly this report was never confirmed or taken up by the media – and a search on line by Google discovered no news of Meriem later than her re-arrest at Khartoum airport when she had tried to leave the country.  I concluded that the news of the family’s flight to Italy was ‘too good to be true’ and this gloomy opinion was reinforced by a news report that the family had taken refuge in the United States Embassy in Khartoum and that her father (who had left her mother to bring up her baby alone!) was urging the reinstatement of the death sentence.

 Home – at last.  The Ibrahim family re-united in the USA.  Baby Maya, born in a Sudanese prison cell, is in her mother’s arms and her toddler son in the care of his Grandpa.   

 It has now become clear that that early BBC report was true.  The whole family had clandestinely flown to Italy with an Italian government minister.  They had met the Pope and Meriem had been congratulated on her refusal to renounce her faith despite the dire consequences that could have followed that refusal.  It seems too that that hasty departure from the American Embassy and from North Sudan, was not a moment too soon.  A lynch mob had been threatening to storm the Embassy and seize its prey!  At a time of bloodshed and violence and of the persecution of Christians throughout much of the Middle East and large areas of northern Africa, the Meriem Ibrahim story is one that has a happy ending!  Latest news reports confirm that Meriem, her husband and two children have flown to her husband’s home in the USA where they have been given a heroes’ welcome.  It was one story that wasn’t too good to be true!

Still living with Mum at 21? - and 31?

          Members and supporters of the present government never tire of complaining about the ‘terrible mess that the previous Labour government left us to clear up’. Well, I was never an enthusiast for New Labour but the Governor of the Bank of England who has recently retired always insisted that it was the Bankers and money-lenders, not the politicians, who were to blame for that mess.

            One of the messes that the New Labour government inherited from the Thatcher years – and failed to address – was the iniquitous right to buy legislation that compelled local authorities, but not private landlords, to sell their council owned houses at a fraction of their market value to sitting tenants  Inevitably council houses in pleasant rural areas were quickly bought up and sold on - often at an enormous profit – directly this legally became possible.  Equally inevitably, since councils were unable to build houses for letting ­to replace them, there were no properties for letting at reasonable rents in many rural villages.   Young couples, whose forbears had lived in that village for generations, found themselves compelled to move away.  Many villages consequently became ‘dormitories’, with their inhabitants commuting daily to the nearest town, doing much of their shopping there, and taking no interest in local life and local affairs.

            Mrs Thatcher and her successors, in pursuit of their dream of home ownership for all changed public attitudes so that, as Paul Honeywood, Tendring Council’s ‘housing boss’ told a Clacton Gazette reporter ‘Council homes are often looked at as a last resort for the unemployed and people in financial trouble but’ he added, ‘we are trying to change that perception and offer it as an alternative for those wanting to set up on their own or start a family’. What Mr Honeywood is urging is in fact, a return to the system that existed and worked satisfactorily for a century before the advent of Thatcherism – when local authorities, without interference from national politicians, built houses for letting and allocated them to those in need.  There was then no stigma attached to ‘living in a council house’.  When I was appointed as a Public Health Inspector by Clacton Council in 1956, my family and I were happy to live in a Council House in Holland-on-Sea until, after a few months, we purchased and moved into the bungalow in which I am living today.

            Clacton, and the Tendring District generally, is particularly in need of social housing available for letting at a reasonable rent.  The housing charity Shelter has discovered that one third of Tendring’s 20 to 34 year olds, despite being in work, continue to live in the family home with mum and dad.   They simply can’t afford ‘to get their feet on the housing ladder’ with house properties at their present level – and there are no longer, as there once were, council houses available for letting.

            Tendring’s position is worse than that of other neighbouring local authority areas.   In Colchester 6,064 (22 percent) of 20 to 34 year old are still living in the family home, in Braintree 5,770 (28 percent) and in Tendring 4,801 (37 percent) Typical of such a ‘stay-at-home’ is 22 year old Natasha Fuller of St Osyth who works full-time as a hairdresser.  She told a Gazette reporter, ‘I still live at home with my parents even though I have a full-time job.  I don’t earn enough to save for a mortgage or rent on my own home while running a car at the same time’.

Shelter representative Campbell Robb told the Gazette ’The clipped-wing generation are finding themselves with no choice but to remain living with mum and dad well into adulthood.  And those who aren’t lucky enough to have this option face a lifetime of unstable, expensive, private renting.  The government knows that the only way to turn the tide of the housing shortage is to fill the gap between the homes we have and the homes we need’.

And the only effective way of doing that is to repeal the ‘right to buy’ legislation and – as in the pre-Thatcher past – encourage local authorities to build the homes their district needs, and to let them to local people who need a home, without interference from ‘Nanny knows best, dear’ politicians!
 .       
ISIS is still with us!

          The blood bath in Gaza, the downing of the Malaysian air liner over eastern Ukraine and the centenary commemoration of World War I have driven ISIS and its determination to establish an extremist Islamic Caliphate throughout Syria and Iraq (and that’s just for a start!) from the news headlines during the past week or so.  They’re still there though and although they don’t seem to have made any progress towards taking Baghdad, they’re consolidating their strict Islamic rule over the territories that they have taken and are edging forward whenever they have the opportunity to do so.

            A recent effect of this has been to drive tens of thousands of Christian Iraqis from their homes in areas where the Christian faith has flourished for centuries.  Many in northern Iraq had been protected by the semi-independent Kurds but their protectors have now been driven out and the new extreme Islamic regime has offered the choice of death, conversion to their own extreme version of Islam, or a crippling tax payable by all non-Muslims. nearly one hundred thousand have fled and are now trapped on a barren mountain without shelter, food or water..  They urgently need the help of their Christian brothers and sisters in Europe and elsewhere. ISIS has changed its name and now likes to be called simply IS, standing for Islamic State.  Its members haven’t changed their nature though.

