Week 37a 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

More Refugees

          2014 is becoming the Year of the Refugees.  We have seen harrowing pictures on the tv of thousands of Syrian refugees seeking shelter and asylum in make-shift camps in Turkey, Lebanon and other nearby countries, from the cruel war in their own homeland from which there seems to be no end in sight.  We have seen similar refugees from Gaza trying to escape relentless shelling and bombing from Israel.  They didn’t even have the option of fleeing to a safer country because the Israeli blockade prevented them from escaping from the strip of land that has been described as ‘the world’s biggest concentration camp’.  More recently we have seen thousands more refugees from northern Iraq, many of them members of Christian communities who have lived peaceably with their Muslim neighbours for centuries, fleeing from the bloodthirsty murderers and torturers of the so-called Islamic State. 

            A brief mention on a BBC news bulletin this (2^nd Sept) evening persuaded me to seek more information about at flood of refugees of which I had previously heard virtually nothing.  Did you know (I certainly didn’t before I consulted Google) that over a million refugees from eastern Ukraine had fled into Russia to escape from the relentless bombardment of their towns and villages by the forces of the Kiev government? No wonder the Russians sent a convoy of humanitarian aid vehicles to the south!  I also discovered that there have been over 2,000 fatal casualties from the civil war in the Ukraine  - most of them among the ‘rebel’ population and many, as in Gaza, civilians including women and little children. Isn’t bombing and shelling his own people one of the war crimes of which we constantly accuse President Assad of Syria?   But, as I have remarked before in this blog, It’s not what is done – it’s who it is does it, that matters as far as ‘the west’ is concerned.  The Kiev government has the support of the UK, the USA and NATO, and the refugees in this case are rebels said to be backed by Russia. They clearly ‘don’t deserve our sympathy and aren’t going to get any help from us!’

             The UK, the USA and NATO’s response to this civil war has been to blame it all onto Russia, to impose ever stronger economic sanctions on Russia and to carry out troop manoeuvres in Poland and naval exercises in the Baltic Sea. These highly provocative activities have produced a response from Russia.  They too are strengthening their armed forces and carrying out military exercises.

            A few weeks ago I wrote in this blog about the way in which, as a result of a series of military alliances, the great powers of Europe had ‘sleep walked’ into World War I.  I think that Vladimir Putin, David Cameron, Angela Merkel and Barak Obama, have sufficient sense not to follow in the footsteps of their predecessors in 1914, but some of the more bullish US Senators and Congressmen may be eager for a confrontation: ‘Sure we should teach them Rooskies a lesson  – and our boys could he do it and be home again before Christmas’. I have little doubt that within the Russian parliament there are similar irresponsible idiots.  World-wide the number of those who remember the devastation of World War II is getting smaller and smaller. 

            Certainly the Kiev Ukrainian government has been doing all it can to lure their west European friends into the conflict.  Remember how its spokesman announced that the ‘black boxes’ on that ill-fated air liner had revealed that the ill-fated Malaysian air-liner had been shot down by pro-Russian rebels. (We haven’t yet received any official word about those black boxes or about the report of the team of international experts who inspected the crash site).  The latest claim is that two Russian armoured divisions have crossed the frontier and are fighting with the rebels.  Really? I reckon that if the Russian government really had sent two armoured divisions to support the rebels, the Russian flag would by now be flying over Kiev Town Hall!

            The bloody advance of Kiev government forces has been halted (possibly with Russian help).  Now, before a counter- offensive by the pro-Russian rebels begins, is surely the time for peace talks to begin.   It should be noted that the pro-Russian rebels have never sought to take over the whole of Ukraine.  All they ask is to be allowed to keep their own language and customs and to make their own international friendships, perhaps within a loosely Federal Ukraine.  Is that really too much to ask?

            It is, of course, a very ill wind that blows nobody any good. The blood-thirsty fanatics of IS (Islamic State) and their counterparts and supporters world wide, are delighted to see their infidel opponents – the enemies of jihadist Islam in the Russian Federation and those within NATO - at each-other’s throats.  They’d like to see a real ‘shooting war’ break out between the warring infidels, hoping that when half the world had been reduced to a radio-active wilderness, the jihadists would be able to move in and enforce their evil perversion of Islam on whoever was left alive.   

Later News

            I wrote the above four or five days ago.  I am writing this on Saturday 6^th September.  Yesterday afternoon we learned that a cease-fire has been agreed between the forces of the Kiev government and the pro-Russian rebels.  The ceasefire involves a cessation of hostilities, an exchange of prisoners and negotiations on a permanent peace based, almost exactly, on the suggestions made in the paragraph above that I have now italicised and emboldened.

            I am unreservedly thankful and very much hope that the cease-fire will hold* and that the negotiations will be successful.  The response from our government and NATO has been, to say the least, ungracious.  The increased sanctions against Russia will be put into effect and there’s to be a ‘rapid response force, stationed in Poland, ready to counter any ‘act of aggression’ on Russia’s part!   Do they really want a third world war?  I am beginning to wonder.

            What they should be doing is making sure that those Baltic countries ‘the west’ is so eager to protect – don’t deliberately provoke Russian action.  Estonia, where Barak Obama made a bellicose speech, has an ethnic Russian minority of 25 percent of the population.  That means that one quarter of the population use the Russian language and have a Russian culture.  Do we, before we make unreserved promises of protection, make sure that these Russian speakers are not treated as second class citizens?  Is Russian an official language?  There’s certainly nothing unprecedented about a country having more than one official language – Belgium, Switzerland, Wales and Canada for instance are just a few examples.

            We should also ask ourselves how we British would react if the Republic of Ireland or possibly an independent Scotland, entered into a hostile military alliance against us and had a ‘rapid response’ unit stationed within its borders as a defence against British aggression.  We do know how the USA would react.  In order to prevent a successful repetition of the ‘Bay of Pigs’ failed attempt at invasion from the USA, the Cuban Government invited the USSR to position missiles and their launchers on its territory.  The USA was so concerned about this that they were prepared to risk  a nuclear war to prevent it.  Fortunately Nikita Khruschev, the Soviet President, was not prepared to risk such a conflict and withdrew the missiles.  This was hailed as a great American victory – but it’s worth noting that there was no further attempt to invade Cuba from the USA!

            Blessed are the peace-makers………………for it is upon them (not on those who constantly prepare for war) that the survival of the human race depends

Monday - 8th September (7.55 a.m.)

