Week 36 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

SURELY NOT AGAIN!

Britain’s involvement with the Islamic Middle East and North Africa

          For more than two centuries the United Kingdom has again and again been involved in armed conflict in North Africa and the Middle East. Empire building during the 19^th century we twice tried, and failed, to occupy and subdue Afghanistan by force.  In that same century we were involved with Egypt and the Sudan as well as with southern Africa.  During World War I, since Turkey was an ally of Germany, we were involved with the whole of the Near and Middle East from the Balkans and Egypt to what was then called Mesopotamia (now Iraq).  Conflict during World War II involved both the whole of the Middle East and the whole of North Africa.  During that war I was a gunner in the Royal Artillery and was in action in the frontier area of Egypt and Libya throughout the winter, spring and early summer of 1941 and 1942.  My active military career came to an abrupt end when Tobruk in Libya fell to Rommel’s Afrikakorps on 21^st June 1942!

            In recent years the pace has accelerated.   To our shame the UK and the USA supported the ‘gallant Afghan Mojihadin’ in their armed resistance to Soviet occupation in the 1980s – thereby financing, training and encouraging the ‘terrorist extremists’, still killing ‘our boys’ in Afghanistan who for the past ten years have been engaged in a mission similar to that of the Soviets in an earlier decade.   All British and other NATO troops are to be withdrawn in the near future.  My guess is that, after an initial blood-bath of Afghans who are considered to have helped the NATO forces, within a year Afghanistan will be as it was before either the Soviet or the NATO interventions.

The Gulf Wars and Iraq’s ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’

            In the meantime the UK has been involved in two Iraq or ‘Gulf’ wars.  We became a combatant in the second bloodier one as a result of false claims that the Iraqi government had been somehow involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack, and that they possessed concealed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ threatening the peace of the region and of the whole world.  What nonsense!  And I believe that those who deceived Parliament and much of the Press into supporting the invasion of Iraq were well aware that both claims were nonsense!   On the eve of the invasion millions of Brits protested – in vain!  I am proud of the fact that both my sons and daughters in law, and my grandchildren (by then, children no more!) were among the protesters.

            Could it be said that the end has justified the means?  Our invasion gained hundreds of recruits for El Qaeda, who had been responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attack and who had hardly had a foothold in Iraq prior to our action there! Nowadays scarcely a week goes by without news of a terrorist bomb attack by one or other of the country’s warring factions killing scores of innocent Iraqi civilians.  The Iraqi Christian community, once an influential and tolerated minority, has been subject to constant attacks by Islamist zealots.  Those of them who can get out of the country have done so.   It would surprise me if today there are not thousands of Iraqis who look back on the rule of Saddam Hussein as a golden age!   There’s certainly no sign of any benefit that might have arisen from that ill-considered and illegal invasion.

‘The Arab Spring’ – in Libya and Egypt

            Next came Libya.  Our involvement started innocently enough with the enforcement of a ‘no fly zone’ to prevent Colonel Gaddafi’s forces from bombing innocent civilians.   Soon we were offering every kind of help short of of troops on the ground, to the rebels. Any bombing of innocent civilians was being done by us! The government forces were defeated and Colonel Gaddafi murdered.  At least that prevented him from telling the world at his trial all about Tony Blair and the other dear friends in ‘the west’ who had supported him while it had suited them to do so!

It is now over a year since Gaddafi was overthrown and the elected government hasn’t yet managed to rule and control the country effectively.  Corruption is rife.  Benghazi, where the rebellion against Gaddafi began, is said to be ruled by armed militia and militant Islamists.  Cemeteries of our dead from World War II have been vandalised and desecrated, and Libya isn’t considered to be a safe destination for British travellers.  It is hardly the outcome for which Cameron, Haig and Co did battle from their comfortable Whitehall armchairs!

Then there’s Egypt.   There, many people in Britain who wished the Egyptians well had high hopes.   A bloodless revolution of ordinary people overthrew an unpopular autocratic President and democratic elections were held. The new elected President represented the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest single political party but by no means representative of the majority of the Egyptian people.  A great many Egyptians  (in particular Egypt’s Coptic Christians, long established - longer than Islam in fact - and ten percent of the total population) feared the outcome.

