Week 26 2012

Tendring Topics.....on line

Quite Legal……but Immoral!

          That, you may have thought, was an accusation that might be made about some of the activities of money-lenders, bookmakers, escort agencies, massage parlours and similar dubious individuals or institutions.  They though are all just small fry compared with the big operators who (obviously for a reasonable fee) can make sure that the rich and famous, the great and the good, get away with paying only a fraction of the income tax of us lesser mortals.

            I have been protesting about the iniquity of legal tax avoidance for years. A particularly flagrant case has at last caught the attention of David Cameron our Prime Minister. His shock/horror at finding that a well-known comedian’s financial arrangements had the perfectly legal effect of reducing the percentage of his income-tax payments  to lower than that of the council employee who empties his dustbins, spurred him into making his judgemental statement about the morality of income tax avoidance.

            I’m not going to pretend that I understand the details of the tax avoidance scheme with which this individual was involved but I understand that his income was first paid into an off-shore account from which he received no income but ‘borrowed’ all the money that he needed.  He, of course, was just the one tax avoider who was singled out and pilloried (and has, as a result, withdrawn from the scheme), but there are scores, perhaps hundreds, of others involved in the same or other similar schemes.  I suspect that if all the tax avoidance loopholes were closed, we would be well on our way to solving the deficit problem that is responsible for so much of the austerity that the government has imposed upon us during the past two years.

            My own solution to the problem would be to tackle it from its source.  I would make the principal source of the national revenue a ‘citizenship tax’, a percentage of the gross income of every single one of us without exception or exemption, as our payment for the very considerable privilege of being a citizen of the United Kingdom. Evading, by any means at all, that basic ‘membership fee’ would be considered to be as irresponsible and antisocial as drink-driving is today! I think it likely that fifteen or twenty percent of income overall would be more than adequate.  This percentage would amount to a very small sum from the very poor (just as percentage increases to their income are very small) but a very large sum from the seriously wealthy.   Once that citizenship tax had been paid, what happened to the remainder of the taxpayer’s income (which, for the seriously wealthy would still be a very large sum) would be no concern of the state.  It could be paid into an off-shore account, donated to charity, used to buy a football team, a yacht, or a home on the shores of the Mediterranean, frittered away on extravagant living – or saved for ‘a rainy day’.

 No - it isn’t going to happen – not this year, not in this decade, probably not in this century.

In the meantime I hope that our Prime Minister and government will cease wringing their hands at the immorality of tax avoidance and close the legal loopholes that make this avoidance possible.  If they can’t do it then it is time they were replaced by a government that can – and will!

A Forgotten Anniversary

            I am often awake at about 5.00 am.  I usually listen to the 5.30 am news headlines, weather forecast and Prayer for the Day on Radio 4, before getting up at 5.45 am with the arrival of Farming Today.  Just before Prayer for the Day listeners are reminded of news items that made the headlines on that day in bygone years.  Last Thursday  (21^st June) for instance, we were told that Prince William had been born on 21^st June in 1982 and that it was therefore his thirtieth birthday, and that on that date in 1945 American forces had finally succeeded in taking the Pacific Island of Okinawa from the Japanese.  There were one or two other anniversaries that I have forgotten but there was one, certainly front page news at the time, which was conspicuously ignored.

            It was the capture of Tobruk by General Rommel’s German Afrikakorps in 1942; not quite as disastrous as the fall of Singapore to the Japanese earlier in that same year, but certainly the nadir of British fortunes in North Africa – a situation that was to be dramatically reversed a few months later with the Battle of El Alamein.

            The fall of Tobruk was seventy years – a lifetime – ago, but it is not an anniversary that I shall ever forget. I was one of the 30,000 British and allied troops taken prisoner on that day and destined to spend the remainder of World War II as a PoW.

            The eight-gun Medium Artillery Battery of which I was a lowly member had been in almost continuous action from the day in late May (a few days after my 21^st birthday) when Rommel had launched his offensive in the neighbourhood of Gazala, some forty miles west of Tobruk.  Continuously on the move, we had in mid-June become part of the Tobruk garrison, defending the perimeter in a position to the south-east of the town and port.

            On 19^th June we learned that we were cut off from the main British forces but were assured by ‘Military Intelligence’ (we used to say cynically that, in descending order, there were three kinds of intelligence – human, animal, and military!) that the main German forces were by-passing Tobruk and moving eastward towards Cairo and the Nile delta.  We settled down for the night expecting a long siege.

            We were woken before dawn by the thunder of artillery fire, the roar of low-flying aircraft, the rattle of machinegun fire and explosion of bombs.  The enemy attack had begun – and it was clearly concentrated on our sector of Tobruk’s perimeter!   We manned the guns and, for several hours, fired at unseen targets, our guns directed by an Observation Post Officer and Assistant in a forward position. Our 4.5mm gun/howitzers were designed and built to batter down fortifications, not to be aimed at relatively small, moving targets like armoured cars and tanks. Our guns targeted the terrain over which the enemy tanks were advancing – but if the tank commander made sure that they were well separated as they advanced he could be certain that some, probably most, would come through unscathed.

