Tendring Topics…….on line
An undignified exit
There is no doubt that the Speaker of the House of Commons had to depart. He had tried to conceal the venality and greed of many of the House’s members, and had shown himself much more interested in the identity of the whistle-blower than in the activities that had been exposed. I didn’t care for the manner of his going though. Could it be that some MPs were less concerned about the fact that he had attempted a cover-up than that it had proved to be unsuccessful?
I have little doubt that he saw himself as trying to protect the honour of the House and of its members, in the tradition of the 17th Century speaker who famously defied the emissaries of King Charles I when they sought to arrest rebellious MPs. Did all of those members who demanded his resignation have nothing whatsoever about which they would have preferred their constituents to remain unaware?
I wasn’t particularly pleased to see our own MP, Mr Douglas Carswell, among the leaders of the pack. I have no doubt that he hasn’t spent a penny that wasn’t permitted by current rules, but we learn that he has claimed for the cost of a fridge freezer and two tables that wouldn’t have been permitted under the agreed new code of conduct. His last year’s claim of £23,083 for his second home was almost a thousand pounds below the permitted maximum. Compared with some of his colleagues he is a paragon. Doesn’t he sometimes though, feel a shade uneasy about the fact that for just a part of his ‘necessarily incurred expenses’ he received a tax-free payment in excess of the total income of a great many, possibly a majority, of his constituents?
One of the saddest, and potentially most dangerous, results of this whole sad affair is the disillusion of the general public with the whole democratic process. Cynical jokes are enjoying a new lease of life: ‘How can you tell when a politician is lying? When you can see his lips moving’; ‘An honest politician is a politician who when he’s been bought, stays bought’; ‘Don’t vote for them. It only encourages them!’; ‘If voting changed anything, they’d have banned it!’; and so on. It is amid such general disillusion that charismatic new leaders, promising to cast out the ‘tired old men of politics’ and bring in a new, clean, all-British era, emerge and flourish; such new leaders, in fact, as Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and in our own country (though he never succeeded in persuading more than a small minority) the late Sir Oswald Mosley.
It was Winston Churchill who said that democracy was, ‘the worst form of government, except for every other form of government that had yet been tried’
Using your vote ‘responsibly’
Nowadays young people have the right to vote in European, National and local elections once they are eighteen. In my day it was twenty-one but, because I was a prisoner of war from the age of twenty-one till I was twenty-four, I was not able to exercise this right until three years after I became eligible.
I welcomed the opportunity to do so in the parliamentary election of 1945. Home from Germany, I was still on leave from the army at the time. My mother and I went together to the polling station to register our votes. As we left we encountered a neighbour who my mother knew perfectly well had different views from our own. ‘Just voted, have you?’ she asked, ‘I hope that you voted the right way’. On my own, I would have either stammered something totally incoherent or, just possibly, launched into a long-winded and totally fruitless argument. My mother who, I discovered, was well able to ‘think on her feet’, smiled sweetly and replied, ‘We all think that we do that, don’t we?’
I thought of that diplomatic reply when I read the leading article in a recent issue of the Clacton Gazette. The editor had clearly realized that, as I have warned in the article above, the current MPs’ expenses scandal could result in electors either refraining from voting in disgust or, in anger, registering a protest vote for a minority candidate whose policies they would normally have held in abhorrence. Here are the editor’s wise words:
Please use your vote, no matter how much it makes you want to hold your nose. Use your vote freely, but also wisely and responsibly. Many people will be tempted to use this time as an opportunity to protest. However protest votes can result in unintended consequences which may pose a threat to democracy, not enhance it
I couldn’t agree more; but don’t we all think that we vote ‘wisely and responsibly’? I would hate to see the BNP gain a foothold either in the County Hall at Chelmsford or in the European Parliament. Nor would I like to see UKIP increase its influence, either at home or on the European mainland. Geographically and historically we are part of Europe. Our destiny is to play a leading role in a culturally, economically and politically united Europe, not to try to position ourselves somewhere in mid-Atlantic.
We are fortunate in having a secret ballot. We cannot be penalised or ostracised by bosses, landlords, trade-union leaders, or even indignant friends and neighbours, for voting what they consider to be ‘the wrong way’. If I were younger I might have preferred to keep my own voting intentions secret, but at eighty-eight I have no hesitation in announcing that on 4th July my vote for the European Election will be for the Green Party and for the Essex County Council my vote will be for the Liberal Democrat candidate.
