27th February 2015

Tendring Topics……on line

Is our economy safe in their hands?

            One of the main points of the Conservative Party’s election campaign is that the country’s economy is safe in their hands.  Vote for any party other than the Conservatives, they say, and you’ll have Ed Miliband as Prime Minister. Our economy – your money – is safe with David Cameron.   Well, I’m not all that keen on Ed Miliband but I really don’t think his economic policies are materially different from those of David Cameron.  It doesn’t seem to occur to either of them (or perhaps they’re both too scared of well-off voters to mention it) that cutting essential public services is neither the only nor the best way of reducing that deficit. 

The deficit is the difference between the government’s income and its expenditure.  Why not try increasing its income?   A penny on income tax would hurt no-one (even with the skewed-in-favour-of-the-wealthy income tax system we have today) and would have an instant effect on the deficit.  Instead David Cameron is talking about cutting income tax!  Both he and the Liberal Democrats are convinced that they’re doing a tremendous service to the poor by raising the level at which income becomes liable, thereby taking some low-paid workers out of the income tax system altogether.  Sometimes they say, ‘Out of the tax system altogether’, as though income tax were the only tax we all pay.

In fact, by raising the  threshold at which income tax becomes payable, they are helping everyone who pays income tax – but they are not in the least helping those whose income is already too low to be subject to taxation.

 One way in which the Government has wasted our money is in the maintenance of our Trident Nuclear Submarine ‘independent Nuclear Deterrent’.  It is not independent (can you imagine us using it – or even threatening to use it – without the OK of Washington?) and it hasn’t deterred any of the many acts of aggression that have occurred in the post-war years.  When the Falklands were invaded by Argentina neither our ‘nuclear deterrent’ nor our ‘special relationship’ with the USA were the least help to us.  Nor does everyone think that the lavish cost of an all-but-a-state-funeral of a politician who deeply divided the country and whose flagship ‘right to buy’ legislation is responsible for our current housing crisis, was money well spent.

Perhaps though the most absurd and obviously crazy way in which the Conservative dominated coalition government has frittered away our money has been the replacement of area Police Committees with directly elected ‘Police and Crime Commissioners’ with power to appoint and sack Chief Constables and to determine the general direction of police work though operational control remains, thank goodness, with the Chief Constables.   The former Police Committees were, so the coalition claimed, ‘undemocratic’.   How can one man or woman, elected by a tiny fragment of the total electorate, possibly be ‘more democratic’ than a committee, at least some members of which had been elected locally?

The obvious way to make the police answerable to the local public was to make them the responsibility of the local county or unitary authority council. They would elect some of their members to serve on a ‘Police and Crime Committee’ with the same responsibilities as those of Police and Crime Commissioners.  These police committees would be more representative of their whole area than any single individual could hope to be.  They’d also be much better able to co-ordinate police activities with those of other local or regional services such as education, social services, highways, and parks and gardens, for which the County Council or Unitary Authority is responsible.  What’s more, they’d cost less, which I would have thought would have been a prime consideration of our Prime Minister and Chancellor.

You’ll recall that the public showed its contempt for the whole idea of directly elected Commissioners (an idea imported from the USA) by failing to turn up at the polling booths.  Nationwide the percentage of those bothering to register their vote was the lowest recorded in any election – and Essex set a splendid example by having the lowest turn-out of the lot!

Of course there has always been the possibility that those of us who were convinced that the appointment of Police and Crime Commissioners was a costly mistake were quite wrong. There could have been a dramatic fall in crime and rise in the detection rate, and we might have all been sleeping easier in our beds in the knowledge that we had a Commissioner looking after our interests.  Essex’s own Commissioner – Nick Alston - seemed a pleasant enough chap.  Perhaps he could work miracles.

Headlines in the local Daily Gazette suggest that he can’t; It’s official……crime is rising in Essex.   In fact, that is only partly true.  The number of domestic abuse cases rose from 9,222 to 10,825 in 2013 and there was 35 percent rise in prosecutions against Class A drug dealers. The solved crime rate fell to 27.63 percent.   On the other hand there was an 11.6 percent drop in the number of burglaries and there were 900 fewer incidents of rural crime.

 While the government exercises tight control of the purse strings there is little that either the Crime Commissioner or a Police Committee can do to reduce crime.  Mark Smith, chairman of the Essex Police Federation is quite sure that the politicians are to blame:

 It is quite clear that what we are being told by the politicians is not true.  They say crime is down.  It is not and we are not even recording new crimes like cyber crime and ‘grooming’.

We have already had cuts of £72.5 million and have heard that in the next five years we are going to have to save another £80 million. We will probably lose 200 officers this year, so we will have gone down from 3,600 to 3,000. In five years there will only be about 2,000 if the cuts go ahead.

I’m not a great Ed Miliband fan and intend to vote Green in the General Election. However I’d support Ed Miliband’s promise that a future Labour Government would put more coppers on the beat and pay for the change by scrapping those expensive and largely impotent Police and Crime Commissioners.

Yet another NHS reorganisation?

In this blog I have again and again criticised the action of successive governments – both Conservative and Labour – of stripping local authorities of the powers and responsibilities that were theirs in the 1930s.   When in 1937 and aged sixteen, I stepped onto the very lowest rung of the staff ladder of Ipswich Corporation’s Public Health Department in 1937 the Department was responsible for a General Hospital, an Isolation Hospital (infectious diseases like diphtheria and scarlet fever were much more common, and deadlier, in those days), a Maternity Home and a Tuberculosis Sanatorium. The department was also responsible for the domiciliary midwives and district nurses and the school medical service, as well as the environmental health services for which it is responsible today.  There may well have been other services of which I was not aware.  I was very young, on the very lowest staff level – and my local government career was interrupted after just two years by the outbreak of World War II!

