Week 1. 2011 4th Jan. 2011

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Always Winter…….but never Christmas!

Since I last posted a blog I have spent several happy hours in C.S. Lewis’ imaginary world of Narnia. I watched ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ on tv before I left Clacton to spend Christmas with my two sons. On Boxing Day my elder son took me to watch the recently released ‘Voyage of the Dawn Treader’ and on my return I watched Prince Caspian that had been recorded for me by my ‘freeview box’ in my absence. I liked the first – ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ best, though The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’ came a close second. I had – some years ago – read all the Narnia books. There are three others yet to be filmed; The Horse and his Boy, The Silver Chair and the award-winning The Last Battle.

Those acquainted with ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ will know that prior to the fortuitous arrival of the evacuated Pevensea children in 1940, Narnia was under the spell of the Wicked Witch. It was a world in which it was always winter – but never Christmas.

C.S.Lewis must have had truly prophetic vision since that seems to be the fate that awaits us. Our world hasn’t been taken over by the Narnian Wicked Witch. We are threatened by another witch though, Courtesy’s ugly sister – Political Correctness. Increasingly ‘Christmas’ is being phased out in the ludicrous belief that its mention might offend non-Christians. Greetings cards manufacturers nowadays prefer to offer ‘Seasons Greetings’ rather than ‘Happy Christmas’. Christmas (the time of thanksgiving for the birth of Jesus Christ) has become The Festive Season or The Mid-winter Festival.

I was disappointed to discover that Tendring Careline, a local institution for which I have the highest regard (and on which at some time or other my life may depend!) has fallen under the evil spell. I and – no doubt – all other Careline clients have received a useful Careline Calendar indicating when they would like us to check the efficiency of the system. The calendar didn’t come with the Christmas Greetings of the Careline Staff (Christmas is becoming one of those words that are not used in polite society) but with Seasons Greeting. Recipients are told that The Careline team would like to offer all our service users a Happy Holiday Season and a safe and peaceful New Year.

There’s nothing wrong with being wished a safe and peaceful New Year, but a Happy Holiday Season is a pretty poor substitute for a hearty and sincere Happy Christmas! To many of us Careline clients – old, possibly disabled, living alone, almost or completely housebound – ‘holidays’ are things of the past, suggesting activities that are now far beyond our capabilities.

Christmas though, is something different. It is a time when we hear, if only via scribbled Christmas cards, from almost-forgotten friends and relatives far away. A time when, on the whole, people are nicer to each other, and to us, than at other times in the year; when we can enjoy the fairy lights and decorations in other people’s homes even if we can’t manage them ourselves. We can enjoy Christmas church services on radio and/or tv. Some of us, perhaps with help, can get to a Christmas church service ourselves. Had I spent Christmas in Clacton my mobility scooter (my iron horse) would have made it possible for me to attend 8.00 a.m. Mass at St. James’ Church followed by a special Christmas Meeting for Worship at the Quaker Meeting House. As it was, on Christmas Day my younger son Andy took me to a Choral Eucharist that I thoroughly enjoyed at St. Mark’s Church of England parish church in Enfield.

It is a time too when we can enjoy our memories of Christmases past, though ironically it is the happiest memories that are most likely to make us feel sad.

A happy Christmas memory. My late wife Heather manning the Quaker ‘white elephant’ stall at the annual CCVS (as it then was) Christmas sale in Clacton's Princes Theatre in, I think, the early '70s.

I hope that, should I still be around next Christmas (not a possibility on which I would advise anyone to bet too heavily!) Tendring Careline will feel able to send me, and all their other clients, a traditional Christmas greeting. In recent years, our winters have been long, cold, dark and miserable. Please don’t rob us of the interlude of warmth, love, light and joy that Christmas brings!

The Big Freeze – the aftermath!

When, a fortnight ago, I warned in this blog about the risk to domestic plumbing systems arising from successive days and nights of sub-zero temperatures, I hardly expected my gloomy forebodings to be realized quite so spectacularly. On 29th December news bulletins recorded that 40,000 Northern Irish homes were without a mains water supply because of the loss of water from tens of thousands of burst pipes. Scotland, although it had more severe weather for a longer period, was not so badly affected and there have, so far, been no reports of interrupted water supplies in England as a result of burst pipes. The Irish Republic where, in many areas, the weather cannot have been wildly different from that in Northern Ireland, has had many crises recently – but widespread loss of water supply has not been among them.

The Northern Irish Government and the Water Authority are being criticised for not having reacted quickly and effectively to the situation. I think that there should be an investigation into the cause of the crisis as well as into the ineffective attempts to alleviate it. Do building regulations in Northern Ireland incorporate proper frost precautions and, if so, are those regulations rigorously enforced? I saw, on a tv news bulletin, water jetting from a burst in what appeared to be a supply pipe from the water main rising to the upper storey of a house on an external wall. On the same news bulletin we saw a branch pipe taken several feet along an external wall to an outside tap. If builders can get away with such obvious and easily spotted design faults what about the less obvious and invisible ones?

Are water mains buried at a sufficient depth below the streets or footpaths? And what about the connecting pipes (or ‘rising mains’) from the water main to the premises? That connecting pipe should be at least 1ft 6in below ground level throughout its length. In a large housing development reducing that depth by a few inches overall can save quite a lot of money and – once the trenches have been filled in – no-one is aware of anything wrong until, of course, there is a cold spell like the one that we have recently experienced!

We all know, because we have heard it so often from know-it-all politicians, that pettifogging regulations enforced mindlessly by faceless bureaucrats, stifle enterprise and inhibit wealth creation. It is worth remembering that they also prevent disasters like that which, as I write these words, we are witnessing in Northern Ireland.

Footnote – I was disquieted to hear the Chief Executive of the Northern Ireland Water Authority, who really should have known better, blame all those burst pipes and leaking water mains on ‘the suddenness of the thaw’. Had he been a reader of this blog he would have known that it was the severe and prolonged freeze that damaged the province’s plumbing systems. The thaw merely made it evident.


‘Give all thou canst. High Heaven rejects the law of nicely calculated less or more’

The above quote by William Wordsworth was inspired by the government’s wish to encourage us towards charitable giving, and their making it easier (by any means other than putting extra cash into our pockets or handbags!) for us to do so. Little ‘nudges’ to urge us toward philanthropy are to be included in Council tax and income tax demands and other official communications.

One of the now-totally-useless skills that I acquired as a PoW in Germany was that of driving an ox-cart (yes, oxen were quite commonly used to pull heavy loads in Germany in 1943/’45). The ox would have a single cord attached to the right-hand side of its mouth, connecting it to the driver. When the driver wanted the ox to turn to the right, he pulled long and hard on the cord. That pulled the ox’s head round to the right and it followed its nose in that direction. If, on the other hand, he wanted the ox to turn to the left he gave a series of short, sharp tugs on the cord. This, the ox disliked and instinctively turned his head away from it – toward the left. ‘Simple!’ as the meerkat says in the well-known tv advert!

I have a feeling that those little nudges toward charitable giving, especially when accompanying some kind of a tax demand, are likely to have the same effect on us as those irritating sharp tugs had on the ox. It’ll turn us away from them.

Most of us, in any case, get plenty of reminders of charitable giving landing on our doormats almost every morning, as worthy charities ply us with heart-rending stories and gifts (ball-point pens, pictorial calendars, greetings cards, shopping bags, electric torches – even a few small coins!) to make us feel guilty if we fail to support them. There are two or three charities that I regularly support as generously as I can. If I attempted to give to all who ask, I’d be in need of charity myself.

I don’t think that I am being unduly cynical in suggesting that the government is well aware of the sterling work that many charities perform, and that they realize that their funding cuts to local authorities are limiting, if not stopping altogether, the financial help that charities have come to rely on from that source. They are hoping that their ‘give more to charity’ campaign will encourage us, as individuals, to make up the shortfall.

Possibly men and women of good will, will respond as generously as they are able to. Surely though, it is the government’s job to ensure that less benevolent citizens also make their fair contribution towards the well-being of the sick, the disabled and those otherwise in need. There’s just one way to do that. Reform the Income Tax system, adding a penny or two per pound to the general rate and making it more progressive, so that the seriously wealthy pay their fair share towards national recovery. Stamp out tax evasion and currently-legal tax avoidance. Those are options that, so far, do not appear even to have been considered in the corridors of power.

‘On the twelfth day of Christmas……..’

…..down come the Christmas trees, the holly and the ivy, the fairy lights and the tinsel. In medieval times that was the end of twelve days of celebration. The fact that Shakespeare wrote a play ‘Twelfth Night’ especially for the occasion suggests that the final day of Christmas (6th January) was reckoned to be almost as important as Christmas Day itself.

On the twelfth day – ‘The crib’ at St James’ parish church in Clacton-on-Sea depicts the Magi arriving and presenting their gifts to the new-born Messiah.

It was remembered and celebrated as the anniversary of the day on which the ‘Three Kings’, ‘Three Wise Men’ or ‘Three Magi’ from the east arrived in Bethlehem to give their gifts of gold, frankincense and Myrrh to the newly born Jesus. It was Epiphany (the ‘showing’), the day on which the Christ Child was presented to the Gentiles, whereby God made it clear that the Christ was his revelation of himself to the whole world, not just to the Children of Israel. All the man-made decoration could therefore be put away because ‘The Light of the World’ had come.

Week 52.10 28th December 2010

Tendring Topics…….on line

Christmas – for Quakers!

Way back in September I wrote an article with the above title for ‘The Friend’, a Quaker Weekly Journal. It expressed my thoughts about the importance of Christmas to Quakers. The Editor thanked me but said that it was rather too long for ‘The Friend’. Could I reduce it from 1,300 to under 1,000 words? I could and I did.

