Tendring Topics……..on Line
Incompetence...or Deliberate Deception?
How very reluctant politicians are to face up to their past errors and to say, as though they really meant it, ‘We’re sorry. We got it wrong’!
The fire-bombing of Dresden in February 1945 (I was only some sixty miles away), and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the same year were among the factors that made me become a not-very-active member of the post-war Peace Movement. In the ‘60s and early ‘70s I used to go up to London with my two young sons on Easter Monday to join the good-natured crowds welcoming the Aldermaston CND Marchers to Trafalgar Square. My days of even such marginal public protest have long been over. I was pleased though that my sons and grandchildren, with their wives and girlfriends, were among the nearly a million protesters who flocked to London on the eve of the Anglo-American bombing and invasion of Iraq to try, in vain, to stop the blood-bath to which we knew this would lead.
We now know that the reasons for which we believed we went to war with Iraq were false. The Iraqi government had no connection with El Quaida and was in no way involved in the 9/11 outrage in New York. Nor, as we now know, did Iraq possess any ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It is true that Iraq had a cruel and undemocratic government with no respect for human rights. Saudi Arabia is much the same, and a number of its citizens were involved in 9/11 – yet, far from invading - we welcome the King of Saudi Arabia ostentatiously as an honoured guest!
Both of the main political parties had supported the war, though it must be said that in both parties there were those who were prepared to swim publicly against the tide and oppose it.
The war cost, and is still costing, billions of pounds. It resulted in thousands of men, women and children, mostly innocent civilians, being killed or maimed. It caused the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure. It proved to be an effective recruiting motive for the terrorism that it was supposed to be combating. By-products have been a murderous feud between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and Iraqi Christians, who had practised their faith freely under Saddam Hussein, are no longer able do so safely!
For years there has been public demand for the causes of the war and its conduct to be the subject of an impartial public enquiry. The government was sympathetic and regretful. There would be such an enquiry, but not while our troops were in Iraq. Understandable enough; when I was a gunner in North Africa in 1941/1942 it wouldn’t have done my morale much good had we been told that we were there, at best, as a result of a bad mistake or, at worst, because of a deliberate lie.
Now though, final departure of British troops from Iraq is imminent, and the government has promised the full impartial public enquiry that had been demanded. However the conditions that the government has imposed will rob it of much of its value. The government is appointing those who will conduct the enquiry. No-one, I think, will question the impartiality of those selected, but it would surely have been a good idea to have first consulted the opposition about these appointments, particularly the Liberal Democrats who, to their credit, opposed the Iraq adventure from its very beginning.
Then, the evidence was to be heard in secret. This simply wasn’t good enough. When the conclusions of the enquiry are announced, we want to know the evidence on which they are based. It is claimed that some of the evidence might endanger national security if made public? Perhaps so, but it should surely be the responsibility of whoever chairs the enquiry to decide what is the small amount of evidence that cannot safely be revealed to the public. A little late in the day and in the face of a public outcry, the government has announced that that is what will take place. It is a welcome, if humiliating U-turn.
Finally, the enquiry will not be allowed to apportion blame. I think that they should be able to; not so that those guilty can be either pilloried or punished. Their own consciences should see to that. Rather, so that we may know when there was an honest mistake and when a deliberate deception.
For instance, in the weeks preceding the invasion there was a relatively slow build-up of allied forces in Kuwait so that, at zero hour, the British and American armoured columns could advance decisively into Iraq. If Saddam Hussein had possessed weapons of mass destruction, even merely ‘battlefield’ ones, he would surely have monitored that build-up and, when he considered the time right, unleashed these weapons onto his enemies, disposing of their invading armies in one lethal stroke.
Did Messrs Bush and Blair genuinely believe that Saddam had these dreadful means of mass destruction? If so they were surely irresponsibly putting their armies in appalling and unnecessary peril in Kuwait. Or did they know perfectly well that he had none? In which case we were being deliberately deceived.
This is just one of the things that we are surely entitled to know.
Ashamed of being British!
