Week 51.2011 29.12.2011

Tendring Topics........on Line

Paying for ‘Sid’s Free Lunch’

            British children of the 1920s and ‘30s learned at an early age that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.  We were all familiar with the politically incorrect nursery rhyme about Simon, a young man with learning difficulties, who encountered a seller of pies on his way to a fair.

Said Simple Simon to the pieman, ‘May I taste your ware?

Said the pieman to Simple Simon, ‘Show me first your penny’.

Said Simple Simon to the pieman, ‘Indeed I haven’t any’.

            And poor Simon went hungry.

            It was a message that in the ‘80s the then Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, would have whole-heartedly endorsed.  If I close my eyes I can almost hear her well-bred but somewhat strident voice:  ‘Wealth is a product of hard work and enterprise.  There is no such thing as a free lunch’.

            How strange therefore that it should have been during her period of office (in fact as a result of her initiative) that thousands of Britons came to the conclusion that there was such a thing as a free lunch after all.  I was reminded of this a week or so ago when a radio programme announced that the year nearing its end had seen the twenty-fifth anniversary of the then government’s privatisation of British Gas, the first of a series of similar privatisations of state enterprises.

            Towards the end of 1986 there was a brilliant sales campaign (do you remember it?) in which we were all asked to ‘Tell Sid’ about the forthcoming sale of British Gas shares.  Well, thousands did, and resold their shares later at a very comfortable profit.  This was repeated with other privatisations though resale didn’t always realize enormous profits.  

            It struck me as very odd at the time.  I remember writing in Tendring Topics (in print) in the Coastal Express that I had been quite persuaded that wealth was the product of hard work and enterprise and that there was no such thing as a free lunch.  Whose hard work and enterprise was it then, I asked, that had produced the profits realized by those who had been astute enough to buy – and then resell – those privatisation shares?

            The fact is, of course, that no extra wealth had been created.  Not a cubic inch of extra gas had been produced.  It had all been simply a paper transaction. I believe though that it was those and similar paper transactions (the deregulation of financial services, the transformation of Building Societies into banks and so on), over which Mrs Thatcher presided in the avaricious ‘80s, that are at the root of our current financial problems. You can ‘tell Sid’, if you encounter him, that the poor, the old, the disabled and the unemployed are today having to pay for all those ‘free lunches’ of a quarter of a century ago!

 Is ‘our Dave’ the only one in step?

          Many years ago there was a magazine cartoon showing a mum and her daughter watching a platoon of soldiers marching past.  The daughter was proudly pointing to one of the soldiers.  ‘Eh Mum, look at our Jim.  He’s the only one in step!’

         I remembered that cartoon (I think it must have been in an old copy of Punch) when I read the press headlines about our Prime Minister being alone in declining to sign up to a new treaty of the willing to sacrifice a small part of our national sovereignty to ensure a united economic Europe in the face of the economic blizzard that we are all facing.  He had already threatened to veto any amendment to the European Treaty to achieve the same end.

               Mr Cameron had been urged by his Europhobic Conservative colleagues to ‘stand up for Britain’ and ‘show the bulldog spirit’.  They had clearly forgotten (or perhaps were not old enough to remember) that Winston Churchill, the very epitome of British independence and the bulldog spirit’, had been a supporter of the idea of a United States of Europe in which Britain would play a leading role.  He had wanted to inspire and lead our fellow Europeans – not turn tail and run away from them!

            Whether we like it or not, Britain is part of Europe – geographically, historically and culturally.  Our ultimate destiny, I have little doubt, is for us to fulfil Churchill’s dream and to become not the leader but a leader of a Europe politically and economically united. As it is the 26 participating European states form a powerful political and economic unit.  It would have been that much more powerful had it included the United Kingdom as the 27^th. Before signing the American Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin is said to have declared, ‘If we do not now hang together then we shall assuredly hang separately’.  It could be that the same is true of Europe today.

            I hope, by the way, that the Parliamentary Europhobes do not imagine that that the ‘special relationship’ will ensure that the USA stands by us in our self-imposed isolation.  The USA acts always in its own interests (why on earth should it do otherwise?)   During the Cold War period Britain was the USA’s unsinkable aircraft carrier.  More recently we have provided the USA with a foothold into Europe.  I fear that, as far as the USA is concerned, Mr Cameron may well have made the United Kingdom redundant.

            By ‘opting out’ David Cameron has certainly earned a place in history.  Will it be as Britain’s liberator, who cast off the shackles of Brussels, secured the UK’s independence and led us on to financial security and prosperity?   Or will it be as the bungler who drove the final nail into the coffins of both the European Union and the UK; the politician who sacrificed British industry for the sake of the very financial institutions that had led us to financial ruin, and sacrificed his country for the sake of the unity of his political party? 

            I am not at all sure that I want to live long enough to find out!