After the war I was older and, I hope, wiser than I had been.  I was one of the returning servicemen who voted for Clem Attlee’s Labour Government – but I was a little dismayed when all those local health and medical services were taken over by the NHS.  However I thought that the advantages of a truly National Health Service outweighed the disadvantages, and – until the last year or so – I have had no reason to think otherwise.   I wasn’t impressed with the Government’s last NHS reorganisation.  It sounds wonderful to make GPs responsible for all their patients needs – seeing a consultant, getting a bed in a hospital and so on.  But GPs are fully occupied examining patients, treating them and passing them on to consultants when necessary.  They really didn’t have the time for administrative work.   I wrote in this blog that they were getting rid of one layer of bureaucracy and replacing it with dozens of smaller layers as GP practices took on extra staff or formed consortiums to deal with this work.  Now it seems the Government is really trying to localise the Health Service in at least one part of the UK.  They are making the local authorities that comprise Greater Manchester a single comprehensive Health and Welfare Authority, responsible for both Health and Social Services.  It sounds a brilliant idea but there are several matters on which I’d like further clarification.

The government will fund this new authority.  This government isn’t famous for its lavish support of public services.  Will there be adequate funding?

He who pays the piper calls the tune.  Are we quite sure that this new authority will not find itself directly under the thumb of bureaucrats in Whitehall?

Just now the new authority will be under democratic control by elected councillors.  But I understand that within a few years the area will have an all-powerful ‘Mayor’.  Will a Mancunian equivalent of Boris Johnson dictate Health Service policy?

   Services inside the new authorities’ area will inevitably be different (not necessarily either better or worse) that those outside.  What will happen when someone complains that ‘That woman over the road got into hospital immediately.  I’ve been told I’ll have  to wait two months – it’s just a post code lottery?'

      

           

Week 51 2012

Tendring Topics......on line

Pots and Kettles!

            Rarely before can such a relatively trivial thoughtless action have caused so great a tragedy as that of the two Australian disc jockeys who successfully phoned through to the hospital ward where the Duchess of Cornwall was being treated for severe morning sickness.  They clearly did it ‘just for a laugh’ and with no malicious intent whatsoever.  It should have done no more than cause embarrassment to the hospital (who should have had a professional phone operator on duty at all times), to the nurse who had actually discussed her royal patient’s condition to a caller pretending to be the Queen, and – just possibly – to the Duchess of Cornwall herself.

            In fact it resulted in the death of a well-loved and devoted nurse who was also a wife and mother. She had done nothing wrong but had tried to help by answering and passing on a phone call.  She died, so we are told, because she couldn’t endure the ‘shame’ of having received a hoax call and believing the caller was whom she claimed to be.

            My word!   During the past year we have seen government incompetence permit hundreds of illegal immigrants enter the country; appoint a private security enterprise to ‘police’ the Olympics that was clearly incapable of fulfilling its obligations; and make a complete botch of handling the West Coast Line rail franchise – costing tax payers millions of pounds!  We have also seen top politicians of both main parties involved in close personal friendships with the principals of a news organisation that has been exposed as involved in widespread criminal activities seriously damaging scores of lives.  Those are just the disasters that have come to my attention!

            None of the top politicians concerned have felt sufficient shame even to resign their office, never mind take their own lives!  As I have said before in this blog, they simply blame it all on the civil servants, tell us that ‘lessons have been learned’, shrug their shoulders and carry on as before. Nurses, whose duties are certainly as full of responsibility (and some may say are at least as valuable) as those of politicians, clearly have thinner skins.

            I have also found nauseating the alacrity of the British Press in condemning the Australian radio station and the two disc jockeys involved in the hoax phone call that had such tragic consequences. All of this was just a week after the publication of the report of Lord Leveson into the nefarious activities of the press in this country.  If ever there was a case of the pot calling the kettle black, that was it.

              And could the David Cameron who said that he couldn’t imagine why the two Australian disc jockeys had been ‘allowed’ to make that phone call, possibly be the same David Cameron who last week was denouncing the idea of ‘freedom of speech’ being stifled by any kind of statutory control on the activities of the news media?

 A New Layer of Bureaucracy?

          Countrywide, not very many people bothered to vote at that election in October for a Police and Crime Commissioner to appoint (and dismiss!) the Chief Constable, set the police budget and generally point the police in the direction that  they should be going.   I wonder how many of us who did vote (yes. I was among them) realized that we weren’t just electing one man or woman on an inflated salary to rule the constabulary roost but establishing the base of a new bureaucracy.

            It should have been obvious that it wouldn’t be only Chief Constables that the new Commissioners would appoint.  They would need their own office and their own staff.  They would need an accountant with some knowledge of public finances to help with the budgetary demands of the office.  They would need a deputy and at least one or two assistants to visit far flung parts of the police area.   Essex is a big area – as large and as populous as some European states, as Lord Hanningfield used to remind us.   They would need a secretary and probably a dogsbody to receive visitors, answer the phone, do the filing, and make an occasional cup of tea.  Oh – come to think of it, it might be a good idea to recruit someone with at least some experience of police work.

            A report in the local daily Gazette suggests that some of the newly elected Commissioners are already throwing their weight about.  Some have compelled the existing Chief Constable in their areas to apply again for his own job!  Sixteen of them have already appointed deputies on salaries of up to £65,000 a year!   Adam Simmonds, Northamptonshire’s Conservative new Commissioner has published plans to hire seventeen people, including four Assistant Commissioners to help him.  There should be several nice ‘jobs for the boys’ there!

