Tendring Topics…..on Line
‘Double, double, toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble’
So sang the three witches in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ as they added ever more revolting bits and pieces to their bubbling brew. What, I wonder, will eventually emerge from the currently seething cauldron of the Muslim-majority states of North Africa and the Middle East. As I write, the Tunisian people have overthrown a corrupt and tyrannical ruler, who had enjoyed the support of ‘the West’. The Egyptian people appear to be in the process of doing the same. There is no shortage of similar rulers in the same area and the successes of anti-government forces in Egypt and Tunis have encouraged similar dissidents elsewhere. There are demands for freedom in the Yemen, and the King of Jordan has taken what I am sure he hopes will prove to be effective pre-emptive action to dampen down rebellion in his country.
A sense of foreboding that I feel about these on-the-surface encouraging moves arises from the fact that history demonstrates that the overthrow – particularly the violent overthrow – of cruel and autocratic regimes is all too often followed by the establishment of equally bad or even worse ones.
Liberal minded people throughout Europe welcomed the overthrow of the French Monarchy in 1789 and the advent of the republican government with its slogan of Liberty, Fraternity, Equality (aims that many of us pursue today!) – but the cruel and oppressive monarchical system was followed first by the ‘reign of terror’ of Robespierre, Danton and Marat, which was itself supplanted by that of Napoleon Bonaparte! The medieval tyranny of the Russian Tsarist government maintained by bands of Cossack ‘enforcers’ armed with sabres and whips, the threat of Siberian exile and the CHEKA (a secret police force differing little from the KGB), was followed, ultimately, by Stalin!
More recently in Iran, the overthrow of the all-powerful Shah was followed by the rule of the Ayatollahs, enemies of any form of liberalism. In Afghanistan; was the Soviet rule that ‘the west’ conspired with the ‘gallant mojihadin’ to overthrow, really much worse that that of the Taliban, whom we had supported against the Soviets, and who are now taking an almost daily toll of the lives of our young men striving to oust them?
Will freedom-loving democratic forces emerge triumphant from the present turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East? I very much hope so, but fear otherwise.
We in Britain, where the level of freedom and democracy that we enjoy today has been gained slowly and after centuries of bitter struggle, may overestimate the attractions that parliamentary representative government has to people in an entirely different environment and with an entirely different history and culture. It is worth remembering that, even in Britain, the idea that everyone over 18, men and women, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, should have a vote and therefore a small share in the country’s government, would have been regarded less than two centuries ago as dangerous and seditious nonsense. Only the Chartists, regarded by contemporary ‘responsible citizens' as ‘the loony lefties’ of the nineteenth century, even suggested such an idea.
It was not until within my own lifetime that universal suffrage was achieved. It was in 1928, when I was seven years old, that the right to vote in Parliamentary and Local Government Elections was conferred on all men and women over the age of 21. It was in 1969, when I was 48, that the voting age was lowered to 18. We have yet to achieve the proportional representation that I believe is a prerequisite of true democracy.
It is not very likely that people whose experience of government has been limited to one or other kind of tyranny, and who believe that all the laws of any importance were dictated directly by God some 1,500 years ago, will find the idea of electing human lawmakers an attractive one. Surely, they will think, all that is needed is experienced theologians able to interpret those God-given laws in the light of modern circumstances. To suggest otherwise must undoubtedly be blasphemous.
For this reason I fear that the present turmoil in Africa and the Middle East is just as likely to end in the triumph of one or other of the extreme forms of Islamism as in the kind of liberal democracies that most of us in ‘the west’ would like to see.
The Crime Map of the United Kingdom
I reckon that the publication of the ‘On line Crime Map’ of the United Kingdom was one of the dafter projects of the present government.
Type in your postal address and postcode and a street map will appear of your district with numbers shown in strategic places. Click on the number nearest to your home and you’ll learn how many incidents of various kinds of crime have taken place in the immediate vicinity during December last year. Residents of Clacton’s Jubilee Avenue, just off the old London Road on Clacton’s outskirts, had a nasty shock when they discovered that the number of burglaries that had taken place in their vicinity made them the third most crime-ridden area in the UK. They weren’t aware of any law-breaking whatsoever in their quiet residential road.
The explanation lies in the fact that Jubilee Avenue is adjacent to one of Clacton’s largest and most popular holiday caravan sites (I remember it well from my public health inspecting days!) It was there, ‘in the vicinity’ of Jubilee Avenue, that the crimes had taken place. Several caravans had been burgled ‘by person or persons unknown’.
