Week 42 2012

Tendring Topics……..on line

The Global Market

            It was I suppose obvious, but it still came as something of a shock when I heard David Cameron’s final rallying speech at the Conservative Party Conference.  We have, he said, to compete on the global market with emerging economies like China, India and Brazil if we are to survive and prosper as a nation.  That is, of course, the logical result of the free global market that most, if not all, our national politicians are so keen on.

            It is a subject on which I had my damascene moment about a year ago when I bought a padded envelope at the post office to send a small gift to a very young friend of mine in Germany.  The packet had ROYAL MAIL in big bold letters at the top.  At the bottom, in much smaller letters, were the words Made in China.  It dawned on me that thousands of miles away on the other side of the world there was a firm that could manufacture those packets, intended solely for the British market, transport them half way round the world, and offer them for sale in Britain at a lower price than any British or European manufacturer, despite the fact that those manufacturers were virtually on-the-spot!  Market forces, whose gods are cost effectiveness and profitability, then dictated that the Royal Mail purchased them in preference to any locally manufactured product.

            To compete with those emerging economies we have either to undercut their prices or produce better quality products.  There was a time when we could confidently predict our ability to do the latter – but that time has gone.  Those other nations with emerging economies, whom Kipling dismissed a century and half ago as ‘lesser breeds without the law’ are as good at quality control as we are and, particularly in China, have a thirst for technical – and general – education that now seems to be lacking in Britain.

            If we are going to undercut their prices we have to create ‘a level playing field’ which would mean that our working men and women would have to accept the same wages as workers in those countries.  We would have to accept the same or worse living conditions than they do, tolerate the same slums, the same level of public services, and the same health and welfare services.  Have you seen the film ‘Slum-dog millionaire’?  In India’s cities in real life there are thousands of slum-dogs for every millionaire!

            Well, we haven’t got there yet, but if the present government pursues with even more vigour its present policies of slashing public services, freezing council tax, cutting grants to local authorities, freeing employers of the restraints that protect the safety and livelihood of working people, and cutting the benefits of the old, the sick, the disabled and those who cannot find work, they’ll get there in the end!  Think of that.  Thanks to David Cameron and his millionaire-friendly government, we may one day be able to make padded envelopes with large inscriptions in Chinese, Urdu or Portuguese printed upon them (and smaller inscriptions saying Made in the UK) and sell them to the postal authorities in China, India and Brazil!

‘Well might the Dead, who struggled in the slime

Rise and deride this sepulchre to crime’

          So wrote 1^st World War poet, war hero and, from 1917 onwards, fervent opponent of the war, Siegfried Sassoon CBE, MC.   He was referring to the Menin Gate, perhaps World War 1’s best-known memorial, on which are inscribed the names of 90,000 men killed in the third battle of Ypres, often known as the Battle of Passchendaele, whose bodies were never found!   I think it likely that were Sassoon living today, he would say much the same about David Cameron’s idea of a day of special remembrance on 4^th August 2014, the 100^th anniversary of the declaration of war between Britain and the Commonwealth, and the Kaiser’s Germany.

Probably most of the dead of the two World Wars would express similar sentiments.  They know that no memorial to their memory or ceremony of remembrance can ever give them back their stolen lives nor ever begin to compensate for their loss.  To pretend that  they do justice to their memory is just a joke in bad taste.

 A memorial to the Rainbow Division of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, that captures something of the tragedy of war.  (Photo by my younger son Andy)    

However that memorial at Ypres, and the memorial events proposed by David Cameron, are not really for them.   They are not for the dead but for the living.  Those 90,000 names carved on the Menin Gate must surely bring to even the most frivolous visitor a sense of the enormity and horror of World War 1, of the appalling loss of human life, and of the deep and inconsolable sorrow of bereaved widows and girl friends, of parents and of young sons and daughters.

               I can just remember Remembrance Day (Armistice Day we called it then) memorial parades and church services in the late 1920s, when World War I was still a dreadful memory in the lives of most people.  There were ex-servicemen, some blinded, some with missing arms or legs. There were widows and girl-friends, some still wearing mourning black.  There were elderly mums and dads fighting the tears as they remembered their own sons whose lives had held so much promise, but who were now among the ‘heroic dead’.  Those scenes were replicated all over the world in lands of former allies and former enemies alike.  Death, love and sorrow hold no passports and know no national boundaries.

