Week 50 2012

Tendring Topics.......on Line

‘In the bleak midwinter……….’

          So begins a well-loved Christmas carol, describing weather rather more Dickensian than Palestinian!  Will Christina Rosetti’s words written in 1872 describe our winter of 2012/’13 with its, ‘Frosty wind made moan.  Earth was hard as iron, Water like a stone. Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow – in that bleak midwinter, long ago’?

            It was still dark when I published my weekly blog on the internet at about 7.00 am last Wednesday, 4^th December.  In it I expressed a fear that, after a summer and autumn of heavy rain and floods, winter would bring freezing weather, icy roads and footpaths, and heavy snow.  I pulled aside the curtains from my window and looked outside – my garden was covered with a thin layer of snow and snow was falling from the heavens!   The snowstorm didn’t last long but, as I write these words three hours later, the snow is still lying and it is bitterly cold outside.  I fear it is a presage of things to come!

            The previous evening I had watched a BBC tv news bulletin including the concern of Shelter, the charity serving the homeless, that the number of people sleeping rough on the streets of our big cities (in particular London and Glasgow), after having fallen at the beginning of the new century, was now steadily rising and expected to rise still further as a result of government policies and proposed policies

It is very difficult to get an accurate estimate of the number of ‘rough sleepers’ as they tend to seek out remote alleyways, passages and derelict buildings to get what shelter they can from the elements.  Estimates are likely to be lower than actuality.  However it is reckoned that during the winter of 2011/2012 there were no less than 5,678 rough sleepers in London – an increase of 43 percent on the previous year’s total of 3,975.  In the future the total is likely to be higher still, particularly if the government goes ahead with its cap on Housing Benefit, its exclusion of single under-25s from Housing Benefit, and its ‘bedroom tax’ on Council house tenants and those in receipt of Housing Benefit.

Every night I sleep warmly and comfortably under my duvet.  At 4.30 am my gas central heating and water heating come on for two hours, ensuring that when I rise just before 6.00 am (yes, I am an early riser) my bungalow is comfortably warm and there is plenty of hot water for my morning wash, shave and shower.  I prepare and eat my ample breakfast at my leisure in a warm kitchen.  During the two hours the boiler was in action it will have produced sufficient hot water for twenty-four hours.  After I have dressed and breakfasted I decide whether or not I need to switch it back on for space heating only.

  How very different every night is the plight of thousands of my fellow men and women!   In London alone at the most conservative estimate, at least 5,000 of them try to find some protection from wind and rain in shop doorways or alleyways and settle down on cold, hard paving stones to snatch a few hours’ sleep, threatened not only by the vagaries of the weather but the criminal violence of fellow humans in an even more desperate plight than themselves.   They wake shivering and with aching limbs, cold, hungry and miserable, to face another day of seeking shelter and begging or stealing to stay alive.   Why don’t they seek work?  For those who have a fixed address it's difficult enough to find a job.. For those who haven’t, it’s impossible. There’s a more-than-usually vicious circle.  Lose your job and you’re likely to be made homeless.  Once you’re homeless and have ‘no fixed abode’ you can never hope to find employment!  

Clacton’s Wellesley Road on New Year’s Day 1979.  Tough luck for ‘rough sleepers’!

Yes, some of them are alcoholics or drug abusers.  Give them the few coins for which they beg and they’ll go straight and spend them on something guaranteed to make their situation even more hopeless. They may be well aware of that – but they also know that the substance that will ultimately destroy them will give them, if only briefly, a release from misery and despair. ‘Judge not, that thou be not judged!’ According to Dante there is a notice at the entrance to Hell; ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here’.  No wonder rough sleepers are 35 times more likely to take their own lives than the rest of us. 

I have endured hunger, cold and privation as a common soldier and as a prisoner of war during World War II, but have never experienced squalid discomfort, cold and hunger comparable with that of these ‘free’ fellow-countrymen and women of mine who have the misfortune to be penniless and homeless. Nor, unlike them, was I ever entirely without hope of a better future.

