10th May 2015

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The Day of Reckoning (2)

            I can’t even say, ‘I told you so!’, because I didn’t!  Like almost everyone else, I believed that the outcome of the General Election would be a hung parliament. Either David Cameron or Ed Miliband would have to form a coalition, or at least come to an understanding with one of the smaller parties in order to produce a workable government.  Most of the press feared an understanding between Ed Miliband and the SNP.  I would have welcomed it because I thought that Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader was far more impressive than any of the other party leaders. She might prevent a Miliband premiership from becoming a pale imitation of a Tory one.  Perhaps that’s just what the press lords feared!

            My own worst possible outcome was of a coalition between the Conservatives and the Ukippers which I felt could easily develop into a right-wing dictatorship.

            In this blog I did at least consider the possibility that, despite the predictions of the opinion polls, one or other of the two main parties might achieve an overall majority and  manage to form an effective government without seeking the support of any other party.  I said that if that happened I could confidently predict that the final outcome would not be as good as supporters of the majority party were hoping, but was unlikely to be as awful as their opponents feared.  I still stand by the first part of that prophecy – but am a little less confident of the second.

            I did correctly foretell the humiliating defeat of the Lib.Dems but really didn’t expect Ukip to lose one of the two seats it held prior to the election, thus making Douglas Carswell, our own MP for Clacton-on-Sea, the sole Ukipper in the House of Commons.  Ukip gained a lot of votes but they were spread fairly evenly over England.  As a result, our first-past-the-post electoral system prevented those votes being translated into parliamentary seats.  It has been quite educational to observe Mr Carswell’s sudden conversion to the idea of proportional representation. I quite expected the SNP to triumph in Scotland but was astonished by their almost complete demolition of the previously dominant Labour Party there.  

            Ed Miliband’s defeat was, I think, at least partly due to the constant drip, drip, drip of denigrating and scare headlines principally in the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, about his weakness as a leader and the probability that he would be subjugated by the wicked witch from the north (Nicola Sturgeon).  Several people interviewed after the tv debates said they were quite surprised to discover that the Ed Miliband they had seen on tv didn’t match those headlines.

            The Sun is part of the Rupert Murdoch press empire, the Daily Mail is owned by Lord Rothermere, and the Daily Express by Richard Leonard, who also owns the ‘adult’ tv channels Television X and Red Hot TV   (No, I haven’t tried to access either of them but their names suggest their nature).  Oh yes, and Richard Leonard has recently donated over a million pounds to Ukip.

            Do you find it as extraordinary and shaming as I do that three very wealthy individuals – a foreigner with no ties of loyalty to the UK, a ‘non-dom’, and a purveyor of soft porn, should own and control the means of influencing the British electorate?

            The Conservative Government will have only a very small majority over all other parties in the House of Commons. I don’t think they’ll find their task to be an easy one, especially bearing in mind the fact that the opposition, with its Scottish, Welsh and English MPs, is much more representative of all the people of the still-united United Kingdom than the members of David Cameron’s government.

…….and the Green Party?

            I have never made any secret of the fact that I voted for the Green Party in the General Election and am now a member of that Party.  On the face of it they failed dismally.  They gained not a single extra member in the House of Commons.

            Look a little deeper though and it will be clear that they are a Party on the way up, not down.  Their candidates obtained a total of over a million votes throughout the UK.  Remember too, that for every voter who puts a cross against the name of a Green candidate there are probably at least two others who would be supporters, but because they live in a strongly Tory or Labour area, or like me, in the heart of Ukipland, imagine that a vote for the Greens is a wasted one.   I knew perfectly well that Chris Howell the Green Candidate in my area hadn’t a hope of being elected, but he did get twice as many votes as he did in the by-election only a few months ago.  Caroline Lucas, our one MP, retained her Brighton seat in Parliament with a substantially increased majority, and the Green candidate came second in four constituencies.  The Green Party now has more actual members than either the Lib.Dems. or Ukip.  

            No, I don’t consider that my vote was a wasted one.

Some sage advice

          Did you see that some has-been Labour politicians have been commenting on Ed Miliband’s lack of success in the election.  Some say that he should have made a greater effort to reach the ‘aspirational’ voter.  Lord Mendelson (he’s an architect of New Labour who has ‘no problem with billionaires!) says that Ed Miliband took the Labour Party too far to the left.  Too far to the left!  We’re talking about the chap who apologised for Labour’s original opposition to ‘right to buy’, who, if he had been elected would have carried on with austerity, and who supported the renewal of the wildly expensive and utterly useless Trident submarines!

            Hasn’t anyone noticed that Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party swept away New Labour in Scotland with policies well to the left of anything that any Labour leader in England has ever dared to suggest?

            If the electorate want Conservative policies, they’ll vote Conservative – not New Labour!

5th April 2015 (Easter Day!)

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Voices of the People?

