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?