The resultant abridged version was duly published in the Christmas/New Year issue of ‘The Friend’. I felt though that the article might be of interest beyond the confines of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and have decided to publish the original unabridged version in this blog. It could even be of interest to some who don’t consider themselves to be Christians.

Here it is – I hope that you may find it interesting:

Christmas - for Quakers

‘How will you your Christmas keep: feasting, fasting, or asleep? asks Eleanor Farjeon in her poem ‘Keeping Christmas.’

Early Quakers would have answered without hesitation, ‘We don’t keep it at all, nor do we keep any other Christian festival’. This was not because they doubted the virgin birth of Jesus, or that he was God’s Word made Flesh, or the accounts of his crucifixion and resurrection, but because they claimed to celebrate those events in their hearts every day of the year.

There are Quakers today who maintain the testimony against observing ‘times and seasons’ but very few, I think, for the same reason as those early Friends. It is likely that many believe that the Gospel accounts of the miraculous birth in Bethlehem, the shepherds’ angelic vision, and the visit of the Magi are all a myth, invented to add some ‘magic’ to an otherwise prosaic narrative. It is no more literal historical truth, and of no more importance, than the story of Adam and Eve or, come to that, the Greek myth of Pandora and her box.

Nowadays, they say, no one really believes the Christmas story and it’s just an excuse for a spending spree, overeating and boozing! Best to forget the whole silly business and get on with daily life, as those early Quakers did some three centuries ago.

Like early Quakers, I do believe that Jesus Christ was God’s word incarnate (made flesh, personified – whichever you prefer). Unlike them though, I think that it is right to commemorate and celebrate his birthday. Do Friends who pay no heed to ‘times and seasons’ ignore their own children’s birthdays or their own wedding anniversaries? If they do, they must have unusually tolerant and understanding families. I think it unlikely that Jesus’ birth occurred exactly as recounted in the Gospels, but I do think that the Christmas story contains a measure of historic truth. I believe too that even if the whole thing were invented, it would be no less important because of the insight it gives us into the deepest convictions of the early Christian Church.

Think about it. The traditional Christmas story proclaims that the mother of the man who was human but also divine was Mary, an ordinary village girl born and living in Nazareth and engaged to be married to a carpenter. She was to bear her son under circumstances that would bring into doubt his paternity and could even have resulted in her facing an accusation of adultery. He was destined to grow up in an obscure village in the remote province of Galilee, far from Jerusalem and the Temple, the centre of Jewish faith and culture. The first reaction of Nathaneal, when he was told of Jesus, was incredulity; ‘Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?’

After having been told that she was to be the mother of the future Messiah Mary composed a triumphal revolutionary anthem that makes The Red Flag appear pale pink in comparison!

He hath shewed strength with his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts’
He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.

It can only have been thanks to the Grace of God that the Magnificat has survived generation after generation of rule by ‘the proud, the mighty and the rich’ to give hope to the poor and to inspire such martyred Christian leaders as Fr. John Ball of Colchester in the 14th century and Archbishop Romero of El Salvador in the 20th.

The birth took place in Bethlehem. The only inn in the town was fully booked. There was no room available. Temporarily homeless, the expectant mother and her husband found shelter in a stable. It was there that their child was born, a cattle trough serving as a cradle.

These were surely strange circumstances to have been invented by those trying to deceive the world into believing that the child was the long-awaited Messiah, destined to redeem Israel.

More equally inauspicious events were to follow. Those who were first informed of the newborn Messiah were not, as might have been expected, the prophets, scholars and priests of Israel. Nor were they the land’s temporal rulers. Rome was ignorant of, and would have been indifferent to, his birth. When Herod heard of it he sought only the baby’s death!

It was shepherds, tending their flocks on the hillside near Bethlehem, to whom the news of the birth was first given. They were well down the social scale and would have been even lower in the estimate of the rulers of the Temple and arbiters of spiritual life. Shepherds couldn’t, by reason of their occupation, obey the Law of Moses to the letter. Sheep need to be guarded and cared for seven days a week. Nature does not heed the Sabbath. Yet, they were chosen by God to welcome the baby who was to change the whole world.

The first to bring the baby gifts that were symbolic of his kingship, his divine nature – and his cruel and untimely death, were neither Children of Israel nor Jewish converts. They were Magi from a distant land, heathen idolaters of the kind that had been roundly condemned throughout the Scriptures. They were surely symbolic of the fact that Jesus was God’s gift to the whole of humanity, not to Israel only.

More was to follow. Within weeks, Mary and Joseph, with the baby Jesus, were political refugees, fleeing for their lives into the land of Egypt. How long did they stay there? No one knows. At least one apocryphal gospel suggests several years. Other authorities believe a matter of months only. Perhaps it didn’t happen at all and was just part of that meretricious ‘Christmas myth’. Perhaps – but early Christians (and early Friends) believed that, at least in the first instance, the Holy Family was dependent upon ‘the kindness of strangers’ and that they lived for months, perhaps years, among the idolatrous heathen.

Those first Chapters of St Luke’s, St. Matthew’s and St. John’s Gospels tell us that when God’s ‘Word’ (‘that was with God and was God from the beginning and without whom was not anything made that was made’ – and is also the ‘True Light that enlightens everyone who comes into the World’) was ‘made flesh and dwelt among us’, he did not make his home and find his friends among the powerful, the most wise or the most outwardly religious. Throughout his life he made a point of his own lack of worldly possessions (‘The Son of Man hath nowhere to lay his head’) and of his identification with social and religious outcasts, with the poor and the homeless, and with ‘foreigners’ dwelling in a strange land. ‘Inasmuch as ye have done these things (good or bad) to one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done them unto me’. This, early Christians clearly believed, was the nature of their, and our, God.

I do not know how much of the Gospel stories of Christ’s Nativity is true. I have no doubt though about the truth of that summation. If the Christmas story is ‘just a myth’ what a magnificent myth it is; a myth that reveals fundamental truths more clearly than could any cold recounting of historical events! For Quakers (whether believing, half-believing or disbelieving the familiar Christmas story), this revelation of the nature of God deserves to be remembered and celebrated, if not every day of the year, at least at Christmas time.

The time draws near the birth of Christ,
A present that can not be priced,
Given two thousand years ago.
And if God had not given so,
He still would be a distant stranger
And not the Baby in the Manger.

‘Advent 1955’ by John Betjeman

HAPPY NEW YEAR?

I had intended to put the customary exclamation mark after that New Year salutation. I altered it to a question mark because it is clear to me that for a great many, perhaps most, of us 2011 threatens to be a far-from-happy year. Not for everybody, of course. The chief difference that the seriously wealthy are likely to notice is that when they get their P.A. to insert an advert in the press for an under-gardener, a nursemaid, scullery maid or some other member of the lower classes to perform a menial task ‘about the mansion’ or on the estate, they are likely to have a really tedious number of applications to sort through.

But there, I expect that they’ll get the P.A., the Press Secretary, the Chef or the Estate Manager to sort through them! Strange how – after ten years of ‘New-Labour’ government - the ever-widening gap between the really wealthy and the poor is beginning to replicate the ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ of Edwardian days, but in a third millennium context. It’s much the same really – just that the upper servants; the butler, housekeeper, cook and head gardener, now have different, and rather less servile, designations.

As for the rest of us, I reckon that until now most of us have only ‘heard of’ the government’s saving plans. We have been able to persuade ourselves that they’ll really only affect ‘other people’. We’ll be immune.

We won’t be. As we move into the New Year, whatever may be our age, physical condition or financial situation (unless, of course, we’re millionaires) we’re going to be affected by the swingeing reductions in governmental financial support for public services. Perhaps we’ll be losing our job, either because we are employed in the public service or because we’re in the private sector but much or all of our work is under contract to a public authority. We may be losing our home because we can no longer keep up the mortgage payments and, in any case, falling house prices may mean that we now owe more than our home is worth!

You’re fit, you intend to stay fit and you use the Council swimming pool and fitness centre? It is likely to close, have restricted hours of opening, or vastly increased charges. Perhaps you’re not so fit, or you’re elderly, and you use the public library. That will be affected in the same way. Meals on wheels, social services generally? Expect increased charges and a reduction in services. Refuse collection and street cleaning? Weekly collection is likely to become a thing of the past. Our streets will become shabbier and more litter-strewn. Potholes and broken paving stones will remain unrepaired. Economies with policing are likely to lead to an increase in crime. Going out alone after dark could be unwise – especially as the highway authority may be economising on street lighting!

And, of course, it will be local councils who collect the Council Tax and will have to impose the cuts, who will get the blame! Central Government will be seen as the knight in shining armour to whom the public can appeal to save them from ‘rapacious and incompetent bureaucrats at the Town Hall’.

Well, I do wish all blog readers a happy and peaceful New Year! – there’s no harm in wishing, and no harm in hoping!


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Week 51.10 21 December 2010

Tendring Topics……..on Line

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

There is a, possibly apocryphal, story of a young couple doing their Christmas shopping and looking at all the depictions of Santa Claus, Rudolph the reindeer, gnomes and fairies in the shop windows. The young woman spotted one shop window with a baby in a manger and shepherds and wise men in attendance. She called to her husband or (since they were a
thoroughly modern couple) her partner. ‘Look at this dear’, she said, ‘would you believe it! They’re even dragging religion into Christmas now!’


In an article in the Christmas number of the Radio Times Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, writes of the modern practice of describing Christmas as the Midwinter Festival and replacing traditional junior school Nativity Plays with winter morality plays having no religious theme. This is presumably because we now live in a multi-faith society and it is feared that a purely Christian festival might offend those of other religious faiths or of none. Dr Rowan Williams points out that many adherents of other faiths are happy to join with Christians in remembering and re-enacting the Nativity story. Muslims, in particular, accept the story of Jesus’ miraculous birth, while rejecting his crucifixion and resurrection. Dr Williams says that one of the best film versions of the Nativity that he has seen was made by an Iranian Muslim film company.