            Meanwhile Stuka bombing aircraft were flying without opposition overhead (on that fateful day we had no support either from the Royal Navy or the RAF) and enemy shells were falling all around our gun position.  ‘Airburst’ shells exploding overhead were particularly deadly.  Much of the force of those bursting on impact was absorbed by the desert sand.

            Our targets were getting closer and closer.  Before we could be over-run we were ordered to ‘limber up’ our guns and withdraw to a new position to the north-west from which we could see, in the distance, enemy tanks heading toward the town and port.  Again we opened fire, this time within sight of our targets.  The dust and smoke of battle made it impossible to see whether our shells were having any effect.

            As darkness fell, the firing on both sides subsided. The air reeked of burnt cordite and of smoke from burning vehicles.  It was painfully obvious to us that Rommel’s attack had succeeded and that the centre of Tobruk was already in enemy hands.  We laid down to sleep beside our guns on the desert sand with the prospect of death, maiming and/or captivity on the following day.  Exhausted, we all slept soundly anyway!

            With the dawn a German spotter plane flew low overhead.  We reached for the captured Italian rifles that most of us had acquired and fired an ineffective volley.  We ‘stood to’ on the guns awaiting an order to fire. We fully expected to be ordered to make a heroic ‘last stand’ and no doubt we would have done so. Fate though, decreed otherwise. A radio message from the garrison commander, a South African, General Klopper ordered us to disable our guns, set fire to our transport and await our victors’ orders.  He had surrendered the garrison to avoid further pointless bloodshed.

            Thus, I became a PoW.  I spent the next almost–three-years, first in a large PoW camp in Italy and later in a small working camp in Germany. When the Third Reich collapsed in May 1945, I liberated myself (with a great deal of help from the Soviet Army!) and made my way through Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia ultimately to the British army – and home!

            There was an unexpected sequel to my capture at Tobruk and my subsequent life as a PoW.  Years later (it must have been in the early 1970s) my wife and I, with our two then-teenage sons were enjoying a camping holiday in Austria.  Taking a  trip to the summit of the Muttersberg near the small town of Bludenz in Vorarlberg province, we found ourselves sharing a cable car with an almost identical German family.  I commented on the father’s very good English.  ‘Yes’, he said, ‘I was a PoW in England for three years and worked on a farm there’.  Shaking hands I told him that I too had been a PoW but had spent 18 months in Italy and 18 months in Germany – that accounted for the fact that his English was much better than my German.  I then asked him – what one PoW always asks another! – ‘Where were you captured?’   He replied, ‘Tobruk’ adding, in case I had never heard of the place, ‘that’s in North Africa!’    I had been captured there on 21^st June 1942.  He had been captured a few months later, subsequent to the Battle of El Alamein!

            It’s a small world!

 A minor banking crisis!

             Nat.West, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulsterbank are banks which last week spectacularly failed to perform what most of us see as their main purpose – looking after our money, adding incoming sums to our accounts, paying our bills, and repaying, promptly and efficiently when we need it, the money we have entrusted to their care.  I wonder if those banks are managed by some of those brilliant financial supermen who need  a salary of millions of pounds a year  to persuade them to turn up at their offices, plus the promise of further five-figure bribes (or bonuses) if they’re to give us their very best?   Offer them less, so we’re told, and they’d go elsewhere.

            When my family and I first moved to Clacton in 1956 I signed on with the Co-op Bank, largely because they imposed no bank charges on those who kept their accounts in credit, and they had a branch office on the corner of Rosemary Road and the Grove, just a couple of hundred yards from the office in the Town Hall where I worked.  That was over half a century ago.  The Co-op Bank is not one of the UK’s largest and most prestigious, but it has never needed to be ‘bailed out’ by us taxpayers. It has never let me down and it has an ethical investment policy that allows me to be confident that my money, entrusted to their care, isn’t used to buy armaments, to exploit the poor, or to help prop up dodgy enterprises or autocratic regimes. The nearest branch is in Colchester but the bank is easily accessible by phone or on the internet. I can pay cheques into my current account at any post office and, again from any post office or cash machine, I can use my Co-op VISA debit card to withdraw cash from that account.  Using the internet I can instantly check the state of my current account and details of payments and withdrawals.  I have no complaints.

The Weather!

          This is a subject on which, this year, words almost fail me; a winter drought that the water companies assured us would take months of steady rain to remedy, followed by a late spring and early summer of high winds, torrential rain (some areas have had a month’s rainfall in two or three hours), floods, high winds and – just occasionally – warm sunshine!   We are just at the beginning of my ninety-second summer and I have never seen another like it! It’s true that I can’t remember much about my first two or three summers I but have been credibly informed that in the year (1921) in which I arrived, the summer was particularly warm and dry.

