18th January 2015

Tendring Topics……….on line

The Parliamentary General Election

          There was a time when political parties existed to promote specific policies – the Conservative Party on retaining the status quo and, in general, observing the sage advice, ‘If it ain’t bust, don’t fix it’.  They were naturally the party of the ‘haves’ rather than the ‘have nots’.  The Labour Party on the other hand, was the party of change.  They wanted a fairer, more equal Britain, a Britain without nuclear weapons and without imperial pretensions or ambitions.  They argued that these objectives could best be achieved if most or all public services were owned and run by the public.   They were the party of the ‘have nots’.  Both parties tried to persuade a majority of the electorate to support them.

            Now both main parties, and what’s left of the Liberals, claim to serve the interests of the whole country.  In reality they all have just one overriding policy. It’s the same policy; to win elections, gain political power – and keep it.  To this end the Conservatives under Mrs Thatcher became a party of revolutionary change; among other things selling off most public services to private enterprise and compelling local authorities, who had built houses to rid their districts of overcrowding and homelessness, to sell them to sitting tenants at bargain basement prices; thus very cleverly buying votes with other people’s money.

            New Labour, ‘to make itself electable’, sold its own soul by going along with the retention of a nuclear ‘deterrent’, accepting the revolutionary changes that had been introduced by Mrs Thatcher and erasing ‘Clause 4’ from its own constitution.  I have little doubt that many party members voted for the removal of Clause 4 imagining that they were simply acknowledging that some activities were best carried out by private enterprise.  If fact they were accepting the wholesale privatisation of every public service.  In addition, they allowed our country to become the puppet of the most reactionary American president in living memory.  This resulted in our engagement in two ‘colonial’ wars – one illegal and the other unwinnable – resulting in the loss of billions of pounds and the sacrifice of hundreds of British lives

            Party policies are decided nowadays, not by principles or by the exercise of reason and compassion, but by the findings of the latest opinion polls.  And influencing opinion polls is the popular press, owned largely by foreign billionaires who owe no loyalty to the United Kingdom and care only about ‘circulation and profit’. I don’t find it in the least surprising that thousands of electors are now disillusioned with the traditional political parties.  It is upon the way that they react to that disillusion that the future of our country depends.

Don’t bother to vote

            Probably the commonest reaction is to decline to vote.  What’s the point?  They’re all the same – feathering their own nests.  If voting changed anything they’d ban it. Our first-past-the-post electoral system makes sure that the voice of those who can’t bring themselves to vote for any of the main parties, is never heard. The Chartists of the nineteenth and the Suffragettes of the twentieth century must be turning in their graves.  They suffered and died to make sure that everyone had a vote – and they really believed that universal suffrage would change the world.

           

Those who don’t bother to vote have no right to complain when they find themselves represented by someone whose views they thoroughly detest.  Those who can’t bring themselves to vote for any of the candidates must surely be able to select one of them whose policies and attitudes they detest more than those of the others. Vote for the candidate most likely to defeat him or her.  For the much-publicised recent Clacton-on-Sea by-election I voted Conservative for the first (and probably only) time of my life.  Although I disliked the Conservative candidate’s policies, he seemed to be a nice enough chap and I thought he was the candidate most likely to defeat Douglas Carswell who had defected to UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party).   He didn’t do so and Clacton had the dubious honour of returning the very first UKIP MP to Westminster!  Still – I did my best. 

Vote for one of the ‘minority’ candidates

            We don’t yet know how many candidates there will be for our own constituencies in next May’s General Election. In every English constituency there will certainly be representatives of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal-Democrat Party.  There will almost certainly be a Ukipper (in my Clacton constituency he’ll be the sitting MP) and a Green Party Candidate.  Also there’s likely to be a variety of fringe party and special-interest candidates ranging from the Official Raving Loony Party to those eager to publicise local or special concerns like ‘saving a hospital from closure’, ‘building a new bypass’ or, as we had for the Clacton by-election, a lady who wanted to raise the status and ensure the safety of ‘sex workers’.   

