21st April 2015

Tendring Topics……..on line

I’m not alone!

            I had begun to think that I was a solitary voice crying in the wilderness in my dislike of ‘right to buy'  and, if the Conservatives win the general election, its progression from the tenants of local authorities to those of Housing Associations.  However I was pleased to read in the Church Times that Dr. David Walker, Bishop of Manchester, has condemned it as making economic nonsense and being morally indefensible.   David Orr, Chief Executive Officer of the National Housing Federation also describes the extension of ‘right to buy’ to tenants of Housing Associations as fundamentally the wrong answer to our country’s housing problems since it involves the transfer of large sums of money to private individuals who are already some of the best and most cheaply housed people in the country.   Furthermore, he says that it is completely unfair to the tens of thousands of tenants of private landlords who haven’t the remotest possible of ever becoming home owners. 

            With the general election coming ever nearer I might be asked, and I have indeed asked myself, why – since I am so strongly opposed to the present coalition government – I don’t wholeheartedly support the Labour Party, which is the only political force with a realistic possibility of replacing them.

            The reason is that there are a few political objectives about which I feel strongly.  My support, little and feeble as it may be, goes to any party that shares those objectives.

            I believe very strongly that the enormous gap between the incomes of the very wealthiest and the poorest in our country is scandalous – the largest in Europe and one of the largest in the developed world.   Its narrowing should be a government priority.

            During the decade of Labour rule that gap widened and Ed Miliband’s Labour Party has no plans to use income tax, or any other effective means, to narrow it.

            Compelling local authorities and/or Housing Associations to sell dwellings to sitting tenants at discounted prices is a betrayal of earlier and wiser generations who provided those homes for letting to eliminate homelessness, overcrowding and sub-standard housing.  ‘Right to buy’ should be repealed as a major cause of our present housing crisis.

            New Labour failed to repeal ‘right to buy’ when it had the opportunity to do so and Ed Miliband has actually apologised for the Labour Party’s earlier opposition to its introduction.

The possession of weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, does not protect our country from attack any more than carrying a knife protects an individual.  It might encourage any ill-disposed country, or terrorist group, possessing similar weapons to use them against us before we had a chance to use ours. The threat of using nuclear weapons is only effective if we are in fact prepared to use them.   If we ever did so we would be guilty of mass murder and possibly responsible for a chain of events that could result in the extinction of the human race.  We should cease our reliance on nuclear weapons as an ‘ultimate deterrent’ and disarm our Trident Nuclear Submarine fleet.  Reliance on Nuclear Defence has been rightly described as Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD!

Meanwhile, the coalition government has run down our regular army which can be used for genuine ‘defence’ as distinct from acts of vengeance, for peacekeeping, and for replacing ‘outsourced’ private enterprises, when they fail to fulfil the public services for which they have been contracted.  Where would we have been had the army not been available to replace the firm that had contracted to provide security for the Olympics and had failed to do so?

David Cameron has announced that a future Conservative Government would replace the existing ageing Trident Submarine fleet with four new state-of-the-art nuclear submarines costing billions of pounds.   Ed Miliband has been at pains to assure the electorate that he would not oppose this.

I believe that a responsible government needs to carry out a thorough review of Britain’s foreign policy, beginning with referendums on our membership of NATO and our ‘special relationship’ with the USA.  These have resulted in our blindly following the American lead into the illegal invasion of Iraq (into which we were led by deliberate lies about Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and its complicity with the outrage of ‘9/11’) and the unwinnable war in Afghanistan, despite our experience of failure in similar wars in that country in the 19^th century!  We have not had reciprocal support from the USA, particularly in the recovery of the Falklands from invasion by Argentina.

More recently, while our EU partners are struggling with the Kiev government, the Russian government and the Ukrainian rebels to secure a lasting peace in Ukraine, our coalition government has given, and is giving, military support to the Kiev government – a government that has lied repeatedly to obtain NATO support, has ruthlessly shelled its own people, and has driven over a million Ukrainians into seeking refuge in Russia.

It might have been expected that UKIP, claiming to be fighting for the UK’s independence, would have agreed with my ideas for a radical revision of Britain’s foreign policy..  It seems though that they’re happy enough having our foreign and defence policies dictated by foreigners from across the Atlantic.

 I have never trusted Nigel Farage whose meteoric rise to fame reminds me too much of Adolf Hitler’s rise in Germany in the late 1920s and early ‘30s.  I hadn’t realized though until the election campaigns got into their stride that he was campaigning under false colours.   Ukip, under Nigel Farage, isn’t battling for UK Independence.  He and his disciples just want to sever our connection with Europe to which we are linked by geography, history and culture, and to the European Union in which Britain has an equal and influential voice..  If they were honest they’d just describe themselves as Europhobes.

Finally, and perhaps most important of all, I’d like the new government to accept the need for early and decisive action to combat and alleviate the effects of the global climate change that is taking place before our eyes. Already we have seen unprecedented drought and bush fires in Australia and parts of the USA. There has also been severe coastal flooding in parts of the USA and a period of unseasonably arctic conditions extending from Canada almost as far as Florida.  Island nations in the Pacific, and parts of the Indian subcontinent have been threatened with extinction. Even in the equable UK there are many households still suffering from the effects of last year’s floods in Somerset and in the Thames valley.

Nigel Farage denies that unprecedented climate change is taking place or – if it is - that human activity has any responsibility for causing it.  Given the opportunity he’d stop all government financial support for wind farms and solar farms.  He’d encourage the extraction of every last ton of coal from British coalfields and the last barrel of oil from our inland and off-shore oil reserves.  He’d tear up the British countryside by ‘fracking’ gas or oil from the beds of shale deep below our feet.

