Week 28 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

A prophetic blog reader!

            A fortnight ago I published in this blog an email received from a regular reader on the subject of the jihadist extremists in the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent and Africa.   It contained the following sentence:

The day surely cannot be far away when they succeed in overthrowing the government of a major country, or carve out a completely new country by annexing bits of other countries.

            Today it seems that that is happening.  The Isis invaders of Iraq and Syria have declared the areas that they have occupied to be a new Islamic Caliphate under their control in which ‘Sharia Law’ will be enforced.  The Shia Iraqi President desperately needs western help but apparently is not quite desperate enough to be prepared to widen his government to represent a truly united Iraqi nation.  That, he says, would be a negation of democracy – that word again.  It clearly means whatever its user wants it to mean!

            We have seen the inspiring spectacle of hundreds of young Iraqi Shia militia volunteers marching up and down with automatic rifles on their shoulders shouting words of defiance against the fighters of Isis.  I’m afraid they’ll discover that there’s a big difference between posturing at patriotic gatherings safe in the middle of Baghdad and actually facing a resolute enemy, with mortars and shells bursting all around you, comrades killed and wounded, and machine-gun fire sweeping the battlefield.

            I think it unlikely that 300 American troops can train an Iraqi army to a standard in which they can defeat those Isis fighters in the few weeks – or perhaps only days – available to them.  It would surely be disastrous for the UK or the USA to become more involved in this conflict than they already are. When we and the Americans withdrew our forces from Iraq after that disastrous and illegal invasion, I wrote in this blog that I thought it likely that within a few years Iraq would be divided into three separate states; an independent Kurdistan in the north, Shia Muslim with close ties to Iran in the south and a Sunni Muslim state in the centre.  It really took someone as ruthless as Saddam Hussein to hold those three opposing factions together.  Already there is virtually an independent Kurdistan in the north and it seems apparent that Sunni and Shia Muslims can’t and won’t live together in peace.  They’ll learn eventually (just as Protestant and Roman Catholic Christians in Europe eventually learned to live together) but we can’t, and shouldn’t try to, hasten the process by force of arms. 

            I wasn’t surprised to learn that very few members of this Isis Army that is trying to take over Syria and Iraq are actually either Syrians or Iraqis.  They are a hotchpotch of fanatics convinced that they’ve got God on their side, from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kosovo, Chechnia and, to our shame, from the United Kingdom and, no doubt, from wherever else there are Muslim communities with a few fervent jihadists or malcontents among them.

            But just as the members of Isis are from a number of different countries there is quite a surprising array of countries opposing them. I remember that when during World War II the Fascist government of Italy was overthrown and the Italians changed sides – we couldn’t bring ourselves to call them ‘allies’ – they were co-belligerents.  Perhaps we’ll have to use that expression again, though most of those concerned aren’t actually fighting yet.

            One that definitely is, is the army of President Assad in Syria.  We seem to have conveniently forgotten that Isis had its origins in Syria and was one of the groups that we were supporting in their efforts to topple President Assad.  The Syrian army is no doubt grateful that Isis has transferred its main attention to Iraq, but Isis definitely intends Syria to be part of its new Islamic Caliphate! 

Then, of course, there’s Iran.  It seems but yesterday that Iran was considered by ‘the west’ to be the centre of all evil in the Middle East.  'We' were quite sure they were  trying to make weapons of mass destruction (just as 'we' had been sure Saddam Hussein had been doing the same in Iraq!) and had to be stopped at all costs.  However Iran is now definitely keen to support Iraq’s Shia government against a Sunni invasion – and we’re welcoming that support.

Finally, Russia has supplied the Iraqi government with some second-hand jet fighter aircraft!   Who knows?  If Iraq has the trained pilots to fly them they could make the air strikes on Isis targets that Barak Obama is so reluctant to authorise, unnecessary.      

            What a muddle!  And most of it brought about by the interference of foreigners in the affairs of both Syria and Iraq.  I think it likely that if all those in Syria and Iraq who are not citizens of those benighted countries were to go home, the natives – those who haven’t yet either fled or been killed – would find a way of resolving their differences and living at peace with each other.

A footnote

Reviewing, in the Radio Times a tv programme about the 'Bay of Pigs' episode in 1961 that ended in total disaster, when the USA sponsored an armed attempt by Cuban exiles to invade Cuba and oust Fidel Castro, Gill Crawford quotes an unnamed US academic as saying: 'Every country has a right to figure out its own destiny......every time we intervene........we produce consequences that are ugly and resonate for generations'.

 If I may quote the Book of Common Prayer, I'd like every American President and every British Prime Minister, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest, that quotation.

The Idol with Feet of  Clay!

            A recent story-line in Holby City  BBC 1’s popular hospital ‘soap’ related to a terminally ill man in his nineties who came into Holby City Hospital accompanied by his granddaughter in her late twenties or early thirties.  She obviously loved him dearly and was very proud of his Polish origins and of the fact that, after coming to England in the immediate aftermath of World War II he had worked in the Fire Service, saving the lives of others at the risk of his own.  He was brave, loving, kind and generous. He was admired, not only by his grand-daughter, but by all who knew him.

            Except - that research revealed that he wasn’t Polish at all but German, and as a young man during World War I he had been a member of Hitler’s dreaded Waffen SS.  He had been a guard at a concentration camp, where he had been feared by all for his cruelty and disregard for human life.  At the end of the war he had stolen the identity of a dead Polish prisoner, in whose name he had come to England and found work in the Fire Service.  Neither his English wife nor his grand-daughter had known anything of his Nazi past and that he was, in fact, a still-wanted war criminal.

            I felt something like the shock and horror and – in the first instance – disbelief, that the grand-daughter felt on learning of her well-loved grandfather’s past, when I realized that Rolf Harris, a tv personality for whom I had felt warm and sincere admiration, had for decades been an abuser of any personable young girl who had the misfortune to make his acquaintance.

            Somehow, although I was shocked at the endless string of offences of which Jimmy Savile is  said to have been guilty, I really didn’t feel the same about him.  My early 20^th century sensibilities had been suspicious of his hairstyle and his very professional showbizzy manner.  Although I watched several of his ‘Jim’ll fix it’ programmes  and had felt admiration at his apparent working as a hospital porter, I wasn’t all that surprised when he was revealed as having been a predatory paedophile.

