Week 4 2013

Tendring Topics......on line

‘When will they ever learn?’

          This was the refrain of a protest song ‘Where have all the flowers gone’, written by Pete Seeger in the 1950s and sung by the author and by, among others, Joan Baez and Marlene Dietrich.  Type that title into Google and you can read all about it – and hear it sung on YouTube by its author!

          When will we ever learn?   It might have been thought that we Brits have had a surfeit of military adventures in North Africa and the Middle East.  It was, no doubt, an achievement to have toppled Saddam Hussein - but at what a terrible cost! Iraq was laid waste, its infrastructure and public services destroyed.   Tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed and many thousands more maimed and permanently disabled.   And, of course, there were scores of British and American dead and wounded. What's more, our illegal intervention provided El Qaeda with a powerful recruitment incentive.

 The war against Saddam is over but Iraq is far from being a country at peace with itself.  The sectarian hatred and violence that we continue to see in Belfast, is trivial compared with that between Iraq's Sunni and Shia Muslims.   In the north of the country the Kurds yearn to be part of an independent Kurdistan incorporating the Kurdish minorities in Turkey and Iran. Members of Iraq’s Christian community, under Saddam Hussein a free and influential minority, are now subject to violent persecution and physical attack. Those who can get out are doing so.  Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, Christians, identified with ‘interfering infidels from the west intent on destroying our religion and historic culture’, are suffering increasing persecution from militant Islamists.  A worker at the Algerian gas plant caught up in last week’s terrorist attack and hostage taking, told us on tv that he had explained to the terrorists who had captured him that he was an Algerian and  Muslim.   ‘You’ll come to no harm’, his captors had assured him. ‘We’re after these crusaders!’

British, American and other NATO forces have been engaged in Afghanistan for a decade.  We are constantly being told how this that or the other area, that two years earlier was ruled by the Taliban, is now under the control of the Afghan government and its NATO allies.  Yet the Taliban still remains capable of launching attacks within Kabul itself and there have been an increasing number – 60 last year – of allied soldiers killed by members of the Afghan forces whom they have been training.  Within a couple of years all NATO combat forces will have been withdrawn and it is confidently believed that the forces of the Afghan government will by then be capable of engaging the Taliban fighters themselves.  They may have the capability will they, I wonder, have the inclination?  Does the ordinary Afghan soldier or peasant really see much difference between NATO forces and the forces of the Soviet Union that, a decade or so ago, the Taliban and other insurgents (with the covert support of the UK and the USA!) managed to oust?

Syria, like Iraq, once had a thriving Christian minority that worshipped freely and without fear.  Now, identified with the tyrannical regime that had allowed them to survive, they find themselves under attack from the rebel forces that we and our allies recognise as Syria’s legitimate government.   Can it really be the intention of ‘the West’ to cleanse the Middle East of Christian minorities and to support governments of militant Islamists from whence recruits for Al Qaeda and similar terrorist organisations spring?   Whatever our intentions may be, that is the effect our actions are having.

Now the French are sending troops to Mali, a former French colony that is under attack from Islamist Arabs in the north of the country supported by Algerian jihadists and armed former supporters of Colonel Gaddafi who have found their way into Mali from Libya*.  The UK is helping transport troops and supplies but is not (so far!) otherwise playing an active part in the conflict.  The French troops, supporting Malian government forces, are expected to make short work of the rebels.  So, of course, were the allied forces in Afghanistan.  They have been there for ten years – and they’re not out yet!

Isn’t it time that we in ‘the west’ paused and gave a little more thought to whom we are supporting, whom we are opposing – and why we are doing either?   The British National Party is totally abhorrent to me and I am reluctant to give the slightest credence to any of its declared policies.  I do think though that their demand that we should withdraw our troops without delay from any country where the majority of the population is Muslim is worth consideration.  Is our military presence wanted there by most of the ordinary people?  Is it harming or helping minorities holding another religious faith? Is it discouraging terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda, or is it encouraging recruitment for them?  Is it closing – or widening – existing sectarian and/or ethnic divisions? Whatever our hopes or intentions for those countries may be, are they really worth even a single human life?

*Was the terrorist attack and subsequent hostage situation on the gas installation in the remotest part of Algeria a consequence of that French action?  The experts insist that it was a well-planned attack that couldn’t possibly have been organised on the spur of the moment.   I think it possible that the attack had been planned to take place  some time in the future but that the French action had provided a useful propaganda reason for bring it forward.

‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be…..’