  A Look Back at 2011

          For Great Britain, Europe and the World, 2011 has been a pretty disastrous year.  There have been earthquakes and tsunamis, devastating monsoon floods and, elsewhere, disastrous droughts.  There have been nuclear contamination fears.   The great depression, out of which we seemed to be slowly emerging before the last General Election, has again deepened.   So far our government’s attempts to lower the financial deficit have only made things worse. Several Governments within the Eurozone are threatened with bankruptcy. Efforts to remedy the situation, plus the incurable Europhobia from which a great many of our MPs suffer, have resulted in a two-tier European Union, with the UK alone and isolated on the lower tier. Tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs, thousands have been rendered homeless.  Meanwhile Climatic Change (progressing virtually unimpeded due to international failure to agree effective counter action) threatens to make our self-made financial crises look like Sunday-school picnics!

            For me though, on a personal level, 2011 has been quite different.   It has been the year in which I have celebrated my 90^th birthday and in which family events have made it a year to remember. It has been a year on which I can look back with quiet satisfaction.

            First, on 23^rd April was the same-sex wedding of my beautiful granddaughter Jo to her partner Siobhan.  It was an event to which I had looked forward with some trepidation – not least because I anticipated that I would be the oldest (probably by as much as 25 years!) of the hundred-or so guests and I had promised to say a few words during the course of the partnership ceremony.

            It turned out to be a loving and dignified occasion of which I have warm memories.  I shared with the other guests Shakespeare’s sonnet beginning, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment……’ and a piece of wisdom that I had acquired from a German daily tear-off calendar while I had been a POW.  ‘Lieben und geliebt zu werden, ist das höchste Glück auf Erden’  (To love and to be loved in return is the greatest good fortune that there is on earth).

            A month later was my 90^th birthday and I celebrated it with my two sons and daughters in law, two of my grandchildren (Chris – the third – lives and works in Taiwan) and my younger son’s girlfriend Romy; eight of us in all, together with my German friends in Zittau, the small town in Germany where I was  POW from 1943 – ’45.

Highlights of the occasion were our champagne reception by the Mayor of Zittau in the Town Hall, my being presented with a splendid certificate confirming my honorary membership of the Fellowship of the Zittau Lenten Veils, and the celebratory dinner that I hosted at our hotel for my family, my German friends, the Mayor of Zittau (Herr Arndt Voight) and his wife and other local VIPs.

Accordion Orchestra.. In the background is the great Lenten Veil. 

 I remember equally warmly though, the spontaneity of the welcome I received from a local twenty-strong piano-accordion orchestra in the museum/church of the Holy Cross where the Lenten Veil, in whose history I played a tiny role, is on permanent display.  They entered playing When the saints come marching in, and gave us a concert of eight or ten folk or light classical items beginning with the European Anthem, Schiller’s Ode to Joy, ­and ending with Happy Birthday To You played with real gusto!

I also remember with great  pleasure a final celebratory family meal that we had together on the last evening of our visit to Zittau.  It was in Zum Alten Sack, a character-filled hostelry in the centre of the town just a few yards from the site of the building (now demolished) where we had the temporary ‘POW Barracks’ in which I lived from October 1943 till May 1945.  Younger son Andy is missing from the picture as he was holding the camera.

         
                Towards the end of the year we also learned that my younger grandson Nick (almost excluded from the photo above!) had been appointed Acting Executive Director of the European Travel Commission, a non-profit making organisation that has the purpose of attracting tourists from the rest of the world to Europe.  He is only ‘Acting’ Director.  Whether he will apply for and be offered the permanent post, remains to be seen.  In the meantime he is, while still only 28, gaining valuable experience at the top-most level of public administration.

            For my family and I 2011 certainly had some memorable moments!  What, I wonder, will 2012 bring?

           

Week 50 2011 20.12.2011

Tendring Topics.......on Line

HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL BLOG READERS!

Next Sunday is Christmas Day.  I decided that I wouldn’t write my usual blog this week but publish an article that I wrote for The Friend, a Quaker weekly journal, last year.  Three hundred years ago the first Quakers didn’t celebrate Christmas.  Some Quakers still don’t, though for rather different reasons.  I think that Christmas should be remembered and celebrated by all.  I entitled my article for the Friend, ‘Christmas for Quakers’.  This time I am calling it ‘Christmas for Nonbelievers*’ because even to those, of other faiths or of none, who may think that the Christmas story is ‘nothing but a myth’, I believe that the Christmas story conveys a truth about the nature of God far more clearly than historical fact or theological argument could ever hope to do.

It is the God revealed in that story who draws me to a celebration of an Anglican Mass every Sunday morning at 8.00 am followed by an hour of prayerful and expectant shared silence at our local Quaker Meeting for Worship at 10.30 a.m.  This blog may help to explain why it is that, though I am ninety years old, and would be housebound but for my electric mobility scooter, I  do so week after week.

*'Nonbelievers' in this context, means simply those who do not accept the nativity story in St. Luke's and St. Matthews Gospels as historical fact, though they may otherwise have a firm Christian, or other, faith.