They did so with good reason. Just like Hitler (who also was democratically elected in the first instance) Morsi, the new President, began to appoint members of his own party, the Muslim Brotherhood, into positions of power and influence and to transform Egypt from a tolerant liberal multi-faith democracy into an Islamic State, introducing the Muslim Brotherhood’s version of Sharia law.  Attacks on Christian Churches and individuals increased, though the British Church Times records that other Muslims, not members or supporters of the Brotherhood, attempted to defend their Christian neighbours against these attacks.

This was emphatically not what those tens of thousands of Egyptians who had toppled the Mubarak regime had wanted.  They gathered once again in their thousands to protest at the democratically elected President whom they believed was abusing his position of power.  At the same time there were mass demonstrations supporting President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.  The Egyptian Army came down on the side of those opposing a Muslim Brotherhood takeover.  They arrested President Morsi and created a new interim Government.  Demonstration sit-downs by thousands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters threatened to bring life in Cairo to a stand-still..  The army claims, probably truthfully, that they tried to persuade the demonstrators to disperse peacefully – and failed.  They then resorted to what armies are best at – the use of force! They opened fire on the demonstrators, killing or wounding hundreds of them.  The demonstrators were dispersed.  They had achieved their objectives though.  Scores – perhaps hundreds – of innocent victims were proclaimed to be ‘martyrs’. The Muslim Brotherhood gained the sympathy and verbal support of the Western World.

And that’s where the situation remains today. I can’t see any solution.  I am sure that supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood will refuse to accept the result of any new election producing a non-Brotherhood President, and they are sufficiently numerous and resolute to sabotage any attempt to liberalise Egypt into a freedom-loving parliamentary democracy.  Fortunately there has so far been no suggestion that the UK, the USA, or NATO should intervene in this conflict.

SYRIA

I am delighted that Britain will not now be joining the USA and France in bringing even more death and destruction to unhappy Syria in the guise of ‘punishing a war crime’.   Thursday 29^th August 2013 will surely go into the history books as the day when, through their elected MPs in the House of Commons, the British public made it clear that the UK had meddled militarily in Middle East politics long enough.  Since the beginning of the armed rebellion against the Syrian government our government has been giving moral and practical support to the rebels, despite the fact that among them are committed terrorists including members of El Qaeda. Would the revelation, on our tv screens, of a particularly horrifying incident in which scores of civilians – men, women and little children - had died in agony as a result of what appeared to be a ‘chemical weapons attack’ provide justification for British military intervention together with the USA and France?.

The Prime Minister recalled MPs from their summer holidays to consider the issue. At first he had hoped to get, on 29^th August, approval from parliament for immediate military action.  That was modified so as to delay a final decision until after the report of the United Nations’ Inspectors, currently investigating the incident, had been received.  Our Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary were quite sure that a chemical attack had taken place and that the Assad government was responsible.  Many others were far less certain.  Yet others believed that, even if all the allegations were true, our military intervention would be more likely to add to the toll of slaughtered innocent civilians than to stop the killing.

Was the Syrian government responsible for that particular atrocity?  I don’t know.  It is difficult to believe though that, at the precise moment when UN weapons inspectors had arrived in Damascus to investigate alleged chemical attacks, the Syrian Government would launch a very conspicuous and well-publicised attack of the very kind the inspectors were investigating.  As George Galloway, Respect MP, said at the debate – President Assad may be bad but he’s surely not mad! Even if the Syrian government was wicked enough to launch such an attack upon civilians, can they possibly have been so stupid as to provoke the righteous anger of the whole world without gaining any discernible military advantage?

 Certainly it is the rebels who have benefited from the attack.  It seems probable that the USA and France – even without the UK – will launch punishing blows on their enemies, possibly altering the course of the war and bringing defeat on the Syrian government..  It has been said that it couldn’t possibly have been the rebels who used the lethal substances because they don’t possess the capability of manufacturing or buying them and, in any case, they would surely not use them against civilians who may have been their supporters.

Perhaps they couldn’t have bought or manufactured those materials themselves, but they undoubtedly have powerful and wealthy friends and allies (Saudi Arabia for instance and other of the Gulf States) who could have obtained them and smuggled them into Syria.  I don’t think they’d have been deterred by the thought of causing a few score – or even a few hundred – civilian deaths.  They would be just collateral damage on the way to final victory – and in any case, they’d all be martyrs and, as such, assured of a place in Heaven.

