Week 9 2014

Tendring Topics......on Line

Spring is on the way!

            Yes, it really is.  Last Sunday (15^th February) here in ‘sunny Clacton’ we had sunshine from dawn till sunset.  It was a weak sun with barely enough heat in it to temper the chilly breeze.  Nevertheless, shining all day on the solar panel on the roof of my bungalow, it managed to raise the temperature of the water in my storage cylinder to sixty degrees Celcius, quite high enough to provide all my hot water needs for the next twenty-four hours!*  And it was only half-way through February and officially still ‘winter’.  Mind you, I still needed to have the boiler going for space heating from mid-afternoon!

`In Southern East Anglia at least, this chilly (but not really cold), very wet and very windy winter really does seem to be coming to an end.   I have daffodils naturalised under the long grass surrounding the eating-apple tree in my back garden.  They have been evident as green shoots for some weeks but yesterday some of them were in full bloom – and here they are.  Known in some parts of the country as ‘Easter lilies’, they are true harbingers of spring.

    

        Nor is it only in the garden that new life has been burgeoning.   On 1^st February I became a great-great uncle when my great-niece Catherine gave birth to a baby boy, Jay Luke Beard.  Here he is with his great-great uncle. Between us Jay and I span four generations and almost a century.  I was born in 1921, within the first quarter of the twentieth century, and Jay first saw the light of day in the first quarter of the twenty-first century – the second decade of the new millennium!

            Jay's life will undoubtedly be very different from mine, but whether better or worse - only time will tell!

*It did the same thing on Saturday 22nd February - we really do  get
more than the average amount of sunshine in Clacton-on-Sea!

           

 

 ‘A Plague on both your Houses’

          Three paragraphs in the latest issue of Private Eye explain why I have no confidence whatsoever in either of the political parties likely to form a government after the next General Election:

            No matter how loudly Ed Miliband proclaims that “those with the broadest backs should bear the greatest burden” the party has no plans for some of those with the deepest pockets to do their bit.

            These are the non-domiciled elite who claim allegiance to somewhere abroad while remaining resident in the UK (often, as in the case of Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere*, for their whole life) and pay the not exactly burden-sharing rate of, er, 0 percent of offshore earnings if they can find an easy way of getting them back into the UK (which they easily do).

            At this stage before the 1997 election, even in the midst of a City charm offensive, New Labour promised to end the non-dom tax break.   That was before, in office, the Party back-tracked as non-doms such as Lakshmi Mittal and private equity broncho Sir Ronald Cohen bankrolled it through subsequent elections with seven-figure donations.  Such plutocrats can look forward to tax haven Britain not loading much on their shoulders, whoever wins in 2015. 

            I really don’t want the United Kingdom to have the very best government that money can buy!

           I am disillusioned with both the Conservative and the Labour Parties and I am sure that I am one of thousands who feel the same.  Nor am I alone in feeling betrayed by Nick Clegg after having voted Lib-Dem. in the last General Election.  The danger is that some – perhaps many – voters, disillusioned with the traditional parties, will vote for UKIP.   Nigel Farage, the Party Leader, wants to sweep away party politics and put Britain first – and what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except that thousands of Germans thought in much the same way about Hitler in the 1930s.  The fact that, unlike  Adolf Hitler, Nigel Farage is a socially likeable chap who enjoys a drink and a smoke  possibly makes him all the more dangerous.

               Me? I shall definitely vote Green in the European Parliamentary Elections later this year.   That election is being held by proportional representation and every vote really will count.  If I’m still around for the General Election I’d like to vote Green again, but under our first-past-the-post electoral system a Green vote is likely to be a wasted vote.  Our present Conservative MP’s views are virtually indistinguishable from those of UKIP so I shall probably vote for whoever is most likely to defeat him unless, of course, his most dangerous rival is the UKIP candidate! I think it likely though that the local Ukippers will consider Mr Carswell to be ‘one of us’ and won’t oppose him.