Christmas for Nonbelievers

‘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 Quakers 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 14^th century and Archbishop Romero of El Salvador in the 20^th.    

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 King 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 estimation 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 Quakers) 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! 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 Magi bring their gifts. (St. James' Anglican Church, Clacton-on-Sea

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 Sir John Betjeman

Every good wish for Christmas to all Blog Readers - and a New Year of Peace!

          A few weeks ago I would have hesitated to write the words above.  I had no idea how many – if any – people read my blog.  It could have been only a few close relatives and friends.

            Now, thanks to modern technology, I know that I have a substantial and truly international readership.  Last month, for instance, there were nearly 2,000 ‘views’ and on several single days there were well over 100.  What’s more – there are blog readers in every corner of the world!

            To my surprise the biggest group of readers do not live in Britain but in India!  Next come Britain and the USA, followed by Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Germany, Russia, France, the Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, Singapore and Australia!

  

            I feel very proud (but at the same time humbled) that so many people, from so many different countries, traditions and religious faiths find my words of interest to them.  They may not always be words that everyone wishes to read – but they are my own words.  No-one tells me what to write and what not to write.  Thank you for reading them.

        The Next Blog

          Next week, the final week of 2011, I expect to publish my blog a day or two later than usual - probably on Thursday 29th December instead of Tuesday 27th.  I shall probably continue to publish my blog on Thursdays in the future. 

Week 49 2011

Tendring Topics......on line

A Career in Local Government?

            There was a time when a ‘career in local government’ meant getting a job at the Town Hall when you left school, starting off as a junior clerk and studying in your spare time for a qualification appropriate to the department of the council employing you.  That was my intended career path.  In 1937, aged sixteen and armed with the London University School Leaving Certificate with Matriculation Exemption I obtained employment in Ipswich Corporation’s Public Health Department as a Junior Clerk/Student Sanitary Inspector. 

              I was to work in the general office for two years while, at evening classes, studying Typing, Shorthand and Building Construction and Drawing.  I would then be transferred to the Sanitary Inspectors Office and spend two years gaining practical experience while travelling up to London once or twice a week for theoretical training. I would then take the exam for the appropriate professional qualification and would apply for the post of Sanitary Inspector when there was a vacancy either in Ipswich or elsewhere.  The Council would lend me £100 (a pretty trivial sum today but far-from-trivial in 1937!) to cover my tuition fees and travelling expenses.                          

  

Myself as Housing Manager

    Thanks to Hitler my own career took a totally different direction.  I did my two years ‘hard labour’ in the Public Health Department General Office but in September 1939, when I was about to commence my practical training,  I was called up  with the Territorial Army and didn’t give another thought to public health for seven years!                                                                                         

And as freelance writer

Discharged from the army in 1946, I attended a special full-time course for Sanitary Inspectors at Battersea Polytechnic.  I passed the qualifying exam in 1947 and was first employed as a Sanitary Inspector (to be renamed Public Health Inspector), later as a Housing Manager and finally as a Public Relations Officer in the local government service, before taking early retirement at the age of 59 and spending the next twenty-three years (until I was 82!) pursuing a second successful career as a freelance writer.  A similar career path in local government was still available until the economic crisis and the savage cuts in public spending limited or closed altogether local authority training schemes.

            Today though, there is another way in which to make a living out of local government without all that tedious business of studying for paper qualifications and enduring years of drudgery while ‘gaining experience’. It’s the political path. 

            Essential qualifications are an easy smile, a ready tongue and allegiance to whichever political party you think has the best chance of gaining a majority at the local elections.  Firmly held political convictions are an optional extra (they can even be a disadvantage) but absolute loyalty to the leaders of the party you have chosen is a key to success, at least in the early stages of your career.

In my day elected councillors were unpaid.  They presented themselves for election because they had strong political views that they believed should be represented when local decisions were made, or simply because they had plenty of the sound common sense and the local knowledge that they felt was needed.  There was no question of personal gain, though they could claim reimbursement of travelling and other necessary expenses and loss of earnings.   Councils made their decisions after considering the recommendations of committees comprising members of all political parties and those who had no political allegiance.

            Nowadays councillors are paid just for turning up at meetings of the full council.  The pay varies but Tendring District councillors get paid a basic £4,983 a year; not enough to live on but a useful addition to the income from ‘the day job’.   That could be just the beginning.  The old ‘committee’ system that I remember has been abolished at the insistence of central government.  Each council now has its ‘cabinet’ of a handful of members of the majority party. These consider all the issues coming before the Council.  Their recommendations can, of course, be amended or rejected by the full Council but – since the party that rules in the cabinet has a majority in the council chamber – they are usually accepted without too much trouble. 

