Week No 39 2012

Tendring Topics.....on line

‘What goes around, comes around!’

 Michael Gove’s idea of an English Baccalaureate having English, Maths and a Science as compulsory subjects, with assessment of pupils dependent upon an examination taken at the end of the years of secondary education, without ‘modules’ and without course-work being taken into consideration, has been condemned by some of its opponents as ‘going back to the ‘80s’.   I would have been inclined to say that it was going back fifty years earlier than that, to the 1930s and would have been inclined to add, ‘and is none the worse for that!’

            I can see little, if any, difference between Mr Gove’s proposals and the examination that I took in 1937 at the age of sixteen, before leaving school at the end of my secondary education   Our exam was not called a Baccalaureate (though I remember our French master telling us that that was the name of the equivalent exam taken by school leavers in France) but the London University General Schools’ Certificate examination.  To gain that certificate we had to study and pass an exam in at least five subjects which had to include English (grammar and literature), Mathematics (arithmetic, algebra, geometry and trigonometry) a Foreign Language and a Science.   I think that most of us took six subjects – the only Foreign Language taught at my school was French, and my other subjects were History, Geography and General Physics.  The last of these was reckoned to be the scientific ‘soft option’ as it was guaranteed to be about scientific principles only and to have no mathematical questions! 

The pass mark was 40 percent.  Those who achieved this mark in the four compulsory subjects plus one other, passed the exam and gained the certificate.  Failure in any one of those subjects meant failure in the whole exam.   Those who gained at least 50 percent marks in the compulsory subjects and one other subject, were awarded ‘Matriculation Exemption’.  Matriculation was the admission examination to London University.   We all aimed at ‘the Matric’ (and that’s what the exam was often called) and I was successful.  Very few of us though even considered the possibility of going to London or any other University.  In those days Universities were not for ‘the likes of us’ working class kids.

            Possession of that General Schools Certificate, especially with the added ‘Matric Exemption’ was the key to a ‘white collar’ job and perhaps the first step towards qualifying for a minor profession.  I would certainly not have been appointed to my first job as Junior Clerk/Student Sanitary Inspector (nowadays they’re called Environmental Health Officers) with Ipswich Council’s Public Health Department without it.  My school studies had been tilted away from the sciences, but my very creditable pass in ‘General Physics’ helped me secure that job and, many, many years later the basic knowledge of science that I had acquired at school certainly helped me to write half a dozen commercially successful books on domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage!

            There are two myths (at least!) about Michael Gove’s proposals that need to be exploded.  The first was one that I heard put forward by a representative of the NUT on tv this (18^th September) morning.  This was that children, having had no previous experience of exams, would be suddenly faced with a vital life-changing one at the age of sixteen.   That simply wasn’t true in the ‘30s and doesn't have to be true today. At the end of every term at my secondary school we had written examinations taken under ‘exam conditions’ in every subject that we had studied. The results of these exams were included in an end-of-term report to our parents.  They also received a half-term report usually based on informal tests to which we had been subjected.  That surely was true ‘continuous assessment’ – and not just the teacher’s opinion.

            At the end of the term prior to taking the General Schools’ Certificate exam we had a ‘mock exam’, usually consisting of questions from previous General Schools’ exams.  From this, pupils, parents and teachers could get a good idea of the likely results in the real examination a couple of months later.

            The second myth is that children would swot away during the months, days, hours, before the final exam and would fill their heads with material that would disappear from their memories within days!

The Stour at Bridge Cottage, Flatford Mill, in the heart of the ‘Constable country’, where we exam candidates relaxed on the day before our exam ordeal began.  Under the wooden foot-bridge can be seen two of the skiffs that our school hired for the day. Bridge cottage once belonged to painter John Constable's father.         

