Tendring Topics…….on line
The Referendum? I have voted YES!
Many years ago (it was in the days before Rupert Murdoch’s News International got its fingers on The Times) a letter of mine on the subject of electoral reform appeared in its then-august Readers’ Letters page.
It had become very obvious to me that although only a limited number of us had any great enthusiasm for any one of the parliamentary candidates for whom we were invited to vote at general elections, most of us knew perfectly well who we wanted to keep out of parliament. I suggested therefore that we should all have two votes, one positive and one negative. We could use either or both, placing the ‘yes’ vote against the name of any candidate that we preferred, or disliked the least, and the ‘no’ vote against the candidate that we wanted kept out of parliament at all costs. Positive and negative votes would both be counted after the election and the winner would be decided by the net result.
I felt that a winning candidate, learning that he had been elected by a net minus-300 votes compared with his nearest rival’s minus-360 would experience a due sense of humility and feel a real determination to ‘do better next time’.
It wouldn’t have worked. I realize that it would have given an unfair advantage to fringe and maverick parties like, for instance, The Official Monster Raving Loony Party. Few people would vote positively for them but even fewer would dislike them sufficiently to waste their one negative vote on keeping them out.
I think that the current ‘first past the post’ system is seriously flawed. It works best when there are just two serious contenders though, even then, it means that anything up to half the voters in every constituency feel that they have no political representation. It doesn’t work fairly when there are three or more contenders. Then it is quite possible – likely in fact – that the candidate elected will have had more votes cast against him, but shared among his opponents, than for him. This results in ‘tactical voting’ (I have done it myself on occasion) when electors don’t vote for the candidate that they really prefer but for the one they think most likely to defeat the candidate they like the least.
It is also entirely possible, and has happened at least once since World War II, that a General Election can produce a government with a comfortable majority in the House of Commons, despite their opponents having secured most votes in the country overall.
The best solution to this is proportional representation where electors votes are cast for the political parties rather than for individual candidates (though they know, of course, which candidates each party is putting forward) and party representation in the House of Commons is proportional to the votes cast for each. It is surely significant that when it was decided that there should be a Scottish Parliament and Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies, no-one suggested for one moment that they should have ‘first past the post’ electoral systems.
The ‘alternative vote’ system, which the referendum invites us to choose or reject, does not offer proportional representation. If it is adopted we will be asked to number the candidates in order of preference. Where, as would be the case in many constituencies, one candidate is the first choice of more than 50 percent of the votes cast, he or she would be elected without more ado. If however no candidate secured more than 50 percent of the vote, second choices would be taken into account until one of the candidates did have more than fifty percent.
It would mean that no MP would be elected on a minority vote. It would mean that there would be less need for tactical voting and we wouldn’t necessarily feel that a vote for the candidate we really prefer would be wasted. It would be rather less likely that a Government could be formed from a party that secured fewer votes overall than their opponents.
A YES majority vote in the referendum wouldn’t usher in a ‘New Jerusalem’. Neither would it, as the NO vote enthusiasts suggest, lead to the end of democracy as we know it. It would result in rather fairer elections than we have today.
Nowadays I vote by post and have already received my voting papers for the referendum and for the Tendring District Council election well in advance. By the time you read this I will have already registered my YES vote and will have posted it back to the Counting Officer.
NHS Reform.
The breakneck pace of NHS reform seems to have come to a standstill. The tide of opposition from the BMA and the General Council of Nursing has made the government pause and look again at some of its ideas. I was always doubtful, and have said so in this blog, about the idea of handing the responsibilities of Primary Care Trusts to ‘the doctors’. They surely have more important things to do than spend time working out exactly where, how and when their patients will get the specialist diagnosis and treatment that they may need.
Of course they couldn’t be expected to do it. They have formed consortia of several medical practices, employing specialist staff to do much of the administrative and clerical work. It seemed to me that, instead of one bureaucratic organisation doing this work, there would be a dozen or more!
The strongest objections to the government proposals come from health professionals; nurses, paramedics and various therapists, who feel that doctors alone shouldn’t control patients’ futures. Perhaps they should have their representatives in the new consortia – and how about the patients? It is all about them anyway. Shouldn’t they too be represented?