            Yesterday there were reports of the cease-fire being broken - probably by both sides.  As I pointed out earlier in this blog, neither side has a monopoly of irresponsible idiots.  I switched on the TV for BBC's 7.00 am news bulletin with some trepidation.  Ukraine wasn't mentioned.  No doubt it will have been later on, but a major breach of the truce would surely have been given headline status.

                I'm still hoping, and praying, for peace.

Meanwhile – back in sunny Clacton-on-Sea…………………

,

          ………………..the political parties are getting ready for the unexpected by-election caused by Douglas Carswell's defection to UKIP, which we now know is to be held on 9^th October.   UKIP has the advantage of knowing for certain who is to be their candidate and beginning their cempaign early.   There’s no honour among thieves and, so it seems, precious little among Ukippers.  Douglas Carswell has deserted the political party that helped him win his seat in two general elections at just about the worst possible moment, publishing and distributing two self-advertising leaflets before announcing his defection. Local Ukippers have cast aside the local candidate they had democratically elected only a few weeks earlier, in favour of this defector from the Conservatives.  Mr Ling has not taken his sacking quietly.  He has resigned from UKIP, intends to resign his UKIP seat on Essex County Council and to take no further interest in politics.  Who can blame him?

            I have just received another circular and what appears to be a personal letter from Mr Carswell (but I bet dozens of people have received them!) in which he addresses me as ‘Dear Ernest’ – and I had no idea we were on first-name terms!

            I do think that the local Conservative Party has hit on a very good idea in having an unofficial ‘primary election’, even though it means that their election campaign will begin later than those of UKIP or the Lib.Dems.  .Local residents of any or no political persuasion are invited to a public meeting to help select the Party’s candidate from a short list of hopefuls who will briefly address the meeting and answer questions.  There’s also a questionnaire especially for those who won’t be attending this meeting.

            I won’t be going to the meeting and I won’t be filling in the questionnaire. To do either would give a false impression.  If I vote for the Conservative Candidate in the forthcoming by-election (which seems quite likely) it won’t be because I want him or her to be my representative in parliament.  It’ll be simply because I want to keep Douglas Carswell – or any other Ukipper - out!   The election of someone of another party (any other party) as an MP is likely to be the only way of ensuring that. So I shall vote for whoever has the best chance of defeating Douglas Carswell and that at the moment seems to be the Conservative, whoever he or she may be..

            

Week 28 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

A prophetic blog reader!

            A fortnight ago I published in this blog an email received from a regular reader on the subject of the jihadist extremists in the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent and Africa.   It contained the following sentence:

The day surely cannot be far away when they succeed in overthrowing the government of a major country, or carve out a completely new country by annexing bits of other countries.

            Today it seems that that is happening.  The Isis invaders of Iraq and Syria have declared the areas that they have occupied to be a new Islamic Caliphate under their control in which ‘Sharia Law’ will be enforced.  The Shia Iraqi President desperately needs western help but apparently is not quite desperate enough to be prepared to widen his government to represent a truly united Iraqi nation.  That, he says, would be a negation of democracy – that word again.  It clearly means whatever its user wants it to mean!

            We have seen the inspiring spectacle of hundreds of young Iraqi Shia militia volunteers marching up and down with automatic rifles on their shoulders shouting words of defiance against the fighters of Isis.  I’m afraid they’ll discover that there’s a big difference between posturing at patriotic gatherings safe in the middle of Baghdad and actually facing a resolute enemy, with mortars and shells bursting all around you, comrades killed and wounded, and machine-gun fire sweeping the battlefield.

            I think it unlikely that 300 American troops can train an Iraqi army to a standard in which they can defeat those Isis fighters in the few weeks – or perhaps only days – available to them.  It would surely be disastrous for the UK or the USA to become more involved in this conflict than they already are. When we and the Americans withdrew our forces from Iraq after that disastrous and illegal invasion, I wrote in this blog that I thought it likely that within a few years Iraq would be divided into three separate states; an independent Kurdistan in the north, Shia Muslim with close ties to Iran in the south and a Sunni Muslim state in the centre.  It really took someone as ruthless as Saddam Hussein to hold those three opposing factions together.  Already there is virtually an independent Kurdistan in the north and it seems apparent that Sunni and Shia Muslims can’t and won’t live together in peace.  They’ll learn eventually (just as Protestant and Roman Catholic Christians in Europe eventually learned to live together) but we can’t, and shouldn’t try to, hasten the process by force of arms. 

            I wasn’t surprised to learn that very few members of this Isis Army that is trying to take over Syria and Iraq are actually either Syrians or Iraqis.  They are a hotchpotch of fanatics convinced that they’ve got God on their side, from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kosovo, Chechnia and, to our shame, from the United Kingdom and, no doubt, from wherever else there are Muslim communities with a few fervent jihadists or malcontents among them.

            But just as the members of Isis are from a number of different countries there is quite a surprising array of countries opposing them. I remember that when during World War II the Fascist government of Italy was overthrown and the Italians changed sides – we couldn’t bring ourselves to call them ‘allies’ – they were co-belligerents.  Perhaps we’ll have to use that expression again, though most of those concerned aren’t actually fighting yet.

            One that definitely is, is the army of President Assad in Syria.  We seem to have conveniently forgotten that Isis had its origins in Syria and was one of the groups that we were supporting in their efforts to topple President Assad.  The Syrian army is no doubt grateful that Isis has transferred its main attention to Iraq, but Isis definitely intends Syria to be part of its new Islamic Caliphate! 

Then, of course, there’s Iran.  It seems but yesterday that Iran was considered by ‘the west’ to be the centre of all evil in the Middle East.  'We' were quite sure they were  trying to make weapons of mass destruction (just as 'we' had been sure Saddam Hussein had been doing the same in Iraq!) and had to be stopped at all costs.  However Iran is now definitely keen to support Iraq’s Shia government against a Sunni invasion – and we’re welcoming that support.

Finally, Russia has supplied the Iraqi government with some second-hand jet fighter aircraft!   Who knows?  If Iraq has the trained pilots to fly them they could make the air strikes on Isis targets that Barak Obama is so reluctant to authorise, unnecessary.      

            What a muddle!  And most of it brought about by the interference of foreigners in the affairs of both Syria and Iraq.  I think it likely that if all those in Syria and Iraq who are not citizens of those benighted countries were to go home, the natives – those who haven’t yet either fled or been killed – would find a way of resolving their differences and living at peace with each other.