            Surely no-one can now deny that we are in the midst of a period of world climatic change and fewer and fewer can possibly believe, as our MP does, that human activity has no responsibility for it.  Our ancestors would have been convinced that we had incurred the anger of God (or perhaps of ‘the gods’) and so perhaps, in a sense, we have.   If not God, then certainly Nature is reacting to our selfishness, greed and our profligate use of fossil fuels.

            I am only thankful that Clacton and the Tendring District generally have, as is often the case, escaped the flooding and devastation that has occurred elsewhere - and we have had more than our fair share of the occasional warmth and sunshine!

           

           

Week 25 2012 21.6.2012

Tendring Topics......on Line

 'Just good Friends!'

The Leveson enquiry rumbles on.   On Tuesday evening (12^th June), as I write this, we have just heard the report of Sir John Major’s appearance at the enquiry.  His evidence had the ring of truth and sincerity about it.  He recorded relevant events (and the result of offending the ruler of the Murdoch Empire) as he recalled them, without hesitation or prevarication.  He told us that for days after incurring the Murdoch displeasure, he had read in the press every day, things that he had not done and things that he had never said

            Let me now write a word or two in defence of Rupert Murdoch!   His statement, under oath, that he had never asked any Prime Minister to do anything, is said to have been contradicted by Sir John’s statement that he had wanted the government to change its policy toward Europe.  The two statements are surely not contradictory.  Mr Murdoch didn’t ask the Prime Minister to change his attitude towards Europe – he simply told him that unless the government changed its policy, the newspapers under his control would switch their support from his party to their opponents. The government didn’t change its policy – and the support of the Murdoch press did change from Conservative to New Labour.  Mr Murdoch keeps his promises. 

            No-one seems to have commented on the impertinence of a foreign media tycoon attempting to persuade a British Prime Minister to change British foreign policy. Imagine the outrage there would have been in Mr Murdoch’s flagship newspaper the Sun if such an attempt had been made by a Russian oligarch or an oil-rich Middle Eastern Sheikh rather than an American multimillionaire! 

            Everybody concerned goes to great lengths to deny that there had been any sort of conspiracy or agreement to grant favours to the Murdoch Empire in exchange for press support.  I don’t suppose for a moment that there has been.  All that happened was that Rupert Murdoch, his family and his senior managers went out of their way to make friends with our Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer and other leading members of the government.  It helped, of course, that Mrs Rebekah Brooks News Corporation’s Chief Executive and her husband, were actually neighbours of the Prime Minister.  He and his wife, together with other top politicians, were invited to a Christmas Party and to other social events. The Prime Minister was encouraged to practise his equestrian skills on Mrs Brooks’ horse – which turned out to be ‘on loan’ from the Metropolitan Police!  The Prime Minister and members of the Murdoch inner circle became good friends. That was all there was to it.  But, of course, one of the characteristics of good friends is the way in which (without having to be asked) they help each other in every way that they can. I don't imagine that media millionaires and top politicians have much difficulty in finding ways of demonstrating their loyal friendship.   ‘If you sup with the devil you need a long spoon’, says the proverb.  At neither 10, nor 11 Downing Street, nor at Chequers were any of the spoons nearly long enough!

14.6.12  The evidence given today by David Cameron to the Leveson Enquiry confirms the accuracy of my conjectures above – except that the friendship between the PM and Mrs Brooks was rather closer than I had imagined.

 What goes around, comes around

          It isn’t very often that I find myself in complete agreement with a pronouncement of a member of the government.   Whether, had I been a teacher and facing yet another change of official policy, I’d have felt exactly the same is doubtful.  However, as I am just a more-or-less disinterested by-stander I warm to the idea that children in primary schools should be taught more things ‘by rote’ and that teachers should pay more attention to grammar and spelling.  That’s how it was done in my day!

A class of 8/9 year olds in 1930 at the Ipswich primary school where I learned ‘my tables’. I am the anxious little boy with glasses at the headmaster’s right knee.

           

Arithmetic, the foundation stone of Mathematics, was never my best or favourite subject at school.  Yet to this day if someone says to me ‘what’s seven times eight’ or ‘nine times six?’ the answers (56 and 54 respectively) come unbidden to my tongue.  This facility comes from my chanting, over and over again, with a whole class of some 40 eight year olds, the ‘times tables’. It is an ability that has been useful on occasion. Even more importantly, chanting those tables provided a learning discipline – the realisation that before learning can become enjoyable, there is hard and boring work to be done in establishing its foundation.