In any case, don’t the apostles of ‘political correctness’ who are so mindful for the feelings of those with other faiths, ever consider the possibility that Christians (still quite a substantial religious group in the UK!) could be offended by their festival having been taken over by secular materialism; what in an earlier age might have been described as the worship and service of Mammon?

Looking at the colourful illustrations of happy children in the pages of the daily Coastal Gazette and the Clacton Gazette during the week before Christmas, I was cheered and relieved to note that by far the greater number of end-of-term primary school Christmas dramas were straightforward old-fashioned Nativity Plays with a baby in a manger, a bashful Joseph and Mary, shepherds, wise men and angels. Long may they remain so!

I feel no need to conceal my Christian faith, shaky and full of doubt as it often is. I wish all blog readers a joyful Christmas and a peaceful and fulfilled New Year. May the God revealed to us in the manger of ‘a lowly cattle shed’ bless us all.

'In a lowly cattle shed'. The Christmas Crib at St. James' (Church of England) parish church, Clacton-on-Sea

‘Black is actually white'

Nobody is saying that – yet. But, when I hear some of the claims of the present government, I am expecting to hear it any day! There is, for instance, the claim that reducing unemployment pay helps the jobless – it gives them an extra incentive to look for a non-existent job!

Then there is the insistent claim that government is divesting itself of its powers and returning them to ‘the people’ and ‘to local communities’. I have been urging that for years! Ever since the end of World War II central government has been taking responsibility for running local services from the representatives of local people, their elected district councils and either controlling them directly itself or handing them over to giant private corporations. Was that to be reversed?

Not a bit of it. Central government is now taking over the control of the letting of socially provided housing accommodation from elected councils ‘Nanny knows best dear’. It is also taking control of schools away from local democratic control and handing it, with the cash that goes with it, over to head teachers. But ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’ as those head teachers will discover if their syllabuses and teaching practices begin to stray too far from what central government (not local people) consider desirable.

Political control of Police Forces is to be taken away from existing Police Committees (whose members, though not directly elected, did at least represent local communities) and handed over to single, directly elected, Police Commissioners (no doubt on a fat-cat salary!) Similarly the government would like to transform local authorities, as they exist today, to be presided over by directly elected Mayors with executive powers. These measures may make for greater efficiency, but they certainly don’t ‘give power to the people’. They would mean that control of the police and of local administration would pass from representative committees to elected dictatorships. It is always easier to bribe or bully a single individual than the members of a committee!

Then there is the matter of university tuition fees, an issue that has provoked, and will continue to provoke, both strong peaceful protest, and angry and destructive riots. But ‘students don’t have to pay a penny up front’ the government insists plaintively. ‘Don’t they understand that no-one has to pay anything at all until his or her income exceeds £21,000 a year. Many students will never pay off their nominal debt. More, rather than less, students from poorer families will be attracted to University education’. Perhaps some, the irresponsible, will be attracted. It will be the more responsible less-than-wealthy who will be deterred. I know that my wife and I would never have encouraged a child of ours to incur a debt of perhaps £40,000 or £50,000 (what’s an odd £10,000 to the seriously wealthy!) hanging over his head for all his working life. The fact that he might never pay it off would have made the prospect additionally abhorrent rather than more attractive. It might have been thought that the current financial crisis would have made even members of the present government (few, if any, of whom have ever known financial hardship) appreciate the fear of debt felt by what used to be known as ‘the deserving poor’ – but apparently not!

But that’s not all. We all know, because top politicians have told us so often, that they’re very keen on keeping seriously and chronically ill patients in their own homes so that they don’t have to spend their last months or years in hospital or a care home. Could it be to facilitate this that the government is phasing out the disability living allowance that pays for carers and other necessities for the bedridden and housebound. This takes effect immediately for new applicants. For those at present in receipt of the allowance it will be phased out in 2015. Perhaps it is to give the disabled an added incentive ‘to rise, take up their beds, and walk’!

‘Black’ may not yet have been officially declared to be ‘white’ but it is certainly beginning to look distinctly ‘greyish’. And now, I learn, the government is trying to find means of measuring the happiness of the electorate! I was about to write that Britain today is looking more and more like George Orwell’s vision of 1984 – but not even George Orwell’s fertile imagination had hit on the idea of a Happiness Gauge!

A bit less seriously!

As Christmas is now just days away, it occurs to me that some readers – or younger members of their families – might be amused by a couple of light-hearted Christmassy pieces of verse that my wife Heather and I wrote many years ago to amuse our grandchildren. You can guess roughly how many years ago by the fact that all three of those grandchildren are now in their late twenties!

When Santa got stuck in a Chimney….

When Santa got stuck in a chimney
Long ago on a cold winter’s night;
You never heard such a commotion,
You never did see such a sight!

There was soot over mother’s best carpet –
There was soot on the furniture too –
And Santa Claus thought that his boots were on fire
The night he got stuck in a flue.

The reindeer pulled hard on their traces.
(You’d have thought he was stuck there with glue!)
Till at last, in a rush, with a huff and a puff,
Old Santa popped out of the flue.

He sent his red coat to the cleaners
And he said, as he scratched his grey head.
‘Next year I’ll wait till the family’s asleep
And creep in through a window instead!’

Good King Wenceslas

Good King Wenceslas is, as far as I know, the only Christmas carol with no reference to the Nativity. It is also not strictly a Christmas carol at all but a ballad for St. Stephen’s Day, better known to most of us as Boxing Day. It does though carry the strong Christian message of the responsibility of the wealthy and privileged towards the less fortunate.

When I was a small boy I quite thought that the King’s name was Wenslas and that he ‘last looked out’. I had a vision of an important looking man with a crown on his head and wearing a dressing gown who, before going to bed, opened the front door of his palace to put the cat out and leave a note for the milkman in the morning. When he did this on 26th December he spotted this poor old man grubbing through the snow looking for a few sticks of firewood!

Many years later, as a prisoner of war, I spent two Christmases in what had been King Wenceslas’ Kingdom of Bohemia. The snow there really was deep and crisp and even. Looking across snowfields toward distant forest and mountains it was easy to imagine the scene that King Wenceslas had surveyed on that Boxing Day night centuries earlier. Later, hitch-hiking my way through Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia after the collapse of Nazi Germany in May 1945, I found my way to Prague where I celebrated with jubilant Czechs before moving on. In Wenceslas Square (Prague’s main square), there was the King himself, on his charger, dominating the scene. He, like me, had survived World War II!

Many more years passed and one Christmas, to entertain our grandchildren, my wife Heather and I composed a piece of verse that could have been a prelude to the events recorded in the carol. It was hardly fair on King Wenceslas who, I have little doubt, was a kind and generous man throughout his life. After a thousand years I hope he won’t mind. Here it is:

King Wenceslas hung his stocking up on 24th December.
‘Will Father Christmas call on me. I hope he will remember’.
He early went to bed that night, woke early in the morning;
Roused his pageboy with a shout, as the day was dawning.
‘At the bottom of my bed, there should be a present;
A new gold ring would be quite nice, or a fine fat pheasant!’
At the bottom of the bed, the pageboy found a letter:
Dear King, Be nicer to the poor and I’ll like you better.
It’s a rich man’s job to see beggars don’t go hungry.
If this warning you ignore, I’ll be very angry.
Tomorrow is St. Stephen’s Day. Please look out of doors.
Help the poor man you’ll see there.
Yours truly, Santa Claus

Not great poetry – but it amused the grandchildren!

Happy Christmas to all!

Week 50 14th December 2010

Tendring Topics……on Line

Just imagine!

Just imagine what would have happened if, during the course of the last General Election campaign, a number of very influential politicians had hurried across to Brussels to declare their undying devotion to the European Cause. They might perhaps have said that they regarded the European Union as their ‘other homeland’, that if their party were to be elected they would make sure that the government’s policies were resolutely pro-European, and that any arms contracts to be awarded would go to European manufacturers.

It wouldn’t have been entirely unreasonable. The UK is geographically, culturally, politically and economically part of Europe. The greater part of our overseas trade is with our fellow-Europeans, we have an equal and influential part to play in EU decision-making, and we are bound to that Union by Treaty obligation.

Yet can you imagine the fury and outrage that such a visit would have evoked in the UK? The MPs concerned would have been branded as traitors and lapdogs of Brussels, eager to give away our country’s precious sovereignty and independence. The flag-waving Europhobes of UKIP (and those who support its policies) would probably suggest that the election of those politicians should be declared null and void. MI5 would be urged to find grounds for their prosecution. The headline writers of The Sun, the Daily Express, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph would be apoplectic in their efforts to outdo each other in denunciation and insult!

You may perhaps have been astonished to have learned (via Wikileaks) that a number of top politicians did, in fact, go to a foreign power – though not to Brussels – and make just such promises and declarations of loyalty! They were prominent Conservative politicians and the foreign power concerned was the USA, a country with which we are said to have a ‘special relationship’ but whose history, political and legal structures, traditions and culture are different from our own and from those of our European neighbours and partners. That ‘special relationship’ has led us into an illegal war in Iraq, the main effect of which has been to encourage the terrorism it was intended to combat, and to an unwinnable war in Afghanistan that is taking an almost daily toll of British lives. I am thankful that half a century ago we had a Prime Minister who, whatever other faults he may have had, had the courage and independence to keep us out of the USA’s disastrous war in Vietnam. Had he not done so we would have had to make room for even more names on our war memorials, and there would have been even more tearful British widows and orphans on Remembrance Sunday.