The other party leaders have more respect for the urgent warnings of scientists world-wide and for the need to take urgent action in the face of otherwise inevitable catastrophe.  Both David Cameron and Ed Miliband, on one or other of whom prompt action surely depends, are aware of this.  Both are fully determined to take resolute action…….but not just yet.  Only in the Green Party’s election literature has the threat of climate change featured prominently.   Only the Green Party shares the concerns that are important to me. In Clacton’s by-election I voted tactically for the Conservative Candidate because I thought he had the best chance of defeating the turn-coat former Conservative now Ukipper, Douglas Carswell, who was in fact elected.  For the General Election I shall follow the advice that I quoted in this blog a week or so ago, given by Polonius to his son Laertes in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, ‘This above all, to thine own self be true and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not  then be false to any man’.

I shall vote for Chris Southall, the Green candidate.   He is a local man, living with his family in Burrs Road He is a trained engineer and has been self-employed for most of his life, working as a potter, computer engineer, drummer and with people with special needs.  He has been both a school governor and a parish councillor.  Chris practises what he preaches.  He and his family live in an ‘Eco house’ with a Permaculture Land Centre that is sometimes open to the public. 

He may be unlikely to win the election but a vote for him is not a vote wasted. My vote, together with those of all who vote Green at the General Election, will give national politicians an idea of the growing number of folk in the UK who care passionately about world peace, fairness and justice, and the future of the world in which we live.

            Voting for the whole of Tendring District Council will take place on the same day as the General Election.  In my (Alton Park) ward I have a choice between two Labour and Co-op, two Conservative, and two UKIP candidates.  I shall vote for the Labour and Co-op hopefuls, more in the hope of keeping the Ukippers and the Tories out than of getting those for whom I am voting in!

           

             

              

             

           

           

             

Week 38 2014

Tendring Topics ……….on line

‘Don’t tear our happy family apart!’

            That is the message that David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband, leaders of the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour Parties, took with them on their separate journeys to Scotland last week in a desperate attempt to boost the number of NO votes in the referendum to be held in that country on 18^th September (only three days away as this blog is published!). This will decide whether or not Scotland becomes an independent nation or remains part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as it is at this moment.

            They have left it a little late. Over 150 years ago Benjamin Disraeli, destined to become a distinguished Prime Minister and to be regarded as the founder of the modern Conservative Party, declared in his political novel, ‘Sybil, or the Two Nations’  that Great Britain had already been torn apart ‘horizontally’ into a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor.  He wrote vivid descriptions of the squalor and abject poverty in which  working people lived in the early part of Queen Victoria’s reign.  Since then circumstances have improved for all of us. However, the yawning gap between rich and poor caused by that ‘horizontal tear’, dividing Britain into two nations grows wider year by year. This is a direct result of the actions and failure to take action of the political predecessors of Cameron, Clegg and Miliband.  It widened during the decade of Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ rule, and is widening again today as the coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats rewards the wealthy and penalises the poor!

            No government ever agrees to a referendum unless it feels confident that a majority will vote the way that that government prefers. Two years ago, David Cameron felt quite sure that a referendum on Scottish Independence to be held in September 2014 would yield a comfortable NO majority vote. He was happy to agree to its being held. He insisted on a simple IN or OUT vote because he thought, probably quite correctly, that there might well be a large number of voters who would hesitate to vote for full independence but would like greater autonomy for Scotland.   I have little doubt that he now wishes that he had offered Scottish voters that ‘middle way’.   If the Scots had been offered the choice of greater autonomy within a looser British federation, it would certainly have split the nationalist vote and might well have made it possible for the present system to continue unchanged.  Now – faced with the real possibility of a majority YES vote, he is having to offer ‘greater autonomy within the UK’ as a bribe to try to win over a few thousand still-undecided or YES voters. Thus, even if the Scots Nationalists fail to get a majority YES vote they will have achieved considerably greater autonomy – as well as having retained the possibility of full independence at a later date; not perhaps a win/win situation but far from being a total defeat either.

      
             The possibility that an independent Scottish Government might try, in at least one part of Britain, to narrow the gap caused by that horizontal tear that makes one nation into two, the poor and the wealthy, is one of the reasons why if I were a Scot, I’d be voting YES in that fateful referendum in a few days time.  Other reasons are the hope that independence might result in country free of nuclear weapons and without Trident nuclear submarines, and a country that wished to remain in a more closely integrated European Union but was questioning whether it benefited from membership of NATO and from a very one-sided ‘special relationship’ with the USA.

            Within the United Kingdom these are all issues that are not available for negotiation and (except for EU membership) on which we will never be given a chance to vote.  Oh yes – and it would be nice to live in a country virtually free of the neo-Fascism of Ukip!

And the effect of a YES majority on the rest of us?

           I don’t live in Scotland and, as far as I know, I don’t have a single Scottish ancestor.  I am about as southern-English as it is possible to be.  On several happy camping holidays though, my family and I have travelled the length and breadth of Scotland from the border to John o’ Groats and from the Isle of Skye to the east coast.  We liked the Scottish people and the mountains and the lochs – though we never learned to love the Scottish midges and few would deny that we generally get better weather at home on the north-east Essex coast!  We don't call a drizzle a 'Scotch Mist' for no reason!