I typed in my address and postcode with some trepidation. I have lived in my present bungalow in Dudley Road since 1956. My family and I have certainly never felt threatened in any way here and I wouldn’t wish to live anywhere else. It must be said though that Dudley Road hasn’t had an exactly crime-free past. Immediately opposite my bungalow is a narrow passageway in, or in the vicinity of, which at least three muggings have taken place over the years. Some years ago I recall that a small ‘cannabis farm’ was found in the roof space of a dwelling in Dudley Road some distance from my home, and I have heard that drug dealing has taken place in the neighbourhood. I have even, in the over-half-a-century I have lived here, added to the crime statistics myself by reporting to the Police (for insurance purposes, rather than in any hope of the perpetrators being caught) the theft of hubcaps from my car, the theft of a bicycle left in my driveway and, more recently, the systematic destruction of my front boundary wall by vandals. No doubt there were other crimes in the vicinity, some more serious, that I didn’t hear about. I don’t go out looking for trouble!
The work of the vandals! The rubble had already been moved from the nearer section of the wall.
However the ‘crime map’ revealed that during December 2010 the vicinity of my home was relatively crime-free. There was one violent crime, and just one complaint of antisocial behaviour. The ‘one violent crime’ is rather disturbing – another mugging perhaps? There are many kinds of violent crime. Clicking on nearby streets in the area of Clacton in which I live (I have heard it described as ‘working class residential’, which is
OK by me) it is clear that the overwhelmingly most common problem is ‘antisocial behaviour’. This is very worrying since I have little doubt that most antisocial behaviour goes unreported either because of fears of reprisals or of the well-founded conviction that ‘there’s not a lot that the Police can do about it’.
My new ‘Vandal-resistant’ garden fence
I whiled away an entertaining half-hour with the Crime Map but, at a time when the government tells us that we must get our pennyworth out of every penny spent, what on earth was its purpose? It doesn’t tell the Police anything they didn’t already know. They supplied the information. How on earth can the crime map possibly, as the government claims, ‘empower’ me? Supposing, for instance, instead of there being one violent crime in my neighbourhood, there had been twenty. I would have been seriously worried but there would be nothing I could do about it. The Police would have already been aware of it. Particularly nowadays, when they are compelled to limit their resources and cut down on staff, they can only increase the policing of one area by cutting down elsewhere. They have more knowledge on which to base their decisions on priorities than either local people or local or national politicians, and I have more faith in their judgement than in that of politicians!
I’m ready to be persuaded otherwise, but it seems to me that the ‘crime map’ will alarm some people unnecessarily, induce a false sense of complacency in others, and move yet others – like the folk of Clacton’s Jubilee Avenue – to righteous indignation. I wonder how much of our money was wasted in setting it up?
‘The easy speeches that comfort cruel men’
As far as I know G.K.Chesterton, author, essayist and minor poet (best known perhaps for his ‘Father Brown’ detective stories) wrote just one hymn. It begins ‘O God of earth and altar….’, and includes a verse that asks for deliverance from, ‘lies of tongue and pen, and from the easy speeches that comfort cruel men’. I think of that verse when I hear some of the speeches of our political leaders today. They are not, of course, cruel men (and women), but well-meaning ones who inflict unintentional (but none the less real!) cruelty on others as a result of their political convictions. It can’t be denied though that they use ‘easy speeches’ to comfort themselves and justify their actions.
They cut benefit paid to the unemployed and tell us that they are actually helping them by giving them an extra incentive to find work. They overlook the fact that thanks to their own policies, there is already a growing army of unemployed competing for fewer and fewer jobs. They cut grants to Citizens’ Advice Bureaux and for the salaries of debt advisers and say rather patronisingly that their aim is to stop people getting into debt in the first instance rather that helping them out of it at a later stage! They overlook the fact that their policies on University Tuition Fees and support for Further Education will put a large proportion of the younger generation heavily in debt for most of their working lives!
There was once a top politician who, between puffs on his pipe, would sometimes begin a televised statement with, ‘Now let’s be absolutely honest about this…..’ That was when we knew that our credulity was going to be stretched almost to breaking point.
Today’s political watchword is clarity. If I had a fiver for every time I have heard a government spokesman claim ‘We have always been absolutely clear……..’, or, echoing one of his predecessors ‘Let’s be absolutely clear about this…….’ or, ‘We stated very clearly…..’ I would be able to buy myself a new mobility scooter!
‘Double, double, toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble’
So sang the three witches in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ as they added ever more revolting bits and pieces to their bubbling brew. What, I wonder, will eventually emerge from the currently seething cauldron of the Muslim-majority states of North Africa and the Middle East. As I write, the Tunisian people have overthrown a corrupt and tyrannical ruler, who had enjoyed the support of ‘the West’. The Egyptian people appear to be in the process of doing the same. There is no shortage of similar rulers in the same area and the successes of anti-government forces in Egypt and Tunis have encouraged similar dissidents elsewhere. There are demands for freedom in the Yemen, and the King of Jordan has taken what I am sure he hopes will prove to be effective pre-emptive action to dampen down rebellion in his country.
