Week 26 2013

Tendring Topics………on line

What's really wrong with the economy? - an expert speaks.

          A recurring theme in Tendring Topics…..on Line has been my conviction that the current financial crisis is not the result of the previous government’s over-spending on benefits to the poor and disabled, but of the greed and selfishness of the wealthy.  I believe that the way to get rid of that deficit about which we are always hearing is not to cut expenditure but to make sure that everyone in the land bears a proportionate burden of taxation.  I am appalled when I hear the leader of the Labour Party, the only possible alternative government, proclaim that his party in power would pursue a very similar policy to that of the present government – but would do so more effectively and, if market forces permitted, a shade more humanely; hardly the kind of policy that inspired the pioneers of the Labour Movement to brave dungeon dark and gallows grim, and whose lifeblood dyed blood-red ‘every fold of the peoples’ flag’!   No wonder neo-fascist movements like Ukip, BNP, and English Defence League are gaining popular support.

            I am not an economist and am unable to substantiate my conviction.  I was delighted therefore to read an article by Dr Alan Storkey, economist and sociologist, in the Church Times (not generally thought of as 'loony lefty'!) of 14^th June declaring that ‘It is the rich, not the poor, who are the problem’  and backing that claim with hard facts and figures.

            Dr Storkey writes that Public Sector net debt was 36 percent of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in April 2008, and then doubled after the banking and other crises.  It is still climbing. The banks were and are a big part of the problem, and the Conservatives pushed for deregulated banking. The Government claims to have had a greater impact on debt than is the case.  It still climbs by about £100 billion a year.

            Yet, Labour would have cut back nearly as much as the Conservatives, and could not have kept the economy from what the Archbishop of Canterbury has rightly called a depression.

            The budget deficit requires the Chancellor, George Osborne, to save perhaps £80 billion a year.  Supposedly, it is the poor on benefits who are the problem.  But the underlying issue is that, over several decades, the rich have been milking the state of hundreds of billions of pounds.

            While the cost of benefits to the poor is less than is generally believed, the rich have received big handouts.  The first is tax, where, as the Office of National Statistics has declared, the poor are subsidising the rich.  The bottom 20 percent of the population pay proportionately 5.8 percent more tax than the top 20 percent (38.2 percent rather than 33.6).   If the rich paid the same proportion of their income in tax as the poor, it would bring in another £100 billion a year.

            That is not all.  Higher income groups have benefited from public-sector contracts, high public-sector incomes and bonuses.  For example GPs (family doctors) received a new contract in 2004, giving them an increase in pay from less than £80,000 to more than £100,000 a year for doing less work.  This cost the NHS more than £2 billion annually.

There has been no revaluation of house prices for council tax since 1993.  Over the past two decades house-price increases have mushroomed, but they are not reflected in council tax, which gives another bonus of tens of billions to the wealthy.

The big corporations avoid much VAT, evading tax to the tune of tens of billions.  The personal income of some of the top ten percent exceeds that of the whole of the bottom 50 percent, but some of this moves to tax havens, removing more billions from revenue.  Tax avoidance and evasion is estimated by the Tax Justice Network to amount overall at £70 billion a year.

In addition the banks have received profits through seigniorage, the windfall that comes through creating electronic money, amounting to between £20 and £30 billion a year, beside receiving government support while they run tax havens and give dud payment-protection insurance.

These losses of revenue are an overwhelming explanation of the Chancellor’s woes, and their solution.  Moreover, the way these funds are hoarded, moved and have created debt, explains why the economy is depressed, and will remain so.

Dr Storkey’s article in the Church Times concludes with the hope that, since the wealthy and the political establishment will not debate these issues, it is time that the Christian Church did so.       Why not?   Our God is one who ‘puts down the mighty from their seat and exalts the humble and meek………scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts ………fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich empty away’ -  and the Anglican tradition of Christ’s Universal Church now has a leader who probably has as wide a knowledge and experience of the realms of high finance and low dealing, as anyone either in our Government of millionaires or its supine and spiritless opposition.

