Week 22 2013

Tendring Topics……on line

‘God hears the embattled nations sing and shout –

‘Gott Straffe England!’ and ‘God save the King!’

God this, God that, and God the other thing!

‘Good God’, says God, ‘I’ve got my work cut out!

            This mildly irreverent rhyme was written by Sir John Squire, early twentieth century satirist, in 1916 the year of the Battle of the Somme in World War I.   ‘Gott straffe England! (God punish England!) was the refrain of a ‘Hymn of Hate’ widely – though not universally – popular in Germany during those war years. It declared England, rather than Russia or France, to be Germany’s principal foe   Both Britain and Germany were nominally Christian countries and both claimed God to be ‘on their side’.  Both armies had military padres to offer their troops spiritual comfort and perhaps to assure them that their cause was the one that had divine blessing and approval. Throughout World War II the belt buckle of every German soldier was inscribed with the words ‘Gott mit uns’ or ‘God with us’?

           The now virtually unknown words of the second verse of our National Anthem were once sung with gusto.   I remember them. They told God exactly what was expected of him!

O Lord our God arise!

Scatter her enemies, and make them fall.

Confound their politics, 

Frustrate their knavish tricks,

On thee our hopes we fix.

God save us all.

            This attitude persists today. The brutal murderers of that British soldier outside the army barracks in Woolwich last week declared the Muslim refrain Allah Akbar (God is Great) as they waited for martyrdom, or the opportunity for yet more killing, with the arrival of the police.  Every suicide bomber believes himself to be giving his own life as a worthy sacrifice to God if, at the same time, he manages to kill a few infidels.

            Nor is this attitude, if not its practice, completely eliminated among Christians.  Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was reported to have been outraged when Archbishop Runcie prayed for the Argentine as well as the British victims of the Falklands War.  Only last week correspondents to the local daily Gazette proclaimed that God had intervened on the side of the western allies in World War II – by calming the sea to enable the remnants of our army to escape via Dunkirk and, on at least one occasion, preventing enemy bombers from taking off to bomb England!  Can those correspondents possibly believe that God was supporting the British and American bomber crews who incinerated thousands of innocent civilians in the bombing raids on Dresden on 13^th and 14^th February 1945?

            The God revealed to us in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ is the loving father of all mankind.   To suggest that he wills any act of violence by one of his children against another is the ultimate blasphemy, the ‘unforgiveable sin’.  Jesus told his followers to love their enemies, bless those that curse them, and do good to those who are spiteful towards them.  To those who rummage through the Old Testament  for justification of this, that or the other act of violence, he said that the whole of the moral teaching of the Old Testament  is encapsulated in the one commandment, to treat other people as you would like them to treat you. I understand that other world religious faiths include the same or a similar injunction.

            Can you imagine Jesus Christ, as we know him from the four Gospels, giving his blessing to suicide bombers, improvised explosive devices, cluster bombs, land mines, unmanned drones controlled from a distant country assassinating those deemed to be enemies of that country, or submarines roaming the oceans armed with weapons capable of destroying whole cities? 

There will, I suppose, always be those who are so consumed with hatred,  fear or envy that they will resort to violence, or plan to resort to violence against their fellow men and women.  Those who do so should not delude themselves that their thoughts and actions have the approval of God!

Some Afterthoughts

          One of the men believed to be involved in the killing of that young soldier in Woolwich  told a bystander that he was hoping to ‘bring war onto the streets of Woolwich’.  Those who have attacked mosques and Islamic Centres in reprisal for the murder are behaving exactly as the murderers had hoped.  Almost equally stupid was our Prime Minister’s assertion that the actions of these cold-blooded murderers ‘had nothing to do with religion’.  Of course they were to do with religion – a false religion that most of us are quite prepared to accept is as contrary to the tenets of Islam as the reaction of those who attack Islamic centres is contrary to Christianity.

            However, when asked why the murder suspects had not been more closely watched by the security forces since their radical views were well-known, an official spokesman replied that there were thousands who held similar views and it was impossible to monitor them all.

             That I do consider a very alarming piece of information.