            I am interested in politics. That’s why they’re a recurring topic in this blog.  But I’m not really interested in politicians’ speeches, and in interviews with politicians.     They’re all too often a masterly demonstration of how to avoid giving a straight answer to a straight question; ‘What we should really be asking ourselves is…………………’ and so on! Then again what, at the time, seemed to be a firm promise turns out to have been no more than an ‘aspiration’.  I’m much more interested in what they do than in what they say!

            Even as recently as a week ago if someone had told me that for two whole hours I would listen to politicians arguing with each other on tv, I’d have thought they must have confused me with someone else.  Yet that’s precisely what happened during the evening of Maundy Thursday, 2^nd April.  A debate took place on ITV between seven prominent politicians, each the leader of a political party with candidates in the General Election on 7^th May.   There was David Cameron, Conservative; Ed Miliband, Labour: Nick Clegg, Liberal; Nigel Farage, UKIP; Natalie Bennett, Green Party; Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish National Party; and Leanne Wood, Welsh National Party.

            I started to watch when the debate began at 8.00 pm, telling myself that I could always turn it off or switch to another channel if it became really boring.  But it didn’t and I watched till the end at 10.00 p.m. Mind you I was sitting in a very comfortable armchair with a generous double-scotch (well watered down!) at hand. I really think that the ITV authorities who organised the event, and the presenter, who kept the participants in order, deserve to be congratulated.  It could have developed into disorganised pandemonium and threatened to do so on a couple of occasions.  However the presenter was polite but firm and order prevailed.

             I suspect that watchers heard what they wanted to hear from the debate.  The headlines of at least one newspaper reported that David Cameron had clearly triumphed, while an immediate post-debate opinion poll commissioned by another newspaper indicated victory for Ed Miliband.   Personally, I thought that Cameron and Miliband trotted out all the predictable arguments that we have heard from them before.  Nick Clegg remains confident that Lib.Dems. will help either Labour or Conservatives to form a government and will steer that government’s actions towards the ‘middle ground’.  He could, of course, be right – but I doubt it.  Nick Clegg also took pride in the fact that the coalition government had raised the threshold of liability for income tax thereby, so he claimed, lifting thousands of people ‘out of the tax system altogether’.  That is simply untrue.  It has raised them out of the ‘income tax’ system but they still pay the indirect taxes and customs duties like VAT and duties on petrol, alcohol and tobacco that Conservatives much prefer.  It also perpetuates the myth that there is an under-class of non-taxpayers supported by tax-payers who have lifted themselves out of poverty by hard work and thrift.  I wonder how many of Britain’s thriving billionaires acquired their millions by their own ‘hard work and thrift’?   

            Nigel Farage was his usual obnoxious self, pouring scorn on the EU and suggesting that ‘Health Tourism’ is a serious problem and that a majority of folk diagnosed as HIV positive were immigrants.  Nick Clegg pointed out that not all foreigners in this country were malign.  Both he, and Nigel Farage, were married to ‘foreigners’!   Farage also claimed that all the other parties represented at the debate were the same, since they all supported EU membership. Only Ukip, he claimed, represented the will of the British people.  I continue to see in Nigel Farage’s progress parallels with the early political career of Adolf Hitler in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s.  He too assured a disillusioned-with-politicians electorate that his Party (the NSDAP or Nazis) was ‘different’ – and so it was!   

            I was impressed with the three women representing the Green Party, the SNP and the Welsh Nationalists but am quite ready to concede that my judgement is largely founded on the fact that the policies they promoted are the ones that I believe are needed today.   The most impressive, confident and articulate was Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party.  She was the only debater who had the courage to refer to the UKs folly in its insistence on possession of nuclear weapons.  ‘The scarce resources of our country should be invested in the future of our children, not on new nuclear weapons’.  A comment on ‘I’ daily newspaper says that she gave an impressive performance and that ‘it is possible that some English voters watching might have been tempted to switch from Labour to SNP if the Party was standing outside Scotland’. I remarked in this blog a few weeks ago that Ms. Sturgeon was a worthy successor of Alex Salmond.  She certainly is! It is a pity that those three women party leaders with so much in common, didn’t get together to agree who was to say what at the debate!   Leanne Wood (Welsh Nationalist) and Natalie Bennett (Green Party) covered much the same ground as Nicola Sturgeon but less confidently and forcefully.  I’d have liked to have heard from Natalie Bennett rather more about the Green Party’s environmental policies – the importance of combating the effects of climate change world-wide; of finding and developing  clean and renewable sources of energy, and of urgently reducing our dependence on fossil fuels;  and, of course, of the utter folly of encouraging ‘fracking’.