The wrong sort of publicity! 

           I have never gone along with the idea that all publicity is good publicity.  There is a difference between ‘fame’ and ‘notoriety’ and it is the latter that has been showered onto Clacton and the Tendring District during the past year or so.

            Quite beyond the control of either the county or district council has been the amount of violent crime – including murder and attempted murder – in and around Clacton during the past year or two, one such incident less than a couple of hundred yards from my front door!  We’re hardly comparable with the Midsomer of Inspector Barnaby or the Oxford of Inspectors Morse and Lewis, but it’s quite disturbing enough in an area that we had thought of as being quiet and peaceful. 

Then there has been the revelation that the Brooklands Estate in Jaywick is Britain’s most deprived area, and that Clacton’s Pier Ward  is a ‘benefits ghetto’. In Pier Ward, the very centre of our holiday town, the UK’s fifth largest number of people on state benefit survive in former boarding houses converted into buildings with multiple ‘bed-sits’.  More recently we have learned that schools in rural areas and seaside towns (that means every one of Tendring’s schools) have an appreciably poorer academic record than those in large inland towns.

            There’s not much that we do about local violent crime. Perhaps the Commissioner we elected a few months ago will make a difference, though I’m not holding my breath!  Michael Gove, the government’s Education Secretary, really tries very hard, reaching back into the past even as far as my school-days, to find a model to solve education’s ills.  Perhaps he’ll succeed one day.

            The government is determined to ‘cut the red tape of planning legislation’ to free developers to ‘create wealth’ and help pull Britain out of recession.  In the ‘80s Mrs Thatcher’s government did much the same thing to free the bankers, wealth creators and financial risk-takers. Nobody at the time thought to mention that the risks were taken with our money!  We have to live with the result today.

            It occurs to me that the planning laws may need to be strengthened rather than weakened. Stronger and more firmly enforced planning legislation could have prevented Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate being transformed from a holiday township with basic facilities suitable only for short-term occupation during the holiday season, to an urban slum with cheap sub-standard homes occupied all the year round.  Is it not possible too that similar laws might have prevented the boarding houses of Clacton’s Pier Ward, being converted into cheap single-room bedsits in a Benefits Ghetto?

            Don’t be in too much of a hurry to cut all that red tape.  It may be all that is holding our fractured society together!

Another ‘bottom of the class!’

          It must have come as something of a shock to Tendring Councillors to know that after over twelve months operation of their reconstructed recyclable and unrecyclable refuse collection service, Tendring Council’s collection of recyclables was the lowest of any local authority within the county of Essex!

            Prior to April 2012 every household in the district had been issued with a green plastic box with lid and a supply of black plastic bags.  The black bags were for non-recyclable rubbish and the green boxes were for paper, cardboard and plastics of all kinds for recycling.  Householders who had more recyclables than would go into the green box could put them in an any-colour-but-black plastic bag or sack and put it on top of the green box.  Filled green boxes and filled black plastic sacks were put on the boundary of the property to be removed on the day of collection.   It worked pretty well though there was a minority of householders who ignored the green box and just put all their refuse in a black sack or sacks as they had done in the past.  Most of us, I think, co-operated.

            That all changed in April 2012.  All 60,000 households were issued with a red plastic box and two smaller green plastic boxes with lockable lids.  Our old green boxes were now to be used only for plastic milk bottles and plastic bottles that had held domestic cleaning fluids.  Other plastics – yoghurt cartons, food containers, plastic bags and so on – were henceforth to be put with the non-recyclable refuse, in the black plastic bag for landfill.

            The two plastic boxes with lockable lids were for food waste.  The smaller (‘the caddy’) was to be kept in the kitchen for the immediate receipt of food waste.  The larger was to be kept outside for reception of the food waste  when the caddy was filled.  The black plastic bag and filled container of food waste were to be put on the boundary of the property every week, the green box with some plastics and the red one with paper and cardboard were to be put out on alternate weeks for fortnightly collection.