A footnote

Reviewing, in the Radio Times a tv programme about the 'Bay of Pigs' episode in 1961 that ended in total disaster, when the USA sponsored an armed attempt by Cuban exiles to invade Cuba and oust Fidel Castro, Gill Crawford quotes an unnamed US academic as saying: 'Every country has a right to figure out its own destiny......every time we intervene........we produce consequences that are ugly and resonate for generations'.

 If I may quote the Book of Common Prayer, I'd like every American President and every British Prime Minister, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest, that quotation.

The Idol with Feet of  Clay!

            A recent story-line in Holby City  BBC 1’s popular hospital ‘soap’ related to a terminally ill man in his nineties who came into Holby City Hospital accompanied by his granddaughter in her late twenties or early thirties.  She obviously loved him dearly and was very proud of his Polish origins and of the fact that, after coming to England in the immediate aftermath of World War II he had worked in the Fire Service, saving the lives of others at the risk of his own.  He was brave, loving, kind and generous. He was admired, not only by his grand-daughter, but by all who knew him.

            Except - that research revealed that he wasn’t Polish at all but German, and as a young man during World War I he had been a member of Hitler’s dreaded Waffen SS.  He had been a guard at a concentration camp, where he had been feared by all for his cruelty and disregard for human life.  At the end of the war he had stolen the identity of a dead Polish prisoner, in whose name he had come to England and found work in the Fire Service.  Neither his English wife nor his grand-daughter had known anything of his Nazi past and that he was, in fact, a still-wanted war criminal.

            I felt something like the shock and horror and – in the first instance – disbelief, that the grand-daughter felt on learning of her well-loved grandfather’s past, when I realized that Rolf Harris, a tv personality for whom I had felt warm and sincere admiration, had for decades been an abuser of any personable young girl who had the misfortune to make his acquaintance.

            Somehow, although I was shocked at the endless string of offences of which Jimmy Savile is  said to have been guilty, I really didn’t feel the same about him.  My early 20^th century sensibilities had been suspicious of his hairstyle and his very professional showbizzy manner.  Although I watched several of his ‘Jim’ll fix it’ programmes  and had felt admiration at his apparent working as a hospital porter, I wasn’t all that surprised when he was revealed as having been a predatory paedophile.

            I really had been taken in by Rolf Harris though. He was just as much part of the ‘showbiz’ scene as Jimmy Savile but somehow he always managed to give the impression of being an extremely gifted amateur.  And he certainly was gifted, both as an artist (he wouldn’t have had the opportunity of painting the Queen had he not been) and as an entertainer.  He gave hours of innocent pleasure to thousands of viewers and listeners and, like Jimmy Saville, did a great deal of work for thoroughly deserving charities. He had even played a leading role in a film warning children of the danger of paedophiles!

            All of that though counts as nothing compared with the now-revealed activities that have led to his downfall and exposure as an abuser of young women and girls.  I feel desperately sad and sorry for Rolf Harris’ victims, and for the thousands who have seen their idol shattered. Was Rolf Harris' prison sentence too lenient?  I reckon that he found his very public shame and disgrace, after years of adulation, a harsher punishment than any number of years in prison.  There's a couple of lines from Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol that may come to his mind:

All that we know who lie in gaol is that the walls are strong,

And every day is like a year - a year whose days are long!

Supporting Clacton’s Tourist Industry

          It isn’t very often that I find myself eye to eye with our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell – a right-wing, climate-change-denying Europhobe; a Crypto-Ukipper if there ever was one!  However I am right behind him in his support of a campaign for the reduction of VAT payable on such tourist-specific items as accommodation in hotels, guest houses and caravan sites and on, for instance, the attractions on Clacton Pier, from the current 20 percent to 5 percent.               

            I believe that the Chancellor could recover the cost of this from income tax – perhaps by making all ‘state benefits’ (including the Attendance Allowance I get because of my very limited mobility!) subject to that tax.  It is the nature of income tax that no-one is ever asked for more than they can afford to pay, whereas VAT hits the poorest the hardest and the very richest the least because, of course, the VAT on any purchased goods or services is a much smaller proportion of the income of the wealthy purchaser.

            Clacton-on-Sea does not attract the very wealthy.  In fact it attracts precisely those whom the government claims to support – the hardworking man or woman who can just afford to take his or her family for a seaside holiday on Britain’s sunny east coast but for whom a few extra pounds one way or the other make all the difference. 

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Week11 2014

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Echoes from 1982

          On 10^th July 1982, over forty years ago, bombs planted by the Provisional IRA exploded in London’s Hyde Park and Regent’s Park killing eleven soldiers, members of the Household Cavalry, and seven of their horses.  Echoes of those explosions have travelled down the years to 2014 – to make press headlines and to cast a little light on a feature of the Good Friday Agreement, that was apparently unknown to thos now responsible for governing that troubled province of the UK.

            John Downey, a former IRA member, had been arrested and was about to stand trial on suspicion of implication in those bomb outrages, but was released on the orders of the Judge when he produced a letter from the Northern Irish Constabulary assuring him that he was not ‘wanted by the police’ for any offence committed during the ‘troubles’.  At first it was suggested that this letter had been a one-off error made by the Northern Irish Police but it later became known that some 180 similar letters had been sent to other suspected republican terrorists ‘on the run’.  It was a promise amounting (at least in the recipients’ minds) to an amnesty.  It had been sent to republican suspected terrorists only and not extended either to ‘loyalists’ or to the British soldiers involved  in the ‘Bloody Sunday’ event in Londonderry.

            Peter Robinson, Northern Ireland’s First Minister, who has the almost-impossible job of holding together an uneasy power-sharing government of loyalists and republicans, claims that he had known nothing of these letters. He is said to have been ‘incandescent with rage’ when he heard of them.  He threatened to resign his post unless there was an immediate judicial enquiry into the whole matter – and David Cameron has agreed that there should be one, reporting its findings at the end of May

It has been suggested that the letters were promised to Sinn Fein by Tony Blair in order to ensure their compliance, without involving others involved in the Good Friday agreement, They were kept secret, rather like the contents of the cosy chats between Tony Blair and President Bush that took place before a majority of members of the House of Commons were deceived into endorsing the illegal and disastrous invasion of Iraq.  

