Week 6 2012 9.2.2012

Tendring Topics........on line

 ‘Do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you’

            St. Matthew records in his Gospel that Jesus declared that single commandment summed up the whole of the moral teaching of the Old Testament.  I hope that I am not being too heretical in saying that I wish he had gone on to state the corollary, ‘Do not do anything to other people that you would hate them to do to you’.  Perhaps Jesus did say that too but it seemed too obvious to need recording.   It clearly needed to be said though, because Christians have flagrantly ignored it through the centuries.

            It could be argued that do not is even more important than the positive do. The things we like vary widely.  George Bernard Shaw wrote in his Maxims for Revolutionaries that we should not do to others what we would like for ourselves. Their tastes may be different.  I think though, that even Shaw would agree that while we may like many different things, there are dislikes that are shared by us all.  I am quite sure that every single one of us would hate the idea of being tortured or burnt to death.  We all would hate to be brought to a violent death, to be enslaved, starved, rendered homeless, or separated from those we love.

            Yet, as Lord Byron pointed out; ‘Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded that all the apostles would have done as they did’ and Thomas Hardy wrote in his poem Christmas 1924 ‘After two thousand years of mass, we’ve got as far as poison gas’.

            These thoughts came to me when I heard Barak Obama, an international leader whom I had greatly admired, defending the use of unmanned drones to find and kill in Pakistan individuals whom the CIA has decided are members of Al Quaida or some other similar terrorist organisation.   The killing of these people, he said, was justified because they were a threat to the people of the USA.  They were carefully targeted and ‘very few’ innocent civilians were accidentally killed at the same time!

            It isn’t so very long ago that convicted, not just suspected, IRA murderers could find sanctuary from British justice in the USA.  American courts refused to return them to Britain for trial and/or punishment. They were a threat to the people of the United Kingdom. What, I wonder, would have been the American reaction had British MI5 agents in the USA sought them out and assassinated them – even if they managed to do so without harming a single innocent civilian?

            Assassination, without even the semblance of a trial, is abhorrent whether carried out by Al Quaida, by Mossad, the CIA or MI5.  In human society there can be no licence to kill

Do not do to other people what you would hate being done to yourself!

 ‘In the bleak midwinter’

  

The sudden change in the weather from milder-than-normal to sub-arctic has come as an unpleasant surprise.  Old people like me are warned to wrap up well and to keep at least one room in our homes warm at all times. I am very sorry for the increasing number of people, not necessarily all old, who have to decide whether to heat or eat.  It was a choice that the unseasonably warm autumn and early winter had led us all to imagine no-one would have to make this winter.

            My mind goes back to cold winters of the past, to the winter of 1962/1963 when the sea froze over.  I was a Public Health Inspector at the time and took these two photographs near Clacton Pier.  It was a bitter winter and a cold spring.  I remember the cemetery staff complaining that when they dug graves, the frost followed them down, freezing the soil beneath their feet as they worked!

We were dressed for the Libyan Winter! No 4 Gun of B Troop, 231^st Medium Battery RA at Wadi Halfaya (Hellfire Pass) on the Egyptian Libyan border, early January 1942.  I am the one on the right – with a woolly hat!

           

                During World War II I spent one winter in the Egyptian/Libyan frontier region, one in a PoW Camp in northern Italy and two in a small working camp (Arbeitskommando) in Germany.  In North Africa it could be bitterly cold when the north wind blew in from the sea.  Some South African troops experienced snow for the first time – a light dusting over the surface of the desert that disappeared as the sun rose.

            The winter in a prison camp in Italy is one that I would prefer to forget.  We were housed in unheated jerry-built huts, wearing totally inadequate Italian army uniforms (most of us had been wearing just shorts and shirt when captured) in which we tried to sleep, pulling our overcoats and two thin blankets over our heads to try to conserve what little warmth we had.  We were permanently hungry, louse infested and bored out of our minds.  Every day in winter we shivered on parade while Italian guards counted us – often miscounting and having to start again from the beginning.  As a result I can still count in Italian uno, due, tre, quarto, cinque and so on as quickly as I can count in English!  There were between 2,000 and 3,000 of us in the camp and deaths from cold-and-starvation related conditions were a daily occurrence.                                                                             

Zittau Rathaus (Town Hall).

One of my more back-aching jobs was to carry filled sandbags to the roof of the town hall as a fire precaution!