            Successive British governments’ no-doubt-well-intentioned meddling in Iraq, Libya and Syria has prepared the ground and earned recruits for extremists like IS and Al Qaeda.The Christian faith is being eradicated from the very area that gave it birth, and the whole of the Middle East and large areas of Africa, are now areas in which Britons visit, live and work in danger of their lives!  

            I wonder if Tony Blair and his successors are proud of the results of their activities?

Later News

         Since I wrote the above, only a day or two ago, events have moved quickly.  The USA and the UK governments have heeded the call for help of the thousands of Christian Iraqi civilians in their barren mountain refuge.   We are co-operating with the Americans in dropping water, food and the means of providing shelter to those refugees and the USA is also carrying out air strikes on the IS forces, though both governments insist that there will be no ground forces involved.

I applaud wholeheartedly the provision of humanitarian aid though, quite apart from the morality of the action, I doubt very much whether air strikes alone can be expected either to make it possible for the refugees to go peacefully to their former home free from persecution, or to pass through territory IS holds to a place of safety. Obviously the present situation cannot continue.  We can't supply those refugees indefinitely - and winter is approaching.  I wish that I could envisage a happy non-violent ending to the present situation.  I can't and, if I'm to be absolutely honest, I can't  imagine a violent one either.

I hope and pray that someone can! 

           

Week 32 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

Nick Clegg

          Do you remember the televised debates of the Party leaders prior to our last parliamentary General Election?  I don’t usually listen to politicians sounding off – but I did watch those debates, and thought that I learned from them. 

 I had for many years considered myself to be an internationalist and a democratic socialist. More recently though I had come to the conclusion that the most important task any new British government needed to undertake was the reduction of the yawning gap between the incomes of country’s wealthiest and poorest citizens. I had been impressed by The Spirit Level by Quakers Kate Picket and Richard Wilkinson which demonstrated that reducing that gap benefited the whole community and not just the poor. I had become a modest supporter of the Equality Trust* and had come to realize that public ownership of the means of manufacture and distribution (whether by local or national government) was only one of the means by which greater economic justice could be secured.  .

During the decade of New Labour rule the gap between the incomes of the rich and poor had actually widened!  Lord Mandelson, a creator of New Labour had publicly declared that he had no problem with billionaires.  Well, I believe that while there are families that are homeless, ill-clad, and don’t know where the next meal is coming from, he should have a problem with them! 

Despite being well into my eighties at the time of the last election I was one of those ‘floating voters’ that politicians are eager to persuade. I intended to vote for the candidate of the Party most likely at least to attempt to reduce that ever-widening gap.

           I have to confess it.  I was taken in by Nick Clegg.  He I thought was the most inspiring of the three speakers, and the one with the most radical ideas.  He appeared to have a ‘fire within’ that reminded me of some of the early twentieth century Labour Movement pioneers  Because of this, for the first time in my life, his party received my vote and although with our system of voting it would have made no difference which way I voted, I have since deeply regretted it.

            Tony Blair, although he abandoned many of the purposes for which the Labour Party was created, did at least win elections for his New Labour.  Nick Clegg didn’t.  His party did quite well – but not well enough.  He went into an unequal coalition with the Conservatives and began to drop the principles on which he had been elected.  I had hoped that he might work towards a more equal society.  He supported the new Chancellor’s early gift to the super-rich, the reduction of the highest rate of income tax, thus benefiting those with a taxable income in excess of £150,000 a year – while beginning an austerity programme that particularly affected the poor and disadvantaged!  In his election campaign he had tried for the student vote – promising not to raise tuition fees.  In coalition this was one of the first promises that he abandoned.

            He would no doubt claim that by membership of the coalition he had been able to modify his Conservative partners more objectionable policies in a way that would have been impossible had he been in opposition.  In the world of British politics today, I don’t believe that that is true.  When a government doesn’t command the majority of votes in the House of Commons a determined opposition party can support the government on matters about which they agree or at least find acceptable, and join (or threaten to join) with other parties to defeat legislation that they find unacceptable.  Thus, in modifying the policies of a ‘minority’ government  a determined opposition party can exert more effective influence than a coalition partner.

            Nigel Farage’s UKIP has an increased representation in the European Parliament - where the Ukippers revealed themselves as an ill-mannered rabble, insulting their fellow parliamentarians by ostentatiously turning their backs on the European Anthem!. In the European and local government elections UKIP have shown themselves capable of appealing to the xenophobia, greed and fear of a great many electors and of taking votes, particularly from Conservative candidates.  They haven’t yet any Westminster MPs and they haven’t gained control of any local authority, but they have gained many Council Chamber seats and, again and again, have driven representatives of the Conservative, Lib.Dem. and Labour parties into ‘third place’ in the polls.

            Anybody surveying the UK political scene today can see that it is the Ukippers rather than the Lib.Dems. who pose the greater threat to an overall  Conservative Majority at next year’s General Election. Ukippers themselves are becoming increasingly confident.  I have always regarded our own Conservative MP Douglas Carswell as a Crypto-Ukipper.  He has the essential qualification of acute Europhobia and has even been singled out for praise by Nigel Farage.  Yet UKIP has selected a candidate to oppose him in the forthcoming General Election.  That candidate probably won't win – but he could take enough Conservative votes to ensure that Douglas Carswell doesn’t win either.  It isn’t surprising that David Cameron is much more concerned with out-flanking Nigel Farage with ever-more Europhobic measures to halt the flow of EU visitors and immigrants, than he is with the concerns of his own Lib.Dem. ‘deputy’.