* I had always thought (when I gave any thought at all to the matter) that Lord Rothermere was as British as the Union Jack. Intrigued by the comment in parenthesis in the second paragraph of the Private Eye article, I consulted Google and found that that his father had lived in France and had taken up French nationality. The present Lord Rothermere has inherited the nationality as well as his title and the Daily Mail.

The Expert

‘The bloated and bureaucratic’ Common Agricultural Policy, that hands out over a billion pounds every year to Europe’s farmers and land owners, is a favourite target of such Europhobic dailies as the Sun, Express and Mail. Who am I, knowing virtually nothing about farming and rural estate management to say whether or not these payments are justified?  I was though interested to learn from Private Eye that an increasingly large share of that billion-plus subsidy is paid not for agricultural production but to land-owners who improve the environment or diversify the local economy by providing and overseeing rural activities.

Private Eye records that the Langwell Estate near Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands has attracted £248,000 (nearly a quarter of a million pounds) in such subsidies.  It offers grouse shooting, deer stalking and other similar activities and rents lodges for £4,250 a week during the high season - a sum larger than the total that my family and I spent on half a dozen annual camping holidays in the Scottish Highlands, the Welsh Mountains and mainland Europe!

I was astonished to learn, again from Private Eye, that the owner of the Langwell Estate is Paul Dacre editor of the Daily Mail.  I have to concede that when leading articles in the Daily Mail rage against the huge handouts of ‘our money’ made by the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels who operate the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, the author – quite unlike me – undeniably has direct personal knowledge of his subject.

NHS National Database

          Every household in the country is supposed to have had an official leaflet delivered to them explaining that a national NHS database is being prepared, giving the medical details of each of us held on the computer files of every medical practice nationwide. It also said that we could ‘opt out’ of the scheme if we wished, and told us how to do so.  The scheme had been supposed to come into operation this April but as thousands of people claim that they have never received the leaflet and knew nothing about the database, the launch has been put back to the autumn.

            I do remember receiving the leaflet.  I glanced at it briefly and it occurred to me that there might be some people with medical conditions that they didn’t want to be made available for instance, to friends or relatives, to employers, or to an insurance company. That didn’t apply to me. At 92 no-one is going to offer me life insurance and my afflictions are boringly common – high blood pressure, osteo-arthritis, failing strength, vision and hearing, and other conditions of old age.  I really don't care who knows about them and I didn’t for one moment seriously consider ‘opting out’.

            I think it likely that a great many people who honestly don’t remember receiving the leaflet, did in fact do so, but just thought it was a piece of the junk mail that we all receive every day (special offers at local supermarkets, begging letters from worthy charities, catalogues from mail order firms and leaflets from local entrepreneurs eager to clean windows, tidy up the garden or clean out the roof gutters) I’m sure I’m not alone in consigning most of them  the recycling bin with no more than a cursory glance. It was pure chance that made me decide to read right through the NHS leaflet when it arrived.

Week 8 2014

Tendring Topics………on line

‘Headless chicken!’

          That is how HRH the Prince of Wales recently described those who deny the reality of global warming or claim that, if global warming is taking place, human activity has anything to do with it. 

            One of the revelations with regard to the weather that has become apparent in recent months has been the accuracy of the Meteorological Office’s weather forecasts.  If they say rain will reach the East Anglian coast around noon – then it probably will (possibly even reaching drier-than-most Clacton-on-Sea!)  The Met Office has come a long way since the evening when a BBC weatherman confidently assured an enquirer that ‘there will be no hurricane,’ just a few hours before hurricane force winds did strike us!    The severe gale and storm-surge that struck us in early December, uprooting trees, stripping roofs, cutting off electricity – and wrecking the helter-skelter on Clacton pier -  arrived almost exactly on the hour that had been predicted - and so have the many other gales and downpours that have since plagued us  this winter.