            My guess (and you can’t exaggerate how much I’d like to be proved wrong!) is that in the Clacton-on-Sea Constituency Douglas Carswell (the sitting UKIP MP) will retain his seat though with a smaller majority, The Conservative Candidate will come next but with only a few more votes than  his Labour opponent, followed by the Green, the Lib.Dem. the Official Raving Loony Candidate and the various ‘special interest’ candidates who will get only a tiny handful of votes each.

UKIP versus GREEN

            In my constituency (Clacton-on-Sea) our sitting MP is a Ukipper.  That is true of only one other constituency in the United Kingdom.  In most other constituencies there will be a Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democrat MP who will be looking nervously over his or her shoulder at the UKIP contestant and wondering what effect this new and apparently growing party will have on the election result.

            UKIP and its leader Nigel Farage, remind me uncomfortably of the NAZI party and its leader, Adolf Hitler, in Germany in the 1920s and early ‘30s.   There too, the electorate was disillusioned and tired of the old political parties and their failing policies.  In Adolf Hitler they found someone who was a fervent German nationalist, just as Nigel Farage is a fervent British Nationalist, who disliked the ‘old politics’ and offered a new path for Germany of action rather than talk.  What’s more he assured the Germans that they weren’t to blame for their country’s problems – it was all the fault of ‘the Jews’.  At first most Germans thought that he was a bit of a joke,  Then the wealthy thought they could manipulate him for their own purposes.   One morning though they woke up to discover that he and his brown-shirted followers had taken over their country. – Hitler’s Third Reich had arrived.

            Nigel Farage also assures us that outside forces – the European Union (demonised as ‘Brussels’) and all those foreign immigrants for which the EU, so he says, was largely responsible – were the cause of Britain’s problems.  Shake off the European yoke and get rid of all those foreigners, and Britain would be great again!  At first everyone thought that Nigel Farage – usually seen holding ‘a fag and a pint’ to assure those who saw him that he was ‘one of us’ - was a bit of a joke.  Then, as with Hitler, the wealthy and powerful thought they could use him for their purposes. They have poured their spare thousands of pounds into his party’s coffers. The story is on-going……….. UKIP is essentially a ‘one-objective party’.   The EU and immigrants are its main target.  Other causes are taken up as seems opportune, but generally UKIP policies are those of the extreme right of the Conservative Party.  Abolish ‘green taxes’ and cease subsidising solar and wind power schemes.  Encourage ‘fracking’ for cheap oil and gas.  Ignore the warnings about climate change and global warming.  It either isn’t happening or, if it is, it’s got nothing to do with human activities so there’s nothing to be done about it.  Vote for UKIP and cheaper fuel oil!  I have little doubt that thousands will be short-sighted enough to do so.

            The Green Party is almost the exact opposite of UKIP.  Below is a brief account of their policies and intentions.

We live in unsettling times. Many of the securities that our parents and grandparents fought for – a functioning National Health Service, free education, and an affordable home – now look out of reach for most of us. Coupled with this, climate change is bringing unpredictable and threatening weather patterns. People feel let down by politicians, and yet there has been an explosion in political activism. People want to do things differently and aren’t afraid to be bold and challenging.

We believe that public services should be for the benefit of the public, not sold off in bits; we believe that education is worth investing in and not something that should mean a lifetime of debt; we believe in leaving behind a better world for our children and grandchildren. This is the only world we have and its welfare, above all things, should be the highest priority for us all.

Politics should work for the benefit of all, not just those who shout the loudest or have the deepest pockets.  We believe in “The Common Good”. A vote for the Green Party is a vote for The Common Good.

            Like UKIP, the Green Party is growing.   They have just one MP – in Brighton – but in the European Parliament elections and in recent by-elections (including that in Clacton) Green candidates received more votes than the Liberal Democrats. Currently there is controversy as to whether The Green Party’s President is to join with the leaders of the Conservative Party, Liberal-Democratic Party, Labour Party and UKIP in public televised debate before next May’s general election.  David Cameron is refusing to take part in the debate unless the Greens are also invited.  He is probably wise to do so.   Green arguments, persuasively presented, are far more likely to draw voters from Labour, Liberal Democrat, and even UKIP than they are from the Conservatives.

            If (and it’s quite a big ‘if’) I’m still around in May, I shall vote for the Green Candidate.  I hope that a great many other people will do the same.    