That all sounds like quite a good idea to me. Wouldn’t it though, be merely a revival of the existing Primary Care Trusts, but with rather wider and more representative management bodies?
Money to burn?
For a long time I have felt that the local government service was ‘top heavy’. The salaries, bonuses and expenses entitlements at the top bore little relationship to those further down the line, despite the fact that these included experienced and highly qualified professional men and women performing vital tasks for the community. It is the salaries of the people at the top that have made some people unable to say council official without prefacing the words 'with 'highly paid! Lots of them certainly aren’t.
However District Council bosses remuneration pale into insignificance compared with the salaries and perks of the top people of the Essex Fire Service. Chief Fire Officer David Johnson, who has recently overseen substantial cuts in the service for which he is responsible, enjoys a salary of £148,633 a year. When first appointed, his home was in Nottingham but he maintained ‘a makeshift’ home in Essex.
In 2005 he moved nearer to his place of employment, though not exactly to take up residence ‘above the shop’, or even in the county of Essex. His new home is in picturesque Stoke-by-Clare in Suffolk. The Daily Gazette reveals that he claimed from the Essex Fire Authority (from us Council Tax payers in fact) the sum of £20,000 to cover his removal and redecoration costs. His expenditure included £3,704 for carpets, £3,466 for floor tiles and £324 for curtains for his new Suffolk home. He also claimed £3,877 in estate agent fees, £2,402 in removal costs, and £4,563 for a mortgage redemption penalty.
I remember that when, in the local government service, I relocated my home from Suffolk to Essex, I was able to claim removal expenses only, and those only if I had accepted the lowest estimate of at least two removal firms!
The Gazette also reports that Mr Johnson and six senior colleagues have claimed nearly £46,000 in other expenses since 2008. These, so the Gazette records included ‘billing taxpayers for a trip to South Korea, meals at an exclusive gentlemen’s club and stays in lavish hotels around the world’.
Since 2006 the Fire Service has also spent £276.000 on the purchase of eight luxury cars (six Audis and two BMWs) each costing over £30,000, for its Brigade Managers – the Essex service’s most senior staff
A spokesman for the fire service is reported to have said, ‘The procedure for claiming expenses does not need to be reviewed. The service is confident all officers and fire authority members have acted appropriately’.
Thank goodness no one has acted ‘inappropriately’. Heaven alone knows what that could have cost us! I wonder what the front line firemen and women, who put their lives in peril every time they go out on a major emergency, think of the expenditure of ‘their bosses’?
Events are taking over!
When Britain first decided to intervene in the uprising against Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, imposing a No Fly Zone over the whole country seemed such a simple, obvious and relatively non-violent course of action. We would be saving civilian lives by eliminating the possibility of air attacks. I did say in this blog at the time that I very much feared that, as with our action in Afghanistan, we might be starting something from which we would find it difficult to extricate ourselves. I didn’t really think though that we would find ourselves being dragged ever deeper and deeper into the action.
But it seems that we have been. It was quite soon realized that Colonel Gaddafi could take back his oil-rich desert empire, killing scores of innocent civilians as he did so, without the need for mastery of the skies. Tanks, artillery and rocket fire followed up by well-armed and disciplined infantry attacks could be equally effective and equally deadly. Well, it was argued, our mission wasn’t simply to impose a no fly zone. It was to protect civilians.
An attack on Benghazi was thwarted by French air attacks on advancing armoured columns. The emphasis of the allied campaign changed. All Libyan government military installations and military vehicles became legitimate targets. Inevitably there were friendly fire incidents. Inevitably bombs dropped on military targets killed civilians. The ousting of Gaddafi became our ultimate aim. Surely he would realize that he couldn’t prevail against the might of NATO. Surely those loyal to him would realize the hopelessness of his position and change sides. One or two did – as one or two of Hitler’s henchmen deserted him when World War II was clearly lost.