It could be that it was only by means of that distinctly one-sided agreement that the present uneasy peace in Northern Ireland was secured.  I ask myself though whether a good conclusion can ever be achieved by dishonest means.  Some time ago I commented in this blog that making Tony Blair the United Nation’s ‘special peace envoy’ to the Middle East was rather like making one of the Kray brothers a Chief Constable.  Nothing has since happened to alter that opinion.

‘Why don’t they eat cake?’

            If, during the final decade of the twentieth century, you had asked an acquaintance or friend their opinion of Food Banks, they would probably have thought you were deranged.  Banks deal with money, not food. We had yet to experience the brave new world of the 21^st century!   You might have received a more positive answer in the USA because Food Banks, providing basic sustenance for the hungry poor, had been established there from 1967.   They were ‘wholesalers’ rather than ‘retailers’ though – collecting and storing donated food items and sending them, in bulk, to approved charities for distribution to those in need.

            European countries, including the UK, generally had better national social services than those in the USA and the need for Food Banks didn’t arise until nearly four decades later – in 2006.  Now they are the United Kingdom’s fastest growing voluntary service, with over 400 such banks nation-wide and growing every week.  In 2013 they fed nearly 347,000 people!  The number of applicants has grown as the Government’s welfare cuts have taken effect.  To obtain help, applicants need to get a voucher from a professional such as a local authority social worker. On presenting the voucher to the food bank they are given sufficient food for three days.

           

            Most Food Banks are co-ordinated by the Trussell Trust and are associated with Christian Churches, in accordance with Jesus Christ’s declaration that we should treat other people as we ourselves would wish to be treated.  It is very heartening that the Bishops of the Church of England and Roman Catholic Church, together with the leaders of the Free Churches, are giving their enthusiastic support, while at the same time criticising government policies that have created the need for the food banks.   Some fifty percent of the food distributed is donated by members of the public.  Some is given by private enterprises such as supermarkets and many Food Banks are supported, in one way or another, by the local authority of the district in which they are situated.

                                                   

                                                         A cartoon from the ‘Observer’

           

In my own town of Clacton-on-Sea (which includes the Brooklands area of Jaywick, said to be the UK’s most deprived area) the Food Bank is run by the Salvation Army with the support of other Christian traditions in the town including, of course, Clacton Quakers of which I am a member.

            The need for Food Banks has increased as the Chancellor’s attacks on the meagre incomes of the poor have begun to bite, though the government insists that this increase is simply because ‘scroungers’ have discovered in them a source of free food and that ‘there is no robust evidence of a link between the increase in demand for Food Banks and the welfare reforms’. It has even been suggested that some recipients of food parcels have sold on their contents!   How robust, I wonder, does evidence have to be to convince those who don't wish to be persuaded.  The fact that food parcels are dispensed only to those presenting a voucher from a welfare professional, is surely a deterrent to ‘frivolous and fraudulent applicants’.

            I have just watched a very striking programme on the tv about Food Banks and the valuable service they provide.  To provide ‘balance’ a number of denigrators of Food Banks were interviewed, including former Cabinet Minister Edwina Curry.  I’d be very surprised if any one of them has ever felt the pangs of real hunger.  Some of their comments made Marie Antoinette’s alleged suggestion that if the poor of Paris couldn’t get bread ‘they should eat cake’ seem positively liberal and benign! 

The Price of Postage Stamps

Like me, you may have thought that that massive increase in the cost of sending mail that we endured last year (First Class minimum postage 60p, Second Class 50p!) was the last we’d have to put up with for a year or two; especially as privatisation, which took place just a couple of months ago, was supposed to be going to be giving us a better, more efficient, service.

We were wrong.  Postage charges are going up again - from 1^st April which is not an inappropriate date!   First class stamps are to go up to 62p (an increase of 3.3 percent) from that date, and second class ones from 50 to 53p (an increase of 6 percent).   I’m glad that I bought enough of those attractive Madonna and Child Christmas stamps to see me through several months of the new financial year.  They’ll prove to have been quite an investment, though nothing like that of the investors who bought shares in Royal Mail at the ridiculously low price of 330p a share.  They have seen their investment almost double to £6.00 a share since they made their purchase.

It is easy to forget that whenever a public service is privatised its main purpose changes from serving the public to satisfying the shareholders!

Spring is here!

A fortnight ago I published a picture with my blog, of a few daffodils around the eating apple tree in my garden, just coming into bloom in late February.  Now in early March, as you can see, they are all in full bloom. 

 Spring 2014 really is here!  

 These daffodils have a special significance for me.  From the kitchen window of our bungalow, my wife Heather watched them grow, bloom and wither, year after year, It was where those daffodils bloom that, nearly eight years ago, I scattered her ashes after sixty years of happy marriage. I hope that when the time comes my ashes too may be scattered there.

 

 

         

Week 33 2013

Tendring Topics………on line

Clacton-on-Sea – Sea, Sand…..and Social Deprivation?

            Those of us who complain about the increasing crime rate are often assured that it’s all just an illusion.   ‘There’s a perceived increase in crime brought about by sensational press reports and by politicians with an axe to grind. The fact is that there is a steady decrease in reported crime. Year by year Britain is becoming a safer country in which to live’. 

This may well be true in most of the country but it certainly isn’t in north-east Essex.  In Clacton-on-Sea there were 38 robberies in the town during April, May and June compared with only 15 in the corresponding months last year.  In Colchester (which I certainly never think of as being ‘safer’ than Clacton) there was also a rise in robberies but only from 8 to 15.  Elsewhere throughout Essex, just as the wiseacres insist, the number of robberies and other crimes did fall.

I am disturbed by the knowledge that part of that north-east Essex crime wave is taking place uncomfortably close to my home in Clacton’s Dudley Road.  It’s not so long ago that a knife attack took place within view of my front door.  Had it not been for a neighbour giving first aid and summoning an ambulance and the Police it would have resulted in a violent death and a murder charge. More recently there has been a mugging involving ‘grievous bodily harm’ in Old Road, only a few hundred yards away from my home.  Even more disturbing to me personally was a report in last week’s Clacton Gazette of a man who had withdrawn a three-figure sum in cash from Magdalene Green Post Office at 9.30 am one morning.. As he walked home along Coppins Road in broad daylight, three men attacked him and robbed him of his money.  It is from that same Post Office that I sometimes draw three figure sums of money from my bank account.  I too travel home along Coppins Road on my mobility scooter!