           

Tendring Topics…….on line

A Glimpse into the future?

The above news cutting from a German regional newspaper was sent to me by a friend living in the Black Forest area. It shows a ten-years-older (and wiser) German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, commenting in 2020 on the failure of the Copenhagn Climate-Change Conference to come to a satisfactory concluson. It is doubly prophetic since the newspaper is dated 4th December, before he Conference had even begun!

The print of the caption is, I regret, too small to read on this blog. My ability to read German is distinctly limited. However I have managed to work out that it is headed 'Late Repentance' and goes on to say that this is one of the posters that greeted Angel Merkel, and other national leaders when they arrived at Copenhagen airport for the Conference. It was part of a Greenpeace Poster campaign.

I don't really think that Chancellor Angela Merkel (or Prime Minister Gordon Brown) need be repentant about their roles at Copenhagen, except perhaps that, unlike Greenpeace, neither of them had foreseen inevitable failure.

A Lucky Year?

To ethnic Chinese, ‘eight’ is a lucky number. That, so I am told, is why they were so keen to hold the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008. Ariel, my elder grandson’s Taiwanese girl-friend was convinced that the year that is coming to an end would be an extremely fortunate one for me. It was the year of my 88th birthday and my house number is also 88!

Myself and Ariel, Grandson Chris’ Taiwanese girlfriend

Actually, I often feel that I have been blest by good luck all my life. No, I have never won the lottery…..but as I have never bought a lottery ticket that is hardly surprising. Over and over again though my life has been punctuated by extraordinary coincidences, and circumstances that seemed to be disasters, but have turned out to be blessings in disguise.

Right -grandson Nick and Romy, his Belgian girlfriend.

2009 isn’t quite over yet, but yes, despite the recession it has so far it has been a good one for me. I had an enjoyable Easter, attending with my daughter-in-law a wonderful Choral Eucharist in Southwark Cathedral that was televised and transmitted on BBC tv. To celebrate my 88 years I visited Brussels with my son and daughter-in-law, to see my grandson Nick who lives and works there. I was introduced to his girl-friend….a charming young lady whose native tongue is French but who also speaks fluent, and virtually unaccented, English. Returning to England for the actual birthday, my son, daughter-in-law and I had a celebratory meal at the very posh Essex pub run by the parents of Jamie Oliver, the well-known tv chef.

Left:Me on my 88th birthday.

Right: Jo

AKA Miss Josephine Hall M.A., B.Sc.

Later in the year my other son and daughter-in-law drove me Sheffield for a weekend to spend time with my granddaughter, an M.A., B.Sc., of whom I am immensely proud. Still in her mid-twenties she works as a social worker attached to the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield Hospital. We drove out into the Peak District and, for the first time in my life, I was able to see traditional Derbyshire ‘well dressing’.

In July I was able to return to Zittau in Germany for my third (and, I think, final) time since the end of World War II. It was to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the town’s restored Lenten Veil (in the 500 year history of which I am believed to have played a tiny part) in its own museum/church of the Holy Cross. Grandson Nick organised the visit and accompanied me. This time I travelled by rail, from London to Brussels by Eurostar and then, with Nick, from Brussels to Dresden with just one change of train at Frankfurt. By booking well in advance we travelled first class at second class prices and, believe me, first class on a German long-distance train really is first class!

Nick drove me from Dresden to Zittau, sixty-odd miles, in a pre-arranged hired car. It was a great pleasure to meet again my friends Dr Volker Dudeck and his wife Julia, and Ingrid Zeibig and her family, including her little niece Maja, now almost three! This time I managed to get to the summit of Mount Oybin, where I had helped take the heavy cases containing the famous Lenten Veil, in February 1945.

From the Left: Ingrid Zeibig, Maja, Ingrid’s mother Frau Ingrid Kulke, Ingrid’s sister-in-law Kornelia (Konnie) and brother Andreas. Konnie’s second baby was born in September; a boy, Tom Friedrich, a brother for Maja.

The view from the summit of Mount Oybin the far distance, swathed in mist, is the town of Zittau.