                   Such was the advice that, in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Polonius  gave to his son Laertes before he set sail for England.  This suggests to me that even in Shakespeare’s time, England was known as a country in which it was all too easy to fall into the hands of the moneylenders.  It certainly is today – and I’m not referring to ‘the deficit’ and the national debt that worries politicians so much.  I am talking about the burden of personal debt carried by far too many of my fellow Brits.   It is a burden that leads to domestic violence, breaks up marriages, renders families and individuals homeless, can motivate criminal activities and  can lead to suicide.

 The local daily Gazette records that research has found that in the first fortnight of 2013, seventeen percent of us were still paying off bills incurred before Christmas 2011!  Richard Aldridge, Chief Executive of Colchester’s Citizens Advice Bureau told a reporter that he wasn’t surprised by that figure. He said that, ‘Last year Colchester CAB debt specialists helped clients to write off more than £3.6 million.  The average debt was about £8,000.   One of the highest debts was more than £200,000 – and that was excluding a mortgage loan’.

            National figures reveal that one in five consumers started the New Year with more than £5,000 credit card debt and one in seven people in the east of England  struggles to keep up rent or mortgage payments.   Mr Aldridge warns (as I have done in this blog) that the increasingly popular ‘pay day loans’ are  a short-term fix and that interest can get racked up to ridiculous levels, as much as 4,000 per cent a year!   The CAB helps people to understand their income and expenditure and to look at priority debts such a keeping a roof over their heads and paying fuel bills.  ‘We know the situation is going to get worse when welfare benefits change in April.  The sooner the CAB is contacted the sooner there can be help to resolve the crisis.  There is no magic wand, but help is at hand’.

          Meanwhile the Government, that never lets us forget about national debt, seems able to regard  remarkably philosophically. debts incurred by hundreds of thousands of British citizens.   For the past two years the number of applicants for places in Universities has fallen sharply.  The reasons are painfully obvious; the huge burden of debt with which graduates are burdened and the difficulty they have in finding appropriate employment.   A government spokesperson says plaintively that, ‘They don’t seem to realize that they have to pay nothing up front and that they only have to start reducing that debt when they’re in a well-paid job’.  I can well imagine that that kind of argument might satisfy the thoroughly irresponsible and the ‘shirkers and scroungers’ about whom we read in the national press.  It doesn’t appeal to people who, like me, were brought up with a horror of debt and who try to live within their means, avoiding it at all costs.  Had students depended on loans instead of means-tested grants in the early 1970s, we would certainly not have encouraged our elder son to become an undergraduate at Cambridge.  It is all very well to say that graduates don’t have to begin repaying their loans until they are in a well-paid job; that is just when responsible graduates want to start buying a home in which to settle and raise a family. For many of them that student loan debt is likely to be hanging over their heads for the remainder of their working lives.

            Then there’s this urge – encouraged by the government and by the popular press – to buy your own home.  All young couples in a stable relationship (oh dear – only a few years ago I would have written ‘all young married couples’!) are assumed to want to ‘get their feet on the home ownership ladder’.  I have just heard on a commercial radio station a property developer urging that ‘with interest rates at a record low level, now is the time to buy!’    Interest rates undoubtedly are at a very low level but house prices aren’t.   Nor are the deposits required by banks or building societies before granting a mortgage loan.  Furthermore few working people nowadays are in a position  to say with confidence that they’ll  be able to keep up the mortgage repayments for the twenty or thirty years that will elapse before they hold the deeds of their home. It is only then that they will be truly home owners, and not just home buyers liable to be rendered homeless if they default on those mortgage repayments.

            Napoleon is said to have remarked with contempt that ‘the English are a nation of shop keepers’.   We’re certainly not that these days.  The most profitable shops are part of nation-wide or international enterprises, probably with their headquarters and their controlling ownership overseas.  What we are nowadays is a nation of debtors and – increasingly – a nation of debtors who are not only unable to repay their debts, but even to pay the interest on them.

           

           

Week 45.10 9th November 2010

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Worse than heroin?

The official claim that alcohol does more harm to individuals and to society than heroin and cocaine, must have come as something as a shock to a great many of us. There have always, of course, been a number of drunks and alcoholics who wrecked their own lives and those of their immediate families. However, until the Government relaxed the licensing laws ‘so that we could learn to drink sensibly like our continental neighbours!’ one rarely, if ever, saw anyone visibly drunk in a town centre. The idea of groups of young people, mostly under 20, going out together at weekends and drinking for no other purpose than to get drunk, was totally alien.