Recently elected Police and Crime Commissioner Nick Alston is reported as saying that Clacton’s problems arise from. ‘a toxic mix of multiple occupancy, alcohol, people choosing to live here or being placed here, and unscrupulous landlords’.  Well, yes, but he might have added that another very potent ingredient of that toxic mix is the very high, and still rising, level of unemployment, and the virtual impossibility of  unskilled new arrivals in the town finding work.

Social Deprivation

The local daily Gazette reports the finding of the Centre for Social Justice that 54 percent of those aged between 16 and 64 in Clacton’s Pier Ward, are on unemployment benefit, the fifth highest percentage in the country.  That’s at the very centre of the town which one might have thought would be its richest area! In Jaywick, part of which is officially Britain’s most deprived area, 35 percent of working age people claim unemployment benefit and 54 percent of the over-16s have no educational qualifications.  They are not alone.  In Clacton overall 41 percent of adults, over twice the national average, have no qualifications!  Nearly one in three Clactonians, the fifth highest in the country again, claims a state pension. I’m one of those one-in-three and I hope that, at 92 and having been a taxpayer for some seventy of those years (and I still am!), no-one grudges my claiming it.

Councillor Peter Halliday, the Council’s leader, is reported as saying that it is important to understand what is causing these problems and how to address them.  He says that high unemployment in the town has been exacerbated by a high number of benefit migrants moving to cheap accommodation either in Jaywick or in one of the old bed-and-breakfast boarding houses being converted into night shelters.  He said that more needed to be done to encourage working people to live in Clacton, rather than the unemployed.

The fact is, of course, that many, perhaps nearly all, of those unemployed ‘benefit migrants’ would very much like to become ‘working people’.  They don’t come to Clacton because it’s easier to get ‘benefits’ here.   They come because the cap on benefits and the ‘bedroom tax’ have made it almost impossible for unemployed – and many low-paid working people – to live in the London area.  It’s a short train-ride from London to Clacton.  It’s usually possible, if you’re patient and try really hard, to get some sort of employment in London.  Incomers don’t realize – or don’t believe – that the employment situation is much worse here.

Many of those who survive on benefits and seem content to do so, have tried in vain so many times to get work that they have given up trying.  Meanwhile, as a result of the government’s austerity cuts and in the interests of ‘efficiency’, machines are replacing flesh and blood, employers are ‘down-sizing’ and ‘rationalising’ and there are fewer and fewer jobs for unskilled or semi-skilled workers to do.  The reason why, as Councillor Halliday suggests, we are short of ‘working people’ is that we are desperately short of work for them to do.

Clacton’ sunny side!  

Younger son (Andy) enjoying himself on Clacton beach half a century ago!

Meanwhile, at least during this extraordinarily hot and sunny summer, Clacton-on-Sea appears on the surface to be flourishing.  Visitors (mostly day-visitors it’s true) are enjoying safe sea bathing from our sandy, gently sloping beaches, strolling through our colourful cliff-top gardens and having seaside fun on the reinvigorated pier. The till-bells of pubs, restaurants and town centre shops are ringing merrily!  I doubt if any of the visitors who throng Pier Avenue, High Street and Station Road in the August sunshine would believe that they are enjoying themselves in a ‘benefit ghetto’!  Those of us who have made our homes here (I have lived in Clacton for nearly sixty years so I surely qualify as a native) wouldn’t wish to live anywhere else.   Here in Clacton-on-Sea it is rarely quite so cold, quite so unbearably hot, quite so wet, quite so overcast as other parts of the UK.   No other seaside resort in Britain has as low an average rainfall as Clacton-on-Sea, Brightlingsea, Frinton-on-Sea, Walton-on-the-Naze and Dovercourt.  The driest spot in the UK is officially St. Osyth – just two or three miles as the crow flies from my front door.

Elder son Pete busy with his school homework almost fifty years ago.

Clacton is a wonderful place in which to live and to bring up children – but we do need better schools for them  (like the ones we had here half a century ago!) and much better career opportunities for them as they grow up. They shouldn't need to go to  London, or even to Colchester, Chelmsford or Ipswich, to get a worthwhile job. Both my sons took it for granted that there would be no satisfying employment locally for them and that they would have to go to London to further their careers

Human Resource Units (or Children of God?)

 Not everyone is clever or skilled.  There needs to be adequately paid jobs for those who are willing enough to work, but lack any particular skill.  Public authorities once met that need but do so no longer.  Do you remember the time when there were uniformed porters at railway stations, conductors on buses and important looking uniformed ‘commissionaires’ at the entrance of cinemas and theatres?  They weren’t very important or very well-paid people but they provided a uniformed ‘presence’ that deterred vandals and hooligans, they answered people’s questions, and they generally made life easier for the rest of us.  Nowadays there’s often no-one manning the ticket office at Clacton Station!  There is a ‘ticket machine’ and notices warning of the penalties resulting from travelling without a ticket.  What more can travellers possibly want?

          Officials who are responsible for the work-force of any organisation used to be known as Personnel Managers or perhaps Staff Managers.   Have you noticed that nowadays they’re known as Directors of Human Resources?  That job title effectively puts men and women, whom we Christians believe to be the children of God, on the same level as cans of beans, bags of cement and gallons of petrol; Human Resource Units (HRUs).  From time to time, like bags of cement and gallons of petrol, they become surplus to requirements and can be discarded when cost effectiveness, productivity and profitability (the three ‘persons’ of Mammon’s Unholy Trinity) demand it.  The maximising of profits is best ensured by Zero Hours Contracts which mean that workers are always available to perform any task required – but the employer has no obligation to provide them with work or to pay them a retainer while they are idle.  The main purpose of any public utility company is no longer to serve the public – but to maximise the dividends of the share-holders.

            There surely must be a better way of organising society than that!

             

Week 33 2012

Tendring Topics.......on Line

Olympics Fever (continued)

            My elder son Pete, a regular blog reader, felt that I wasn’t being quite fair to Great Britain’s Olympic team in my comments last week.  He pointed out that, taking into consideration the size of the populations from which each country has to choose its Olympic teams, Great Britain had already overtaken both the USA and China.