           

            In Tendring, most cabinet members receive a special annual allowance of £10,738 on top of their £4,983.   That, for some people, would constitute a living wage – but it need not be the end of the line.  The Council’s political ‘leader’ gets additional allowances and there is no reason why a member of the district council should not aspire to being a county councillor at the same time – and county councillors, county cabinet members and their leader receive higher allowances!  It isn’t quite true to say that ‘the sky’s the limit’ for the aspiring local politician – but the limit is certainly well up in the clouds!

           

Turkeys voting for Christmas?

          The ‘cabinet’ system of local administration combined with the government’s demand that local authorities cut their expenditure, has produced a situation within Tendring District Council’s Council Chamber which an opposition councillor described as comparable with ‘inviting turkeys to vote for Christmas’.

 

            Tendring Council’s services had been organised in ‘departments’ with a portfolio holder (one of the ten members of the ‘cabinet’) presiding over each.   In September a money-saving internal reorganisation cut the number of departments to five.  At the last meeting of the full council, Labour councillor Ivan Henderson called for the number of cabinet members to be reduced to reflect the new structure, thus saving the council approximately another £40,000 a year.

          This seems an entirely reasonable idea and the Council could have debated it and voted on it immediately.  However the Council Chairman, needless to say a member of the ruling party, decided that the motion should be sent to the cabinet for consideration.   That puts off the final decision at least till the next meeting of the full council, which won’t be till February next year!   Ivan Henderson has calculated that the extra cost of four redundant cabinet members between September (when the number of departments was halved) and February, will amount to £20,000.

In any event what is the cabinet’s recommendation likely to be?  Will the four members who could be made redundant vote to be deprived of over £5,000 each – and will the other members of the cabinet vote for the dismissal of their colleagues?  I wouldn’t bet on it.  Council leader Neil Stock is reported as saying, ‘I am planning to reduce the size of the cabinet, but it will be done in a calm and rational way when we have seen how the departments are working’.   If it is just the Council’s political leader who makes decisions of this kind, perhaps we could dispense with the whole of the rest of the ‘cabinet’.  Now that would produce a worth-while saving!

On a lighter note

The news news that two giant pandas from China have been loaned to Edinburgh zoo reminded me of happier days when my wife Heather and I used to write verses each week to amuse our grandchildren.  You can guess how long ago it was from the fact that those grandchildren are now in their late twenties and early thirties!  One of our early efforts was The Giant Panda.  If you have young children or grandchildren it may amuse them too.   Here is a photo of Heather with granddaughter Josie and, below it, The Giant Panda

The Giant Panda used to fight with every animal in sight.

He now looks like a cuddly toy, but once he was a bully boy.

He’d quarrel with the wolves and bears, and challenge tigers in their lairs –

And then he’d settle down to munch someone else’s stolen lunch!

One day he teased a kangaroo, (a very foolish thing to do).

After they’d fought for half a day, the Giant Panda ran away!

And now you’ll find he always hides on lonely, wooded mountain-sides.

His only food is now bamboo (It’s tasteless, tough and hard to chew)

And it will come as no surprise to find that he has two black eyes!

          The Future of Afghanistan – and the Middle East

          Last week an international conference on the future of Afghanistan was held without two voices that are likely to have an important – possibly decisive – influence on that country’s future.  One was Pakistan, boycotting the conference after being understandably outraged at an attack by United States’ forces on one of their border posts that resulted in the killing of a score of Pakistani soldiers. Did they over-react?   Hardly; imagine the outrage there would be in the USA if a score of their soldiers had been killed by Pakistani, or British – or any other – allied armed force. An apology, however abject, and condolences, would not have sufficed.  Believe me, the wives, mothers and girlfriends of Pakistani soldiers killed by ‘friendly fire’ mourn every bit as deeply as would wives, mothers and girlfriends in New York State, Ohio, or California under similar circumstances.

            The other ‘absent voice’ at the Conference was that of the Taliban.  They know perfectly well what they want and are convinced that, in the fullness of time, they will get it.  They are not prepared to compromise, so there was really nothing for them to discuss.   Nothing emerged from that conference that persuaded me to modify my conviction that within months of the departure of the last NATO soldier, the Taliban will be back in control – and may Heaven help those Afghan who had thrown in their lot with the NATO forces!

            Elsewhere it seems that there is little possibility of liberal and tolerant forces emerging triumphantly from the Egyptian general election or from the current post-Gaddafi turmoil in Libya. It is easy to overestimate the attraction of free speech and of liberal, parliamentary democracy as we know it in Europe, to people who have never known anything but autocratic government. In both North African countries it is likely that Islamic political parties will triumph and that they will be unable to curb the activities of jihadist extremists.  This would be bad news for members of Egypt’s nearly 2,000 year old Coptic Christian Church, just as the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime proved to be bad news for Iraqi Christians. Even in ‘friendly and democratic’ Pakistan, Christians come regularly under attack and a woman is currently in prison facing the death penalty for allegedly committing the heinous crime of converting from Islam to the Christian faith.