            Voting in the General Election will be taking place the day before the 70^th anniversary of VE Day, the day on which in Europe World War II ended.   It comes as something of a shock to me to realize that you really have to be at least eightyish to remember anything at all about World War II, six years that were such an important part of my life..  On that fateful day in 1945 I was with a group of British prisoners of war being marched south-westward into Czechoslovakia, away from the inexorably approaching battle front.  Half-way through the morning our guards announced that they had heard on the radio that the war was over, and left us to our own devices.  We thereupon liberated ourselves – though with grateful thanks to the Soviet Red Army.  I walked through the front door of my home in Ipswich just ten days later – on 18^th May, which happened to be my 24^th birthday!

            I little thought on that day that seventy years later the world would be threatened by climate change; that Christians would be massacred in parts of Africa and the Middle East for no other reason than that they were Christian; that the Christian faith was in danger of being eradicated from the region that saw its birth; and that the world’s rulers believed that nuclear weapons, whose use could erase humanity, were needed to maintain a precarious world peace.  

Finally

Let's end this somewhat gloomy blog with a message of hope on an Easter Morning on which the daffodils in my garden announce that Spring is here.  Here is the traditional Easter salutation of the Universal Church of Christ and the response.

'Christ is risen - Alleluia!'    'He is risen indeed, Amen!'  

           

   

            

25th March 2015

Tendring Topics……..on line

‘Dear Ernest……….

                                 …….. warm regards, Douglas’

            You would probably imagine that the above was the salutation and farewell of a personal letter from a close friend or relative, and that between that ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ there was a communication of great interest to both ‘Ernest’ and ‘Doug’.   It wasn’t; and although presumably it was of interest to the sender it certainly was not to me.

            It wasn’t a personal letter. I have never met, and almost certainly never will meet the ‘Douglas’ who addresses me by my first name and sends me his ‘warm regards’.  Nor was it a personal letter.  It was a circular letter, probably sent to every Tom, Dick and Harry and every Jane, Mary or Kate in the Clacton-on-Sea parliamentary constituency from Douglas Carswell once our Conservative MP but currently, thanks to a lightning conversion and an expensive and totally unnecessary by-election,  one of two UKIP MPs in the House of Commons.

            A remarkable feature of that by-election was the fact that Douglas Carswell the UKIP candidate, was the only one who seemed to make a real effort to get elected.  I was deluged by UKIP leaflets, brochures and at least one of those ‘personal’ letters from Douglas Carswell.  I received a phone call on behalf of UKIP and a canvasser who called at my front door.  He seemed a little shocked when I assured him that I would never vote for any UKIP candidate. There was also – so I believe – a well-attended public meeting addressed by both Douglas Carswell and his political boss Nigel Farage.   I received just one leaflet from the Conservative candidate, one from the Liberal Democrats and one from Labour.  There were also a Green candidate and two independents from whom I received nothing.

            The General Election is now only a few weeks away.  History seems to be  repeating itself.  During the past week or so I have received three glossy brochures or leaflets extolling Douglas Carswell’s virtues, a canvassing phone call, and today (21st March)  this ‘personal letter’ from the man himself.  The content of the letter confirms my opinion that, apart from leaving the European Union and reducing immigration, UKIP’s policy is simply to jump on any band-wagon that offers the promise of a few extra votes.   I have so far received nothing from any of the other candidates.

            Douglas’ circular letter promises that UKIP will abolish hospital parking charges, funding this by ’cutting overseas aid and EU payments’ (could be a vote winner – parking at Colchester General Hospital is difficult and expensive – and getting worse!).  They’ll also ‘defend the NHS, defend winter fuel payments, bus passes and tv licences for older folk’ (there are lots of ‘older folk’ with votes in this constituency) ‘stand up to big corporations’ (I don’t know quite what that means but it certainly sounds vote-catching!) and ‘introduce an Australian-style points system’ to control immigration (locally our most serious immigration problem is created by fellow-Brits driven from the London area by ridiculously high housing costs and the ‘bedroom tax').

             

            At the end of the letter there is a chart based on figures supplied by www. ElectoralCalculus.co,uk which suggests that UKIP can expect to gain 48 percent of the votes in this area in the general election, and the Conservatives 45 percent.  Douglas Carswell appeals ‘Only UKIP can keep David Cameron’s candidate out of Clacton’.  I’m inclined to reverse that message and proclaim.  Only the Conservatives can keep Nigel Farage’s candidate out of Clacton. 

            Regular blog readers will know that at the by-election I ‘voted strategically’.  For the first, and probably only time in my life I put my cross against the name of the Conservative candidate in the hope of denying the seat to Douglas Carswell.  It didn’t succeed!    The closeness of the two parties in the forecast tempts me to do the same in the General Election – but I won’t.  This time I’ll vote Green because I am convinced that it is only the policies of the Green Party that offer a cure for Britain’s ills.