Eighty-eight is Great…….so far
I certainly celebrated my eighty-eighth birthday in style. It all began a fortnight earlier when my younger son and daughter in law, Andy and Marilyn, came down from London to visit me. After an enjoyable lunch at the ‘Bowling Green’, Weeley, we dro
ve on to the Beth Chatto Gardens, a visit that I wrote about in a recent blog.
The following Saturday Pete and Arlene brought grandson Chris from Taiwan and his girlfriend Ariel to see me. Their visit was mentioned last week.
Left:Ariel and myself in my home in Dudley Road, Clacton
An undignified exit
There is no doubt that the Speaker of the House of Commons had to depart. He had tried to conceal the venality and greed of many of the House’s members, and had shown himself much more interested in the identity of the whistle-blower than in the activities that had been exposed. I didn’t care for the manner of his going though. Could it be that some MPs were less concerned about the fact that he had attempted a cover-up than that it had proved to be unsuccessful?
I have little doubt that he saw himself as trying to protect the honour of the House and of its members, in the tradition of the 17th Century speaker who famously defied the emissaries of King Charles I when they sought to arrest rebellious MPs. Did all of those members who demanded his resignation have nothing whatsoever about which they would have preferred their constituents to remain unaware?
I wasn’t particularly pleased to see our own MP, Mr Douglas Carswell, among the leaders of the pack. I have no doubt that he hasn’t spent a penny that wasn’t permitted by current rules, but we learn that he has claimed for the cost of a fridge freezer and two tables that wouldn’t have been permitted under the agreed new code of conduct. His last year’s claim of £23,083 for his second home was almost a thousand pounds below the permitted maximum. Compared with some of his colleagues he is a paragon. Doesn’t he sometimes though, feel a shade uneasy about the fact that for just a part of his ‘necessarily incurred expenses’ he received a tax-free payment in excess of the total income of a great many, possibly a majority, of his constituents?
One of the saddest, and potentially most dangerous, results of this whole sad affair is the disillusion of the general public with the whole democratic process. Cynical jokes are enjoying a new lease of life: ‘How can you tell when a politician is lying? When you can see his lips moving’; ‘An honest politician is a politician who when he’s been bought, stays bought’; ‘Don’t vote for them. It only encourages them!’; ‘If voting changed anything, they’d have banned it!’; and so on. It is amid such general disillusion that charismatic new leaders, promising to cast out the ‘tired old men of politics’ and bring in a new, clean, all-British era, emerge and flourish; such new leaders, in fact, as Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and in our own country (though he never succeeded in persuading more than a small minority) the late Sir Oswald Mosley.
It was Winston Churchill who said that democracy was, ‘the worst form of government, except for every other form of government that had yet been tried’
Using your vote ‘responsibly’
Nowadays young people have the right to vote in European, National and local elections once they are eighteen. In my day it was twenty-one but, because I was a prisoner of war from the age of twenty-one till I was twenty-four, I was not able to exercise this right until three years after I became eligible.
I welcomed the opportunity to do so in the parliamentary election of 1945. Home from Germany, I was still on leave from the army at the time. My mother and I went together to the polling station to register our votes. As we left we encountered a neighbour who my mother knew perfectly well had different views from our own. ‘Just voted, have you?’ she asked, ‘I hope that you voted the right way’. On my own, I would have either stammered something totally incoherent or, just possibly, launched into a long-winded and totally fruitless argument. My mother who, I discovered, was well able to ‘think on her feet’, smiled sweetly and replied, ‘We all think that we do that, don’t we?’
I thought of that diplomatic reply when I read the leading article in a recent issue of the Clacton Gazette. The editor had clearly realized that, as I have warned in the article above, the current MPs’ expenses scandal could result in electors either refraining from voting in disgust or, in anger, registering a protest vote for a minority candidate whose policies they would normally have held in abhorrence. Here are the editor’s wise words:
Please use your vote, no matter how much it makes you want to hold your nose. Use your vote freely, but also wisely and responsibly. Many people will be tempted to use this time as an opportunity to protest. However protest votes can result in unintended consequences which may pose a threat to democracy, not enhance it
I couldn’t agree more; but don’t we all think that we vote ‘wisely and responsibly’? I would hate to see the BNP gain a foothold either in the County Hall at Chelmsford or in the European Parliament. Nor would I like to see UKIP increase its influence, either at home or on the European mainland. Geographically and historically we are part of Europe. Our destiny is to play a leading role in a culturally, economically and politically united Europe, not to try to position ourselves somewhere in mid-Atlantic.