            Nick Alston. Essex’s new Commissioner is taking a more cautious approach.  He is first of all recruiting an adviser to help him draft a job description for the post of Deputy.  He hopes to have the deputy in office by April.   A rather more urgent task will be finding a replacement for the existing Chief Constable, Jim Barker-McCardle who has announced that he will be leaving ‘for personal reasons’.   There are said to be fourteen forces currently looking for new Chief Constables (I suppose it couldn’t be the thought of having a political ‘commissar’ breathing down their necks that has prompted a mass exodus?) so he’ll face strong competition for the best.

           The Government could have avoided all this extra expense and further tier of bureaucracy by simply passing the responsibility for overseeing the police to the democratically elected local authority for the area.  Those authorities would then have had to make fewer of their existing staff redundant, would have ensured closer co-operation between the police and other closely related local services such as education and social service – and would have saved the expense of that stupid, unrepresentative and expensive election.  If only they could get it into their heads that what may be right for Boston Mass. isn’t necessarily the best thing for Boston Eng. And that Littlehampton’s needs aren’t necessarily exactly the same as those of Little Rock!  You’d never dream that this was a government cutting services and benefits to the unemployed, the old and the disabled in a frantic effort to reduce the national debt. 

            Will the new Commissioners breathe fresh life into our police forces and thus justify their existence and their very nice salaries?  Perhaps…….but  I’m not holding my breath!

Local Statistics

          I don’t suppose that anyone was surprised to learn that last year’s census revealed that the Tendring District was among the top ten with the oldest populations.    I was only surprised that as many as eight of the 363 local authorities in England and Wales have populations older than ours.  Over 35 percent of Tendring’s population are over the age of 60 and 1.4 percent (more than 2,000 altogether) are – like me - over ninety. I am personally acquainted with only three of them beside myself and I suppose that the reason we are not very conspicuous is that old age tends to limit our mobility. Certainly it is only my mobility scooter (my iron horse!) that prevents my being housebound – and a miserable old so-and-so I’d be if I were!

            I was pleased to see that 88,000 of us describe ourselves as being Christian.  That’s 64 percent of Tendring’s population, five percentage points higher than the population of England and Wales as a whole.  I think that the relatively low figure may be at least a little misleading.  I know personally several people whom I would describe as Christian but who don’t themselves do so because they feel that it associates them with the crusades, the religious wars and persecutions of the Middle Ages, the witch trials and the inquisition.

            I prefer to think that it associates us with such great Christian characters as Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, William Penn, Elizabeth Fry and thousands of other unknown-by-name men and women who, over the past two millennia, have opposed the evils of their world.  Many have suffered as a result.  Tens of thousands of others have quietly tried to live their lives in accordance with the example and teaching of Jesus Christ.  Without them the world today would be an even sadder place than it is. 

Some Good News

          As 2012 draws towards its close it is good to have news of the progress  of an international enterprise whose activities will affect us all and whose efforts are proceeding on time and in accordance with promises made months ago, despite a year of extreme weather conditions that did their best to hinder progress.

            Earlier this year I commented on a ground-breaking addition to the Gunfleet Sands Windfarm visible from Clacton’s beaches and promenades.  Two giant turbines – beside which the existing turbines will appear as midgets! – with vastly increased energy producing capacity, are to be added to that wind-farm.  If  successful they will be the prototypes of future wind turbines round the British coastline.

    Dong Energy’s recently published Community Newsletter tells us that they are well beyond the half-way point in the offshore construction of these two giant turbines.  Onshore and offshore cable installation has been completed as has the foundation structures for the turbines.  It is hoped that the turbines themselves will be installed in January (this does depend to some extent on the weather) and that they will begin to generate power by March of next year – in less than three months time          !

            I look forward to the appearance of these two new ‘one-legged giants’ on our skyline.  Wind turbines can’t supply all Britain’s energy needs but we do need urgently to end our reliance on fossil carbon-producing energy sources.  Even our climate-change sceptical MP, and the one or two misinformed correspondents of the Clacton Gazette who oppose both wind and solar farms, must surely see that the sources of fossil fuels are finite and even if they did not hasten climatic change (which I am sure they do!) we would need to replace them with clean and infinitely renewable means of energy supply.

            Wind-power, solar power, tidal and wave power can, I believe, ultimately supply that need.  We should welcome any and all progress toward that end.    

           Christmas is coming!

            In fact, when I publish this blog on the internet next Wednesday morning 19^th December, it will be less than a week away.  Christmas Day is on the Tuesday of the following week so I shall publish my blog for that week on Christmas Eve, Monday 24^th December, instead of on Wednesday 26th.  I really don’t yet know when the blog after that will be published – possibly on Wednesday 2^nd January.

            I know from the statistics given by my website provider that I have many greatly valued readers in India and in the Middle East.  Christmas is a Christian Festival and my blog next week will relate to the Christian story of the birth of Jesus.  May I assure Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist readers (and readers who have no religious faith at all!) that you will read nothing in that blog that will offend you or your religious faith in any way.  I hope that you will find the blog interesting and entertaining and that it will encourage friendship and understanding between people of every religious tradition.

            Whatever your faith may be I wish all blog readers a very happy day on 25^th December – and a New Year of Peace and Hope. May God Bless us All.

            

Week 48 2012

Tendring Topics.......on line

Essex leads again?

            A low turn-out for he recent elections of Crime and Police Commissioners to oversee the work of Britain’s Police Forces had been expected.   Few people though imagined that it would break all records as the lowest turn-out in any British election ever!  And this was despite the fact that a great many electors didn’t have to actually ‘turn out’ in order to vote!  I didn’t have to.  I vote by post and my voting paper and voting instructions were sent to me a week before the poll, for me to complete and post back at my leisure. 