           

Final Note:  

The reason that, in both the by-election and in the months preceding the coming general election I had so much potentially mind-bending material from the UKIP candidate and so little from the others, is not I am sure, because the Labour, Conservative, Green and Lib.Dem candidates and their supporters lack enthusiasm and conviction, but that they have limited funds – and good quality printing and distribution costs money.  UKIP presumably has some very wealthy and generous financial backers – or perhaps Douglas (as he uses my first name I’m sure he won’t mind my using his) has a very considerable personal fortune that he is prepared to use to secure electoral success.

An Anniversary

          We have recently seen the first anniversary of the annexation/recovery of the Crimea by Russia.  It was marked by a public opinion poll in the Crimea that revealed that 93 percentage of the population were happy to remain as Russians and had no desire to be once again citizens of Ukraine.   Ninety-three percent! That’s the kind of result that one would only get in a place like North Korea – it must have been fiddled or fabricated!   Well, that’s what ‘the west’ would no doubt like to believe.  The only difficulty with that explanation is that the opinion poll was carried out by a Ukrainian polling agency commissioned by the Ukrainian government.  That was not the result for which the government in Kiev was hoping!  Certainly in the 1950s when both Russia and Ukraine were provinces of the Soviet Union, the citizens of the Crimea were not consulted when Nikita Khruschev decided that their land (which had been part of Russia since Tsarist times) should become part of Ukraine.

            Meanwhile the fact that we have heard no recent news from the disputed region of Eastern Ukraine suggests  that the terms of the cease-fire are being observed; that hostilities have ceased and heavy weaponry withdrawn from the front line.   I hope that prisoners are being exchanged by both sides and that talks are in progress about the degree of autonomy to be granted to the Russian speaking eastern areas of Ukraine. Meanwhile the British Government, which played no part in the cease-fire negotiations, has supplied the Ukrainian Government in Kiev with armoured cars, and is sending units from our army (depleted by government cuts and by less-than-totally-successful campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan), to help train the Ukrainian army.  That’s our contribution to the cause of world peace!

            

           

           

           

     

6th March 2015

Tendring Topics……..on line

The New ‘Levellers’

          For many years I would have described myself, if asked, as a democratic socialist.  In today’s market-based society, everything, and everybody, is deemed to have a price.  It’s a society in which it is assumed that everyone’s ambition is the acquisition of greater personal wealth; in which everyone grabs as much as he can for as little as he (or she) can get away with.

            I have learned to survive, even to prosper, in this society.  I didn’t and don’t like it.  I hoped that democratic socialism could develop, if not into an earthly paradise, at least into a fairer and happier society than the one in which we live today.   However reading of the researches of two Quakers, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, in their book ‘The Spirit Level’ published in 2009, convinced me that, although public ownership could be one way of producing a fairer society, there are other ways – the co-operative movement could be one, as could employer/employee partnerships like the John Lewis business group.

            Richard and Kate discovered and demonstrated that our society’s greatest evil was the ever-widening gap between the incomes of the wealthiest and the poorest members of our society.  Furthermore they discovered that levelling off incomes didn’t just benefit the poor (though they are the immediate and obvious beneficiaries) but the whole of society – rich, poor, and the great majority of us who are neither the one nor the other.   More equal societies, Denmark, Sweden and Norway for instance, are happier, less crime-ridden, have fewer teenage pregnancies, and are more peaceful and healthier societies.

            The United Kingdom has the most unequal society in Europe and one of the most unequal in the whole of the developed world.  The gap between the incomes of the wealthiest and the poorest in the United Kingdom steadily gets wider.  The Labour Party was created to provide a political voice for working people and the poor.   It is to the party’s shame that during ten years of New Labour government, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest widened!

            In 2009, in the wake of the publication of The Spirit Level the Equality Trust was formed to draw attention to our unequal society; to promote policies that work towards greater equality and oppose those that widen the gap.  All over the country there are groups working towards those ends.  A newsletter is sent regularly to supporters and below is an extract from the latest newsletter:

February has been a successful if troubling month for exposing some of the forces behind our extreme inequality. Revelations on HSBC’s role in tax avoidance saw the media focus on the incredible schemes used by the very rich to shield their wealth. With impeccable timing it was also revealed than banks themselves have done pretty well over the last few years. The Robin Hood Tax campaign found bonuses paid out by banks and insurers since the start of the financial crisis are set to top £100bn this year.

It didn’t end there either, as a sting operation led to claims that MPs Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind were involved in a ‘cash for access’ scandal.  We calculated that Rifkind and Straw command rates of around £2,290 and £500 per hour for some of their consulting work. That’s 197 and 43 times the average wage rate respectively. Once again the question is asked as to how, and how much, our politicians are paid.

If you’d like to know more about the Equality Trust and its work, the address is 18 Victoria Park Square, London, E2 9PF.   Its email address is info@equalitytrust.org.uk and its web site is www.equalitytrust.org.uk

The major parties are setting out their policies in attempts to persuade us to vote for their candidate in the General Election which is now only weeks away.  It seems to me that the only Party attempting anything more than a slight nudging in one direction or the other of the present grossly unfair economic and political system is the Green Party. I was surprised and heartened to learn that the Greens now have more members that the much more publicised Ukippers. Green policies are not all that different from those of the Party for which I voted and which won the election in 1945 at the end of World War II.  They do promise the hope of a fairer, more equal society.  The Green Party candidate will get my vote.