            I really had been taken in by Rolf Harris though. He was just as much part of the ‘showbiz’ scene as Jimmy Savile but somehow he always managed to give the impression of being an extremely gifted amateur.  And he certainly was gifted, both as an artist (he wouldn’t have had the opportunity of painting the Queen had he not been) and as an entertainer.  He gave hours of innocent pleasure to thousands of viewers and listeners and, like Jimmy Saville, did a great deal of work for thoroughly deserving charities. He had even played a leading role in a film warning children of the danger of paedophiles!

            All of that though counts as nothing compared with the now-revealed activities that have led to his downfall and exposure as an abuser of young women and girls.  I feel desperately sad and sorry for Rolf Harris’ victims, and for the thousands who have seen their idol shattered. Was Rolf Harris' prison sentence too lenient?  I reckon that he found his very public shame and disgrace, after years of adulation, a harsher punishment than any number of years in prison.  There's a couple of lines from Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol that may come to his mind:

All that we know who lie in gaol is that the walls are strong,

And every day is like a year - a year whose days are long!

Supporting Clacton’s Tourist Industry

          It isn’t very often that I find myself eye to eye with our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell – a right-wing, climate-change-denying Europhobe; a Crypto-Ukipper if there ever was one!  However I am right behind him in his support of a campaign for the reduction of VAT payable on such tourist-specific items as accommodation in hotels, guest houses and caravan sites and on, for instance, the attractions on Clacton Pier, from the current 20 percent to 5 percent.               

            I believe that the Chancellor could recover the cost of this from income tax – perhaps by making all ‘state benefits’ (including the Attendance Allowance I get because of my very limited mobility!) subject to that tax.  It is the nature of income tax that no-one is ever asked for more than they can afford to pay, whereas VAT hits the poorest the hardest and the very richest the least because, of course, the VAT on any purchased goods or services is a much smaller proportion of the income of the wealthy purchaser.

            Clacton-on-Sea does not attract the very wealthy.  In fact it attracts precisely those whom the government claims to support – the hardworking man or woman who can just afford to take his or her family for a seaside holiday on Britain’s sunny east coast but for whom a few extra pounds one way or the other make all the difference. 

 .

                          

Week 39 2013

Tendring Topics……….on line

The Kindness of Strangers

          The newspapers and the radio and tv news bulletins are full of stories of human folly and wickedness; of senseless slaughter in the Middle East (can either side of the conflict in Syria really believe that any possible ending will be worth the death, destruction and human misery that is taking place daily in that unhappy country?) of robbery, fraud, neglect and abuse of children and of the old and disabled. They record the triumph of selfishness and greed. It is easy for very old people like me to despair of humanity and to fear the future; not for ourselves but for our grandchildren and their grandchildren.

            I try to tell myself that it is the exception that makes the news; that the time to get really worried is when acts of kindness and generosity are so rare that they make the headlines in the press and the ‘lead story’ on the tv news bulletins. Just occasionally though, something happens that makes me realize that, despite the gloomy headlines and the news stories of violence, cruelty and greed, most people are not a bit like that.  They’re kind and helpful and generous.  They really do try to treat other people as they themselves would like to be treated. .

            I had such a moment on Monday of last week.  I had written a letter to a friend of mine in Brussels.  There were a couple of enclosures to go with it and I had no idea what it would cost to send.  The days when I could stroll along to the Post Office are long past.  Supported by my stick I took the half dozen steps to my shed, mounted my mobility scooter (my ‘Iron Horse’!) and drove the few hundred yards from my home to Magdalene Green Post Office.  There I dismounted, retrieved my stick from its holster and stepped inside.  I had forgotten that Monday was ‘benefits day’.   There was a queue.  I took my place and slowly shuffled forward.  The queue was being dealt with very efficiently and I don’t suppose that I had queued for longer than fifteen minutes before I realized that I had stood for as long as I was able to. I had to sit down or collapse! There was a chair nearby and three people ahead of me in the queue; a youngish woman with a toddler, a middle-aged man with several parcels and an elderly lady who was, I thought, probably drawing her pension.  I told them that I wasn’t trying to jump the queue but would they mind if I sat in the chair until it was my turn to be served? They agreed and I thought it likely that I’d have about another ten or fifteen minutes to wait.

I was totally astonished when the counter clerk became available and called for the next customer.  All three of those who were before me in the queue urged me to take their place and go first. My business at the counter took no more than two minutes. It had been a spontaneous act of kindness and thoughtfulness towards an old man with walking stick whom none of them knew – but it really was deeply appreciated.   There were tears in my eyes as I thanked them for their kindness.

We humans aren’t just half-trained animals, motivated only by greed and self-interest as politicians seem to imagine.   There really is – as we Quakers maintain – a divine spark deep within the personality of each one of us, just waiting to be transformed into a warm, friendly and generous flame.

‘Out of the Tax system?’

I don’t grudge Nick Clegg his minor triumph over the provision of free school meals for all children in the first three classes of primary schools.

It was only to be expected that some would complain about having to help pay to feed other people’s kids – many of those other people being much better off than they are.  Young people, struggling to bring up a family, might equally complain about having to pay for the benefits enjoyed by well-off pensioners.  I can see the difficulties and injustices that would arise if every benefit were to be means-tested.  Pride would prevent some needy folk from applying.  Poor children getting free school meals would be stigmatised by their fellows. Children can be cruel to each other. But there is one ‘means test’ to which we are all subjected – our income tax assessment.  The state retirement pension is taxable. Those pensioners who, like me, have a supplementary pension from former employment, or some other source of income, know that the state retirement pension is added to it and becomes taxable income.

I can see no reason why all universal benefits – children’s allowance, job seekers’ allowance, winter fuel allowance, free tv licence, housing benefit, attendance allowance and so on, should not be similarly taxable.  The really poor would continue to get their full benefit.  The better off would pay back some of it in tax and the really wealthy would pay the highest rate of tax on it.  Even with our tax system as it is at present it would bring some welcome cash back into the Treasury (to help with that deficit!)  It would be fairer than the current system and no-one would suffer real hardship. Income tax has never yet made anyone hungry or homeless. I am surprised that this idea hasn’t already been embraced by our cash-hungry chancellor.

If, of course, the income tax system were to be reformed so that we all – rich and poor alike – paid an equal percentage of our gross income (before thousands are siphoned off into charitable trusts, tax havens and the like!) as income tax or – as I prefer to think of it – as our annual membership fee for British citizenship, the system would be fairer still.  What’s more, I believe that the indirect taxes (VAT, customs duties and so on) that disproportionately penalise the less-well-off could be reduced or even eliminated.  