Was there outrage about the MPs who were promising unequivocal support (and arms contracts!) to the USA? Not a bit of it. The headline writers of the Mail, the Express and the Sun have been unwontedly silent, despite the fact that one of those MPs is now Foreign Secretary and another Minister for Defence! Nor has there been a squeak of protest from the flag-waving patriots of UKIP (I have always suspected that they were motivated more by hatred of Europe than by love of Britain)

Only an incorrigible romantic can imagine that Britain, bereft of its once mighty Empire, can stand alone in today’s world. Today we are facing a stark choice of closer political and economic integration within a new United Europe in which we would have a powerful and influential voice, or of accepting the status of a protectorate of the USA, having no say in its policies but being always ready to do its bidding, thankful for the occasional smile of approbation and the metaphorical pat on the head. Can it really be possible that a majority of the people in this once-proud country would be happy to see Great Britain reduced to such an abject role?

Within a reborn and truly united Europe we could have a new – and more balanced – special relationship with the USA and with the world’s other emerging powers.

Going away for Christmas? Will your plumbing be safe from frost?

Glancing at my once-popular manuals on domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage on my bookshelves as the outside temperature plunged below zero, I remembered that in the past – while they were still in print - arctic weather had encouraged both their sales and the number of times they were loaned out from public libraries, thus boosting my royalties and public lending right payments! It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good!

In recent years the Christmas period has tended to be quite mild over the whole of the UK. Cold spells were most likely to come in January, February and March. It was usually safe enough to leave your home for a few days over Christmas without worrying unduly about the possibility of a frozen or burst pipe greeting you on your return.

This year things have been – and still could be – very different. We have already had very cold weather with subzero temperatures day and night for several days at a time. Thought should be given to frost protection even if you expect to be absent over Christmas only for a couple of days. The suggestions in my plumbing books are some twenty years out of date. Domestic heating systems and home insulation have made spectacular advances in those two decades. Basic principles and basic problems remain the same though.

Practically everything in the world contracts (shrinks, gets smaller) as it gets colder and colder. Water is an exception. It contracts until it gets to within a few degrees of zero Celsius – then it expands as it ‘changes state’ and becomes ice. It is that expansion that bursts pipes and damages plumbing systems. Many people imagine that pipes burst with the thaw. That’s not true. They burst, if they are going to, when they freeze. You don’t know about it till the thaw though, because the ice blockage prevents water flowing from the damaged pipe.

Lagging, although essential, will not, on its own, protect a plumbing system from freezing during a prolonged icy spell. There will always be some loss of heat when a house is unoccupied and its fabric chills off completely. The best way to protect it is to introduce a regular source of warmth. If you have a reliable automatic gas or oil fired central heating system it is a good idea either to have a ‘frost stat’ or to make sure that it comes on, perhaps for an hour or two when it is likely to be most cold – in the ‘small hours’ of the morning. That should be sufficient to prevent freezing.

The most vulnerable part of your plumbing system is up in the roof space and if you have – as recommended – insulated it to prevent heat loss from the rooms below, it will be that much more vulnerable. While the house is empty it is a good idea to prop the trap-door leading to the roof pace open by perhaps an inch, to allow slightly warmer air from the house to flow up into this vulnerable area. Don’t forget to close I again though, directly you are home!

The above really does no more than alert readers to the risk and suggest one or two obvious precautions. If in doubt it would be a good idea to consult the heating engineer who regularly services your boiler.

I hope that you have an enjoyable – and carefree – Christmas break and return to find your home as warm and comfortable as it was when you left it.

Perfect Timing

I hope that the Guardian will forgive my lifting a few paragraphs from a recent edition. On 7th December, the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Lasange, was arrested on a Swedish extradition request, was refused bail despite enormous sums being offered as surety, and was incarcerated in Wandsworth Prison. Mr Lasange is charged with sexual offences that he hotly denies. (Meanwhile we learn today, 10th December that a suspected murderer wanted by the South African Government has been granted bail while awaiting a court hearing!) Strident but influential voices in the USA have been loud in their condemnation of Wikileaks’ exercise of its freedom of speech, and in demanding the arrest of the organisation’s founder. It really doesn’t need an incorrigible devotee of ‘conspiracy theories’ to see the hand of the State Department and the CIA in the sequence of events.

The Guardian reports that meanwhile, on the same day (7th December)………..

5.30pm: With perfect timing an email arrives from Philip Crowley at the state department:
The United States is pleased to announce that it will host Unesco's World Press Freedom Day event in 2011, from 1-3 May in Washington, DC.
Ironic? Read the next paragraph from the press release:
The theme for next year's commemoration will be 21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers. The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals' right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.
I particularly like the bit that I have printed in ‘bold’ type! I am sure that it would be appreciated by Mr Lasange!

There really isn’t anything that I can add to the Guardian’s brief comment. ‘Shameless, you couldn’t make it up’

Essex County Council breaks new ground – yet again!

It’s quite like the old days when Lord Hanningfield was at the helm! Once again Essex County Council is leading the way with a revolutionary policy that, as far as I know, has never yet been tried by a local authority.

One of the statutory duties laid on County Councils by central government is the welfare of children in care – and it seems that Essex C.C. is not very good at it. An Ofsted report says that the Council’s care homes are ‘unsatisfactory’ and Mrs Sarah Candy, the county councillor responsible for these homes says with endearing candour, ‘We are more than aware of the Ofsted judgement against us. Essex County Council does not have the best record and we have not been delivering the services children need.’

It might have been thought that the County Council would now be making mammoth efforts to improve those services – even if it cost money, even if it meant digging into those reserves-held-for-a-rainy-day, even if it meant foregoing the increase in allowances that the councillors voted for themselves earlier this year.

Not a bit of it. Innovative lateral thinking has produced a solution that will enable the Councillors to put all those unkind criticisms behind them, and make some money in the process! They are simply going to privatise their failing children’s homes – sell them off as they sold off their old people’s homes a few years ago. It is expected that this will result in the loss of 128 jobs (tough luck – but you can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs) but it will save the County Council an estimated £3 million a year!

Mrs Candy insists that it is the children’s welfare that they have at heart and that the privatisation has nothing to do with money. No wonder though, that she was smiling when pictured in the Coastal Gazette.

Week 49 7th Dec. 2010

Tendring Topics…….on line

Prepared for the weather?

Do you remember last winter, how it went on and on? And do you remember how, directly it was over, Essex County Council, as one of England’s largest highway authorities, called a conference of all such authorities, to discuss dealing with snowed-up highways in future years. I can’t remember what the conference decided. I do remember though that Lord Hanningfield (then leader of Essex County Council) announced that it had been a great success. It was, he claimed, yet another example of Essex County Council leading the way and others following!

Well, winter has undoubtedly come onto us early this year and, before the end of November snow covered a great deal of the country. We had the usual toll of traffic accidents and of traffic halted or reduced to a crawl. Highway authorities began salting and gritting major roads in an effort to keep traffic moving. Most of them, (who knows, perhaps they had been inspired by that conference!) announced that this year they wouldn’t be caught out. They had enormous stocks of grit and salt available and had ample reserves accessible if they needed them.

I think that they may have been a little over-confident. They started using up their salt stock before the beginning of December. No-one can possibly know how long the winter will last and how many days and nights of freezing temperatures and lying snow we would have to endure before the spring. Shelley concludes his ‘Ode to the West Wind’ with the rhetorical question, ‘O Wind – if winter comes, can spring be far behind?’ The only honest answer to that is, ‘Yes, sometimes it can be!’ There are no certainties where the weather is concerned.

There were no such boasts from County Hall in Chelmsford. Unaccustomed modesty? Perhaps – but on 25th November the Coastal Gazette carried the alarming report that, ‘Essex may run out of road gritting salt if this winter becomes as bad as last year’. The report goes on to say:

‘Despite improvements to the quality of the salt and closer relationships with other authorities to improve gritting, another bad winter could make public highways dangerous for pedestrians, shoppers and drivers.

Figures in Essex County Council’s winter operational document for 2010/2011 show that Essex will have less than the minimum material recommended every week for the winter. Some depots do not have the capacity to store even the minimum.‘
‘
Norman Hume, county councillor responsible for highways and transportation agreed that the council had made provision only for a ‘normal’ winter and not for the conditions that we had experienced during the past two years. ‘We started with the salt barns full to capacity but the problem was re-supply. As a nation we can’t put resources into a policy not required except in exceptional circumstances’

I would hardly think that conditions that prevailed throughout the last two winters and look set to continue this year could be regarded as particularly exceptional!

The weather has been worse. Here is the sea frozen over near Clacton Pier in the early months of 1963. That year we had hard frosts until well into early spring

The county council does not plan to salt residential or minor roads, but will concentrate on major routes with local councils helping in town centres. Where, I wonder, will local councils find the funding to carry out this Highway Authority task?

Altogether, unless the weather gets much kinder, it is a pretty poor outlook this winter for local motorists, cyclists and pedestrians (and, of course, mobility scooterists; snowfall is the only circumstance that keeps my ‘iron horse’, confined to stable!) It’s not really what those who live in a county with a council that claims to ‘lead the rest!’ would expect.

In Vino Veritas

No, I didn’t have a classical education (I envy those who did!) but along life’s way most of us pick up a few Latin phrases and In Vino Veritas (Truth is in the wine) is one of mine. It means that alcohol loosens the tongue, frees us from our inhibitions and reveals our true nature. Thus, under the influence of a couple of drinks, a road sweeper may be revealed as a true gentleman and a Duke as something of an oaf.

The leaked (by Wikileaks) report of Prince Andrew’s indiscreet speech at a ‘brunch’ in Kyrgyzstan that he had attended as a British trade representative, suggests to me that His Royal Highness should have had a little more ‘tonic’ in his host’s pre-meal vodka-and-tonic. Surely he wouldn’t otherwise have made unflattering remarks about our American cousins with the American Ambassador present.