That General Election in 1945, held just after I had returned to England at the end of World War II in Europe, was the first opportunity I had ever had to vote. I voted I thought, for a fairer Britain and a more peaceful world. The vote that I hope to cast in May this year will almost certainly be my last opportunity to vote in a general election. I shall cast it with exactly the same hope of a fairer Britain and a more peaceful world, not for myself this time (I certainly won’t see any sign of it in my lifetime!) but for my grandchildren.

There’s no place like home……..

……….and no vote-winner like ‘homes for all’ or, as far as the Tories are concerned ‘Home ownership for all’.  At least that’s what all the Party leaders think, because they’re competing with each other to promise 100,000 200,000 (why stop there – the sky’s the limit as far as promises are concerned) new homes if only they’re elected in May.   To hear them talk you’d think they were going to don the overalls and hard hats they wear for ‘photo opportunities at the workplace’ and go out and build those houses themselves.  A blog reader and regular correspondent, who has expert knowledge and experience in the field of housing explains the rationale of David Cameron’s promise of 200,000 cut-price homes.

He is promising to build 200,000 new homes and sell them at a discount to first time buyers under 40 (a high age limit, but that’s how long it takes to save a deposit these days!)  He claims this “scheme” will cost nothing to the public purse. Developers are apparently very enthusiastic.

The London Evening Standard explains, as no other news medium  is doing, that these homes are to be built on “brown field” and ex-commercial sites, not normally available for housing.  When Local Authorities allow these sites to be built on for a major development (as Croydon Council is  doing right now), they normally get money from the developers for building infrastructure, of £45,000 per home. They also have a requirement that 20% will be “affordable homes” and are sold to a Housing Association. Both of these rules are being scrapped for this scheme, thus “allowing developers” to sell the homes at a 20% reduced price. Presumably, for the concession, they are forced to sell at this reduced price (but in a market economy this doesn’t make much sense). If the buyers sell within 5 years they have to return the subsidy (I don’t understand that, because it isn’t really a subsidy, just a concession, which cannot be reversed). I don’t know who they would return it to? The homeless families who are being short changed by this scheme?  It sounds like a good 5 year savings plan to me, to buy a 250K flat and get a 50K discount, wait 5 years while you live in it, then sell and get the 50K back, plus the value of house price inflation which probably means it would be worth 100K.

The reality is, that this is another calculated move to help core Tory voters – middle aged, middle class people aspiring to buy their first home – while robbing would-be Labour-Voting Social Housing Tenants of potential housing.  In the end, this isn’t reducing the cost of housing, but rather it is increasing it, by increasing the supply of inflated owner-occupied housing at the direct cost of the supply of the shrinking supply affordable rented housing.  However, it makes a good headline before an election; about as meaningless as many of the other promises being made right now.

It is worth remembering that much, if not all, of our country’s current housing problems date from the Thatcher years when ‘right to buy’ legislation compelled local authorities (but not private landlords) to sell, at bargain basement prices, houses and flats that had been provided by their predecessors to eliminate homelessness and overcrowding from their districts; ‘buying votes with other people’s money!’  Prior to the ‘avaricious eighties’ local authorities had a right and a duty to provide homes in their districts for letting and to allocate them to those with greatest need.

‘The Government giveth – and the Government taketh away!’

I recently commented in this blog on the Government’s proposal to hand over all health and welfare services in the Manchester area to the local authority for that area. That’s quite a responsibility!

Today I have just heard on ‘BBC Breakfast’ that, in connection with another public service,  the Government is interfering in the very minutia of local government administration.  Motorists nationwide parking their cars in municipal car-parks are to be allowed an extra ten minutes before any action is taken about their over-running the time for which they have paid.  Furthermore local authorities mustn’t use illegal parking fines as a source of revenue.

Goodness – local government can be trusted to run the health and welfare services of a large conurbation but  can’t be trusted to administer its own car-parks!   It couldn’t, I suppose, be anything to do with the fact that a great many supporters of the present Government are owner-drivers of cars – and that a general election is only a few weeks away?

  

                       

                

             

            

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.    

           

Week 44 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

The Ukippers!

            I was not surprised (though I was disappointed) that Douglas Carswell now a Ukipper, retained his seat in parliament with a comfortable majority at Clacton’s recent by-election.  Douglas Carswell had undoubtedly been a popular MP and in the few weeks before the election we had been deluged with literature telling us what a wonderful chap he was.  There was door-step canvassing, cold-calling on the phone and a couple of well-attended public meetings addressed by Nigel Farage, Ukip’s leader, as well as by the successful candidate.

