5th February 2015

Tendring Topics……..on line

 Eye to Eye with ‘Private Eye’

           

On 24^th January I wrote critically  in this blog about the Westminster Abbey authorities flying our national flag at half-mast in mourning for the death of the King of Saudi Arabia, and of the Prime Minister and the Prince of Wales, a future Defender of the Faith (our Faith!) flying to that benighted country to present their condolences.  I asked if we really needed oil – and arms sales – so desperately that we were prepared to take as an ally a country whose ethos is the exact opposite of the ‘British values’ that our Prime Minister claims to be so keen to promote.

            I have just read the copy of Private Eye published on 23^rd January, just the day before I published that blog, in which they gave their view of the United Kingdom’s relationship with Saudi Arabia.  Here it is:

            While David Cameron stands shoulder to shoulder with world leaders protesting at extremist assaults on freedom of expression on the streets of Paris, his government continues to ignore such intolerance when practised by a government with which the UK wants to do business.

            As ‘Charlie Hebdo’ was attacked, Saudi Arabia was meeting out the first of 1,000 lashes to blogger Raif Madawi.  Yet so keen is Cameron to cultivate the despots in Riyadh that, not only did he not denounce the flogging, but his government continues to cover up the corruption that sustains the barbaric regime there.

            ‘Private Eye’ is currently engaged in a freedom of information battle with the Ministry of Defence for details of its complicity in corruption on a £2 billion defence contract.  The government refuses to provide it on the grounds that exposing such dirty secrets would harm relations with Saudi Arabia.

            Given that the oppressive state spawned the group that claims responsibility for the Paris attacks (not to mention the 9/11 bombers) al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, perhaps the ‘relations’ so highly valued by the British government would be better served by exposing the Saudi regime rather than covering up for it.

          
                King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died on 23^rd January, the day that Private Eye went on sale. In that issue it commented on the jihadist murders in Paris and on the world-wide demonstrations – led by the western world’s political leaders - supporting ‘free speech’.  It was unable though to comment in that issue on the obsequious haste with which some of those same leaders flew to Saudi Arabia to offer their condolences on the loss of the leader of a country that prohibits free speech, bans the practice of any religious faith other than its own fundamentalist version  of Islam, inflicts cruel and  barbarous punishments on it own people, holds democracy and human rights in contempt, and generally makes Saddam Husseins's Iraq, Colonel Gadafi's Libya and President Assad's Syria, seem by comparison to have been earthly paradises of liberty and tolerance.

          In view of this, the cover of the Private Eye of 23^rd January shown above, was remarkably prophetic. The  'speech bubble' shown emanating from the world's leaders is surely more accurate than 'Je suis Charlie', the slogan of the 'free speech' protesters!

‘Man’s inhumanity to man!’

            I can’t imagine a crime more heinous than that of IS (Islamic State) in burning alive, in a cage, the unfortunate Jordanian airman who fell into their hands.  The wickedness of the action was made worse by IS’ pretence of negotiating his release in exchange for a captured failed suicide bomber.   These ‘negotiations’ ensured IS the publicity for which they had hoped, and gave false hope to the victim and his friends and relatives.  I have little doubt that his fate was sealed from the moment of capture.

            The airman’s dreadful death brought to my mind another shameful incident almost exactly seventy years ago.  I was a prisoner of war at a ‘working camp’ in Zittau in eastern Germany.  Throughout the bitterly cold winter of 1944/’45 we had watched civilian refugees from the inexorably approaching Eastern Front pass through the town; old men, women and little children. Many were trudging through the snow pulling little carts with all their belongings.  They were making for Dresden, 60 or 70 miles to the west where they’d be sorted out by the German Red Cross and sent to relatively safe areas for refuge.  It was obvious to all that Germany was defeated and World War II coming to an end.

            On the night of 13^th February 1945 Dresden was flattened by high explosive and incendiary bombs dropped by hundreds of RAF bombers.  The centre of the town – not the railways and factories on the outskirts – was the bombers’ target and it was crowded with hapless refugees. The RAF bombers departed before the dawn but bombers from the USA continued during the following day. The number of dead is estimated to have been between 22,000 and 25,000.  Many of them were killed by collapsing buildings, others were asphyxiated by smoke.  They were the lucky ones.  A substantial number, men, women and little children will have been burnt alive – just like that unfortunate Jordanian airman.

            The crews of the RAF and American bombers were ‘just obeying orders’.  They didn’t know on whom their bombs were falling and anyway, the Germans had done much more dreadful things.  The bombing of Dresden took place just a few days after the Soviet Army had liberated the Auschwitz death camp in Poland and had told the world of the horrors they had discovered there.   Those aircrews were quite different from the killers of IS who had allowed their victim to hope for release and had then murdered him in the cruellest way that they could devise – a way that was guaranteed to torture not only their victim but those who loved him.