            Meanwhile ‘the West’ is becoming ever more threatening to Syria, torn by what has developed into a civil war, and to Iran because of its alleged nuclear weapon programme.   I pray daily and with all my heart that the UK will not be dragged into yet another military adventure in the Middle East by that wonderful ‘special relationship’ with the USA!  You think this would be impossible in our current financial situation?  Don’t you believe it.  We may not be able to afford proper pensions, homes for the homeless and generous help for the poor, the sick and the disabled – but governments can always find a few billion pounds for a small war, especially if they can be persuaded – as they were in 1914 and again in 1939, not to mention Afghanistan in 2001 – that, ‘It’ll be all over in a few months!’

         

Week 48 20.11.2011

Tendring Topics.......on line

'All Hope Abandon......'

           As 2011 draws towards its end, the thoughts of old folk like me inevitably go back to Christmases and New Years of the past.  I don’t ever before recall the year’s end being ‘celebrated’ in quite such an atmosphere of gloom and foreboding as it will be this year.

            I suppose that my life was at its very lowest ebb as 1942 came to an end.  I had been a PoW for six months and was in a large PoW camp in northern Italy.  We were cold. We were hungry.  Prolonged hunger showed in our faces, which were gaunt and hollow-cheeked!  Almost every week there was a death from hunger-related causes.  We were louse-infested.  We were dispirited and bored out of our minds. We never lost hope though.  We were all of us sure that Britain and its allies would win the war, and that we would be liberated. By the end of 1943 (though by then transported to a working camp in Germany) – and particularly by the end of 1944, when the thunder of gunfire from the ever-approaching eastern front daily became louder - that hope had become a certainty.  We would soon be home again, and so we were.

            The immediate post-war years are often depicted by historians (how extraordinary that a past that seems so close to me should now be ‘history’!) as a time of privation and hardship with continued shortages and rationing. Many of our towns (and those of most of mainland Europe) were in ruins. We had a housing shortage that makes today’s housing difficulties seem Lilliputian and, having had most of the population engaged in non-productive war activities for the previous six years, we must surely have had a gargantuan national debt.

Heather, the ‘Essex girl’ who had waited for me, and I, never saw it in that light.  To us, the final years of the 1940s were a time of hope and expectancy.  We were proud of the new Labour (not of course New-Labour!) government that we had helped to bring to power and we really believed that we were entering a new age of peace and prosperity shared by all.  How naïve and innocent we were!

We had no worries about the future and were married just days after my discharge from the army in 1946.  Heather’s wedding dress was made by a friend of her mother, and she carried a splendid bouquet of real flowers.  The sports jacket and slacks that I had been given on my discharge from the army didn’t seem quite right for a wedding, so I wore my khaki uniform.  I had had the jacket of my battle dress tailored so that I could wear the top open, with a collar and tie.   A couple of days before the wedding I strode into a posh men’s  outfitters in Ipswich and bought a silk khaki shirt and tie clearly labelled ‘For sale only to officers of HM Forces’.  I was 24 years old and, with seven years army service behind me, I reckoned that I was as good as any officer – and that my bride-to-be was a lot better than any officer’s ‘lady’ I had ever met!

The wedding was at Gant’s Hill Methodist Church, Ilford, and the reception - well attended by both Heather’s and my friends and relatives – was in the church hall.  My best friend, whom I would have liked to have been my best man, was still serving in India.  I asked a former colleague and former fellow POW to do the honours.  I knew that he was a member of the Salvation Army and unlikely to embarrass me at a teetotal wedding reception!  I don’t know how much it all cost but it couldn’t have been very much because neither we, nor our parents had very much to spend.

We were married for sixty years and we faced and survived most of the problems that beset all married couples and one or two (prolonged separation by illness for example) that most avoid.  In all our time together though, I don’t recall a single New Year that we entered without at least a shred of hope of better things to come.

As 2011 comes toward its end I have a warm and comfortable home. I have an income sufficient for my needs.  I have a mobility scooter that prevents my being housebound, loving friends and relatives and, thanks to modern technology, the means of keeping in touch with all of them.

One thing that I lack is hope for the future; Not for my own future (there is unlikely to be very much of that!) but for the future of my sons and grandchildren and, indeed, for our country as a whole.  For the first time ever I don’t feel that there is a reasonable chance that next year will be better for us all than the one coming to an end.  Nor can I see a future has any possible ‘happy ending’.  I don’t think that either our present coalition government or the Labour opposition has a true understanding of, let alone a solution to, our present woes – and I am quite sure that neither UKIP nor the BNP has! 

I hope that I am wrong and that my pessimism is just a product of old age.  St Paul told us that when all else fails Faith, Hope and Love remain, and that the greatest of these is Love.  Quite so, but Hope and Faith are not optional extras.  We can’t live for long without them.  Dante got it right when, at the entrance to Hell, he imagined a posted warning, 'All hope abandon, ye who enter here!'