Much has been made of the claim that prior to the latest most serious attack there had been 14 other incidents in which chemical weapons had been used by government forces.  Did those alleged incidents occur before or after President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron had publicly declared that the use of chemical weapons would change their whole attitude towards the conflict?   If after then the rebels are clearly suspect.

  In the end the debate back-fired spectacularly onto the government. Parliament didn’t decide to postpone a final decision until the weapons inspectors had made their report.  They made a decision there and then that they didn’t want military action – and the Prime Minister, however reluctantly, has accepted that decision.

Will the UKs decision not to join with the USA in a punitive action against the Syrian government reduce Britain’s status in the world and harm the ‘special relationship’.  It is surely more important to do what is right – and refrain from doing what is clearly wrong, than to gain international popularity. As for the ‘special relationship’ it has always surely been understood that the USA and the UK do not necessarily always have identical objectives and priorities.

 Despite the ‘special relationship’ Britain did not join with the USA in its campaign in Vietnam.  In Harold Wilson we had a Prime Minister with sufficient strength of character to refuse Britain’s support for what proved to be a disastrous American adventure. Neither did the USA support Britain in the Falklands.  In October 1983 (almost exactly twenty years ago) the USA led an unprovoked invasion of the Caribbean island state of Grenada to unseat an elected socialist government that was in danger of setting a good/bad (delete as preferred) example to its south and central American neighbours.  The USA President (Ronald Regan) didn’t even bother to notify Grenada’s Head of State of his intention to invade that island and enforce a ‘regime change’. Grenada was part of the British Commonwealth and its Head of State was our Queen, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.  Mrs Thatcher was her Prime Minister.  She seems to have been more of a ’tinfoil’ than an ‘iron lady’ on that occasion!

Since those incidents don’t appear to have damaged transatlantic friendship I  don’t see why our present disinclination to join with the USA in its ‘punishment’ of the Syrian Government should do so.

  

           

           

 

Week 25 2012 21.6.2012

Tendring Topics......on Line

 'Just good Friends!'

The Leveson enquiry rumbles on.   On Tuesday evening (12^th June), as I write this, we have just heard the report of Sir John Major’s appearance at the enquiry.  His evidence had the ring of truth and sincerity about it.  He recorded relevant events (and the result of offending the ruler of the Murdoch Empire) as he recalled them, without hesitation or prevarication.  He told us that for days after incurring the Murdoch displeasure, he had read in the press every day, things that he had not done and things that he had never said

            Let me now write a word or two in defence of Rupert Murdoch!   His statement, under oath, that he had never asked any Prime Minister to do anything, is said to have been contradicted by Sir John’s statement that he had wanted the government to change its policy toward Europe.  The two statements are surely not contradictory.  Mr Murdoch didn’t ask the Prime Minister to change his attitude towards Europe – he simply told him that unless the government changed its policy, the newspapers under his control would switch their support from his party to their opponents. The government didn’t change its policy – and the support of the Murdoch press did change from Conservative to New Labour.  Mr Murdoch keeps his promises. 

            No-one seems to have commented on the impertinence of a foreign media tycoon attempting to persuade a British Prime Minister to change British foreign policy. Imagine the outrage there would have been in Mr Murdoch’s flagship newspaper the Sun if such an attempt had been made by a Russian oligarch or an oil-rich Middle Eastern Sheikh rather than an American multimillionaire! 

            Everybody concerned goes to great lengths to deny that there had been any sort of conspiracy or agreement to grant favours to the Murdoch Empire in exchange for press support.  I don’t suppose for a moment that there has been.  All that happened was that Rupert Murdoch, his family and his senior managers went out of their way to make friends with our Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer and other leading members of the government.  It helped, of course, that Mrs Rebekah Brooks News Corporation’s Chief Executive and her husband, were actually neighbours of the Prime Minister.  He and his wife, together with other top politicians, were invited to a Christmas Party and to other social events. The Prime Minister was encouraged to practise his equestrian skills on Mrs Brooks’ horse – which turned out to be ‘on loan’ from the Metropolitan Police!  The Prime Minister and members of the Murdoch inner circle became good friends. That was all there was to it.  But, of course, one of the characteristics of good friends is the way in which (without having to be asked) they help each other in every way that they can. I don't imagine that media millionaires and top politicians have much difficulty in finding ways of demonstrating their loyal friendship.   ‘If you sup with the devil you need a long spoon’, says the proverb.  At neither 10, nor 11 Downing Street, nor at Chequers were any of the spoons nearly long enough!