            The average turn-out nationally was a miserable 14 percent but Essex ‘led’ (or should it be ‘dragged along behind’?) all the rest with the nation’s lowest turn-out of 12.81 percent.  Was it the result of apathy and lack-of-interest or of a conviction that it was an expensive and unnecessary poll, a negation of democracy and localism, and a means of giving one individual in each police authority unprecedented power – and a high salary to match it!   The Home Secretary claimed after the election that November’s short, dark and rainy days were a major cause of the low turn-out.  This hardly affected postal voters and, in any case, the date of the election was chosen by her government, not by us electors.   I reckon that if the ballot paper had included one further question; Do we need an elected Police and Crime Commissioner to oversee the County Police Force? folk would have been queuing up at the polling stations!

            I voted for Independent Linda Belgrove who lives within the Tendring District and who had been a member of the Police Authority that is being replaced by the new post of Commissioner.  She came fourth out of six candidates, but I notice that she was a runner-up in Tendring, Colchester, Chelmsford, Brentwood and Uttlesford which suggests to me that the locality in which each candidate lives had, as one would expect, some effect on the result.  However an even greater effect was that of having the support of a political party machine and it was Conservative Candidate Nick Alston who was successful, though only after electors’ second preferences had been taken into consideration.  He topped the poll in ten of Essex’s fourteen districts and came first with 51,235 votes.  Second came Mick Thwaites, Independent, a former police officer, with 40,132 votes.  The other candidates trailed well behind.

            A bold headline on the front page of the local Daily Gazette, in the same issue that reported the result of the election, highlighted a major problem to which the new Crime and Police Commissioner will need to give his attention; HALF OF CRIMES ARE NOT SOLVED.  The headline relates to Colchester where 449 crimes were reported in the town during September but 208 of them were marked for no further action by the end of the month. There were similar figures for August and those for October were not yet available.

            Discussion about crime deterrence usually focuses on the severity of the punishment for offenders, but I believe that the likelihood or otherwise of being detected is far more important.  Career criminals don’t worry about the punishment when they are confident that they will get away with the crime! The novels of Dickens and his contemporaries suggest that in the days when you could be hanged for stealing a sheep and transported to Australia for petty crime, more sheep were stolen and there was more petty crime per capita than there is today.  When hanging, drawing and quartering was the accepted penalty for treason (a fate comparable in horror only with burning alive for heresy!) there were certainly more plots aiming at the violent overthrow of the monarchy and the government, than there have been in these more humane and enlightened times.

            Get the crime detection rate up to 75 percent or higher and I have no doubt that, whatever penalty is suffered by those convicted, the crime rate will drop like a stone.  No – I have no idea how that can be achieved, but then I wasn’t among those aspiring to be Crime and Police Commissioner.

Economic Family Planning

          I sometimes wonder if the members of David Cameron’s coalition government (with its heavy concentration of millionaires) live in the same world as the rest of us.  Do they ever actually meet ordinary people except, of course, when they want their votes?

Take, for example, Iain Duncan-Smith, the work and pensions secretary.  He has decided that the United Kingdom can no longer afford to pay all the children’s benefits to which large families become entitled.  He has suggested therefore that child allowances should be paid for the first two children of every family but nothing at all for subsequent offspring. He is, I believe, a Roman Catholic. Can he possibly have never met and mixed with the parents of eight, nine or ten children?

He would find that they come in two, quite separate, categories though it is possible for a family to belong to both of them.  One category consists of a single parent or of parents who are feckless and irresponsible. They may have learning difficulties.  One or other, or both, of them may have a drink or a drugs problem (though they probably won’t admit to it).  Their home is likely to be squalid, smelly and poverty-stricken and their children neglected.  It may be that with patient one-to-one education from a dedicated Social Worker or Health Visitor they could, in time, adopt a more responsible life-style – but they certainly won’t think far enough ahead to ask themselves how they are going to feed a third, fourth, fifth or sixth child with no children’s benefit.

The other category consists of those who believe that to limit the family by ‘artificial’ means is in defiance of the will of God.   They may be devout Roman Catholics or describe themselves as fundamentalist Evangelical ‘Bible Christians’.  They may be ultra-orthodox Jews or fundamentalist Muslims.   They are most unlikely to yield to threats to limit child benefit to the first two children.  To do so, they believe, would bring them eternal punishment.

Paying children’s allowance only to the first two children of such families would do little or nothing to limit or reduce their size. It would increase child poverty and child neglect – and would probably increase the number of abortions.  I can’t believe that that is really what Iain Duncan-Smith wants?

An Honour Denied!

          It seems almost incredible that our government should refuse to allow surviving Royal Navy personnel who, in World War II, protected the Arctic convoys conveying vital war materials to our Soviet allies, to accept a medal from the Russian government in appreciation of their services.  To sail round the northern tip of Norway to the Russian port of Archangel  under constant threat of air attack from the Luftwaffe bases along the Norwegian coast and from German U-boats patrolling the North Atlantic, was one of the most perilous and physically demanding tasks undertaken in World War II.  Hundreds of vessels and some 3,000 men were lost in those Arctic waters.  In refusing to permit Clacton octogenarian Fred Henley and some 200 other Naval survivors of the Arctic Convoys accept this thank-you from the Russian government, our government has displayed a meanness of spirit unique among the World War II allies. American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand veterans of those convoys have already received their Russian medals.  A typically smooth explanation of Britain’s refusal comes from a spokesman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office:  

‘We very much appreciate the Russian Government’s wish to recognise the brave and valuable service given by veterans of the Arctic Convoys. However the rules on the acceptance of foreign awards clearly state that in order for permission to be given for an award to be accepted, there has to have been specific service to the country concerned and that that service should have taken place within the previous five years.

