Tendring Topics.........on Line
‘Deja
vu’
As I get older and older I find that
practically everything that happens around me reminds me of an incident in the
distant past. ‘There is nothing new under
the sun’, as the author of the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes remarks. A few
weeks ago the government’s crass handling of a possible petrol shortage
included the potentially lethal advice to motorists to have a jerrican or two
of petrol stored in the garage. This
triggered a memory of the coining of the word ‘jerrycan’ during the winter of 1941/1942 to refer to portable steel petrol containers captured from the
German Army in the Libyan Desert .
The
current heavy rain and flooding in the midst of a serious drought might have
been thought to be a unique occurrence.
It again took me back in memory to the Libyan
desert ; this time a few months after the naming of the jerrycan. There can be few places on earth more arid
and barren than the Libyan desert in the area
of Tobruk. A wilderness of rock and sand
extends for mile after desolate mile.
Through it, from the barren
desert in the south to the sea in the north, run a number of deep valleys or
‘wadies’, carved out centuries earlier by now-dried-up rivers at a time when
Libya’s climate was very different from that today.
In
one such wadi the 231st Medium Battery RA was stationed in the
spring of 1942 to oppose the advance into Egypt of General Rommel’s re-equipped
and reinvigorated Afrikakorps. Our eight
6in howitzers, pointing westwards, were in protective gunpits dug into the
valley floor. Round them were the bivvy
tents of the crew, erected over widened slit trenches that afforded a measure
of protection from bombardment and made them relatively comfortable sleeping
quarters. From time to time one or other of the two troops of four guns would
be ordered out into no-mans-land (officially it was called ‘the operational area’) for a day, to
shell and exchange fire with unseen enemy gun positions or troop concentrations
a few miles to our west. Both sides were testing the other’s strengths
and weaknesses in preparation for a major offensive.
A flooded gunpit near Gazala , Libya
We were sure that it never rained in the Libyan
desert . Very occasionally though, it does! One night, I think it
must have been in March, black storm clouds blew in from the Mediterranean . Amid flashing lightning and the crash and
rumble of thunder the heavens opened and rain bucketed down, perhaps for a
couple of hours, perhaps longer. It was
long enough to transform our wadi from a long-dried-up river bed, to an active
fast-flowing river. The gunpits quickly
filled with water which rose to above the wheel axles of the guns. The trenches over which our bivvy tents were
erected were inundated, soaking our bedding and spare clothing.
Had
Rommel attacked that night there would have been little resistance. The weather
though is non-partisan. Rommel’s troops
were rendered impotent by that same storm.
The Afrikakorps was as incapable of attacking as we were of defending.
That
morning there was not the usual, ‘Stand
to on the guns! at first light, with
every gun crew ready for action. Dawn
broke. The rain stopped, the flood subsided,
draining away into the desert sand. The
guns, our bivvies and – eventually – our clothes and bedding, dried out in hot
North African sunshine.
By
sunset we were more-or-less back to normal.
The evening ‘Stand to!’ took
place without incident. Much worse
things than that were to happen to us before we saw England again. It was just an unexpected incident, with no harm done. It was an incident that has been brought to
the forefront of my memory by recent floods on our own thirsty land.
Legacies!
Spokesmen
for the Coalition Government complain ad
nauseum about the terrible financial legacy left them by their
predecessors. It’s true that they took
over at a time of financial crisis; thugh it was not one created by the
previous Government, but by the greed and incompetence of the bankers. I remember that in the last months of the
Labour Government, Britain ’s
economy was showing signs of the green shoots of economic recovery. We were
beginning to pull out of recession. I wouldn’t suggest that that Government
deserved any special credit for those signs of recovery – but their successors
certainly bear some responsibility for destroying them with their blindly
applied brake on public expenditure.
I
wonder if the members of today’s government ever give thought to the legacy
that they will leave their successors.
They hope that they will have reduced substantially the national
deficit, the gap between government expenditure and government income from taxation.
Whether they will succeed is uncertain – I think it unlikely until the
seriously wealthy can be persuaded (or coerced) into carrying their fair share
of the burden.
What
is certain is that we shall have become a nation of debtors, with every
university graduate carrying a lifelong burden.
Joining them, from the other end of the social scale, will be the former
council tenants persuaded to take out mortgages in pursuit of the dream of ‘home ownership for all’ and to ensure
that, with council tenancies being now on a temporary basis only, they secure
for themselves a home for life..
Already evident is the creation of a
disillusioned and disheartened population, including a vast army of young,
bored and impoverished unemployed people, rapidly becoming unemployable and
completely alienated from society. Their only legal hope of escape from a life
of poverty is the very remote possibility of ‘coming up on the lottery!’ It will need only the spark of unjustified police
violence for them to explode into the kind of rioting that we experienced last
year.