To my great surprise and pleasure, I was also given by Dr Dudeck proof copies of a long article of mine entitled ‘Return to Zittau’. It had been translated into German and published as a glossy booklet, illustrated with photographs taken locally, and pictures culled from my Flickr web site, www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea More copies of this booklet have since been published and are on sale in the tourist shop at 5€, profits going to the upkeep of the Lenten Veil, which has recently had its 300,000th visitor (an English tourist!) in the ten years that it has been on public display.

Inspired by the German booklet, I am self-publishing a similar booklet entitled ‘Zittau…..and I’ Incorporating my original Return to Zittau’, but with a great deal of additional material and half a dozen or so photographic illustrations. I am having 150 copies printed for family and friends. The typescript has gone to the printer and I hope to have them before the end of January..

Yes, it has been a good year, though I don’t think that ‘all the eights’ has had a great deal to do with it. Those who read this blog a year ago may remember that my New Year Resolution was to ‘count my blessings, count them one by one’. Two thousand-and-nine certainly gave me many to count. As, in two thousand-and-ten I shall, if I am still around, be entering my ninetieth year, I ought perhaps to hope that it will be a little less action-packed!

‘Incapable of running a bath!’……..yet the best in Essex!

It was, of course, our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell who claimed that the previous ‘Clacton First’, non-Conservative coalition administration of Tendring Council, was incapable of running a bath. Not everyone however regards him as the greatest living authority on local and world affairs. Rather more reliable is the Government’s Independent Audit Commission which awarded the Council three out of four for performance, and declared it not only to be the best local authority in Essex, but in the top twenty-five of the two hundred plus local authorities in the country! I wonder what Mr Carswell, who is perhaps best known as a climate change sceptic, and for his purchase (at public expense) of ‘a love seat’ and a £60 kettle for his second home in Thorpe-le-Soken, has to say about all the other Essex authorities. Unlike Tendring Council, several of them invested their tax-payers’ money in high-interest-earning banks in Iceland…..and are now regretting it!

Most of the data on which the Audit Commission’s report was based was garnered during the previous non-Conservative administration of which Mr Carswell was so scathing. Possibly that is why the reaction of the present Council leader, Mr Neil Stock has been distinctly low-key. He praises the Council’s staff (not the Council!) for their hard work but says that the Audit Commission has given a loud and clear message that they still have some serious concerns. The report had pointed out that the council’s public image was poor, with less than half of local people surveyed expressing satisfaction with the way it ran things.

He added encouragingly that the report said that Tendring had ‘a firm foundation for future improvement’ (under Mr Stock’s new Conservative administration of course!)

There are, of course, several reasons why Tendring Council has a poor public image. The current in-fighting between the two, almost equal, opposing Parties doesn’t help. Then again many people imagine that all public services are the responsibility of the district council. Mobility scooter users like myself for instance, are particularly conscious of the atrocious state of many of the pavements away from the town centre. How many, I wonder, realize that these are the responsibility of the Conservative County Council (who received only an ‘adequate’ rating from the Audit Commission) to whom the greater part of our Council Tax is paid. I think that many of Tendring Council’s services, including, for instance the refuse collection and recycling collection services and the street cleansing service, that are second to none.

Then again, for both the local and national press, local government disasters provide much more attractive stories than local government triumphs. The news story about the Audit Commission’s findings is to be found only at the bottom of Page 7 of the Clacton Gazette of 17th December, with the headline, ‘Council staff earn a pat on the back’. I suggest that had Tendring been rated the worst, instead of the best, local authority in Essex, the story would have been on the front page with some such headline as ‘Tendring First’ Council comes Last! and a story about how the new administration was doing its best to clear up the mess left by its predecessor.

Week 22.09

Tendring Topics…….on line

An undignified exit

There is no doubt that the Speaker of the House of Commons had to depart. He had tried to conceal the venality and greed of many of the House’s members, and had shown himself much more interested in the identity of the whistle-blower than in the activities that had been exposed. I didn’t care for the manner of his going though. Could it be that some MPs were less concerned about the fact that he had attempted a cover-up than that it had proved to be unsuccessful?

I have little doubt that he saw himself as trying to protect the honour of the House and of its members, in the tradition of the 17th Century speaker who famously defied the emissaries of King Charles I when they sought to arrest rebellious MPs. Did all of those members who demanded his resignation have nothing whatsoever about which they would have preferred their constituents to remain unaware?