 It follows that when the Met Office tells us that the exceptional weather that we have been – and are – experiencing, is probably linked to climate change and that this climate change is most likely the result of human activity, it is time for even the most sceptical (and the most stupid) to pay attention.  The weather definitely has been exceptional!  More than 130 severe flood warnings have been issued in the first six weeks of this year - and that was before the Thames Valley was flooded - compared with only nine in the whole of 2012.   During those same six weeks of 2014 more than 5,000 properties have been flooded (again before the Thames Valley was flooded) and the Environment Agency says that 1.3 million homes have been protected from flooding only by flood defence work carried out during the past decade.

            A Met Office report links ‘the recent extreme weather in Europe and North America to perturbations in the North Atlantic and Pacific jet streams, partly emanating from changing weather patterns in South East Asia and associated with higher than normal ocean temperatures in that region.  The attribution of these changes to global warming caused by human activities requires climate models of sufficient resolution to capture storms and their associated rainfall.  Such models are now available and should be deployed as soon as possible to provide a solid evidence base for future investment in flood and coastal defences’.

 At a recent Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons, David Cameron said that he suspected that the recent storms battering the UK and the extreme weather in North America were connected to global temperature changes.  However pressure from parliamentary ‘headless chicken’ particularly in his own party made him modify that reply;  ‘You can’t point to one weather event and say that is climate change but many scientists were talking of a link between the two.  The point I was trying to make is whatever you think – even if you think climate-change is mumbo-jumbo – because these things are happening more often, it makes sense to do all you can do to prevent these floods affecting so many people, and that is exactly what we are doing.

In the Barrack Room of the POW ‘camp’ in Germany where I spent the last eighteen months of World War II we had a daily tear-off calendar with a ‘thought for the day’, in German of course, for every day.  One or two of those ‘thoughts’ have stuck in my memory to this day.  One was from the German poet Friedrich von Schiller

Mit der Dumheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens (with stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain!)

The Climate Change deniers ‘diabolical cocktail'.

          One member of the government who is prepared to speak his mind about global warming and its effects is Lib.Dem MP Ed Davey, Energy Secretary.  He says that the political consensus about the need to tackle climate change is breaking down as some Conservatives and members of UKIP, driven by ‘a diabolical cocktail of nimbyism, denial of science, and fear of Europe, try to discredit the science by undermining public trust in the scientific evidence for climate change’.

            The chief scientist at the Met Office, Dame Julia Slingo, declared recently that evidence suggests a link between the extreme weather gripping Britain and climate change. Prime Minister David Cameron has also said that he suspects there is a connection.  However the Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, has regularly downplayed the risks of climate change, leading to calls from environmental groups and the Green Party for his dismissal.

            Lord Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer says that the link between the floods and global warming is absurd.  He claims that the Met Office denies it and that, ‘It is just this Julia Slingo woman who made this absurd statement. There’s been bad weather before and anyhow, climate change is a global phenomenon and you don’t attribute local things to some global picture’.  If our floods were an isolated incident that argument might have some weight – but other recent meteorological phenomena in the Philippines, Australia, the Indian sub-continent and northern America surely demonstrate that our floods and storms are part of a global phenomenon.  

            Nigel Farage, leader of Ukip, also denies any link between the floods and climate change.  On a recent trip to the flooded Somerset Levels he told locals that the cause of the flooding was ‘just the weather!’  What a pity he doesn’t read our local Clacton Gazette.  One of his disciples claims on the  latest ‘Readers Letters’ page that he has proved, at least to his own satisfaction, that the European Union must bear the blame for the floods!

            If I want advice on getting votes from a gullible electorate or evading awkward questions from prying journalists I might well seek the advice of politicians like ‘those Lawson and Farage fellows’.  But for an informed opinion about the weather I prefer to take the word of  an acknowledged expert such as ‘that Julia Slingo woman’ better known as Dame Julia Slingo the Meteorological Office’s chief scientist.