Gaddafi though refused to comply and flaunted his power by driving in an open vehicle round Tripoli amid cheering crowds. It is in the nature of megalomaniacs to believe that they are invincible. In April 1945 it was only when the Soviet Army was within a few hundred yards of his bunker that Hitler accepted that he was beaten – and took his own life. To the end – and even after his suicide – there were Nazi fanatics who fought on!
The latest development in Libya is the deployment, with the insurgents, of military advisers from the UK, France and Italy (I hope they’ll all be singing from the same hymn-sheet!) They are not, as one might have imagined, advising on military matters but are ‘helping with communications and co-ordinating humanitarian aid’. They each have, of course, a small armed force with them to protect them from possible attack.
How long will it be, I wonder, before we enter the next phase of the conflict – and still with no end in sight!
Showing posts with label Alternative vote. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alternative vote. Show all posts
26 April 2011
14 February 2010
Week 7.10
Tendring Topics……….on Line
Saving the Naze?
‘Crumbling cliffs and tower saved’, announced a headline in the Clacton Gazette on 11th February. It related, of course, to Walton’s crumbling Naze cliffs which recede year by year. A silent witness to the progress of the erosion is the concrete defensive ‘pillbox’ now yards from the foot of the cliffs. This had been built on the cliff-top as part of Britain’s defences against invasion during World War II
The news story below the headline made it clear that the salvation of the cliffs and Naze Tower, a Grade II Listed Building and a well-known local landmark, hadn’t yet occurred. Moreover the work to be undertaken will, in fact, protect only a 110-metre stretch of the cliff immediately in front of the Tower.
The work referred to is the creation of a ‘Crag Walk’, a tourist attraction and educational project that will include a rock revetment to protect the foot of the eroding cliffs and a new walkway that will incorporate a viewing platform from which the fossil-rich red crag cliffs can be inspected. The project will cost £1.2 million and the Gazette’s report follows the news that a grant of £500,000 from Essex County Council will bring the funding to that figure. Tendring District Council have contributed £520,000 from a £1 million grant in connection with the Government’s Coastal Pathfinder scheme and the Naze Protection Society has itself raised £230,000.
I have no doubt that it is a worthwhile scheme but it surely hardly deserves quite the enthusiastic reception it is receiving from Naze Protection supporters. It does not protect the whole of the Naze and it will only temporarily (though perhaps for a number of years) protect any part of it. A truly long-term solution can only be found by dealing with the seepage of rainwater through the subsoil and the stratum of permeable red crag, to the clay bed below it. This currently flows over the surface of that clay to escape at the foot of the cliff. It thus makes the crag above it unstable. The surface of the cliff crumbles and falls – and the sea washes the debris away.
In the very first years of Tendring Council’s existence following the reorganisation of 1974, the Council’s Engineer and Surveyor’s Department worked out a solution to this problem. This was the subject of a Public Enquiry. The Government inspector approved the scheme which was then shelved because of ‘lack of funds’. I pointed this out in my very first Tendring Topics in print, in 1980.
When the Crag Walk Project is completed the cliffs each side of the project will continue to erode. The protected section of the Naze will become a salient under constant threat from the sea. Eventually, possibly after many years, the sea will win. As King Canute demonstrated to his flattering courtiers a thousand years ago, no man can halt the flow of time or tide.
Not quite ‘proportional representation’ – but very welcome!
The passage through the House of Commons of the very first step towards a much-needed reform of our electoral system hasn’t attracted a great deal of attention from the national press – possibly because, with a general election only weeks away, it is quite likely that it will come to nothing.
At the moment we have a ‘first past the post’ voting system. The candidate who gets the greatest number of votes is elected. This is fine when there are just two candidates. However, when there are a number of them (as there often are these days) it is quite possible for the candidate elected under this system to have less than half the total votes cast. This means that, whoever else electors may have wanted, the majority of them didn’t want the candidate who has been declared the winner!
Under this system it is also quite possible, and has happened twice in recent years, for the Party that secures the most parliamentary seats, and therefore forms the government, not to be the one that secures the greatest number of votes throughout the whole country.
What is proposed is an ‘alternative vote’. Ballot papers would be exactly the same as at present but voters would be able to express their preference by putting 1, 2 or 3, indicating first, second and third choice against the candidates names.