            The spokesman goes on to say that the award is also ruled out because the veterans concerned had been eligible for a British award for the same service; the World War II ‘Atlantic Star’.  In 2006 an official lapel badge, the ‘Arctic Emblem’ had also been introduced and some 10,000 had been issued   That settles it then.  ‘The rules’ make it quite impossible for these old men, all in their late eighties or nineties, to receive an official thank-you from a grateful Russian government for their part in one of the most arduous and dangerous exercises in World War II.    I hope that I am not being unduly cynical in suggesting that had the USA (or Saudi Arabia for that matter) wished to make a similar gesture for a similar reason, the government would have either changed those ‘rules’ or found some way of getting round them.

            I suspect that the real reason is that our top politicians are old enough to remember the cold war but not the real war of 1939 to 1945. They are reluctant to admit the enormous contribution that the then USSR made to the downfall of the Nazis (80 percent of all German army casualties in World War II were on the Eastern Front!) or the appalling suffering of the Soviet people during the Nazi occupation of much of their country.  Perhaps, of course, some of them don’t even realize that the Russians were our valued allies during those dark years. Old Etonians seem to have gaps in their knowledge of recent history. It’s not so long ago that our Prime Minister imagined that in 1940 we were junior partners of the USA in the struggle against Hitler!   It is no exaggeration to suggest that the outcome of the war against Nazi Germany was finally decided in a great tank battle that raged on the Russian steppe near Kursk in July and August 1943.  It ended in a defeat from which the Nazis never recovered.  The men of the Arctic Convoys ensured that the Soviet Army had the equipment needed to achieve that decisive victory – and to press on to Berlin!

A Church Divided

A somewhat time-worn certificate in my possession declares that Ernest George Hall born on 18^th May 1921, the son of Regimental Sergeant-Major Frederick Charles Hall, was baptised at St. Michael’s Garrison Church, Tidworth on 26^th May 1921. Thus, I have been a member of the Church of England for over 91 years! I certainly can’t claim to have been an active church member for the whole, or even for the greater part, of that time. However I have never formally rejected the Church and, even in the days when I would have described myself as an agnostic, I regarded the Church of England with affection and respect, recalling nostalgically the days when first as a choirboy and later as a server, I had used and loved the liturgies of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.

For well over a decade I have been an occasional attender and communicant at my local Church of England Church, and six years ago I renewed and revived my active membership (well, as active as is possible in my late eighties and early nineties!).  I had never, of course, actually ceased to be a member.

            All of that probably accounts for the deep sadness that I feel about the way in which, in recent years, the Church of England has been torn by controversy, first about the ordination of women priests and, only last week, about the creation of women bishops.  How strange that at that latest Synod, the Bishops, who might have been expected to take a conservative stance, overwhelmingly welcomed the idea of committed women joining their ranks, the clergy accepted it and it was the laity who opposed and – by a majority of just a handful of votes vetoed it!

             Since 1948 I have also been a Quaker. I would certainly never abandon the Christian tradition that, in the silence of its expectant and prayerful Meetings for Worship, brought me back from my sterile agnosticism (I suppose that today it would have been called non-theism) to George Fox’s affirmation, on which the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) is founded, that there is one even Christ Jesus who can speak to thy condition. Consequently I am in dual membership; an unusual but not unique position. Canon Oestreicher of Coventry Cathedral and Terry Waite, Archbishop Runcie’s envoy to the Middle East, who spent several years in captivity as a hostage, are two other – much more distinguished – dual members.

            Quakers do not have a separated professional priesthood and the idea of settling controversial issues by means of a majority vote is alien to the Quaker tradition. We have no fixed liturgy, prayer book or hymn book. We do though have a published booklet of Advices and Queries, revised from time to time, that provides us with a guide, but not a fixed rule, to advise and support us both in worship and in our daily lives.

One of these advices is, I think, particularly relevant to those who hold strong views on either side in the current controversy within the Church of England.

Consider the possibility that you may be mistaken.

I would add that this should be done prayerfully and in the light of the teaching and example of Jesus Christ, rather than that of any other authority.

           

           

             

           

           

           

             

Week 46 2012

Tendring Topic.....on line

‘They shall not grow old………..’

A Lifetime ago ……….. The last voyage of the SS Scillin

            The SS Scillin was an Italian cargo ship, built in 1903, of some 1,600 tons.  Just seventy years ago, on 13^th November 1942, she was in Tripoli Harbour being loaded with a living cargo of allied prisoners of war to be transported from camps in Libya across the Mediterranean to Italy.  814 prisoners were ordered into her hold which is reported as having been suitable for no more than 300.   There would have been a further 195 but for the vehement protests about the severe overcrowding and insanitary conditions of the prisoners’ accommodation, made by Captain Gilbert a British medical officer

Among the 814 were 50 members of my own regiment, the 67^th Medium Regiment RA. Most of them, like me, were from Ipswich or East Suffolk, were in their early twenties, and had volunteered for the Territorial Army early in 1939.    We had been in action in the Egyptian/Libyan border area since the previous November.  By the end of 1941 we had been involved in a number of successful assaults against German and Italian garrisons in Bardia, Sollum and Wadi Halfaya (Hellfire Pass). In the spring and early summer of 1942 we found ourselves in defensive actions in the desert south and west of Tobruk.  Finally we became part of the Tobruk garrison and were overwhelmed and taken prisoner by Rommel’s Afrikakorps on 21^st June.  My own transportation to POW camps in Italy had been from Benghazi in July on the SS Ravello.  The voyage across the Med. to Taranto had been uneventful and the fact that, after 70 years, I can remember little about it suggests that it can’t have been too awful an experience.

            That of my 50 former comrades in the Scillin was vastly different.  What happened to them, and to all but a handful of the rest of the 814 prisoners crammed into its noisome hold, remained a secret for more than half a century. It was not until 1996 that persistent enquiries by historians and by relatives (among them friends of mine in Ipswich researching the lives of their fathers who had been in my regiment) forced a full revelation from the Ministry of Defence. 