   I think it likely that Nick Clegg will be remembered in history as the man who finally destroyed the once-great Liberal Party.

*For further information about the Equality Trust and ‘The Spirit Level’ contact www.equalitytrust.org.uk or Equality Trust, 18 Victoria Park Square, London E2 9PF   Email – info@equalitytrust.org.uk

The Slaughter of the Innocents!

          Last week the CIA announced that it had found no evidence of Russia being directly involved in the destruction of that Malaysian air liner.  That, I am sure, was not what their political bosses had wanted them to report and I am equally sure that, had the Russians been directly involved, the CIA would have found evidence of it.

            On 28th July,  a spokesman for the Kiev Ukrainian Government declared that the aircraft’s ‘black boxes’ had revealed that the air liner had been destroyed by a ground-to-air missile as had been surmised.  That was surely extraordinary.  We had been told that the ‘black boxes’ had been handed over intact by the pro-Russian insurgents to representatives of the Malaysian Airline and that they were being sent to the UK to be opened and have their contents analysed.  How, I wonder, did those boxes fall into the hands of the Kiev government and had they tampered with them in any way?

It was a fortnight before international inspectors were able to secure the site of the crash and begin to make a proper inspection of the remains of the plane and even now their situation is far from safe and secure.  This has not been because of lack of co-operation from the insurgent authorities (they, after all, found and secured the ‘black boxes’ and handed them over untouched to the Malaysian air line). The reason the inspectors can't get on with their work is continued shelling by the artillery of the Kiev Government and the refusal of that government’s forces to cease their attacks while inspection is going on. 

In fact, we still don’t know for certain how that air disaster took place.  We don’t know if it was shot down by a missile and, if it was, who fired that missile, why they fired it and from where.   This hasn’t prevented the leaders of the EU from deciding that it was all the result of Russia’s support of the Ukrainian rebels – and they have imposed a further set of economic and political sanctions on Russia.  Meanwhile, NATO is holding a series of naval exercises in the Baltic Sea and the UK is sending troops to take part in military exercises in Poland. Both actions are surely quite uncalled for and dangerously provocative.  Can we really have already forgotten the horrors of the two twentieth century world wars?  The few of us who still remember World War II certainly haven’t.

Meanwhile in the ‘Holy Land', Israel is conducting a bloody and destructive campaign in Gaza which has so far resulted in the deaths of nearly 2,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians and many of them women and children. A fragile temporary cease-fire lasted only a matter of hours and the Israeli Prime Minister has suggested that the campaign may go on for much longer. Yes, they have been provoked.  HAMAS too bears some responsibility for the slaughter – but the Israeli response has been and is totally disproportionate.  The situation is made worse by the fact that Israel exerts a tight blockade on Gaza which means that the unfortunate victims haven’t even the choice of fleeing their country and becoming refugees. Twice at least, Israeli forces have bombed or shelled United Nations buildings in which hapless civilians have sought safety.  ISIS, Al Qaeda and the like must be delighted by the extra recruits that the situation is producing!

Why is there not even talk of sanctions and dire ‘consequences’ for Israel and those who support her and supply her with the weapons of death?  Israel is responsible for many more deaths and much more destruction than those east Ukrainian insurgents.  Are the lives of Middle Eastern women and children less sacred than those of European countries?  Or is it, as I suggested in this blog a fortnight ago: It’s not what is done, it’s who it is does it, that really matters?  How much more strident and belligerent the voices from 'the west' would have been if only it were the 'Russians’ who were slaughtering innocent women and children in Gaza! 

Week 31 2014

Tendring Topics

Pots and Kettles

            Nowadays, of course, both cooking pots and kettles gleam on the kitchen shelf and their contents are cooked or heated by gas or electricity.  This wasn’t always the case.  I can remember a time, in the 1920s and ‘30s, when much cooking and water heating was carried out over a coal fire or on a coal fired cooking range.  It didn’t take long for both saucepans and kettles to acquire a black, sooty coating.  Hence came the expression ‘the pot calling the kettle black’ when a critic of someone else’s behaviour showed the same defect as the subject of his (or her) criticism.

            It was a thought that must have recently been in the minds of a great many people with memories as long as mine. Our Prime Minister, Mr David Cameron, has been revealed as the head of a government that has approved the export of arms and military equipment to the Russians, shortly after he had publicly criticised the French for honouring a contract for providing the Russians with battleships.  The embargo had been imposed because of Russian support, and alleged supply of arms, to the pro-Russian separatist rebels in Eastern Ukraine.

            It could, in fact, be argued that ‘our offence’ was rather more serious than that of the French.  I don’t think any one seriously imagines that the pro-Russian rebels have any ambition to acquire a navy, whereas they most certainly can use rifles, missile parts and other military equipment that we have been sending to Russia.  I don’t find the excuse that rifles can be used for hunting and that some of the other equipment was to be sold on to the Brazilian Navy, very convincing. Is it, I wonder, quite OK to supply arms to the Kiev government?   I reckon that those tanks that we see the rebels using don’t come from Russia but have either been captured, or acquired as a result of the defection to the rebels of some of the government’s forces.