              The situation was made worse by the fact that, presumably to save a few pounds, the red boxes for paper and card had no lids!  This inevitably meant extra litter blowing about the streets.  It also meant that when it rained between the box being put out and the arrival of the collectors, the saved paper and card became a soggy mess.  After receiving scores of angry letters, the Council bought 12,000 lids for those red boxes and left them to be picked up by householders at several centres throughout the Tendring District.

            The new recycling collection scheme was described by Tendring Councillor Nick Turner as ‘a Rolls Royce’ service but opposition Councillor Gary Scott wrote in the local daily Gazette ‘It is more like a Robin Reliant Service!’  For householders the system is complicated and, particularly for the old, time and energy consuming.  A kind neighbour carries my filled black sack and two filled plastic boxes (waste food and either the red or the green box) from my back door to my front boundary every week.  I find filling the sack and two plastic boxes every week and putting them by my back door completely exhausting.   Yes, I know that I am very old and am consequently feeble and lacking in energy – but then so are a great many other Tendring householders.  Don’t forget us. We pay our Council tax and we vote!

            Complicated, exhausting and incomplete (tons of salvageable plastics go into landfill) the system is much more ‘Robin Reliant’ than ‘Rolls Royce’.   A stroll down any residential road on ‘collection day’ for that area will reveal that a great many, possibly a majority, of householders simply ignore it and put out two three or four black plastic sacks filled with refuse of all kinds for landfill disposal.   I’m not at all surprised that Tendring District Council is ‘bottom of the class’ where collection of recyclables is concerned.

It is only fair to mention that the Essex County Council has done its bit to discourage recycling by closing Martin’s Farm Disposal and Recycling Centre in St Osyth, and reducing the hours of opening of their other centres.  No wonder there’s an increase in fly-tipping and that there are always queues of motorists at Clacton’s Rush Green Road Disposal and Recycling Centre.

            I expect that both county and district councillors are expecting a pat on the back for having ‘kept the Council Tax down to a minimum’.  I reckon that many voters will feel as I do that we would get better value for our money if the Council spent a little more and provided us with a better service. 

   

S more than £2 billion annually.

Week 25 2013

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘Now thrive the armourers…….’

          This line, spoken in the prologue to Shakespeare’s Henry V suggests that as long as 400 years ago it was realized that the real winners in any international or civil conflict are those who manufacture and sell the means with which the combatants kill each other.  Henry V is Shakespeare’s account of the campaign in France in 1415 that began with the siege and eventual capture of Harfleur, and ended at Agincourt.  There a much larger French army was defeated in its attempt to prevent Henry’s   depleted and disease-ridden force from reaching Calais, then an English possession, and returning safely to England. 

The campaign was part of a war that dragged on for a century. It cost thousands of French and English lives and thousands of pounds wrung from the ordinary people of France and England.   Agincourt was indeed a famous victory in which English bowmen and foot soldiers defeated a much larger French Army and slaughtered large swathes of the French nobility and chivalry.  Whatever else may have been its result there’s no doubt at all that, on both sides of the Channel, those ‘armourers’ did very nicely out of it, and out of the century-long war.

Let us hope that the war ‘the west’ has been waging ‘against terrorism’ since ‘9/11’ doesn’t go on for so long.  In Iraq the flames of conflict have been dampened down but not extinguished. The future of Afghanistan seems likely to be similar, if not even bleaker.  Libya could hardly be described as a country at peace.