When the votes are counted, the ‘first choices’ are first counted. If more than fifty percent of those who voted made any one of the candidates their first choice, then that is the end of the matter. That candidate is elected. If no-one has secured more than half of the ‘first choices’, then the second choices are counted and added to the ‘first choice’ totals. This will almost certainly produce a candidate with more than fifty percent of the vote. If it does not, then the ‘third choices’ can also be counted and added to the total. The candidate with more than fifty percent of the total votes counted will then be declared the winner.
This isn’t true ‘proportional representation’. It would still be possible for a party of government to have less than half the total vote. It would mean though that individual members of parliament couldn’t be elected on a minority vote and, unlike some forms of truly proportional representation, it would mean that those electors who chose to do so, could vote for the candidate rather than his or her party.
Gordon Brown’s opponents say that he has put the suggestion forward now ‘for political reasons’. It might make people who were wavering between Labour and Liberal Democrat, vote Labour. If there were to be a ‘hung parliament’ after the election it might persuade the Lib. Dems. to form a coalition with Labour rather than with the Conservatives.
Of course Mr Brown has put the idea forward for ‘political reasons’. That’s what politicians do. That doesn’t mean that it is a bad idea though. I think that, in the interest of democracy, it is a good, if not the very best, solution
The proposal that has successfully survived its first reading in the House of Commons is not that such a system should be introduced, but that the idea of its introduction should be presented to the electorate in a referendum.
Those who think that having a strong and decisive government is more important than having a truly representative one, would no doubt vote NO in such a referendum. Me? The reigns of Mrs Margaret Thatcher and of Mr Tony Blair have taken away my appetite for strong government. I would vote YES.
Fencing off the sea!
I’m not surprised that residents in Brightlingsea are up in arms at Tendring Council’s fencing off part of Brightlingsea’s promenade for health and safety reasons. I am glad that the Council has decided to have second thoughts about it.
It is said that a fatality that occurred some years ago when an elderly woman’s mobility scooter rolled over the edge on a seafront path in Holland-on-Sea, is one of the factors that have led to this fencing. Gordon Beare, founder and organiser of the Tendring Pensioners’ Action Group is a mobility scooter user himself. He is reported as saying he believed that railings were a good idea. ‘Many elderly people can have simple accidents on their scooters, so anything that will make sure a scooter can’t go into the water is a good idea’. Well, I too use a mobility scooter and wouldn’t wish to be without it. It could be dangerous, even fatal, to drive too close to the kerb (the pavement edge) of the footpath of a busy street. I think that most of us are wise and careful enough to keep away from the edge of the promenade.
A year or two ago, I watched a family disembarking from their car on the Naze at Walton and preparing for a picnic. The adults failed to notice that a two or three year old toddler, rejoicing in his freedom from adult attention, was making a beeline for the cliff top. Fortunately an onlooker spotted the child’s danger, intercepted him and brought him back to his parents. Instead of apologising for their own lack of attention their reaction was, ‘You’d really think that they’d have those cliffs fenced off!’
Where will it end? Ought we perhaps to erect fences along our beaches just above high tide mark because someone might wander into the sea and drown?
I don’t blame local authorities, or even the Health and Safety Executive for this absurd determination to make every human activity totally risk-free. Responsibility lies with our own ‘compensation culture’, the idea that every single mishap is ‘somebody’s fault’ and that ‘somebody’ must be made to pay!
It is a culture that is nourished and perpetuated by the ‘ambulance chasing, no-win, no-fee, lawyers’, whose adverts holding the promise of hundreds or thousands of pounds of compensation, help to keep commercial daytime tv on its feet!
A Fateful Anniversary
I am writing these words on St. Valentine’s Day. It is the sixty-fifth anniversary of my learning of an event that has affected me for the remainder of my life. At first it reinforced the Agnosticism that I held at that time. Three years later though it was one of the factors that led my wife and I to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). The date was 14th February 1945. It was then that I learned of the horrifying firebomb raids on the city of Dresden, that had been carried out by the RAF during the night, and that the U.S. Air Force was continuing throughout that day.