           

The fact is that no-one can be certain of the actual use to which exported arms may be put.   I don’t suppose that when the French sold exocet missiles to the Argentines, they imagined for one moment that the Argentines would use them to sink British warships engaged in the liberation of the Falklands.  I have little doubt that Colonel Gaddafi used weapons and ammunition that we had sold to him against us, when we helped Libyan rebels to overthrow his government.  Some of the weapons used by the Taliban to kill ‘our boys’ in Afghanistan were undoubtedly provided clandestinely by ‘the west’ to help their grandfathers kill Russians!  We have also sold weaponry to such autocracies as Saudi Arabia and Qatar some of which, I have little doubt, have  found their way into the hands of ISIS and Al Qaeda. I hope too, that the governments of both the USA and the UK have recently felt  just a little uneasy about the use of weaponry that we have sold to Israel.

 The manufacture and sale of weapons of war is an evil comparable with the slave trade.  It thrives on international discord and those who hold shares in the companies involved grow wealthy on the death and maiming of their fellow men and women; on violent death, the destruction of homes, and the creation of innocent and helpless refugees.

A world-wide ban on the manufacture and sale of weapons of war would be a positive answer to our prayer, ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven’.

 Two young heroines!

At a time when the news seemed to be going from bad to even worse, with three air liners downed in a week, an Israeli armed incursion into Gaza with the shelling of a United Nations school used as a shelter for refugees, and a total of some 1,000, mostly civilian, Palestinian dead, on 24^th July there came some really good news on a BBC news bulletin.. Meriem Ibrahim had been allowed to leave North Sudan and, with her husband and two children and accompanied by an Italian government minister, had flown to Rome where she had met the Pope who had commended her faithfulness and courage.

Sadly there was no confirmation of this the next day and I very much fear that it may be yet another example of the  truth of the cynical comment that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is!

Blog readers will recall that Meriem Ibrahim was the young Sudanese mother who was sentenced to being flogged followed by hanging for allegedly converting from Islam to Christianity and for marrying a Christian - which, since a Muslim woman is forbidden by Sharia law from making such a marriage, was regarded as adultery!  She could have escaped those penalties had she abandoned her Christian faith for Islam – but that she resolutely refused to do.  She gave birth to a daughter while shackled to the floor of her prison cell.

World-wide protests resulted in her being freed but then at Khartoum airport where she, her husband and her two children were about to depart for her husband’s home in the USA, they were prevented from departing on the pretext that her passport was invalid – and in North Sudan, so it seems, she remains.

No less deserving, but more fortunate, is Malala Yousafazai the teenage Muslim girl from Pakistan who was shot and left for dead by the Taliban for the crime of attending school and promoting education for other girls.  At death’s door, she was flown to Britain for urgent surgery and, almost miraculously, has been restored to health.  However Malala isn’t one to seek safety from further Taliban activity in obscurity..  She has inspired others to campaign, and is campaigning herself, for education for girls throughout the world and has recently been to Nigeria where she urged the President to redouble his government’s efforts to find and liberate the teenage girls who have been abducted by jihadist extremists and threatened with slavery or a forced marriage.

A sad, bad world has reason to be thankful that there are young women of the calibre of Meriem and Malala!    I wish I could claim to have, or ever to have had, their faith and their courage.  The thousands of us, and the governments, who rescued Meriem from a cruel and totally unjust punishment must  again urge the North Sudan government to allow her to return home.

Late News

I have just read in the ‘Church Times’ that Meriem and her family have taken refuge in the United States Embassy in Khartoum.  Well, at least they’ll be safe there until the North Sudan government can be persuaded, or coerced, into allowing them all to travel to the USA.

Assisted Suicide

          One of my most horrifying nightmares is of being trapped in a totally paralysed body, praying for death, but being incapable of doing anything about it; incapable in fact of doing anything at all.

            It might have been thought that that recurring bad dream would make me a keen supporter of the ‘assisted suicide’ bill that was recently debated in the House of Lords.  It wouldn’t have helped 'the me' of my nightmare in the least!. No doctor would have been able to declare that I had six months or less to live, or that I had a necessarily terminal illness.  Nor, I think, would it have been possible for me to give the informed consent required by the bill.

            I don’t think it possible to solve this problem by means of legislation.  The present situation is, I believe, that it remains a criminal act to assist a suicide – but that the Public Prosecutor does not press charges if he or she is persuaded that the person giving the assistance was acting out of love and did not have some ulterior motive. That is probably the best that we shall get.  If the Public Prosecutor can’t make up his mind then a jury can decide.

           After sixty years of marriage  my wife’s life came to an end eight years ago, in her sleep  in her own bed at home, and after several days of unconsciousness.  I do not believe that she suffered any pain.  I can’t say with absolute certainty what I would have done had she been suffering unbearable pain that our doctor was unable to alleviate, and had begged me to help her end her life.  I hope that I would have agreed and tried to do so.  One thing I do know. The possibility of my being prosecuted for manslaughter or even murder would not have had the very least influence on my decision!  I doubt if I would have given it a moment's thought.

Week 30 2014

Tendring Topics………on Line

The Day of the Assassin

            I think that I may have referred before in this blog to the story that at the very beginning of the Battle of Waterloo a gunner officer reported to the Duke of Wellington that Napoleon himself was squarely in the sights of one of his cannon.  ‘Should he open fire?’ ‘Certainly not!’ the Duke is said to have replied, ‘We’re soldiers, not assassins’.  Yet if that cannon had been fired and had hit its target, thousands of lives would possibly have been saved.  Without its charismatic leader the French Army would surely have crumbled and the Battle of Waterloo would have been won and lost before it had even started.  Perhaps – but no-one can be quite sure of that.  The final effect of acts of violence is rarely predictable.