I very much deplore Nick Clegg’s claiming that the coalition government has benefited low earners by raising the level of income at which income tax becomes payable ‘and taking millions out of the tax system altogether!’ This perpetuates - or tries to perpetuate – the myth, fostered by much of the press, that the only really burdensome tax is income tax.  It divides society into two antagonistic classes – the taxpayers, whose hard work and enterprise keep a parasitic underclass of non-taxpayers in comfort and, in many cases so they claim, in idleness.

Raising the level at which income tax is payable is often presented as helping only the very poorest in society. It isn’t. Raising that level affects and benefits every income tax payer from those who only just become liable for income tax, to the seriously wealthy with an income (I hesitate to say ‘earnings’!) of a million pounds or more a year.  Nor is it true that those who are not liable for income tax pay no taxes to the government.  Since the Thatcher years there has been a shift from direct taxation (income tax, death duties and so on) to indirect taxes such as VAT and customs duties.  The tax is the same for rich and poor alike but the VAT payable on, for instance, a repair to the family car or essential maintenance to the home, makes a far greater dent in the budget of someone with a low income than it does on those of the wealthy.

There’s one source of revenue for the government that comes almost exclusively from the poor.  That is the quite small amount that goes with the purchase of every lottery ticket and every scratch card.  Lots and lots of tiny payments come to a very considerable sum of money.  Even the very poor feel able, as I once heard a Government Minister put it, ‘to have fun on the lottery’.  It is their one, albeit very very remote, chance of gaining a fortune and escaping from grinding poverty.  You’ll look in vain for stockbrokers, merchant bankers or payday money lenders in the queue for lottery tickets and scratch cards.  They prefer to gamble much more profitably and preferably with other people’s money, on the stock exchange!

I wait, probably in vain, for one of the political parties to include in their programme the reform of the income tax system to ensure that every adult citizen, rich and poor alike, pays the same percentage of his of her income to the Inland Revenue as their annual  membership fee as British citizens.  This reform would be the first step towards narrowing the vast gap that at present exists between the incomes of the very rich and the very poor and the transformation of the United Kingdom into a United Common Wealth in the future of which every citizen would have a stake and a responsibility.

'I shall not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

Till I have built Jerusalem

In England's green and pleasant land'.

Lord Hanningfield’s Legacy

          When the Police decided to take no other action with regard to Lord Hanningfield’s use of his County Council credit card to spend nearly £300,000 on business trips abroad, expensive meals and hospitality, I commented in this blog that there must have been sighs of relief from some of his colleagues at County Hall. .  Certainly his downfall seems to have heralded a new era of thrift there.

            The daily Gazette reports that Ms. Joanna Killian, the County Council’s Chief Executive appointed in 2006, spent £4,700 on her County Council credit card including a team-building exercise for five members of the council’s staff that included a trip to Colchester Zoo, various expenses during a weeklong trip to Jamestown, Virginia where she and a number of councillors took part in their 400^th anniversary celebrations.  These included ‘a meal for 23 at the Old Original Bookbinders Restaurant that set taxpayers back £1,152.16 and a four-night stay for seven at Jamestown’s Berkeley Hotel that cost £3,436.59’   The purpose of the transatlantic excursion was to ‘create new trade and business links between Essex and Virginia’ ;. and did it, I wonder?   For Christmas 2007 Ms Killian paid Kingsmead Publications £331.35 for personalised corporate Christmas cards.

            That was then.  Now, we have a somewhat different story.  Since 2010 Ms Killian has used the card only seven times – six times for train journeys and once for the renewal of a subscription to the Local Government Chronicle. In 2011 her expenses amounted to just £259.   It seems that we have at least something for which to be grateful for Lord Hanningfield’s example!

Week 30 2013

Tendring Topics………on line

Helping the taxpayers! (but, who are the Taxpayers?)

         

Last week I heard Work and Pensions Minister Iain Duncan Smith defending the Government’s cuts in benefits for the needy and, in particular, the £20,000 ‘cap’ on benefits to any family.   It is clearly unfair, he said, that anyone on benefit should be financially better off than those who are working. He also claimed (without any firm evidence, as a BBC interviewer pointed out) that in pilot areas where the benefit cap had already been introduced, thousands of folk who had been living on benefit had been encouraged back to work.

Obviously, everybody who is able to work should be encouraged to do so – but where are they to find a job when, as in this area for instance, there are twenty applicants for every job vacancy?  Does Iain Duncan Smith really believe that anything other than a tiny minority of the two and a half million unemployed people in the UK prefer to live on ‘benefit’.  Like the tax avoiders and tax evaders, that tiny minority should be exposed and penalised.  Whatever the feature writers of the tabloid press may say, their lives must be pretty miserable, especially when much of that ‘benefit’ isn’t retained by the recipient but is handed over directly to a rapacious private landlord..  But you’d hardly expect a government that includes seventeen millionaires to appreciate that!

Over and over again Mr Iain Duncan Smith claimed that he had to balance the reasonable interests of ‘the taxpayers’ against the cost to the nation of benefit payments.  By the taxpayers he clearly meant those (like me!) who are fortunate enough to have an income high enough to be liable for income tax. But we are by no means the only taxpayers, nor is income tax the only way in which we contribute to the government’s finances   During the Thatcher years (‘the avaricious eighties') there was a deliberate policy of reducing ‘direct taxation’ such as income tax, corporation tax and death duties, and compensating for this by increasing ‘indirect taxation’  (referred to as ‘stealth taxes’ by the tabloid press when imposed by a government that they oppose!) These are VAT, taxes on insurance, gambling and air travel, and customs and excise charges – on, for instance, fuel oil, tobacco products and alcoholic drinks.

This policy was continued by New Labour under Tony Blair and his successors. Indirect taxes are levied equally on rich and poor alike (we’re all in this together’) but, of course, they have a much bigger impact on the incomes of the poor than they do on the rich.

The poor make a contribution to Government’s Inland Revenue whenever they have their cars or motor bikes (often vital for their work or seeking work) repaired, serviced or filled with petrol or diesel; every time they buy a packet of cigarettes or a pint of beer, and every time they buy a lottery ticket in the hope (almost certainly in vain!) of escaping from a life of poverty.

In the Biblical parable ‘the widow’s mite’ was one hundred percent of her wealth, a far greater personal contribution than even hundreds of the shekels of a wealthy Pharisee. Today, as a result of indirect taxation, the working and unemployed poor pay a higher percentage of their income to the Inland Revenue than those in the highest income brackets.