I wasn’t particularly pleased to see our own MP, Mr Douglas Carswell, among the leaders of the pack. I have no doubt that he hasn’t spent a penny that wasn’t permitted by current rules, but we learn that he has claimed for the cost of a fridge freezer and two tables that wouldn’t have been permitted under the agreed new code of conduct. His last year’s claim of £23,083 for his second home was almost a thousand pounds below the permitted maximum. Compared with some of his colleagues he is a paragon. Doesn’t he sometimes though, feel a shade uneasy about the fact that for just a part of his ‘necessarily incurred expenses’ he received a tax-free payment in excess of the total income of a great many, possibly a majority, of his constituents?

One of the saddest, and potentially most dangerous, results of this whole sad affair is the disillusion of the general public with the whole democratic process. Cynical jokes are enjoying a new lease of life: ‘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 been bought, stays bought’; ‘Don’t vote for them. It only encourages them!’; ‘If voting changed anything, they’d have banned it!’; and so on. It is amid such general disillusion that charismatic new leaders, promising to cast out the ‘tired old men of politics’ and bring in a new, clean, all-British era, emerge and flourish; such new leaders, in fact, as Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and in our own country (though he never succeeded in persuading more than a small minority) the late Sir Oswald Mosley.

It was Winston Churchill who said that democracy was, ‘the worst form of government, except for every other form of government that had yet been tried’


Using your vote ‘responsibly’

Nowadays young people have the right to vote in European, National and local elections once they are eighteen. In my day it was twenty-one but, because I was a prisoner of war from the age of twenty-one till I was twenty-four, I was not able to exercise this right until three years after I became eligible.

I welcomed the opportunity to do so in the parliamentary election of 1945. Home from Germany, I was still on leave from the army at the time. My mother and I went together to the polling station to register our votes. As we left we encountered a neighbour who my mother knew perfectly well had different views from our own. ‘Just voted, have you?’ she asked, ‘I hope that you voted the right way’. On my own, I would have either stammered something totally incoherent or, just possibly, launched into a long-winded and totally fruitless argument. My mother who, I discovered, was well able to ‘think on her feet’, smiled sweetly and replied, ‘We all think that we do that, don’t we?’

I thought of that diplomatic reply when I read the leading article in a recent issue of the Clacton Gazette. The editor had clearly realized that, as I have warned in the article above, the current MPs’ expenses scandal could result in electors either refraining from voting in disgust or, in anger, registering a protest vote for a minority candidate whose policies they would normally have held in abhorrence. Here are the editor’s wise words:

Please use your vote, no matter how much it makes you want to hold your nose. Use your vote freely, but also wisely and responsibly. Many people will be tempted to use this time as an opportunity to protest. However protest votes can result in unintended consequences which may pose a threat to democracy, not enhance it

I couldn’t agree more; but don’t we all think that we vote ‘wisely and responsibly’? I would hate to see the BNP gain a foothold either in the County Hall at Chelmsford or in the European Parliament. Nor would I like to see UKIP increase its influence, either at home or on the European mainland. Geographically and historically we are part of Europe. Our destiny is to play a leading role in a culturally, economically and politically united Europe, not to try to position ourselves somewhere in mid-Atlantic.

We are fortunate in having a secret ballot. We cannot be penalised or ostracised by bosses, landlords, trade-union leaders, or even indignant friends and neighbours, for voting what they consider to be ‘the wrong way’. If I were younger I might have preferred to keep my own voting intentions secret, but at eighty-eight I have no hesitation in announcing that on 4th July my vote for the European Election will be for the Green Party and for the Essex County Council my vote will be for the Liberal Democrat candidate.

Eighty-eight is Great…….so far

I certainly celebrated my eighty-eighth birthday in style. It all began a fortnight earlier when my younger son and daughter in law, Andy and Marilyn, came down from London to visit me. After an enjoyable lunch at the ‘Bowling Green’, Weeley, we drove on to the Beth Chatto Gardens, a visit that I wrote about in a recent blog.

The following Saturday Pete and Arlene brought grandson Chris from Taiwan and his girlfriend Ariel to see me. Their visit was mentioned last week.