As far as I am aware, I have never actually met a Romanian though, in one way or another, I have encountered citizens of virtually every other European country in my time. However, a few years ago one of my much-travelled grandsons made friends with a Romanian girl and was invited to visit her home and family.
Their home is on the outskirts of Bucharest and, when he arrived back in England again, he was full of praise and gratitude for the warm welcome, friendship and hospitality that he had found there. ‘They were poor’, he said, ‘but what little they had, they were eager to share with me’. He returned home with a higher view of humanity than he had had when he departed.
My memories of his story of his reception in Bucharest made me feel doubly ashamed of the fact that young people in Belfast who would, no doubt, claim to be proud to be British, had made the lives of 100 Romanian immigrants (including a young baby) so miserable that they had fled from their homes, even though they had nowhere to go.
It is such incidents as this that make me alarmed when I see the BNP gaining ground in British politics, both locally and nationally and remember that the recent elections revealed them to have at least 2,000 sympathisers in Clacton.
There is just one cheering aspect of this deeply depressing affair. In their distress the refugees from hooliganism sought the help of the nearest Christian Church. They, I think will have been members of either the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Church. The Belfast church from which they sought help was a Protestant one……..but its Pastor and congregation responded instantly, giving them overnight shelter in their church hall.
Long may every tradition of the Universal Church of Christ be prepared to offer sanctuary and shelter to victims of bullying and violence!
‘The more things change………………..’
Most references to the years immediately following World War II depict them as years of deprivation, with continuing rationing and shortages. Those judgements are usually made by people who weren’t there at the time. I was…..and I remember them as years of hope and promise!
We had a new Labour, as distinct from a New-Labour, government that my fiancée and I (we married in 1946) had helped to elect. We trusted our politicians. How strange that seems in 2009! We, and thousands of others, looked forward to a new order of justice, shared wealth and prosperity in Britain, and of our country leading the world into an era of peace and international co-operation.
.JPG)
27th April 1946. We looked forward to the future with hope
Little did I imagine that there could possibly come a day when, in a disagreement between the Governor of the Bank of England and a ‘Labour’ Chancellor of the Exchequer I would find myself unhesitatingly on the side of the Governor; when, in financial policy, I would wish that our ‘Labour’ government would follow more closely the example of the USA.
It is generally agreed that the current financial crisis, which has made thousands homeless and millions unemployed, was precipitated by the greed and irresponsibility of those running our banks and financial services. This had been made possible by the Conservative government of the 1980s, ‘freeing the banking services from the shackles of control’ and giving them a free hand to create wealth or (as actually happened) lose it. The New-Labour governments of the turn of the century, dazzled I suppose by the glittering promises of ‘big business’, cheered them on. I am reminded of the biblical story of the Gadarene swine!
To prevent the total collapse of our economic system, our government has poured millions of pounds of our money into the banking system. The American government has done the same thing on an even bigger scale. That government, under its new President, is determined that this should never again. Strict regulations are to be imposed on their banks to ensure that the irresponsible behaviour of the past few decades cannot be repeated. In Britain the Governor of the Bank of England, who has been given the task of overseeing the future behaviour of our financial institutions, has asked for ‘the tools to enable him to do the job’; firm legally enforced regulations to which those institutions would be required to comply.
The answer from our Chancellor of the Exchequer, was ‘no’. Perhaps it will make little difference in the long run. Similar regulations and restrictions were imposed on American banks after the great slump of the early 1930s. ‘Freedom loving’ presidents removed them, with the results that we are experiencing. I have no doubt that were such regulations to be imposed in this country today we would, perhaps in forty or fifty years time have Prime Ministers of the calibre of Lady Thatcher and Mr Blair……..and history would repeat itself.
Talking about banking…….
……….did you see that Sir Fred Goodwin, who settled for early retirement at the age of fifty after having presided over the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland, is voluntarily giving up a substantial part of his pension.
It was very good of him, and his well-wishers (I’m sure that there must be a few) will be relieved to learn that he isn’t likely to be a future drain on either our charity or on state welfare. He will still have a pension of over £350,000 a year (that’s rather a large sum to visualise. It works out at about £6,730 a week), plus a tax-free lump sum of about £2 million. I wonder how much he would have received if he had proved to be a success?