  Pay rises to public servants and to many employees in the private sector are

 always a percentage of their existing income.   When, for instance, all the staff of a local authority get a 2 percent pay rise, Chief Executive Officers can claim that they get exactly the same pay increase as the humblest clerical officer, despite the fact that the CEO is getting 2 percent of perhaps £150,000 and the junior employee 2 percent of less than £20,000!  I wonder if they would continue to equate their loss with that of junior officers if they were compelled to suffer a ten percent pay reduction!

           

I believe, very strongly, that the government’s principal source of revenue should be an income tax consisting, just like those pay rises, on an equal percentage of every adult’s existing income.  I believe too, that every British adult and everyone who lives and works in Britain, should pay that percentage of his or her income as an annual membership fee of the Society of British Citizenship – and that they should be proud and pleased to do so.    

 ‘The Lady’s not for Turning’

          That phrase,  parodying the title of a play of the late 1940s by Christopher Fry, is one of Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher’s best remembered sound-bites.  It was true too.  Mrs Thatcher was very strong-minded (opponents might have said ‘stubborn’ or even ‘pig headed’) and rarely, if ever, changed her mind on a matter of policy.

            The same can hardly be said about her successors in government today..  Their path is littered with the torn-up remains of policies that have either been abandoned or changed out of all recognition. Particularly blatant is their recent U-turn on a minimum price for alcoholic drinks, and the plain packaging of cigarettes.   It seems but yesterday that Prime Minister was making impassioned speeches about the benefits to public health that would result from both these policies and how preventing the sale of cheap alcohol would reduce anti-social behaviour.

            Now, so it seems, the imposition of plain packaging for cigarettes is to await the result of a similar experiment on the other side of the world in Australia (and I thought the coalition government claimed that Britain led the world!) and the imposition of minimum prices for alcohol has been shelved indefinitely.  It is now being claimed that no-one will be discouraged by plain packaging from having ‘that first smoke’ that can begin an addiction.  If the tobacco manufacturers really believe that, then why do they oppose plain packaging.  It must surely be cheaper to produce than packaging currently in use.  This government U-turn will without question result in continued growth in alcohol fuelled  antisocial behaviour, additional cost to the NHS for the treatment of tobacco and alcohol related diseases, and the premature termination of thousands of promising young lives.

            Does the hope of a few extra votes in the no-longer-distant next general election or a few extra thousand pounds in the party war-chest really make all that worthwhile?

‘Council takes stock and turns clock back 30 years’

            That, last week, was the Clacton Gazette’s headline over a news story that gave me real satisfaction and raised by several notches my opinion of the present Tendring District Council.   For years now I have urged that the best solution to Britain’s housing problem – and the best way to get the building industry onto its feet and busy again – was to encourage local authorities to build or purchase houses for letting as they had done successfully for a century prior to Mrs Thatcher’s Right to Buy legislation of 1980.   This had compelled local authorities and Housing Associations (but not private landlords) to sell, at bargain basement prices, the homes that earlier generations had built to solve as they thought their community’s future housing problems.  Right to Buy was, in fact, a very effective means of buying votes with other people’s money.  Better still, those ‘other people’ were no longer around to protest!  They were those of earlier generations who had thought that they were building homes to ensure that no-one in their areas need ever be homeless, overcrowded or living in sub-standard conditions.

            Last year the coalition government made a bad situation even worse by compelling housing authorities to give tenants wishing to buy their homes even bigger discounts.   They also prevented ‘social housing’ from being offered to anyone other than the poorest of the poor, and required that all tenancies should be short term and should be terminated if the tenant’s income rose above the poverty level.  This they compounded with the ‘bedroom tax’ that charges social housing tenants extra rent for any spare bedroom!

            I was therefore delighted to see that, despite all the obstacles, Tendring Council was to go ahead and, for the first time in thirty years, buy homes for letting to needy housing applicants in our area.  They have set aside a million pounds for this purpose.  Their first purchase is to be of six flats in Victoria Road, Walton-on-the-Naze at a cost believed to be about £525,000.   They also have plans to build two council houses in Brightlingsea, and it is expected that more homes for letteing will be built in other towns.   They hope that they will thus raise the council’s existing housing stock to 3,227 homes.  It will, of course, take many years to rectify the effect of three decades of inaction.

              

            Council Leader Peter Halliday is reported as saying, ‘It is fair to say that most people don’t think a Conservative council would want council houses, let alone building or buying to add to housing stock………..We are determined to get local housing for local people, and the only way to do that is to do it ourselves’.

            Good for Councillor Halliday! It wasn’t always the case though that Conservative Councils didn’t want Council Houses.  I was Clacton Urban District Council’s Housing Manager in the early 1970s.  The council owned about 1,000 houses, bungalows and flats and had a building programme adding a few housing units every year.  Clacton Council had a Conservative Majority (though they certainly weren’t run on the parliamentary political lines that central government has forced on councils today) but resolutely refused to sell any of their council properties, though they encouraged and offered support to tenants who bought a house or bungalow in the private sector thereby releasing a council house for letting.

           

Myself as Clacton’s Housing Manager in 1973 or thereabouts. Oh dear, don’t I look every inch the Town Hall Bureaucrat!!

           

The Council's members, of all parties, were proud of their housing estates – and so was I.  Tenants were encouraged to cultivate their gardens and to keep the interiors of their homes spic and span. The knowledge that, provided they paid their rent regularly and complied with the other tenancy conditions, they had homes ‘for life’ encouraged this.   We had two and three bedroom houses and flats for families, specially adaptable bungalows for the disabled or elderly, and a few one-bedroom flats for singletons.   Thanks to the building programme and casual vacancies arising from deaths or tenants moving away, during my time as housing manager no family or individual ever, to my knowledge, ‘slept rough’ within the Clacton Urban District.  Nor did we ever have to resort to ‘bed and breakfast’ accommodation for homeless families.

        Later, when I was Tendring Council's Public Relations Officer, I remember showing with pride a visiting American studying British local government, round one of our Clacton housing estates.  He was deeply impressed.  ‘You wouldn’t find social housing like this in the States’, he told me. That was nearly forty years ago. I haven’t visited any of those estates recently but I have a feeling that nowadays he would find himself to be more ‘at home’.  