            It transpired that during the night of 14^th November the Scillin was intercepted by the British submarine HMS Sahib.  The submarine surfaced and fired 12 rounds from its 3in deck gun at this unarmed Italian merchant vessel. Ten of these rounds found their target and brought the Scillin to a standstill.   The Sahib then closed to within 750 yards and fired a torpedo at the Scillin’s engine room.  The torpedo did, in fact, explode in the hold and the Scillin sank almost immediately. Only 27 of those 814 prisoners, plus the Scillin’s captain and crew, survived and were picked up by the Sahib.

            At an enquiry the Sahib’s commander (Lt. John Bromage) was cleared of culpability.  He claimed that the Scillin had no lights, had not responded to his initial shelling and had appeared to be heading for Africa.  He had believed it to be carrying Italian troops.

Nor was the Scillin the only Italian vessel to be similarly attacked.  Five other vessels carrying PoWs were attacked by British submarines during 1941 and 1942. These attacks resulted in the deaths from ‘friendly fire’ of a total of 2,000 British and allied PoWs.  It was particularly in  memory of those forgotten 2,000, fifty of whom had been from my regiment and some of whom had been my friends, that I wore my scarlet Flanders poppy on Remembrance Sunday.

A Triumph for Democracy?

          It is said that a somewhat taciturn Scotsman, who had just attended a service at a local church that had a new Minister, was asked what the sermon had been about.  ‘Sin’, he replied.  ‘And what did the Minister have to say about it?’   ‘He was agin it!’

            I feel somewhat like that questioner with regard to the six candidates for the post of Police and Crime Commissioner to the Essex Constabulary, for whom we are all invited to cast our vote on 15^th November. I have already received my ballot paper as I vote by post. I assume that all six applicants are ‘agin’ crime or they’d hardly be standing.   I know their names.  I know that four of them are standing as representatives of political parties (Conservative, Labour, UK Independence Party and English Democrats) and two are Independents.   Apart from what appears to be a political party slogan ‘More Police – Catching Criminals’* after the name of the political party (English Democrats) that candidate Robin  Tilbrook is representing, we know nothing about the candidates other than what we may have seen in the press or on the internet.

            I’m not really blaming the candidates for this.  I daren’t think what delivering an election address to every household in Essex would cost – and the candidates have already had to find £5,000 deposit!  No doubt the government, always ready to save money, declined to go to the expense of a free mail-shot for each candidate!

            To pretend that this election is an exercise in democracy, much less an exercise in the ‘localism’ for which the government claims to be so enthusiastic, is quite ridiculous.  How can one man, or one woman, possibly be able to respond to the needs of residents of a Police Authority Area as large, as populous, and as diverse as Essex?   How can the election of just one person in charge of its police force be, in any sense of the word, ‘democratic’?

            No doubt the old Police Authorities were less than perfect, though I don’t recall hearing very many complaints about them.  There were surely better ways of replacing them than with a single all-powerful individual.  

There was a simple, democratic solution to their replacement that would have empowered local people while saving the government the very considerable expense of this ridiculous election.  Police Authority boundaries coincide with those of County or Unitary Authority.  Why not make the existing democratically elected local authority the Police Authority?  It could perhaps be stipulated that the authority should appoint a Police and Crime Committee of say ten members, representative not of the political parties comprising the council but of the geographical parts of the council’s area?   Then, all voters would have their own member of the Police Committee whom they could contact with regard to policing problems.  Such a system would also have facilitated co-operation between the police and other local authority activities – education and social services for instance.

But we are afflicted with a government convinced that what is best for those living on the other side of the Atlantic must necessarily be best for us. Possibilities other than that of having a single elected commissioner overseeing each constabulary had not, as far as I know, even been considered.  All of this presented me with a dilemma.  If I voted in the election would I be giving support to a process that I believed to be a ridiculously expensive and unnecessary waste of time and money; a cynical negation of the principle of representative democratic control of our Police Services?

 

  My first inclination was to ignore it – or perhaps deliberately spoil my voting paper before posting it back.  Then I realized that although I didn’t know much about the individual candidates, I did know something about the parties that four of them stood for.  Was it just possible that my failure to vote would allow the UKIP candidate, representative of a Party with policies to which I am strongly opposed, to head our Essex Police Force?

            That possibility made me decide that I must vote!  My first choice will be Linda Belgrove, Independent.  She lives in Alresford and is therefore more-or-less local. She was vice-chairman of the Essex Police Authority that is being replaced, so she at least knows what the job is all about.   She has worked for solicitors and has served on the parish council so she is acquainted with the workings of the law and of problems in our area.  She is not the representative of any political party and (this was probably the deciding factor!) on the photographs that I have seen of her in the local press, she has a friendly smile!  I don’t suppose for a moment that she’ll get elected, but I wish her well. 

And my other vote, my second choice in case whoever gets most votes doesn’t get a clear overall majority? I haven’t yet decided.  Perhaps I won’t use it……. or perhaps I will.  I’ll make up my mind just before I slip my voting paper into the envelope provided and post it.

* I'm rather surprised that that was permitted.

Making the most of the Sunshine

            I have no doubt at all that Britain’s best interests lie in developing alternative renewable sources of energy to reduce, and ultimately replace, our reliance on such fossil fuels as coal, gas and oil.  I believe, and the recent great storm affecting North America has strengthened that belief, that neither Middle East terrorism nor ‘the deficit’ but steadily accelerating climate change, is the biggest and most urgent threat to Britain and to the rest of the world of the 21^st century.  The use of fossil fuels, particularly coal, increases that threat.  What’s more, our oil and gas supplies come from notoriously unstable parts of the world and are, in any case, finite.  They will one day – perhaps a few decades, perhaps a century or more ahead – begin to run out and as they do so their price will escalate.