14.6.12  The evidence given today by David Cameron to the Leveson Enquiry confirms the accuracy of my conjectures above – except that the friendship between the PM and Mrs Brooks was rather closer than I had imagined.

 What goes around, comes around

          It isn’t very often that I find myself in complete agreement with a pronouncement of a member of the government.   Whether, had I been a teacher and facing yet another change of official policy, I’d have felt exactly the same is doubtful.  However, as I am just a more-or-less disinterested by-stander I warm to the idea that children in primary schools should be taught more things ‘by rote’ and that teachers should pay more attention to grammar and spelling.  That’s how it was done in my day!

A class of 8/9 year olds in 1930 at the Ipswich primary school where I learned ‘my tables’. I am the anxious little boy with glasses at the headmaster’s right knee.

           

Arithmetic, the foundation stone of Mathematics, was never my best or favourite subject at school.  Yet to this day if someone says to me ‘what’s seven times eight’ or ‘nine times six?’ the answers (56 and 54 respectively) come unbidden to my tongue.  This facility comes from my chanting, over and over again, with a whole class of some 40 eight year olds, the ‘times tables’. It is an ability that has been useful on occasion. Even more importantly, chanting those tables provided a learning discipline – the realisation that before learning can become enjoyable, there is hard and boring work to be done in establishing its foundation.

            Similarly History (to choose a subject at which I was good and in which I am still interested) is often said to have been ‘in the bad old days’ (my schooldays!) just a case of learning by rote a list of dates and notable events.  There was a lot more to it than that.  The fact remains though that until you have at least a rough idea of the sequence of events in British and world history you can’t hope to see the way in which, over the centuries, one event has led to the next.  Unless you know that the Roman invaders, about 2,000 years ago were followed by the Anglo Saxons and the Vikings and, about 1,000 years ago, by the Normans, followed by the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance; the Protestant Reformation, Thomas Cranmer, Shakespeare, Milton, Christopher Wren, and Isaac Newton   (Oh yes and, really much less importantly, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Cromwell and so on) you’ll never understand how today’s political and economic world evolved – and is still evolving.  Once you have acquired – by rote, by constant repetition and by boring hard work – that skeleton of events, you can start putting the flesh on it and begin to enjoy reading history.

            Being encouraged to learn poetry ‘by heart’ (rather than by rote!) in my primary school years, gave me the ability to store in my head a very considerable collection of poetry, ranging from extracts from the King James Bible,  through some of of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the work of the great poets of the 18^th and 19^th Centuries, and more recent ones like Houseman, Belloc, Kipling and Betjeman, to modern less-than-prim-and-proper limericks.  This mental anthology has been a source of immense pleasure and satisfaction to me in the past and (though I may nowadays forget what happened yesterday – or an hour ago!) it remains in my memory and continues to give me pleasure and satisfaction today.

            I remember being told at school that although we had special English classes, every lesson was in fact an English lesson.  No matter how thoroughly a pupil may have mastered, for instance, a Chemical, Physical or Biological principle, that knowledge is incomplete unless it is accompanied by the ability to pass it on to someone else in clear and lucid English.  That means in grammatically correct and correctly spelled English prose, and legible handwriting.  In those days, that was what teachers and examiners demanded, not because they were fussy and pedantic, but because in later life it would be what other people including employers, would expect

       
           One proposed alteration to the curriculum that is definitely an improvement on that of my childhood and youth is compulsory introduction to a foreign language at primary school. I had no acquaintance whatsoever with a foreign language until I was introduced to French at the age of ten at my secondary school.  That, I think, was much too late.  I was taught French for six years and still only managed to scrape a ‘pass’ mark in the school leaving exam.  Where a school is really determined that its pupils will emerge from their education with a thorough command of a language (Welsh in all schools in the Principality and Hebrew in Jewish schools for instance) that language is taught from ‘infants’ level.  