That certainly didn’t happen in my school, the Northgate Secondary School for Boys in Ipswich.  Quite apart from the continuous assessment from end-of-term examinations, our Headmaster (Mr Alfred Morris) had a very strong dislike of ‘last minute swotting’.  He established a tradition that on the day before sitting for the first session of the General Schools’ Certificate exam all candidates would cycle (we all rode bicycles in those days!) from Ipswich to Flatford Mill where we would spend the day boating on the Stour, finally rowing up river to Dedham where we would enjoy a communal tea in one of the restaurants there.  We each took our own packed lunch but the school paid for the hire of the skiffs and for the tea!  Many of us took the exam next day with aching backs and blistered hands but, for all that, the results were usually pretty creditable.

A criticism of Michael Gove’s proposal is that there’s nothing in it for academic ‘low achievers’.   They, so it is said, are set up for failure.   Perhaps so – but if the exam were to be in carpentry or practical electrics, or in any other activity requiring manual dexterity I, and many others like me, would also be set up for failure.  At school my total uselessness at every outdoor game and sport (except swimming) also set me up for failure – and derision! Don’t blame education. Blame a social and economic system that generally rewards ‘white collar activities’ (particularly in the field of finance) much more generously than even the most highly skilled manual work.

I found my secondary education and its culminating examination of great value to me in later life.  My two sons, educated in the ‘60s in the days of ‘O’ levels found the same.  No regular reader of this blog is likely to accuse me of being an uncritical admirer of the present government.  The words mendacious incompetents spring to mind! Nor do I share Mr Gove's enthusiasm for 'academies' and 'free  schools' - free that is from local democratic control, but firmly under the thumb of central government. He who pays the piper calls the tune!'

 I do think though that there is merit in Michael Gove’s plans for secondary education, even if they are nearly eighty years old!   It is strange to find myself on the same side as the Mail, the Sun and the Telegraph rather than the Independent and the Guardian, but there it is.  I remember Polonius’ advice to his son Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet:  ‘This above all, to thine own self be true’. It is advice that I do try to follow.

Policing the Police!

          Overseeing the operation of Britain’s Police Forces at the present moment are Police Committees, thoroughly undemocratic bodies that appear to be answerable to no-one but themselves. They need to be reformed, and since Police Force boundaries generally coincide with those of a local authority (either county or borough council) an obvious solution might have been to hand over their functions to the appropriate local authority.   That however is not the path that the Government has chosen.   They intend to have each Police Force under the wing of a single directly elected Commissioner – to be elected by us on 15^th November of this year!

           These Commissioners, says the government’s official web site, will aim to cut crime and deliver an effective and efficient police service within the force area. They will do this by:

·                            holding the chief constable to account for the delivery of the force

·                            setting and updating a police and crime plan

·                            setting the force budget and precept

·                            regularly engaging with the public and communities

·                            appointing, and where necessary dismissing, the chief constable

It will not be for the PCC to tell the professionals how to do their job - the legislation continues to protect the operational independence of the police by making it clear that the chief constables retain direction and control of the forces officers and staff. The operations of the police will not be politicised; who is arrested and how investigations work will not become political decisions.

            Do you fancy the job?  There’s no mention of the salary on the web site but I reckon it’ll be well worth having!  You’re not eligible if you have ever been convicted of an imprisonable offence, if you are a civil servant or are employed by a local authority in the Police Authority area (for Tendring District residents that means within the county of Essex).  Otherwise the field is open  to any registered voter in that area except that you’ll need to find another 100 registered voters to nominate you and you’ll have to hand over a deposit of £5,000 that will be forfeited if you don’t attract at least 5% of the votes cast.   Candidates may be independent or the nominees of a political party.

            There are currently six prospective candidates for our Essex area, three male and two female, three the nominees of political parties – Conservative, Labour and English Democrat, and three Independents.   Nominations cannot be made before 8^th October or after 19^th October.

            I shall undoubtedly vote, though I’ll need to know a lot more about each candidate before deciding to whom my vote will go. It is unlikely that it will be for one of the party nominees.  I would have preferred the Commissioner to have been advised by a directly elected committee but, since this isn’t going to happen, I shall want him or her to be truly independent; without, for instance, being subject to this kind of pressure: ‘Of course it’s your decision to make, no question about it, but - if you hope to retain Party support when it comes to re-election - you’ll………….