            If the referendum on the 18^th yields a YES majority I’ll congratulate our Scottish neighbours and wish them well.  If I were half a century younger I’d be considering emigrating there! I can’t though ignore the fact that we English would miss them badly.  There would be no group of Scottish MPs to challenge the more outrageous of the coalition government’s policies. It is very likely that we would have to endure a Conservative/Ukip coalition government – perhaps a succession of them! We would probably leave the EU without bothering to go to the expense and trouble of a referendum. Outrageous Ukip demands would be likely to result in many responsible Conservatives repudiating the coalition, and the Ukip leader deciding that ‘because of the mess we have inherited from the previous Con/Lib.Dem. coalition government it will be necessary to have temporary single-party government under firm leadership, to ensure the speedy implementation of necessary emergency measures. The country’s political leader will adopt the traditional English title of Lord-Protector and will continue in office until those measures have been introduced and enforced’.

            No, I don’t really suppose that England’s future would be quite as dire as that in the event of a YES majority. During what is proving to be an unconscionably long lifetime I have discovered that, particularly where political issues are concerned, outcomes are very rarely as good as optimists had hoped – but are even less frequently as bad as pessimists had feared.   I do remember though how, in Germany in the late 1920s and early '30s, many people first dismissed Hitler as a funny little man with a Charlie Chaplin moustache and some really daft ideas – a bit of a fruit-cake in fact.  Later, major German industrialists and traditional military leaders thought they could control him and use him for their purposes – but he and his brown-shirted followers controlled and used them – and the Third Reich was born.  I hope that I didn’t spend seven years of my late teens and early twenties playing a tiny role in the destruction of that Third Reich, only to live to see comparable developments in 21^st century Britain!

 Our own by-election

            The possibility that Ukip could develop into an Anglicised NAZI Party and its leader into an Anglo-Saxon Adolf Hitler will certainly be in my mind when I place my cross on the ballot paper on 9^th October. United Kingdom Independence Party sounds innocent enough, and Nigel Farage seems a pleasant enough fellow – enjoying a fag and a drink, and not a bit like everyone’s idea of a scheming politician.  Quite so, but then who would have expected the mildly cranky National Socialist German Workers’ Party to become a movement of extreme right-wing nationalist thugs prepared to use any means – mass murder, torture, genocide – to achieve their ends.  Hitler too; we think of him as being an unscrupulous raving rabble-rouser, but he had an unquestionably magnetic personality and could be good company when he chose to be.  Certainly he too was no-one’s idea of a scheming politician.

             The national press is forecasting a landslide victory for Douglas Carswell and his Ukippers.  I can’t think why. Our former MP has deserted the political party that has loyally supported him and has forced a totally unnecessary by-election only seven months before a scheduled general election. That by-election will cost us taxpayers something like £100,000.  He presumably hopes to bask in the glory of being Ukip’s very first Member of Parliament.  That should guarantee him  a top job if and when Nigel Farage forms his first government!

            Douglas Carswell and his Ukippers are certainly working hard for his election and don’t appear to be short of funds.  I, and presumably all Clactonians, have been deluged by leaflets – I’ve had at least five of them (two a couple of weeks before his defection!) telling us what a wonderful fellow he is and how lucky we have been to have had him as our MP.  I have also had a leaflet from the Labour Party.  The Conservatives have been handicapped by not having a new candidate waiting to be selected, but they’ve chosen one now and I wish local man Giles Watling, actor and Frinton town and district councillor, success in this expensive, absurd and totally unnecessary by-election.

            I had a doorstep Ukip canvasser calling at my home before the Conservative candidate had been selected.  He was armed with a list of voters, a clip-board and a ballpoint pen. He seemed to have expected me to be an enthusiastic Ukipper and  may have been a little taken aback when I told him I was hoping that Douglas Carswell would be roundly defeated in this by-election, and that all Ukip contestants in all future elections would have the same fate.  I intended to vote for the candidate most likely to defeat him, and that - for this by-election and for the very first time in my long life – I intended to vote for the Conservative Candidate, whoever he or she might be!

Week 29 2014

Tendring Topics……on Line

First – the Bad News

            For years the UK has had nuclear Trident submarines roaming the world’s oceans as a so-called Independent Ultimate Deterrent to aggressors. Like NATO it is a relic of the cold war and of the ‘defence policy’ aptly described as Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD); ‘You dare to threaten me with your nuclear missiles – and I’ll threaten you with mine. If you dare to attack me with them, then I’ll attack you.  We’ll both be totally destroyed and (it's unfortunate about the collateral damage) large areas, perhaps the whole, of planet Earth will be made uninhabitable.

            Well, neither the Soviet Union nor NATO were stupid enough to use nuclear weapons.  The ‘cold war’ ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.  The UK ran down its full-time professional army, navy and air force in response to our economic situation – but Trident remained sacrosanct, untouchable.  In the meantime acts of aggression took place and it became abundantly clear that our ‘ultimate deterrent’ deterred no-one at all in the real world.  It didn’t deter Argentina from invading the Falklands.  It didn’t deter Turkey from invading Cyprus.  It didn’t deter the USA and its Caribbean allies from invading Grenada.  When, quite recently, Russia annexed and recovered its lost province of Crimea ‘the west’ blustered and threatened but – thanks to God and common sense – nobody even mentioned that ‘ultimate deterrent’.

            In the meantime the real threat to us all comes not from aggressive sovereign nations but from terrorists who have been inspired by a perversion of Islam to believe that they’re fighting God’s battles for him on earth.  They don’t yet possess nuclear weapons but the danger of their acquiring them is a natural consequence (or perhaps God’s punishment!) for our continuing to develop them, instead of banning their manufacture world-wide and destroying every single exiting nuclear weapon.  We have learned recently that chemical weapons can and have been banned world-wide.  It must be possible to do the same with nuclear weapons.