Now, we have all become accustomed to tv news bulletins of the Police trying to clear the streets of drunken, abusive and violent teenagers, often fighting each other after binge drinking on a Friday or Saturday night. Even more disquieting is the news that, at weekends, the treatment of victims of genuine accidents in Hospital Accident and Emergency Departments is often delayed while professional staff deal with the out-of-control subjects of self-inflicted alcohol poisoning. Nowadays too, no one is particularly surprised to see someone lurch unsteadily out of a pub doorway at three o’clock in the afternoon!

Recently I saw a number of tv documentaries about the way in which some – I am sure a small minority – of teenagers abuse their bodies and shorten their lives as they pursue ephemeral pleasure through promiscuous sex and unrestricted consumption of alcohol. A nineteen year old diabetic girl, who had been brought into hospital (not for the first time!) unconscious and suffering from alcohol poisoning summed up the attitude of ‘a lost generation’ by announcing after she had regained consciousness ‘I’m gonna do what I wanna do when I wanna do it’.

It is, no doubt, shaming incidents like these that have led to the conclusion that alcohol is more dangerous than heroin and cocaine. It takes no account of other equally valid images of working men chatting companionably with their mates over a friendly evening or weekend pint, of a bottle of wine broached and shared at a celebratory meal, or of elderly pensioners (I can’t be the only one!) sipping a nightcap of watered down whisky while watching a tv programme before going to bed. We are urged ‘to drink responsibly’ and tens of thousands of us do just that. Neither heroin nor cocaine ever is, or can be, used moderately, companionably and responsibly.

I think it very unlikely that announcing that alcohol does more harm than heroin or cocaine will turn a single heavy drinker into a moderate one, much less a teetotaller. What it very probably will do is to produce more junkies drawn into drug abuse by the whisper; ‘Come on, try it. There’s nothing else quite like it, and - haven’t you heard? – it is now officially recognised as being less harmful than alcohol.

‘Kick away the ladder – I’m safely up it!’

Every current Member of Parliament who holds a University Degree had his or her University tuition fees paid by the state. Those whose parents might have had difficulty maintaining them during their time away from home, received a generous grant towards their living costs. They wouldn’t have had to be desperately poor to qualify for such a grant. I was a middle rank council official in 1971 when my elder son was offered a place at Cambridge. The County Council, as Education Authority, paid half the estimated cost of his maintenance. The other half was the ‘parental contribution’ paid by me.

These are facts that should be written in letters of fire in the House of Commons when those same MPs are deciding to limit undergraduate living grants only to ‘the very needy’ and raise the sum that Universities can charge students for their tuition fees to as much as £9,000 a year! It’s a policy which, in the army we used to describe as, ‘Up ladder Jack!’ shorthand for ‘Kick away the ladder Jack, I’m safely up it!

Nowadays students are expected to recognise and repay the advantage that a University degree gives them in the jobs market. They can obtain student loans to cover living costs and tuition fees, which they repay by instalments once their income rises above £21,000 a year. This means that graduates typically begin their working lives with a burden of debt in the region of £20,000. With increased tuition fees, that sum is clearly destined to increase, probably to double, in the future.

My wife Heather and I had been brought up in working class homes with a horror of debt. Had the situation been the same in the 1970s as it is today, we certainly wouldn’t have encouraged our offspring to aspire to a university education.

The present government complains repeatedly (and probably with good reason) about the burden of debt imposed on us all by the policies of their predecessors. How extraordinary therefore that they should be cheerfully transferring some of that burden to the individual shoulders of the very gifted young people on whose skills we are relying to get us out of this crisis brought about primarily (let us never forget) by the avarice and incompetence of our financial services and the short-sightedness of our politicians.

How should the situation be dealt with? We could bear in mind that a university degree hasn’t quite suddenly conferred on its possessors an unfair advantage in the jobs market. Those graduate MPs were undoubtedly helped in their political careers by their university successes. So were most successful bankers, businessmen and women, captains of industry, and high flying civil servants

Why shouldn’t they begin, however belatedly, to repay the unfair advantage that they have had over their less fortunate fellow men and women. And what about those who, by the accident of birth, followed their parents into privileged positions? Being the son or daughter of a Press Lord, a merchant banker or the head of an international corporation confers an advantage far greater than that enjoyed by even the most distinguished scholar.

A properly graded (and loophole free!) income tax system would solve this problem, and give the wealthy the opportunity to bear their fair share of the national burden. No one would be asked to pay a penny more than they could afford and it might have been thought that our MPs would sleep more soundly at night in the knowledge that they were no longer imposing on others a burden that they themselves were not bearing.

But that is the one remedy that so far has never been seriously considered!

A footnote

Did you see that the new head of one of our Banks is to have an annual salary of £1 million, plus estimated bonuses of £2 million? It was explained that the justification for this was that the bank had to secure the very best for the post. It is a poor outlook for Great Britain and indeed for the world, when the very best in any field of human activity, can be obtained only by offering bribes on this scale.