            The production of nuclear energy, although favoured by the government, is – as we have seen in at Chernobyl and, more recently, in Japan – potentially dangerous. Moreover it produces a waste product that remains lethal for centuries, and for which no-one has yet discovered a safe and permanent means of either disposal or storage.

            Safe and infinitely renewable sources of power available to an island nation such as ours lie in the waves that break upon our shores, in the inexorable ebb and flow of the tides, in the wind and in the rays of the sun.  I believe that the power of the waves and of the tides has yet to be fully exploited, but that of the wind and of the sun is currently being harnessed and has infinite further potential for exploitation.

            I am delighted to see the still growing regiment of wind turbines off our north-east Essex coast and have little patience with those who complain they are spoiling the view.  Consider what climatic change, strengthened and accelerated by mankind’s profligate use of fossil fuels, has done for the view of the east coast of the USA!

            A proposal to build on-shore wind turbines never fails to produce local outrage.   They are, and will always be, either too near to people’s homes or alternatively, destroying hitherto unspoilt countryside and a threat to wild life. There was certainly a storm of protest about the proposed provision of wind turbines between Clacton and St Osyth.  Yet now that they are actually in position and operating we hear little about them.  Could it be that they haven’t proved to be quite the noisy, unsightly and health-threatening monsters that protesters had been led to expect?

            Then there’s sunshine – and this really is the Essex Sunshine Coast!   Solar panels have no moving parts so they can’t be noisy. They are effective.  My single solar panel, from which water heated by the sun is circulated in a sealed circuit through my hot water storage cylinder by a pump activated by two small photo-electric cells, supplies nearly all my hot water needs during the summer months.  Winter sunshine preheats the water in the cylinder before it is brought to the required temperature by my gas boiler, and therefore saves money all the year round.

            More ambitious schemes involve virtually covering the sun-side slope of the roof with solar panels that are, in fact, photo-electric cells and convert the sun’s light, rather than its heat, into electric power to be fed back into the national grid, making the householder an actual supplier of electricity.

            I was delighted when I learned that there are plans to provide no less than 40,000 power generating solar panels locally on fields at Chisbon Heath between Great Bentley and St Osyth, and 15,000 at Sladbury’s farm between Holland-on-Sea and Great Holland.  The south-facing solar panels would be no more than three metres off the ground and would be screened from public view by trees and bushes. Together they are expected to produce sufficient electricity to power 4,750 homes.

            There are similar plans further inland.  A £20 million pound solar scheme in Kelvedon will involve 60,000 solar panels and is expected to provide enough power for 7,200 homes.  Wind power we have and solar power is on its way.  If only some practical and economic way can be found to harness the power of the waves that crash on our beaches, Southern East Anglia could be among the leaders of the development of safe and carbon-free means of energy supply.  

Week 51.10 21 December 2010

Tendring Topics……..on Line

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

There is a, possibly apocryphal, story of a young couple doing their Christmas shopping and looking at all the depictions of Santa Claus, Rudolph the reindeer, gnomes and fairies in the shop windows. The young woman spotted one shop window with a baby in a manger and shepherds and wise men in attendance. She called to her husband or (since they were a
thoroughly modern couple) her partner. ‘Look at this dear’, she said, ‘would you believe it! They’re even dragging religion into Christmas now!’


In an article in the Christmas number of the Radio Times Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, writes of the modern practice of describing Christmas as the Midwinter Festival and replacing traditional junior school Nativity Plays with winter morality plays having no religious theme. This is presumably because we now live in a multi-faith society and it is feared that a purely Christian festival might offend those of other religious faiths or of none. Dr Rowan Williams points out that many adherents of other faiths are happy to join with Christians in remembering and re-enacting the Nativity story. Muslims, in particular, accept the story of Jesus’ miraculous birth, while rejecting his crucifixion and resurrection. Dr Williams says that one of the best film versions of the Nativity that he has seen was made by an Iranian Muslim film company.

In any case, don’t the apostles of ‘political correctness’ who are so mindful for the feelings of those with other faiths, ever consider the possibility that Christians (still quite a substantial religious group in the UK!) could be offended by their festival having been taken over by secular materialism; what in an earlier age might have been described as the worship and service of Mammon?

Looking at the colourful illustrations of happy children in the pages of the daily Coastal Gazette and the Clacton Gazette during the week before Christmas, I was cheered and relieved to note that by far the greater number of end-of-term primary school Christmas dramas were straightforward old-fashioned Nativity Plays with a baby in a manger, a bashful Joseph and Mary, shepherds, wise men and angels. Long may they remain so!

I feel no need to conceal my Christian faith, shaky and full of doubt as it often is. I wish all blog readers a joyful Christmas and a peaceful and fulfilled New Year. May the God revealed to us in the manger of ‘a lowly cattle shed’ bless us all.

'In a lowly cattle shed'. The Christmas Crib at St. James' (Church of England) parish church, Clacton-on-Sea

‘Black is actually white'

Nobody is saying that – yet. But, when I hear some of the claims of the present government, I am expecting to hear it any day! There is, for instance, the claim that reducing unemployment pay helps the jobless – it gives them an extra incentive to look for a non-existent job!

Then there is the insistent claim that government is divesting itself of its powers and returning them to ‘the people’ and ‘to local communities’. I have been urging that for years! Ever since the end of World War II central government has been taking responsibility for running local services from the representatives of local people, their elected district councils and either controlling them directly itself or handing them over to giant private corporations. Was that to be reversed?

Not a bit of it. Central government is now taking over the control of the letting of socially provided housing accommodation from elected councils ‘Nanny knows best dear’. It is also taking control of schools away from local democratic control and handing it, with the cash that goes with it, over to head teachers. But ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’ as those head teachers will discover if their syllabuses and teaching practices begin to stray too far from what central government (not local people) consider desirable.