  I believe that much more dangerous than the possibility that Iran may develop a nuclear armoury, is the very real possibility that the nuclear weapons that we know Pakistan possesses should fall into the hands of terrorists.  NATO sent forces to Afghanistan to destroy the bases of Al Qaeda that had been protected by the Taliban government.   All they succeeded in doing was persuading Al Qaeda to move its bases elsewhere, notably the tribal areas of northern Pakistan, and Yemen in the Arabian peninsula. In those tribal areas of Pakistan, Al Qaeda, the Taliban and those who sympathise with them, are a considerable force possibly with a ‘fifth column’ in the Pakistan armed forces.  It is by no means impossible that they may one day overthrow the present Pakistani Government, acquire those nuclear weapons and threaten to use them

            Would our ‘independent ultimate deterrent’ then reveal its true value?  I doubt it.  Are people who tie explosives round their bodies and blow themselves up in crowded market places in the conviction that thereby they’ll go straight to Heaven as holy martyrs, likely to be deterred by the possibility that the victims of their nuclear weapon may respond in kind?

            And the bad news?  The independent cross-party Trident Commission, set up by the British American Security Information Council, has decided that there is no credible alternative to Trident.  I’m glad to note that British Quakers – but there are so few of us – are opposing this decision.  Here’s a copy of a report in The Friend, an independent Quaker weekly:

 The assertion that ‘these are weapons of mass destruction……….which have proved to be a poor deterrent against acts of terror or against recent political events’ must be an example of Quaker fear of making exaggerated statements.  They haven’t proved to be a poor deterrent, but have been no deterrent whatsoever!

…..and the not-quite-so-bad news!

          When I first heard it, in fact, I had thought that it was really good news.  It all began a few months ago when we learned that, to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, the Royal Mint was going to strike a memorial £2.00 coin with an image of Lord Kitchener on it.  The image was taken from an army recruiting poster in which the general (the hero of Corporal Jones in Dad's Army!) was assuring anyone viewing the poster that  Your Country needs YOU!

            I was one of thousands who felt that a war that had cost millions of British, French, Russian, Austrian and German lives, fought for reasons that were far from clear, and which had led to another bloody world-wide conflict  only twenty-one years later, was not best remembered by an image of a  luxuriously   moustached General urging young men to become cannon-fodder.  We petitioned the Royal Mint and the government to use instead an image of Nurse Edith Cavell.  The daughter of a Norfolk parson, she had been nursing the wounded of every country in a hospital in German-occupied Belgium.  She also helped two hundred wounded and captured British service-men escape to neutral Holland.  She was detected and arrested by the Germans, court-martialled and shot.

            In 1947 I worked briefly as a Public Health Inspector for the city of Westminster.  Quite near the office was a statue of Edith Cavell.  It bore the words for which she is best remembered.  ‘Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone’, which she said to the pastor who visited and prayed with her on the eve of her execution.    She was obviously a much more appropriate image for a memorial coin than that of a past-his-best general beckoning other men to their deaths.

            Last week I was elated when I learned that there would be a Nurse Edith Cavell coin struck in commemoration of the World War I centenary.  We had won!   Or so I thought until I read the ‘small print’ of the news item.   The Nurse Cavell coin is not to be struck instead of, but as well as, the Lord Kitchener one.   What’s more the Kitchener coin is to be a £2.00 one for general use – apart from the image it’ll be exactly like the £2.00 coins in use today.  The Nurse Cavell coin, on the other hand, will have a nominal value of £5.00 and is intended for coin collectors.  Unlike the Kitchener coin, they won't be in daily use.  Most of us will probably never see one.

             

                                                           

 Here are enlarged pictures of the two coins.  It is likely to be all that most of us will ever see of the Nurse Edith Cavell coin!

                                                                          

Week 18 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

Bravo David Cameron!

            It isn’t very often that I find myself leaping to defend David Cameron our Prime Minister from his critics. In fact, I don’t think that it has ever happened before and it may well never happen again.  I do however wholeheartedly agree with him that Britain is a Christian country and we should celebrate that fact.  I would qualify that declaration though (and I think that Mr Cameron would agree with me on this point) by asserting that Britain is not only a Christian country; but it is a Christian country in which adherents of other faiths or of no faith at all, are not just tolerated but welcomed. They are given exactly the same rights and privileges as Christians to practise their faith, to build places of worship and religious teaching, to bring up children in that faith, and to encourage and accept converts from any other religious tradition or from none. 

            That is surely one of the reasons why the fact that we are a Christian country should be celebrated.  At least during the past 1,000 years it is only in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and in countries with a Christian tradition, that people of all religious faiths have been able to worship, teach and proselytise on equal terms, and  can expect to enjoy the protection of the state in doing so..

            There have, of course, been a number of countries in which folk of different faiths have lived together in peace in the past – in Moorish Spain for example, or Bosnia under Turkish rule – but always the adherents of a minority faith were second-class citizens. Those wonderful examples of Moorish architecture you may have seen in southern Spain were almost certainly built by Christian slaves.  In 1980 my wife and I toured what was then still a united Jugoslavia.  In Sarajevo we visited a Mosque and a Serb Orthodox Church.  Both were open to tourists and worshippers.  The latter though was behind a high wall so that during the period of Turkish rule the Muslim majority need not be visibly conscious of the infidels in their midst.  It took Marshal Tito’s godless (but springing from a Christian tradition) communist government to give tolerance and equal state recognition to followers of the Serb Orthodox and Croat Catholic traditions and to Muslims.

            In the Middle East there were countries, among them Iraq, Syria and Egypt, which although predominantly Muslim, at one time had considerable Christian minorities. They were prohibited from making converts from among their Muslim neighbours, but otherwise thrived and prospered.  All of that ended as a result of Britain’s blundering foreign policy, particularly with Tony Blair’s and George Bush’s disastrous – and illegal – invasion of Iraq.  Now, throughout the Middle East, Pakistan and much of Africa, Christians survive in fear for their livelihoods and their lives – emigrating where they are able to do so, and adding to the growing number of asylum seekers.  In Saudi-Arabia, Christian faith and practice are banned absolutely, only the most extreme Muslim worship and practice being permitted.  But Saudi Arabia buys our weaponry and we buy their oil – so their intolerance and contempt for human rights are tolerated, and visiting Saudi royalty are treated as honoured guests!   That is not something of which we should be proud!