           

Week 27 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

‘The King was in his counting house, counting out his money’

            These days, of course, it wouldn’t be the king but the Chancellor of the Exchequer.   For me, Chancellor George Osborne lost all credibility and respect when, at the same time as introducing an austerity programme that penalised the poor and disadvantaged, he reduced the liability for income tax of the seriously wealthy; those with a taxable income in excess of £150,000 a year!   Quite apart from the flagrant injustice of penalising the poor and rewarding the rich, I find it incredible that any Chancellor of a country with a serious deficit problem should deliberately, and despite widespread protest, cut off a source of revenue. That the source consisted of very wealthy people who would barely notice the loss compounds the irresponsibility of the action.

             The Chancellor expects to be credited with ‘helping the poor’ when he raises the threshold of liability for income tax, thus ‘taking thousands of low-paid workers out of the income tax system altogether’. It isn’t only the poor who are helped.  Raising the tax liability threshold benefits all income tax payers, including the very wealthiest.  What’s more, being ‘taken out of the income tax system altogether’ automatically makes those affected into second class citizens, patronised by ‘we tax-payers who have to support a nation full of slackers and scroungers!

            Last week’s financial statement continued the tradition that the Chancellor and his colleagues have established.  Can they possibly really believe that the poor are to blame for their poverty and that that there is work in plenty available for those who genuinely seek it?  Extending to seven days the time that elapses before an unemployed person can sign on to claim job-seekers’ allowance suggests that they do.  Unemployed and penniless people and their families still need to eat, pay the rent, and buy other necessities during those seven days.  How else can those without savings do so without resorting to the ‘help’ of a loan-shark or one of those pay-day loans that are so deceptively easy to obtain and so very, very difficult to pay off.

            It isn’t likely that very many people will criticise the decision to deny the winter fuel allowance to elderly Brits. living in countries enjoying milder winters than those in the UK. It hadn’t even occurred to me that those who choose to live permanently overseas had been receiving it!  The countries affected are residents in European Union countries bordering on the Mediterranean, including France but excluding Italy.   At first glance that seems ridiculous. Surely winters in, for instance, Calais and Rouen must more closely resemble those in Britain than do winters in Naples or Palermo?

            Probably so – but the decision is made by a comparison between the average winter temperature in south-west England and the average winter temperature throughout the country concerned.   Italy’s average winter temperature is brought down by the permanently snow-capped Italian Alps and by the peaks of the Apennines extending down ‘the spine’ of Italy. I doubt if many, if any, ex-pats live among those peaks…………… but rules are rules!

            I really don’t understand why the Chancellor is so reluctant to use income tax to make winter fuel allowance and other benefits fairer, and yield revenue to narrow that deficit much more easily and painlessly than anything that he has done so far.  The state retirement pension is subject to income tax.  I can see no valid reason why all benefits (in fact, all sources of income) shouldn’t be similarly taxed.

            The only conclusion that I can reach is that the Chancellor’s political outlook, and that of his colleagues sees something morally wrong  in the idea that we should be taxed in accordance with our ability to pay.   A couple of pence in the pound on VAT or customs duty may lose a few votes, but it is tolerable because ‘the rich man in his castle’ and ‘the poor man at his gate’ pay exactly the same amount.  That clearly is the government’s idea of us ‘all being in this together’.

            A tax for rich and poor alike based proportionately on ability to pay?  Unthinkable – that’s the road to red revolution and the end of civilisation for ‘people like us’ (with a Rolls in the garage, a yacht in the marina, and a second home in Majorca).

            Mrs Thatcher must have had much the same idea when she replaced the rating system for the local financing of local government by the Poll Tax.   Rate demands had, admittedly very imperfectly, reflected the wealth or poverty of the householder.   The poll tax was the same for us all, the millionaire, the slum dweller and the rural cottager.  A late 14^th century version of the Poll Tax triggered the Peasants’ Revolt.  The late 20^th century version triggered revolt against Mrs Thatcher and her government and led to her eventual downfall at the hands of her own supporters. I think it unlikely that I shall still be around to see the eventual consequences in the 21^st century, of robbing the poor to make the wealthy even richer.

Clacton County High School

          My two sons were both pupils at Clacton County High School in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.  Both did very well there and I have always followed the progress of the school with a warm interest.

            I was very pleased therefore to read in the Clacton Gazette that the CCHS is in the top twenty percent of schools for raising pupils’ educational standards from admission at 11 to completing their GCSE examinations at 16.   Sue Williamson, chief executive of the Secondary School Admission Test education group, is reported as saying ‘Clacton County High School should be congratulated for their stunning performance in adding value to their students’ achievements.  It is one of the best schools in the country in outperforming expectations for their pupils and improving their future prospects.  There is plenty that other schools could learn from their success’.

            So far, so good.  It isn’t quite the whole story though.   On a back page of the same Gazette are to be found tables showing the percentage of pupils from each school and educational  establishment in Colchester and the Tendring District who went on to University or other Higher Education Institution.  These give a rather different picture.   Out of 110 school leavers from Clacton County High School 44 percent went on to Higher Education Institutions but only 6 percent went to the top third of these (that is, to a good university).  Not a single pupil from any school or other institution within the Tendring District gained admission to either Oxford or Cambridge Universities.  Things have been very different in the not-too-distant past.

  Peter Hall B.A.(Cantab) aged 21, on his graduation day. Selwyn College Chapel is in the background.  He was subsequently made an M.A.     

My elder son left Clacton County High School in 1970 at the age of 17, having sat and passed his ‘A’ level exams with outstanding results,. He had been  accepted by Selwyn College, Cambridge to begin his life there as an undergraduate from September 1971. He would then be just 18.  He spent his ‘gap year’ working in the store room of the Eastern Electricity Board HQ in Clacton, learning something of the ‘real world’ of work before he began his studies.  In 1971 he was one of  at least four CCHS sixth formers who became students at Cambridge University, all of whom graduated with honours.  Those four I knew about personally.  There may well have been others whom I didn’t know who started at either Oxford of Cambridge that same year.

       I don’t believe that young men and women of Clacton at the end of the 1960s were cleverer than those of the first decade of the 21^st century.  While it is possible that they were prepared to work and study harder (there certainly weren’t the distractions then that there are today) I think that their expectations and those of their teachers were higher, and that their teachers were more inspiring – and perhaps more skilled.

            Clacton County High School has proved itself brilliant at instilling a basic education into what may sometimes have been unpromising and perhaps resistant human material.  I believe though that the low percentage of pupils gaining admission to the best Universities – and none at all to Oxford and Cambridge – demonstrates that the school is failing its more gifted and hard-working pupils.   

           

   .

Week 31 2012

Tendring Topics.....on Line

The Mote in your neighbour’s eye…….