Political control of Police Forces is to be taken away from existing Police Committees (whose members, though not directly elected, did at least represent local communities) and handed over to single, directly elected, Police Commissioners (no doubt on a fat-cat salary!) Similarly the government would like to transform local authorities, as they exist today, to be presided over by directly elected Mayors with executive powers. These measures may make for greater efficiency, but they certainly don’t ‘give power to the people’. They would mean that control of the police and of local administration would pass from representative committees to elected dictatorships. It is always easier to bribe or bully a single individual than the members of a committee!

Then there is the matter of university tuition fees, an issue that has provoked, and will continue to provoke, both strong peaceful protest, and angry and destructive riots. But ‘students don’t have to pay a penny up front’ the government insists plaintively. ‘Don’t they understand that no-one has to pay anything at all until his or her income exceeds £21,000 a year. Many students will never pay off their nominal debt. More, rather than less, students from poorer families will be attracted to University education’. Perhaps some, the irresponsible, will be attracted. It will be the more responsible less-than-wealthy who will be deterred. I know that my wife and I would never have encouraged a child of ours to incur a debt of perhaps £40,000 or £50,000 (what’s an odd £10,000 to the seriously wealthy!) hanging over his head for all his working life. The fact that he might never pay it off would have made the prospect additionally abhorrent rather than more attractive. It might have been thought that the current financial crisis would have made even members of the present government (few, if any, of whom have ever known financial hardship) appreciate the fear of debt felt by what used to be known as ‘the deserving poor’ – but apparently not!

But that’s not all. We all know, because top politicians have told us so often, that they’re very keen on keeping seriously and chronically ill patients in their own homes so that they don’t have to spend their last months or years in hospital or a care home. Could it be to facilitate this that the government is phasing out the disability living allowance that pays for carers and other necessities for the bedridden and housebound. This takes effect immediately for new applicants. For those at present in receipt of the allowance it will be phased out in 2015. Perhaps it is to give the disabled an added incentive ‘to rise, take up their beds, and walk’!

‘Black’ may not yet have been officially declared to be ‘white’ but it is certainly beginning to look distinctly ‘greyish’. And now, I learn, the government is trying to find means of measuring the happiness of the electorate! I was about to write that Britain today is looking more and more like George Orwell’s vision of 1984 – but not even George Orwell’s fertile imagination had hit on the idea of a Happiness Gauge!

A bit less seriously!

As Christmas is now just days away, it occurs to me that some readers – or younger members of their families – might be amused by a couple of light-hearted Christmassy pieces of verse that my wife Heather and I wrote many years ago to amuse our grandchildren. You can guess roughly how many years ago by the fact that all three of those grandchildren are now in their late twenties!

When Santa got stuck in a Chimney….

When Santa got stuck in a chimney
Long ago on a cold winter’s night;
You never heard such a commotion,
You never did see such a sight!

There was soot over mother’s best carpet –
There was soot on the furniture too –
And Santa Claus thought that his boots were on fire
The night he got stuck in a flue.

The reindeer pulled hard on their traces.
(You’d have thought he was stuck there with glue!)
Till at last, in a rush, with a huff and a puff,
Old Santa popped out of the flue.

He sent his red coat to the cleaners
And he said, as he scratched his grey head.
‘Next year I’ll wait till the family’s asleep
And creep in through a window instead!’

Good King Wenceslas

Good King Wenceslas is, as far as I know, the only Christmas carol with no reference to the Nativity. It is also not strictly a Christmas carol at all but a ballad for St. Stephen’s Day, better known to most of us as Boxing Day. It does though carry the strong Christian message of the responsibility of the wealthy and privileged towards the less fortunate.

When I was a small boy I quite thought that the King’s name was Wenslas and that he ‘last looked out’. I had a vision of an important looking man with a crown on his head and wearing a dressing gown who, before going to bed, opened the front door of his palace to put the cat out and leave a note for the milkman in the morning. When he did this on 26th December he spotted this poor old man grubbing through the snow looking for a few sticks of firewood!

Many years later, as a prisoner of war, I spent two Christmases in what had been King Wenceslas’ Kingdom of Bohemia. The snow there really was deep and crisp and even. Looking across snowfields toward distant forest and mountains it was easy to imagine the scene that King Wenceslas had surveyed on that Boxing Day night centuries earlier. Later, hitch-hiking my way through Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia after the collapse of Nazi Germany in May 1945, I found my way to Prague where I celebrated with jubilant Czechs before moving on. In Wenceslas Square (Prague’s main square), there was the King himself, on his charger, dominating the scene. He, like me, had survived World War II!

Many more years passed and one Christmas, to entertain our grandchildren, my wife Heather and I composed a piece of verse that could have been a prelude to the events recorded in the carol. It was hardly fair on King Wenceslas who, I have little doubt, was a kind and generous man throughout his life. After a thousand years I hope he won’t mind. Here it is:

King Wenceslas hung his stocking up on 24th December.
‘Will Father Christmas call on me. I hope he will remember’.
He early went to bed that night, woke early in the morning;
Roused his pageboy with a shout, as the day was dawning.
‘At the bottom of my bed, there should be a present;
A new gold ring would be quite nice, or a fine fat pheasant!’
At the bottom of the bed, the pageboy found a letter:
Dear King, Be nicer to the poor and I’ll like you better.
It’s a rich man’s job to see beggars don’t go hungry.
If this warning you ignore, I’ll be very angry.
Tomorrow is St. Stephen’s Day. Please look out of doors.
Help the poor man you’ll see there.
Yours truly, Santa Claus

Not great poetry – but it amused the grandchildren!

Happy Christmas to all!