            It is true that in Britain Christians have done terrible things both to each other and to others in the past.  I don’t think that we need to reproach ourselves too much about the medieval crusades.  Muslim armies had invaded Christendom (in Spain)  before those crusades and, advancing from Constantinople (Istanbul) to the outskirts of Vienna, long after them. The Crusades had, at least in the first instance, the surely laudable objective of ensuring that Christian pilgrims could visit in safety the holy places in Palestine. 

            The same cannot be said about the torture and burning alive of heretics in medieval Britain, about which the godless Lord Byron wrote, ‘Christians have burned each other, quite persuaded, that all the apostles would have done as they did’.  Nor about the witch hunts and witch hangings of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, and of Christian involvement in the slave trade.  None of those practices can possibly be excused though it must be said that it is quite a long time since a heretic was burned or a witch hanged in the UK, and Christian Britain was among the first countries to ban slavery and to use its navy to stamp out the slave trade.

            In the recent census only just over half those who responded declared themselves to be ‘Christian’. That was a majority, if only a small one – but I know of people who certainly hold Christian values and Christian beliefs but hesitate to describe themselves as ‘Christian’ because they fear that that would associate them with the inquisition, witch hunts and over-eager fundamentalist doorstep evangelists today!  

            But today’s numbers of professed Christians are only one of the reasons why we may claim that Britain is a Christian country.  Christianity has shaped our history over the past 1,000 years.  It has enriched our language.  We all know what is meant by ‘A Judas’, ‘a Good Samaritan’, ‘a Job’s comforter’, ‘a Delilah’,  ‘Petering out’, ‘David and Goliath’, ‘Adam’s ale’, ‘Old as Methuselah’, ‘Antediluvian’, ‘a Martha or a Mary’, ‘a voice crying in the wilderness’  - there are many more, all directly linked to the Old or New Testaments of the Christian Bible with which during my childhood and youth almost everyone was, at least to some extent, familiar.

            Nowadays the Christian Church sometimes acts as the prophets of the Old Testament did and points our rulers, concerned only with worldly values, towards compliance with the will of God.  Archbishop Runcie incurred the wrath of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher when his service of thanksgiving after the Falklands War remembered the Argentine as well as the British dead, wounded and bereaved. ‘It was like a Quaker Meeting’ she is said to have complained.  That suggests to me that the Archbishop had got the service about right!

            It says much for David Cameron that he continues to proclaim his Christian faith despite the fact that in recent months his government’s policies towards the poor and disadvantaged have been strongly criticised by the leaders of all Christian traditions. I disagree with virtually every other statement he has made and almost every policy of his government.  But - like him, I believe that we live in a Christian, but uniquely tolerant and welcoming, country – and that this is something that we should celebrate, and for which we should thank God.‘

Hier stehe ich.  Ich kann nicht anders!’

            ‘Here I stand.  There is nothing else that I can do’.  Thus spoke Martin Luther, the ‘father of Protestantism’ as he expounded his reformist doctrines.  Writing, for the first time ever, in support of David Cameron as he declared his Christian faith, I found myself wondering where I really stand on the burning political issues of the 21^st Century. I know that I am an opinionated old man, but what do those opinions amount to?  Am I a really a closet revolutionary, a well-meaning but somewhat woolly-minded liberal, or could I possibly be at-heart a true-blue Tory?  Where do I stand on the political spectrum?  Well, here are some of my deeply-held convictions:

             I believe that there should be a steady reduction of the income gap between the wealthiest and poorest of our countrymen, and that our government should work towards a society in which no-one’s income is more than ten times that of anyone else’s. Steps towards this would be a shift from indirect taxation (VAT and Excise duties) to direct taxation (Income tax and death duties), and a revision of the income tax system to ensure that we all pay the same percentage of our income in tax. I believe that those who move to tax havens overseas to avoid paying income tax in this country, should automatically forfeit their British nationality and their right to a British passport. I’d also like everyone to have a fair wage and to give of their best without a ‘target' and without a promised bonus as a bribe!  I'd like to put behind us a system in which the poor are forced to work hard by the threat of starvation and homelessness; and the very wealthy are persuaded to work by the promise of an enormous bribe. We must get rid of this 'expecting an enormous bonus', culture.  It is infinitely more damaging both to individuals and to society than the 'benefit culture' that members of the government are so keen to eradicate.  

            I believe too that we should scrap our nuclear weapons and nuclear submarine fleet and that the role of the armed forces should increasingly be that of dealing with the results of civil and natural disasters (earthquakes, fires, floods, civil conflicts, failure of private enterprise contractors, and so on) and the evacuation or rescue of their victims.

 I’m clearly a ‘loony lefty’ – well to the left even of ‘Old Labour’!

            I am though also convinced of the reality and threat of Global Warming, and of humankind’s responsibility for it. Accepting this and attempting to respond positively to it over-rides all other political concerns.  I think we should redouble our efforts to explore and exploit renewable energy sources and believe that wave and tidal power, surely much more dependable than that of the sun or the wind, have yet to be fully exploited.  We should be working towards the total ending of the use of fossil fuels. Fracking should be made illegal throughout the UK.  Those convictions surely put me squarely among the ‘Greens’.