            Similarly History (to choose a subject at which I was good and in which I am still interested) is often said to have been ‘in the bad old days’ (my schooldays!) just a case of learning by rote a list of dates and notable events.  There was a lot more to it than that.  The fact remains though that until you have at least a rough idea of the sequence of events in British and world history you can’t hope to see the way in which, over the centuries, one event has led to the next.  Unless you know that the Roman invaders, about 2,000 years ago were followed by the Anglo Saxons and the Vikings and, about 1,000 years ago, by the Normans, followed by the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance; the Protestant Reformation, Thomas Cranmer, Shakespeare, Milton, Christopher Wren, and Isaac Newton   (Oh yes and, really much less importantly, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Cromwell and so on) you’ll never understand how today’s political and economic world evolved – and is still evolving.  Once you have acquired – by rote, by constant repetition and by boring hard work – that skeleton of events, you can start putting the flesh on it and begin to enjoy reading history.

            Being encouraged to learn poetry ‘by heart’ (rather than by rote!) in my primary school years, gave me the ability to store in my head a very considerable collection of poetry, ranging from extracts from the King James Bible,  through some of of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the work of the great poets of the 18^th and 19^th Centuries, and more recent ones like Houseman, Belloc, Kipling and Betjeman, to modern less-than-prim-and-proper limericks.  This mental anthology has been a source of immense pleasure and satisfaction to me in the past and (though I may nowadays forget what happened yesterday – or an hour ago!) it remains in my memory and continues to give me pleasure and satisfaction today.

            I remember being told at school that although we had special English classes, every lesson was in fact an English lesson.  No matter how thoroughly a pupil may have mastered, for instance, a Chemical, Physical or Biological principle, that knowledge is incomplete unless it is accompanied by the ability to pass it on to someone else in clear and lucid English.  That means in grammatically correct and correctly spelled English prose, and legible handwriting.  In those days, that was what teachers and examiners demanded, not because they were fussy and pedantic, but because in later life it would be what other people including employers, would expect

       
           One proposed alteration to the curriculum that is definitely an improvement on that of my childhood and youth is compulsory introduction to a foreign language at primary school. I had no acquaintance whatsoever with a foreign language until I was introduced to French at the age of ten at my secondary school.  That, I think, was much too late.  I was taught French for six years and still only managed to scrape a ‘pass’ mark in the school leaving exam.  Where a school is really determined that its pupils will emerge from their education with a thorough command of a language (Welsh in all schools in the Principality and Hebrew in Jewish schools for instance) that language is taught from ‘infants’ level.  

            I wish the Education Secretary success with his proposed reforms.  It remains to be seen whether or not he’ll be able to introduce them without the firm discipline that was enforced in schools in my day*, and the then taken-for-granted co-operation and compliance of most parents.

*Take another look at that picture from my childhood. It’s clear that, especially in the presence of the headmaster, not one of us dared to step an inch out of line!

A timely reminder

            A timely reminder that it isn’t only the present Prime Minister and top members of the Conservative Party who stand accused of inappropriate fraternisation with Rupert Murdoch and his entourage, has come with the publication of an autobiographical record based on the diaries of Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s chief spin-doctor. This reveals the closeness of Tony Blair to Rupert Murdoch, ruler of News International, the international news media empire. 

            Mr Campbell reveals that in the week prior to Britain’s declaration of support for the American-led invasion of Iraq Rupert Murdoch phoned Tony Blair on three occasions to urge him to declare his support without delay.   How extraordinary that an American multimillionaire and newspaper tycoon, owing no loyalty whatsoever to our Queen and Country, should have immediate access to a British Prime Minister in order to exert influence on a matter of foreign policy!   This was the Prime Minister who allowed parliament to be deceived about Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’* and about the presence and influence of Al Qaeda in that country; the same Prime Minister who ignored the million British citizens who marched through London registering their strong opposition to the invasion of Iraq and the further millions who supported them

Perhaps we need an enquiry into the behaviour of top politicians quite as much as we needed an enquiry into the behaviour of the press!

*It should be noted that Alistair Campbell, whose autobiographical publication has revealed these phone calls, was himself complicit in the compilation of the ‘Dodgy Dossier’ on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction  that contributed to the deception of parliament and of many members of the public.

Those WMDs!

            Writing the above reminded me that it was several days – perhaps several weeks – before Iraq was invaded that I realized it was most unlikely that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction (even ‘battlefield’ ones) at his disposal, and equally unlikely that Tony Blair and George Bush were unaware of this.

            I am not a great admirer of either of those gentlemen. I can’t believe though that they were so stupid or so irresponsible as to order the inevitably rather slow build-up of invasion forces in Kuwait just across Iraq’s border, if they had thought there was the slightest possibility of their being destroyed when, just before the invasion was launched, Saddam Hussein ‘pressed the button’ and unleashed his Weapons of Mass Destruction upon them.

            It really didn’t take either ‘rocket science’ or secret sources of information to work that out!

           

                               

Week 24 2012 17.6.12

Tendring Topics......on Line

 ‘When will they ever learn*?