            This November election has a feature that some may find surprising.  You remember that referendum we had last year that firmly rejected the idea of listing parliamentary candidates in order of preference, in favour of ‘one man, one vote’ and ‘first past the winning post wins’?   Well, voting for our Police and Crime Commissioner won’t be on a ‘first past the post’ basis. We are to be invited to indicate our first and second choices, the second choice to be taken into account if the winner doesn’t get an overall majority; much the same, in fact, as the system for which I voted in that referendum but that was decisively rejected by a comfortable majority!

Tendring Topics......on Line

‘Securicor’ to G4S

            In the distant days of the late 1940s, World War II was an all-too-recent memory. My wife and I had married in 1946 and  had not yet started our family. Tony Blair was unborn and New Labour undreamt of.  In politics Left was Left and Right was Right, and Kingsley Martin was Editor of The New Statesman, the leading journal of the ‘intellectual left’.  I was one of its avid readers, on one occasion winning first prize (I think it was all of £5!) in the weekly literary competition.  It was a proud moment.

            The content of one article that I read in the NS at that time has stuck in my memory.  It warned of the danger of private armies growing, competing with, and possibly supplanting, the country’s armed forces and police forces,  ‘Securicor’ was mentioned, a firm of which, at that time, I had never heard.

            I wonder what the author of that article would have said had anyone told him that some sixty years later, Securicor (then providing uniformed protection for cash transfers from banks and similar security operations) would have evolved into G4S an enormous international organisation with its base in Britain but its tentacles world-wide.

              Most people in Britain today probably know of G4S only as the private security firm that signally failed to fulfil a £300 million contact with the government (that actually means with us, the tax payers!) to provide security cover for the London Olympics. They admitted their inability to honour their promises when it was too late to set things right except by dragging soldiers, on leave and war-weary from Afghanistan, and police officers from off their beats, to take their place.   They then had the nerve to demand a £57 million  management fee!

            That is what everybody knows.  What I have learned quite recently, largely from an article by Clare Sambrook in the Friend, a Quaker weekly journal (though I have since confirmed the accuracy of its content on the internet), is that G4S is an international organisation based in the UK now employing 657,000 people in 125 countries!

 ‘Company employees protect oil, gas and mining companies all over the world.   They have served the Israeli prisons service and businesses in the Occupied Territories. For G4S the Arab Spring’s popular uprisings seemed more about business opportunity than democracy.  Last year their executives told shareholders that civil unrest had sparked a rising demand for private security services. In Egypt and Bahrain G4S gained visibility among government heads of security and built the brand.  In Saudi Arabia the company’s support for the regime during popular protests earned local staff, by royal decree, a two-month bonus’.

Clare Sambrook writes that here in the UK, where G4S is based, the company is a leading beneficiary of outsourcing – the transfer of government functions and service provision to the private sector.  Its success is helped by an ability to nurture cosy relationships with ministers and civil servants.  In this year alone G4S will receive more than £1 billion in long-term contracts with the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Department of Work and Pensions and local Police Authorities!

In Britain G4S activities include building and managing prisons, running children’s homes, monitoring tagged offenders, training magistrates and reclassifying benefits claimants.  Lincolnshire is the scene of one of G4S’ most comprehensive outsourcing triumphs.  In that county, they are managing custody suites for the police, dealing with both routine and emergency phone calls and are in charge of firearms licensing and court protection.  They have been commissioned to build and run Britain’s first for-profit police station and they stamp their corporate logo on police staff uniforms!

Simon Reed, vice-chairman of the Police Federation says of ‘out-sourcing’ what I have said over and over again in this blog:  The bottom line is that the priority for private companies will always be shareholders and profit margins.   That is why we have voiced real concerns about the future negative impact of public safety if the government’s drive to privatise mass swathes of policing comes into fruition………..it is very clear that these private contracts are built upon an expectation that the public sector will step in to pick up the pieces if private industry fails to deliver.