Meanwhile, across the North Sea…..

Holland (the Netherlands) resembles the Somerset Levels and the Norfolk Broads – but on a much larger scale.  Practically the whole country is at or below sea level.  Their weather is not unlike our own and they are certainly subject to the same tidal surges and storms as eastern England.  Like us, they were severely affected by the storm surge of 1953 that brought unprecedented death and destruction.

They learned its lessons though.  The Netherlands is much smaller than the UK. Despite this the Dutch government spends five times as much annually on flood defences as ours does.  It is money well spent.  The Netherlands has had none of the destructive floods that we have suffered and are suffering. Nor do they talk of the necessity of surrendering some rural areas to the sea in order to have more funds to protect major towns.  Much of their land has been reclaimed from the sea.   We saw on tv some of the Dutch sea defences under construction – they make our defensive walls of filled sandbags, and even of concrete, look pretty pathetic!

How can they afford it?  I know very little about the Netherlands’ economy. I do know though that their government doesn’t spend millions of pounds annually on Trident submarines, prowling the world’s oceans, bearing nuclear deterrents that haven’t yet deterred any actual threats (and there have been plenty of them!) to civilisation.  If those nuclear weapons were ever to be used they could herald the extinction of the human race.  I doubt if any native of the Netherlands loses a moment’s sleep at the thought that their country lacks the so-called ‘ultimate deterrent’.  They know that their tax money is spent combating the forces of nature, a real and present danger, not frittered away ‘impressing the neighbours’ and protecting the Netherlands from an imagined peril.

            Mind you, money spent on flood defences is only postponing the day of reckoning unless at the same time, at least as much money is spent on the development of sustainable sources of energy – sun, wind, waves, tides – to reduce, and ultimately end, humankind’s reliance on the fossil fuels that are producing climate change and extreme weather conditions world-wide.     

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Week 7 2014

Tendring Topics…..on Line

 

Mr Gove in the News

 

             Michael Gove, the Government’s Education Secretary, has been in the news lately.  First of all there was his naïve demand that we should celebrate the centenary of the outbreak of World War I and ignore the left-wing intellectuals who insisted that it was a gigantic waste of human life from which no-one really emerged victorious except the armaments manufacturers. Born in 1921, I am not old enough to remember the war. I can though, remember being taken as a very young child to Remembrance Day (we used. to call it Armistice Day) services where there were still tearful  women clad in black mourning dead sons or husbands, and still-young ex-service men with missing arms or legs, or unsteadily making their way with the aid of a white walking stick.  There was not much celebrating then.

 

                    Then there was Mr Gove’s decision not to renew the contract of the Labour- supporting Chairman of Ofsted in order, so it was claimed, to replace her with a Conservative supporter – perhaps a generous donor to the Party. Needless to say Mr Gove indignantly denies any such motive.  It was, he said, a good idea to get new blood into any public office after three years (he clearly didn’t include the post of Education Secretary that he has held for four years!) and claimed that he always selected the best person for the job, irrespective of political affiliation.  Well, naturally – but the best person for the job in Mr Gove’s eyes would obviously be someone who would pursue his sometimes revolutionary ideas with genuine enthusiasm.

 

             I remember, in the turmoil of local government reorganisation in 1973, applying for the post of Director of Housing with the Harlow District Council.  I was asked if I would have any problem working with a Labour Council when my previous experience had been only with Conservative authorities. I replied that I believed senior local government officers, like civil servants, should be prepared to serve loyally authorities of any political persuasion.   Perhaps if I had replied that I was a whole-hearted Labour supporter and had for years been yearning for service with an unequivocally Labour Council (which, at that time, wouldn’t have been far from the truth) I’d have got the job!  Never mind – I was appointed as Public Relations Officer to the Conservative Tendring District Council, and I did put everything of which I was capable into it.   It was much less well paid but more congenial – and it didn’t involve my wife and I moving from our home in Clacton-on-Sea.