We are fortunate in having a secret ballot. We cannot be penalised or ostracised by bosses, landlords, trade-union leaders, or even indignant friends and neighbours, for voting what they consider to be ‘the wrong way’. If I were younger I might have preferred to keep my own voting intentions secret, but at eighty-eight I have no hesitation in announcing that on 4th July my vote for the European Election will be for the Green Party and for the Essex County Council my vote will be for the Liberal Democrat candidate.
Eighty-eight is Great…….so far
I certainly celebrated my eighty-eighth birthday in style. It all began a fortnight earlier when my younger son and daughter in law, Andy and Marilyn, came down from London to visit me. After an enjoyable lunch at the ‘Bowling Green’, Weeley, we dro
ve on to the Beth Chatto Gardens, a visit that I wrote about in a recent blog.
The following Saturday Pete and Arlene brought grandson Chris from Taiwan and his girlfriend Ariel to see me. Their visit was mentioned last week.
Left:Ariel and myself in my home in Dudley Road, Clacton
Above: Andy and Marilyn high above London in the 'London
Eye'
Then, for the weekend immediately preceding my birthday, Pete and Arlene took me to Brusselsto see younger grandson Nick and meet his charming girlfriend Romy, a young Belgian lady whose first language is French but who speaks English fluently and with barely a trace of accent. Like Nick, she works for the European Travel Commission. I found her to be intelligent, a good listening-as-well-as-talking conversationalist, and an altogether warm and cheerful companion. Both in her appearance, and in some of her mannerisms, she reminded me strongly (and heart-breakingly!) of my late wife Heather, Chris and Nick’s grandma, when she was in her twenties…..and that is the greatest compliment that I can pay to anyone.
While in Brussels, Pete, Arlene and I stayed at the very posh Raddison Hotel (favoured by visitors to the European Parliament!). We all went to an enormous multiplex cinema and enjoyed watching ‘Slum-Dog Millionaire’ (in English with French and Flemish subtitles) and drove out through the Ardennes to the lovely Meuse Valley, scenically comparable with the Valley of the Rhine.
While in Brussels, Pete, Arlene and I stayed at the very posh Raddison Hotel (favoured by visitors to the European Parliament!). We all went to an enormous multiplex cinema and enjoyed watching ‘Slum-Dog Millionaire’ (in English with French and Flemish subtitles) and drove out through the Ardennes to the lovely Meuse Valley, scenically comparable with the Valley of the Rhine.
A family meal in a Brussels Restaurant. Left to right; Arlene, Pete, Nick and Romy
There we lunched in an open-air restaurant beside the Meuse in Dinant (did you know that it was in the Dinant area that fish and chips was invented?) and travelled by cable railway to the Citadel, on a rocky cliff-top high above the town. I was sorry when we had to leave late on the Sunday evening.
Dinant and the River Meuse from the Citadel, built on a commanding clifftop above the town and its strategic bridge over the Meuse.
Back in London for my actual birthday Pete drove Arlene and myself into Essex to enjoy a celebratory lunch at ‘The Cricketers’ in Clavering, owned and run by the parents of Jamie Oliver, the celebrated down-to-earth tv chef. The food and service were, as one would expect, impeccable. I am glad that I didn’t even catch a glimpse of the bill! Pete drove me home to find twenty greetings cards awaiting me; not bad for an octogenarian who has outlived many of his friends and relatives.
One of my favourite stories is of the unfortunate chap who fell off the roof of a skyscraper. As he hurtled past the eighth floor he saw all the anxious faces watching him, and called out reassuringly, ‘I’m all right so far!’Bearing that story in mind I am able to assure blog readers that, for me, eighty-eight is great…..so far.
18th May 2009
Me at my birthday celebratory lunch at 'The Cricketers'. Clavering
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