My memories of the two winters in Zittau, eastern Germany are far less negative.  We were wearing British army uniform and greatcoats (presumably supplied by the Red Cross) as our louse-infested Italian uniforms had been burnt on arrival.  I was in a small working ‘camp’ (Arbeitskommando) of just 30 British PoWs.  Our living quarters were palatial compared with those in Italy.  We had a separate living room and dormitory with double glazed (as well as barred!) windows.  There was a tortoise stove in the bedroom and a solid fuel cooker in the living room.   We were very often unloading coal trucks on the local railway sidings – so we were never short of fuel, even if it was only inferior lignite (‘brown coal’) briquettes! We were never cold.  Working every day (with just one ‘rest day’ in three weeks) we had no time to be bored and, from mid-winter 1944/1945 we could hear the gradually increasing thunder of artillery fire as the Soviet Army advanced inexorably across Poland and into Germany, and a constant stream of refugees from the battle front trudged wearily westward through the snow-covered streets of Zittau.   Our time of captivity was hastening to an end.

           

A New Danish Invasion!

            If any one had told me a year ago that I would get hooked on a tv serial in a foreign language about high level politics in a foreign country, with dialogue subtitled in English as in the silent movies, I would have thought that they were crazy.  Goodness knows I find news reports  of English party-political point scoring tedious enough! I can though at least understand what it is all about. Political manoeuvres in a foreign land and in a foreign language would surely be much worse.

            Yet I have just watched the tenth and final hour-long episode of Borgen, a Danish political drama on BBC 4 tv, with real regret that it had come to an end.  It was the third Danish tv drama with English-subtitles that BBC 4 had given us.  The first two were detective thrillers, both with the unpromising title of The Killing, featuring the unsmiling but strangely magnetic police detective Sarah Lundt.  I thought that the first, in which we were taken into the ‘real life’ of the family of the teenage murder victim, was the better of the two. I know that they were ‘only actors’ but it was difficult to believe that the grief, sorrow and anger of her parents and younger brothers were not real!  Surprisingly, the strong intertwined sub-plot, about the election of Copenhagen’s Mayor, was equally gripping.

            Borgen was quite different.  It followed the fortunes of Birgitte Christensen, fortyish, married, mother of two, and leader of one of Denmark’s political parties. Very likeable, she was clearly highly principled – sacking her Public Relations Consultant for unfairly discrediting the then Prime Minister, one of her political opponents. 

            As a result of political manoeuvring she found herself Prime Minister of a coalition government of a number of political parties.  At first we saw her clearly ‘on the side of the angels’.  She stopped the use of a Greenland air base by United States planes engaged in the ‘rendition’ of political prisoners, thereby  incurring the wrath of the White House and the cancellation  of a Presidential visit to Denmark.   She called the bluff of a Danish millionaire newspaper magnate who threatened to leave the country if she persisted with legislation promoting women's rights.   She secured a contract to supply wind turbines to a former Soviet Republic with an appalling human rights record, outwitting the country’s president who would have liked to have made the deal conditional on the extradition of a dissident refugee who had fled to Denmark.

            Then Birgitta’s halo began to slip. She allowed the use of a recorded remark made by a former friend many years earlier at a drunken party, to justify the bugging by the Danish Secret Service of the office of the political party which that former friend now led. Her friend’s reputation and political career were shattered.  To help cover up the Defence Minister’s corrupt acceptance of gifts and hospitality in connection with the purchase of fighter aircraft, Birgitta persuaded her husband to refuse a very satisfying and lucrative job that he had been offered.   She sacrificed the cabinet post of a trusted colleague and long-standing friend and adviser to keep the coalition government intact – and she agreed to a divorce and abandoned her marriage in the pursuit of her political ambition.  At the end of the final episode we saw her after she had made on tv the most eloquent speech of her career, extolling Danish nationalism and earning the applause even of her victims!   She was Denmark’s undisputed political leader – but she had lost everything that had made her the likeable, principled political leader that she once had been.   'What shall it profit a man (or woman) to gain the whole world and lose his/her soul?'

            I am looking forward to the next tv offering from the land of the Vikings!

             

           

           

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Week 32 2011 16th August 2011

Tendring Topics……on line


A Generation without Faith, Hope or Compassion!


St Paul, in his letter to the members of the newly formed Christian Church in Corinth, memorably wrote that there are three abiding and overriding virtues, Faith, Hope and Compassion* and that the greatest of these is Compassion, without which even our most worthy action or activity is valueless. Watching, on the tv screen, the rampaging mobs of young people, at first in London and later in other English cities, burning, destroying and looting other people’s goods and properties, it struck me how singularly lacking in all three of those virtues the members of those mobs seemed to be.