I was a British prisoner of war at a working camp in Zittau, a small German town situated some sixty miles east of Dresden at the point where today the German, Czech and Polish frontiers coincide. Throughout the bitterly cold winter of 1944/’45, we had heard the sound of gunfire in the east increase from a distant murmur to a continuous and ever louder rumble.
By early February (after the failure of the last-ditch German winter offensive in the Ardennes) everyone in Zittau – we, our guards, the many foreign ‘slave workers’, and the German population knew that the war would be over in months, if not weeks.
The trickle of refugees fleeing before the inexorably advancing Soviet Army had grown to a flood. There were old men (younger ones had all been called up into the army), women and children, some babes in arms. Most were, of course, Germans but there were among them allied prisoners of war on a forced march away from the front line and possible liberation. There were Russian, Ukrainian and Polish ‘slave workers’, and there were abject and defeated units of Nazi Germany’s allies, Hungarians Bulgarians, and renegade Cossacks. Some had all their worldly goods piled onto ox-drawn carts, a few had lorries driven by ‘Holzgas’ (a gas – carbon monoxide perhaps? – produced by the slow and partial combustion of wood chippings). Many just trudged through the snow with their belongings on their backs or piled into small hand-carts.
They were heading for Dresden where the German Red Cross would take charge and distribute them among the few remaining parts of Germany that were relatively ‘safe’. By the 13th February some 300,000 refugees were crowded into the city.
That was the night that the RAF struck, creating firestorms that flattened fifteen square miles of the centre of Dresden and killed an estimated 25,000 people, overwhelmingly civilian, and many of them women and children. The grandfather of one of my current friends in Zittau was among the victims. He was a frail old man who escaped the flames to spend a bitterly cold February night in the open. He wouldn’t have counted as a casualty of the raid as he died a week later, of pneumonia!
In justification of the raid it has been claimed that no-one could be sure the war was nearly over, and that Dresden was a legitimate target as it contained factories supporting the Nazi war effort. It was also an important communications centre. However factories, a large railway station and an important river bridge, on the outskirts of the town were left unscathed while the bombers concentrated on the heavily populated city centre.
I have no doubt that the raids on Dresden were totally unjustified acts of terror which, had they been perpetrated by our opponents, would have been regarded as war crimes. Could they perhaps, have been an early gambit in the Cold War, carried out to impress the Soviet Army, which we knew would be there within weeks, with the strength of British and American Air Power?
‘The Nazis did worse things’. I know they did. Is that really an excuse for us?
Saving the Naze?
‘Crumbling cliffs and tower saved’, announced a headline in the Clacton Gazette on 11th February. It related, of course, to Walton’s crumbling Naze cliffs which recede year by year. A silent witness to the progress of the erosion is the concrete defensive ‘pillbox’ now yards from the foot of the cliffs. This had been built on the cliff-top as part of Britain’s defences against invasion during World War II
The news story below the headline made it clear that the salvation of the cliffs and Naze Tower, a Grade II Listed Building and a well-known local landmark, hadn’t yet occurred. Moreover the work to be undertaken will, in fact, protect only a 110-metre stretch of the cliff immediately in front of the Tower.
The work referred to is the creation of a ‘Crag Walk’, a tourist attraction and educational project that will include a rock revetment to protect the foot of the eroding cliffs and a new walkway that will incorporate a viewing platform from which the fossil-rich red crag cliffs can be inspected. The project will cost £1.2 million and the Gazette’s report follows the news that a grant of £500,000 from Essex County Council will bring the funding to that figure. Tendring District Council have contributed £520,000 from a £1 million grant in connection with the Government’s Coastal Pathfinder scheme and the Naze Protection Society has itself raised £230,000.
I have no doubt that it is a worthwhile scheme but it surely hardly deserves quite the enthusiastic reception it is receiving from Naze Protection supporters. It does not protect the whole of the Naze and it will only temporarily (though perhaps for a number of years) protect any part of it. A truly long-term solution can only be found by dealing with the seepage of rainwater through the subsoil and the stratum of permeable red crag, to the clay bed below it. This currently flows over the surface of that clay to escape at the foot of the cliff. It thus makes the crag above it unstable. The surface of the cliff crumbles and falls – and the sea washes the debris away.