The Scandinavian model – Queen Margrethe II of Denmark disembarks from her Royal Yacht in London Docks, as she visits and encourages the Danish athletes at the 2012 Olympics.  Photo by my elder son Pete.   

           

But..........I also believe in the merits of our constitutional monarchy (though I’d prefer the informality of the Scandinavian model) and I am certainly not a republican.   I think that there is a lot to be said for the selective education that made it possible for folk like me to climb out of the ‘aspiring working class’ into the lowest levels of the ‘middle class’.There clearly is something the matter with our educational system.  Michael Gove, Education Minister, seems desperately eager to put it right and I wish him well in that task - but he really has a knack of upsetting everybody from the NUT to his own 'old Etonian' colleagues!

 Although I think that women should be able to aspire to any job in the United Kingdom (even those of Archbishop of Canterbury or York if they’re the best candidates for the job) I also think that making a comfortable and happy home, and bringing up children ‘in the way that they should go’, can be a perfectly satisfying and fulfilling career for some women. It is a career that they should be encouraged to follow if they wish to do so. I have no doubt that the best person to guide and guard a child from infancy to adolescence is not a child minder or a nursery school but the child’s mum.

Children are bound to be neglected if both parents are in  full-time work.  Mum and dad will  be away from home all day and when they get home there'll be a meal to be prepared, housework to be done and private mail to attend to..   They are really very fortunate if they can find the time and energy to listen to their children's concerns and help them with their homework.

 In the 'bad old days' when I grew from childhood through adolescence to adult life, folk married before they lived together, and didn't marry until the potential husband's income was sufficient to support a wife and family.  I really wouldn't wish to return to those days.  Then though, there would always be either dad or mum (all right - so it would most likely be mum!) at home when a child or young adolescent came home from school . Consequently there was much less juvenile crime, and schoolchild pregnancies, juvenile 'social diseases' and juvenile drug-taking were virtually unknown.

Some of my thoughts on these issues are probably 'to the right'  of those of many Conservatives! 

         Oh yes – and I’m an unashamed Europhile and a Federalist!  Every political party (except of course UKIP) has a few of us. Can you wonder that, in ‘first past the post’ elections, I no longer seek for a candidate I’d like to see win. There won't be one.   I look instead for the candidate I most want to be rejected and vote for the candidate most likely to defeat him or her!

           

         

           

           

           

         

Week 44 2013

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Our Grandchildren’s Legacy

            One of the most persuasive arguments that the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer use to justify their continuing assault on the finances of the poor and disabled and the services on which they depend, is that it would be grossly unfair of us to leave our grandchildren with a legacy of our debts that we have been too selfish to clear.  It’s a persuasive argument. None of us wants to be the cause of suffering or hardship to our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.   I doubt though if it has  satisfied those whose car has been damaged by a pothole in the road, who have tripped over a broken paving stone or who have found that they are no longer eligible for a financial benefit needed to keep their family warm and above starvation-level.  Our top politicians are also – or so I thought – quite keen on supporting British industry that will provide jobs for British workers and thus make up for some of the unemployment resulting from their cuts in the public services.

            That being so, I find it difficult to understand why they are quite so enthusiastic about a new nuclear power station that is to be built, at the cost of billions of pounds, by a French enterprise and financed by the Chinese!   It will, announced the Prime Minister, provide thousands of jobs and cost the British taxpayer nothing at all.  And that, he added with self-satisfaction, ‘must be a good thing’.

            The Chinese aren’t philanthropists and they are lending that money for the power plant’s construction just as surely as the financial institutions lend money to the government to allow it to carry out its functions.  They’ll want it back – with interest!  It may not cost us anything now as tax-payers but it certainly will cost our grandchildren and great-grandchildren as consumers.  Luckily for the government they won’t have votes in the next General Election!  The government has promised repayment by means  of electricity charges to domestic, commercial and industrial consumers at twice the rate at which those consumers are charged today – and goodness knows, many people, and many firms, are finding today’s prices crippling.  It’s true that some of that increase will be absorbed by general inflation by the time that power station is producing electricity – but wages and incomes (except for those of the very wealthy) aren’t keeping up with inflation now.  Why should we assume they’ll do so in the future?

            Debt will not, of course, be the only legacy left to our grandchildren and great grandchildren by this and other nuclear power stations.   The production of nuclear power leaves a toxic residue that remains lethal for hundreds of years and for which no-one has yet discovered a safe means of disposal or storage.

            I wrote fairly light-heartedly in this blog about ‘fracking’ a few weeks ago.  The real objection to its practice is not that it will despoil the countryside and possibly pollute water supplies but that it will encourage complacency in the face of the strongest evidence yet that accelerating climate change is taking place and that human activity is responsible for it.  Fracking, as well as being expensive and destroying the beauty of ‘England’s green and pleasant land’, produces fossil fuels that will hasten that climate change and delay our development of sufficient clean and renewable sources of energy sufficient to meet the UK’s needs.

           

            Nuclear power doesn’t produce greenhouse gases but it does have bulky by-products that remain lethal for centuries.  Nuclear power plants are also subject to damage by natural disasters, as we have seen recently in Japan where radio-active material from a ruined nuclear energy installation continues to pollute the Pacific Ocean.  Had anyone warned of that Japanese power plant’s potential vulnerability four years ago they would have been laughed at, just as those who in Britain warn about vulnerability to natural disaster and to terrorist action, are laughed at today.

            We need to press on with our harnessing of the power of the wind and the sun.  We need also to find effective ways of exploiting the power of the waves that crash onto our beaches and the foot of our cliffs all the year round.  The potential energy of wind, sun and waves does, as critics delight in pointing out, vary according to the weather and the season.    That of the tides that ebb and flow twice daily round our coasts and into and out of our estuaries is completely dependable.  Tidal power doesn’t pollute, needn’t deface the landscape and doesn’t produce a lethal by-product.  It has been harnessed and used in tide-mills for centuries. We need to use 21^st century technology to exploit for modern use this totally reliable, non-polluting and inexhaustible source of energy.