Some later thoughts

          I wrote the above before the Chancellor of the Exchequer made his ‘Autumn Statement’ and I had wondered if it might contain anything that would persuade me to change it.  It didn’t.  It is clear that the outlook is every bit as bleak as it had appeared to be and that for those in the public service it is even worse. There are to be more job losses, and pay rises capped at one percent when the current wage freeze ends. 

            There is room for argument about who was responsible for the current economic situation.  The Government insists that it was all the fault of the previous Labour Government (but then they would, wouldn’t they?)   The Governor of the Bank of England, who really should know and has no axe to grind, has told us – and reiterated – that the greed and incompetence of the bankers was to blame. 

            I think it likely that both are right.  The bankers were directly to blame but the New-Labour Government was guilty of failing to curb them (but then I doubt very much if any possible alternative government would have done differently). Nobody suggests for one moment that teachers, doctors, nurses, refuse collectors and other public servants were in any way to blame.  Yet it is they who are being punished while the bankers continue to walk away with telephone number salaries and bonuses.

It should be remembered that with inflation at 5 percent, a wage freeze is in effect a 5 percent wage cut – and a pay increase of one percent is just a slightly smaller cut. Thousands of public servants are losing their jobs. Those who keep theirs are to suffer continuing pay cuts, and are expected to work longer and pay more for a smaller pension!   Public servants are overwhelmingly not soul-less bureaucrats who spend their days sending each other memos.  They provide the foundation on which profit-making private enterprise can function; the personal and public health services, the highways, the fire and police services, the social services safety net and, come to that, the armed forces. We neglect them at our peril.  Yes – had I still been in the public service as I was for over forty years, I would, however reluctantly, have certainly joined the strikers last Wednesday.

    As for the belated capital expenditure on the infrastructure that it is hoped will create jobs and lift us out of recession, it is too little, too late.  Much of it is simply trying to put right things that the government got wrong in the first instance!

  In our region, for instance, much is being made of road widening on the A14 – a project that obviously makes sense, generating jobs in construction and facilitating the transport of goods from the Midlands to Felixstowe for export.

  A blog reader points out that there is nothing ‘new’ about this initiative. Together with, for instance, the School Building Programme, this had been agreed by the previous government, but was one of the first to be dropped by the new Coalition Government when it came to power.  Roads Minister Mike Penning said that the scheme was unaffordable and no longer offered acceptable value for money.

            My correspondent asks, ‘How many construction jobs might have been saved, and how many manufacturing companies would by now have had their exports streamlined if the scheme hadn’t been cancelled in the first place?’  

              

‘Sing, Choirs of Angels!’

    When, three weeks ago, under the above heading I wrote about choir-master Gareth Malone’s success in creating a community choir from the residents of what I described as a ‘New Town’ near London, I little thought that a fortnight later we would be watching on BBC2 his revisit there after two years – with lots of highlights from his earlier success.

   I was glad to discover that my memory of the original programmes hadn’t been too faulty.   I hadn’t remembered the name of the ‘New Town’.  It was, in fact, South Oxhey in Hertfordshire, less a ‘new town’ than an enormous and soul-less housing estate – until Gareth’s genius turned it into a living community!   As I wrote in my blog, he had brought his South Oxhey Community Choir up to a standard at which its members were able to sing very professionally the Agnus Dei (O Lamb of God) prayer, in Latin, to an appreciative audience in St Alban’s Cathedral!

   That wasn’t the whole story.  During the nine months that Gareth spent in South Oxhey he created not just one but three choirs – the original community choir, a children’s choir from local schools, including one school for children with special educational needs, and a ‘male voice choir’ from regulars of local pubs whose previous choral experience had been limited to Karaoke after having had a pint or two to dull their inhibitions!

   The climax of his visit had been an open-air concert on a football field given by the three massed choirs to an audience that must surely have consisted of most of the population of South Oxhey!

  That was in 2009.  On his revisit earlier this year Gareth Malone received an enthusiastic welcome from his friends in South Oxhey and was delighted to find that the Community Choir was still flourishing, with another enthusiastic choirmaster.  It was still giving much-acclaimed performances before large audiences and was still making its contribution to binding the inhabitants of South Oxhey into a living community!

   I was reminded how, in my childhood and long before the advent of television, church socials had been one of the highlights of our lives.  My dad, who could play any stringed instrument, and two or three of his friends, had formed a small band for these occasions which always included a spell of ‘community singing’. We sang ‘Clementine’, ‘Cockles and Mussels’, ‘There’s a Tavern in the Town’ and ‘Jerusalem’ with gusto (I remember their words to this day!) and a few songs both from World War I, of which many present still had sad memories, and of other earlier conflicts;  Keep the Home Fires Burning!’  ‘There’s a long, long trail a’winding……’ and ‘Tramp, tramp, tramp the boys are marching’ (a prisoner of war song from the American Civil War) were particularly popular.  I little guessed how prophetic of my own future the last of these was to be!