No wonder there’s a national pensions crisis if there are many pay-outs like that! Somehow it makes the daytime tv adverts about the government’s determination to catch all those ‘benefit cheats’ ring a little hollow.
The Blacked-out Whitewash!
Was there ever such an anticlimax as the long-awaited but heavily censored ‘full publication’ of MPs’ expenses. Among the blacked-out portions were the locations of MPs’ homes, sometimes far from both their constituency and Westminster, where moats had been cleaned out and duck islands, plasma tvs and, of course, ‘love seats’ had been provided. The black-outs were in the interests of ‘security’. Is it seriously imagined that anyone determined to do so would have much difficulty in locating MPs’ first homes, second homes and, for those who have them, third homes? The Daily Telegraph had, in any case, revealed where they were and, surprisingly perhaps, none have yet been blown up by either terrorists or angry constituents!
The black-spattered images took me back to World War II when as a POW, I received regular letters from my girlfriend, Heather Gilbert, always a prolific but not always discreet correspondent. Between the ‘My dear Ernest’ and the ‘lots and lots of love, Heather’, sentences, paragraphs and, on one occasion, the whole letter, would be obliterated by the British censors, with identical ‘black-outs’ to those that punctuate the official ‘revelations’ of MPs’ expenses.
Heather Gilbert (subsequently Heather Hall), aged 19 in 1943, a prolific, but not always discreet. letter writer. Note the miniature RA badge worn as a brooch. This proudly announced to the world; ‘hands off! My boyfriend’s a gunner!’
I suppose that had those letters been passed uncensored, the Gestapo might have been mildly interested in such information as the fact that two bombs had been dropped on Woodville Gardens, Ilford, during the previous Thursday night but that the Gilbert household had escaped unscathed, or that the young man next door had been issued with tropical kit and had departed for an unknown destination. Today’s censors haven’t even got that excuse.
Thank goodness for the Daily Telegraph which gave us the unexpurgated version!
Incompetence...or Deliberate Deception?
How very reluctant politicians are to face up to their past errors and to say, as though they really meant it, ‘We’re sorry. We got it wrong’!
The fire-bombing of Dresden in February 1945 (I was only some sixty miles away), and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the same year were among the factors that made me become a not-very-active member of the post-war Peace Movement. In the ‘60s and early ‘70s I used to go up to London with my two young sons on Easter Monday to join the good-natured crowds welcoming the Aldermaston CND Marchers to Trafalgar Square. My days of even such marginal public protest have long been over. I was pleased though that my sons and grandchildren, with their wives and girlfriends, were among the nearly a million protesters who flocked to London on the eve of the Anglo-American bombing and invasion of Iraq to try, in vain, to stop the blood-bath to which we knew this would lead.
We now know that the reasons for which we believed we went to war with Iraq were false. The Iraqi government had no connection with El Quaida and was in no way involved in the 9/11 outrage in New York. Nor, as we now know, did Iraq possess any ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It is true that Iraq had a cruel and undemocratic government with no respect for human rights. Saudi Arabia is much the same, and a number of its citizens were involved in 9/11 – yet, far from invading - we welcome the King of Saudi Arabia ostentatiously as an honoured guest!
Both of the main political parties had supported the war, though it must be said that in both parties there were those who were prepared to swim publicly against the tide and oppose it.
The war cost, and is still costing, billions of pounds. It resulted in thousands of men, women and children, mostly innocent civilians, being killed or maimed. It caused the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure. It proved to be an effective recruiting motive for the terrorism that it was supposed to be combating. By-products have been a murderous feud between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and Iraqi Christians, who had practised their faith freely under Saddam Hussein, are no longer able do so safely!
For years there has been public demand for the causes of the war and its conduct to be the subject of an impartial public enquiry. The government was sympathetic and regretful. There would be such an enquiry, but not while our troops were in Iraq. Understandable enough; when I was a gunner in North Africa in 1941/1942 it wouldn’t have done my morale much good had we been told that we were there, at best, as a result of a bad mistake or, at worst, because of a deliberate lie.