It isn’t very often that I find myself 'on the same side' as a feature writer in the Mail, but I have to admit reluctant agreement with at least some of the sentiments expressed by Peter Hitchins in the Mail on Sunday at Whitsun.

            ‘Why do William Hague and the BBC want to help Saudi Arabia set up a fanatical Islamist state in Syria?  Have we learned nothing from the failed hopes of Egypt and Libya?  Don’t we realise that the ‘activists’ we support are just as capable of conducting massacres as the pro-Assad militias.

            I had been shocked earlier when I had discovered that Saudi Arabia was among the most fervent supporters of Syria’s ‘freedom fighters’.   Surely we all know that, at least prior to the current uprising, Syria was an oasis of tolerance and liberalism compared with Saudi Arabia, with its subjugation of women, its medieval laws and punishments, and its total prohibition of any kind of religious worship other than its own extreme version of Islam.  Far from supporting ‘freedom fighters’, Saudi Arabia’s ruler had sent troops into neighbouring Bahrain to help the brutal efforts of the government there to suppress its own ‘Arab spring’ of rebellion.

            Had any other two countries been similarly involved in the suppression of popular rebellion, there would have been outrage in London and Washington. Both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain though, are not only sources of oil, they are also wealthy and reliable purchasers of armaments.   Plausible excuses can always be found for their excesses and their rulers welcomed as honoured guests when they deign to visit us.                             

Do you remember the high hopes when Saddam Hussein was overthrown in Iraq – and of their outcome?  Saddan Hussein was a cruel and ruthless dictator – but under his dictatorship Iraq was a united country in which terrorist groups like El Qaida scarcely had a foothold and in which there was a degree of religious freedom and tolerance unusual in the Middle East.  There was a thriving Christian community and well-attended Christian churches.  Our ‘victory’ (do you remember George Bush proclaiming it from the bridge of a US Aircraft Carrier?) has produced a divided country with a ruined infrastructure.  Kurds are seeking independence and Sunni and Shia Muslims are at each other’s throats. Christians are under constant attack and are emigrating as quickly as they are able to do so. There is a constant threat of terrorist bombs.

Then there was the Arab Spring first in Tunisia, then in Egypt and finally Libya.  It really seemed that parliamentary democracy would triumph, that these countries would throw off their ancient legacies of autocracy and embrace government of the people, for the people, and by the people.   I did, at the time, suggest in this blog that it was at least equally likely that a militantly Islamic government, comparable with that of the Taliban in Afghanistan, would emerge.  Currently the Egyptians have elected an Islamic parliament and are faced with the choice of an Islamic President or a representative, albeit a milder one, of the old regime.  My guess is that the Islamic candidate will win.  The moderate, liberal, secularist, and freedom-seeking Egyptians who had been the backbone of the Arab Spring have disappeared.  Their various factions had varying ultimate aims.  They were divided.  The Islamists and the Traditionalists had clear and understandable objectives and were united. It is they who have triumphed.

I am not surprised that the Coptic Christians, one of the oldest traditions of the Christian faith, established in Egypt long before the arrival of Islam, are full of foreboding.

As for Libya, where ‘the west’ played an active role, having secured a mandate from the United Nations on the dubious grounds of protecting civilians from  air strikes by the Libyan Government.  In Egypt there may have been some doubt, but in Libya we know perfectly well than among the ‘freedom fighters’ we have been supporting are terrorists trained in Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnia and  Pakistan.   At least some of them have proved themselves to be as competent as Colonel Gaddafi’s minions at torturing and murdering their captured and helpless opponents.

I have no idea when, or even if, a credible government will eventually emerge in Libya but I have little expectation or hope that it will be a freely elected, liberal and tolerant one.

Today (6^th June 2012) has been a bad one for Afghan civilians.  In Kandahar three Taliban suicide bombers have killed scores of civilians.  Elsewhere in that unhappy country, an American air strike (not for the first time) has accidentally managed to slaughter everyone at a wedding reception - collateral damage, innocent victims of our ‘war on terror’.  Can we wonder that ordinary Afghans hate us foreign infidels even more than most of them hate the Taliban?

History (the French Revolution of 1789, the Russian revolution of 1917, the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s) has shown that foreign intervention has the effect of increasing the bloodiness of civil conflict.   We should, I am quite sure, offer humanitarian aid where we can to alleviate the suffering of civilians on either side of the conflict, and mediate if and when asked to do so.  For God’s sake though (and I mean that reverently not blasphemously!) let us otherwise keep out of other people’s armed conflicts!

*’When will they ever learn?’ was the refrain of a popular protest song of the 1960s entitled ‘Where have all the flowers gone?

