Week 23 2014

Tendring Topics……on line

‘The Lights are going out all over Europe………’

          So said Lord Grey, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, as World War I broke out.  I had much the same sinking feeling and presage of doom as the results of the recent European Parliamentary Elections became known.  The voters of practically every one of the EU’s member states had expressed at the polling booths their dissatisfaction at the performance and progress of the institution from which some of us had hoped for so much.

            Extremism triumphed.  Mostly, as in the UK and in France, it was right-wing extremism reminiscent of the nationalism that spawned Fascism and Nazism in Europe in the 1930s.  Nigel Farage took over a small fringe political party and, by finding appropriate scapegoats and urging immediate extreme action to deal with one or two issues that were causing public concern, he transformed it into a political force that seems unstoppable.  It reminded me of Hitler’s takeover of the well-meaning but slightly batty National Socialist German Workers Party and transforming it into the brown shirted,  jack-booted, ruthless and all-conquering Nazis.

            Hitler’s scapegoats for Germany’s defeat in World War I and all the country’s post-war problems were ‘The Jews’ and ‘the Bolsheviks’.  Nigel Farage’s scapegoats for all the UKs 21^st Century problems are ‘the European Union’ and ‘the immigrants’.  Nigel Farage has an advantage over Hitler in that he has an engaging man-of-the-people personality.   He enjoys a pint and a fag and he doesn’t 'talk posh' in meaningless platitudes like most other politicians.  On the surface he‘s ‘one of us’ – an ordinary bloke who believes in straight talking and calling a spade a spade even if it’s sometimes not ‘politically correct’; a politician for those who thought they detested all politicians!

            Well, I have come to distrust all politicians. I am sure that David Cameron and George Osborne do what they believe is best for the country – which means to them best for the seriously wealthy.   ‘If they’re getting richer the whole country’s getting richer.  Prosperity ‘trickles down’ to the lower classes’. I did fall for Nick Clegg’s rhetoric before the last general election; never again!  As for Ed Miliband – surely the Daily Mail’s dubbing him ‘Red Ed’ must be ironic. The 19^th and 20^th century pioneers of the Labour Movement would see him as about as ‘red’ as a pale pink blancmange!

            Perhaps things aren’t quite as hopeless as I fear. UKIP made little progress in the north-east and in Scotland, and actually lost ground in London.  Essex – my county – is where they did best.  The only two policies on which all Ukippers are agreed is getting out of the EU (Why bother with a referendum? – We know what ‘the people’ want!) and drastically cutting immigration.

 Funny thing – Ukippers don’t seem to be bothered by the fact that the progress of privatisation of public services means that more and more of them are coming under the control of foreign shareholders, nor about the fact that popular and influential newspapers and radio and tv services, moulders of public opinion, are owned and controlled by wealthy, often foreign, individuals.  I’d have expected that to be anathema to people who really valued the UKs independence.  What about NATO and the ‘special relationship’? Ukippers worry themselves to death about trivial decisions taken in Brussels.  Decisions costing us billions of pounds and hundreds of British lives are similarly taken in Washington.

Sometime between now and the next General Election UKIP will have to make up its mind about its policy on a great many issues other than ‘Europe’ and ‘immigration’ – education, the health service, social services, tax policy and so on.  As they reveal their position on these issue some, perhaps a great deal, of their support is likely to fade away.  Their deputy leader, for instance, would like to see more of the NHS privatised.   There’s talk of a flat-rate tax; another 'poll tax'?  Such hard-right measures such as these will surely alienate Labour, Lib. Dem and at least some of the Conservative voters who have defected to UKIP. 

It wasn’t only UKIP that came well out of the European Parliamentary Election.  I supported – and urged others to support – the Green Party as an alternative to the traditional parties. The Greens offered the promise of a better country, and a better Europe for all, not just for a wealthy minority.  They are a small party without the funds of UKIP who, in this area, managed to leaflet the electorate both at the beginning of the election campaign to catch the postal voters and, at the last minute, to catch the undecided.  UKIP was the only party to do that.

The Greens are still a small Party but they have one MP at Westminster (which is one more than UKIP has!) and, while they previously had only one member from the UK in the European Parliament they now have three!  There, they will join Green EMPs from other EU countries to make sure that the Green Voice is heard, and join in alliance with other parties over matters of mutual concern.   The Greens were, for example, active in the campaign to limit the bonuses paid to bankers within the EU.  Considering the general outrage within the UK about these bonuses, it seems almost incredible that our government opposed that measure. But they did!

Say not ‘the struggle naught availeth

The labour and the wounds are vain;

The enemy faints not, nor faileth,

And as things have been, they remain’

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars,

Perhaps by yonder smoke concealed,

Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,

And but for you, possess the field!

For though the tired waves, vainly breaking,

Seem here no painful inch to gain;

Far back, through creek and inlet making,

Comes silent, flooding in, the main

                                                                            Arthur Clough (mid-Victorian poet)

 An Insane Law?

‘INSANE LAW’  To boot mum from the UK says headline in the ‘Clacton Gazette’  ‘Please don’t take me away from my family’, pleads Clacton housewife fearing deportation.

          Thirty-two year old Mrs Christine North was born in Germany of a German mother and an English service-man father.  She moved with her mum into a British Army base when she was just six months old, attended an English School on the base and moved to England with her mum and step-dad, another British soldier, when she was seven years old.

She grew up, married an English husband, has two children and has lived in Clacton-on-Sea for a quarter of a century!  She has a National Insurance number, has twice served on a jury (that’s something I have never done!) and claims to have voted in every election since she was eighteen.  Her ‘Britishness’ has never been questioned and probably never would have been had she and her family not decided last year to take a holiday in France.  When she applied for a passport it was discovered that her German mother’s name was on her birth certificate but not that of her British father.

Technically, so it seemed, she was not British but German.  Could she be deported and separated from her family?   Was it possible that she could be prosecuted for claiming this, that or the other benefit to which only British citizens are entitled. Somebody has clearly warned her that this could happen  MP Douglas Carswell has taken up her case and says that he has written to Home Secretary Teresa May ‘in the strongest terms possible’  but received, only ‘flat bureaucratic replies saying rules are rules’.

I don’t believe that there is the least danger of her being deported and separated from her family.  Even convicted terrorists are able to avoid deportation by claiming their ‘human right’ to a normal family life.  What’s more, EU rules (that Mr Carswell would like to abolish!) give Germans, as citizens of the European Union, every right to live in Britain if they wish to do so.  As for prosecution; clearly Mrs North had no fraudulent intention and I don’t believe for one moment that she would be prosecuted.

As Teresa May is alleged to have said rules are rules. The obvious solution is for Mrs North now to apply for British Citizenship for which she certainly has an overwhelming case, for our MP to use every ounce of whatever influence he may possess to expedite the process, and for those who wish Mrs North well to assist with whatever cost this may involve.

          This is surely a saga that can- and will – have a happy ending.