Week 24 2014

Tendring Topics……on line

No matter what – they’ve won!

          Commenting on the results of the recent local government, and in particular, European Parliament elections, a despairing blog reader wote to me.  ‘No matter what happens in the Newark by-election and next year’s General Election, the pernicious ideas of Nigel Farage and his Ukippers have won. Terrified by the result of the EU Parliament elections, the top politicians of the main political parties are vying with each other in demonstrating their Euroscepticism and promising to “get tough with immigrants”, in an attempt to outflank a triumphant Ukip. At future elections our choice is likely to be between different degrees of ukippery’

            I very much hope that my pessimistic reader will be proved wrong.   His words though, demonstrated the fundamental difference in British politics that has occurred between the days in the late-1930s when I first took a serious interest in them, and today.  In the 1930s, throughout World War II and for a decade or so afterwards, political parties in Britain had definite, clear policies with which every one was familiar.  The Conservatives stood, as their name suggests, for keeping the current order of things – the public sector, the armed forces, the civil service and local authorities had their own spheres of activity and though changes would undoubtedly take place, they should be peripheral and gradual.  The Labour Party on the other hand was the party of change.  Labour supporters’ main concern was the welfare of working people.  They believed that the Britain should be a fairer, more equal country than it was, and thought that this aim could best be obtained by most, if not all, industry and commerce coming under public ownership and control. 

            Rather uneasily between the two were the dwindling Liberals and on the extreme left and right were the Communists and the Fascists.  I remember attending a meeting in Ipswich’s public hall addressed by a black-shirted Sir Oswald Mosley leader of the BUF (British Union of Fascists and National Socialists).  His ideas were poisonous but he had a charismatic personality.  When he entered the hall twenty or thirty members of the audience leapt to their feet giving the outstretched arm fascist salute! My serious interest in politics dates from that public meeting – in 1937 or possibly ’38.   I wasn’t at that time quite sure what I was for but I did know what I was against; Fascism and Nazism!   Had I been a couple of years older I would probably have volunteered to join the International Brigade fighting Franco and his Fascists in Spain.  As it was, early in 1939 and at the age of 17, I enlisted in the Territorial Army having little doubt that we would be at war with Hitler’s Germany within months.

            In those pre-war pre-tv days there was a clear demarcation between the political parties.  People actually attended public political meetings – and were influenced by what they heard at them.  And we read too!  I was a great admirer of  George Bernard Shaw.  I read most of his plays – and his prefaces to them, which were often almost as long as the plays themselves.  I remember being held – and deeply influenced – by his ‘Intelligent woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism’. I came across a copy a year or two ago, dipped into it and have to confess that I was bored out of my mind!  In those days everybody took politics very seriously.  Politicians went to great lengths to try to convert the electorate to their point of view.

            The development of tv and the internet giving instant virtual contact with Party leaders and a surfeit of what G.K.Chesterton described as ‘The easy speeches that comfort cruel men’,  has something to do with  today’s cynicism and distrust of all professional politicians.  ‘How can you tell when a politician is lying?’ – ‘When you can see his lips moving!’   ‘An honest politician is a politician who, when he’s bought – stays bought!’   ‘If voting really changed anything, they’d ban it!’   And of course, politicians themselves encourage us to think like that with their ‘cash for questions’ their fiddled expenses, their free meals and cheap booze.  I think though, that it is the opinion poll that has been the greatest influence in the corruption of politicians. Now we can see, almost day by day, which policies are popular and which otherwise.   It is usually much easier to delete unpopular proposals from a political programme, no matter how much they are part of the party’s reason for existence, than it is to convert sufficient people to reverse an opinion poll result.

            Thus the Labour Party changed its policy on Britain’s ‘independent nuclear deterrent,’ not because that policy had been proved to be wrong, but simply ‘to make the Party electable’. Clause 4 of Labour’s constitution, which aimed at wholesale nationalisation of private enterprise, clearly needed amendment. Instead, in order to make Labour electable, it was abolished – thereby opening the door to wholesale privatisation of public services that should never have been taken from public democratic control.   It’s no wonder that during ten years of New Labour rule the gap between the rich and the poor actually widened, the UK became a haven for wealthy foreign tax-dodgers, and billions of pounds were squandered on an independent ‘ultimate deterrent’ that isn't independent and doesn’t deter. Today our national sovereignty is being threatened, not by the EU as Nigel Farage and his Ukippers insist, but by our ‘special relationship’ with the USA and our membership of NATO that is expanding its activities far beyond those originally intended.