I have little doubt that if we invested half as much capital and effort into researching and developing those entirely benign and renewable sources of energy as we spend on manufacturing weapons of death and destruction, our grandchildren would have all the energy they needed, in safety and at prices they would be able to afford.

Late News - David Cameron has announced that he will 'roll back' the green taxes introduced to combat  climate change as they add too much to fuel bills.  Well, it's easier than confronting the energy supply companies and it should win a few votes for his Party.  Tough on those grandchildren and great grandchildren about whom he and the Chancellor were once so concerned.

A Prophecy Fulfilled!

How very rarely does the ability to say ‘I told you so!’ give the speaker any satisfaction whatsoever!

It must surely be obvious to any sane person that this dreadful civil war in Syria must be stopped. Thousands of innocent people have been killed.  Thousands more have been rendered homeless.  Much of the country has been reduced to ruin. The flood of refugees is overwhelming neighbouring countries.  Egypt and Libya, Muslim countries that might have been expected to welcome their fugitive co-religionists are simply moving then on – many to their deaths as they try to cross the Mediterranean Sea in cockle-shell boats. The religious tolerance that was once a hallmark of the Syrian regime has been replaced by sectarian strife, intolerance and persecution of people of minority religious traditions. Christians, who before the civil war had lived in peace beside their Muslim neighbours have been particularly targeted by the very rebels whom our government is supporting. 

 Backing either one side or the other in an attempt to force an end to conflict by bringing one of the combatants to victory is as stupid as it is wicked!  The fact is that both sides have shown total contempt for human life. Both sides are culpable.   The only possible end to the conflict must surely lie in negotiations in which all concerned are prepared to compromise to restore the country to peace and allow Syrians – free from any foreign interference – to heal their wounds, bury their dead and rebuild their shattered country.

Just such an international conference has been planned for next month.  I prophesied in this blog that I thought it likely that Russia would be able to persuade the Syrian Government to attend in a spirit of compromise.  Our government's ability to persuade the rebels (a hotchpotch of liberal idealists, fanatical Muslim jihadists and known democracy-hating terrorists, many of them foreigners with no previous   association whatsoever with Syria) to send representatives ready to compromise and authorised to negotiate, would be another matter!

So it has proved.  The Syrian Government is prepared to attend the international conference with no preconditions.  By promising that President Assad would play no part in any future Syrian Government (I'd have thought that that was a decision that the Syrian people might have been allowed to decide in the ballot box?) our Foreign Secretary William Hague has persuaded some of the rebels to send representatives.  Others though, notably members and supporters of Al Qaida, are interested only in total victory no matter how many innocents are slaughtered to achieve it. If, miraculously, a compromise is reached and a new peaceful Syria emerges, I have little doubt that supporters of Al Qaida will continue their war of terrorism to try to undermine and destroy it.

Just one good thing does appear to be emerging from this appalling conflict.  The Head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, believes that the surrender and destruction of Syria’s stock-pile of chemical weapons will mean that the organisation’s objective;  a world free of these terrible means of killing fellow human beings, can and will be achieved in his lifetime.

If that is possible – then why should it not be possible to make progress towards achieving a world free of those even-more-terrible nuclear weapons?  At the moment we in the UK live in one of seven countries (but officially only six!) that possess these dreadful weapons of mass destruction. Do we really imagine that the citizens of for instance, Canada, Germany, Sweden and Japan sleep any less easily in their beds than we do because they don’t possess these so-called ultimate deterrents?  I hope, again for the sake of our grandchildren and great grandchildren, that it doesn’t take their use in some future conflict to persuade the world’s governments of the importance and urgency of banishing them for ever from our planet.

  Is the UK betraying Europe – for the CIA?         

The UK Government's deafening silence amid a chorus of indignation about the bugging of the phones of European leaders, while David Cameron reserves his condemnation for those who have revealed this practice, gives credence to the accusation that Britain's GCHQ has been assisting in the CIA's clandestine activities.  Imagine the outrage there would be if it were revealed that agents from 'Brussels' were listening in to the private conversations of David Cameron, George Osborne and William Hague!  How do we know that the CIA isn’t doing just that?  ‘We’ve been given assurances……. I’ve no doubt that if Angela Merkel had enquired six months ago, she’d have been given the same assurances.  There’s no honour among thieves or among spies  and not very much it seems, among politicians!

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Week 38 2013

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Thoughts on an anniversary

            I am typing these words on the twelfth Anniversary of the ‘9/11’ terrorist attack on the ‘Twin Towers’ of New York, a terrorist attack that was one of the pretexts for the invasion of Iraq and the reason for the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan. I consulted ‘Google’ to check my memories of the event (I remember that when we first switched on the tv during the afternoon of 11^th September 2001 my wife and I imagined we were watching a preview of a sci.fi. disaster movie!)

            I did learn from Google that the CIA had published the names and nationalities of nineteen terrorists who had played leading roles in the outrage.  They were all members of Al Qaeda  To my surprise I found that fifteen of them were from Saudi-Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt and one from Lebanon.  There was not a single terrorist from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or Syria.   Yet those are supposed to be the ‘rogue states’ that harbour and encourage terrorists and must be brought to heel by the ‘free world’, while Saudi-Arabia and the U.A.E. are trusted allies.

 Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E are the main supporters and suppliers of arms to the rebel forces trying to topple the present Assad government in Syria.  They are now expressing their anger and dismay at the fact that the USA has at least postponed its  punitive missile attacks on the Syrian government while it pursues the possibility of that government handing over its store of chemical weapons to the ‘international community’. Prominent among those rebel forces in Syria is Al Qaeda, the organisation that undoubtedly was responsible for 9/11.  We, the Americans and the French are currently giving them moral support and helping to supply them with all their needs short of actual weaponry!

            The British and American governments are said to have ‘compelling evidence’ that the Assad government was responsible for the chemical attack that undoubtedly killed a very large number of Syrian civilians a fortnight ago.  We haven’t yet  been allowed to see that ‘compelling evidence’.  Is it, I wonder, as irrefutable as the evidence for Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction that lured us into the invasion of Iraq?

 Intelligence Services are made up of fallible humans, with human strengths and human weaknesses. They receive and analyse scores of often-contradictory reports daily.  It would be surprising if they didn’t emphasise the importance of evidence that their political paymasters want to hear, and minimise or discard that which they don’t.  Evidence from Saudi Arabia is very likely to be biased against the Assad Government. Assad is the wrong sort of Muslim! So, I fear is evidence from Mossad, Israel’s secret service.   We know that Israel doesn’t like the present Syrian government, if only because of its ties of friendship with Iran.  We also know that Mossad is utterly ruthless in defence of what it considers to be Israel’s interests.  It has carried out assassinations, kidnappings and forgery (of British Passports, for example, to make it possible for assassins to get closer to their target).   I do not think that, if they considered it to be in Israel’s interest, they’d have any problem with bearing false witness.

            I hope that the current initiative for peace does succeed.  I wonder if the prayers of millions of people world-wide inspired by the Pope’s appeal to all  humanity have been heard – and answered.  I think that armed interference by foreigners like ourselves on behalf of either side can only add to the death and destruction.

            What is needed is for all foreign fighters, on both sides, to go back to their homelands.  Then, free of foreign interference, for the Syrians on both side of the conflict to lay down their arms and get on with the task of rebuilding their lives and their shattered country.   I am quite sure that they would receive generous help in doing so from well-wishing, peace-loving, folk world-wide. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers…..’

Pots and Kettles!

            I am sometimes embarrassed by the patronising ‘holier than thou’ attitude of our top politicians and those of the USA with regard to the sins of other governments. We don’t mistreat prisoners of war, bomb harmless civilians, threaten others with nuclear weapons and so on – and on.   All fine – until we are stopped in our tracks by allegations of the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers, the torture and killing of terrorist suspects during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya and, going back a little, the blanket fire raids on civilian centres like Dresden in World War II.  Going back even further it comes as something of a shock to learn that it was  neither Hitler nor Stalin but we Brits. who invented Concentration Camps.  The very first of these was built by the British for the confinement of Boer Families during the South African War

         When we hear politicians on both sides of the Atlantic threatening dire consequences if this, that or the other regime manages to acquire a nuclear weapon, it is worth remembering that the only country that has ever used these dreadful weapons to kill fellow human beings (men, women and children 'in one red burial blent') was the USA when, with full British approval, they dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945!  

.      I am amazed that the Americans have the gall to lecture others on the wickedness of Chemical Weapons when there are something like half a million Vietnamese children with serious physical or mental defects as a result of the use by the USA of Agent Orange as a defoliant during the Vietnam War. About three million were affected altogether.

       The reason why some 20 million gallons of  herbicides and defoliants were poured onto the forests of Vietnam was not primarily to kill or maim little children but to get rid of the trees and bushes that provided cover for the Vietcong – but kill and maim the  innocent they certainly did.  It was, at the very best, recklessly irresponsible.  In 2010 a joint U.S.A /Vietnam Commission recommended .that the U.S. should pay $300 million in compensation for the victims and towards the repair of the ecosystem. To date the USA has paid nothing.

Then, of course, there was the use of Napalm, a particularly unpleasant chemical weapon – a burning gel that adheres to the body or clothes of its victims causing intense agony and death.  One of the most striking news pictures of that dreadful war was of the little nine year old girl who had torn off her burning clothing and was running naked with other refugees from a Vietnamese village concealed by smoke and consumed by flame..   A South Vietnam Air Force plane had committed  that particular war crime – but their US allies had supplied the Napalm, and had used it themselves often enough in Vietnam..

That naked and terrified little girl, although badly burnt, survived and currently lives in Canada.   Here is a message that she sends to all humankind.  If only we all heeded it!

‘Forgiveness made me free from hatred. I still have many scars on my body and severe pain most days but my heart is cleansed. Napalm is very powerful, but faith, forgiveness, and love are much more powerful. We would not have war at all if everyone could learn how to live with true love, hope, and forgiveness. If that little girl in the picture can do it, ask yourself: Can you?’ 

Well, can you?

Clacton Quakers

The interior, Clacton Quaker Meeting House

     Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a Quaker (a member of the Religious Society of Friends).  My wife Heather and I joined the Quakers in Ipswich in 1948 and became members of Clacton-on-Sea  Quaker Meeting in 1955 when we moved to this area.   We celebrated and gave thanks for our silver, ruby, golden and diamond wedding anniversaries in the Clacton Quaker Meeting House, and the Meeting House was full when we gave thanks for Heather's life at a Memorial Meeting for Worship there on 30th July 2006.

Our golden wedding celebration 1996

       I still try to get to our Sunday morning Quaker Meeting for Worship every week.

       We Clacton Quakers now have our own web site.  If you'd like to know more about the faith that inspires me to write 'Tendring Topics....on line' each week, click onto www.quaker.org.uk (that's the official national Quaker website) but if you'd like to know more about the Quaker Meeting of which I have been a member for over half a century click onto www.clactonquakers.org.