            Who for instance, in 1914 would have imagined that an assassin’s bullet fired in Sarajevo would trigger the activation of a series of alliances that would lead to the mass slaughter of World War I?  In the 19^th Century a Russian aristocrat declared that the Russian system of government was autocracy tempered by assassination. American President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.  So was John F. Kennedy, one of his successors. Not one of those assassinations made any progress towards the end for which the perpetrator had hoped.  In her autobiography Hons and Rebels Jessica Mitford expresses regret that she didn’t seize her opportunity to assassinate Hitler – her sister Unity was in love with him and her father, the Earl of Redesdale, was a pre-war sympathiser.   It wouldn’t have been too difficult to have contrived a meeting.  Perhaps in the late 1930s the assassination of Hitler would have changed the course of history.  But there would have been others eager to step into his shoes.  No-one can be sure of what would have happened.  When in 1944 an attempt was made on Hitler’s life, the attempt failed and scores of suspects were cruelly executed or, as in the case of folk-hero Field-Marshal Irwin Rommel, forced to commit suicide.

            Do governments arrange assassinations of those they consider to be their enemies? Until recently they have always denied it but, if there is any truth at all in the popular James Bond novels, during the ‘cold war’ both the Soviet Union and ‘the West’ did assassinate or attempt to assassinate individuals among their opponents.

            In recent years though, the US government at least has admitted – declared triumphantly in fact – that it has used and is using a form of assassination to eliminate known terrorists and terrorist leaders. Unmanned, but lethally armed drones – robotic pilotless and crew-less aircraft – can be directed from a control room thousands of miles away to hit a human target.  It’s true, of course, that as well as ‘taking out’ their intended target they may also accidentally kill a few innocent civilians standing nearby but that’s just unavoidable collateral damage.  Drones offer a means of assassination without risk to the assassin, who is sitting safely in a control room far from the scene of action..

            During World War I battle-weary soldiers in the trenches would say fatalistically that if a bullet’s got your number on it (or a shell has your name on it) it’ll get you, no matter what you do.  The number was, of course, the army number engraved on the identity discs that every soldier wore round his neck. It is a number that, so it is said, is never forgotten. That may well be true.  It’s nearly 70 years since I marched out of the army into ‘civvy street’ but, although I’ve forgotten most other things, I have never forgotten my army number – 912411, or my POW identity number 229456!  The ‘shell’ would, of course, have had room on it for several names!

      
                That, of course, was nonsense. It does seem possible though that assassins of the future may, in effect, be able to put the identity of their victim on their bullets and fire their weapons with a certainty that they’ll find their target!  A US military agency has conducted its first successful tests of guided bullets which can track a target regardless of external factors or even where the sniper rifle is aimed. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an arm of the Department of Defence, is developing a smart .50-calibre bullet which can hit a moving target, rather like a guided missile.   The agency, which researches new technologies for use by the US military, announced its fruitful trials with a YouTube video demonstrating the in-flight guidance of the bullets.

It is being developed as part of the organisation’s Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) project, a programme tasked with improving “sniper effectiveness and troop safety” and to “revolutionise rifle accuracy and range by developing the first ever guided small-calibre bullet,” the government department says.  The bullets have fins and on-board computers to direct them towards laser-marked targets as far away as 1.2 miles.  The work is being carried out by a subsidiary of Maryland-based private defence firm Lockheed Martin and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging.   In 2010 Teledyn received $25.5 million in funding from the US government.

      
        I suppose that I ought to be pleased at a development that should reduce the ‘collateral damage’ of the slaughter of the innocent when a government has decided, without any pretence of a trial, that some individual is an ‘enemy of the state’ and have ordered their assassins to ‘take him out’.  It saddens me though, to see so much effort, intelligence and money devoted to finding more efficient means of killing our fellow humans.   If only the same amount of effort and finance could be devoted to the prevention of war and conflict!

‘A plague on both your houses!’

            So said the dying Mercutio, of the Montagues and Capulets in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  I sometimes feel much the same about the one-sided struggle that is going on between the Israelis and the residents of Gaza.

It is one-sided because the Israelis have overwhelming fire power, a disciplined and well equipped army, navy and air force at their disposal and the knowledge that, no matter how blatantly they ignore the pleas and injunctions of the United Nations, the USA will always support them.  Their missiles, their air raids, their bombardments from the sea, and now the invasion of their army, are reducing the towns of Gaza to rubble and the land to shell-scarred desert.  The toll of the dead – men, women and little children – rises daily.

Instinctively, I think, we support the underdog and the Palestinians clearly are the underdogs.  I am sure that the tragic civilian population of Gaza do need and deserve our support but I am beginning to think that they need protection from their own HAMAS government as well as from the Israelis.

It is clear to me that the present Israeli offensive is a violent and disproportionate response to continual rocket attacks from HAMAS.  If the constant hail of rockets towards Israeli targets ceased, the Israeli bombardment would cease too.  This wouldn’t solve all Gaza’s problems but it would put a halt to the daily toll of civilian deaths.  That would surely be a start.

HAMAS knows this but persists with its futile rocket attacks.  Militarily they are a total failure.  Something like half the rockets are intercepted by the Israeli defences and the rest, for the most part, explode harmlessly.  They are not, in any case, properly targeted.  The sole Israeli civilian casualty in the current flare-up was killed by an ‘old fashioned’ mortar bomb.  I reckon that the ordinary Israeli civilian going about his daily business, is more likely to be killed in a traffic accident than by being struck by a rocket from Gaza!      

Why then, does HAMAS persist in firing them on Israel?  The only explanation that occurs to me is that those deciding HAMAS policy are jihadist fanatics of the same nature as those who are ravaging parts of Syria and Iraq, are kidnapping schoolgirls and murdering Christians and anyone who does not subscribe to their own perversion of Islam, in Nigeria.  They provoke the Israelis into violent, disproportionate – and all too effective – reprisals because they know that Israeli slaughter of the innocent will persuade angry young Muslims round the world to enlist in or support ISIS, Al Qaeda or whatever local jihadist movement exists in their area, and will swing world-wide public opinion to their support.