Faith? It would surprise me if there was a single member of those mobs who would have described himself as a committed follower of any of the world’s religious faiths. Nor I think, were they committed atheists (I reckon that Richard Dawkins is, intellectually, a bit out of their depth!). I don’t think either that they have a fervent political faith, a rage against authority like many that took part in riots in the past. These rioters ignored secular symbols of power such as Town Halls, Public Offices, and Police Stations, to vent their violence on departmental stores, sports outfitters and electrical and electronic goods retailers that were worth plundering. Their motive was greed - the acquisition of useable or saleable items – trainers, jewellery, electronic equipment and so on.

Then, there is Hope. That is something that we all need. It was what kept me alive and sane during the three long years that I was a prisoner of war. Dante knew what he was doing when in his Inferno he posted ‘All hope abandon ye who enter here!’ at the entrance to Hell. I reckon that most of those young rioters had abandoned theirs. Ill educated and undisciplined, they had little chance of obtaining worthwhile employment and a secure future. Government policies and government cuts had made that ‘little chance’ even smaller. They were the straw that broke the camel’s back; the fuse that ignited the powder keg of resentment and hatred. The riots were doubly welcomed by those who considered themselves to be disadvantaged. They provided them with an opportunity to hit out at a society that they felt had dealt with them unfairly, and of obtaining simply by helping themselves, some of the worldly goods they had seen flaunted on their tv screens.

As for compassion; there was little enough compassion in the minds of those who looted and then burned to the ground decades-old family businesses that had survived the air raids of World War II, and more recent enterprises developed perhaps by hard-working immigrants struggling to build up a support their families.

It is one thing to diagnose a problem; yet another to suggest a remedy. Perhaps some of their ‘elders and betters’ could begin by setting the younger generation a better example. It couldn’t have helped the moral development of the rioters to discover that a great many (many more than were actually prosecuted) of our MPs and at least one ‘Noble Lord’ had fiddled their parliamentary expenses, thereby robbing the rest of us, who pay those expenses with our taxes. It couldn’t have helped for them to know that a succession of Prime Ministers and other leading politicians of both main political parties, had courted the favours of an international enterprise that was bribing our police and spying on the private lives of British citizens. Had the culprits not been caught I have little doubt that both lots of wrongdoing would still be with us today. This surely suggests to the young that the one commandment that they need to obey is Thou shalt not be found out!

If we want Great Britain to develop into a land of which we can all feel proud, the government must work towards narrowing the yawning gap between the wealthiest and the poorest people in our country, and between the least and the most privileged. Can you even imagine riots such as those that we have experienced, happening in countries like Sweden and Denmark where the gap between wealthy and poor is much narrower? Have you noticed, by the way, that there has been no comparable rioting in Scotland and Wales despite some of their cities (Glasgow for instance) having a reputation for lawlessness? Could it be because they both have truly democratically elected assemblies that really do represent their whole nation?

Then again, it is no good haranguing parents to spend more time with their children while, at the same time, encouraging both parents to be in fulltime paid employment. It is no good expecting parents, tired from a full day’s work, preparing a meal and doing other jobs about the home, to spend any leisure time that may be left them playing with their children and furthering their education.

Finally – and I think that this is the most important of all – we have got to be prepared to tell young people that some activities, using drugs, indulging prematurely or promiscuously in sexual activity, stealing, gang-fighting, shop lifting, bullying younger kids and so on are not just unwise, dangerous, antisocial and bad for one’s health but wrong (wicked or sinful if you prefer) and that there is a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ that applies to followers of every culture and to adherents of every religious faith and of none.

We might even try to instil into the minds of the young the Golden Rule that you should always ‘Treat other people in the same way that you would like them to treat you’. I am told that that rule, or something very like it, is implanted in every religious tradition. I know it from Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. Jesus said that it was a summation of all the moral law of the Old Testament. If our forebears had tried to observe that rule rather more often during the past two thousand years, the world today would be a much happier place. Today could be a good time to start!

*The King James Bible says ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’. Most modern translation of the Bible say ‘Faith, Hope and Love’. I think that ‘Charity’ still has a slight taste of Victorian Workhouse ‘gruel’. Human love can be jealous and selfish. I think that ‘compassion’ is closer than either to what St. Paul meant.


That Dreadful Deficit!


If there is one message that the government has been absolutely determined, and largely successful, in impressing upon us all it is that Britain has an enormous fiscal deficit that simply must be reduced or eliminated.