When that prophetic New Statesman journalist in the late 1940s warned about Securicor and similar organisations ultimately rivalling and coming into conflict with the police he could hardly have imagined that nearly seventy years later Securicor’s successor would be slowly taking over not only the police but large amounts of Britain’s other vital public services.  Nor that they would be doing so with the connivance of a government blinded by its obsession that private enterprise is always better than public service – a proposition that has been demonstrated time and time again to be untrue.

The Olympic Legacy

          The United Kingdom’s summer of almost unbelievable sporting success is over.  It began with the winning by a British cyclist (for the first time ever) of the Tour de France!   Hot on its heels came the Olympics, which began with an opening ceremony that was acclaimed world-wide, and continued with day after day of successful and extremely watchable, athletic and sporting events from which Great Britain harvested an unprecedented crop of medals.  Although we came third in the ‘medals table’, if we take populations of the leading countries into consideration, we were ahead of both the USA and China!

A vey special Paralympian.  Unable to use his legs from birth, David Weir MBE, has won a total of six gold medals at the Paralympics of 2008 and 2012 and has also won the London Marathon on six occasions! This was surely a triumph of courage and determination over adversity that is an example to us all. David Weir won for Great Britain the very last gold medal for the very last event of the 2012 Olympics

           

The Paralympics that followed were, in their own way, even more successful.  They too had a universally acclaimed opening ceremony.   They were, I believe, watched much more widely than ever before and the spectators’ seats in the Olympics Park and at the other venues were full day after day.  It was perhaps unfortunate that they were available for viewers only on Channel 4 television, where viewers had to endure regular ‘commercial breaks’ for adverts!   Those on the spot cheered with enthusiasm athletes who ran, jumped, swam, rode or manoeuvred their wheelchairs, with disabilities that would have anchored most of the rest of us to our armchairs, if not our beds.

            And then, when it was all over, there was that wonderful ‘Victory Parade’ through the streets of central London before a million cheering spectators.  Among that multitude were my elder son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene who found a vantage point in Trafalgar Square from which they managed to get ‘close-ups’ of some of the athletes we had been cheering on during the games.

            Even that wasn’t quite the end.   As a postprandial treat after a very satisfying meal, we had Andy Murray, who had already achieved a gold medal in the games, win the American Open Tennis Championship – the first Brit to have done so since I was a schoolboy (and that was a long time ago!)   What a wonderful few weeks – even the weather cheered up and smiled on the athletes!  

And after the Games were over?   The example of the athletes and of all those who had striven to make them a success (in particular perhaps the thousands of volunteers who, without hope of either financial reward or Olympic glory, had welcomed visitors, directed, helped and supported them) was supposed to instil us with patriotism, an enthusiasm for personal participation in sports and games, and a new respect for and appreciation of our disabled fellow-citizens.

I think that it has inspired a sense of national pride that revelled in the prowess of our own athletes, but honoured and applauded too the successes of those from other lands.  It was wonderful to see those thousands of red, white and blue flags displayed by Brits of all skin colours and ethnic origin.  They demonstrated that our national flag is not, as it has sometimes seemed in the past, the exclusive property of the White Anglo-Saxon far right!  Perhaps an enthusiasm to follow those Olympians’ example will emerge in due course, but I have seen little evidence of increased respect and understanding of the disabled.  I was shocked to read a headline on one national newspaper announcing that there had actually been an increase in the number of ‘hate crime’ attacks on disabled people.

The government isn’t setting a very good example. They want to encourage public participation in outdoor sports and games – yet all over the country government cuts are doing the reverse.  Cash-strapped local authorities are closing public swimming pools and fitness centres and removing tennis courts from municipal parks and recreation grounds. In Colchester OTT (Opportunities through Technology) is a thoroughly worth-while charity that through the use of technology, helps disabled people to lead independent lives and to find work.   The Gazette records that, ‘as well as finding equipment suitable for each individual’s disability such as specially designed keyboards or computer programmes that read text for blind people, the charity’s technical team have also developed new kit to meet users’ varying physical needs’. All this threatens to end before Christmas unless OTT can find funding to replace the grant of £25,000 a year that has been withdrawn as a result of government cuts.