Many of those whose memory we shall be honouring in churches and at war memorials next Sunday (14th November) lost their lives, the most precious thing that they possessed, for as little as ‘two bob a day*!

A week or so ago I quoted the refrain from one of Bob Dylan’s popular ‘protest’ songs of the ‘60s – ‘The answer is blowing in the wind’. Here’s a refrain from ‘Where have all the flowers gone’, another popular protest song of that period. It seems particularly relevant to the matter of bankers’ monetary rewards:

‘When will they ever learn, Oh, when will they ever learn!’ When indeed?

*‘two bob’ (two shillings or 10p) a day was a private’s – or gunner’s - pay when I was called up into the army in 1939. In 1914, at the beginning of World War I it was one shilling (5p) a day.

Name Calling!

Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have referred to England as ‘Perfidious Albion’. I suppose therefore that our neighbours across the Channel can’t complain too bitterly at being described by Bernard Jenkin, Conservative MP for Harwich and North Essex (whose judgements don’t have quite the same weight as Napoleon’s) as the Duplicitous French. Criticising the Government’s decision to share some defence facilities with the French, he is reported as having said ‘We need to recognise France has never shared, and is never likely to share, the same strategic priorities as the UK. There is a long track record of duplicity on the French part’.

David Cameron’s grasp of twentieth century history seemed a little shaky when he asserted (and was quickly corrected!) that Britain was the ‘junior partner’ of the USA in the struggle against Hitler in 1940. It seems that Mr Jenkin’s grasp is even shakier. I would have thought that French sharing with us the carnage on the Western Front of World War I indicated a certain unity of purpose with the UK. The USA, whom I imagine Mr Jenkins does regard as a reliable ally, took part only in the final year of the struggle. Then again, Britain with the Commonwealth, and France were alone among the world’s nations in declaring war on Hitler’s Germany when the Nazis invaded Poland. Hitler had not directly attacked either country but both believed that destroying Nazi Germany was ‘a shared strategic priority’. The USA? They joined in only when Hitler declared war on them in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

Duplicitous? Well – the French did supply the Exocet missiles that the Argentines used with murderous effect on our Naval Task Force, but then we had trained some of the Argentine troops who had invaded the Falklands. They didn’t know that it was to be against British ships that those Exocets would be used - any more than when we helped train the ‘gallant and freedom-loving Mojihadin’ to kill and maim Soviet troops, had we known that those heroic Mojihadin were to become the fanatical Taliban using the skills we had taught them, to kill our troops!

The French did have the independence and force of character to resist being drawn into an illegal war in Iraq which, as well as costing thousands of lives and ruining the country's infrastructure, has done more to recruit volunteers to Islamic terrorism than any number of inflammatory sermons could ever hope to do. Come to think of it, wasn’t it just a little duplicitous to persuade British MPs to vote for war against Iraq by convincing them of that country’s non-existent links with international terrorism and its imaginary weapons of mass destruction?

Christmas Stamps

The celebratory Postage stamps for Christmas 2010 are now available in Post Offices. The secular stamps feature Wallace and Gromit, and very cheery and colourful they are.

However for those of us who like our Christmas greetings to be carried in an envelope with a stamp bearing a relationship to Christ’s Nativity, the very attractive 1st and 2nd Class Madonna-and-child stamps, that have been available for the past two years are available again. You do have to ask for them specifically though. At my branch Post Office the usually-very-helpful lady behind the counter looked at me in total astonishment when, after enquiring about Christmas stamps, I added that I would like the religious ones. ‘You mean you don’t want the Wallace and Gromit ones?’ she asked incredulously. ‘That’s right’, I said, ‘I believe that there are some 1st and 2nd Class Virgin-and-child stamps available. Those are the ones I want please’. Clearly taken aback, she disappeared into a back room for several minutes, and emerged bearing some sheets of the stamps I wanted in her hands.

She was even more astonished when I asked for quite a lot of each denomination. I could almost read the thoughts going through her head. ‘The poor old chap’s really off his rocker this time. He can’t possibly be sending off that number of Christmas cards and letters. Ought I to take his money?’ She was, of course, quite right about that. I don’t send off that amount of Christmas post. However I do like to use those stamps throughout the year as a quiet and unobtrusive affirmation of Christian Faith. I think that the supply that I bought last Christmas lasted me through to mid-October!

Oh yes, and they can prove a worthwhile investment too. When, as happened this year, the price of stamps goes up, First and Second Class stamps retain their value, whatever may have been their price at the time of purchase!