They’re no doubt sorry about the civilians, women and children who die in the Israeli onslaughts but can console themselves with the thought that, as Muslim martyrs, they’ll go straight to Heaven – as, so they believe, will those who provide the Israelis with an excuse for their murderous reprisals.  Those who hope to bring peace and security to Israel and peace and justice to the Palestinians, must cast away the conviction that because one side in the dispute is clearly in the wrong – their opponents must be ‘in the right and deserving of our support’.  Both sides need to cast aside thoughts of vengeance, of exacting ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’, and heed the message of the local boy who, as an adult, taught that we should love our enemies, bless those who curse us, and do good to those who seek to do us evil.

It’s about the only option that hasn’t yet been tried!

That Airliner

Like everyone else, I am appalled at the loss of that Malaysian Air Liner and all its passengers and crew.  I think though that I'll wait till a little more is known before deciding who was to blame. One thing that is quite certain (unless it was the work of a jiihadist suicide bomber) is that it was an accident.  Not one of the groups involved, not the Ukrainian separatist rebels, not the Kiev government, nor the Russians, could possibly have intended to destroy a airliner loaded with passengers.

The separatist rebels and/or the Russians are being blamed - and they may well be guilty of an appalling misjudgement.  The rebels had succeeded in bringing down lower flying Kiev government military aircraft and may possibly have imagined that that government was sending in a high altitude bomber to attack them.

I don't understand the current furore about the international inspectors being denied access to the crash site.  I have seen on tv pictures of lots of foreign (to the Ukraine) press and tv folk examining and taking pictures of the site.  Why can't those international inspectors get there?  Could it possibly be that it's because they insist on coming via Kiev and the Kiev Government - despite the crisis - continues to shell rebel-held towns and villages?

The site has been unsecured?  Reports say that the airliner's wreckage is strewn over a corridor a mile wide and several miles long.  Securing that, in the middle of a civil war, would surely be an impossible task.  The rebels are in possession of the 'black box''?   We should surely be pleased that it has been removed from the site and is, presumably, being kept safely. It will be time to protest when the separatist rebels decline to hand it over.

Already 'the west' has passed judgement and is busily deciding what extra sanctions it will impose on Russia.  In the meantime Israel has invaded Gaza and the civilian casualties - men, women and little children already outnumber those on the airliner.   The 'west's reaction' - they've asked for a cease-fire!

Years ago, there was a popular song; 'It ain't what you do - it's the way that you do it'.  Perhaps nowadays that should be changed to, It ain't what's done - it's who it is does it!.  

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Week 29 2014

Tendring Topics……on Line

First – the Bad News

            For years the UK has had nuclear Trident submarines roaming the world’s oceans as a so-called Independent Ultimate Deterrent to aggressors. Like NATO it is a relic of the cold war and of the ‘defence policy’ aptly described as Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD); ‘You dare to threaten me with your nuclear missiles – and I’ll threaten you with mine. If you dare to attack me with them, then I’ll attack you.  We’ll both be totally destroyed and (it's unfortunate about the collateral damage) large areas, perhaps the whole, of planet Earth will be made uninhabitable.

            Well, neither the Soviet Union nor NATO were stupid enough to use nuclear weapons.  The ‘cold war’ ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.  The UK ran down its full-time professional army, navy and air force in response to our economic situation – but Trident remained sacrosanct, untouchable.  In the meantime acts of aggression took place and it became abundantly clear that our ‘ultimate deterrent’ deterred no-one at all in the real world.  It didn’t deter Argentina from invading the Falklands.  It didn’t deter Turkey from invading Cyprus.  It didn’t deter the USA and its Caribbean allies from invading Grenada.  When, quite recently, Russia annexed and recovered its lost province of Crimea ‘the west’ blustered and threatened but – thanks to God and common sense – nobody even mentioned that ‘ultimate deterrent’.

            In the meantime the real threat to us all comes not from aggressive sovereign nations but from terrorists who have been inspired by a perversion of Islam to believe that they’re fighting God’s battles for him on earth.  They don’t yet possess nuclear weapons but the danger of their acquiring them is a natural consequence (or perhaps God’s punishment!) for our continuing to develop them, instead of banning their manufacture world-wide and destroying every single exiting nuclear weapon.  We have learned recently that chemical weapons can and have been banned world-wide.  It must be possible to do the same with nuclear weapons.

  I believe that much more dangerous than the possibility that Iran may develop a nuclear armoury, is the very real possibility that the nuclear weapons that we know Pakistan possesses should fall into the hands of terrorists.  NATO sent forces to Afghanistan to destroy the bases of Al Qaeda that had been protected by the Taliban government.   All they succeeded in doing was persuading Al Qaeda to move its bases elsewhere, notably the tribal areas of northern Pakistan, and Yemen in the Arabian peninsula. In those tribal areas of Pakistan, Al Qaeda, the Taliban and those who sympathise with them, are a considerable force possibly with a ‘fifth column’ in the Pakistan armed forces.  It is by no means impossible that they may one day overthrow the present Pakistani Government, acquire those nuclear weapons and threaten to use them

            Would our ‘independent ultimate deterrent’ then reveal its true value?  I doubt it.  Are people who tie explosives round their bodies and blow themselves up in crowded market places in the conviction that thereby they’ll go straight to Heaven as holy martyrs, likely to be deterred by the possibility that the victims of their nuclear weapon may respond in kind?