Then, of course, the government is ending the Disability Living Allowance that enables many disabled people to survive.  Existing recipients of this allowance will be re-assessed (by a foreign corporation to whom the task has been ‘outsourced’!) and may or may not become entitled to a new PIP (Personal Independence Payment).  Small wonder that when Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne had the temerity to visit the Paralympics he was greeted with boos and derision!   

As my son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene followed the Olympics from start to finish and supplied the photographic illustrations to this blog, perhaps Pete should have the last word:

                It occurred to me that we have witnessed talented MPs /ex MPs from both sides of the Commons working together to put on a really excellent show for the whole world, and now we come back to earth and have to witness incompetent amateurs fighting it out for the right to wreck the Economy. I would put Seb Coe and Tessa Jowell in charge of the economy rather than have them bother with the “Legacy”!

Tendring Topics.......on Line

Welcome Northumberlandia!

          Where seams of coal – or other valuable natural material – are close to the earth’s surface, opencast mining provides an inexpensive and relatively safe way of extracting it.  It does leave a ruined landscape though – an enormous hole in the ground and tons and tons of rock, clay and soil ‘spoil’.   There are various ways of dealing with this problem.   Who, for instance, would guess that the delightful lake, venue of every kind of water sport that, on a recent visit, I could see from my bedroom window in the Haus am See Hotel in Olbersdorf in eastern Germany, was once an opencast lignite (‘brown coal’) mine?

            Rather nearer home American landscape architect Charles Jencks has found an even more imaginative way of dealing with the aftermath of opencast mining in Northumberland.  From 1.5 million tons of rock and clay spoil from a local mine he has created the enormous reclining figure of a woman (Northumberlandia!) as the centrepiece of an attractive country park.   The figure is 1,300 ft. long and 112 ft. high at its highest point. The recumbent figure is encircled by carefully planned and sited footpaths. 

She is naked but not, I think, in a way that will cause offence.  She is surely much more attractive than the male figures cut into the chalk hills of the southern shires. Northumberlandia  certainly complements that other iconic local figure, the well-loved Angel of the North.  I am not at all sure, mind you, that this newly arrived curvaceous and very earthy lady is an appropriate companion for an angel.  Perhaps it is just as well that they are a few miles apart and strictly immobile!     Last week, she was officially declared ‘open to the public' by the Princess Royal.  I hope that she, and the country park of which she is the central feature, will attract many visitors.

            My only criticism is of her name.  Northumberlandia surely is a bit of a mouthful for northerners and southerners alike.  I have no doubt that local people will soon think of an appropriate and less long-winded title.  My own suggestion would be Geordina, as a tribute to the nickname by which her fellow northern English are happy to be known?

Some Modern Myths

          A disillusioned blog reader has written to me expressing his disgust at the fact that the then Housing and Local Government Minister Grant Shapps had said in the course of a newspaper interview that Social Housing should be renamed Tax Funded Housing.   He hoped presumably to arouse the resentment of other tax payers. My correspondent points out that Mr Shapps is himself a Tax Funded Minister and that he and all his parliamentary colleagues are tax funded MPs!   Perhaps we should be grateful that the former Minister for Housing and Local Government has been ‘promoted’ (is his new job really more important?) to that of joint Chairman of the Conservative Party.

            The idea that folk in social housing are uniquely supported out of taxation is just one of the modern myths that divide our society.  There is, for instance, a general belief that those in Social Housing are work-shy drop-outs living off the State.  I know from my own experience (and am assured that the situation hasn’t changed materially in that respect) that most tenants either do have a job that pays only the minimum wage or little more, or are pensioners with no capital and no occupational pension.

            There is a similar myth that housing benefit, helping tenants in the private sector, is just for the unemployed.   In fact, a great many claimants are hard working people whose salary is just too low to pay an exorbitant rent, or folk who have retired after having been a shop assistant or something similar all their lives, and who are now surviving on a state pension.

            Finally there is the particularly noxious belief encouraged by the government that all public service workers (including doctors, nurses and ancillary health workers and therapists, fire fighters, teachers, the police and so on) are ‘a drain on the economy, funded by the‘productive’ part of society the ‘private` sector. This, of course includes moneylenders, those involved with the betting ‘industry’, proprietors and employees of escort agencies and massage parlours, beauty and make-up artists.