We Christians should remember that every time we say ‘Our Father’ we are acknowledging that the homeless and the destitute, the undeserving as well as the deserving, are our brothers and sisters, our fellow humans.  I am glad that Christian Churches are well to the fore in seeking to alleviate the plight of the rough sleepers and trying to lift them out of the abyss of hopelessness, loneliness and despair in which they find themselves.

 But charities, however committed and hard-working, can never hope to do more than ease the problem.  It is up to the politicians to reduce and ultimately solve it.  I have almost given up hope of them ever doing that – but surely they could try to refrain from making a bad situation even worse!

 Correcting Karl Marx!

            There has been a great deal of outrage in the news media in recent weeks  about the overseas corporations that trade very successfully in this country but, usually by having their HQ or financial base in a country with a lower corporation tax than the UK, succeed in paying little or no taxation here.  Three highly successful international corporations have been ‘named and shamed’ – Starbucks, Amazon and Google.

            This negative publicity seems to have had a salutary effect on Starbucks who, no doubt because their customers were deserting them and patronising other coffee-house chains, have announced that they will be changing their financial arrangements so that our Inland Revenue receive some benefit from their highly profitable activities.  That is very nice of them – but it really shouldn’t be the prerogative of a commercial enterprise to decide whether or not to pay its proper dues.  Operating a business in this country is a privilege and, in market-driven Britain today privileges, like everything else, have their price.

            The only one of those three corporations that is of regular service to me is Google – and very valuable I have found it.  Providing me and the rest of us Brits with a first-class service isn’t however the primary objective of Google.  That is maximising the profits made for its international shareholders. Paying for the privilege of trading profitably in this country is just one of the, no doubt tiresome, overheads that need to be subtracted from those profits before they are distributed.  It is up to our government to see that that this is done.

            Nor, of course, is it only foreign enterprises that seek to maximise their profits at the expense of other British taxpayers.  I pointed out a few months ago that Boots the Chemists (as British as the Union Jack!) has its HQ in a small village in Switzerland for no other purpose than to reduce its tax liability.  I don’t for one moment imagine that Boots is the only British culprit.

When Karl Marx declared that Der Arbeiter hat kein Vaterland (working people have no Fatherland) he could hardly have been more wrong.  Hundreds of thousands of European working men and women (British, German, French and Russian) demonstrated their loyalty to their fatherlands (and paid for that loyalty with their lives) in two World Wars.   It is their employers, the giant corporations whom Marx would have described as the Bourgeoisie, who place profit before both fatherland and fellow-countrymen.

'Patriotism is all very well - but Business is Business!'

 ‘All in this together?’

            Now we truly are ‘all in this together’ announced  the ecstatic front page headline of the Daily Mail the day after George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, delivered his autumn statement last Tuesday (5^th December).   The really wealthy and those in benefit are both to be targeted by the Government.   Both ends of the social spectrum are to suffer financially. What could be fairer and more egalitarian?

            That assessment overlooks the fact that the sums to be extracted from the bank accounts of the wealthy will cause them, at the most, only minor irritation and inconvenience.   The cuts imposed on the poor will force thousands of poor families to face the question, ‘Do we eat or heat?’  Thousands will be a little closer to losing their homes.    In the Biblical parable the poor widow who handed over her last ‘mite’ to the Temple Treasury was left totally penniless. The Treasury’s wealthy contributors poured in their gold and silver coins – but those coins amounted to only a fraction of their total wealth.  ‘Which of them’. asked Jesus, ‘was the more generous giver?’            

         

            As a pensioner I am one of those who will not suffer directly from the Chancellor’s Budget proposals.  However, the postponement of a return to normality for yet another year (and who is to say there won’t be a further postponement in a year’s time?) makes it increasingly unlikely that I shall live to see an end to austerity.  I do wish that the Chancellor hadn’t had quite such a self-satisfied smile on his face as he announced the failure of his policies and his economic predictions.