More serious though was his claim that it was ‘idiocy’ to investigate the allegations of bribery having taken place during the course of a major arms deal with Saudi Arabia, and to have denounced snooping Guardian journalists investigating bribery and corruption in other overseas trade deals. Perhaps even more disturbing was the fact that the American report on the incident said that the other Brits present had greeted these remarks not with disapproval but with enthusiasm.

Perhaps they too had had a drop too much. I hope so. It would be very sad indeed if, when stone cold sober, representatives of our country believed that there was some moral difference between offering a bribe and accepting one, and that it was quite all right for Britons to bribe influential ‘foreigners’ to obtain lucrative overseas contracts for British firms.

Can they really believe that morality, like religion, is a private matter for the individual conscience ………but that business is business and obeys no rules but its own?

Healthy North-East Essex?

I have always believed that the Tendring District, and in particular its coastal area is a good and healthy place to live. Low rainfall, fresh air blowing in off the sea, and lots of sunshine, combine to account for the fact that there are a great many oldies in our district. Some, like me, have grown old here, others have chosen to come here on retirement. More of us than in most areas survive and even thrive, into our eighties.

This is just as well because a recently published NHS report makes it clear that appreciably less is spent by the NHS in north-east Essex, in the Colchester and Tendring Districts, than in other parts of our county. The North-East Essex Primary Care Trust spends up to £8,000 per 1,000 residents less on cancer treatment (cancer is a condition more likely to afflict the old than the young) than Trusts in south Essex. Our primary care trust spends between £140,00 and £170,00 on mental health while in the south-east of the county they spend between £200,000 and £240,000.

People in north Essex are less likely to receive a needed hip replacement than their counterparts in the south and patients with chronic lung disease (another affliction of the elderly) are likely to face a longer hospital stay in Colchester and Clacton than elsewhere in the county. This, says the report, ‘does them more harm than good’.

Will the government’s plan to abolish primary care trusts and put commissioning of health care in the hands of GPs help reduce these inequalities. Bernard Jenkin, North Essex and Harwich MP thinks so. He is reported as saying, ‘What the government is going to do is remove the bureaucrats from the decisions about who gets treated, and the doctors are going to be put in charge of health treatment budgets. GPs choosing what treatments are made is the best way to create greater equality.’

Perhaps – but in the same issue of the Coastal Gazette that carries the NHS report we learn that a Dr Shane Gordon is the joint chief executive of the new GP consortium that will take over health-care budgets for Colchester and Tendring by 2013. I reckon that Dr Gordon will need quite a few lay clerical and administrative staff to help him with this task. Could it be just another bureaucratic organisation in the making

A Question of Extradition

Wikileaks revelations have brought the sad case of Gary McKinnon back into the public eye. I have to confess that I had completely forgotten this young IT genius who – clearly with no evil intent – had hacked his way into the defence secrets of the USA’s Pentagon! The sensible course of action of the US government would have been to ask him how he had done it, and ask him to co-operate in helping them to design a truly hack-proof system.

But no, for this dire offence ‘that threatened US security’ the USA wanted him to be extradited, in accordance with an extradition treaty accepted by Tony Blair, and to face trial in the USA. My opinion of Gordon Brown and David Cameron went up a notch or two when I learned that they had both intervened on Gary McKinnon’s behalf – and my opinion of Hilary Clinton dropped like a stone on learning that she had rejected their pleas.

I remember all too well how American Courts repeatedly refused to extradite convicted IRA murderers to England during the still-recent ‘troubles’. I remember too how a British Government had refused to extradite to Spain, General Pinochet, who had presided over the murders of hundreds of his fellow countrymen and others, and the torture of hundreds more, including Sheila Cassidy, a British doctor*. What a British government could do for Pinochet, its successors can do for Gary McKinnon.

But then, of course, General Pinochet had been a personal friend of Mrs Thatcher (now Lady Thatcher) and of Norman Lamont (now Lord Lamont) her less-than-successful Chancellor.

*See ‘Audacity to Believe’ by Sheila Cassidy, published 1977 by Collins of London, Publishers.

Not all Surprises!

I was certainly surprised by some of the revelations from Wikileaks, which – as I write – are being fed to us daily. I was, for instance, quite astonished to discover that the Governor of the Bank of England’s assessment of the qualities of our Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer was much the same as my own – though his judgement is of course, much more firmly grounded in knowledge and experience than mine is.

I was not however in the least surprised that the British and American governments were both seriously concerned about the possibility of Pakistan’s Nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of terrorists, who might use those weapons against us and/or India. In fact, I’d have been very anxious had I thought that that they were not worried about this possibility.

I reckon that the fact that Pakistan, India and Israel actually have nuclear weapons should cause us a lot more anxiety than the thought that Iran may possibly one day acquire them.

Week 48 30th Nov. 2010

Tendring Topics………on Line

Council Housing – once upon a time!

A job that I thoroughly enjoyed during my long local government career was that of Housing Manager. It was a position that I held in rural Suffolk and later in Clacton-on-Sea. Both Clacton Urban District Council and Gipping Rural District Council (just north of Ipswich) owned and controlled nearly a thousand council properties. I helped the Council with tenants’ selection, oversaw the general management of the housing estates including their maintenance, and tried to keep rent arrears down to a reasonable level. In Clacton, though not in Gipping, rent collection, the only regular direct contact with the tenants, was my direct responsibility

It was a satisfying role. I came to know personally all the housing applicants and a great many of the tenants. I went very thoroughly into the circumstances of every housing applicant so that his or her circumstances could be reported to the Council’s Tenants Selection Committee. Were they overcrowded? Were they compelled to live with in-laws? And what sort of relationship was there between them? Were the premises that they were living in at present damp, or otherwise unfit for habitation or, in the case of a sick or disabled applicant, unsuitable for that particular person? Did they have roots in the area where the houses were becoming available (particularly important in rural communities)? How long had they been trying to get more suitable accommodation?

Neither Clacton nor Gipping had a ‘points system’ of allocation. Had they had such a system it would have made life easier for me – but both Councils felt that no points system could adequately measure housing need. One question that I never asked applicants, and I am glad that I was never required to, was their income. Both Councils allocated houses on the basis of need for housing, neither wealth nor poverty being considered. Obviously it was those on the lower incomes who were most likely to be in need of accommodation – but not exclusively so. The son or daughter of a middle class family might be thoroughly miserable as a result of having to live with their spouse in an in-laws home, and might have a job with a great future – but still be unable to purchase a home, and unable to find anywhere private to let.


Both authorities for which I worked had modest, but steady, annual house building programmes. There were also ‘casual vacancies’ as tenants died, moved away or bought their own homes. This meant that, at least during my period of office both in Gipping and Clacton no-one and no family was ever left completely homeless, nor did we ever have to resort to bed-and-breakfast accommodation to prevent this.

Councils could attract key staff for themselves or for newly establishing enterprises by offering them council accommodation until they were in a position to buy a home in the area. My wife and I lived for a year in a Council House in Thorpe le Soken, and our younger son was born there. We then lived briefly in a Council House in The Chase, Holland-on-Sea before buying the bungalow in Dudley Road, Clacton, where I am typing these words today. There was no question of Council House provision being a ‘social service’, only available to the really needy. There was no stigma – or at least Heather and I never felt one, in being a ‘council tenant’.

39 Byng Crescent, Thorpe-le-Soken. The Council House in which Heather and I lived for a year and in which our younger son Andy was born.

The Council, and I as their agent, encouraged tenants to be proud of their homes. Tenants who wished to carry out, often quite expensive, structural alterations were usually permitted – even encouraged - to do so. We liked them to cultivate and to be proud of their gardens, front and rear. In the Gipping Rural District there was an annual Council house gardens competition which concluded with the Chairman of the Council and the Judges visiting each group of Council Houses and, at a subsequent ceremony, presenting the tenant with the best garden, and the runner up, with prizes. A number of other tenants would receive honourable mentions – all of which would be reported, with pictures, in the local press.

The result was that our Council houses, and our Council estates were a source of pride. A couple of years after I had progressed from being Clacton’s last Housing Manager to Tendring Council’s first Public Relations Officer, I escorted an American visitor, studying British local administration, round the Clacton’s Percy King Estate. He was deeply impressed. ‘Public Housing’ in the USA was not a bit like that, he assured me.

A Post-Shakespearean Sonnet!

It may be thought that I have painted rather too idyllic a picture of Council Houses and Council House Management in the pre-1980s. There were tenants who defaulted on their rent, had quarrels with their neighbours, had late-night parties, lit smoky garden bonfires or otherwise behaved in an antisocial way. There were, no doubt, some local government officials who were cold-hearted, unbending bureaucrats. I hope that I was not among them

Myself as Housing Manager in 1972. I have to concede that I do look like a smooth-tongued bureaucrat as the lady who inspired my sonnet suggested – rather more forcibly!

Certainly, after every meeting of the Council’s Tenants Selection Committee there were bitterly disappointed people with whom I had to deal. An overheard snatch of conversation after just such a difficult interview inspired me to compose a sonnet that I thought might, forty years on, interest blog readers. It represents my first and only attempt at real poetry (as distinct from doggerel to entertain the grandchildren) and it did, many years ago, earn me an ‘honourable mention’ in a regional amateur poetry competition.

After the Interview

‘No, nothing doing yet, “A thousand on the list”,
He says, “Come back in early May”.
Our application “missed
The last committee”. It’s “coming up next time”.
I answered all his questions; gave him proof
We paid the rent, and still had got to quit.
The smooth-tongued sod! He’s never lacked a roof
Over his head! I stripped our marriage bare,
Told him we fight; how Craig and Tracy yell.
Told him about the dampness on the stair,
And in the bedroom. It was wasted breath.
I’d like to see all Council men in Hell!