In Syria a motley array of rebel fighters (many with a minimal knowledge of Syria but a wide experience of terrorism) are trying to overthrow the government of President Assad.   We are being dragged deeper and deeper into the conflict.  At first there was just aid for the victims, more recently there has been supply of ‘non-lethal’ military equipment to the rebels.  The government of the USA has repeatedly said that it would take more positive action if it were satisfied that the Syrian government’s forces were using chemical weapons.  Now it proclaims that that Rubicon has been crossed – Sarin gas has been used and it has claimed over 100 victims.  The USA will therefore support the rebels with military aid of all kinds. It is to the credit of our Prime Minister that for once he strikes a note of caution.  I hope that he will resist any plea to send more weaponry and perhaps troops from our depleted army, to ‘train and support’ rebel fighters, among whom, eagerly gaining more murderous experience, are the very terrorists who threaten us in the UK.

Reports suggest that the principal backer of the Syrian rebels is Saudi Arabia, which is supplying them with both weapons and funds.  Compared with Saudi Arabia, pre-civil-war Syria was an oasis of liberty and tolerance.  Does anyone seriously imagine that the rulers of Saudi Arabia, with its absolute ban on any religion other than its own version of Islam, its religious police (who make the ‘thought police’ of pre-war imperial Japan look like well-meaning boy scouts), its subjugation of women and its medieval legal and penal code, want to see a new liberal and tolerant Syria as preferred by Barak Obama and David Cameron?

It is probable that Sarin gas, or whatever, has claimed victims in the Syrian conflict.  But which side has used it?   Barak Obama has repeatedly said that the use of chemical weapons by the government side would result in more positive action by the USA in favour of the rebels. That’s just what the rebels need. Is it likely that the Syrian government would authorise the use of a small amount of Sarin gas; enough to provoke the USA into action but by no means enough to turn the conflict in the government’s favour?  Nor would it be likely to do so at a time when government forces are gaining the upper hand using conventional weapons. Surely it is much more likely that the rebels have used it as a sure, if desperate, means of gaining greater support from ‘the west’ in their cause?   We were deceived into taking part in the invasion of Iraq by a dodgy dossier of ‘irrefutable evidence’ that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction at his disposal.   He hadn’t. Nor had he, as was falsely claimed at the time, played any part in the outrage of 9/11. We surely have more sense than to be again deceived into military action by false or flawed evidence.

Perhaps we should look on the bright side.  Arms manufacturers and salesmen (modern ‘armourers’ engaged in one of the UKs most successful industries) are doing do very nicely out of the conflict. If the UK and USA give more support to the rebels, they could do even better. They’d make more profits and might even be able to ‘create more jobs’ knocking a few hundred off the UK’s two and a half million unemployed   For some that would be ample compensation for the destruction of a country and for  tens of thousands of its inhabitants being slaughtered, mutilated and/or rendered homeless.

A little grand-paternal pride!

Nick and Romy in a Brussels restaurant 

            I am very proud of the fact that Nick, my younger grandson, has become an authority on international tourism.   Shortly after graduating he obtained a post with the European Travel Commission and was appointed as their on-line Sales Manager.  Later, despite the fact that he was not yet thirty and that the UK had opted out of membership of the ETC, he was appointed as the Commission’s Acting Executive Director. Nick though, had no intention of becoming a senior International Civil Servant or of limiting his tourism activities to Europe. With the experience he had gained and the world-wide contacts that he had made, he launched his own international tourism consultancy SE1Media Ltd. of which he is now Managing Director (www.se1media.com).  Since then he has organised international tourism conferences and seminars world-wide and has visited the tourism and holiday-travel ministries of over forty countries.

            Nick had, of course, visited my wife and I in Clacton on many occasions as a child and adolescent. I don’t recall his ever expressing any great enthusiasm for our town as a holiday destination.  I was a little anxious therefore when, after the guests at the celebratory  lunch for my 92^nd birthday (see Blog Week 21) began to disperse, my German friend Ingrid and her partner Ray announced that with the younger members of my guests, they would be going down to the sea front to see the cliff-top gardens and the pier.  How, I wondered, would  Nick, now an international expert, regard Clacton's holiday attractions?