            Despite all this it seems that some Clactonians were a bit confused even up to and beyond polling day.  One resident is reported as having said ‘Yes, I voted for Ukip this time – our Conservative MP has done nothing for years!’

            Did you see BBC’s Panorama feature on Nigel Farage and Ukip last week?  One thing that did surprise me was to learn how many people had held senior positions within Ukip and had apparently been close friends of its leader, until there had been a falling-out and they had parted with some acrimony.  I wonder if the apparent close friendship between him and Douglas Carswell is similarly fated.  I was also astonished to learn how many thousands of pounds Farage had claimed from the EU in expenses – and how rarely he had bothered to attend the EU parliament. 

 I wasn’t particularly surprised at a revelation of his lack of common courtesy. I had noted the rudeness of all Ukippers in  the European Parliament in standing up and deliberately turning their backs on the  playing of the European Anthem but I hadn’t realized how very rude, boorish and (he’d probably laugh at the word) ungentlemanly Nigel Farage himself can be on occasion. It was really embarrassing to watch him on tv, deliberately and without provocation insulting the European President, an older man than Farage and more distinguished than he will ever be.   

I had hoped that our MP, Douglas Carswell, former Conservative now Ukipper, might prove to be quite different in that respect.  I certainly hadn’t associated him with lack of courtesy – though he didn’t apparently have any qualms about displacing the recently democratically elected UKIP parliamentary candidate for the Clacton Constituency, when he decided to defect from the Conservatives and contest the seat as a Ukipper.  The elected candidate, Mr Lord, a UKIP county councillor and a local farmer, didn’t take kindly to the usurpation.  He resigned in anger from the Party and from the county council.     

Sir Bob Russell, Colchester’s Lib.Dem. MP was mildly surprised when the Chief Whip, Michael Gove, phoned him on Saturday 11^th October to say that Mr Carswell had invited him to be one of his sponsors when he made his debut in the House of Commons as a Ukipper.  Sir Bob told a Gazette reporter, ‘He held me in high regard as an Essex MP although I have expressed critical words about him and Ukip’.  However, when Sir Bob arrived at the House of Commons on Monday 13^th October he learned that there had been a change of plan. Former colleagues Sir Peter Tapsell and Zac Goldsmith were to accompany Mr Carswell into the chamber.  Sir Bob withdrew, though not before commenting that it showed, ‘astonishing pomposity’. 

An unfortunate muddle caused by mistaken underlings?  Perhaps, or is our born-again-as-a-ukipper MP a quick learner who realized what his new loyalty demanded of him?   

What of the future?

          A friend of mine is convinced that the current popularity of Ukip and of Nigel Farage is fleeting; that by the time of the general election next May electors will have realized where their true loyalties lie.  Ukip’s glory, and that of Nigel Farage will fade away and it’ll be a straight fight between Conservative and Labour.   I very much hope that that is so, because I believe that Ukip and its leader are dangerous.

            Meanwhile Nigel Farage is convinced that the tidal wave of public opinion in support of Ukip is unstoppable. He is already making plans for action when Ukip holds the balance between what we think of as ‘the main parties’.  In the meantime he’s delighted that there is a proposal that he will be asked to take part in at least one (he’d prefer two!) of the pre-election political leaders’ debates. It may well be that that could prove to be his downfall because although Farage performs brilliantly before a friendly audience I’m not at all sure that he’s capable of answering convincingly, hostile or even neutral questioning on either the details, or the broad sweep, of Ukip’s policies and the direction in which they would take the UK.   

            I find it extraordinary that the debates will be between the leaders of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties with the leader of Ukip taking part in at least one of them. Why hasn’t Natalie Bennett, the leader of the Green Party been invited?  The Greens are offering a real alternative to the tired old policies of the Tories and Labour.  Ukip doesn’t offer an alternative – their programme simply fulfils the secret wishes of the extreme right-wing of the Conservatives as Labour defectors are likely to find out if ever Ukip gains real power.

            The Green Party stands for a more equal Britain, with a National Health Service in public hands for the benefit of the many – not a source of profit for the few; for free education and affordable homes for all. They oppose welfare cuts and believe that public services should be in public hands.  Come to think of it, that’s what we returning servicemen and women thought we were getting when we elected Clem Attlee’s government in 1945.   In those days, of course, we didn’t realize the importance of replacing fossil fuels with renewable sources of energy, another Green priority.

            And the Greens are growing. Like Ukip, they have just one member in the House of Commons but in the European parliament they are a force to be reckoned with. Did you know that 1.2 million people in the UK voted Green in May this year – 150,000 more than voted for the Liberal Democrats.  In our own Clacton by-election the Green Party Candidate – with minimal expenditure on his campaign, pushed the Liberal Democrat candidate into ignominy in fifth place! Yet Nick Clegg is offered a place in those pre-election debates and Natalie Bennett isn’t.   I voted Conservative in that by-election because I thought that the Conservative candidate stood the best chance of denying victory to Ukip.  And I think he might have had the local Conservatives campaigned with the same energy and enthusiasm as the Ukippers.

