Tendring Topics.......on Line
‘In
the bleak midwinter……….’
So begins a well-loved
Christmas carol, describing weather rather more Dickensian than Palestinian! Will Christina Rosetti’s words written in
1872 describe our winter of 2012/’13 with its, ‘Frosty wind made moan. Earth
was hard as iron, Water like a stone. Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on
snow – in that bleak midwinter, long ago’?
It was still dark
when I published my weekly blog on the internet at about 7.00 am last
Wednesday, 4th December. In
it I expressed a fear that, after a summer and autumn of heavy rain and floods,
winter would bring freezing weather, icy roads and footpaths, and heavy snow. I pulled aside the curtains from my window
and looked outside – my garden was covered with a thin layer of snow and snow
was falling from the heavens! The
snowstorm didn’t last long but, as I write these words three hours later, the
snow is still lying and it is bitterly cold outside. I fear it is a presage of things to come!
The
previous evening I had watched a BBC tv news bulletin including the concern of Shelter, the charity serving the
homeless, that the number of people sleeping rough on the streets of our big
cities (in particular London and Glasgow), after having fallen at the beginning
of the new century, was now steadily rising and expected to rise still further
as a result of government policies and proposed policies
It is very
difficult to get an accurate estimate of the number of ‘rough sleepers’ as they
tend to seek out remote alleyways, passages and derelict buildings to get what
shelter they can from the elements.
Estimates are likely to be lower than actuality. However it is reckoned that during the winter
of 2011/2012 there were no less than 5,678 rough sleepers in London – an increase of 43 percent on the
previous year’s total of 3,975. In the
future the total is likely to be higher still, particularly if the government
goes ahead with its cap on Housing Benefit, its exclusion of single under-25s
from Housing Benefit, and its ‘bedroom tax’ on Council house tenants and those
in receipt of Housing Benefit.
Every night I
sleep warmly and comfortably under my duvet.
At 4.30 am my gas central heating and water heating come on for two
hours, ensuring that when I rise just before 6.00 am (yes, I am an early riser)
my bungalow is comfortably warm and there is plenty of hot water for my morning
wash, shave and shower. I prepare and
eat my ample breakfast at my leisure in a warm kitchen. During the two hours the boiler was in action it will have produced sufficient hot water for twenty-four hours.
After I have dressed and breakfasted I decide whether or not I need to switch it back on for space heating only.
How very different every night is the plight
of thousands of my fellow men and women!
In London alone at the most conservative estimate, at least 5,000 of
them try to find some protection from wind and rain in shop doorways or
alleyways and settle down on cold, hard paving stones to snatch a few hours’
sleep, threatened not only by the vagaries of the weather but the criminal
violence of fellow humans in an even more desperate plight than themselves. They wake shivering and with aching limbs,
cold, hungry and miserable, to face another day of seeking shelter and begging or
stealing to stay alive. Why don’t they
seek work? For those who have a fixed address it's difficult enough to find a job.. For those who haven’t, it’s impossible. There’s a more-than-usually vicious circle. Lose your job and you’re likely to be made
homeless. Once you’re homeless and have
‘no fixed abode’ you can never hope
to find employment!
.bmp)
Yes, some of
them are alcoholics or drug abusers.
Give them the few coins for which they beg and they’ll go straight and
spend them on something guaranteed to make their situation even more hopeless.
They may be well aware of that – but they also know that the substance that
will ultimately destroy them will give them, if only briefly, a release from
misery and despair. ‘Judge not, that thou
be not judged!’ According to Dante there is a notice at the entrance to
Hell; ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter
here’. No wonder rough sleepers are
35 times more likely to take their own lives than the rest of us.
I have endured
hunger, cold and privation as a common soldier and as a prisoner of war during
World War II, but have never experienced squalid discomfort, cold and
hunger comparable with that of these ‘free’ fellow-countrymen and women of mine who have the misfortune
to be penniless and homeless. Nor, unlike them, was I ever entirely without
hope of a better future.
We Christians
should remember that every time we say ‘Our Father’ we are acknowledging that the homeless and the destitute,
the undeserving as well as the deserving, are our brothers and sisters, our
fellow humans. I am glad that Christian Churches
But charities, however committed and
hard-working, can never hope to do more than ease the problem. It is up to the politicians to reduce and
ultimately solve it. I have almost given
up hope of them ever doing that – but surely they could try to refrain from
making a bad situation even worse!
Correcting Karl Marx!
There
has been a great deal of outrage in the news media in recent weeks about the overseas corporations that trade
very successfully in this country but, usually by having their HQ or financial
base in a country with a lower corporation tax than the UK, succeed in paying
little or no taxation here. Three highly
successful international corporations have been ‘named and shamed’ – Starbucks, Amazon and Google.
This negative
publicity seems to have had a salutary effect on Starbucks who, no doubt because their customers were deserting them
and patronising other coffee-house chains, have announced that they will be
changing their financial arrangements so that our Inland Revenue receive some
benefit from their highly profitable activities. That is very nice of them – but it really
shouldn’t be the prerogative of a commercial enterprise to decide whether or
not to pay its proper dues. Operating a
business in this country is a privilege and, in market-driven Britain today privileges,
like everything else, have their price.
The
only one of those three corporations that is of regular service to me is Google
– and very valuable I have found it.
Providing me and the rest of us Brits with a first-class service isn’t
however the primary objective of Google.
That is maximising the
profits made for its international shareholders. Paying for the privilege of
trading profitably in this country is just one of the, no doubt tiresome,
overheads that need to be subtracted from those profits before they are
distributed. It is up to our government
to see that that this is done.