            I wish the Education Secretary success with his proposed reforms.  It remains to be seen whether or not he’ll be able to introduce them without the firm discipline that was enforced in schools in my day*, and the then taken-for-granted co-operation and compliance of most parents.

*Take another look at that picture from my childhood. It’s clear that, especially in the presence of the headmaster, not one of us dared to step an inch out of line!

A timely reminder

            A timely reminder that it isn’t only the present Prime Minister and top members of the Conservative Party who stand accused of inappropriate fraternisation with Rupert Murdoch and his entourage, has come with the publication of an autobiographical record based on the diaries of Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s chief spin-doctor. This reveals the closeness of Tony Blair to Rupert Murdoch, ruler of News International, the international news media empire. 

            Mr Campbell reveals that in the week prior to Britain’s declaration of support for the American-led invasion of Iraq Rupert Murdoch phoned Tony Blair on three occasions to urge him to declare his support without delay.   How extraordinary that an American multimillionaire and newspaper tycoon, owing no loyalty whatsoever to our Queen and Country, should have immediate access to a British Prime Minister in order to exert influence on a matter of foreign policy!   This was the Prime Minister who allowed parliament to be deceived about Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’* and about the presence and influence of Al Qaeda in that country; the same Prime Minister who ignored the million British citizens who marched through London registering their strong opposition to the invasion of Iraq and the further millions who supported them

Perhaps we need an enquiry into the behaviour of top politicians quite as much as we needed an enquiry into the behaviour of the press!

*It should be noted that Alistair Campbell, whose autobiographical publication has revealed these phone calls, was himself complicit in the compilation of the ‘Dodgy Dossier’ on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction  that contributed to the deception of parliament and of many members of the public.

Those WMDs!

            Writing the above reminded me that it was several days – perhaps several weeks – before Iraq was invaded that I realized it was most unlikely that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction (even ‘battlefield’ ones) at his disposal, and equally unlikely that Tony Blair and George Bush were unaware of this.

            I am not a great admirer of either of those gentlemen. I can’t believe though that they were so stupid or so irresponsible as to order the inevitably rather slow build-up of invasion forces in Kuwait just across Iraq’s border, if they had thought there was the slightest possibility of their being destroyed when, just before the invasion was launched, Saddam Hussein ‘pressed the button’ and unleashed his Weapons of Mass Destruction upon them.

            It really didn’t take either ‘rocket science’ or secret sources of information to work that out!

           

                               

Week 52.09

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Happy Christmas!

I hope that everyone (anyone!) who reads this blog will have a very Happy Christmas and that their New Year will be one of peace and hope. It will not be a very happy one for many people – for the bereaved and lonely for instance (and the kindness and sympathy of friends and relatives may only make that bereavement and loneliness seem even harder to bear!), those rendered homeless or jobless by the recession, and those who know that for any other reason, this Christmas will be a pale shadow of Christmases past.

Those who wish to denigrate the Christian message often point out that the birth of Jesus, if it occurred at all, almost certainly didn’t take place ‘in the bleak midwinter’ and that our Christmas festival is simply an adaptation of much more ancient pagan festivals, Yule for instance in northern Europe and Saturnalia within the Roman Empire.

I have always felt that that supports, rather than impedes, the Christian message. No one knows exactly when in the year Jesus Christ was born. What could be more appropriate though, than to celebrate the advent of the Light of the World just a few days after the shortest day and longest night………when pagans were celebrating the very first indications that the world’s plunge into darkness had halted? The sun was once again returning to restore life and light to all creation. C.S.Lewis, author of the Narnia books, and great Christian scholar, always maintained that God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ was the fulfilment of the pagan religions of Europe as well as that of the people of Israel.

The Nativity story, even if not all historical fact, surely tells us a great deal about the God revealed in Jesus Christ. He was born to a working-class girl whose home was in one of the few places in the Holy Land that don’t even get a mention in the Old Testament. By many of his contemporaries his parentage would have been considered dubious. At the time of his birth his parents were temporarily homeless, taking shelter in a ‘lowly cattle shed’, with a manger having to serve as a cradle for the baby.

The first people to be told of his birth were neither wealthy and powerful nor wise and pious. They were neither princes nor priests, neither prophets nor scholars, but farm labourers looking after sheep on a hillside. The first people to bring him gifts were not even his own compatriots but Gentiles who would have been considered to be among the ‘heathen’ by his fellow-countrymen.

