Week 7.10

Tendring Topics……….on Line

Saving the Naze?

‘Crumbling cliffs and tower saved’, announced a headline in the Clacton Gazette on 11th February. It related, of course, to Walton’s crumbling Naze cliffs which recede year by year. A silent witness to the progress of the erosion is the concrete defensive ‘pillbox’ now yards from the foot of the cliffs. This had been built on the cliff-top as part of Britain’s defences against invasion during World War II

The news story below the headline made it clear that the salvation of the cliffs and Naze Tower, a Grade II Listed Building and a well-known local landmark, hadn’t yet occurred. Moreover the work to be undertaken will, in fact, protect only a 110-metre stretch of the cliff immediately in front of the Tower.

The work referred to is the creation of a ‘Crag Walk’, a tourist attraction and educational project that will include a rock revetment to protect the foot of the eroding cliffs and a new walkway that will incorporate a viewing platform from which the fossil-rich red crag cliffs can be inspected. The project will cost £1.2 million and the Gazette’s report follows the news that a grant of £500,000 from Essex County Council will bring the funding to that figure. Tendring District Council have contributed £520,000 from a £1 million grant in connection with the Government’s Coastal Pathfinder scheme and the Naze Protection Society has itself raised £230,000.

I have no doubt that it is a worthwhile scheme but it surely hardly deserves quite the enthusiastic reception it is receiving from Naze Protection supporters. It does not protect the whole of the Naze and it will only temporarily (though perhaps for a number of years) protect any part of it. A truly long-term solution can only be found by dealing with the seepage of rainwater through the subsoil and the stratum of permeable red crag, to the clay bed below it. This currently flows over the surface of that clay to escape at the foot of the cliff. It thus makes the crag above it unstable. The surface of the cliff crumbles and falls – and the sea washes the debris away.

In the very first years of Tendring Council’s existence following the reorganisation of 1974, the Council’s Engineer and Surveyor’s Department worked out a solution to this problem. This was the subject of a Public Enquiry. The Government inspector approved the scheme which was then shelved because of ‘lack of funds’. I pointed this out in my very first Tendring Topics in print, in 1980.

When the Crag Walk Project is completed the cliffs each side of the project will continue to erode. The protected section of the Naze will become a salient under constant threat from the sea. Eventually, possibly after many years, the sea will win. As King Canute demonstrated to his flattering courtiers a thousand years ago, no man can halt the flow of time or tide.

Not quite ‘proportional representation’ – but very welcome!

The passage through the House of Commons of the very first step towards a much-needed reform of our electoral system hasn’t attracted a great deal of attention from the national press – possibly because, with a general election only weeks away, it is quite likely that it will come to nothing.

At the moment we have a ‘first past the post’ voting system. The candidate who gets the greatest number of votes is elected. This is fine when there are just two candidates. However, when there are a number of them (as there often are these days) it is quite possible for the candidate elected under this system to have less than half the total votes cast. This means that, whoever else electors may have wanted, the majority of them didn’t want the candidate who has been declared the winner!

Under this system it is also quite possible, and has happened twice in recent years, for the Party that secures the most parliamentary seats, and therefore forms the government, not to be the one that secures the greatest number of votes throughout the whole country.

What is proposed is an ‘alternative vote’. Ballot papers would be exactly the same as at present but voters would be able to express their preference by putting 1, 2 or 3, indicating first, second and third choice against the candidates names.

When the votes are counted, the ‘first choices’ are first counted. If more than fifty percent of those who voted made any one of the candidates their first choice, then that is the end of the matter. That candidate is elected. If no-one has secured more than half of the ‘first choices’, then the second choices are counted and added to the ‘first choice’ totals. This will almost certainly produce a candidate with more than fifty percent of the vote. If it does not, then the ‘third choices’ can also be counted and added to the total. The candidate with more than fifty percent of the total votes counted will then be declared the winner.

This isn’t true ‘proportional representation’. It would still be possible for a party of government to have less than half the total vote. It would mean though that individual members of parliament couldn’t be elected on a minority vote and, unlike some forms of truly proportional representation, it would mean that those electors who chose to do so, could vote for the candidate rather than his or her party.

Gordon Brown’s opponents say that he has put the suggestion forward now ‘for political reasons’. It might make people who were wavering between Labour and Liberal Democrat, vote Labour. If there were to be a ‘hung parliament’ after the election it might persuade the Lib. Dems. to form a coalition with Labour rather than with the Conservatives.

Of course Mr Brown has put the idea forward for ‘political reasons’. That’s what politicians do. That doesn’t mean that it is a bad idea though. I think that, in the interest of democracy, it is a good, if not the very best, solution

The proposal that has successfully survived its first reading in the House of Commons is not that such a system should be introduced, but that the idea of its introduction should be presented to the electorate in a referendum.

Those who think that having a strong and decisive government is more important than having a truly representative one, would no doubt vote NO in such a referendum. Me? The reigns of Mrs Margaret Thatcher and of Mr Tony Blair have taken away my appetite for strong government. I would vote YES.