Now though, final departure of British troops from Iraq is imminent, and the government has promised the full impartial public enquiry that had been demanded. However the conditions that the government has imposed will rob it of much of its value. The government is appointing those who will conduct the enquiry. No-one, I think, will question the impartiality of those selected, but it would surely have been a good idea to have first consulted the opposition about these appointments, particularly the Liberal Democrats who, to their credit, opposed the Iraq adventure from its very beginning.
Then, the evidence was to be heard in secret. This simply wasn’t good enough. When the conclusions of the enquiry are announced, we want to know the evidence on which they are based. It is claimed that some of the evidence might endanger national security if made public? Perhaps so, but it should surely be the responsibility of whoever chairs the enquiry to decide what is the small amount of evidence that cannot safely be revealed to the public. A little late in the day and in the face of a public outcry, the government has announced that that is what will take place. It is a welcome, if humiliating U-turn.
Finally, the enquiry will not be allowed to apportion blame. I think that they should be able to; not so that those guilty can be either pilloried or punished. Their own consciences should see to that. Rather, so that we may know when there was an honest mistake and when a deliberate deception.
For instance, in the weeks preceding the invasion there was a relatively slow build-up of allied forces in Kuwait so that, at zero hour, the British and American armoured columns could advance decisively into Iraq. If Saddam Hussein had possessed weapons of mass destruction, even merely ‘battlefield’ ones, he would surely have monitored that build-up and, when he considered the time right, unleashed these weapons onto his enemies, disposing of their invading armies in one lethal stroke.
Did Messrs Bush and Blair genuinely believe that Saddam had these dreadful means of mass destruction? If so they were surely irresponsibly putting their armies in appalling and unnecessary peril in Kuwait. Or did they know perfectly well that he had none? In which case we were being deliberately deceived.
This is just one of the things that we are surely entitled to know.
Ashamed of being British!
As far as I am aware, I have never actually met a Romanian though, in one way or another, I have encountered citizens of virtually every other European country in my time. However, a few years ago one of my much-travelled grandsons made friends with a Romanian girl and was invited to visit her home and family.
Their home is on the outskirts of Bucharest and, when he arrived back in England again, he was full of praise and gratitude for the warm welcome, friendship and hospitality that he had found there. ‘They were poor’, he said, ‘but what little they had, they were eager to share with me’. He returned home with a higher view of humanity than he had had when he departed.
My memories of his story of his reception in Bucharest made me feel doubly ashamed of the fact that young people in Belfast who would, no doubt, claim to be proud to be British, had made the lives of 100 Romanian immigrants (including a young baby) so miserable that they had fled from their homes, even though they had nowhere to go.
It is such incidents as this that make me alarmed when I see the BNP gaining ground in British politics, both locally and nationally and remember that the recent elections revealed them to have at least 2,000 sympathisers in Clacton.
There is just one cheering aspect of this deeply depressing affair. In their distress the refugees from hooliganism sought the help of the nearest Christian Church. They, I think will have been members of either the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Church. The Belfast church from which they sought help was a Protestant one……..but its Pastor and congregation responded instantly, giving them overnight shelter in their church hall.
Long may every tradition of the Universal Church of Christ be prepared to offer sanctuary and shelter to victims of bullying and violence!
‘The more things change………………..’
Most references to the years immediately following World War II depict them as years of deprivation, with continuing rationing and shortages. Those judgements are usually made by people who weren’t there at the time. I was…..and I remember them as years of hope and promise!
We had a new Labour, as distinct from a New-Labour, government that my fiancée and I (we married in 1946) had helped to elect. We trusted our politicians. How strange that seems in 2009! We, and thousands of others, looked forward to a new order of justice, shared wealth and prosperity in Britain, and of our country leading the world into an era of peace and international co-operation.
27th April 1946. We looked forward to the future with hope
Little did I imagine that there could possibly come a day when, in a disagreement between the Governor of the Bank of England and a ‘Labour’ Chancellor of the Exchequer I would find myself unhesitatingly on the side of the Governor; when, in financial policy, I would wish that our ‘Labour’ government would follow more closely the example of the USA.