            Those aircrews were quite different from the cold-blooded torturers and murderers of IS. But their victims, whose bodies were found among the still smouldering ruins of Dresden, suffered exactly the same agonies as that Jordanian airman. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the events of that February night almost exactly 70 years ago set my mind on a course that ended with my repudiating all acts of violence and, just three years later, joining the religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and embracing the Quaker testimony against all wars.

Late Note.  The action of the Jordanian Government in hanging two jihadist prisoners (including the woman whom the government had been prepared to exchange for that airman) was understandable but regrettable.  It is only by breaking the cycle of vengeance that we can hope to achieve peace.

           

Week 4.10

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Making the Punishment fit the Crime

I’m not a "Hang ‘em and flog ‘em” man, or even one who believes that long gaol sentences should be the automatic penalty for virtually every major crime. I don’t think that before they set out on their nefarious activities, criminals give a great deal of thought to the penalty they may incur if caught. They are convinced that they’re not going to be caught, so the possible penalty is irrelevant. When the penalty for sheep stealing was hanging, there were still plenty of sheep stolen. And in the days when the punishment for treason was hanging, drawing and quartering, treason was more common than it is today. I think that persuading the potential criminal that he or she stands a less-then-fifty-percent chance of getting away with it would have a far greater deterrent effect than increasing the penalty for those who are caught.

That said, I have every sympathy with Tendring District Council’s indignation
at the fact that a convicted fly-tipper was given a conditional discharge with the payment of £250 costs at Colchester Magistrates Court earlier this month. Twenty-eight year old Rodney Fisher had been spotted in Clacton’s Holbrook Close dumping a carpet from a lorry in the early hours of 29th October last year. A vigilant neighbour noted the lorry’s registration number and informed the Police. Tendring Council decided to prosecute. I’m not surprised that Chris Kitcher, acting head of environmental services, should have been reported as saying, ‘I feel bitterly disappointed over the sentence and feel we have been badly let down’. I’m a former Environmental Health Officer myself (though we were called Public Health Inspectors in my day!) and I would have felt the same.

The maximum penalty for the offence for which Rodney Fisher was convicted is twelve months imprisonment or a fine of £50,000. His only penalty was payment of £250 costs and the knowledge that, if he were again to be convicted of the same offence, he would be more harshly treated. Catching a fly-tipper once is difficult enough. The odds against catching the same offender again for the same offence must be astronomical!

I suppose that the magistrates considered that fly tipping is a pretty trivial offence. It isn’t. Most criminal activity – breaking and entering, or mugging for instance – affects just one person or one household, though of course it may affect the victims very severely. Fly tipping (like litter dropping – its ‘little sister’!) is a crime against the whole community. It disfigures a whole neighbourhood and one act of illegal tipping on a piece of unused land quickly attracts more. Usually too, the whole community has to pay to clear it up.

What is more, fly tipping (unlike litter dropping) is a premeditated crime. No one gets out of bed on an impulse at two o’clock in the morning to load an old carpet, or a mattress, or a rusted water tank onto a car or lorry and take it somewhere where it can be dumped unseen. The time and the destination are carefully chosen in advance.

Bearing those factors in mind, I would have hoped that, having decided that the defendant was guilty, the magistrates would have imposed a penalty that if not causing actual pain, would at least have caused him serious inconvenience. A conditional discharge is not even a metaphorical ‘rap on the knuckles’. It certainly doesn’t encourage those whose job it is to enforce the law.

My new front fence

Here is my new front fence. I am very pleased with it. It is neat, unobtrusive and, I think, vandal-resistant. Perhaps I ought to thank the vandals who, on three successive nights, destroyed the low wall that had marked the front boundary of my home for over half a century. It was old, weather-beaten and nearing the end of its useful life (not unlike me, in fact!) but I shall miss it……and I wish it were still there.

It may seem absurd to feel sentimental about an ageing collection of bricks, but they have been a part of my life for fifty-four years. I was thirty-five and Heather thirty-two when we moved into our home in Dudley Road in 1956. We had two young sons, one three years old and the other under a year. The wall was there as they grew up, as they left home and as they have returned home from time to time as adults with their own wives and families. Subsequently it has become familiar to our now-grown up grand-children. Heather and I saw it every day of our lives and have watched it, like us, show signs of age.

Now the wall has gone – just as the life that Heather and I had together has gone. It is as though yet another chapter of my life has come to an end.


My family in November 1957. We had been married for ten years and had lived in Dudley Road, Clacton, for just over a year. Peter, aged four, is clambering over his Mum while I am holding on to nearly-two-year-old Andy. Like us, the wall seems to be young and unmarked by age and decay!