Fencing off the sea!

I’m not surprised that residents in Brightlingsea are up in arms at Tendring Council’s fencing off part of Brightlingsea’s promenade for health and safety reasons. I am glad that the Council has decided to have second thoughts about it.

It is said that a fatality that occurred some years ago when an elderly woman’s mobility scooter rolled over the edge on a seafront path in Holland-on-Sea, is one of the factors that have led to this fencing. Gordon Beare, founder and organiser of the Tendring Pensioners’ Action Group is a mobility scooter user himself. He is reported as saying he believed that railings were a good idea. ‘Many elderly people can have simple accidents on their scooters, so anything that will make sure a scooter can’t go into the water is a good idea’. Well, I too use a mobility scooter and wouldn’t wish to be without it. It could be dangerous, even fatal, to drive too close to the kerb (the pavement edge) of the footpath of a busy street. I think that most of us are wise and careful enough to keep away from the edge of the promenade.

A year or two ago, I watched a family disembarking from their car on the Naze at Walton and preparing for a picnic. The adults failed to notice that a two or three year old toddler, rejoicing in his freedom from adult attention, was making a beeline for the cliff top. Fortunately an onlooker spotted the child’s danger, intercepted him and brought him back to his parents. Instead of apologising for their own lack of attention their reaction was, ‘You’d really think that they’d have those cliffs fenced off!’

Where will it end? Ought we perhaps to erect fences along our beaches just above high tide mark because someone might wander into the sea and drown?

I don’t blame local authorities, or even the Health and Safety Executive for this absurd determination to make every human activity totally risk-free. Responsibility lies with our own ‘compensation culture’, the idea that every single mishap is ‘somebody’s fault’ and that ‘somebody’ must be made to pay!

It is a culture that is nourished and perpetuated by the ‘ambulance chasing, no-win, no-fee, lawyers’, whose adverts holding the promise of hundreds or thousands of pounds of compensation, help to keep commercial daytime tv on its feet!

A Fateful Anniversary

I am writing these words on St. Valentine’s Day. It is the sixty-fifth anniversary of my learning of an event that has affected me for the remainder of my life. At first it reinforced the Agnosticism that I held at that time. Three years later though it was one of the factors that led my wife and I to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). The date was 14th February 1945. It was then that I learned of the horrifying firebomb raids on the city of Dresden, that had been carried out by the RAF during the night, and that the U.S. Air Force was continuing throughout that day.

I was a British prisoner of war at a working camp in Zittau, a small German town situated some sixty miles east of Dresden at the point where today the German, Czech and Polish frontiers coincide. Throughout the bitterly cold winter of 1944/’45, we had heard the sound of gunfire in the east increase from a distant murmur to a continuous and ever louder rumble.

By early February (after the failure of the last-ditch German winter offensive in the Ardennes) everyone in Zittau – we, our guards, the many foreign ‘slave workers’, and the German population knew that the war would be over in months, if not weeks.

The trickle of refugees fleeing before the inexorably advancing Soviet Army had grown to a flood. There were old men (younger ones had all been called up into the army), women and children, some babes in arms. Most were, of course, Germans but there were among them allied prisoners of war on a forced march away from the front line and possible liberation. There were Russian, Ukrainian and Polish ‘slave workers’, and there were abject and defeated units of Nazi Germany’s allies, Hungarians Bulgarians, and renegade Cossacks. Some had all their worldly goods piled onto ox-drawn carts, a few had lorries driven by ‘Holzgas’ (a gas – carbon monoxide perhaps? – produced by the slow and partial combustion of wood chippings). Many just trudged through the snow with their belongings on their backs or piled into small hand-carts.

They were heading for Dresden where the German Red Cross would take charge and distribute them among the few remaining parts of Germany that were relatively ‘safe’. By the 13th February some 300,000 refugees were crowded into the city.

That was the night that the RAF struck, creating firestorms that flattened fifteen square miles of the centre of Dresden and killed an estimated 25,000 people, overwhelmingly civilian, and many of them women and children. The grandfather of one of my current friends in Zittau was among the victims. He was a frail old man who escaped the flames to spend a bitterly cold February night in the open. He wouldn’t have counted as a casualty of the raid as he died a week later, of pneumonia!

In justification of the raid it has been claimed that no-one could be sure the war was nearly over, and that Dresden was a legitimate target as it contained factories supporting the Nazi war effort. It was also an important communications centre. However factories, a large railway station and an important river bridge, on the outskirts of the town were left unscathed while the bombers concentrated on the heavily populated city centre.

I have no doubt that the raids on Dresden were totally unjustified acts of terror which, had they been perpetrated by our opponents, would have been regarded as war crimes. Could they perhaps, have been an early gambit in the Cold War, carried out to impress the Soviet Army, which we knew would be there within weeks, with the strength of British and American Air Power?

‘The Nazis did worse things’. I know they did. Is that really an excuse for us?