           

Once again he is taking pride in having brought a large group of low earners outside the income tax system altogether and ‘freed them from the burden of income tax’.  I remain convinced that we will not have a fair taxation system until the annual first demand on every single adult resident in this country, from the very poorest to the very wealthiest, is a percentage (to be calculated every year in accordance with the nation’s needs) of his or her gross income; the annual payment for the privilege of living and working in the UK.  The percentage would be exactly the same for everyone but, of course, the actual amount demanded would vary widely according to the wealth or poverty of each individual. What each individual did with the rest of his or her income – spend it, save it, give it to charity or put it in an off-shore account - would be no concern of the state.

            We then really would be all in it together in a true ‘common-wealth’ of which we could be proud to be citizens!

Songs of Praise

          My wife and I always watched BBCtv's Songs of Praise together early on Sunday evenings and I have continued to do so since her death.  Last Sunday, the first in the Church’s season of Advent, circumstances  prevented my doing so – but I did record it and have just watched the recording.

            

         I am glad that I didn’t miss it because I felt it was one of the best ever.  It included the Military Wives' Choir giving us one of the finest renderings of In the Bleak Midwinter that I have ever heard.  There were readings by Sheila Hancock, a fellow-Quaker, and Sir Derek Jacobi (whom I remember best as the Emperor Claudius in the BBC tv serial!)  Sheila Hancock mentioned how she had managed to enthuse children in a school in a deprived area of London with Shakespeare’s sonnets.  How wrong it is, she said, to patronise children by assuming that they can't learn to appreciate the magic of Shakespeare's words and to try to 'simplify' them

            Sir Derek shared with us the final two verses of Sir John Betjeman’s poem, ‘Christmas’ which summarise what Christmas is really all about:

And is it true? For if it is

No loving fingers tying strings

 Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie, so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare –

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine

            Thank-you BBC, for producing a programme of which I enjoyed every minute.  And thank-you modern technology for making it possible for me to watch and enjoy that programme a week after its transmission.

  one of the very finest renderings of In the Bleak Midwinter by the Military Wives’ Choir that I have ever heard.  There were readings by Sheila Hancock, a fellow-Quaker, and Sir Derek Jacobi (whom I remember best as the Emperor Claudius in the BBC tv serial!)  Sheila Hancock mentioned how she had managed to enthuse children in a school in a deprived area of London with Shakespeare’s sonnets.  How wrong it is, she claimed, to patronise children by trying to ‘simplify’ things, destroying their ‘magic’.

            Sir Derek shared with us the final two verses of Sir John Betjeman’s poem, ‘Christmas’

And is it true? For if it is

No loving fingers tying strings

 Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie, so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare –

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine

            Thank-you BBC, for producing a programme of which I enjoyed every minute.  And thank-you modern technology for making it possible to watch and enjoy that programme a week after its transmission.

  one of the very finest renderings of In the Bleak Midwinter by the Military Wives’ Choir that I have ever heard.  There were readings by Sheila Hancock, a fellow-Quaker, and Sir Derek Jacobi (whom I remember best as the Emperor Claudius in the BBC tv serial!)  Sheila Hancock mentioned how she had managed to enthuse children in a school in a deprived area of London with Shakespeare’s sonnets.  How wrong it is, she claimed, to patronise children by trying to ‘simplify’ things, destroying their ‘magic’.

            Sir Derek shared with us the final two verses of Sir John Betjeman’s poem, ‘Christmas’

And is it true? For if it is

No loving fingers tying strings

 Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie, so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare –

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine

            Thank-you BBC, for producing a programme of which I enjoyed every minute.  And thank-you modern technology for making it possible to watch and enjoy that programme a week after its transmission.

Week 6 2012 9.2.2012

Tendring Topics........on line

 ‘Do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you’

            St. Matthew records in his Gospel that Jesus declared that single commandment summed up the whole of the moral teaching of the Old Testament.  I hope that I am not being too heretical in saying that I wish he had gone on to state the corollary, ‘Do not do anything to other people that you would hate them to do to you’.  Perhaps Jesus did say that too but it seemed too obvious to need recording.   It clearly needed to be said though, because Christians have flagrantly ignored it through the centuries.