 

                 Mr Gove’s latest crusade is to make state schools as good as those in the private sector by lengthening the school ‘working day’ and encouraging extra-curricular activities like music and art appreciation, membership of the Army Cadet Corps and so on.  I think perhaps by ‘private schools’ he meant ‘private boarding schools’ where the children are available for education, or perhaps for indoctrination, for twenty-four hours a day.

 

                     When I was at a state secondary school in the 1930s, our school hours were from 9.00 am to 4.30 pm Mondays to Fridays and, once we had progressed beyond the 1^st Form, from 9.00 am till 12.00 noon on Saturdays.  We did though have two hours 12.00 till 2.00 pm for lunch (or as we young ‘plebs’ called it, ‘dinner’) and I cycled home every day because I preferred my mum’s cooking!   Added to that we were expected to do one hour’s homework every evening when we were in the first form, one and a half hours in the second and third forms and two hours in the fourth and fifth forms as we prepared for the General Schools’ Leaving Exam (the Matric).  There really wasn’t a lot of spare time for playing at being soldiers or whatever! 

 

I have no doubt that private boarding schools do teach children to speak properly, to be well mannered and self confident, and to have at least a smattering of knowledge of art, music and literature.   I have often wished that I had had those qualities when I left school, but I have sometimes been astonished at gaps that there appear to have been in the education of some of their best-known former pupils.

                   David Cameron our Prime Minister for instance, attended one of the very poshest of posh public (which actually means ‘private’) schools.  Yet he imagined, until someone corrected him, that the United Kingdom had been the ‘junior partner’ to the USA in the struggle against Hitler and Nazism in 1940.  Subsequently it transpired that he was unfamiliar with the third verse (few people nowadays even realize that there was once a second verse!) of our National Anthem.

 

             I suppose those are the kind of gaps that one might expect to find in the knowledge of the average bank or insurance clerk, shop assistant or postman of Mr Cameron’s age.  Surely though our Prime Minister (in fact all our leading politicians) should be thoroughly familiar with the history of the past century, if only to avoid making some of the mistakes that were made at that time.  It might have been thought too that the leader of a Party that aspires to ‘making Britain Great again’, is proud of its patriotism, and has appropriated the Union Jack for its political meetings, would have been familiar with:

 

Thy choicest gifts in store

On her be pleased to pour.

Long may she reign!

May she defend our laws

And ever give us cause

To sing with heart and voice

God Save the Queen.

 

               Yes, I did type the above verse from memory – but must confess that I later checked with Google that I’d remembered it correctly!

 

Mixed News from Clacton-on-Sea

             Recently, whenever Clacton-on-Sea has been featured in the national news bulletins or the front pages of the national press, it has been with bad news.

 

             We’ve an enormous bed-sit population living on ‘benefit’. Jaywick, one of Clacton’s suburbs is officially the most deprived community in the UK.  While the crime rate over the rest of the country and, in fact, over the county of Essex, is declining, in Clacton-on-Sea it’s rising.  There’s never a mention of the the fact that visitors to our town are rarely aware of any of those things, that we have suffered very little from the floods and gales that have afflicted the rest of the country since the beginning of December, that we have safe, sandy beaches, a lively pleasure pier and the lowest average annual rainfall of any seaside holiday resort in the British Isles!

 

              Once again disaster has struck Clacton and has made the national headlines – but this horror story isn’t all bad.  Last Wednesday (5^th February) what is believed to have been an accidental gas explosion completely destroyed two semi-detached houses and damaged others in the vicinity.  Two people were seriously injured and were air lifted by helicopter to a hospital in Chelmsford for treatment, and eleven others, less seriously injured, were taken by road ambulance to Colchester General Hospital. Considering the extent of the damage it is surprising that there were no fatal casualties on the spot.  Had the explosion occurred just half an hour later than it did, it might well have involved young children on their way to the nearby St. Clare’s Roman Catholic Junior School.