In the very first years of Tendring Council’s existence following the reorganisation of 1974, the Council’s Engineer and Surveyor’s Department worked out a solution to this problem. This was the subject of a Public Enquiry. The Government inspector approved the scheme which was then shelved because of ‘lack of funds’. I pointed this out in my very first Tendring Topics in print, in 1980.
When the Crag Walk Project is completed the cliffs each side of the project will continue to erode. The protected section of the Naze will become a salient under constant threat from the sea. Eventually, possibly after many years, the sea will win. As King Canute demonstrated to his flattering courtiers a thousand years ago, no man can halt the flow of time or tide.
Not quite ‘proportional representation’ – but very welcome!
The passage through the House of Commons of the very first step towards a much-needed reform of our electoral system hasn’t attracted a great deal of attention from the national press – possibly because, with a general election only weeks away, it is quite likely that it will come to nothing.
At the moment we have a ‘first past the post’ voting system. The candidate who gets the greatest number of votes is elected. This is fine when there are just two candidates. However, when there are a number of them (as there often are these days) it is quite possible for the candidate elected under this system to have less than half the total votes cast. This means that, whoever else electors may have wanted, the majority of them didn’t want the candidate who has been declared the winner!
Under this system it is also quite possible, and has happened twice in recent years, for the Party that secures the most parliamentary seats, and therefore forms the government, not to be the one that secures the greatest number of votes throughout the whole country.
What is proposed is an ‘alternative vote’. Ballot papers would be exactly the same as at present but voters would be able to express their preference by putting 1, 2 or 3, indicating first, second and third choice against the candidates names.
When the votes are counted, the ‘first choices’ are first counted. If more than fifty percent of those who voted made any one of the candidates their first choice, then that is the end of the matter. That candidate is elected. If no-one has secured more than half of the ‘first choices’, then the second choices are counted and added to the ‘first choice’ totals. This will almost certainly produce a candidate with more than fifty percent of the vote. If it does not, then the ‘third choices’ can also be counted and added to the total. The candidate with more than fifty percent of the total votes counted will then be declared the winner.
This isn’t true ‘proportional representation’. It would still be possible for a party of government to have less than half the total vote. It would mean though that individual members of parliament couldn’t be elected on a minority vote and, unlike some forms of truly proportional representation, it would mean that those electors who chose to do so, could vote for the candidate rather than his or her party.
Gordon Brown’s opponents say that he has put the suggestion forward now ‘for political reasons’. It might make people who were wavering between Labour and Liberal Democrat, vote Labour. If there were to be a ‘hung parliament’ after the election it might persuade the Lib. Dems. to form a coalition with Labour rather than with the Conservatives.
Of course Mr Brown has put the idea forward for ‘political reasons’. That’s what politicians do. That doesn’t mean that it is a bad idea though. I think that, in the interest of democracy, it is a good, if not the very best, solution
The proposal that has successfully survived its first reading in the House of Commons is not that such a system should be introduced, but that the idea of its introduction should be presented to the electorate in a referendum.
Those who think that having a strong and decisive government is more important than having a truly representative one, would no doubt vote NO in such a referendum. Me? The reigns of Mrs Margaret Thatcher and of Mr Tony Blair have taken away my appetite for strong government. I would vote YES.
Fencing off the sea!
I’m not surprised that residents in Brightlingsea are up in arms at Tendring Council’s fencing off part of Brightlingsea’s promenade for health and safety reasons. I am glad that the Council has decided to have second thoughts about it.
It is said that a fatality that occurred some years ago when an elderly woman’s mobility scooter rolled over the edge on a seafront path in Holland-on-Sea, is one of the factors that have led to this fencing. Gordon Beare, founder and organiser of the Tendring Pensioners’ Action Group is a mobility scooter user himself. He is reported as saying he believed that railings were a good idea. ‘Many elderly people can have simple accidents on their scooters, so anything that will make sure a scooter can’t go into the water is a good idea’. Well, I too use a mobility scooter and wouldn’t wish to be without it. It could be dangerous, even fatal, to drive too close to the kerb (the pavement edge) of the footpath of a busy street. I think that most of us are wise and careful enough to keep away from the edge of the promenade.