            Here’s what he has to say:

I see from your Blog that you have also been watching the Olympics. I would say that considering  our population, we are doing far better than the USA or China.  To be fair, you should compare Team GB with any collection of 10 American States. Similarly we are doing so much better than the Russians who have twice our population. Did you know that New Zealand is the country doing the best compared to its population, with 3 gold medals and only 4m people – about the same as Scotland?  Also Yorkshire has won 7 of our gold medals, which means they would be 8^th in the Country list.

            In a later email sent on the eve of the Games’ closure, he wrote:

            I think it is  pleasing to see everyone cheering on the son of a Somalian refugee.  In the Games Britain has massively benefited from its immigrant population, and regardless of other allegiances, from what I saw in Greenwich where everyone was watching a giant screen, a very multi-cultural audience was rapturously cheering British athletes of any colour or creed. I think this has been a bit of a victory for “multi-culturalism”

Pete’s figures in that first email are, of course, based on the situation a week ago, but I doubt if the proportion of medals won by each national team changed all that much after that.

            On Thursday (9^th August) afternoon I had the good fortune to switch on to BBC 1 just as the Dutch contestant had begun her individual ‘dressage’ performance at the Greenwich equestrian stadium.  She was followed by British gold-medal-winning Charlotte Dujardin.  I have watched a few medal-winning performances during these games but this was the first time that I could truly say that both performances were not merely committed, flawless and thoroughly professional, but almost breath-takingly beautiful to watch. For her horse’s dance the Dutch contestant had chosen pieces from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, with which I was familiar.  I enjoyed every minute of it.

            Charlotte had chosen a patriotic medley of familiar melodies.  It included ‘I vow to Thee my Country…..’ from Holst’s Planet Suite and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ from Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance. Her performance too held me entranced.  Horse and rider were as one, both responding as a single unit to the mood as well as to the melody of the music.  When she bowed out I felt that though both were excellent, Charlotte Dujardin was the better of the two.

            Thus the announcement of the score, which made it clear that she had in fact earned another gold medal to add to the one already gained in the team ‘dressage’ competition came as no surprise. No-one who had experienced that performance could have doubted that Charlotte had earned her place in Olympic history. Nor, I think, would anyone have doubted that her Netherlands predecessor thoroughly deserved the silver medal. How my father, who had spent all his working life with horses, would have appreciated and enjoyed those performances! 

           

‘Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder’

            The perception of beauty and ugliness is indeed, a very personal matter.  Many tv viewers may have been quite unmoved by the spectacle of Charlotte Dujardin and her horse earning their Olympic gold medal.  Similarly there are paintings and structures about which others wax lyrical and that seem to my eyes to be just plain ugly.  One such is that extraordinary structure in the Olympic Park which to me suggests a meccano model made by a baby giant and abandoned half-finished.  I feel much the same about ‘the Shard’, that other monstrosity that now dominates the London skyline.   Others though, find them beautiful and inspiring.  Probably my opinion says more about me than it does about the structures concerned.  Yes, I am an old fogy.

            Locally, I realize from comments in the local press, many people have similar feelings about the wind turbines that have become a feature of the local seascape and more recently a conspicuous spectacle inland between Clacton and St Osyth, plainly visible from miles around. ‘Ugly, monstrous, noisy, dangerous, an eyesore, expensive, useless, unnecessary, a danger to birds and wildlife, a threat to house values in the area,’ are just some of the accusations levelled at them.

            It was quite refreshing to get a different view in readers’ letters page of last week’s Clacton Gazette.  Mr C. Griggs of Walton-on-the-Naze, an artist who was formerly an engineer, finds them delightful.  He writes that his artistic nature sees tham, ‘as an awe-inspiring work of art…..huge sculptures that enhance our skyline and otherwise bleak seascape’. He adds that, ‘as an engineering project they are awe-inspiring.  I look at them as my bus passes and wish that it would slow down so that I have them in sight for longer.  One day, I promise myself, I will get off the bus and go to the site, have a good look and maybe do some painting’.

            John Kampf of Meadow Way, Jaywick is a little less poetic but equally forceful: ‘When I was driving in Jaywick Lane the first time, I saw this beautiful invention, an invention that benefits mankind.  I would like one in my back garden. Wind turbines are harmless and cheap to run’.  I don’t like to think of the furious response that those two letters may evoke in next week’s Readers Letters!

             Wind turbines as objects of art, arouse neither my enthusiasm nor my indignation.   They do have a certain stark grandeur and they are certainly not so ugly, nor so potentially dangerous, as the electricity pylons that stride across our countryside and to which we are now thoroughly accustomed.  I have no doubt at all though that – together with the means of harnessing the power of the sun, the waves and the tides – they will provide a badly needed alternative source of the power that is needed to support our civilisation.  They are energy sources that are infinitely renewable, unlike the fossil fuels that will eventually be exhausted and will in the meantime, year by year, become more and more expensive.   Unlike those fossil fuels (coal and oil) they do not produce by-products that poison the environment and hasten climatic change nor, like nuclear energy, do they have a lethal residue that remains dangerous for centuries and for which mankind has not yet discovered a safe means of disposal.

            Now we have a new generation of wind turbine – and the prototypes are being installed for testing with the existing forty-eight wind turbines just a few miles off-shore from Clacton-on-Sea.  We may well think that the existing turbines are enormous but compared with these new ones they are pigmies!

            The new giants are said to have have a blade-span equivalent to the length of two and a half football pitches! – and two of them are currently being installed on the Gunfleet Sands.  Work began in May and installation is expected to be complete by November.  The installers are so confident of success that plans are already being made for 300 of these monsters to be installed round the coast of Britain between 2013 and 2017.

            This pioneering development on the Gunfleet Sands presents the Tendring District with great opportunities.  It will strengthen Harwich’s claim to be the centre for the servicing of North Sea wind farms, and will surely attract extra visitors eager to visit the beaches and the pier from which these new giants can be viewed in action.  I wish I felt confident that the current District Council is up to seizing those opportunites and making the most of them.

            The engineering genius at the dawn of history who first had the idea of a windmill, using turning sails to harness the power of the wind and thus to supplement man and ox-power, would surely have been astonished at the development of his invention, centuries later!  Perhaps, somewhere beyond time and space, he does know about it….and is applauding.

The Olympics Legacy

          I don’t think that it is in any way an exaggeration to claim that The London Olympics of 2012 have been a tremendous success,  Britain’s best ever.  The opening and closing ceremonies excelled and were lauded world-wide, though I can’t pretend that most of the music of the closing ceremony was quite my cup of tea. Actually I much preferred that of Songs of Praise on BBC2 a few hours earlier. But there, that’s just the old fogy in me surfacing again!  