 A month or so ago, when the back-boiler in my kitchen that serves my hot water supply and central heating systems had its annual service, I had quite a shock.  I was told by the heating engineer that it had sprung a leak and needed to be replaced urgently.  My dismay was compounded by the fact that its manufacturer no longer makes back-boilers.   I would need to have a new modern boiler installed in quite a different position!

This, I thought, is going to be an expensive job – and so it proved to be.  It took two heating engineers two full days to remove the old boiler and complete the installation of the new one (and they really did give me two days service – taking only half an hour or so for lunch, and drinking while working the mid-morning and mid-afternoon coffee that I made them)  In addition, another operative was called in to arrange the new boiler’s ventilation by means of a pipe and fitting taken through the roof, and there were several hours work by an electrician who provided and tested the boiler’s electronic controls.  Then of course there was the cost of the boiler itself!

Yes, it was expensive.  Fortunately though I have an emergency fund saved for just such a crisis (though I wouldn’t want too many of them!) and I wrote out my cheque in payment without resentment at the cost of the work.  I had no doubt that I had received value for money.  Furthermore, the efficiency of the new boiler would complement my solar water heating system to reduce my energy bills still further.

What I did resent though was the £500 VAT charge that the Heating Engineering firm had to add to my bill and hand over to the government.   I never complain about my regular income tax payments because I appreciate the public services (depleted though they are nowadays!) that I receive for them, and because I realize that I am fortunate in having an income large enough to be liable for income tax.  I do object though to having to pay a considerable sum to the government for the privilege of carrying out the essential maintenance of my own home!    

I remember Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher explaining unctuously that the great thing about VAT (unlike income tax!) was that you could choose not to pay it.  That may well be the case for those considering the purchase of diamond ear-rings or designer ball-gowns, or having a new garage built to accommodate the second car.  There’s precious little choice though about mending a leaky roof, keeping a car that you need for work, on the road or – in my case – replacing a leaking boiler!

My resentment at VAT payments was reignited last week when Treasury Minister David Gauke complained about the way in which, so he claimed, tax liability was being regularly avoided by the payment  of small bills in cash. He claimed that jobbing builders, gardeners, domestic cleaners, window cleaners and the like would offer substantial discounts for cash in hand to avoid paying tax.  The resulting loss to the Treasury was comparable with the loss resulting from the tax avoidance by the wealthy that had recently been publicised.

Much of the news media seems to have assumed that David Gauke was referring to avoidance of VAT.  I find that difficult to believe.  Surely he must be aware that only quite large firms are required to be registered for VAT (the proprietor of the garage where I used to have my car serviced took some pride in the fact that he managed to keep his turnover below the level of liability) and I can’t believe that many, if any, jobbing gardeners, odd-job-men, window clearers and general cleaners need to be VAT registered.

What probably does happen is that these small self-employed entrepreneurs pocket unrecorded the fruits of their labours and neglect to declare them to the Inland Revenue. Probably quite a few of them would remain below the level of liability for income tax anyway! I’d be very surprised if many formally offer a discount for cash.  They simply agree to do a job at a lower rate than they would were they expecting part of their earnings to be skimmed off by the government.  They work on the principle that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and some of them may not even have a bank account. 

It isn’t all that long ago that all transactions of ‘working class’ people were carried out in cash or with postal orders.  As a lower ranking local government officer I was paid in cash (and paid all my bills in cash) until I came to Clacton in 1956 and opened an account with the Co-op Bank. 

It is probable that the government does lose a small amount of revenue through the unrecorded cash receipts of some of these self-employed workers.    I am quite sure though that it bears no comparison whatsoever with the tax avoidance of the super-wealthy and of Britain’s and the world’s giant corporations, though Mr Gauke and his well-heeled friends and colleagues may prefer to think otherwise.

I suggest that they take the advice in Chapter 7 of St. Matthew’s Gospel, which can be loosely paraphrased as,  ‘Don’t worry too much about the speck of dust in your neighbour’s eye until you have got rid of that enormous log obscuring your own vision!’

A Prophetic Email

The news that Britain had slipped even further into recession than had been forecast  (due, according to our Chancellor, to the weather, and to our all having taken our eyes off the ball, our shoulders away from the wheel and our noses from the grindstone for a whole working day to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee!), and David Cameron’s subsequent public affirmation that the government would not change its economic policy, reminded me of a prophetic email that I had received from a regular blog reader a month or so earlier.

I really feel that George Osborne’s and David Cameron’s financial strategy is now in ribbons, don’t you? The country’s debt burden is growing as tax receipts go down and benefit payments rise.  The Governor of the Bank of England seems to be convinced that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, so that’s it – the economy just carries on shrinking.  The really pathetic thing is that these two failed leaders have only one response to everything, which is to do more of the same; carry on with policies that have been shown to be counter productive.

The Bank of England is considering cutting interest rates further (to zero?)  This is like driving a car with one’s foot flat on the accelerator, and trying to push it through the floor to get some more power!  As for George Osborne; he’ll need to make more cuts to benefits and public services to pay for the cost of the cuts that he has already made!  Meanwhile David Cameron, the front man, will run a diversionary campaign, whipping up suspicion and hatred against groups of claimants, the old, the disabled, the unemployed, against public sector workers (despite the fact that they have cleared up the muddle in which the private sector had left security at the Olympics) and against our European neighbours and partners.

Cameron was right in one respect – about the problem of a ‘benefit culture’. .It takes some of the sting out of poverty and unemployment.  If the victims of the government’s policies were actually starving and their families were actually out on the streets, I have little doubt that we would see demos and riots that would make those in Egypt and Greece seem like Sunday-school picnics!  As it is I suspect that most of those affected didn’t even bother to vote in the last election, and probably won’t bother to vote in the next one either!

‘Which came first - The chicken or the egg?’

This ancient conundrum comes to my mind when I think of the government’s ineffectual efforts to solve our national economic problems.  To deal with youth unemployment they make every effort to make unemployed young people employable by learning new skills; and to find employment by learning how best to apply for a job and to behave at a job interview.  These skills are not much use while there is little demand for either new or old skills, and a score of applicants for every job that is available.

One reason for the shortage of jobs is that the banks, despite all the financial support they have been given are reluctant to lend money to entrepreneurs who would like to set up a new business or expand an existing one. The banks’ reluctance to lend is because they are by no means certain that the new or expanded businesses would attract enough customers to service and ultimately repay the loans.