                                                                        Clacton’s Memorial Gardens

            I am very pleased to be able to record that they all, including Nick, thoroughly enjoyed themselves and were deeply impressed.  They appreciated the pier and its present rides and facilities.  Nick was very impressed with the Pier Restaurant with its large glass windows looking out on to the great sweep of the sea and the new Maplin Sands wind farm.

 There was Ingrid from Germany (originally from Zittau but now living and working in Bayreuth), her Austrian god-daughter Jenny, grandson Nick, and Romy, from Brussels, grandson Chris from Taiwan, granddaughter Jo from Sheffield and Ingrid’s partner Ray from Ipswich.   It is good to think that they have all returned to their homes with positive memories of their visit to Clacton-on-Sea and the Essex Sunshine Coast on the occasion of my ninety-second birthday.

Oh dear!  Sixteen year old Austrian Jenny has been gobbled up by an alien ogre from outer space, on Clacton Pier.     

                                                         The Pier Restaurant

Week 24 2013

Tendring Topics…….on Line

‘Cash for Questions?'

            ‘Goodness me - No! That would be quite contrary to the standard of integrity expected of ‘honourable gentlemen’ and ‘noble lords’ of both Houses of Parliament. Remember all that fuss there was a few years ago about twenty pound notes in little brown envelopes? Cash for Questions is definitely not on the programme.  Cash for Consultancies? – well, that could be quite a different thing.’

            According to reports on tv and in the press, conversations on the lines above took place a few weeks ago between some of our parliamentary representatives and under-cover journalists who pretended to represent well-heeled business interests.   It seems that the MPs and/or members of the House of Lords involved were - perfectly legally – offered well-paid spare-time consultancies and agreed to further unobtrusively the interests of their paymasters ‘in the House’.  There would be nothing so blatant as ‘cash for questions’, nor so squalid as ‘bulging brown envelopes’.  But the consultant could organise an all-party group of parliamentary friends and colleagues who might raise matters of concern and perhaps ask questions of the relevant Minister.   No-one would suggest for a moment that those friends received any payment for this but (who knows?) they too might be glad of a favour one day.

            David Cameron (who actually foresaw this kind of problem before the last election!) has been spurred into action.  All ‘lobbyists’ (professional benders of MPs’ minds!) are to be registered and steps taken to limit their activities.  Big business will no doubt be relieved to learn that the working poor are also to be prevented from using theiir meagre contributions, entrusted to their trade unions, to influence the minds of MPs! The members of the Government really do imagine that they are thus ensuring that, we’re all in this together!’

            Cash for questions, fiddled expenses and now ‘cash for consultancies’; is there no end to it?  Ordinary members of the public may be astonished that men (no women have so far been involved in the latest scandal) who are in the public eye and who, by most people’s standards, are handsomely remunerated for representing us in parliament, should behave in this way for a few extra quid.  It is surely a result of the general market-driven conviction of the past twenty or thirty years that the desire for money is humankind’s sole motivation; that the rich can only be goaded into action by the promise of even greater wealth, while the poor are kept working by the threat of homelessness and starvation. Everything and everyone has a price! We haven’t yet reached a state that justifies the cynical trans-Atlantic comment that, an honest politician is a politician who, when he’s bought – stays bought!’  - but we’re getting there!

New Labour’s ‘Bright Ideas’

          ‘New Labour’ might almost be called ‘New Conservative’ because, when they achieve power, they seem to have a penchant for conserving the results of their predecessors' actions – no matter how disastrous they may have been.  They didn’t, for instance, repeal the disastrous ‘right to buy’ legislation that compelled local authorities to sell off their community’s housing legacy at a fraction of its true value. Despite its malign effects becoming more and more obvious as the years have passed, Ed Miliband has even apologised for the Labour Party’s having opposed that legislation while in opposition!   Similarly, the new hard-line Conservatives of Mrs Thatcher and her successors might well have been called the ‘New Revolutionaries’. They had no qualms whatsoever about systematically destroying everything established by a Labour Government chosen by returning‘victorious’ servicemen and women from World War II; thus changing the nation’s zeitgeist from service and co-operation to greed and cut-throat competition.