And that blonde bimbo with her bawling brat,
That lives above the pub – she’s got a flat!’

There was a ‘happy ending’. I am sure that the lady’s opinion of me changed a little two months later, when I was able to offer her husband, her two children (whose names, incidentally, were not Craig and Tracy) and herself, the tenancy of a new three bed-roomed council house.

The Future – Rubbish homes for Rubbish People?

All the above was between forty and sixty years ago. While I was in their employ, both Gipping Rural District Council and Clacton Urban District Council had Conservative majorities, though in those days no councillor was ever expected to follow blindly a ‘party line’ contrary to his or her conscience or common sense. Neither council ever agreed to sell any of their council houses either to their occupiers or to anyone else – although both were asked to do so on a number of occasions.

They both believed that their housing stock was a sacred trust passed on to them by their far-sighted predecessors who were determined that, in their district at least, the aim would always be to have no-one homeless, overcrowded or badly housed – and that there would always been a home, in their local community, for those growing up there. They were determined to expand that legacy and pass it on to their successors.

Right to buy ended all that! In this blog I have already denounced, probably ad nauseum, this 1980s legislation that compelled local authorities to sell off their houses at bargain basement prices - the chicanery of the government that introduced it, (‘buying votes with other people’s money) the cowardice and myopia of the New Labour Government that failed to repeal it.

It is really impossible though to exaggerate its malign effects, some of which have only become evident in recent years. Few, for instance, could have realized at the time of its passing the way in which it would help destroy village communities that had existed for generations. Their council houses were sold on – as second homes or as weekend residences for businessmen and women commuting to the nearest city daily. At the same time, Right to Buy was playing a part in the house price inflation that put new homes beyond the means of ordinary villagers. It also, of course, played a part in the nation-wide borrowing spree that culminated in the financial crisis we are currently struggling to overcome.

The best council houses have long since been sold off to ‘the best’ – or at least the better off – tenants, many of whom have since sold them on at a comfortable profit. There are, as had been eminently predictable – long waiting lists for Council and Housing Association property that show no sign of shortening. The present government’s solution will complete the destruction of ‘social housing’ begun by its predecessors. Council (and presumably Housing Association?) tenancies will, in the future, be of two years duration only. At the end of that period tenants will have their incomes assessed and, if they are deemed to be high enough to permit them to buy or to rent privately, they will be expected to do so. Social housing in the future is to be for the very poor only!

Can you imagine any situation less likely to encourage tenants to cultivate their gardens, decorate their rooms or to take a pride in their homes? All Council Estates will become unredeemable slums. In less than half a century we will have progressed from properties and estates of which local communities could be proud, through second class homes for second class tenants, to rubbish homes for those perceived as rubbish people! There’s progress for you!


We Brits are a rum owd lot!

Only a week, or was it two weeks, ago I was suggesting that our Prime Minister should take a little more care in choosing his advisers. One of them, needless to say someone whom Lady Thatcher would have unhesitating accepted as being ‘one of us’, had announced that despite all the much-publicised cut-backs, most people (I suppose he meant most of the people who really mattered) ‘had never had it so good’.

He resigned his honorary position but I don’t suppose for a moment that he has changed his opinion. Now we have another protégé of the Prime Minister – one destined, on his recommendation, for the House of Lords – assuring us that the exclusion of those paying the higher rate of income tax from child benefit would simply prevent ‘Middle England’ ‘from breeding’, while all those terrible oiks on unemployment benefit would continue to breed like rabbits!

We Brits really are a run owd lot! Wealthy people have to be bribed with millions of pounds to persuade them to give of their best. Poor people have to be threatened with the loss of the little that they have, to persuade them to work at all. Now, it seems, the loss of a few quid threatens the reproductive capacity of the very-comfortably-off!

Week 47.10 23rd Nov. 2010

Tendring Topics……….on Line

Back to the Wild West?

I have always had quite a warm feeling for the Coalition’s Justice Minister, Ken Clarke. I don’t care for his connection with the tobacco industry. Nor do I share his enthusiasm for Formula One motor racing. He does though seem more human than the average politician and (now that smoking has been banned on all railway trains!) I can imagine that he might be a congenial accidental companion on a long rail journey!

I admired his public opposition to the invasion of Iraq against the policy of his own party and that of the government, and his consistently pro-European attitude that lost him the leadership of the Conservative Party and infuriates such Europhobes as our own MP. I agreed too with his contention that short prison sentences are more likely to lead to relapses into crime shortly after release than to the reformation of the criminal.

I even found it in me to feel sorry for him as he broke the news that the government, rather than defend protracted civil law suits, was paying thousands of pounds in compensation to prisoners and ex-prisoners who alleged that they had been tortured with British connivance. Clearly he had had nothing to do with the interrogations at which the alleged torture had taken place and I doubt very much if he had made the decision to pay out generous compensation.

His arbitrary cutting of legal aid though, was surely a step to far. Find ways of eliminating frivolous law suits by all means. Limit the fees of barristers and reduce the salaries of judges. Reduce the time wasting involved in any legal action. But to make British justice inaccessible to the poor and underprivileged, the very people who most need its protection, is surely inexcusable.

Think particularly of the position of vulnerable spouses and innocent children where marriages or partnerships have broken up and child custody is involved. Those who cannot afford the services of a barrister (a very large proportion of those concerned!) will be denied the judgement and protection of the law. I foresee an increase in cases of domestic violence, of child abuse, of child abduction and kidnapping – perhaps of children being transported, against their will and against the will of ‘the other parent’, to distant lands where customs, cultural and moral values, and human rights are very different from our own.

Nor does it seem likely that the police will any longer be readily available to protect the vulnerable. The maintenance of law and order has always been in the forefront of Conservative Policy. The Party’s members yearn for a return of the days when ‘the policeman on his beat’ was a symbol of the availability of the enforcement of the law and struck terror into the hearts of vandals, hooligans and petty criminals.

That, I fear, is something that under the present government, they are not going to get! Police Authorities all over the country are cutting their budgets. This means that they are not going to maintain even their present standard of policing, never mind improving it. Manchester for instance, not exactly a crime-and-problem- free city, is cutting its police budget by 25 percent. There is no way in which ‘front line’ police services will be maintained after a cut of that magnitude. One might almost imagine that our prison population had already been enfranchised and that the coalition was angling for the ‘criminal vote’! They are certainly creating a brighter future for professional criminals, if for nobody else.

I hope that members of the government aren’t imagining that David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ volunteers will step into the law-and-order breach. It is easy to imagine our country descending into lawlessness resembling that of America’s 19th century Wild West. It certainly won’t be put right by issuing enthusiastic vigilantes with ‘Deputy Sheriff’s stars’, forming them into a posse, and encouraging them ‘to leap onto their mustangs and head off them goldarned thieving rustlers (or whatever) at the pass’

The World of the 1930s

Have you been watching Turn back Time: The High Street, on BBC1 tv on Tuesday evenings? They have been ‘re-creating’ a small-town High Street at various periods of its history. Last week’s (on 16 November) was of particular interest to me as a shop in Clacton’s Pier Avenue – not that you would have recognised it! – was one of the businesses re-created. The date of re-creation was 1938 and it was supposed to be typical of the 1930s generally.

Me (left), about 1935, with cousin Ron from London. Ron and I were good friends and occasionally got into terrible trouble together.

In 1930 I was ten years old and moving from primary to secondary school. In 1939, before my 18th birthday, I joined the Army as a Territorial volunteer. The ‘thirties were a decade in which I progressed from childhood through teenage to being almost-an-adult. It was a period in which I left school, started work and joined the army. In 1939 (on the day World War II broke out) I met the girl to whom I was destined to be happily married for sixty years. I well remember those fateful ten years; remember them better, in fact, than the events of yesterday or of last week!

Myself in February or March 1939. Not yet 18, I had volunteered to be a spare-time soldier in the Territorial Army

As so often happens when I watch a documentary or drama set in the ‘30s or ‘40s (Foyle’s War was an exception), they never seem to get the atmosphere or the details quite right.

The High Street grocer in the programme had a very large stock of sweets in jars and these really seemed to be a considerable part of his trade. In 1938 I had progressed beyond sweets and was into fags! In earlier years though my mates and I would never have dreamed of going to a High Street grocer for our sweets. They had them, of course, but they’d have been expensive and the, to us posh, grocers wouldn’t have welcomed unaccompanied ‘scruffy kids’ into their shops To get the most out of our ha’pennies and pennies we’d go to the back-street and corner shops – often the front room of a terraced house well stocked with a few cheap but popular sweets which were sold at a tiny profit to bring the ‘shop keeper’ a few inches above the poverty line.

Heather and I when we first met in September 1939. I was in the army but preferred to wear ‘civvies’ to take my new girlfriend to ‘the pictures’.

High Street Grocer’s shops I remember for their distinctive smell – a blend of the aromas of cheese, ham, tea and coffee; and for the wonderful slicing machines with which they’d cut perhaps just two or three slim slices of ham exactly to customer requirements, and the thin wire with which they would cut huge cheeses into manageable pieces. Then there were the wooden paddles used to shape pounds or half-pounds of butter or lard, and the scoop for flour, sugar or tea – all sold loose and packed into paper bags of course. Selling Groceries in those days was a skilled job, very different from getting packets off a shelf!

Another matter that on the tv programme certainly wasn’t as I remembered it, was the preparation for a street party held on Empire Day (24th May). We did remember Empire Day of course but it wasn’t a public holiday and, it was just an ordinary workday for most people. At school things were different. In my primary school I remember that we marched round the playground and saluted the Union Jack that fluttered proudly overhead. At Assembly the headmaster would pray for the Empire and its people and we would sing patriotic hymns and songs.