It is generally agreed that the current financial crisis, which has made thousands homeless and millions unemployed, was precipitated by the greed and irresponsibility of those running our banks and financial services. This had been made possible by the Conservative government of the 1980s, ‘freeing the banking services from the shackles of control’ and giving them a free hand to create wealth or (as actually happened) lose it. The New-Labour governments of the turn of the century, dazzled I suppose by the glittering promises of ‘big business’, cheered them on. I am reminded of the biblical story of the Gadarene swine!
To prevent the total collapse of our economic system, our government has poured millions of pounds of our money into the banking system. The American government has done the same thing on an even bigger scale. That government, under its new President, is determined that this should never again. Strict regulations are to be imposed on their banks to ensure that the irresponsible behaviour of the past few decades cannot be repeated. In Britain the Governor of the Bank of England, who has been given the task of overseeing the future behaviour of our financial institutions, has asked for ‘the tools to enable him to do the job’; firm legally enforced regulations to which those institutions would be required to comply.
The answer from our Chancellor of the Exchequer, was ‘no’. Perhaps it will make little difference in the long run. Similar regulations and restrictions were imposed on American banks after the great slump of the early 1930s. ‘Freedom loving’ presidents removed them, with the results that we are experiencing. I have no doubt that were such regulations to be imposed in this country today we would, perhaps in forty or fifty years time have Prime Ministers of the calibre of Lady Thatcher and Mr Blair……..and history would repeat itself.
Talking about banking…….
……….did you see that Sir Fred Goodwin, who settled for early retirement at the age of fifty after having presided over the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland, is voluntarily giving up a substantial part of his pension.
It was very good of him, and his well-wishers (I’m sure that there must be a few) will be relieved to learn that he isn’t likely to be a future drain on either our charity or on state welfare. He will still have a pension of over £350,000 a year (that’s rather a large sum to visualise. It works out at about £6,730 a week), plus a tax-free lump sum of about £2 million. I wonder how much he would have received if he had proved to be a success?
No wonder there’s a national pensions crisis if there are many pay-outs like that! Somehow it makes the daytime tv adverts about the government’s determination to catch all those ‘benefit cheats’ ring a little hollow.
The Blacked-out Whitewash!
Was there ever such an anticlimax as the long-awaited but heavily censored ‘full publication’ of MPs’ expenses. Among the blacked-out portions were the locations of MPs’ homes, sometimes far from both their constituency and Westminster, where moats had been cleaned out and duck islands, plasma tvs and, of course, ‘love seats’ had been provided. The black-outs were in the interests of ‘security’. Is it seriously imagined that anyone determined to do so would have much difficulty in locating MPs’ first homes, second homes and, for those who have them, third homes? The Daily Telegraph had, in any case, revealed where they were and, surprisingly perhaps, none have yet been blown up by either terrorists or angry constituents!
The black-spattered images took me back to World War II when as a POW, I received regular letters from my girlfriend, Heather Gilbert, always a prolific but not always discreet correspondent. Between the ‘My dear Ernest’ and the ‘lots and lots of love, Heather’, sentences, paragraphs and, on one occasion, the whole letter, would be obliterated by the British censors, with identical ‘black-outs’ to those that punctuate the official ‘revelations’ of MPs’ expenses.
Heather Gilbert (subsequently Heather Hall), aged 19 in 1943, a prolific, but not always discreet. letter writer. Note the miniature RA badge worn as a brooch. This proudly announced to the world; ‘hands off! My boyfriend’s a gunner!’
I suppose that had those letters been passed uncensored, the Gestapo might have been mildly interested in such information as the fact that two bombs had been dropped on Woodville Gardens, Ilford, during the previous Thursday night but that the Gilbert household had escaped unscathed, or that the young man next door had been issued with tropical kit and had departed for an unknown destination. Today’s censors haven’t even got that excuse.
Thank goodness for the Daily Telegraph which gave us the unexpurgated version!
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