Since it is indisputable that we have a large national debt, it must surely follow that someone has lent us all that money. Have you ever wondered who those manipulative money-lenders, those latter-day Shylocks, could possibly be? Harold Wilson, I remember, used to tell us about the financial machinations of ‘the gnomes of Zurich’. Today, if you were to ask a Daily Mail, or a Daily Express reader you would probably be told that the schemers of Brussels are most likely to be guilty. It was, so they would probably say, all part of a cunning plan to ensure that the malign European Union ruled Britannia!

In fact it seems that those nefarious international loan sharks live much closer to home than either Zurich or Brussels. They are, in fact, we ourselves! A reader’s letter in The Friend, a Quaker independent weekly journal, helps to explain the situation. Below are some extracts from his letter:

The national debt is owed to private individuals and is what constitutes their savings. Eighty percent of public borrowing is owed to UK citizens. The interest payments on that debt are not lost to society but will go to those citizens – and their lucky grandchildren………..


……….The UK government is emphatically not in the same position as a household or business. It is the issuer, not just the user, of its own currency and therefore cannot go bankrupt. The UK is fundamentally different to Greece and Ireland as a result.


In a recession, households and businesses, quite rationally, try to save money. This means that others lose income and possibly their jobs. It makes no sense for the state to add to the problem by reducing its spending at the same time………………..


………As the Quaker and Nobel-prize-winning economist William Vickrey said, ‘There is no real justification for a requirement that a budget of any sort should be balanced, except as a rallying point for those who seek to hamstring government.’ All this was understood decades ago by Keynes and the generations of economists and leaders he influenced. Sadly, such understanding does not lead to policies that give short-term benefit to the very rich, and so will now rarely be found in the press, tv or government.


The letter was written by Paul Doherty of Heswall Quaker Meeting who also comments that those who would like to find alternative views on how our monetary system works, could read about modern monetary theory in Warren Mosler’s The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy, a fascinating insider’s account.

I can’t get away from that deficit!


No, I can’t get away from that deficit no matter how hard I try. I have just been referred to – and have read on line – an article in the Daily Telegraph by Janet Daley who is reckoned to be an expert in economics. She is occasionally to be heard pontificating on the BBC. She is no fan of President Obama and recently wrote an article claiming that, as an African American he is, quite literally, only half African and only half American!

That should have warned me, but I read on. She says that we simply ’can’t afford’ our welfare state and our free national health service. She believes that the welfare safety net that was established by my generation 66 years ago (long before she was born!) should be dismantled and that we should revert to the everyone-for-himself-and-devil-take-the-hindmost system that prevails in the USA – and from which President Obama has tried, it seems in vain, to drag them. If you want to read it yourself try using Google to find Janet Daley, Daily Telegraph. The contribution in question is dated Saturday 6th August and is entitled ‘If we are to survive the looming catastrophe….’

I believe that that health and welfare safety net that offered everybody in the United Kingdom the Freedom from Fear promised by President Roosevelt (I bet Ms Daley would have had no time for him either!) was one of the proudest achievements of Clem Attlee’s post-war Labour Government that I am glad my vote helped to office. Funny thing – we had just come out of six years of total warfare which had left our country in ruins and many of us seriously injured in mind and/or body, with tens of thousands of homeless and (although I don’t know the figure) a national debt that must have been sky-high. Yet, we could afford it then; possibly because we had the will and determination to do so and because, in those days, we had a Labour Government that didn’t rate the interests of multimillionaires above the clearly expressed will of the people.

I really think that Ms Daley would be happier back in her native USA especially as the Republicans (reinforced by the truly Neanderthaler Tea Party movement!) appear to have defeated an attempt by the Democrats to make the really wealthy pay their share towards the reduction of the USA’s deficit.

We can afford the Social Security and NHS Safety Nets if we really want Britain to be a fairer society and are all prepared to contribute towards that end. What we can’t afford are the super-wealthy who avoid paying their fair share of taxation, and successful British Companies like Boots who – as I pointed out a few weeks ago – ‘locate’ the headquarters of their companies in overseas tax havens, to reduce or eliminate altogether their tax obligation to Britain.

I have long urged an overhaul of the Income Tax system to ensure a more equitable distribution of the nation’s wealth. I am amazed to learn that David Cameron is considering a change to the income tax system – but it is to help the wealthy, by reducing the 50 percent rate of tax on the taxable income of those with the highest incomes, ‘to increase competitiveness’. Words fail me!