‘

Clacton’s ‘Benefit Ghettos’

          When my wife and I were house-hunting in Clacton for our small family way back in 1956 we quickly realised that we couldn’t afford to buy a home near to the seafront.  The properties  within a few minutes walk of the sea, mostly large Edwardian houses offering holiday accommodation during the summer months, were well beyond our means.  We settled for the modest bungalow in Dudley Road (once described in Clacton Town Hall’s Council Chamber as ‘working class residential’) where, fifty-seven years later, I am writing these words.

            How astonishing therefore to find that those once ‘posh’ roads near the seafront in Clacton’s Pier Ward are now a ‘Benefits Ghetto’ with a staggering fifty-four percent of residents living on state benefit.  It is claimed to have the fifth highest number of folk-on-benefit in the country. Even in the town’s Golf Green Ward which includes Jaywick, Britain’s most deprived area, only forty-eight percent of residents of working age are living on state benefits. Douglas Carswell, Clacton’s Conservative MP says that, ‘this just shows the need for welfare reform.  I don’t think that William Beveridge and Clement Attlee when setting up the welfare state all those years ago, wanted to see half the people living in Pier Ward to be living at someone else’s expense.  There are government changes coming in which will see people who are on jobseekers allowance expected to look for a job.  Frankly that hasn’t been happening.  People who are young and fit and able to work will be expected to work’.  Perhaps Mr Carswell can suggest where those job-seekers should look for work in an area where jobs are notoriously scarce and where there are at least a dozen applicants for every vacancy.

            William Beveridge and Clem Attlee, were they alive today, certainly wouldn’t have expected to see two and a half million unemployed in Britain sixty-five years after the end of World War II.   Clem Attlee would have been horrified at the way in which the aspirations of those who had fought and won the war have been treated with contempt by successive governments.  In particular he would have had difficulty in believing that after ten years of New Labour government the gap between the incomes of the richest and poorest in our land was wider than it had been at any time in the twentieth century.

            The fact is that the decline of Clacton as a holiday resort, largely as a result of cheap air travel, has meant that there is no longer the demand that there once was for boarding house holiday accommodation.  The owners of buildings that had been used for this purpose found that they could manage quite nicely by letting out single rooms cheaply all the year round as bed-sitters for those who could afford nothing better.  It became known that there is usually cheap bed-sit accommodation available in Clacton – and homeless and jobless people from all over the country found their way here; just another example of the functioning of 'market forces'.  

            Government Cuts in the public services and the attempt to persuade ‘the big society’ to do for nothing some of the tasks formerly undertaken by paid labour, have played their part in reducing the number of jobs available for both skilled and unskilled workers.  Public and private enterprises alike are cutting the number of their employees to the bare minimum – and below!  Recently I noticed that the Public Conveniences on Clacton Station were locked because of vandalism and misuse.  Those who needed to use the Convenience were advised to get a key from one of the station staff. They'll be lucky to find one!  It isn’t so long ago that the constant presence of uniformed station staff acted as a deterrent to miscreants of all kinds.  But Profitability, Productivity and Cost Effectiveness (the unholy trinity driving market forces!) demand that employees must be profitably occupied every minute of their working day. No wonder hospital emergency departments are unable to cope with the demand put upon them, public property is constantly vandalised, public buildings defaced by graffiti, litter blows about our streets, there are potholes in our roads and broken paving makes our pavements dangerous to pedestrians.

            In the coming months we can confidently expect even more refugees from the imposition of the Housing Benefit Ceiling and the Bedroom Tax in London, to arrive among us.  Many of them will hope, almost certainly in vain, to find work as well as cheap accommodation. A few will be content to exist on ‘benefit’.  It is about those that we’ll read in the tabloid press.  There is little point in castigating them.  They are the product of our wonderful ‘free market economy’ that encourages everybody  (billionaire tax-dodgers, Bank Executives with their bonuses and miss-sold insurances, money lenders, expenses fiddling Councillors, MPs and Noble Lords, slum landlords, loan sharks and, right at the bottom of the pile, lowly benefit scroungers), to grab as much as they can for as little as they can get away with.