            Ed Miliband has made it clear that, should he become Prime Minister, he will continue in the tradition of Tony Blair and his New Labour colleagues.  There will be the same old devotion to the cut and thrust of the market place, the same deference to the money-changers in ‘the city’, the same preference of private to public enterprise.   He’ll try to make the whole system just a tad less unfair, a little less deferential to cosmopolitan multi-millionaires, perhaps even just a shade more efficient than the present cowboy setup.

            He will, for instance, stop the payment of the winter fuel allowance to those who pay the higher rate of income tax.  He will stop payment of children’s allowance to households where one member has an income above £50,000 a year.  The latter seems a good idea until it is realized that the household of a family with a member whose income is just over £50,000 a year might include a mother who stays at home, making a home for the family and bringing up her child herself, instead of passing the baby to the care of a child-minder while she makes more money.  That family would lose its child allowance while next door may be a couple where husband and wife each earn £45,000 and pass their child on to a day nursery at the earliest opportunity.   They’d keep their child allowance!

            Hasn’t it occurred to Ed Miliband, to George Osborne, or to anyone concerned with the nation’s finances that there is one way of making all ‘universal’ benefits fairer – and that is by making them subject to income tax?  This wouldn't penalise the poor in any way while the better off would be asked for no more than they can afford.  The state retirement pension, a universal benefit if there ever was one, is taxable.   There’s really no reason why children’s allowances, winter  fuel payments, disability (or whatever they’re now called) benefits, attendance allowances (that would affect me, but I’d gladly pay tax on it if all benefits were similarly taxed)  job seekers allowances and so on, should not all be subject to income tax.  Even with our income tax system as it is today it would make for fairness – and bring extra revenue to the government.  A reformed system taking a fixed proportion of the gross income (it’s between the gross and the net that all those wonderful tax avoidance schemes operate!) of every one of us, the poorest as well as the wealthiest, could make our income tax assessment the only means test to which any of us need be subjected – and it would mean that we really were all in this together

Art for Art’s sake

'Modern Art - in Jaywick

Folk of my generation tend to be dismissive of what I believe is known as ‘conceptual art’.  We can see no artistic merit whatsoever in, for instance, an unmade bed, a disembowelled sheep, a light flashing on and off, a pile of bricks, or the ‘acclaimed work of art’ resembling a half-finished poultry shed (on the left!) on which residents of Jaywick were able briefly to feast their eyes a year or so ago.  What’s more, we’re inclined to think that everyone sees them as we do, but that members of a younger generation (as with ‘The Emperor’s new clothes’) don’t like to say so.

This kind of ‘art’ (though, I think, a rather more attractive form of it) is found in the Orient too.  Here is a photo, sent to me by my niece in Hong Kong, of a giant inflatable duck that has been seen floating in the harbour there for several days.   She tells me that it has also been seen in Sidney Harbour in Australia.  Perhaps one day it’ll turn up in the Thames – or even perhaps in Harwich Harbour!

 

A giant duck in Hong Kong Harbour

Thinking about the far-flung members of my family made me realize that a completely original, and of course deeply meaningful (aren't they all?), work of modern art might be created by joining them up by pencilled lines on a globe.  There’s niece Christine in Hong Kong, grandson Christopher in Taipei (in Taiwan).  Then there’s grandson Nick who regularly commutes between London and Brussels. His journeys could make an art-work of their own.  He’s founder and Managing Director of an international tourism consultancy, SE1 Media Ltd.  (www.se1media.com) and on any given day is as likely to be found in Beijing or Brasilia as in either Belgium or the UK.

The ancient grandfather ('monarch of all he surveys!)