Nor,
of course, is it only foreign enterprises
that seek to maximise their profits at the expense of other British
taxpayers. I pointed out a few months
ago that Boots the Chemists (as
British as the Union Jack!) has its HQ in a small village in Switzerland for
no other purpose than to reduce its tax liability. I don’t for one moment imagine that Boots is
the only British culprit.
When Karl Marx
declared that Der Arbeiter hat kein
Vaterland (working people have no Fatherland) he could hardly have been more
wrong. Hundreds of thousands of European
working men and women (British, German, French and Russian) demonstrated their
loyalty to their fatherlands (and paid for that loyalty with their lives) in
two World Wars. It is their employers,
the giant corporations whom Marx would have described as the Bourgeoisie, who place profit before
both fatherland and fellow-countrymen.
'Patriotism is all very well - but Business is Business!'
'Patriotism is all very well - but Business is Business!'
‘All in this together?’
Now we truly are ‘all in this together’ announced the ecstatic front page headline of the Daily Mail the day after George Osborne,
Chancellor of the Exchequer, delivered his autumn statement last Tuesday (5th
December). The really wealthy and those
in benefit are both to be targeted by the Government. Both ends of the social spectrum are to
suffer financially. What could be fairer and more egalitarian?
That
assessment overlooks the fact that the sums to be extracted from the bank
accounts of the wealthy will cause them, at the most, only minor irritation and
inconvenience. The cuts imposed on the
poor will force thousands of poor families to face the question, ‘Do we eat or heat?’ Thousands will be a little closer to
losing their homes. In the Biblical parable the poor widow
who handed over her last ‘mite’ to the Temple Treasury
As
a pensioner I am one of those who will not suffer directly from the Chancellor’s
Budget proposals. However, the
postponement of a return to normality for yet another year (and who is to say
there won’t be a further postponement in a year’s time?) makes it increasingly
unlikely that I shall live to see an end to austerity. I do wish that the Chancellor hadn’t had
quite such a self-satisfied smile on his face as he announced the failure of
his policies and his economic predictions.
Once again he
is taking pride in having brought a large group of low earners outside the
income tax system altogether and ‘freed
them from the burden of income tax’. I
remain convinced that we will not have a fair taxation system until the annual first demand on every single adult
resident in this country, from the very poorest to the very wealthiest, is a
percentage (to be calculated every year in accordance with the nation’s needs)
of his or her gross income; the
annual payment for the privilege of living and working in the UK. The percentage
would be exactly the same for everyone but, of course, the actual amount demanded would vary widely
according to the wealth or poverty of each individual. What each individual did
with the rest of his or her income – spend it, save it, give it to charity or
put it in an off-shore account - would be no concern of the state.
We
then really would be all in it together in a true
‘common-wealth’ of which we could be proud to be citizens!
one of the very finest renderings
of In the Bleak Midwinter by the
Military Wives’ Choir that I have ever heard. There were readings by
Sheila Hancock, a fellow-Quaker, and Sir Derek Jacobi (whom I remember best as
the Emperor Claudius in the BBC tv serial!)
Sheila Hancock mentioned how she had managed to enthuse children in a
school in a deprived area of London
with Shakespeare’s sonnets. How wrong it
is, she claimed, to patronise children by trying to ‘simplify’ things,
destroying their ‘magic’.
Songs of Praise
My
wife and I always watched BBCtv's Songs of Praise
together early on Sunday evenings and I have continued to do so since her
death. Last Sunday, the first in the
Church’s season of Advent, circumstances prevented my doing so – but I did record it and have just watched
the recording.
I
am glad that I didn’t miss it because I felt it was one of the best ever. It included the Military Wives' Choir giving us one of the finest renderings
of In the Bleak Midwinter that I have ever heard. There were readings by
Sheila Hancock, a fellow-Quaker, and Sir Derek Jacobi (whom I remember best as
the Emperor Claudius in the BBC tv serial!)
Sheila Hancock mentioned how she had managed to enthuse children in a
school in a deprived area of London
with Shakespeare’s sonnets. How wrong it
is, she said, to patronise children by assuming that they can't learn to appreciate the magic of Shakespeare's words and to try to 'simplify' them
Sir
Derek shared with us the final two verses of Sir John Betjeman’s poem, ‘Christmas’ which summarise what Christmas is really all about:
And is it true? For if it is
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie, so kindly meant.
No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare –
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine
Thank-you BBC, for
producing a programme of which I enjoyed every minute. And thank-you modern technology for making it
possible for me to watch and enjoy that programme a week after its transmission.
one of the very finest renderings
of In the Bleak Midwinter by the
Military Wives’ Choir that I have ever heard. There were readings by
Sheila Hancock, a fellow-Quaker, and Sir Derek Jacobi (whom I remember best as
the Emperor Claudius in the BBC tv serial!)
Sheila Hancock mentioned how she had managed to enthuse children in a
school in a deprived area of London
with Shakespeare’s sonnets. How wrong it
is, she claimed, to patronise children by trying to ‘simplify’ things,
destroying their ‘magic’.
Sir
Derek shared with us the final two verses of Sir John Betjeman’s poem, ‘Christmas’
And is it true? For if it is
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie, so kindly meant.
No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare –
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine
Thank-you BBC, for
producing a programme of which I enjoyed every minute. And thank-you modern technology for making it
possible to watch and enjoy that programme a week after its transmission.
Sir
Derek shared with us the final two verses of Sir John Betjeman’s poem, ‘Christmas’
And is it true? For if it is
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie, so kindly meant.
No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare –
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine
Thank-you BBC, for
producing a programme of which I enjoyed every minute. And thank-you modern technology for making it
possible to watch and enjoy that programme a week after its transmission.
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