A year or two ago, I watched a family disembarking from their car on the Naze at Walton and preparing for a picnic. The adults failed to notice that a two or three year old toddler, rejoicing in his freedom from adult attention, was making a beeline for the cliff top. Fortunately an onlooker spotted the child’s danger, intercepted him and brought him back to his parents. Instead of apologising for their own lack of attention their reaction was, ‘You’d really think that they’d have those cliffs fenced off!’
Where will it end? Ought we perhaps to erect fences along our beaches just above high tide mark because someone might wander into the sea and drown?
I don’t blame local authorities, or even the Health and Safety Executive for this absurd determination to make every human activity totally risk-free. Responsibility lies with our own ‘compensation culture’, the idea that every single mishap is ‘somebody’s fault’ and that ‘somebody’ must be made to pay!
It is a culture that is nourished and perpetuated by the ‘ambulance chasing, no-win, no-fee, lawyers’, whose adverts holding the promise of hundreds or thousands of pounds of compensation, help to keep commercial daytime tv on its feet!
A Fateful Anniversary
I am writing these words on St. Valentine’s Day. It is the sixty-fifth anniversary of my learning of an event that has affected me for the remainder of my life. At first it reinforced the Agnosticism that I held at that time. Three years later though it was one of the factors that led my wife and I to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). The date was 14th February 1945. It was then that I learned of the horrifying firebomb raids on the city of Dresden, that had been carried out by the RAF during the night, and that the U.S. Air Force was continuing throughout that day.
I was a British prisoner of war at a working camp in Zittau, a small German town situated some sixty miles east of Dresden at the point where today the German, Czech and Polish frontiers coincide. Throughout the bitterly cold winter of 1944/’45, we had heard the sound of gunfire in the east increase from a distant murmur to a continuous and ever louder rumble.
By early February (after the failure of the last-ditch German winter offensive in the Ardennes) everyone in Zittau – we, our guards, the many foreign ‘slave workers’, and the German population knew that the war would be over in months, if not weeks.
The trickle of refugees fleeing before the inexorably advancing Soviet Army had grown to a flood. There were old men (younger ones had all been called up into the army), women and children, some babes in arms. Most were, of course, Germans but there were among them allied prisoners of war on a forced march away from the front line and possible liberation. There were Russian, Ukrainian and Polish ‘slave workers’, and there were abject and defeated units of Nazi Germany’s allies, Hungarians Bulgarians, and renegade Cossacks. Some had all their worldly goods piled onto ox-drawn carts, a few had lorries driven by ‘Holzgas’ (a gas – carbon monoxide perhaps? – produced by the slow and partial combustion of wood chippings). Many just trudged through the snow with their belongings on their backs or piled into small hand-carts.
They were heading for Dresden where the German Red Cross would take charge and distribute them among the few remaining parts of Germany that were relatively ‘safe’. By the 13th February some 300,000 refugees were crowded into the city.
That was the night that the RAF struck, creating firestorms that flattened fifteen square miles of the centre of Dresden and killed an estimated 25,000 people, overwhelmingly civilian, and many of them women and children. The grandfather of one of my current friends in Zittau was among the victims. He was a frail old man who escaped the flames to spend a bitterly cold February night in the open. He wouldn’t have counted as a casualty of the raid as he died a week later, of pneumonia!
In justification of the raid it has been claimed that no-one could be sure the war was nearly over, and that Dresden was a legitimate target as it contained factories supporting the Nazi war effort. It was also an important communications centre. However factories, a large railway station and an important river bridge, on the outskirts of the town were left unscathed while the bombers concentrated on the heavily populated city centre.
I have no doubt that the raids on Dresden were totally unjustified acts of terror which, had they been perpetrated by our opponents, would have been regarded as war crimes. Could they perhaps, have been an early gambit in the Cold War, carried out to impress the Soviet Army, which we knew would be there within weeks, with the strength of British and American Air Power?
‘The Nazis did worse things’. I know they did. Is that really an excuse for us?
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