Secularism

         

          In the United Kingdom those of us who, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it, ‘­profess and call ourselves Christians’ have come to take it for granted that the greatest enemy of Christian faith and tradition in this country has been the apparently inexorable advance of secularism.  We no longer have a public holiday at Whitsun.  It has been replaced by a fixed-date secular late spring public holiday.  Christmas, the time at which we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, has been systematically secularised.   Happy Christmas! is being replaced on our greetings cards by Season’s Greetings or some such similarly meaningless phrase. Ask at a Post Office for the special stamps issued as Christmas draws near and you’ll be offered secular ones. However, as a rather patronising concession to a minority interest, there will be some ‘religious Christmas stamps’ kept ‘under the counter’ for those who specially ask for them! We are encouraged to speak of ‘the festive season’ or ‘the mid-winter holidays’ rather than of Christmas!   The most popular Christmas images are no longer a baby in a manger, a young mother lovingly holding her new-born child or wise men following a star, but of Santa Claus and his reindeer, holly and ivy, or young children playing in the snow.

            Easter has become a celebration of hot cross buns, cuddly bunnies, chocolate eggs and dancing daffodils, rather than of a suffering man on a cross and his glorious resurrection.

            We are encouraged to abandon referring to dates as BC (before Christ) or AD (Anno Domini or ‘Year of our Lord’) but as BCE (before Common Era) and CE (Common Era).  Determined secularists would like to see the abolition of prayers in schools or at public meetings and the departure from radio and tv of such popular religious programmes as Songs of Praise, Thought for the Day and Prayer for the Day.

            Yet, as an article in the Church Times reminded its readers a few weeks ago, while we in the UK deplore the advance of secularism, Christians in Egypt are fervently praying, probably in vain, that they may have a secular government in Cairo!

            I have listed above some of the things that proselytising secularisers have done and are doing.  It is only fair to add some of the things that even the most determined secularists, however misguided we may think them to be, don’t do.  They don’t throw bombs into religious gatherings or explode them fixed to themselves in public places, convinced that – if only they can take a few believers with them – they will be rewarded.   Nor do they persecute, ostracise, punish, or threaten to kill members of their families or communities who convert to one of the religious faiths available, or who marry into a believing family. 

            I am, of course, describing the activities of some Muslims. I know perfectly well that none of those things is compatible with ‘true Islam’ and that Jihad is really all about the struggle between good and evil within oneself.  A great many, probably a large majority, of Muslims in this country find the activities listed above as abhorrent as I do.  But some Muslims do believe they are an essential part of Islam and that jihad doesn’t mean an inner struggle but an outward war against the infidel.  When Britain and the USA covertly funded the ‘gallant mojihadin’ in Afghanistan, they hoped they would use our money to kill Russians, certainly not to conduct a struggle within themselves!  They are now realising that to the mojihadin, one lot of foreign infidels is much the same as another. 

            I am not selecting Muslims for condemnation.  Christians have been as bad, if not worse. I know that the Christian faith is one of love and compassion, of forgiveness and reconciliation.  In the 16^th century though, when Christians were torturing each other and burning each other alive in the name of Christ – who would have believed that?

            Similarly in the 17th and 18th centuries pious Puritans in New England as well as in Britain imprisoned, tortured and hanged unfortunate women denounced as witches. They would have quoted Biblical chapter and verse against any who protested.  ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ was, so they believed, the Word of the Lord.  Even today there are those who proclaim themselves to be fundamentalist or Bible Christians, who eagerly hunt through obscure passages in Leviticus or Deuteronomy to justify their fierce opposition to practices or attitudes with which they disagree

In their enthusiasm for the small print of the Old Testament they seem to have missed the words of Jesus Christ. He told us that the whole of the moral teaching of the Old Testament is encapsulated in just two simple commandments – Love God with all your being and love your neighbour as much as you love yourself.  Jesus clarified that second commandment by explaining that we should treat other people in exactly the same way as we would like them to treat us.  When he reminded his listeners that they should not attempt to pour new wine into old bottles or sew new cloth onto an old garment,  he was surely referring to the many rules and regulations  of the Old Testament

How strange that some Christians prefer to live by the multitudinous prohibitions and demands of the old dispensation rather than by the two straightforward and simple commands of the new!

 Like Egypt’s Coptic Christians, I would not wish to be ruled by an ostentatiously religious government, whether Muslim or Christian (no, not even Quaker!).  I am happier with a secular government, that may well include individual Christians or Muslims;  one that is tolerant of all religions whose followers are prepared to comply with the law of the land; a Government that is always prepared to listen to and take seriously the advice of religious leaders.  Its members, religious, agnostic and atheist, should act in accordance with the reason that God has given them and in the light of the dictates of their conscience, which, as a Quaker, I believe to be inspired and enlightened by the Inward Light of Christ,  God’s gift to every man, woman and child on this earth.

‘Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven’

            I am afraid that there has been nothing very cheering or uplifting in anything that I have so far written in this week's blog.  I thought therefore that I would end it with the latest picture of my ‘honorary German niece' Maja.   Isn’t she a truly beautiful child?  Although not yet six years old her eyes seem to be full of intelligence, love and trust.  It was surely such a child as this that Jesus set in the midst of his disciples and told them that this was the example they needed to follow if they wished to enter God's kingdom.