 There was a community spirit in those pre-television days that doesn’t exist today.  Perhaps community singing had something to do with it.  It would have been nice to have had a Gareth Malone to encourage us to keep it up!

'A damp squib?'

    David Cameron is surely an authority on damp squibs.  He has had plenty of experience of them.

However, when he uses that expression to describe a general strike of  two million workers from every walk of life, which closed a majority of our schools and affected every one of us in one way or another, it makes me hope that we will never encounter a dry one!

               

Week 47 2011 29.11.2011

Tendring Topics……on line

'What goes around, comes around'

            There was a time – I remember it well – when the maximum loan for house purchase that Building Society and Bank Managers would approve for house purchase depended upon the income of the main wage earner in the applicant’s family.  That was in the days before it was assumed that both members of the marriage or other partnership would continue in full-time work even after a baby or babies arrived.   Then, provided one of the couple, usually the male, had a steady job they could buy their new home with a twenty or twenty-five years mortgage and a deposit of ten percent of the total cost.  If the local authority were prepared to act as guarantor and the applicant’s job seemed very secure, then a five percent deposit might be acceptable.

            When, way back it 1956, my wife Heather and I bought our bungalow in Clacton (the one in which I am writing these words) we had thought we could manage the monthly mortgage payments on the kind of home that we needed (I had just been appointed Additional Public Health Inspector by Clacton Urban District Council).  Raising the deposit though was a major obstacle.  We had been married for ten years but during that time Heather had suffered a life-threatening illness and had had a crippling operation.  We had two young children, and a loan to repay on the car I needed for my work.  My pay had been adequate but we had virtually no savings.   The Council was prepared to act as guarantor and we had only to raise five percent of the value of the bungalow.  It seems a totally piffling sum now but we were able to raise it only by selling Heather’s solitaire diamond engagement ring that I had bought eleven years earlier with a considerable proportion of the army back pay I had accumulated as a prisoner of war.

            There came a housing shortage.  It was destined to be made much worse by Mrs Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ legislation that, within a short space of time, markedly reduced the amount of social housing available for letting.  With rents prohibitively high in the private sector, young couples yearned to get their feet on the first rung of the home ownership ladder.

            It was a time of low unemployment and relative prosperity.  Married women, including young mothers, carried on working, leaving their children in day care.    Banks relaxed their rules and made loans based on the total income of the applicants – not just that of the highest earner.  Many more became eligible for mortgages.  But, of course, there was no commensurate increase in the number of homes available for purchase.  The price of houses began to rise, and rise – and rocket!   The housing boom had begun.  Soon house price inflation soared well above general rise in prices.

             Banks competed with each-other in making tempting offers to would-be buyers.  Ninety-five percent mortgages became commonplace.  Soon there were one hundred percent, and eventually one hundred and ten percent loans to help prospective house buyers with their legal costs and their removal and furnishing expenses!

            It couldn’t, and didn’t last.  The bubble burst.  Home buyers (they had imagined they were ‘home owners’ but they weren’t!) or their partners lost their jobs and half their incomes.  They couldn’t keep up the mortgage payments and either sold their homes at a loss, or were dispossessed by the Bank. House prices plummeted. The homes thus recovered by the Banks were often worth only a fraction of the sums originally loaned on them.  Some Banks would have been declared bankrupt had they not been bailed out by us taxpayers.     

            Right now we have stagnation.  Few new houses are being built.  Skilled and experienced building workers – bricklayers, plumbers, electricians – are unemployed.  Many people are homeless or inadequately housed. There is an acute housing shortage and there is nothing like sufficient social housing available for rent.

            There is, of course, an obvious solution – repeal the ‘right to buy’ legislation and encourage local authorities and Housing Associations to build housing for letting, fund them adequately and leave them to solve the housing problem in their own areas – as they did successfully for a century before the advent of Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatism and its pale-pink New Labour shadow.  That would have been true ‘localism’.

            Is that what the Coalition Government is going to do?   Not likely; they are going to encourage remaining council tenants to buy their own homes with discounts as high as 50 percent (well, it isn’t their money they’re giving away!) and guarantee,  with taxpayers’ money, part of the mortgage on  homes newly built for sale at affordable prices.    This, it is hoped, will encourage Banks to reduce the level of that difficult deposit and bring home-purchase within the scope of ordinary people again. This, so they declare, will stimulate the building trade and thus get the general economy moving.  I hope that it will!  It seems to me though to be offering to bail out the banks before they are even in trouble, and bringing us back to a situation similar to that at the beginning of the house price boom.

‘Ere the winter storms begin’

          The harvest hymn tells us that, ‘All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin’.   And so it should be – but those of us who live in towns know that bringing in the harvest is not the only task that needs to be performed before the winter storms, the ice and perhaps the snow are with us again. Among them are repair of the damage done to our roads and footpaths by the last two hard winters.