            My correspondent speculates on how different the world would look if we were all rewarded in accordance with the contribution that we make to society.  Heading the list would be those who produce the food that we eat, the buildings that we live and work in and the clothes that we wear - agricultural workers, builders and factory workers making items that everybody needs. Somewhere in the middle would be those who provide the services that those essential workers and all the rest of us need (most of today’s public services).  Right at the very end would come the makers and vendors of luxury goods, of  designer clothing and of junk food and drinks, together with money lenders, gamblers and those who currently make a fortune by moving money from one account to another - just about a total reversal of the present position in fact!

             That certainly would be the day - and I had thought that some of my ideas were pretty utopian!

This year?..........next year?........sometime?.............    

            When the Tendring District Council introduced its controversial refuse collection/recycling scheme earlier this year there was a storm of angry protest from local householders.   One of the more justified complaints was that in at least one respect, less material was being recycled under the new scheme than had been under the old one.

Those of us who had co-operated with the council’s recycling efforts (there has always been a substantial minority who didn’t!) had put out our green boxes every week with paper and cardboard waste, metal cans of all descriptions and most plastics – including, for instance, plastic bags, yoghurt and margarine containers and other plastic food containers, as well as plastic milk bottles and other plastic bottles used for cleaning fluids and so on, together with our black plastic bag filed with unrecyclable refuse for landfil..   

With the new system was introduced we were all issued with a red box into which we put our waste paper and cardboard to be collected on alternate weeks.  The existing green box was to be used for plastic milk bottles and other plastic bottles only, and was to be put out for collection on the other alternate weeks.  The weekly collection of our non-recyclable rubbish continued under the new system, but we were asked also to put out every week a new locked-lid container with waste food.   Plastic bags and plastic containers other than bottles, which had previously been collected for recycling, now had to go into the black plastic bags for landfill.   These plastic items comprised a considerable proportion of many householders’ refuse.  Failure to collect them for recycling seemed to nullify the whole purpose of the new scheme.

Enquirers at the Council’s offices were told that the Council was aware of this problem and intended to solve it.  In the future there would be a comprehensive collection of plastics.  No date was ever given or suggested but enquirers undoubtedly hoped that this would take place within months, rather than years.

We now know that it won’t!   Tendring Council’s hopes of expanding the present system rest on a new recycling sorting centre to be opened in Basildon.   It will, says the Clacton Gazette recover recyclable materials such as metal, plastic and glass. Work on the new sorting centre hasn’t yet started, but the County Council hopes that it will start sometime in 2013 and will be completed by 2015, still three years away!   It isn’t even quite certain yet that the centre will be started or that, if it is ever in action, it will take plastics not covered by the present scheme.  Tendring’s ‘Cabinet Member for the Environment’, Councillor Nick Turner, is reported as saying, ‘We don’t know the fine details yet, but as far as we are led to believe, we will be able to collect more plastics’.  Oh yes, and the final paragraph of the Gazette’s report tells us that the sorting centre site 'is currently waiting for planning permission!’  This year?...........next year?.........sometime?........never?

‘Lies, damned lies – and statistics!’

In tv interviews I have heard economics expert after economic expert express surprise at the fact that although Britain’s economy is undoubtedly in a double dip recession with no signs of an early recovery, unemployment figures haven’t been rising as one would have expected.  They have either remained static or have fallen slightly.

A study by Sheffield Hallam University led by Professor Steve Fothergill and welcomed by Tendring Council leader Neil Stock suggests that the reason could be that the state of our economy is established by an independent body and is beyond dispute, while the unemployment statistics are based on data selected by the government.   The study finds that unemployment in seaside towns in the south of England is much worse than official figures suggest.  In our own Tendring District of north-east Essex, for example, the government figure for unemployment is 4.2 percent.  The study suggests that the true figure is 9.6 percent, more than twice as high as the official figure, with almost one in ten people out of work.