            Maja’s great grandfather was a lieutenant in the German Army in World War II.   He was killed on the Eastern Front at the same time that I and my comrades in the British Eighth Army and his compatriots in the German Afrikakorps were trying to kill each other in Libya.  My greatest hope for the .future is of lasting peace in Europe spreading throughout the world so that such circumstances may never arise again.  

           

         

   

Week 23 2012

Tendring Topics......on line

 ‘Time, like an ever-rolling stream..........'

            During the past few weeks two events have conspired to give me salutary reminders (as though I need them!) of my advancing years.

There was my ninety-first birthday on 18^th May.   Obviously it was never going to be as exciting as my ninetieth when the whole immediate family, eight of us altogether, travelled to Zittau to join my German friends in celebration.  I was very glad of that because I am increasingly conscious of the fact that I am a year older, a little feebler, a little less steady on my feet, a little more forgetful and a little more easily tired than I was then.  

We didn’t have a family photo this year but here we all are celebrating my 90^th Birthday in Zittau last year.  Younger son Andy isn’t in the picture – he was behind the camera

         

This year all the family, except grandson Chris in Taiwan, joined me for a celebratory meal and exchange of family news at The Bowling Green at Weeley. The following day Ingrid my longest standing German friend, who had been unable to be with us the previous year, came to see me with a friend.  We again lunched at The Bowling Green and came back for a chat to my home in Dudley Road afterwards.  I was pleased to learn that her family are all well and that her nephew and niece (my ‘honorary’ nephew and niece!) two year old Tom and his six year old sister Maja, are thriving.

     In addition I received 35 posted birthday cards plus email and text greetings from friends and relatives in England and Germany (and one in Australia!). 

With Ingrid on 20^th May – I think I look very tired (which I was!)             

 Then, of course, another reminder of my age came with the Queen’s Jubilee and the realisation that, despite the fact that she has been our Queen for sixty years, I have actually seen the reign of no less than three other British monarchs!  During my childhood there was George V.   He seemed very grand, very distant and very worthy, deserving our respect and loyalty but hardly our affection.  That was until, years later, I learned what are said to have been his last words (no, not the official ones – I never did believe that he said How goes the Empire?)  before dying. When I learned what he really said I realized that he had been very human and ‘one of us’, after all.

  His successor Edward VIII had a very short reign.  He abdicated to marry twice-divorced American socialite Mrs Wallis Simpson. The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Cosmo Lang and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin were strongly criticised at the time for forcing the abdication. I really think that they were right though.  It had been difficult to imagine a Queen Wallis! Quite apart from her earlier broken marriages she had been much too friendly with some of Germany’s top Nazis. Not everyone took the situation desperately seriously and there was a lot of back-street humour at the situation.  One printable witticism was, ‘He could have been Admiral of the Fleet but chose to be third mate to a Yankee drifter.’

            I was in the fifth form of Ipswich’s Northgate School for Boys at the time of the abdication crisis.  In Ipswich we had something of a grandstand view of the crisis as the divorce making the royal marriage legally (if not ecclesiastically) possible was granted in an Ipswich Court. After the abdication, we fifth formers were given a couple of hours off school and encouraged to cycle down to Ipswich’s Cornhill to hear the proclamation of the accession of the new king – George VI – publicly made by the Mayor on the steps of the Town Hall.

            When, over two years later, I volunteered for the Territorial Army it was to King George VI ‘and all his lawful heirs and successors’ that I swore my allegiance and loyalty.  I have known quite a few avowed republicans in my time but have never heard a word of personal criticism either of King George or of his consort the Queen Elizabeth.  She is best remembered today as the indomitable Queen Mother with a passion for race horses and salmon fishing.   People of my generation  remember when she and the king were a youngish middle-aged couple with two endearing little girls, the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose. They stayed in London throughout the blitz, though they could have easily gone to Canada for safety.  Viewers of ‘The King’s Speech’ will know of the struggle the King had with his speech impediment.  I heard on ‘the wireless’ (that’s what we called the radio in those days!) the speech – the climax of the film – that the King made on the outbreak of World War II, and remember thinking that the King’s impediment was not nearly as bad as the popular press had suggested.  I now realize what an ordeal making that speech must have been.

            I remember being told of King George VI’s death.  I was Housing Manager to Gipping Rural District in Suffolk at the time and someone told me the news as I visited a Council House in the village of Haughley.  It came as a complete surprise.  I hadn’t even known that he was ill.  I think that it must have come as a surprise to our top politicians and to members of the Royal family as well.  Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip would surely never have embarked on a Commonwealth tour had they imagined for a moment that the King’s death was imminent.