            And the bad news?  The independent cross-party Trident Commission, set up by the British American Security Information Council, has decided that there is no credible alternative to Trident.  I’m glad to note that British Quakers – but there are so few of us – are opposing this decision.  Here’s a copy of a report in The Friend, an independent Quaker weekly:

 The assertion that ‘these are weapons of mass destruction……….which have proved to be a poor deterrent against acts of terror or against recent political events’ must be an example of Quaker fear of making exaggerated statements.  They haven’t proved to be a poor deterrent, but have been no deterrent whatsoever!

…..and the not-quite-so-bad news!

          When I first heard it, in fact, I had thought that it was really good news.  It all began a few months ago when we learned that, to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, the Royal Mint was going to strike a memorial £2.00 coin with an image of Lord Kitchener on it.  The image was taken from an army recruiting poster in which the general (the hero of Corporal Jones in Dad's Army!) was assuring anyone viewing the poster that  Your Country needs YOU!

            I was one of thousands who felt that a war that had cost millions of British, French, Russian, Austrian and German lives, fought for reasons that were far from clear, and which had led to another bloody world-wide conflict  only twenty-one years later, was not best remembered by an image of a  luxuriously   moustached General urging young men to become cannon-fodder.  We petitioned the Royal Mint and the government to use instead an image of Nurse Edith Cavell.  The daughter of a Norfolk parson, she had been nursing the wounded of every country in a hospital in German-occupied Belgium.  She also helped two hundred wounded and captured British service-men escape to neutral Holland.  She was detected and arrested by the Germans, court-martialled and shot.

            In 1947 I worked briefly as a Public Health Inspector for the city of Westminster.  Quite near the office was a statue of Edith Cavell.  It bore the words for which she is best remembered.  ‘Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone’, which she said to the pastor who visited and prayed with her on the eve of her execution.    She was obviously a much more appropriate image for a memorial coin than that of a past-his-best general beckoning other men to their deaths.

            Last week I was elated when I learned that there would be a Nurse Edith Cavell coin struck in commemoration of the World War I centenary.  We had won!   Or so I thought until I read the ‘small print’ of the news item.   The Nurse Cavell coin is not to be struck instead of, but as well as, the Lord Kitchener one.   What’s more the Kitchener coin is to be a £2.00 one for general use – apart from the image it’ll be exactly like the £2.00 coins in use today.  The Nurse Cavell coin, on the other hand, will have a nominal value of £5.00 and is intended for coin collectors.  Unlike the Kitchener coin, they won't be in daily use.  Most of us will probably never see one.

             

                                                           

 Here are enlarged pictures of the two coins.  It is likely to be all that most of us will ever see of the Nurse Edith Cavell coin!

                                                                          

Week 28 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

A prophetic blog reader!

            A fortnight ago I published in this blog an email received from a regular reader on the subject of the jihadist extremists in the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent and Africa.   It contained the following sentence:

The day surely cannot be far away when they succeed in overthrowing the government of a major country, or carve out a completely new country by annexing bits of other countries.

            Today it seems that that is happening.  The Isis invaders of Iraq and Syria have declared the areas that they have occupied to be a new Islamic Caliphate under their control in which ‘Sharia Law’ will be enforced.  The Shia Iraqi President desperately needs western help but apparently is not quite desperate enough to be prepared to widen his government to represent a truly united Iraqi nation.  That, he says, would be a negation of democracy – that word again.  It clearly means whatever its user wants it to mean!

            We have seen the inspiring spectacle of hundreds of young Iraqi Shia militia volunteers marching up and down with automatic rifles on their shoulders shouting words of defiance against the fighters of Isis.  I’m afraid they’ll discover that there’s a big difference between posturing at patriotic gatherings safe in the middle of Baghdad and actually facing a resolute enemy, with mortars and shells bursting all around you, comrades killed and wounded, and machine-gun fire sweeping the battlefield.

            I think it unlikely that 300 American troops can train an Iraqi army to a standard in which they can defeat those Isis fighters in the few weeks – or perhaps only days – available to them.  It would surely be disastrous for the UK or the USA to become more involved in this conflict than they already are. When we and the Americans withdrew our forces from Iraq after that disastrous and illegal invasion, I wrote in this blog that I thought it likely that within a few years Iraq would be divided into three separate states; an independent Kurdistan in the north, Shia Muslim with close ties to Iran in the south and a Sunni Muslim state in the centre.  It really took someone as ruthless as Saddam Hussein to hold those three opposing factions together.  Already there is virtually an independent Kurdistan in the north and it seems apparent that Sunni and Shia Muslims can’t and won’t live together in peace.  They’ll learn eventually (just as Protestant and Roman Catholic Christians in Europe eventually learned to live together) but we can’t, and shouldn’t try to, hasten the process by force of arms. 

            I wasn’t surprised to learn that very few members of this Isis Army that is trying to take over Syria and Iraq are actually either Syrians or Iraqis.  They are a hotchpotch of fanatics convinced that they’ve got God on their side, from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kosovo, Chechnia and, to our shame, from the United Kingdom and, no doubt, from wherever else there are Muslim communities with a few fervent jihadists or malcontents among them.

            But just as the members of Isis are from a number of different countries there is quite a surprising array of countries opposing them. I remember that when during World War II the Fascist government of Italy was overthrown and the Italians changed sides – we couldn’t bring ourselves to call them ‘allies’ – they were co-belligerents.  Perhaps we’ll have to use that expression again, though most of those concerned aren’t actually fighting yet.