Then there are second cousins in Canada of whom I learned only through Facebook, and an even more remote relative (my grandsons’ Aunt) in Western Australia, plus a granddaughter in Sheffield and, right at the centre of the web in sunny Clacton-on-Sea, the ancient patriarch, the not-yet-quite-moribund nonagenarian grandfather!  I can’t wait to get those lines drawn to reveal the artwork of the century!  Where, I wonder, should I apply for an award – and perhaps a cash grant?

    

Week 23 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

Syria – again!

            It was a fortnight ago, on 14^th May, that I published in my weekly blog the following paragraph relating to the civil war raging in Syria:

             Britain is becoming steadily more and more involved.  It started highly commendably with humanitarian aid.  Our intervention in Libya began, you’ll recall, with the very moderate ‘enforcement of a no-fly zone’.   In Syria we have progressed to non-lethal military aid.  What next I wonder – supplying the rebels with weapons?   That would surely be almost as daft as the idea, currently held by some in the USA, that the best way to end gun crime is to make sure that all ‘the good guys’ are armed to the teeth!   The only winners in that particular arms race will be the arms manufacturers and dealers.

Those words are proving painfully prophetic.  Britain and France, with the USA cheering us on from the sidelines, have persuaded their fellow EU members to lift the embargo on the supply of arms to ’moderate elements’ in the motley array of forces in rebellion against the government of President Assad..   This, so it is said, will persuade the Syrian Government to come prepared to negotiate to the International Conference planned to take place shortly.  The British Government has not yet decided whether or not to consult parliament before actually to taking this step.  As with the disastrous decision to join the USA in the invasion of Iraq, they’ll probably wait until they are sure that they have bullied or bribed enough MPs into assuring an affirmative vote.

            Probably Iraq government representatives will attend an international conference, prepared to compromise – but will the insurgency?   Reports make it clear that they are far from a united front.   While the ‘moderate elements’ that Mr Haig is eager to supply with arms may be ready to negotiate a reasonable settlement, the extremists are unlikely be satisfied with anything less than the unconditional surrender of the government, and probably ‘President Saddat’s head on a platter’.  

            What’s more, if by some miracle, President Saddat’s government were to be peacefully replaced by the kind of secular, tolerant, liberal government that ‘the west’ would like to see, those very substantial extreme elements would immediately seek to undermine it, using the terrorist methods in which they have become experts – and in which we have encouraged them.

            This has already happened, in Afghanistan.  In the 1980s the British and American Governments covertly assisted the ‘gallant mojihadin’ to fight and win a guerrilla war against the occupying Soviet forces, only to produce a Frankenstein monster in the Taliban and Al Qaida to whom the liberal and democratic attitudes of ‘the west’ were, if anything, rather more offensive than the ideology of the Soviets.   The extremists are likely to prove victorious because, being absolutely certain that God is on their side, they have no qualms whatsoever about shedding either other people’s blood or their own in pursuit of their ends.

              An even greater danger today is that the conflict in Syria will evolve into a proxy world war with Russia, Iran and Shia Muslims everywhere, supporting the Assad regime and Britain, France, the USA, Israel, and such ‘freedom loving’ regimes as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar arming the rebels.  There is a real danger that from such a confrontation a third world war, with nuclear weapons could - possibly accidentally - be triggered.

            Surely the world’s political leaders have more sense than to allow that to happen.    But have they?

The Press ………and the Politicians

          Recently I heard on the radio a heated debate as to whether or not it was reasonable to demand that members of the Police Force or other public servants should be required to declare any friendships or other relationships that they had with journalists.   It does seem very intrusive but when one considers recent occasions on which information that should have been kept secret has been leaked – sometimes accidentally and sometimes corruptly – to the press, it isn’t wholly unreasonable.

             Much more serious to my mind is a problem to which I can see no obvious answer and which wasn’t seriously addressed in the Leveson Enquiry. That is the way in which government policies may be swayed by close friendships between top politicians and newspaper owners or senior executives who have the power to sway public opinion, and thus influence the result of parliamentary and local elections.  Mrs Thatcher used Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times (or did he use her?)  in their mutual struggle against British Trade Unions.   Tony Blair created New Labour and robbed the Labour Party of its soul, to gain favourable headlines in The Sun.  David Cameron and senior members of his government had a far too friendly relationship both with Rupert Murdoch, and with at least two of his top executives.