              The positive side to this sad story?   It was the Clactonian reaction to it.   It really didn’t take very long for the first fire-fighters and the first ambulance to arrive on the scene.   In those few minutes though, neighbours and nearby pedestrians didn’t just retreat into their homes or ‘pass by on the other side’.  They were on the spot, regardless of their own safety, helping trapped and injured people from the still –burning debris. They were congratulated on their efforts when the professionals appeared on the scene and took over.

 

                   The neighbours then organised a collection of clothing and household items to replace those that the victims of the explosion had lost.  Occupiers of adjacent properties were evacuated from their homes and driven to Clacton Town Hall where they stayed until their homes were declared safe for their return.  The operation went like clockwork and local businesses brought sandwiches for them to enjoy while they waited.

 

             The incident was a tragic one but the local reaction to it reinforced my conviction that we Clactonians have warm hearts and willing hands when needed to help those in desperate trouble, and that Clacton-on-Sea is a wonderful town in which to live, or to visit.  I wouldn’t swap my modest home in the town’s Dudley Road for any in the UK!

 

The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass may fall for ever,
But if we break the b……  glass, it won’t hold back the weather.

           Thus, remarkably prophetically, ends Bagpipe Music, a poem by mid-twentieth century Irish poet Louis MacNeice.

            I had intended not to mention the weather, the flooding and the general storm damage in this week’s blog.  But then, at the last moment, I received an email from my elder son Pete.  He is a business man who after working his way into the upper reaches of the local government service, launched his own successful IT Consultancy (Hub Solutions Ltd) of which he is now Managing Director, specialising in solving the IT problems of public authorities. He is, in fact, just the kind of successful small-business man whom the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer hold up to us as an example to emulate.  Here’s what he has to say about the floods in the West Country

 

              I'm still really in shock over the relentless weather, the devastation caused to Dawlish and other places I know well, and Somerset which seems to me to becoming an inland lake not fit for farming or habitation. The whole area seems to be below sea level, so all that water has to be pumped out, but all the time it keeps on raining. At some point you have to give up and let nature take its course. Even though it is now generally accepted to be due to Climate Change, there is very little recognition of the absurdity of finding any more oil and gas by fracking, deep sea drilling or any other way.  Scientists are saying that we cannot afford to burn the known reserves of fossil fuels, but every nation wants to get that little bit of short term financial advantage from its own reserves before the party comes to an end.  And I feel sorry for the people flooded out of their homes and who have lost their livelihoods; but give them a microphone and they just blame the government for not having built the walls higher or dredged the rivers deeper.

 

            I hadn’t realized that Pete knew Dawlish well.  I did, because his mother and I spent our honeymoon there in 1946 – seven years before he was born – and we also visited long after he had grown up and left home, when we spent several holidays in Devon with our motor-caravan.  I remember very well that railway by the sea, now wrecked by the storms.

 

            Pete had also noticed my comments about Pete Seager. Probably he remembered  going with me to Trafalgar Square at Easter time to welcome the arrival of the Aldermaston marchers and to join in the CND demo there.

 

           I see you have picked up on Pete Seager's death on your Blog! Thinking about the titles of his songs and others of the era, I feel there was "optimism in the face of adversity" where now there is just cynicism and acceptance.

 

          There must be something in this ‘inherited genes’ business because, although Pete couldn’t possibly have inherited his business acumen from me, those extracts  from his email that I have copied in italic above could have as easily been my words as they are his!

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NOTE - I experienced some difficulty in accessing this blog for editing and checking this morning.  I had intended to publish it tomorrow (Tuesday) morning but - just in case I get the same trouble tomorrow - I think I'll publish it now.

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Week 6 2014

Tendring Topics……..on Line

 

'Oh - What a Lovely War!'