            It could be argued that do not is even more important than the positive do. The things we like vary widely.  George Bernard Shaw wrote in his Maxims for Revolutionaries that we should not do to others what we would like for ourselves. Their tastes may be different.  I think though, that even Shaw would agree that while we may like many different things, there are dislikes that are shared by us all.  I am quite sure that every single one of us would hate the idea of being tortured or burnt to death.  We all would hate to be brought to a violent death, to be enslaved, starved, rendered homeless, or separated from those we love.

            Yet, as Lord Byron pointed out; ‘Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded that all the apostles would have done as they did’ and Thomas Hardy wrote in his poem Christmas 1924 ‘After two thousand years of mass, we’ve got as far as poison gas’.

            These thoughts came to me when I heard Barak Obama, an international leader whom I had greatly admired, defending the use of unmanned drones to find and kill in Pakistan individuals whom the CIA has decided are members of Al Quaida or some other similar terrorist organisation.   The killing of these people, he said, was justified because they were a threat to the people of the USA.  They were carefully targeted and ‘very few’ innocent civilians were accidentally killed at the same time!

            It isn’t so very long ago that convicted, not just suspected, IRA murderers could find sanctuary from British justice in the USA.  American courts refused to return them to Britain for trial and/or punishment. They were a threat to the people of the United Kingdom. What, I wonder, would have been the American reaction had British MI5 agents in the USA sought them out and assassinated them – even if they managed to do so without harming a single innocent civilian?

            Assassination, without even the semblance of a trial, is abhorrent whether carried out by Al Quaida, by Mossad, the CIA or MI5.  In human society there can be no licence to kill

Do not do to other people what you would hate being done to yourself!

 ‘In the bleak midwinter’

  

The sudden change in the weather from milder-than-normal to sub-arctic has come as an unpleasant surprise.  Old people like me are warned to wrap up well and to keep at least one room in our homes warm at all times. I am very sorry for the increasing number of people, not necessarily all old, who have to decide whether to heat or eat.  It was a choice that the unseasonably warm autumn and early winter had led us all to imagine no-one would have to make this winter.

            My mind goes back to cold winters of the past, to the winter of 1962/1963 when the sea froze over.  I was a Public Health Inspector at the time and took these two photographs near Clacton Pier.  It was a bitter winter and a cold spring.  I remember the cemetery staff complaining that when they dug graves, the frost followed them down, freezing the soil beneath their feet as they worked!

We were dressed for the Libyan Winter! No 4 Gun of B Troop, 231^st Medium Battery RA at Wadi Halfaya (Hellfire Pass) on the Egyptian Libyan border, early January 1942.  I am the one on the right – with a woolly hat!

           

                During World War II I spent one winter in the Egyptian/Libyan frontier region, one in a PoW Camp in northern Italy and two in a small working camp (Arbeitskommando) in Germany.  In North Africa it could be bitterly cold when the north wind blew in from the sea.  Some South African troops experienced snow for the first time – a light dusting over the surface of the desert that disappeared as the sun rose.

            The winter in a prison camp in Italy is one that I would prefer to forget.  We were housed in unheated jerry-built huts, wearing totally inadequate Italian army uniforms (most of us had been wearing just shorts and shirt when captured) in which we tried to sleep, pulling our overcoats and two thin blankets over our heads to try to conserve what little warmth we had.  We were permanently hungry, louse infested and bored out of our minds.  Every day in winter we shivered on parade while Italian guards counted us – often miscounting and having to start again from the beginning.  As a result I can still count in Italian uno, due, tre, quarto, cinque and so on as quickly as I can count in English!  There were between 2,000 and 3,000 of us in the camp and deaths from cold-and-starvation related conditions were a daily occurrence.                                                                             

Zittau Rathaus (Town Hall).

One of my more back-aching jobs was to carry filled sandbags to the roof of the town hall as a fire precaution!