British athletes and gymnasts, cyclists, sailors and equestrians have garnered an unrivalled harvest of medals, a gratifying number of golden ones among them.  Taking Britain’s population into account we have done better than any of our major rivals.  The participants have been a credit to themselves, to their trainers and to the cheering crowds who had supported them.

            It might have been thought that the government would have been pretty pleased with the result and feel that they had got something right at last.  Britain had demonstrated its athletic and sporting prowess.  Now, while maintaining the standard in those fields, we needed to concentrate on upgrading our young people’s scholastic, academic and technical standards to rival those of their contemporaries in Europe, Asia and the USA. This too, just like the training for the Olympics, will demand determination, hard work, and sometimes deadly-boring continuous repetition and practice.

            Is that what the government is doing?   Not a bit of it.  Against all the evidence, a government that has cut education grants and is even now encouraging the sale of school playing fields, has  chosen this moment of triumph to decide that there isn’t enough physical education in British schools. What, I wonder, would they have done had we failed to win any medals?  Nor are they going to leave it to Head Teachers, much less Education Authorities, to decide how much PE there must be and what should be its nature.  These devotees of ‘localism’ who had  insisted that all reforms must come from the bottom up, not from the top down, are going to dictate not only how much time must be spent on PE but how it is to be spent.  It must be on proper competitive sport (like 'we' had in Eton and Harrow), none of this mamby-pamby ‘Indian dance’ stuff, insists David Cameron.

            Needless to say local politicians are getting in on the act.  London’s Mayor Boris Johnson, whose current motto appears to be ‘Anything David Cameron can do, I can do better’, has been quoted as urging that every schoolchild should have two hours of PE a day!   That would leave just three hours a day for reading, writing and arithmetic (the foundation of any education), science, history, geography and religious education, not to mention frivolities like art and music.  It would not however need the daft idea of devoting almost half of each school day to PE, to derail an already flawed educational system.   Every extra hour that is devoted to physical education means an hour less for the teaching of academic, scientific and technical subjects.    

Thanks to the government’s policy of combating unemployment by training the young unemployed for non-existent jobs, and extracting the maximum work capacity from the disabled, we are already building up the world’s best-trained army of unemployed.  The government’s post-Olympic educational policy could result in our also having an unrivalled host of athletic and muscular illiterates!

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Week 26 2012

Tendring Topics.....on line

Quite Legal……but Immoral!

          That, you may have thought, was an accusation that might be made about some of the activities of money-lenders, bookmakers, escort agencies, massage parlours and similar dubious individuals or institutions.  They though are all just small fry compared with the big operators who (obviously for a reasonable fee) can make sure that the rich and famous, the great and the good, get away with paying only a fraction of the income tax of us lesser mortals.

            I have been protesting about the iniquity of legal tax avoidance for years. A particularly flagrant case has at last caught the attention of David Cameron our Prime Minister. His shock/horror at finding that a well-known comedian’s financial arrangements had the perfectly legal effect of reducing the percentage of his income-tax payments  to lower than that of the council employee who empties his dustbins, spurred him into making his judgemental statement about the morality of income tax avoidance.

            I’m not going to pretend that I understand the details of the tax avoidance scheme with which this individual was involved but I understand that his income was first paid into an off-shore account from which he received no income but ‘borrowed’ all the money that he needed.  He, of course, was just the one tax avoider who was singled out and pilloried (and has, as a result, withdrawn from the scheme), but there are scores, perhaps hundreds, of others involved in the same or other similar schemes.  I suspect that if all the tax avoidance loopholes were closed, we would be well on our way to solving the deficit problem that is responsible for so much of the austerity that the government has imposed upon us during the past two years.

            My own solution to the problem would be to tackle it from its source.  I would make the principal source of the national revenue a ‘citizenship tax’, a percentage of the gross income of every single one of us without exception or exemption, as our payment for the very considerable privilege of being a citizen of the United Kingdom. Evading, by any means at all, that basic ‘membership fee’ would be considered to be as irresponsible and antisocial as drink-driving is today! I think it likely that fifteen or twenty percent of income overall would be more than adequate.  This percentage would amount to a very small sum from the very poor (just as percentage increases to their income are very small) but a very large sum from the seriously wealthy.   Once that citizenship tax had been paid, what happened to the remainder of the taxpayer’s income (which, for the seriously wealthy would still be a very large sum) would be no concern of the state.  It could be paid into an off-shore account, donated to charity, used to buy a football team, a yacht, or a home on the shores of the Mediterranean, frittered away on extravagant living – or saved for ‘a rainy day’.

 No - it isn’t going to happen – not this year, not in this decade, probably not in this century.

In the meantime I hope that our Prime Minister and government will cease wringing their hands at the immorality of tax avoidance and close the legal loopholes that make this avoidance possible.  If they can’t do it then it is time they were replaced by a government that can – and will!

A Forgotten Anniversary

            I am often awake at about 5.00 am.  I usually listen to the 5.30 am news headlines, weather forecast and Prayer for the Day on Radio 4, before getting up at 5.45 am with the arrival of Farming Today.  Just before Prayer for the Day listeners are reminded of news items that made the headlines on that day in bygone years.  Last Thursday  (21^st June) for instance, we were told that Prince William had been born on 21^st June in 1982 and that it was therefore his thirtieth birthday, and that on that date in 1945 American forces had finally succeeded in taking the Pacific Island of Okinawa from the Japanese.  There were one or two other anniversaries that I have forgotten but there was one, certainly front page news at the time, which was conspicuously ignored.

            It was the capture of Tobruk by General Rommel’s German Afrikakorps in 1942; not quite as disastrous as the fall of Singapore to the Japanese earlier in that same year, but certainly the nadir of British fortunes in North Africa – a situation that was to be dramatically reversed a few months later with the Battle of El Alamein.

            The fall of Tobruk was seventy years – a lifetime – ago, but it is not an anniversary that I shall ever forget. I was one of the 30,000 British and allied troops taken prisoner on that day and destined to spend the remainder of World War II as a PoW.

            The eight-gun Medium Artillery Battery of which I was a lowly member had been in almost continuous action from the day in late May (a few days after my 21^st birthday) when Rommel had launched his offensive in the neighbourhood of Gazala, some forty miles west of Tobruk.  Continuously on the move, we had in mid-June become part of the Tobruk garrison, defending the perimeter in a position to the south-east of the town and port.