The remedy is to make sure that the potential customers, the general public, have enough money for them to buy the services or manufactured products that those new or expanded enterprises would offer.  But the government’s austerity programme, coupled with a taxation system (VAT and customs duty increases and reduction of the highest rate of income tax) that penalises ‘ordinary’ people at the expense of the super-wealthy, has precisely the opposite effect.

Another blog reader (I really do read and appreciate readers' comments!) reminds me of my pie-in-the-sky dream of a UK government funded largely by a compulsory annual ‘citizenship membership subscription’ consisting of 20 percent of the gross annual income of every adult citizen from the very poorest to the most wealthy.  This could, at a stroke, be a means of redistributing our national income without impoverishing anybody, and would put money into the pockets of those who would spend it to revive our moribund economy.

One day that pie-in-the-sky may be seen as the only diet capable of restoring our nation to health.  The chances of my seeing that day dawn are pretty slim - but there's no harm in hoping!

Lord of the ‘Olympic’ Rings!

That, I think, certainly describes Danny Boyle, creator and director of the wonderful Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.  It was watched and appreciated world-wide.  Here is an email that I received early on the morning of Saturday 28^th July from a friend in Zittau, in what is to us the most remote part of Germany.

Dear Ernest,

Did you watch TV yesterday evening? Julia and I watched the opening performance of the Olympic Games in London. It was marvellous - congratulation!

Yours Volker and Julia

            My friend is a Cultural Senator of the Federal State of Saxony and is a Ph.D. whose specialism is European history.   His praise for what was a graphic portrayal of the transformation of the verdant England of tiny villages, green fields and rural pursuits of the 17^th and 18^th centuries to the chaotic and ugly (but productive) ‘dark satanic mills’ of the industrial revolution of the 19^th and 20^th  therefore carries some weight!  I thought that the idea of the symbolic forging of the Olympic rings as one of the positive results of that revolution was especially brilliant.  

So too, was the idea of visiting Buckingham Palace and involving the Queen (and her corgis!) at the very beginning of the celebration.  James Bond was, I suppose, an appropriate escort though he isn’t one of my favourite fictional characters. I’d have preferred Brother Cadfael or the first Chief Inspector Barnaby, and think that the Queen would have found either of them a more congenial temporary companion. The helicopter ride and parachute drop would surely have tested Brother Cadfael’s faith to the utmost, though to Inspector Barnaby it would no doubt have been just another of those last-minute calls of duty that constantly prevent him from spending a quiet evening at home with his family.

Other highlights of the evening for me were the splendid celebration of the NHS, one of the achievements of the immediate post-war years that hasn’t – yet – been totally destroyed by the forces of Mammon, and that wonderful soprano solo voice singing Blake’s Jerusalem.  At first I feared that we were to hear only the first verse of that magnificent poem but later – at an appropriate moment – we had the other verse:

Bring me my bow of burning gold.

Bring me my arrows of desire.

Bring me my sword, O clouds unfold,

Bring me my chariot of fire!

I shall not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

Till I have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant land.

It is a wake-up call that the disheartened, disillusioned and dispirited Britain of today badly needs.

  

  

Week 9 2012 1.3.2012

Tendring Topics........on Line


The Cost of Weddings ………

            One of the biggest changes in public attitudes that have taken place during my lifetime is that relating to love and marriage.  In my childhood and youth the idea of an unmarried couple living together as man and wife evoked shock and horror.  It was ‘living in sin’.  The woman in such a liaison was regarded as ‘fallen’, any children were ‘illegitimate,’ a designation that could prove to be a lifelong disadvantage. As late at the early 1950s a popular song announced that, ‘Love and marriage, love and marriage, They go together like a horse and carriage.  You can’t have one without the other’.  Well, that was certainly what I - and many thousands like me – took for granted.

            How different things are in the twenty-first century.   It is considered perfectly normal – even wise – for a young couple to live together, and perhaps have one or two children before getting married or, in many cases, deciding not to marry at all.   Sometimes they’ll say that they are ‘saving up to get married’ by which they usually mean saving up to be able to afford the kind of lavish wedding reception and honeymoon that will be the envy of their friends, neighbours and work colleagues.

            Recently I was quite shocked to discover that many couples may have to ‘save up’ to pay for the actual ceremony. It was something with which I had never been involved.  Traditionally it is the bride’s parents who pay for the wedding, though that too seems to have changed nowadays. Heather and I were married in the Methodist Church of which she was a member with a (teetotal!) wedding reception in the church hall.  One of my sons was married in a Roman Catholic Church and the other in a Registry Office.  Obviously there was a charge for the Registry Office but it didn’t even occur to me that there would be a charge for the actual wedding in a church – except for the services of the organist and, if there was one, the choir.  I thought it was just ‘a service’ like any other service at which the priest or minister officiated.  I have also been peripherally involved in several Quaker weddings – and for them there is definitely no charge.

            I now learn that there has been a charge of £262 for a Church of England wedding and that this has recently been raised to £400.  That is quite a lot of money to a great many people today; quite enough to make an impecunious young couple who had been thinking of ‘tying the knot’ think again.  They may be facing a lot of other expenses including furnishing a home!

            I would never have expected the Church to deter couples from the sacrament of marriage and am not surprised at the fact that at least some members of the clergy are rebelling against this latest charge.  One such is Fr. Richard Tilbrook of St Barnabas’ Church, Colchester.  He intends to stick to the former fee of £262.   He is reported as saying, ‘In this economic climate in poor parishes this is a huge increase which is not acceptable.  We work very hard to encourage people to come to church and to get married in church and I worry that this will turn people away.          Fr. Richard has the support of Colchester’s recently knighted MP Sir Bob Russell who has promised to raise the matter in parliament.

…….and of Funerals

            Charges for Church of England funerals have also been increased to £160, not quite so much, but quite enough to add worry to a great many hard up new widows and widowers faced with the other inevitable funeral costs.

            Oddly enough, I have had some direct experience here.   It must have been about twelve years ago that an occasional attender at our Clacton Quaker Meeting who, like me, had been a POW in Germany during Word War II, asked me if I would officiate at his funeral service when the time came.  No – he didn’t want a Quaker funeral, but he would like me to take it.  I didn’t feel that it was the kind of request that I could refuse, though I didn’t take my promise all that seriously.  There was no certainty that he would predecease me – and in any case, it would be his relatives who would decide on the form that the funeral would take.