My memories of the two winters in Zittau, eastern Germany are far less negative.  We were wearing British army uniform and greatcoats (presumably supplied by the Red Cross) as our louse-infested Italian uniforms had been burnt on arrival.  I was in a small working ‘camp’ (Arbeitskommando) of just 30 British PoWs.  Our living quarters were palatial compared with those in Italy.  We had a separate living room and dormitory with double glazed (as well as barred!) windows.  There was a tortoise stove in the bedroom and a solid fuel cooker in the living room.   We were very often unloading coal trucks on the local railway sidings – so we were never short of fuel, even if it was only inferior lignite (‘brown coal’) briquettes! We were never cold.  Working every day (with just one ‘rest day’ in three weeks) we had no time to be bored and, from mid-winter 1944/1945 we could hear the gradually increasing thunder of artillery fire as the Soviet Army advanced inexorably across Poland and into Germany, and a constant stream of refugees from the battle front trudged wearily westward through the snow-covered streets of Zittau.   Our time of captivity was hastening to an end.

           

A New Danish Invasion!

            If any one had told me a year ago that I would get hooked on a tv serial in a foreign language about high level politics in a foreign country, with dialogue subtitled in English as in the silent movies, I would have thought that they were crazy.  Goodness knows I find news reports  of English party-political point scoring tedious enough! I can though at least understand what it is all about. Political manoeuvres in a foreign land and in a foreign language would surely be much worse.

            Yet I have just watched the tenth and final hour-long episode of Borgen, a Danish political drama on BBC 4 tv, with real regret that it had come to an end.  It was the third Danish tv drama with English-subtitles that BBC 4 had given us.  The first two were detective thrillers, both with the unpromising title of The Killing, featuring the unsmiling but strangely magnetic police detective Sarah Lundt.  I thought that the first, in which we were taken into the ‘real life’ of the family of the teenage murder victim, was the better of the two. I know that they were ‘only actors’ but it was difficult to believe that the grief, sorrow and anger of her parents and younger brothers were not real!  Surprisingly, the strong intertwined sub-plot, about the election of Copenhagen’s Mayor, was equally gripping.

            Borgen was quite different.  It followed the fortunes of Birgitte Christensen, fortyish, married, mother of two, and leader of one of Denmark’s political parties. Very likeable, she was clearly highly principled – sacking her Public Relations Consultant for unfairly discrediting the then Prime Minister, one of her political opponents. 

            As a result of political manoeuvring she found herself Prime Minister of a coalition government of a number of political parties.  At first we saw her clearly ‘on the side of the angels’.  She stopped the use of a Greenland air base by United States planes engaged in the ‘rendition’ of political prisoners, thereby  incurring the wrath of the White House and the cancellation  of a Presidential visit to Denmark.   She called the bluff of a Danish millionaire newspaper magnate who threatened to leave the country if she persisted with legislation promoting women's rights.   She secured a contract to supply wind turbines to a former Soviet Republic with an appalling human rights record, outwitting the country’s president who would have liked to have made the deal conditional on the extradition of a dissident refugee who had fled to Denmark.

            Then Birgitta’s halo began to slip. She allowed the use of a recorded remark made by a former friend many years earlier at a drunken party, to justify the bugging by the Danish Secret Service of the office of the political party which that former friend now led. Her friend’s reputation and political career were shattered.  To help cover up the Defence Minister’s corrupt acceptance of gifts and hospitality in connection with the purchase of fighter aircraft, Birgitta persuaded her husband to refuse a very satisfying and lucrative job that he had been offered.   She sacrificed the cabinet post of a trusted colleague and long-standing friend and adviser to keep the coalition government intact – and she agreed to a divorce and abandoned her marriage in the pursuit of her political ambition.  At the end of the final episode we saw her after she had made on tv the most eloquent speech of her career, extolling Danish nationalism and earning the applause even of her victims!   She was Denmark’s undisputed political leader – but she had lost everything that had made her the likeable, principled political leader that she once had been.   'What shall it profit a man (or woman) to gain the whole world and lose his/her soul?'

            I am looking forward to the next tv offering from the land of the Vikings!

             

           

           

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