            Should I still be around for next year’s election I shall vote Green.  The Green candidate is unlikely to be elected in Clacton-on-Sea but every vote cast for him will add to the total number of Green votes nationally.  If you’re disillusioned with the traditional political parties and are seeking an alternative – don’t vote Ukip.  You’ll regret it if they ever do rule Britain.  Vote Green!

Dear Blog readers…..

          I took early retirement from the local government service in 1980, a few days before my 59^th birthday. I then embarked on a new career as a freelance writer.  Among many other things I contributed ‘Tendring Topics’ to a local newspaper every week for 23 years.  It was a weekly comment mostly on local and regional affairs though occasionally I wrote about the wider scene.

            In 2003 a new editor wrote to me saying that Tendring Topics was no longer required.  I was summarily dismissed.  I was very hurt at the time, as I had acquired a large and appreciative readership.  However, like so many apparent disasters in my life, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.  Very shortly after that my wife, whose health had been deteriorating, fell and broke her hip.  She never regained her ability to walk and during the next two years she became more and more disabled.  During those two years I didn’t write a word, read a newspaper or listen to the news on tv or radio.  I was her full-time sole carer and really had neither time nor inclination to do anything else.

            On 12^th July 2006 my wife’s life came to an end.  She was 82, I was 85. Three months earlier we had celebrated our 60^th wedding anniversary and had received a congratulatory card from the Queen.  Her death left a gaping, and aching, hole in my life that I attempted to fill with activity.  My grandsons helped.  Christopher, the elder, arranged for me to have a Flickr site on which I have posted hundreds of photographs (www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea)  Nick, my younger grandson, is a computer expert and now runs his own successful international Digital Travel Publicity Consultancy (www.se1media.com)   He organised at first my blogspot (www.ernesthall.blogspot.com ) and later my website (www.ernesthall.net) on both of which I have published week by week Tendring Topics …on line  for the past seven years.

            I am now 93 and am feeling my age.  I fear that my writing has become stale and repetitive and I often find myself consulting Google for information that, even a few months ago, had been stored in my head.  I don’t propose to stop writing the blog altogether but I won’t be publishing it regularly every week.  Nor will I feel that I have to write quite such a long blog as has been my custom.  I will continue to support the causes that I think are important: nuclear disarmament; a United Europe; narrowing that yawning gap between the rich and the poor; proportional representation in parliament; a comprehensive reorganisation of the taxation system so that all of us – rich and poor alike – pay  an equal percentage of our gross income  as income tax or, as I prefer to think of it, our annual subscription to British citizenship - and I shall continue to promote my Christian/Quaker Faith!   I thank all blog readers for your interest in my ideas.

Week 9 2014

Tendring Topics......on Line

Spring is on the way!

            Yes, it really is.  Last Sunday (15^th February) here in ‘sunny Clacton’ we had sunshine from dawn till sunset.  It was a weak sun with barely enough heat in it to temper the chilly breeze.  Nevertheless, shining all day on the solar panel on the roof of my bungalow, it managed to raise the temperature of the water in my storage cylinder to sixty degrees Celcius, quite high enough to provide all my hot water needs for the next twenty-four hours!*  And it was only half-way through February and officially still ‘winter’.  Mind you, I still needed to have the boiler going for space heating from mid-afternoon!

`In Southern East Anglia at least, this chilly (but not really cold), very wet and very windy winter really does seem to be coming to an end.   I have daffodils naturalised under the long grass surrounding the eating-apple tree in my back garden.  They have been evident as green shoots for some weeks but yesterday some of them were in full bloom – and here they are.  Known in some parts of the country as ‘Easter lilies’, they are true harbingers of spring.

    

        Nor is it only in the garden that new life has been burgeoning.   On 1^st February I became a great-great uncle when my great-niece Catherine gave birth to a baby boy, Jay Luke Beard.  Here he is with his great-great uncle. Between us Jay and I span four generations and almost a century.  I was born in 1921, within the first quarter of the twentieth century, and Jay first saw the light of day in the first quarter of the twenty-first century – the second decade of the new millennium!

            Jay's life will undoubtedly be very different from mine, but whether better or worse - only time will tell!

*It did the same thing on Saturday 22nd February - we really do  get
more than the average amount of sunshine in Clacton-on-Sea!

           

 

 ‘A Plague on both your Houses’

          Three paragraphs in the latest issue of Private Eye explain why I have no confidence whatsoever in either of the political parties likely to form a government after the next General Election:

            No matter how loudly Ed Miliband proclaims that “those with the broadest backs should bear the greatest burden” the party has no plans for some of those with the deepest pockets to do their bit.

