09 June 2014

Week 24 2014



Tendring Topics……on line



No matter what – they’ve won!

          Commenting on the results of the recent local government, and in particular, European Parliament elections, a despairing blog reader wote to me.  No matter what happens in the Newark by-election and next year’s General Election, the pernicious ideas of Nigel Farage and his Ukippers have won. Terrified by the result of the EU Parliament elections, the top politicians of the main political parties are vying with each other in demonstrating their Euroscepticism and promising to “get tough with immigrants”, in an attempt to outflank a triumphant Ukip. At future elections our choice is likely to be between different degrees of ukippery’

            I very much hope that my pessimistic reader will be proved wrong.   His words though, demonstrated the fundamental difference in British politics that has occurred between the days in the late-1930s when I first took a serious interest in them, and today.  In the 1930s, throughout World War II and for a decade or so afterwards, political parties in Britain had definite, clear policies with which every one was familiar.  The Conservatives stood, as their name suggests, for keeping the current order of things – the public sector, the armed forces, the civil service and local authorities had their own spheres of activity and though changes would undoubtedly take place, they should be peripheral and gradual.  The Labour Party on the other hand was the party of change.  Labour supporters’ main concern was the welfare of working people.  They believed that the Britain should be a fairer, more equal country than it was, and thought that this aim could best be obtained by most, if not all, industry and commerce coming under public ownership and control. 

            Rather uneasily between the two were the dwindling Liberals and on the extreme left and right were the Communists and the Fascists.  I remember attending a meeting in Ipswich’s public hall addressed by a black-shirted Sir Oswald Mosley leader of the BUF (British Union of Fascists and National Socialists).  His ideas were poisonous but he had a charismatic personality.  When he entered the hall twenty or thirty members of the audience leapt to their feet giving the outstretched arm fascist salute! My serious interest in politics dates from that public meeting – in 1937 or possibly ’38.   I wasn’t at that time quite sure what I was for but I did know what I was against; Fascism and Nazism!   Had I been a couple of years older I would probably have volunteered to join the International Brigade fighting Franco and his Fascists in Spain.  As it was, early in 1939 and at the age of 17, I enlisted in the Territorial Army having little doubt that we would be at war with Hitler’s Germany within months.

            In those pre-war pre-tv days there was a clear demarcation between the political parties.  People actually attended public political meetings – and were influenced by what they heard at them.  And we read too!  I was a great admirer of  George Bernard Shaw.  I read most of his plays – and his prefaces to them, which were often almost as long as the plays themselves.  I remember being held – and deeply influenced – by his ‘Intelligent woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism’. I came across a copy a year or two ago, dipped into it and have to confess that I was bored out of my mind!  In those days everybody took politics very seriously.  Politicians went to great lengths to try to convert the electorate to their point of view.

            The development of tv and the internet giving instant virtual contact with Party leaders and a surfeit of what G.K.Chesterton described as ‘The easy speeches that comfort cruel men’,  has something to do with  today’s cynicism and distrust of all professional politicians.  How can you tell when a politician is lying?’ – ‘When you can see his lips moving!’   ‘An honest politician is a politician who, when he’s bought – stays bought!’   ‘If voting really changed anything, they’d ban it!’   And of course, politicians themselves encourage us to think like that with their ‘cash for questions’ their fiddled expenses, their free meals and cheap booze.  I think though, that it is the opinion poll that has been the greatest influence in the corruption of politicians. Now we can see, almost day by day, which policies are popular and which otherwise.   It is usually much easier to delete unpopular proposals from a political programme, no matter how much they are part of the party’s reason for existence, than it is to convert sufficient people to reverse an opinion poll result.

            Thus the Labour Party changed its policy on Britain’s ‘independent nuclear deterrent,’ not because that policy had been proved to be wrong, but simply ‘to make the Party electable’. Clause 4 of Labour’s constitution, which aimed at wholesale nationalisation of private enterprise, clearly needed amendment. Instead, in order to make Labour electable, it was abolished – thereby opening the door to wholesale privatisation of public services that should never have been taken from public democratic control.   It’s no wonder that during ten years of New Labour rule the gap between the rich and the poor actually widened, the UK became a haven for wealthy foreign tax-dodgers, and billions of pounds were squandered on an independent ‘ultimate deterrent’ that isn't independent and doesn’t deter. Today our national sovereignty is being threatened, not by the EU as Nigel Farage and his Ukippers insist, but by our ‘special relationship’ with the USA and our membership of NATO that is expanding its activities far beyond those originally intended.