            Government by opinion poll may, on the surface, appear to be a kind of democratic control - by the people and for the people.  But what is it that moulds public opinion? It is surely the radio, tv and national newspapers.  They rarely attempt to do so by direct lies, but by giving front page treatment to news items and expressed opinions that endorse the views of the owners and publishers, and relegating to the back pages and small print, or ignoring altogether, items and opinions that oppose them. Day after day, week after week, words do have their effect upon human minds – and on the opinion polls.  The BBC does its best to be impartial – and is constantly under critical attack as a result.

The owners and editors of the news media continually stress the value of a ‘free press’, by which they mean a press free from the influence of ruling politicians.  Well – I too would hate our press to be under political control.  But we can, at least, sack our politicians and change that control.   I think that, on the whole, I’d rather have a press influenced by a democratically elected government than, as it is at present, owned and controlled by cosmopolitan billionaires who owe no loyalty to our country, its traditions and its culture.  Possibly we need a New Party – NUKIP perhaps - to oppose these foreign influences, rather than those of the EU in which we have at least as much voice as any other European country.

Qatar

          I was astonished when the row blew up about Qatar having allegedly bribed its way into hosting a future World Cup.  This was not because I had imagined they were incapable of such a thing.  On the contrary, I had never doubted for one moment that they had ‘bought’ the privilege.   They couldn’t possibly have been chosen because they were known as a great footballing nation, or because their desert land was particularly suitable for the game, or because the climate of Qatar in the height of summer provided just the measure of temperature and humidity that enables footballers to give of their best.

            I thought that they had probably found a legal way of using their undoubted wealth to secure the World Cup competition. And perhaps they have.  They’ll certainly be able to hire the very best lawyers to state their case.  If, as I fully expect, they’re found to be not guilty, I shall look forward with confidence to their making a successful bid to host a future Winter Olympics!

D-Day Commemoration

          I remember 6^th June 1944 very well.  I was a POW in eastern Germany and was one of a party of four or five of us who were marching from our ‘Lager’ (our accommodation) to Zittau’s railway sidings to unload a couple of wagons of coal.  Some French POWs, who had better access to radio than we had, shouted to us from the other side of the road that the allied invasion in France had begun.  We had no doubt then that within a matter of months the war would be over and we would be going home!  I’m glad that there has been blanket coverage of the commemoration of that event in Normandy 70 years ago and that there has been homage paid to those who fought, and those who died, there.  Before being taken prisoner at Tobruk, I had been under enemy fire on many occasions, and had survived.  Never though had I been required to charge up an open beach that was being shelled and, at the same time, being raked by machine-gun fire!

            It isn’t in any way denigrating the courage and resolve of those who did charge up those open beaches, to say I regret that there was no mention made of the part played by the Soviet army in Hitler’s downfall.  Had the Red (mostly Russian) Army not decisively defeated the Germans a year earlier in enormous and bloody tank battles on the Russian steppe near Kursk, and had also forced the surrender of the Nazi 7^th Army in Stalingrad, it is most unlikely that the D-Day landings could have taken place.  It is more likely that in June 1944 we’d have been trying to repel a German invasion!

            Counting ‘scalps’ is a distasteful occupation but ‘killing the enemy’ rather than ‘sacrificing one’s life for one's country is, and always has been, really what war is all about.  The fact that 80 percent of fatal casualties in the German army occurred on the Eastern Front gives an indication of the magnitude of the contribution of the Soviet forces to victory.  The Soviet achievements were not without sacrifice. Their human losses have been estimated to amount to over 20 million men women and children!  If we owe a debt of gratitude to those who fought and died on the Normandy beaches, we owe at least an equal debt to those Soviet forces who were our allies, and to the Soviet civilians who suffered and died under Nazi occupation.

           

           

             

           

           

               

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.