            On 19^th June we learned that we were cut off from the main British forces but were assured by ‘Military Intelligence’ (we used to say cynically that, in descending order, there were three kinds of intelligence – human, animal, and military!) that the main German forces were by-passing Tobruk and moving eastward towards Cairo and the Nile delta.  We settled down for the night expecting a long siege.

            We were woken before dawn by the thunder of artillery fire, the roar of low-flying aircraft, the rattle of machinegun fire and explosion of bombs.  The enemy attack had begun – and it was clearly concentrated on our sector of Tobruk’s perimeter!   We manned the guns and, for several hours, fired at unseen targets, our guns directed by an Observation Post Officer and Assistant in a forward position. Our 4.5mm gun/howitzers were designed and built to batter down fortifications, not to be aimed at relatively small, moving targets like armoured cars and tanks. Our guns targeted the terrain over which the enemy tanks were advancing – but if the tank commander made sure that they were well separated as they advanced he could be certain that some, probably most, would come through unscathed.

            Meanwhile Stuka bombing aircraft were flying without opposition overhead (on that fateful day we had no support either from the Royal Navy or the RAF) and enemy shells were falling all around our gun position.  ‘Airburst’ shells exploding overhead were particularly deadly.  Much of the force of those bursting on impact was absorbed by the desert sand.

            Our targets were getting closer and closer.  Before we could be over-run we were ordered to ‘limber up’ our guns and withdraw to a new position to the north-west from which we could see, in the distance, enemy tanks heading toward the town and port.  Again we opened fire, this time within sight of our targets.  The dust and smoke of battle made it impossible to see whether our shells were having any effect.

            As darkness fell, the firing on both sides subsided. The air reeked of burnt cordite and of smoke from burning vehicles.  It was painfully obvious to us that Rommel’s attack had succeeded and that the centre of Tobruk was already in enemy hands.  We laid down to sleep beside our guns on the desert sand with the prospect of death, maiming and/or captivity on the following day.  Exhausted, we all slept soundly anyway!

            With the dawn a German spotter plane flew low overhead.  We reached for the captured Italian rifles that most of us had acquired and fired an ineffective volley.  We ‘stood to’ on the guns awaiting an order to fire. We fully expected to be ordered to make a heroic ‘last stand’ and no doubt we would have done so. Fate though, decreed otherwise. A radio message from the garrison commander, a South African, General Klopper ordered us to disable our guns, set fire to our transport and await our victors’ orders.  He had surrendered the garrison to avoid further pointless bloodshed.

            Thus, I became a PoW.  I spent the next almost–three-years, first in a large PoW camp in Italy and later in a small working camp in Germany. When the Third Reich collapsed in May 1945, I liberated myself (with a great deal of help from the Soviet Army!) and made my way through Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia ultimately to the British army – and home!

            There was an unexpected sequel to my capture at Tobruk and my subsequent life as a PoW.  Years later (it must have been in the early 1970s) my wife and I, with our two then-teenage sons were enjoying a camping holiday in Austria.  Taking a  trip to the summit of the Muttersberg near the small town of Bludenz in Vorarlberg province, we found ourselves sharing a cable car with an almost identical German family.  I commented on the father’s very good English.  ‘Yes’, he said, ‘I was a PoW in England for three years and worked on a farm there’.  Shaking hands I told him that I too had been a PoW but had spent 18 months in Italy and 18 months in Germany – that accounted for the fact that his English was much better than my German.  I then asked him – what one PoW always asks another! – ‘Where were you captured?’   He replied, ‘Tobruk’ adding, in case I had never heard of the place, ‘that’s in North Africa!’    I had been captured there on 21^st June 1942.  He had been captured a few months later, subsequent to the Battle of El Alamein!

            It’s a small world!

 A minor banking crisis!

             Nat.West, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulsterbank are banks which last week spectacularly failed to perform what most of us see as their main purpose – looking after our money, adding incoming sums to our accounts, paying our bills, and repaying, promptly and efficiently when we need it, the money we have entrusted to their care.  I wonder if those banks are managed by some of those brilliant financial supermen who need  a salary of millions of pounds a year  to persuade them to turn up at their offices, plus the promise of further five-figure bribes (or bonuses) if they’re to give us their very best?   Offer them less, so we’re told, and they’d go elsewhere.

            When my family and I first moved to Clacton in 1956 I signed on with the Co-op Bank, largely because they imposed no bank charges on those who kept their accounts in credit, and they had a branch office on the corner of Rosemary Road and the Grove, just a couple of hundred yards from the office in the Town Hall where I worked.  That was over half a century ago.  The Co-op Bank is not one of the UK’s largest and most prestigious, but it has never needed to be ‘bailed out’ by us taxpayers. It has never let me down and it has an ethical investment policy that allows me to be confident that my money, entrusted to their care, isn’t used to buy armaments, to exploit the poor, or to help prop up dodgy enterprises or autocratic regimes. The nearest branch is in Colchester but the bank is easily accessible by phone or on the internet. I can pay cheques into my current account at any post office and, again from any post office or cash machine, I can use my Co-op VISA debit card to withdraw cash from that account.  Using the internet I can instantly check the state of my current account and details of payments and withdrawals.  I have no complaints.

The Weather!

          This is a subject on which, this year, words almost fail me; a winter drought that the water companies assured us would take months of steady rain to remedy, followed by a late spring and early summer of high winds, torrential rain (some areas have had a month’s rainfall in two or three hours), floods, high winds and – just occasionally – warm sunshine!   We are just at the beginning of my ninety-second summer and I have never seen another like it! It’s true that I can’t remember much about my first two or three summers I but have been credibly informed that in the year (1921) in which I arrived, the summer was particularly warm and dry.

            Surely no-one can now deny that we are in the midst of a period of world climatic change and fewer and fewer can possibly believe, as our MP does, that human activity has no responsibility for it.  Our ancestors would have been convinced that we had incurred the anger of God (or perhaps of ‘the gods’) and so perhaps, in a sense, we have.   If not God, then certainly Nature is reacting to our selfishness, greed and our profligate use of fossil fuels.

            I am only thankful that Clacton and the Tendring District generally have, as is often the case, escaped the flooding and devastation that has occurred elsewhere - and we have had more than our fair share of the occasional warmth and sunshine!