Essex takes the lead…..again!

Whatever other people may think of Essex County Council, there’s no doubt about it, Essex County Councillors think well of themselves! At the beginning of March they’re to host a national conference of highway authorities to consider how they can improve the way in which they deal with snow and ice.

Readers of the local Daily Gazette have their own views on this forthcoming event. One says ‘I expect this beanfeast will be held in a five-star hotel. With no expenses spared. My preference would be a village hall out in the sticks where, when it snows, it’s not on the gritting route’. Another says that what’s needed is more gritters, more salt and grit stocks, more salt and grit stores around the county, and more yellow bins stocked with grit and salt on locations such as hills – ‘no expensive and time consuming conference required’.

The trouble with that, apparently obvious, solution is that doubling, trebling or whatever the grit and salt stocks would almost certainly be followed by a succession of mild winters – and outrage at Highway Authorities wasting taxpayers’ money on enormous stockpiles ‘that any idiot could see wouldn’t be needed’.

The comment that most appealed to me was from a correspondent with the appropriate pseudonym of OntheBall,Colchester. He, or possibly she, urges, ‘Return the gritting responsibility to Colchester Borough. The whole recent effort by Essex in our area was slipshod and half-hearted. When Colchester had the responsibility, at least the local main road, bus routes and school routes used to be gritted, along with pavements in key areas. I couldn’t agree more. The more local services that can be handed over to local control the better. Then, at the very least, we’d know whom to blame when things went wrong.

Mind you, I think that we are all losing the point. There really isn’t a chance that anything said or decided at that conference will make even the least difference to future snow-clearing operations. It will give Essex County Council the chance to take the lead again – as in running a banking service, opening a branch in China, advertising (at our expense) its apprenticeship scheme on tv, and farming out to private enterprise many of the tasks for which it is responsible. Oh yes, and it’ll give Lord Hanningfield a chance to feature in the local press, and on regional tv - perhaps even to make it to the middle pages of the national tabloids.

In that sense the conference is likely to be a great success. Discussing a crisis in depth is much more fun than actually dealing with it. It’s easier too.


Help for Clacton’s old and disabled

Just before Christmas Tendring Council had an unexpected cash windfall ‘to help support town centre enterprises’. It seemed to me that it might usefully be spent on a last-minute rescue of Clacton’s Shopmobility service which hired out, at cut price rates, mobility scooters to the old and disabled. This, I said, would enable such people to get into the town centre to do their shopping and thus help fulfil the purpose of the grant.

Goodness knows whether the idea was ever considered but, if so, it was rejected and – as was inevitable – Shopmobility closed down on New Year’s Eve. No doubt the Council, or rather its inner ‘cabinet’, decided that those who used the service would manage to do their shopping by other means, or that their friends and neighbours would do it for them. Clacton’s town centre traders would be none the worse off.

They were wrong. Colchester Community Transport and Shopmobility is offering Clacton residents the opportunity to come and shop in Colchester’s town centre. Those who join the scheme will be picked up at their homes and taken to St. Mary’s car park in Colchester where a mobility scooter will be available for their use. The scheme will begin on 2nd February and will be available from 10.00 a.m. till 4.00 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays.

It seems a good idea to me. For details phone Sylvie on 01206 570643.

Tendring Council has certainly managed to help town-centre traders ……but it's those in Colchester’s town centre, not Clacton's!

Oh dear!

A former Chairman of Tendring Council arrested in connection with suspected corruption and money laundering. £30,000 seized from his home. Councillors who served between 1990 and 2009 ‘helping the police with their enquiries’! I’m glad that I’m no longer the Council’s Public Relations Officer and that I took early retirement in 1980!

Everyone suspected of a crime is deemed innocent until proved otherwise. It may well be that this whole affair will soon be cleared up and forgotten. I am uncomfortably reminded though of the ending of a poem Executive by the late Sir John Betjeman. In the poem a thrusting young executive explains to an acquaintance how it is that he has possesses an expensive sports car and speed boat:

And how did I acquire them? Well, to tell you about that
And to put you in the picture, I must don my other hat.
I do some mild developing, the kind of thing I need
Is a quiet country market town that’s rather gone to seed.
A luncheon and a drink or two, a little savoir faire,
I fix the Planning Officer, the Town Clerk and the Mayor.
And if some preservationist attempts to interfere,
A ‘dangerous structure’ notice from the Borough Engineer
Will settle any buildings that are standing in our way -
The modern style, sir, with respect, has really come to stay.

When I first read that that I was a serving local government officer, with decades of experience. Much as I admired and enjoyed Betjeman’s work I was convinced that that particular poem was rubbish. I still hope that it was - and is!