            However, eighteen months later I had a phone call from a local funeral director. He had died and his desire that I should officiate at the funeral had been included in the will.  I was given the name and address of his son and daughter-in-law, and I went to see them.  Yes, they would like me to officiate at the cremation.  No, they didn’t want a Quaker funeral.  They didn’t want long Quaker silences.  No, none of the relatives wanted to speak at the funeral, though they were happy enough to tell me all about the deceased. No, they didn’t want any hymns.   

            A crematorium funeral service lasts only 20 minutes but that can seem quite a long while when it has to be filled with talk and prayer!  I managed it, including a reading of the 23^rd Psalm and Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar, in which the poet compares dying with passing through the turbulent water at a harbour’s outlet. I pressed the button that brings curtains round the bier as I asked for a blessing on us all at the end of the service.  My ordeal was over and the relatives were pleased.

            They were even more pleased when I waived the £80 that the Funeral Director told me was ‘the usual fee’.  £80 for twenty minutes work, perhaps an hour and a half in all if my preparation was taken into consideration!   Still pretty good payment – but I wouldn’t have accepted any payment.  Quite apart from the fact that to do so would have been considered unquakerly, I felt that I had simply been fulfilling a promise made to a former comrade; a straightforward not-all-that-difficult task dictated by friendship.

            If the ceremony had taken place in a church that had to be maintained, kept clean at all times, and warm when required, it would, I suppose, have been reasonable to make a small charge for the use of the premises, but £160? – hardly.  Once again Fr Richard Tillbrook of Colchester’s St Barnabas’ Church is sticking to the old fee of £105 for a funeral – and I think that he is right.

             Unjustifiable charges play into the hands of the National Secular Society and others who would like to separate religion from every aspect of what they regard as ‘real life’.

 Some thoughts on Taxation

          Did you notice the story last week about Civil Servants whose salary was being paid into a limited company to reduce their tax liability?  There was a tremendous fuss about whether or not they really were civil servants – or were they just contractors to the civil service. 

            Whether or not they were civil servants is surely beside the point.  What was to the point was that due to a loop-hole (one of many I fear) in the law, the Inland Revenue was deprived of tax to which it would otherwise have been entitled and which the rest of us will now have to pay.  The exact employment status of those concerned should not have mattered in the least.

            It is tax loop-holes of this kind that the government needs to seek out and close with at least the same vigour and enthusiasm that it seeks out Benefit Scroungers,  if it is to persuade even the most gullible that ‘we’re all in this together’.

            Then there was the promise last week by the opposition  that, if they were elected, they would take those with the lowest incomes out of the income tax system altogether because it had been found that extra money in the pockets of those with the lowest incomes tends to be spent, thereby helping Britain’s economic recovery.  Extra money in the pockets of better off people tends to be saved – however wise that may be personally it isn’t going to speed national recovery.

            I understand that argument but, though raising the level of income tax liability would certainly be to my advantage, I don’t think that it is the right way to achieve that objective.  I believe that we need to reverse the transfer of direct taxation (income tax, death duties, national insurance and so on) to indirect taxation such as VAT and customs duties on alcohol, petrol and diesel fuel.  This was initiated during the governments (I nearly said the reign!) of Mrs Thatcher and continued enthusiastically during those of Tony Blair.

            VAT is paid by rich and poor alike (‘we are all in this together’) but it is a much larger proportion of the total income of the poor.  Its imposition and removal therefore affects the poor more than the rich.   Reducing the cost of goods by cutting VAT would make it possible for the poor to buy goods that would otherwise have been beyond their reach – and help economic recovery.

            I have personally had an example of that during the past few weeks.  I have recently self-published part of my autobiography as a 65 x A5 page booklet entitled ‘Zittau….and I’, relating to my association with that small German town both during World War II and more recently.  I had 250 copies printed to give to friends, family and anyone who may be interested.  Printing work of this kind is not subject to VAT – so I was able, within my means, to have the work done and thus help keep the printing firm functioning.  Had the work been subject to VAT I couldn’t have afforded it, and probably many of the firm’s other customers wouldn’t have been able to either.

            As for income tax – well, it is the one tax that could be levied on all of us according to our ability to pay it.  Properly graded, so that we all paid a similar proportion of our incomes, it could make sure that we really were all in this together.

           

I believe that even the poorest should pay a small amount in income tax.  They too could then claim to be tax payers and free themselves of the jibe that others have to pay for public services that they enjoy.  Those – like me – who are a little better off should pay a larger amount but the same proportion of our income in taxation and so on, with the very wealthy paying a much larger amount, but the same proportion of their incomes.  It seems blindingly obvious to me that that is the path towards fairness and the creation of a true Common Wealth.

            I should add that I don’t think that there is the least possibility of the present, or any currently-possible alternative government, pursuing that path in the foreseeable future!

Provoking ‘The Wrath of God’

          It is becoming more and more certain that NATO’s adventure in Afghanistan will end in the same way as the two British incursions into that country in the 19^th century and the Soviet one in the 20^th century - in humiliating departure.  I have little doubt that within months of the final withdrawal of our forces, Afghanistan will be ruled by an extreme Islamist clique, its schools (except of course those indoctrinating boys in the most extreme Muslim traditions) will be closed and its women and girls again reduced to the status of ‘goods and chattels’. There will have been a massacre of those Afghans who co-operated with the ‘Western Infidels’ and were foolish enough to imagine that we would protect them.

            This opinion has been reinforced by recent events.  A population that supported, or meekly endured without protest, the outrages of the Taliban was raised to hysterical fury by the accidental burning of some copies of the Koran by American troops.  There have been days of frenzied rioting and hate-demonstrations against NATO and ‘western values’ generally, culminating in the murder of top American Army Officers in what should have been the most secure compound in the most secure city in Afghanistan.  The murders are believed to have been committed by interpreters or other Afghans trusted as being ‘on our side’.  We may succeed in training Afghans in the use of modern weapons and in the skills of modern warfare – but we can’t dictate against whom those skills and weapons will be used!

            How extraordinary that all the violence and killing has been done in the name of God.  The God in whom I believe knows very well that books, however significant and sacred may be the words that they contain, are made by human hands and, when destroyed, can easily be replaced with identical copies.  Every single one of our fellow humans, on the other hand, is (as our Quaker Advices and Queries assert) unique and a child of God, created by God in his own image and irreplaceable.  My God, learning that sacred books dedicated to his worship and service had been destroyed, would metaphorically shrug his shoulders and say, ‘My servants will make many more to replace them’.  I believe though that nothing would be more likely to arouse his anger than learning that someone had killed even a single fellow human, one of his children, and had claimed to have done so in his name