            These are the non-domiciled elite who claim allegiance to somewhere abroad while remaining resident in the UK (often, as in the case of Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere*, for their whole life) and pay the not exactly burden-sharing rate of, er, 0 percent of offshore earnings if they can find an easy way of getting them back into the UK (which they easily do).

            At this stage before the 1997 election, even in the midst of a City charm offensive, New Labour promised to end the non-dom tax break.   That was before, in office, the Party back-tracked as non-doms such as Lakshmi Mittal and private equity broncho Sir Ronald Cohen bankrolled it through subsequent elections with seven-figure donations.  Such plutocrats can look forward to tax haven Britain not loading much on their shoulders, whoever wins in 2015. 

            I really don’t want the United Kingdom to have the very best government that money can buy!

           I am disillusioned with both the Conservative and the Labour Parties and I am sure that I am one of thousands who feel the same.  Nor am I alone in feeling betrayed by Nick Clegg after having voted Lib-Dem. in the last General Election.  The danger is that some – perhaps many – voters, disillusioned with the traditional parties, will vote for UKIP.   Nigel Farage, the Party Leader, wants to sweep away party politics and put Britain first – and what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except that thousands of Germans thought in much the same way about Hitler in the 1930s.  The fact that, unlike  Adolf Hitler, Nigel Farage is a socially likeable chap who enjoys a drink and a smoke  possibly makes him all the more dangerous.

               Me? I shall definitely vote Green in the European Parliamentary Elections later this year.   That election is being held by proportional representation and every vote really will count.  If I’m still around for the General Election I’d like to vote Green again, but under our first-past-the-post electoral system a Green vote is likely to be a wasted vote.  Our present Conservative MP’s views are virtually indistinguishable from those of UKIP so I shall probably vote for whoever is most likely to defeat him unless, of course, his most dangerous rival is the UKIP candidate! I think it likely though that the local Ukippers will consider Mr Carswell to be ‘one of us’ and won’t oppose him.

* I had always thought (when I gave any thought at all to the matter) that Lord Rothermere was as British as the Union Jack. Intrigued by the comment in parenthesis in the second paragraph of the Private Eye article, I consulted Google and found that that his father had lived in France and had taken up French nationality. The present Lord Rothermere has inherited the nationality as well as his title and the Daily Mail.

The Expert

‘The bloated and bureaucratic’ Common Agricultural Policy, that hands out over a billion pounds every year to Europe’s farmers and land owners, is a favourite target of such Europhobic dailies as the Sun, Express and Mail. Who am I, knowing virtually nothing about farming and rural estate management to say whether or not these payments are justified?  I was though interested to learn from Private Eye that an increasingly large share of that billion-plus subsidy is paid not for agricultural production but to land-owners who improve the environment or diversify the local economy by providing and overseeing rural activities.

Private Eye records that the Langwell Estate near Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands has attracted £248,000 (nearly a quarter of a million pounds) in such subsidies.  It offers grouse shooting, deer stalking and other similar activities and rents lodges for £4,250 a week during the high season - a sum larger than the total that my family and I spent on half a dozen annual camping holidays in the Scottish Highlands, the Welsh Mountains and mainland Europe!

I was astonished to learn, again from Private Eye, that the owner of the Langwell Estate is Paul Dacre editor of the Daily Mail.  I have to concede that when leading articles in the Daily Mail rage against the huge handouts of ‘our money’ made by the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels who operate the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, the author – quite unlike me – undeniably has direct personal knowledge of his subject.

NHS National Database

          Every household in the country is supposed to have had an official leaflet delivered to them explaining that a national NHS database is being prepared, giving the medical details of each of us held on the computer files of every medical practice nationwide. It also said that we could ‘opt out’ of the scheme if we wished, and told us how to do so.  The scheme had been supposed to come into operation this April but as thousands of people claim that they have never received the leaflet and knew nothing about the database, the launch has been put back to the autumn.

            I do remember receiving the leaflet.  I glanced at it briefly and it occurred to me that there might be some people with medical conditions that they didn’t want to be made available for instance, to friends or relatives, to employers, or to an insurance company. That didn’t apply to me. At 92 no-one is going to offer me life insurance and my afflictions are boringly common – high blood pressure, osteo-arthritis, failing strength, vision and hearing, and other conditions of old age.  I really don't care who knows about them and I didn’t for one moment seriously consider ‘opting out’.

            I think it likely that a great many people who honestly don’t remember receiving the leaflet, did in fact do so, but just thought it was a piece of the junk mail that we all receive every day (special offers at local supermarkets, begging letters from worthy charities, catalogues from mail order firms and leaflets from local entrepreneurs eager to clean windows, tidy up the garden or clean out the roof gutters) I’m sure I’m not alone in consigning most of them  the recycling bin with no more than a cursory glance. It was pure chance that made me decide to read right through the NHS leaflet when it arrived.