            The accession of our new young Queen in 1952 was hailed as the beginning of a New Elizabethan Age in which our country would recapture some of the splendour of the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth.  It hasn’t worked out quite like that.  Few of us then could have imagined that during the course of the next 60 years we would see the systematic denigration and dismantling of the Welfare State  created by the generation that had won World War II; that in the first decade of the new millennium a spectacular failure of the capitalist free market economy world-wide had meant that Britain’s public services, of which we had been so proud, would be run down, that all of us (except the very rich) would be facing years of hardship; that more young British lives would have been lost and were still being lost in warfare, and that in the  Diamond Jubilee year the gap between rich and poor would have become wider than it had ever been.

            Don’t blame the Queen – blame the politicians and the financiers!  The Queen too has had cause for sadness.  Those sixty years have seen the Empire disappear and the Commonwealth shrink.  She has seen one of her most historic homes – Windsor Castle – threatened with destruction by fire.  She has seen the first marriages of three of her four children end in divorce.  She has said farewell to her Royal Yacht.  Yet she has remained apparently serene, a worthy representative of all her people.  She is just four years younger than I am and I have seen her, in the press and on tv, develop from engaging child to outwardly imperturbable matriarch.  My late wife and I appreciated the card of congratulation that was sent us on her behalf on the occasion of our own Diamond Wedding Anniversary six years ago. 

Heather and I, with our extended family, celebrating our Diamond Wedding Anniversary in Clacton's Quaker Meeting House in April 2006.  Three months after that happy event, Heather’s life came to an end.     

I offer her every good wish, and hope that her lawful heirs and successors, to whom I swore allegiance and loyalty in 1939, profit from her example.  I have been asked how I reconcile my belief that a constitutional monarchy is best for our country with my fervent desire that our country should become a more ‘equal’ society.  There really is no contradiction.  Norway, Sweden and Denmark are all constitutional monarchies.   The USA is a republic.  Yet, I don’t think that anyone would question the assertion that the USA is a far less equal society than every one of those three Scandinavian countries.  In the British Utopia of which I sometimes dream, the principal source of government revenue would be the Citizenship Tax, levied proportionately as the first charge, without exception, on the income of every single citizen, from the wealthiest and most powerful to the very poorest.  The monarch and members of his or her family would be subject to that tax in the same way as the humblest citizen. That, I think, would level off society far more effectively than toppling the monarchy and replacing our hereditary ‘head of state’ with an elected president.

            May God save the Queen and, as the never-used-nowadays second verse of the National Anthem puts it in its final line, may God save us all!’

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…….’

            That’s how, in the silent movies of my childhood, the scene shifted from the menfolk gallantly combating marauding rustlers or Indian warbands, to the ranch-house where the dastardly villain (you could tell him by his twirly moustache and –‘city slicker’ clothes) was threatening the virtue of the rancher’s beautiful daughter.

            At the end of May 2012, as Britain prepared for a four-day Jubilee holiday weekend, life was going on, in Europe, in the Middle East, in Afghanistan – and at the Leveson Enquiry.

            Tony Blair, not one of my favourite people, was disarmingly honest when he explained that politicians simply couldn’t afford to get on the wrong side of powerful press magnates.  That’s why he had pursued Rupert Murdoch half-way across the world to get into his good books.  No, of course there was no kind of formal agreement between himself and the American (formerly Australian) multi-millionaire.  There didn’t need to be.  Mr Blair was well aware of Murdoch’s policy preferences.

            If there is one thing that is worse than a government-controlled press, it’s a press-controlled government!

            The theme continued with the long awaited appearance before the enquiry of Jeremy Hunt, Culture Minister, who had been given the responsibility of deciding whether or not News International (the Murdoch media empire) should have total control of BSkyB tv.  Mr Hunt explained that he had held, and did hold, a personal view favouring News International’s case but, in the quasi-judicial role to which he had been appointed, he had put his personal views on one side and had acted strictly ‘according to the book’.  He had done nothing wrong.  Why on earth should he resign? 

            I am quite sure that he had done nothing wrong.  He had consulted all the right people and had been able to put affirming ticks in all the right boxes.  When the time came he would be in a position to make his own quasi-judicial decision – and who could possibly doubt what that decision would have been? However Mr Murdoch, evidently more shaken by the phone hacking and police bribing scandal than Mr Hunt had been, withdrew his application for full control of BSkyB.  Mr Hunt, who had done nothing wrong, was off the quasi-judicial hook.

            Prime Minister David Cameron is to appear before Lord Leveson in the near future.  I look forward to hearing his explanation of his sacking Vince Cable from the post of adjudicator for having been tricked into declaring his personal opposition to the BSkyB takeover, and on the same day, appointing Jeremy Hunt, who had equally emphatically declared his support for the takeover, to the same post.  Email evidence suggests that Chancellor George Osborne had also been involved in those decisions. Those two posh boys who don’t know the price of milk (both of whom had close contacts with the Murdoch Empire) had been at it again!

           

           

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