This was the title of a satirical musical stage play and film of the 1960s that made it abundantly clear that  'the Great War' of 1914 - 1918 was anything but lovely.  This year sees the 100th anniversary of its outbreak and the news media is making the most of it.  The picture of General Kitchener urging  members of the civilian public to 'join up' because ‘Your Country needs You to which I referred in last week’s blog,  inspired the cover of this week’s Radio Times.  The threat of war breaking out is affecting the plot-line of ITV’s popular Sunday evening serial ‘Mr Selfridge’ and on Monday evenings on BBC tv, Jeremy Paxman is presenting a fascinating four-part series on the effect of the ‘Great War’ on ordinary people.  I’m sure there will be many similar to come.

       I generally enjoy programmes presented by Jeremy Paxman though I don’t think I would care to be the subject of his somewhat acid wit.  Enjoyment isn’t how I would describe my reaction to the first episode in the present series though it certainly held my attention throughout.  I was struck by the fact that some members of the Government had at least an inkling of the horrors that were to come.  Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Minister’s best remembered remark as ‘the Great War’ began was ‘The lights are going out all over Europe.  They will not be lit again in our time’.  Bearing in mind that the terms of the Peace Treaty that ended World War  made World War II inevitable within less than twenty years, it was not a wholly inaccurate forecast.  Sir Edward, it seems, was only one of the stiff-upper-lipped English gentleman in the government to be moved to tears by a vision of Europe’s future.  What a tragedy it was for the world that they were unable – or perhaps unwilling – to do more to change that vision.

      I was shocked to learn (I read it in the Radio Times before seeing the programme)  that in the second episode of his series Jeremy Paxman refers to conscientious objectors as ‘cranks’ and states his belief that World War I, although terrible, had to be fought ‘to prevent Europe becoming a German colony’.  Conchies, as they were disparagingly called, may have been cranks but they were certainly heroic ones.  When I was seventeen I volunteered for the Territorial Army because I thought it was the right thing to do. I was not in the least dismayed when - only a few months later – I was called up for full-time service in the army to ‘do my bit’ in World War II.  Fortunately perhaps for my peace of mind, it never even occurred to me at that time that killing or trying to kill fellow humans, for whatever cause, was wrong.

      Had it done so I really doubt if I would have had the moral courage to swim against the overwhelming tide of public opinion, and register as a Conscientious Objector.   And that was in 1939 when the right to conscientious objection was legally recognised. The chances are that I would have been drafted to work on the land or something similar and would have had to face nothing worse that the contemptuous looks of former friends.   The situation was very different in Wotld War I.  Then there was a very real possibility of being forced into uniform, taken to the front line and shot for ‘cowardly’ refusing to obey a lawful order.

      Nor do I think that the Kaiser, arrogant and foolish as he certainly was, had any ambition to rule the whole of Europe.  He wasn’t Adolf Hitler.   I have little doubt that he was thinking in terms of the European wars of the late 19^th Century; the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, both of which had been won by the armies of his forbears. In those wars rival armies had fought each other in one or two battles and/or sieges.  The side that had lost had sued for peace and the winners had returned home covered in glory and the spoils of war.   The losers lost two or three provinces and a lot of national pride to the victors, and that was that – until the next time. Not even Napoleon had tried to rule from Paris all the countries whose armies he had defeated..  

      The ‘Great War’ developed quite differently from those earlier armed conflicts. Neither the Kaiser and his generals nor the British government and theirs, had imagined for one moment that their armies would be bogged down for years in defensive trenches extending from the English Channel to the Swiss border, and that hundreds of thousands of men would die horribly, and many more be mutilated, in vain attempts to break through the defences of the other side.

              There was an extraordinary spontaneous Christmas truce in 1914 when soldiers of the opposing armies temporarily laid down their arms and fraternised with their enemies. They showed each other treasured photos of their families in London or Berlin, Manchester or Munich, Darlington or Dresden.   They played a friendly football match between the trenches; and sang carols of the advent of the Prince of Peace.  It was almost as though God, or Fate, or the Evolutionary Instinct for Survival (whichever you prefer) had given humankind a final opportunity to change its mind – a last chance.