            There was, of course, no formal agreement.  That was unnecessary.  Good friends obviously try to help each other.  What could be more natural?   I have no doubt that had it not been for the phone hacking and police-bribing scandals (about which, of course, Rupert Murdoch was blissfully ignorant) full ownership of BSkyB would have gone to Rupert Murdoch’s News International ‘on the nod’.

            Incidentally, two of News International’s senior executives have been arrested, charged and released on police bail, on the serious charge of ‘perverting the course of justice’.  I hope that those cases haven’t been ‘kicked into the long grass’ and are destined to be dropped for ‘lack of evidence’ or because ‘pursuing them wouldn’t be in the national interest’.

            No, I don’t know the answer to this problem. I do know though that it is quite wrong for control of a powerful means of influencing public opinion to be in the hands of one or two extremely wealthy individuals, especially individuals who are not citizens of the UK and owe no loyalty to our customs, our traditions – and our Queen. This, rather than venting their Europhobia, is a matter that should concern UKIP if they are genuinely worried about the UK’s independenc.  I understand though that Nigel Farage recently had a cosy lunch with Rupert Murdoch!  The leader of UKIP is clearly very selective in his choice of ‘threats to UK Independence’.

 Try to please everybody……..

          …….and you’re very likely to end up pleasing nobody. It seems that the Chaplaincy team at Colchester Hospital managed to achieve that result in their organisation of this year’s annual memorial service for the parents of miscarried or stillborn children, or of children who died within the first year of their lives.

St James' Church, Clacton-on-Sea (interior)

      For many years this service has been held in St James’s Church of England Church very near to Clacton Hospital.  This year though, the organisers had thought that the venue should be changed so that bereaved parents of any faith or none could be accommodated – and they decided that the venue should be in the hospital restaurant.  Rev David Flower, principal chaplain, is reported as saying, ‘What we wanted was to make the service more inclusive and thought that being in a building other than a church would be helpful to some people.  There was one family that came that would not have done if it had been held in a church’.  It seems though that many other families didn’t come who would have come to a church.  Only seven families were there and most of them were anything but pleased.  One complained that, ‘it was held in the hospital restaurant amongst cups and saucers.  Behind us, the tea urn was going and candles for parents to light were presented on a meat tray covered with foil……..I thought it would be in the chapel but when we got there we were told it would be in the canteen – we were disgusted’.

            My wife and I were fortunate in never having a miscarriage, stillbirth or child death in infancy.  However many years ago – it was while I was contributing a weekly Tendring Topics (in print) for the Coastal Express - I was asked to attend one of these services and write an account of it.  I recall that I was deeply impressed.  The service was well-attended and there were bereaved mums and dads on their own as well as families.  Votive candles were in proper holders and the service was conducted with great sensitivity.  There were prayers and hymns and it was suggested that those present should attempt to visualise their lost children. I do not recall anything specifically Christian about the service.  Its theme was that those lost children were in the care of a loving Father-God, perhaps with an implication that eventually, beyond the bounds of time and space, they and their parents would be re-united.  I would have thought that that was a theme that would have been acceptable to followers of any faith with a loving father-like God central to its worship.  I don’t see how any kind of service can help atheists with their loss.  There is no materialist compensation for bereavement, nor any such comfort for the bereaved.

It is a service that demands an ‘atmosphere’ that is difficult to define or describe but that most of us can experience.  St James’ Church has that atmosphere. Roman Catholic and Non-conformist churches, Quaker Meeting Houses, synagogues, mosques and temples may also have it.  Hospital restaurants definitely do not!  I am glad for the bereaved that next year the service  will again be held in St. James’ Church.