Left:Ariel and myself in my home in Dudley Road, Clacton

Above: Andy and Marilyn high above London in the 'London

Eye'

Then, for the weekend immediately preceding my birthday, Pete and Arlene took me to Brusselsto see younger grandson Nick and meet his charming girlfriend Romy, a young Belgian lady whose first language is French but who speaks English fluently and with barely a trace of accent. Like Nick, she works for the European Travel Commission. I found her to be intelligent, a good listening-as-well-as-talking conversationalist, and an altogether warm and cheerful companion. Both in her appearance, and in some of her mannerisms, she reminded me strongly (and heart-breakingly!) of my late wife Heather, Chris and Nick’s grandma, when she was in her twenties…..and that is the greatest compliment that I can pay to anyone.

While in Brussels, Pete, Arlene and I stayed at the very posh Raddison Hotel (favoured by visitors to the European Parliament!). We all went to an enormous multiplex cinema and enjoyed watching ‘Slum-Dog Millionaire’ (in English with French and Flemish subtitles) and drove out through the Ardennes to the lovely Meuse Valley, scenically comparable with the Valley of the Rhine.

A family meal in a Brussels Restaurant. Left to right; Arlene, Pete, Nick and Romy

There we lunched in an open-air restaurant beside the Meuse in Dinant (did you know that it was in the Dinant area that fish and chips was invented?) and travelled by cable railway to the Citadel, on a rocky cliff-top high above the town. I was sorry when we had to leave late on the Sunday evening.

Dinant and the River Meuse from the Citadel, built on a commanding clifftop above the town and its strategic bridge over the Meuse.

Back in London for my actual birthday Pete drove Arlene and myself into Essex to enjoy a celebratory lunch at ‘The Cricketers’ in Clavering, owned and run by the parents of Jamie Oliver, the celebrated down-to-earth tv chef. The food and service were, as one would expect, impeccable. I am glad that I didn’t even catch a glimpse of the bill! Pete drove me home to find twenty greetings cards awaiting me; not bad for an octogenarian who has outlived many of his friends and relatives.
One of my favourite stories is of the unfortunate chap who fell off the roof of a skyscraper. As he hurtled past the eighth floor he saw all the anxious faces watching him, and called out reassuringly, ‘I’m all right so far!’

Bearing that story in mind I am able to assure blog readers that, for me, eighty-eight is great…..so far.

18th May 2009
Me at my birthday celebratory lunch at 'The Cricketers'. Clavering

Week 10.09

Tendring Topics………….on Line

The Financial Crisis

Being a prophet of doom, as I have tended to be throughout the past year is a pretty thankless role. Either you’re discredited because your warnings of disaster have proved to be false alarms, or your prophecies have turned out to be all too true and you yourself may well be caught up in the disasters that you have foreseen.

As I had suggested was likely, 40,000 families, who had imagined that they were ‘home owners’,were dispossessed last year, and the number of unemployed is about 2 million and rising. This time too, the unemployed seem to include many people at lower and middle management level, much where I had been during my years of local government service, rather than largely unskilled manual workers. I haven’t yet been seriously affected but I take no pleasure in other people’s misfortunes. I can imagine all too well how awful it must be to be without a job. To lose a home as well, on which all your future hopes had been pinned and on which you had already spent every bit as much as (perhaps rather more than!) you could afford, must surely be the final straw!

I feel particularly sorry for some folk who hadn’t attempted to get on the home ownership ladder but had been content to rent their homes and had paid their rent regularly when it became due. To their dismay they find themselves having to get out because their landlords were not actually owners but tenants or investment-home-buyers themselves who had failed to keep up their payments! I hadn’t even thought of that happening.

Way back in 1956 Heather and I did manage to take our first step towards home ownership. With a guarantee from Clacton Urban District Council we succeeded in getting a ninety-five percent mortgage to buy our bungalow in Dudley Road. One hundred percent mortgages were unheard of in those days and raising that last five percent (plus the inevitable expenses of moving into a new unfurnished home!) was a real struggle. We had been married for ten years and, although we had no debts, neither had we any worthwhile savings. In the end we sold Heather’s engagement ring to make up the sum. It was a single diamond in a square setting that I had bought with a substantial chunk of my saved-up army pay when I returned from German captivity in 1945.