One explanation of the discrepancy is that since the 1980s successive governments have hidden the real unemployment figures by moving unemployed people onto sickness and incapacity benefit. Now this process is being reversed but there is still a long way to go.  Another factor is the number of unemployed people disqualified from claiming Job Seekers Allowance because they have savings or because they have a partner who is working.

I certainly remember in the 1980s a friend of mine, in his early sixties, who was told that he could draw his retirement pension early if he undertook not to look for work.  Sixty-five year old Peter Bloomfield of Enfield, interviewed by a Gazette reporter, confirmed that this practice of the Thatcher years continued into the Blair governments of the 1990s.  ‘When I was unemployed in the 1990s, they put me onto incapacity benefit, even though I was only unemployed.  I was told that because of my age I wouldn’t find work’.

In conclusion Professor Fothergill makes a point that I have made over and over again in this blog.  ‘Our figures cast serious doubt on the likely impact of  government initiatives such as the Work Programme and Universal Credit, which are founded on the assumption that unemployment can be brought down simply by encouraging the unemployed to look for work.  There has to be jobs for people to go to.

           

           

            

Week 36 2012

Tendring Topics......on Line

‘Underneath the Street Lamp…….’

          Last week in this blog I wrote of how a recent photograph of a Red Cross Parcel had brought back memories of my life long ago.  These were reinforced a few days later by a tv interview with Vera Lynne, several years older than me but still very active and living quite near those ‘white cliffs of Dover’ over which her metaphorical bluebirds can now fly freely! No-one, ex-service or civilian, who lived through World War II can ever forget her melodious voice on the radio assuring us all that ‘We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day’ and that some day we and our girl-friends would again be, ‘Arm in arm together, just like we used to be.  Arm in arm with you sweetheart meant all the world to me’.

            I was reminded of another song of World War II that is not primarily associated with Vera Lynne (though she did sing an English paraphrase of it to its by-then-familiar tune)  It is the one song that became popular with the rank and file of the opposing armies.  Originally a German song, loved by the Afrikakorps and broadcast over the German forces radio in occupied Belgrade, it was first ‘captured’ by the British 8^th Army in the North African desert.  I understand that it was equally popular on the Eastern Front and that there was a Russian as well as an English version!

            It was Lili Marlene (the Germans spell her surname Marleen) derived from a poem entitled The Song of the Lonely Sentry’ written  in World War I, about a young woman who stood under the street-light by the gate of the barracks, waiting for her boy-friend to emerge. It did not have a happy ending. Her boy-friend, a young soldier, kissed her ‘beloved mouth’ in his dreams and vowed that when the cold mist of death overtook him he would return to that street-light ‘Wie einst Lili Marleen, Wie einst Lili Marleen’ (‘where once was Lili Marlene, where once was Lili Marlene’).

            It was a universal theme among soldiers of every nation on active service.  We all knew that some of us would never go home to our wives or girlfriends.  Out of my own artillery regiment of some 700 to 800 men, mostly volunteers still in their early twenties, 100 never returned. Needless to say it was not a message that the Nazi authorities wanted spread.  Goebbels tried to ban the song but General Irwin Rommel commander of the Deutsch Afrikakorps, then a popular hero, liked it and his will prevailed.   Its singer though, Lale Andersen, Vera Lynne’s German opposite number, was regarded with suspicion and forbidden to sing her most popular song on the radio.  She remained out of the limelight for the latter part of World War II.

            Browsing the internet with the aid of Google I was astonished to come across a statue of Lili Marlene, standing beneath a street lamp, on the German North Sea Island of Langegoog (according to Google it means ‘Long Island’ in the Platt Deutsch dialect).    It is, in fact, a memorial to singer Lale Andersen who lived for several years on the island and, after her death in Vienna in the 1970’s, was buried there.

            It is a fine and appropriate memorial but I have to say that the  attractive young woman sculpted there isn’t my idea of Lili Marlene.  My wartime memories of both England and Germany suggest that, at that time, no young woman of either country would have dreamed of wearing trousers, particularly on a date. 