            I hope that the centenary of the beginning of World War I will be observed in sorrow and with repentance……certainly not in an orgy of self congratulation and triumphal nationalism.  World War I was declared to be a war to end wars.   It didn’t.  World War II was fought to defeat for ever the forces of Nazism and Fascism and to establish a new world order of peace, tolerance and prosperity.  It didn’t. Two Gulf Wars disposed of Saddam Hussein but have failed to make Iraq a safer, happier place in which to live.  Whatever may be the outcome of the current bloody civil war in Syria the one  prediction that I can make with total confidence is that we shall end with a Syria having less tolerance and freedom than it had before the conflict started. 

Peaceful negotiations do not always obtain their objective.  Warfare and violence never do.  The very best memorial that we can give those 90,000 lost soldiers who perished as they ‘struggled in the slime’ of Passchendaele and whose bodies were never found, and the millions of others of every nation who were slaughtered in two Word Wars, is an end to the international arms trade and real progress towards a lasting peace such as Tennyson prophesied nearly two centuries ago in a world where:

The war drum throbs no more and the battle flags are furled,

In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.

The Time Traveller

I have in the past written in this blog that I sometimes think of myself as a time traveller; a mid-twentieth century man who has managed to stray into the twenty-first century and isn’t completely comfortable there.  Last week I travelled back in time, at least in my memory, some eighty years – and found that I was even less comfortable there!

 My new gas-fired boiler with automatic control was installed in July.  As  I am an early riser I have set the automatic controls so as to ensure that by six a.m. when I usually get up, my bungalow is warm and comfortable and there is plenty of hot water for my wash, shave and shower.  The boiler is set to switch off at 6.30 am. However I can, and do, switch the central heating and/or the water heating on manually at any time during the day when the need arises.

Last Thursday (11^th October) I was out during the morning and returned home at about 11.00 am.  It was, as Clacton blog-readers may remember, a chilly, cheerless and overcast day with occasional light rain.  I decided to switch on the central heating.  I pressed the appropriate button.  Nothing happened.  The boiler obstinately refused to respond.   I phoned the installer (the system was well within its guarantee) and was promised that an engineer would call and sort out my problem early the next day.  That was the most I could have hoped for.  The installer could hardly have been expected to get one of his men to down tools instantly in order to sort out my problem.

In the meantime I had to face the next twenty-four hours with no hot water on tap and no central heating.  Thursday was one of those relatively rare days on which there had been no sign of the sun – and therefore no heating of the water in my storage cylinder from the solar panel on the roof!   My mind shot back eighty years to my childhood.       

I was back in my mind to that small and draughty jerry-built terraced house in Ipswich where I spent most of my childhood. It was no longer 2012 but 1932 and I was eleven years old.  I climbed the stairs to my unheated bedroom, a lighted candle in a candle-stick in my hand, undressed, climbed into my pyjamas, and crept shivering between the icy cold sheets.  When I had warmed up a little I would blow out the candle on the bedside chest of drawers, and try to go to sleep.

In the morning I would hear my parents get up before 7.00 am.   I would do so at about 7.30, when I could hear the kindling crackling on the coal fire that my dad would have lit in the living room.  In the winter I would relight that candle before stepping out of bed with bare feet onto icy lino and hurriedly dragging on my clothes.  There might well be a film of ice formed from the condensation on the inside of the bedroom window. By the time I got downstairs the gas light hanging in the middle of the room would have been lit and, with any luck, the fire would be burning merrily.

My Mum and Dad would have finished their ablutions and Mum would be busying herself preparing breakfast.  The kettle, with water for my wash, would have been singing on the gas stove.  We washed in a bowl in the kitchen sink of course. We had a bathroom but it was a tiny room with space only for a small bath with one cold water tap, and a gas fired ‘copper’, in which on Saturday nights, we heated our bath water.   The loo was outside.      

No, my present predicament was really nothing like that, and it was even less like my experiences in the army and as a PoW (but I preferred not even to think of them!).  My bungalow is double-glazed, with cavity walls infilled and roof space thoroughly insulated.  My bedroom is carpeted. My bed, with its duvet, is warm and welcoming and there is a bedside electric lamp.   I had a portable electric fire to take the chill off the room as I dressed.

The bathroom was chilly but, in any case, I had no option but to miss my usual morning shower.  Hot water for my wash and shave was supplied from an electric kettle.  In my home in the ‘20s and early ‘30s there was no electricity. That was provided, for lights only, in the mid-1930s. In 1932 my mum and dad and I would have considered that my living conditions today, even without running hot water and central heating, were luxurious beyond their wildest dreams!

Be that as it may, I breathed a deep sigh of relief when the heating engineer turned up, brought my boiler back into service (I hope I remember his advice on the prevention of a recurrence!) and restored my home to the comfort and convenience that we expect today.  Despite my occasional nonagenarian despair at aspects of 21^st Century life, I really wouldn’t want to revisit the daily discomforts that we took for granted just eighty years ago,