At my Secondary School we didn’t do any saluting but we too had a ‘patriotic’ assembly with a brief history lesson about The Empire and we always sang Kipling’s Recessional. As we cheerfully sang ‘Our faded pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre’ we little thought that fifty years on that prophecy at least would be fulfilled – and that most of us would then think that that was a good thing. Also on that day we always had a guest speaker – from India, New Zealand, Southern Rhodesia or some other outpost of Empire – who would tell us about the great careers that beckoned ‘out there’ to ambitious young men prepared to carry the white man’s burden and help the natives toward civilisation. There were certainly no street parties or all-age celebrations.

Despite these reservations I did enjoy last Tuesday’s Turn Back Time. It was an interesting programme that stirred a few memories for me, and would have given younger viewers at least a flavour of the time. I am glad that I watched it.

Never had it so good?

David Cameron really should choose his advisors more wisely. He surely has already enough very-comfortably-off upper middle class folk around him to be well aware of how they are enduring his efforts to solve Britain’s financial problems. What he badly needs is a few opinions from the real world of shabby streets with broken paving stones and obscene graffiti, of crowded and unreliable public transport, of job insecurity, a struggle for survival for the sick and disabled, and of Saturday night binge drinking for the young.

Lord Young, one of David Cameron’s closest advisors, really put his foot in it when he echoed a former Prime Minister who had announced, with a great deal more justification than Lord Young, that most people ‘had never had it so good!’ This confirmed my own opinion, that of the Archbishop of Canterbury and of every truly independent observer, that it is the poor and the vulnerable who are suffering the pain imposed by attempts to remedy Britain’s economic problems, while those likely to be in Lord Young’s social circle have not suffered even the mildest inconvenience.

There’s one little matter of fact on which Lord Young – and a great many other people – need to be corrected. Home owners (and I am among them!) do not benefit from low mortgage interest rates. We have paid off our mortgages and have, for the most part, put our subsequent savings into accounts administered by the same banks or building societies that had formerly loaned us the money for our home purchase. We are now seeing our hard-earned savings diminish in value as inflation outpaces the miserable amount of interest paid on these accounts.

Those who do at present benefit from the low interest rates, are the home buyers who are paying off their mortgages. They should make the most of that advantage because, as they will find out soon enough that if circumstances compel them to default on their repayments, the bank or building society is the true owner of their home. What is more, house prices are now falling. If they are now compelled to sell, they risk losing not only their homes but much of the money that they have already paid off their mortgages.

Footnote: I wrote the above before Lord Young resigned his honorary office of adviser to the Government. When I heard that he had done so I was considering erasing it. Then I heard on BBC Radio 4, David Mellor who served with Lord Young in a Thatcher government, strenuously defending his former colleague and castigating David Cameron for having had the impudence to rebuke him. It was obvious to me that although Lord Young had departed, his spirit was still among us. My comments remain unchanged!

Week 46 10 16th Nov. 2010

Tendring Topics………on Line

Full Marks for Ingenuity!

I have to give Britain’s coalition government full marks for ingenuity. The announcement of their new ‘workfare’ idea revealed true genius. Originating, as I suppose we might have guessed, in the USA, it means that people on benefit who are considered capable of any sort of work (never mind the fact that there may not be any appropriate work for them) will lose some of their meagre allowance unless they undertake ‘voluntary work’ for the community. The tv image of a ‘benefit volunteer’ happily swabbing hospital floors in a tv news bulletin revealed the true brilliance of the scheme.

In order to achieve the cuts demanded by central government, local and other public authorities, and managers of large private institutions, are having to ‘downsize’, ‘rationalise’, or ‘re-evaluate their human resources’, or whatever else may be the current fashionable euphemism for sacking some of their staff. Among those sacked will be computer programmers, draughtsmen, and other holders of jobs demanding skill, long training, and experience. There will also be holders of menial jobs – cleaners, porters, gardeners and so on. But floors will still need to be cleaned and rubbish cleared away, trolleys pushed from one place to another, hedges trimmed, lawns swept clear of leaves, vehicles hosed down, and so on.

That’s where those happy, smiling volunteers appear on the scene. ‘Menial tasks’ (I quote a government spokesman) that had been undertaken by employees on at least the minimum wage, will now be carried out by ‘volunteers’ regardless of their professional skills and experience, for a benefit guaranteed to be lower than the pay obtainable by anyone ‘in work’. Further cuts will ensure a never-ending supply of such cheap labour. This is called ‘encouraging the workless (and by implication the work-shy) back into work!’

Not even the most hard-nosed owners of Blake’s ‘dark, satanic mills’, of the early nineteenth century could have dreamed up a better way of obtaining cheap labour!

The Chinese ‘Secret Weapon’

No, there’s no cause for alarm. It’s not that kind of a weapon and it is not in the possession of the present or any likely future Chinese government, but of the ethnic Chinese whether they live in mainland China, in Hong Kong, in Taiwan or in London. It is a weapon that hurts no-one and is available to us all if we wish to have it. It is, I am convinced, of immense value to those who possess it, yet in Britain in recent years, fewer and fewer people seem to appreciate this.

It is a thirst for and a deep appreciation of the value of education. I first became aware of this as a result of emails from my grandson Chris who teaches English both to young children and adults in Taiwan, after having first done this in mainland China. We had been reading in our British newspapers about rising truancy in British schools, disrupted classes, violence toward teachers, and children who expected to be rewarded for simply turning up regularly and refraining from disruptive behaviour. Chris, on the other hand, was telling me about children eager to learn, and to please and earn the praise of their teachers, and of parents who gladly offered co-operation and respect to those who were helping their offspring to ‘get on in the world’.
Chris (at the back on the right) with some of his colleagues

It seems that this attitude towards education is to be found in Chinese worldwide. My younger son Andy (when one is old, how helpful it is to have eyes and ears elsewhere than in Clacton!) sent me a press cutting from the Guardian about the prowess of British Chinese in the field of education.

Nationwide in 2009, 26.6 percent of pupils eligible for free school meals (children from poorer families) achieved five or more GCSE grades (including maths and English) between grades C and A*. British Chinese children who were also eligible for free meals achieved 70.8 percent. Overall there was a wide attainment gap between children from the poorest and those from the better-off children. Among the Chinese, the gap between that of the children of the wealthy and the poor was just two percent. The Chinese poor are obviously just as keen as the wealthy to further their children’s education. So it is for young people and adults. British Chinese people of school-leaving age and over, are four times as likely to be full-time students as the rest of us.

The explanation, the Guardian reporter was told, was that with the Chinese, ‘education isn’t just desirable; its an obsession. Parents don’t just want their children to do well; they assume a ferocious duty to make it happen. Young children know that they have to study hard not to disappoint parents. The children have their own incentives too. A lot grow up in restaurants and want a different life for themselves. They work ten times as hard. Customers see the front of the restaurant. They don’t see the son or daughter of the proprietor bent over homework on a little table somewhere in the rear, under the occasional watchful eye of an adult’.

I dare not think what a twenty-first century British ‘educationalist’ or child psychiatrist would think of it all. I have little doubt though that it is dedication of this kind that will produce Britain’s leading lawyers, doctors, scientists and top politicians of the future.

'Thank you My Lord Archbishop'

It is always very pleasant to have our ideas, particularly when they are a little controversial, endorsed by someone for whom we have the greatest admiration and respect. I was delighted therefore to note that my concern about the effects of the government’s cuts on the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society are shared by no less a person than Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, and head of the Church of England and of the Anglican Church world-wide.

Not only did he endorse my general concern on this subject. He also referred to a matter that hadn’t occurred to me but had been raised by my son Peter in his letter to his Lib. Dem. MP; the fact that capping housing benefit at £400 a week would have the effect of driving all but the very-comfortably-off out of city centres, particularly out of central London.

A glaring example of this was recently illustrated in Metro, the London free newspaper. A two-bedroomed council flat in London’s Elephant and Castle area (a traditionally working class neighbourhood) had been sold to an existing tenant under the infamous ‘right to buy’ legislation. It had subsequently been resold and was now advertised to let – at £500 a week! Here was a property that had been provided by local taxpayers at public expense to house working people. It was now being made inaccessible to the people for whom it had been intended. It could however be expected to make a comfortable profit for its now-private owner.

Needless to say, the Archbishop’s warning was greeted with derision by the popular press. In the columns of the Sun the Archbishop was described as ‘a chump’ and his words as ‘Bish-bosh*’. I don’t imagine that Dr Rowan Williams was greatly concerned. He was the latest in long line of spiritual leaders who have dared to criticise established authority, ranging from the Old Testament prophets through St Thomas a Becket, one of Dr Rowan Williams’ distinguished predecessors, and Fr. John Ball of Colchester, a leader of the Peasants Revolt, to the martyred Archbishop Romero of Costa Rica, Sheila Cassidy who endured torture at the hands of the henchmen of General Pinochet of Chile and later became a nun, Trevor Huddlestone, Archbishop of Mauritius and the Indian Ocean, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.

We hear a great deal in the press about ‘The Christian Religious Right’ particularly in the USA (Sarah Palin and her ‘Tea Party’ friends for instance). It is good to be reminded from time to time that there is, and always has been, a Christian Religious Left and a Christian Religious Centre, and that among their leaders have been men and women of renowned courage and spirituality!

*The Sun tries desperately hard to speak the language of the English Working Class of whom it aspires to be the voice. It never quite succeeds. When, for instance, did you last hear anyone wearing workman’s overalls describe a stupid person as ‘a chump’ or his utterances as ‘bosh’?

Week 45.10 9th November 2010

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Worse than heroin?