Heather Gilbert aged 19, my ‘Lili Marlene’! A photo taken while I was overseas, and posted to me while I was a PoW in Germany.  Note the Royal Artillery Badge brooch which clearly says ‘my boyfriend is a gunner – hands off!’

I have two mental images of the Lili who waited under the streetlamp.  The first is of a young girl still in her teens wearing her best dress, perhaps a little faded after three years of war. Her trusting blue eyes anxiously scan the uniformed figures emerging from the barrack gate for a young man whom she hadn’t known for long but whose life she feels she is destined to share.  Yes, I am thinking of my own girlfriend as she was at that time. I believe that we all, British and German alike, saw something of our own girlfriends in that patiently waiting Lili Marlene!    

The other Lili of my imagination is older – in her early thirties perhaps; quite sure of herself and possibly wearing a well-cut raincoat over a tweed skirt, together with a beret, or perhaps a cap, at a jaunty angle.  She would have a friendly smile for everyone, with a surreptitious wink for one or two favoured ones, and a warm embrace for her evening’s escort.   She is perhaps the more likely Lili Marlene of the two.

            The sculpture is of a charming young lady – quite possibly engaged to an ambitious young lieutenant and destined (though not in those trousers) to grace the officers’ mess, delighting the colonel with her respectful smile and impeccable manners.   I don’t really think though that she would have evoked romantic daydreams in rank-and-file soldiers such as I was.

            She is clearly the sculptor’s vision of Lili Marlene - but she isn’t mine!

Nick Clegg – Champion of the poor?

          That is how he would undoubtedly like to see himself and that is how, before the general election, thousands of misled voters were persuaded to see him.  I was one of them!

            Now he has caused a flutter in the coalition dove-cote by making the suggestion that, on a purely temporary basis, the rich might perhaps be persuaded to make a rather larger contribution to the national economy than they do at present.  This suggestion, timid and half-hearted as it is, comes strangely from a politician who a few months ago raised not a discordant voice when the Chancellor of the Exchequer decided to reduce the tax liability of the very wealthy by lowering the top rate of income tax.

            Even this latest very modest suggestion has provoked a wholly predictable response from Chancellor George Osborne.   We mustn’t try to make the wealthy pay their fair share of the nation’s debt because if we do so they might up sticks and depart elsewhere, taking their wealth with them.   Does he really suggest that wealthy folk have so little patriotism and love of their country that they would desert it for a few extra millions?

I have an abiding memory of hundreds of young British men who, in 1939, voluntarily abandoned their careers for a paltry two shillings (10p) a day, and offered their very lives to their country when it was in peril. I can’t believe that seventy-three years later a substantial number of wealthy Brits would abandon their homeland when it is in economic peril rather than surrender to it a fair proportion of that wealth.  And is it not almost equally incredible that also-wealthy top politicians should consider that behaviour to be perfectly reasonable?  Surely great wealth can’t have quite such a corrupting influence.

Sir Walter Scott asked incredulously. Breathes there a man with soul so dead that to himself he hath not said, ‘This is my own, my native land?’   Today it appears that we could assure him; Well yes, there are quite a few of them.  They have all got a few millions safely tucked away offshore – and they are prepared to live anywhere in the world in order to hang on to every penny of them. Sir Walter concludes in his poem that, if there are any such wretches, they are destined to go to their graves 'unwept, unhonoured and unsung’.  I doubt if that thought bothers them much.

If it is indeed true, then ought not David Cameron and George Osborne be thinking of ways of stemming that defection, instead of simply shrugging their shoulders and regarding it as inevitable?  Is it right for instance, that those who have deserted their country to preserve their wealth, should continue to hold British passports, have the right to vote in our elections, and to enjoy the very considerable privileges of British citizenship?

 Once again I suggest that the main source of our national income should be a ‘citizenship subscription’, of say 20 percent of gross income, levied on every British citizen from the poorest of the poor to the wealthiest of the wealthy!  Then we will value and honour our citizenship and only then will the UK become a true ‘commonwealth’ and politicians be able to claim with truth that ‘we’re all in this together’.