            One that definitely is, is the army of President Assad in Syria.  We seem to have conveniently forgotten that Isis had its origins in Syria and was one of the groups that we were supporting in their efforts to topple President Assad.  The Syrian army is no doubt grateful that Isis has transferred its main attention to Iraq, but Isis definitely intends Syria to be part of its new Islamic Caliphate! 

Then, of course, there’s Iran.  It seems but yesterday that Iran was considered by ‘the west’ to be the centre of all evil in the Middle East.  'We' were quite sure they were  trying to make weapons of mass destruction (just as 'we' had been sure Saddam Hussein had been doing the same in Iraq!) and had to be stopped at all costs.  However Iran is now definitely keen to support Iraq’s Shia government against a Sunni invasion – and we’re welcoming that support.

Finally, Russia has supplied the Iraqi government with some second-hand jet fighter aircraft!   Who knows?  If Iraq has the trained pilots to fly them they could make the air strikes on Isis targets that Barak Obama is so reluctant to authorise, unnecessary.      

            What a muddle!  And most of it brought about by the interference of foreigners in the affairs of both Syria and Iraq.  I think it likely that if all those in Syria and Iraq who are not citizens of those benighted countries were to go home, the natives – those who haven’t yet either fled or been killed – would find a way of resolving their differences and living at peace with each other.

A footnote

Reviewing, in the Radio Times a tv programme about the 'Bay of Pigs' episode in 1961 that ended in total disaster, when the USA sponsored an armed attempt by Cuban exiles to invade Cuba and oust Fidel Castro, Gill Crawford quotes an unnamed US academic as saying: 'Every country has a right to figure out its own destiny......every time we intervene........we produce consequences that are ugly and resonate for generations'.

 If I may quote the Book of Common Prayer, I'd like every American President and every British Prime Minister, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest, that quotation.

The Idol with Feet of  Clay!

            A recent story-line in Holby City  BBC 1’s popular hospital ‘soap’ related to a terminally ill man in his nineties who came into Holby City Hospital accompanied by his granddaughter in her late twenties or early thirties.  She obviously loved him dearly and was very proud of his Polish origins and of the fact that, after coming to England in the immediate aftermath of World War II he had worked in the Fire Service, saving the lives of others at the risk of his own.  He was brave, loving, kind and generous. He was admired, not only by his grand-daughter, but by all who knew him.

            Except - that research revealed that he wasn’t Polish at all but German, and as a young man during World War I he had been a member of Hitler’s dreaded Waffen SS.  He had been a guard at a concentration camp, where he had been feared by all for his cruelty and disregard for human life.  At the end of the war he had stolen the identity of a dead Polish prisoner, in whose name he had come to England and found work in the Fire Service.  Neither his English wife nor his grand-daughter had known anything of his Nazi past and that he was, in fact, a still-wanted war criminal.

            I felt something like the shock and horror and – in the first instance – disbelief, that the grand-daughter felt on learning of her well-loved grandfather’s past, when I realized that Rolf Harris, a tv personality for whom I had felt warm and sincere admiration, had for decades been an abuser of any personable young girl who had the misfortune to make his acquaintance.

            Somehow, although I was shocked at the endless string of offences of which Jimmy Savile is  said to have been guilty, I really didn’t feel the same about him.  My early 20^th century sensibilities had been suspicious of his hairstyle and his very professional showbizzy manner.  Although I watched several of his ‘Jim’ll fix it’ programmes  and had felt admiration at his apparent working as a hospital porter, I wasn’t all that surprised when he was revealed as having been a predatory paedophile.

            I really had been taken in by Rolf Harris though. He was just as much part of the ‘showbiz’ scene as Jimmy Savile but somehow he always managed to give the impression of being an extremely gifted amateur.  And he certainly was gifted, both as an artist (he wouldn’t have had the opportunity of painting the Queen had he not been) and as an entertainer.  He gave hours of innocent pleasure to thousands of viewers and listeners and, like Jimmy Saville, did a great deal of work for thoroughly deserving charities. He had even played a leading role in a film warning children of the danger of paedophiles!

            All of that though counts as nothing compared with the now-revealed activities that have led to his downfall and exposure as an abuser of young women and girls.  I feel desperately sad and sorry for Rolf Harris’ victims, and for the thousands who have seen their idol shattered. Was Rolf Harris' prison sentence too lenient?  I reckon that he found his very public shame and disgrace, after years of adulation, a harsher punishment than any number of years in prison.  There's a couple of lines from Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol that may come to his mind:

All that we know who lie in gaol is that the walls are strong,

And every day is like a year - a year whose days are long!

Supporting Clacton’s Tourist Industry

          It isn’t very often that I find myself eye to eye with our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell – a right-wing, climate-change-denying Europhobe; a Crypto-Ukipper if there ever was one!  However I am right behind him in his support of a campaign for the reduction of VAT payable on such tourist-specific items as accommodation in hotels, guest houses and caravan sites and on, for instance, the attractions on Clacton Pier, from the current 20 percent to 5 percent.               

            I believe that the Chancellor could recover the cost of this from income tax – perhaps by making all ‘state benefits’ (including the Attendance Allowance I get because of my very limited mobility!) subject to that tax.  It is the nature of income tax that no-one is ever asked for more than they can afford to pay, whereas VAT hits the poorest the hardest and the very richest the least because, of course, the VAT on any purchased goods or services is a much smaller proportion of the income of the wealthy purchaser.

            Clacton-on-Sea does not attract the very wealthy.  In fact it attracts precisely those whom the government claims to support – the hardworking man or woman who can just afford to take his or her family for a seaside holiday on Britain’s sunny east coast but for whom a few extra pounds one way or the other make all the difference. 

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