The official claim that alcohol does more harm to individuals and to society than heroin and cocaine, must have come as something as a shock to a great many of us. There have always, of course, been a number of drunks and alcoholics who wrecked their own lives and those of their immediate families. However, until the Government relaxed the licensing laws ‘so that we could learn to drink sensibly like our continental neighbours!’ one rarely, if ever, saw anyone visibly drunk in a town centre. The idea of groups of young people, mostly under 20, going out together at weekends and drinking for no other purpose than to get drunk, was totally alien.

Now, we have all become accustomed to tv news bulletins of the Police trying to clear the streets of drunken, abusive and violent teenagers, often fighting each other after binge drinking on a Friday or Saturday night. Even more disquieting is the news that, at weekends, the treatment of victims of genuine accidents in Hospital Accident and Emergency Departments is often delayed while professional staff deal with the out-of-control subjects of self-inflicted alcohol poisoning. Nowadays too, no one is particularly surprised to see someone lurch unsteadily out of a pub doorway at three o’clock in the afternoon!

Recently I saw a number of tv documentaries about the way in which some – I am sure a small minority – of teenagers abuse their bodies and shorten their lives as they pursue ephemeral pleasure through promiscuous sex and unrestricted consumption of alcohol. A nineteen year old diabetic girl, who had been brought into hospital (not for the first time!) unconscious and suffering from alcohol poisoning summed up the attitude of ‘a lost generation’ by announcing after she had regained consciousness ‘I’m gonna do what I wanna do when I wanna do it’.

It is, no doubt, shaming incidents like these that have led to the conclusion that alcohol is more dangerous than heroin and cocaine. It takes no account of other equally valid images of working men chatting companionably with their mates over a friendly evening or weekend pint, of a bottle of wine broached and shared at a celebratory meal, or of elderly pensioners (I can’t be the only one!) sipping a nightcap of watered down whisky while watching a tv programme before going to bed. We are urged ‘to drink responsibly’ and tens of thousands of us do just that. Neither heroin nor cocaine ever is, or can be, used moderately, companionably and responsibly.

I think it very unlikely that announcing that alcohol does more harm than heroin or cocaine will turn a single heavy drinker into a moderate one, much less a teetotaller. What it very probably will do is to produce more junkies drawn into drug abuse by the whisper; ‘Come on, try it. There’s nothing else quite like it, and - haven’t you heard? – it is now officially recognised as being less harmful than alcohol.

‘Kick away the ladder – I’m safely up it!’

Every current Member of Parliament who holds a University Degree had his or her University tuition fees paid by the state. Those whose parents might have had difficulty maintaining them during their time away from home, received a generous grant towards their living costs. They wouldn’t have had to be desperately poor to qualify for such a grant. I was a middle rank council official in 1971 when my elder son was offered a place at Cambridge. The County Council, as Education Authority, paid half the estimated cost of his maintenance. The other half was the ‘parental contribution’ paid by me.

These are facts that should be written in letters of fire in the House of Commons when those same MPs are deciding to limit undergraduate living grants only to ‘the very needy’ and raise the sum that Universities can charge students for their tuition fees to as much as £9,000 a year! It’s a policy which, in the army we used to describe as, ‘Up ladder Jack!’ shorthand for ‘Kick away the ladder Jack, I’m safely up it!

Nowadays students are expected to recognise and repay the advantage that a University degree gives them in the jobs market. They can obtain student loans to cover living costs and tuition fees, which they repay by instalments once their income rises above £21,000 a year. This means that graduates typically begin their working lives with a burden of debt in the region of £20,000. With increased tuition fees, that sum is clearly destined to increase, probably to double, in the future.

My wife Heather and I had been brought up in working class homes with a horror of debt. Had the situation been the same in the 1970s as it is today, we certainly wouldn’t have encouraged our offspring to aspire to a university education.

The present government complains repeatedly (and probably with good reason) about the burden of debt imposed on us all by the policies of their predecessors. How extraordinary therefore that they should be cheerfully transferring some of that burden to the individual shoulders of the very gifted young people on whose skills we are relying to get us out of this crisis brought about primarily (let us never forget) by the avarice and incompetence of our financial services and the short-sightedness of our politicians.

How should the situation be dealt with? We could bear in mind that a university degree hasn’t quite suddenly conferred on its possessors an unfair advantage in the jobs market. Those graduate MPs were undoubtedly helped in their political careers by their university successes. So were most successful bankers, businessmen and women, captains of industry, and high flying civil servants

Why shouldn’t they begin, however belatedly, to repay the unfair advantage that they have had over their less fortunate fellow men and women. And what about those who, by the accident of birth, followed their parents into privileged positions? Being the son or daughter of a Press Lord, a merchant banker or the head of an international corporation confers an advantage far greater than that enjoyed by even the most distinguished scholar.

A properly graded (and loophole free!) income tax system would solve this problem, and give the wealthy the opportunity to bear their fair share of the national burden. No one would be asked to pay a penny more than they could afford and it might have been thought that our MPs would sleep more soundly at night in the knowledge that they were no longer imposing on others a burden that they themselves were not bearing.

But that is the one remedy that so far has never been seriously considered!

A footnote

Did you see that the new head of one of our Banks is to have an annual salary of £1 million, plus estimated bonuses of £2 million? It was explained that the justification for this was that the bank had to secure the very best for the post. It is a poor outlook for Great Britain and indeed for the world, when the very best in any field of human activity, can be obtained only by offering bribes on this scale.

Many of those whose memory we shall be honouring in churches and at war memorials next Sunday (14th November) lost their lives, the most precious thing that they possessed, for as little as ‘two bob a day*!

A week or so ago I quoted the refrain from one of Bob Dylan’s popular ‘protest’ songs of the ‘60s – ‘The answer is blowing in the wind’. Here’s a refrain from ‘Where have all the flowers gone’, another popular protest song of that period. It seems particularly relevant to the matter of bankers’ monetary rewards:

‘When will they ever learn, Oh, when will they ever learn!’ When indeed?

*‘two bob’ (two shillings or 10p) a day was a private’s – or gunner’s - pay when I was called up into the army in 1939. In 1914, at the beginning of World War I it was one shilling (5p) a day.

Name Calling!

Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have referred to England as ‘Perfidious Albion’. I suppose therefore that our neighbours across the Channel can’t complain too bitterly at being described by Bernard Jenkin, Conservative MP for Harwich and North Essex (whose judgements don’t have quite the same weight as Napoleon’s) as the Duplicitous French. Criticising the Government’s decision to share some defence facilities with the French, he is reported as having said ‘We need to recognise France has never shared, and is never likely to share, the same strategic priorities as the UK. There is a long track record of duplicity on the French part’.

David Cameron’s grasp of twentieth century history seemed a little shaky when he asserted (and was quickly corrected!) that Britain was the ‘junior partner’ of the USA in the struggle against Hitler in 1940. It seems that Mr Jenkin’s grasp is even shakier. I would have thought that French sharing with us the carnage on the Western Front of World War I indicated a certain unity of purpose with the UK. The USA, whom I imagine Mr Jenkins does regard as a reliable ally, took part only in the final year of the struggle. Then again, Britain with the Commonwealth, and France were alone among the world’s nations in declaring war on Hitler’s Germany when the Nazis invaded Poland. Hitler had not directly attacked either country but both believed that destroying Nazi Germany was ‘a shared strategic priority’. The USA? They joined in only when Hitler declared war on them in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

Duplicitous? Well – the French did supply the Exocet missiles that the Argentines used with murderous effect on our Naval Task Force, but then we had trained some of the Argentine troops who had invaded the Falklands. They didn’t know that it was to be against British ships that those Exocets would be used - any more than when we helped train the ‘gallant and freedom-loving Mojihadin’ to kill and maim Soviet troops, had we known that those heroic Mojihadin were to become the fanatical Taliban using the skills we had taught them, to kill our troops!

The French did have the independence and force of character to resist being drawn into an illegal war in Iraq which, as well as costing thousands of lives and ruining the country's infrastructure, has done more to recruit volunteers to Islamic terrorism than any number of inflammatory sermons could ever hope to do. Come to think of it, wasn’t it just a little duplicitous to persuade British MPs to vote for war against Iraq by convincing them of that country’s non-existent links with international terrorism and its imaginary weapons of mass destruction?

Christmas Stamps

The celebratory Postage stamps for Christmas 2010 are now available in Post Offices. The secular stamps feature Wallace and Gromit, and very cheery and colourful they are.

However for those of us who like our Christmas greetings to be carried in an envelope with a stamp bearing a relationship to Christ’s Nativity, the very attractive 1st and 2nd Class Madonna-and-child stamps, that have been available for the past two years are available again. You do have to ask for them specifically though. At my branch Post Office the usually-very-helpful lady behind the counter looked at me in total astonishment when, after enquiring about Christmas stamps, I added that I would like the religious ones. ‘You mean you don’t want the Wallace and Gromit ones?’ she asked incredulously. ‘That’s right’, I said, ‘I believe that there are some 1st and 2nd Class Virgin-and-child stamps available. Those are the ones I want please’. Clearly taken aback, she disappeared into a back room for several minutes, and emerged bearing some sheets of the stamps I wanted in her hands.

She was even more astonished when I asked for quite a lot of each denomination. I could almost read the thoughts going through her head. ‘The poor old chap’s really off his rocker this time. He can’t possibly be sending off that number of Christmas cards and letters. Ought I to take his money?’ She was, of course, quite right about that. I don’t send off that amount of Christmas post. However I do like to use those stamps throughout the year as a quiet and unobtrusive affirmation of Christian Faith. I think that the supply that I bought last Christmas lasted me through to mid-October!

Oh yes, and they can prove a worthwhile investment too. When, as happened this year, the price of stamps goes up, First and Second Class stamps retain their value, whatever may have been their price at the time of purchase!