            Government by opinion poll may, on the surface, appear to be a kind of democratic control - by the people and for the people.  But what is it that moulds public opinion? It is surely the radio, tv and national newspapers.  They rarely attempt to do so by direct lies, but by giving front page treatment to news items and expressed opinions that endorse the views of the owners and publishers, and relegating to the back pages and small print, or ignoring altogether, items and opinions that oppose them. Day after day, week after week, words do have their effect upon human minds – and on the opinion polls.  The BBC does its best to be impartial – and is constantly under critical attack as a result.
The owners and editors of the news media continually stress the value of a ‘free press’, by which they mean a press free from the influence of ruling politicians.  Well – I too would hate our press to be under political control.  But we can, at least, sack our politicians and change that control.   I think that, on the whole, I’d rather have a press influenced by a democratically elected government than, as it is at present, owned and controlled by cosmopolitan billionaires who owe no loyalty to our country, its traditions and its culture.  Possibly we need a New Party – NUKIP perhaps - to oppose these foreign influences, rather than those of the EU in which we have at least as much voice as any other European country.

Qatar
          I was astonished when the row blew up about Qatar having allegedly bribed its way into hosting a future World Cup.  This was not because I had imagined they were incapable of such a thing.  On the contrary, I had never doubted for one moment that they had ‘bought’ the privilege.   They couldn’t possibly have been chosen because they were known as a great footballing nation, or because their desert land was particularly suitable for the game, or because the climate of Qatar in the height of summer provided just the measure of temperature and humidity that enables footballers to give of their best.

            I thought that they had probably found a legal way of using their undoubted wealth to secure the World Cup competition. And perhaps they have.  They’ll certainly be able to hire the very best lawyers to state their case.  If, as I fully expect, they’re found to be not guilty, I shall look forward with confidence to their making a successful bid to host a future Winter Olympics!

D-Day Commemoration

          I remember 6th June 1944 very well.  I was a POW in eastern Germany and was one of a party of four or five of us who were marching from our ‘Lager’ (our accommodation) to Zittau’s railway sidings to unload a couple of wagons of coal.  Some French POWs, who had better access to radio than we had, shouted to us from the other side of the road that the allied invasion in France had begun.  We had no doubt then that within a matter of months the war would be over and we would be going home!  I’m glad that there has been blanket coverage of the commemoration of that event in Normandy 70 years ago and that there has been homage paid to those who fought, and those who died, there.  Before being taken prisoner at Tobruk, I had been under enemy fire on many occasions, and had survived.  Never though had I been required to charge up an open beach that was being shelled and, at the same time, being raked by machine-gun fire!

            It isn’t in any way denigrating the courage and resolve of those who did charge up those open beaches, to say I regret that there was no mention made of the part played by the Soviet army in Hitler’s downfall.  Had the Red (mostly Russian) Army not decisively defeated the Germans a year earlier in enormous and bloody tank battles on the Russian steppe near Kursk, and had also forced the surrender of the Nazi 7th Army in Stalingrad, it is most unlikely that the D-Day landings could have taken place.  It is more likely that in June 1944 we’d have been trying to repel a German invasion!

            Counting ‘scalps’ is a distasteful occupation but ‘killing the enemy’ rather than ‘sacrificing one’s life for one's country is, and always has been, really what war is all about.  The fact that 80 percent of fatal casualties in the German army occurred on the Eastern Front gives an indication of the magnitude of the contribution of the Soviet forces to victory.  The Soviet achievements were not without sacrifice. Their human losses have been estimated to amount to over 20 million men women and children!  If we owe a debt of gratitude to those who fought and died on the Normandy beaches, we owe at least an equal debt to those Soviet forces who were our allies, and to the Soviet civilians who suffered and died under Nazi occupation.


           

           

             
           
           

               

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