         It was an opportunity that the rulers of humankind didn’t take. Next day it was ‘business as usual’. The slaughter was to continue and intensify, with no further truces of any kind, for three more years!

 

‘January brings the snow, makes our face and fingers glow.

February brings the rain,  thaws the frozen lake again’

 So insisted the first two lines of a nursery rhyme with which as children in the 1920s and ‘30s we were all familiar. I imagine that they had been well-known to generations of children long before that.  

This year though, there was no snow (and very little frost) in January.  No lakes have frozen - but there are 25 square miles of lake in Somerset where once there was farmland and scattered villages and hamlets.  Those who live on Somerset Levels are accustomed to occasional flooding – but not to flooding of the whole area for a whole month.  Last week a representative of the government visited and announced that he’d produce ‘a plan’ ‘in six weeks.    Six weeks! and just 'a plan'!   The Levels have already been flooded for over a month, and more rain is forecast.

 I am writing these words on the first day of February. January was a month in which southern England had the heaviest rainfall ever recorded! Who knows what shocks ‘February fill-dyke’ will bring us? Throughout the southern half of Britain the dykes (ditches) and rivers are already full and overflowing, the subsoil is saturated – and more heavy rain is forecast.

          When, as in this case, everything else has failed, the government’s immediate reaction is to call on the normally much-maligned public services to save the situation.  The army and police were called when a private sector firm proved to be incapable of providing the security promised for the 2012 Olympics.   The army has been summoned to help with the present flooding situation. It appears though that there is nothing they can do at present and another public service, the Fire Service, is doing what it can to help by pumping thousands of gallons of flood water from the Levels into the Severn estuary when low tide makes this possible.

 Meanwhile it has been pointed out that the Norfolk Broads are geographically very similar to the Somerset Levels.  They too are a considerable area of largely reclaimed land at or below normal sea level.  Norfolk’s annual rainfall is lower than Somerset’s but this winter Norfolk too has had far more than its usual quota of rain.  The subsoil there is soaked – but there has been no serious flooding.

 Locals claim that the principal reason for this is that the waterways through the Norfolk Broads are regularly and thoroughly dredged (we saw on tv a dredger currently in action there) while flood victims in Somerset claim that their waterways haven’t been dredged for over twenty years!   Dredging is, of course, one of the not-very-glamorous activities carried out by the public sector – the sector that has been, and is being, systematically kept short of essential funding by central government.

 I believe that the public services; the armed forces, the police, the NHS and the many local government services, are the essential supports of civilised society. They are rather like the foundations of a great cathedral or other splendid and much-loved building.  You can chip away at those foundations, probably for many years, without any visible effect whatsoever.  There may well be warning signs, but they can be ignored.  There will come a point though at which the creaks and groans from the building become a thunderous roar – and the whole structure will collapse in ruin. Could  the world's governments' reluctance to tackle the threat of global warming and our government's apparent inability to counter its increasingly disastrous effects, be early signs of just such a collapse?

Pete Seager

  Pete Seager, American folk singer and peace campaigner was two years older than me.   News of his death took me back in memory to the ‘60s and to the days of CND demos and the Aldermaston Marches.  I was never a marcher but for several years I went with my two sons (when they were old enough to appreciate the meaning of ‘Ban the Bomb!) to Trafalgar Square to welcome them at their destination.  What rallies they were!   How full we all were of hope and of enthusiasm!  At their heart were Pete Seager’s songs.   Their tunes are running through my head as I type; ‘We will overcome – one day!’, ‘We shall not be moved’, ‘Where have all the flowers gone……when will they ever learn?’

 Well, they still haven’t learned. The Cold War is over but the world is as far from peace as it ever was and is scarcely less dangerous, and the gap between the rich and the poor, both in the United Kingdom and the USA, is even wider than it was in Pete Seager’s prime!