A sense of foreboding that I feel about these on-the-surface encouraging moves arises from the fact that history demonstrates that the overthrow – particularly the violent overthrow – of cruel and autocratic regimes is all too often followed by the establishment of equally bad or even worse ones.
Liberal minded people throughout Europe welcomed the overthrow of the French Monarchy in 1789 and the advent of the republican government with its slogan of Liberty, Fraternity, Equality (aims that many of us pursue today!) – but the cruel and oppressive monarchical system was followed first by the ‘reign of terror’ of Robespierre, Danton and Marat, which was itself supplanted by that of Napoleon Bonaparte! The medieval tyranny of the Russian Tsarist government maintained by bands of Cossack ‘enforcers’ armed with sabres and whips, the threat of Siberian exile and the CHEKA (a secret police force differing little from the KGB), was followed, ultimately, by Stalin!
More recently in Iran, the overthrow of the all-powerful Shah was followed by the rule of the Ayatollahs, enemies of any form of liberalism. In Afghanistan; was the Soviet rule that ‘the west’ conspired with the ‘gallant mojihadin’ to overthrow, really much worse that that of the Taliban, whom we had supported against the Soviets, and who are now taking an almost daily toll of the lives of our young men striving to oust them?
Will freedom-loving democratic forces emerge triumphant from the present turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East? I very much hope so, but fear otherwise.
We in Britain, where the level of freedom and democracy that we enjoy today has been gained slowly and after centuries of bitter struggle, may overestimate the attractions that parliamentary representative government has to people in an entirely different environment and with an entirely different history and culture. It is worth remembering that, even in Britain, the idea that everyone over 18, men and women, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, should have a vote and therefore a small share in the country’s government, would have been regarded less than two centuries ago as dangerous and seditious nonsense. Only the Chartists, regarded by contemporary ‘responsible citizens' as ‘the loony lefties’ of the nineteenth century, even suggested such an idea.
It was not until within my own lifetime that universal suffrage was achieved. It was in 1928, when I was seven years old, that the right to vote in Parliamentary and Local Government Elections was conferred on all men and women over the age of 21. It was in 1969, when I was 48, that the voting age was lowered to 18. We have yet to achieve the proportional representation that I believe is a prerequisite of true democracy.
It is not very likely that people whose experience of government has been limited to one or other kind of tyranny, and who believe that all the laws of any importance were dictated directly by God some 1,500 years ago, will find the idea of electing human lawmakers an attractive one. Surely, they will think, all that is needed is experienced theologians able to interpret those God-given laws in the light of modern circumstances. To suggest otherwise must undoubtedly be blasphemous.
For this reason I fear that the present turmoil in Africa and the Middle East is just as likely to end in the triumph of one or other of the extreme forms of Islamism as in the kind of liberal democracies that most of us in ‘the west’ would like to see.
The Crime Map of the United Kingdom
I reckon that the publication of the ‘On line Crime Map’ of the United Kingdom was one of the dafter projects of the present government.
Type in your postal address and postcode and a street map will appear of your district with numbers shown in strategic places. Click on the number nearest to your home and you’ll learn how many incidents of various kinds of crime have taken place in the immediate vicinity during December last year. Residents of Clacton’s Jubilee Avenue, just off the old London Road on Clacton’s outskirts, had a nasty shock when they discovered that the number of burglaries that had taken place in their vicinity made them the third most crime-ridden area in the UK. They weren’t aware of any law-breaking whatsoever in their quiet residential road.
The explanation lies in the fact that Jubilee Avenue is adjacent to one of Clacton’s largest and most popular holiday caravan sites (I remember it well from my public health inspecting days!) It was there, ‘in the vicinity’ of Jubilee Avenue, that the crimes had taken place. Several caravans had been burgled ‘by person or persons unknown’.
I typed in my address and postcode with some trepidation. I have lived in my present bungalow in Dudley Road since 1956. My family and I have certainly never felt threatened in any way here and I wouldn’t wish to live anywhere else. It must be said though that Dudley Road hasn’t had an exactly crime-free past. Immediately opposite my bungalow is a narrow passageway in, or in the vicinity of, which at least three muggings have taken place over the years. Some years ago I recall that a small ‘cannabis farm’ was found in the roof space of a dwelling in Dudley Road some distance from my home, and I have heard that drug dealing has taken place in the neighbourhood. I have even, in the over-half-a-century I have lived here, added to the crime statistics myself by reporting to the Police (for insurance purposes, rather than in any hope of the perpetrators being caught) the theft of hubcaps from my car, the theft of a bicycle left in my driveway and, more recently, the systematic destruction of my front boundary wall by vandals. No doubt there were other crimes in the vicinity, some more serious, that I didn’t hear about. I don’t go out looking for trouble!