I find it less than inspiring when I hear spokesmen for the New Labour Government and for the Conservative Opposition being wise after the event and urging ‘responsible’ lending on the banks and the end of mortgages of one hundred percent or more. They were the very people who vied with each other to remove restrictions on borrowing and free capitalist entrepreneurs for the ‘courageous risk taking’ that would make themselves and the nation wealthy. Nobody mentioned that it was with our money, not their own, that they were taking those risks!

How can the crisis be ended?

Your answer to this question is probably as good as mine, and mine is almost certainly as good as that of the financial experts who are responsible for the present situation. I wasn’t particularly surprised to find that one of the Prime Minister’s Chief Advisers on dealing with the financial crisis had been among the top executives of HBOS. They, of course, have been revealed as among the most irresponsible of a group of financial institutions remarkable for their irresponsibility!

Measures taken by the government don’t seem to have had a great deal of effect so far. We are told that it may be months, or even a year or so, before they take effect. That long-term view is of little interest to those who lost their jobs last week and who, with their families, are facing eviction next week from what they had fondly imagined was their home.

Can the wheels of industry and commerce really be made to turn again only by lubricating them with public money…our money? If so, how should this lubricant be applied? Not, I think, by pouring it into the bottomless pit of the banks; nor is it by handing vast sums to the motor manufacturers to enable them to continue producing even more cars that no one wants to buy.

In the 1930s President Roosevelt began to pull the USA out of its slump with his ‘New Deal’; spending vast sums of money on badly needed public works. President Obama now seems to be following a very similar course. That may well be our way forward too. Here in Britain there is an obvious need for lots of affordable housing. Let’s build those houses and the infrastructure that is need for their support, not in the vain pursuit of the chimera of home ownership for all, but for letting at affordable rents by Local Authorities and Housing Associations.

Then again, we should direct large sums towards the production of clean and renewable energy, and research into new and improved ways of exploiting wind, wave, tidal and solar power. Bring the insulation and draught proofing of our homes up to the best North European standards. Improve our woeful public transport systems. All these measures would provide employment both directly and in ancillary industries and services.

Finally, the government must find some way of reducing the enormous gap in wealth that that exists between Britain’s poor and our super-rich. It is difficult to believe that the plight of the unemployed and the homeless is being taken seriously in a society in which professional footballers are bought and sold (don’t they find that a demeaning process?) for millions of pounds; where the head of a bank whose spectacular failure makes other banks’ losses look like mislaid petty cash, has retired at fifty on an annual pension of nearly three quarters of a million pounds* (his victims, of course, struggle along on job seekers’ allowance!); and where leading members both of the government and of the opposition are prepared to be guests on the luxury yacht of a multi-billionaire. What actually happened while they were on that yacht is less important than the fact that they had accepted its owner’s lavish hospitality. Those who sup with the Devil (or with Mammon) need a very long spoon indeed. There is, as we are frequently being told, ‘no such thing as a free lunch’.

The suggested measures might not only bring the present economic depression to an end but could also lay the foundations of a truly ‘great’ Britain that could proudly lead a politically and economically united Europe along the road to prosperity. Yes, it would result in a national debt that future generations would have to pay….but it should at least ensure that they have a future in which to pay it!

*The government, realizing the extent of public anger at this particular incident is currently making desperate efforts to persuade the gentleman in question to forgo at least part of his enormous pension. They haven’t, so far, succeeded!

A welcome break!

Everyone needs an occasional break from the daily routine…. and I had a wonderful one last weekend, from 26th February to 1st March. My elder grandson Chris, living and working in Taiwan, had decided to spend a week with his younger brother Nick, living and working in Brussels!

Their Dad my son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene, invited me to accompany them on a weekend visit to Brussels so that, for a couple of days, we could all be together. Needless to say I was delighted to accept their invitation.