Other
legacies will be a run-down public service with depleted and embittered staff,
shabby and neglected public buildings, parks and gardens, council housing
estates degenerating into slums, vandalised properties, graffiti polluted walls
and badly policed town centres resulting in a wave of petty, and not-so-petty
crime. The neglect of our roads and footpaths is an example of the public
squalor that is already making itself apparent.
I
have referred before to Clacton-on-Sea ’s
potholed roads and broken and dangerous pavements. Last week in the Clacton Gazette there were two angry readers’ letters on the same
subject.
One
drew attention to a ‘very large and deep
pothole’ in the middle of the road at Clacton’s busy St. John’s roundabout. The writer says that if
a motorcyclist, unaware of its existence rode over it, the rider would be
thrown into the road and into the path of oncoming traffic. The letter-writer reported the pothole on the
County Council’s website on 11th April and received an automatic
acknowledgement – but there’s no sign of action. The other letter was from a St Osyth motorist
warning of an unexpected pothole that took his car off the road and into a
telegraph pole. He was not seriously injured but his car was a write-off. The telegraph pole has since been replaced –
but the pothole is still there! Tendring
District isn’t unique. Similar
circumstances must exist nation-wide
Highways
are, of course, a county council, not a central government responsibility. But central government has cut grants to
local authorities, demanded that they make economies and urged them not to
raise council tax. I’d like to see more
money spent on highways but I am well aware that, if it is, there will be less
to spend on the care of the elderly or of the very young.
Oh
– to be absolutely fair to the government it must be added that a tiny minority
really have benefited from their policies.
While most of us have become poorer the seriously wealthy have become
even wealthier!
It
takes only two or three years for communities to degenerate into lawless
slums. It could take decades to get them
back onto their feet again and to restore their civic pride. I don’t envy the government, whatever its
political complexion that has the task of dealing with the legacy likely to be
left by the ‘arrogant posh boys who don’t
know the price of milk’
‘If
you want to know the time – ask a policeman’
Thus advised a popular
Edwardian Music Hall song, adding in explanation, ‘every member of the force has a watch and chain of course, so, if you
want to know the time – ask a policeman’.
Nowadays most of us wear wristwatches day and night, taking them off
only in the shower. At work if we aren’t
wearing a watch someone else within shouting distance certainly will be. There’s at least an even chance that there
will be a radio-controlled watch or clock available giving accurate time to the
second.
This
apparently is not so in County Hall, Chelmsford . Perhaps I was over-generous to Essex County
Council in suggesting above that they might only be able to give our roads and
pavements the maintenance they need by cutting down on other vital
services. According to the daily Gazette a Freedom of Information request
has revealed that between April 2011 and January 2012 county council employees
dialled the Speaking Clock 1,349
times, clocking up a bill of £566! This was not a vast sum of money compared
with those that, a few years ago during the reign of Council Leader Lord
Hanningfield, some county councillors were claiming in unaudited expenses, but
it was surely completely unjustified. In over thirty years in the local
government service I certainly never dialled the Speaking Clock myself, nor do I recall anyone else ever doing so.
Possibly
more justifiable was the sum spent on calling directory enquiries. During that same period there were 5,705 calls
made to ‘118 numbers’ (a few would have been reasonable enough – but nearly
6,000?). The cost of these – with the £566 for time enquiries – came to a total
of £22,768! I reckon that would have
paid for filling in several potholes! A
‘council spokesman’ is reported as saying, ‘We
strive to keep all costs at a minimum and do not endorse the use of the talking
clock, and we actively encourage our staff not to use it’. So that’s all right then.
Last week’s local elections
Last
week’s local elections (in which our own Tendring District was not involved)
confirmed my belief that more people vote to keep one or other of the
candidates out than to get their own
preferred candidate in. The strong Labour vote was, I think, the
result of disillusionment with the coalition government rather than a
conviction that Labour can cure all the nation’s ills.
I
was glad that the Green Party did relatively well, their candidate coming third
in the London Mayoralty election, in front of the Liberal Democrat candidate. I
am delighted that the British National Party was virtually wiped off the
political map, but am sorry to see UKIP flourishing. I am sorrier that Boris Johnson won than I am
that Ken Livingstone lost. It seems
that Boris has ambitions to be Party Leader and made a not-too-heavily-veiled
criticism of David Cameron in his victory speech.
I
was unreservedly glad that seven out of the eight local authorities that had a
referendum on whether or not they wanted a Mayor, rejected the idea
decisively. They will continue with
their ‘cabinet style’ administration. I
am only sorry that members of the public were never offered a referendum on the
central government’s decision to insist that all local authorities should
either have an all-powerful Mayor or adopt ‘cabinet government’, copying
Westminster in having policy decided by a tiny clique of the ruling majority
party, to which all party member on the Council are expected to give their
unqualified support. I believe that if public opinion had been tested in
referendums, a substantial majority would have opted for a continuation of the
old ‘committee’ based local administration, in which every issue was discussed
openly in committee before being presented to the Council for further debate
and a decision.
The
old system may have been more cumbersome and time consuming – but it certainly
came closer to expressing the will of the electorate.
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