The work of the vandals! The rubble had already been moved from the nearer section of the wall.
However the ‘crime map’ revealed that during December 2010 the vicinity of my home was relatively crime-free. There was one violent crime, and just one complaint of antisocial behaviour. The ‘one violent crime’ is rather disturbing – another mugging perhaps? There are many kinds of violent crime. Clicking on nearby streets in the area of Clacton in which I live (I have heard it described as ‘working class residential’, which is
OK by me) it is clear that the overwhelmingly most common problem is ‘antisocial behaviour’. This is very worrying since I have little doubt that most antisocial behaviour goes unreported either because of fears of reprisals or of the well-founded conviction that ‘there’s not a lot that the Police can do about it’.My new ‘Vandal-resistant’ garden fence
I whiled away an entertaining half-hour with the Crime Map but, at a time when the government tells us that we must get our pennyworth out of every penny spent, what on earth was its purpose? It doesn’t tell the Police anything they didn’t already know. They supplied the information. How on earth can the crime map possibly, as the government claims, ‘empower’ me? Supposing, for instance, instead of there being one violent crime in my neighbourhood, there had been twenty. I would have been seriously worried but there would be nothing I could do about it. The Police would have already been aware of it. Particularly nowadays, when they are compelled to limit their resources and cut down on staff, they can only increase the policing of one area by cutting down elsewhere. They have more knowledge on which to base their decisions on priorities than either local people or local or national politicians, and I have more faith in their judgement than in that of politicians!
I’m ready to be persuaded otherwise, but it seems to me that the ‘crime map’ will alarm some people unnecessarily, induce a false sense of complacency in others, and move yet others – like the folk of Clacton’s Jubilee Avenue – to righteous indignation. I wonder how much of our money was wasted in setting it up?
‘The easy speeches that comfort cruel men’
As far as I know G.K.Chesterton, author, essayist and minor poet (best known perhaps for his ‘Father Brown’ detective stories) wrote just one hymn. It begins ‘O God of earth and altar….’, and includes a verse that asks for deliverance from, ‘lies of tongue and pen, and from the easy speeches that comfort cruel men’. I think of that verse when I hear some of the speeches of our political leaders today. They are not, of course, cruel men (and women), but well-meaning ones who inflict unintentional (but none the less real!) cruelty on others as a result of their political convictions. It can’t be denied though that they use ‘easy speeches’ to comfort themselves and justify their actions.
They cut benefit paid to the unemployed and tell us that they are actually helping them by giving them an extra incentive to find work. They overlook the fact that thanks to their own policies, there is already a growing army of unemployed competing for fewer and fewer jobs. They cut grants to Citizens’ Advice Bureaux and for the salaries of debt advisers and say rather patronisingly that their aim is to stop people getting into debt in the first instance rather that helping them out of it at a later stage! They overlook the fact that their policies on University Tuition Fees and support for Further Education will put a large proportion of the younger generation heavily in debt for most of their working lives!
There was once a top politician who, between puffs on his pipe, would sometimes begin a televised statement with, ‘Now let’s be absolutely honest about this…..’ That was when we knew that our credulity was going to be stretched almost to breaking point.
Today’s political watchword is clarity. If I had a fiver for every time I have heard a government spokesman claim ‘We have always been absolutely clear……..’, or, echoing one of his predecessors ‘Let’s be absolutely clear about this…….’ or, ‘We stated very clearly…..’ I would be able to buy myself a new mobility scooter!
Usually whatever they were talking about was far from clear. But it leaves us wondering uneasily if we may be exceptionally stupid and that whatever was being discussed was perfectly clear to everyone else.
‘The times are out of joint!’
What a strange world we live in today!
Sex education, including ‘safe sex’ techniques, is taught in schools to senior pupils in mixed classes. Full sexual activity among teenagers is regarded as normal and taken for granted. Yet I have just read of two senior girls at a Colchester school having to face disciplinary action for holding hands – behaviour that would have seemed perfectly natural, even commendable, among the most demure and bashful young lady characters of a staid Victorian novel!
‘The times are out of joint!’
What a strange world we live in today!
Sex education, including ‘safe sex’ techniques, is taught in schools to senior pupils in mixed classes. Full sexual activity among teenagers is regarded as normal and taken for granted. Yet I have just read of two senior girls at a Colchester school having to face disciplinary action for holding hands – behaviour that would have seemed perfectly natural, even commendable, among the most demure and bashful young lady characters of a staid Victorian novel!
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