Well, here are a couple of local examples of road and footpath disrepair that need urgent attention.  They are by no means the only examples of highway neglect in Clacton and they are almost certainly not the worst, but they are examples that I see regularly.  The footpath is beside Old Road and is regularly used by pedestrians (and mobility scooterists) on their way to Morrison’ supermarket.  It is a positive danger to those unsteady on their feet or with impaired sight, and a source of bone-shaking discomfort to scooterists.  I speak from personal experience!

            The pothole is in Beaconsfield Road, near its junction with Skelmersdale Road.  If it doesn’t receive attention it will get much worse, and more dangerous, in the coming winter.  Unspectacular work like this is far more worth-while than, for instance, the wholesale reconstruction of the seaward end of Pier Avenue last winter – when the dust had scarcely settled on the precious reconstruction!

The ever widening incomes gap!

          At last – the gaping chasm between the incomes of the poorest and the wealthiest of us has received the attention of an official investigation and is being brought to the attention of the government.  It seems that the average income of the staff of a top FTSE100 company is £20,000 a year (for many people even that is wealth beyond the dreams of avarice!) while the incomes of Directors and Chief Executives of these companies is – wait for it! – more than three and a half million pounds a year.

            A CBI spokesman explained to us on TV this morning why nothing could – or should – be done about this.  It’s all because of that wonderful Global Market. Profit-making enterprises throughout the world need the very best brains to make them even more profitable.  They are prepared to pay the best salaries, bonuses and other perks, to get them.   If we lesser mortals were to attempt to limit the number of millions our top people receive (I can’t bring myself to write ‘earn’) they would simply up sticks and move elsewhere.  How very convenient, for some, it is to have an economic system that demands that the pay of workers gets ever lower so that we can be competitive in the global market, while that of their bosses has to get ever higher, for exactly the same reason!

Despite the obvious absurdity of this situation and world wide protests about its manifest unfairness and injustice, the Global Market is welcomed by all three of our main political parties!

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

            The government’s policy of cuts in public services and benefits, and of tax increases (in VAT and similar indirect or ‘stealth’ taxes) that particularly affect the less-well-off are really beginning to bite.  The provident, who have ‘nest eggs’ in savings accounts with banks and building societies are worse hit than the extravagant.  Their savings decrease in value as inflation outstrips the meagre interest that they earn.  Some  have lost their homes, many more have lost their jobs and practically all of us are beginning to lose hope.

            There would be one very simple and straightforward way of restoring our faith in the Coalition Government’s handling of the economic crisis and persuading us that the sacrifices we all (except the seriously wealthy) are having to make, have been worthwhile. Why not – perhaps quarterly or half-yearly – reveal by how many (surely millions) of pounds the deficit has been reduced during that period?  Then we would know whether or not the gain had been worth the pain.  As a former public relations officer I am astonished that this isn’t already happening.  Could it be that there has been no decrease?  Perhaps there has even been  an increase in that worrying deficit; one that even the most accomplished spin doctor would have difficulty in attributing to the previous Labour Government, or to ‘Brussels’, or to whom or whatever is the latest popular scapegoat.   

            That is very possible.  The cynical may see it as a reason why no such disclosure has been made.  A blog reader points out that the government, in formulating its financial strategy must have been expecting the national economy to show modest (perhaps 2 percent) growth.   This would have been expected to bring a reduction in the number of benefit claimants, together with increased revenue from corporation tax, income tax and VAT.  In fact the government’s austerity policy has killed economic growth, increased unemployment and suppressed demand.

            It is an unfortunate fact that we have to rely on their political opponent’s estimates of the effects that their policies, and those of their rivals, would have on the deficit.

            The Conservatives claim that Labour’s policy of reversing ‘the cuts’ to stimulate the economy, would increase the deficit by £85 billion a year by the end of the present Parliament.  They may well be quite right.

            Labour has considered Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts from November 2010 together with the latest estimates from independent forecasters, They predict that the coalition government’s borrowing could rise by £11 billion more than planned this year, £22 billion next year, £34 billion in 2013 – ’14, and £42 billion in 2014-’15.

            Voters at the next election will, it seems, have a clear choice.  Vote Conservative, cut even deeper, and increase the deficit, or Vote Labour, reverse the cuts and – though in a slightly different way – do the same thing!

            Well, it isn’t all that likely that I shall still be around for the next General Election to have to make a decision! 

An Affront – or a Lucky Escape?

          A couple of weeks ago members of Tendring Council, together with the local press, were full of indignation at the fact that Tendring was the one district in Essex through which the Olympic Torch  would not be carried next year as it makes its tortuous journey to the Olympic Stadium at Stratford.

            Now I learn that the passage of the torch through Colchester on July 6^th   is expected to cost the district council £30,000 in road closures, crowd control and street cleaning.  Our omission from the route may have been a blow to our local pride but I reckon that in every other respect it was a lucky escape!