We took Zoe (their elderly boxer dog who now has her own ‘pet passport’) with us and crossed the Channel via the Tunnel’s shuttle service. This was another new experience for me. Cars are driven, nose to tail, onto the shuttle that consists of a series of open-ended freight wagons linked closely together to produce, in effect, a very long mobile garage. Drivers and passengers stay with their vehicles throughout the journey, which in our case was totally uneventful and lasted just half an hour. It is certainly the quickest and simplest way of taking a car to the Continent but, of course, there are no sea views or refreshing breezes. Nor, of course, is there any risk of being sea-sick.

Chris and Zoe the dog renew their friendship in Nick's Brussels' apartment

We spent the afternoon companionably in Nick’s Brussels apartment catching up with family news, and went out to a restaurant for an evening meal.

Dining out in Brussels. Clockwise, grandsons Nick and Chris,myself, Arlene and Pete

Brussels is a city with a multitude of restaurants and they seem always to be well filled. Eating out is taken very seriously indeed and is a leisurely activity about as far removed as you can get from sandwiches in front of the telly, or a ‘burger and fries’ at a MacDonalds! Me? I prefer something somewhere between the two extremes.

Here I am relaxing in my apartment in the Raddison Hotel

Pete, Arlene and I spent two nights at Brussels’ Raddison Hotel where I really discovered how the other half live! My luxurious suite (with comprehensively appointed en suite bathroom) had, among other amenities, a huge ‘built in’ tv set, the screen of which carried a message of personal welcome to me as I entered!

On the Saturday we drove into the Ardennes mountains, the starting point for the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ at the end of 1944 when the German army made its last desperate counter-offensive against the allies. We lunched in a picturesque village high in the mountains and then went on into Luxembourg. In the Grand Duchy’s capital we met and dined with a former colleague and business associate of Nick, and her boy-friend. Once again I was very favourably impressed with the absence of frontiers in today’s mainland Europe. We had no idea when we were in Belgium and when in Luxembourg though, in past times, the defence of those frontiers had cost untold numbers of young lives.

We were reminded of this on the following day when we visited the battlefield of Waterloo, just a few miles outside Brussels. This was an excursion that should be on the programme of everyone visiting Belgium’s capital. It can be enjoyed as much by those with a serious interest in history as by those who have been enthralled by the exploits of Richard (Rifleman to Colonel!) Sharpe on tv, or who have enjoyed Bernard Cornwell’s novels of the fictional hero on which the tv dramas were based!

A unique feature of this battlefield is that it has been strictly conserved by the Belgian government’s veto on any new development within the area. This means that visitors, travelling round the field of battle in a tourist bus are able to see it much as it was on that fateful day in late June 1815; the points from which Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington endeavoured to direct the course of the battle; the area where defensive ‘British squares’ withstood attack after attack of French cavalry, the 'sunken roads' in which the infantry awaited the order to attack, and the woods from which the Prussian army under Marshal Blucher advanced to engage the French flank late in the day. A commentary in English and French is accompanied by the realistic ‘noises off’ of bugle calls, the roar of artillery fire, the thunder of horses hooves and the shouts of their riders and – of course, the screams and moans of the wounded and dying.

Dozens of visitors of all nationalities throng the tourist centre. There were British, French, German and, of course, Belgians. There were film shows and presentations and dozens of books and souvenirs, all relating to the Battle of Waterloo. I bought a facsimile of the edition of ‘The Times’ newspaper which carried a report of ‘Our Glorious Victory over the tyrant Bonaparte!’

I found myself wondering what on earth was the purpose of all the carnage. Was Napoleon really such a cruel tyrant compared with some we have seen more recently? In any case, were the regimes of the nations allied against Napoleon any better? Russia in particular was a cruel autocracy of which a considerable proportion of the population were serfs (in effect slaves, bound to the estate on which they were born). In Britain, offenders, including young children, could be hanged for crimes that today would be considered trivial, and it was to be decades before there was even the pretence of democratic rule. Austria and Prussia were certainly no better. I was reminded of some lines from G.K.Chesterton’s poem The Rolling English Road:

I knew no harm of Bonaparte (and plenty of the Squire!)
And for to kill the Frenchmen I did not much aspire,
But I did bash their bayonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the rolling road an English drunkard made!

The visit reinforced my conviction that warfare, in the early nineteenth century as in the twentieth and the twenty-first, produced no winners.…….only some who lose more than others.