Finally, very shortly after his birth, his parents had to flee with him for their lives, to become asylum seekers in a heathen foreign land. Christ’s Nativity and its aftermath is a theme that resonates throughout the history of mankind, today no less than at any time in the past! If part of it is mythical it surely is a magnificent myth, unequalled I believe, in any other culture.

One of the late Sir John Betjeman’s lesser-known poems is Advent 1955. It discusses the way in which we celebrate Christmas, comparing greetings and presents given with those received, and possibly mentally pricing both.

It concludes with the following lines:

The time draws near the birth of Christ,
A present that can not be priced,
Given two thousand years ago.
And if God had not given so,
He still would be a distant stranger
And not the Baby in the Manger.

The God revealed to us through Christ’s nativity, life, death and resurrection is not ‘a distant stranger’. He is to be seen in the loving mother, the baby in the cot, the workman at his lathe, tending his sheep or, nowadays, bending over his lap-top, the suffering victim on the cross and in the modern ‘interrogation cell’…….and in the risen Christ triumphant over evil and over death.

Iraq – Before and After

It may seem inappropriate, even sacrilegious, to consider those under scrutiny in connection with the Public Enquiry into the War in Iraq at the same time as our celebration of Christ’s incarnation. However our God is one, ‘to whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid’ and one of the titles of the Risen Christ is ‘Prince of Peace’.

Possibly to pre-empt the questioning to which he will undoubtedly be subjected at the Public Enquiry in the New Year, Tony Blair who, as Prime Minister, led us into that war, has been talking to national tv about his motivation. This, it appears, was not the threat posed to Britain by Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as we may have imagined, but the need for ‘regime change’. Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator and, even had he known that there were no WMDs, our Prime Minister would have found some other justification for invasion!

That, I must say, is very frank. Just think. There was no need for that ‘dodgy dossier’ that was said to establish, beyond a shadow of doubt, the existence of these terrible weapons. There was no need for the ‘leaked intelligence’ that gave rise to scare headlines about ‘our boys in Cyprus’ being in danger from them. All Mr Blair had to do was to persuade the rest of us that getting rid of Saddam would amply justify the certain loss of scores of British and American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi ones, not to mention the laying waste of Iraq’s cities and destruction of its infrastructure.

Saddam Hussein was a cruel dictator, but was not the only such ruler in the Middle East. In some ways his government was an enlightened one. There was a substantial and influential Christian minority that worshipped regularly and in safety. Where are they and their churches now that Iraq has been ‘freed’? Where are they in the lands of our Middle Eastern allies? Women in Iraq under Saddam enjoyed a freedom and the ability to develop their potential that their counterparts in other Middle Eastern countries would (and often do!) die for.

Whatever Mr Blair may have known and kept to himself, he won that vote for war in the House of Commons for no other reason than that he had persuaded sufficient of its members that Saddam Hussein did possess terrible weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them. Without having done that he would have, and should have, lost the vote.

I believe moreover that Messrs Blair and Bush were fairly confident that there were no such weapons. Had they not been, they would surely never have allowed that relatively leisurely build-up of troops, weapons and war supplies just over the Iraq border in Kuwait. Saddam would only have had to wait until the build-up reached a critical point, and then destroyed the lot with his WMDs!

I am more than ever proud of the fact that my sons, grandsons, wives and girlfriends were all part of the million strong march that protested in vain against the war through the streets of London. I only wish that I had been physically capable of joining them!

The Christmas Crib

To get away, if only momentarily, from the rather grubby world of the 21st Century, here’s the Christmas crib at St. James Anglican Church Clacton-on-Sea, taken at Christmas time last year. Similar cribs will appear on Christmas Eve in tens of thousands of Christian churches world-wide, to remind worshippers that Christmas is not about illuminations, Christmas cards, over indulgence in food and drink, or even about Santa Claus. At its heart is the story of a temporarily homeless couple who found shelter in a ‘lowly cattle shed’ where a young mother gave birth to a baby who was the ‘Light of the World’.

‘And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth’
St. John 1.14

Week 49.09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

‘These Mechanical Beasts…..these Carbuncles…..these Monsters!’

These are the words of Tendring District Councillor Peter Halliday published on the readers’ letters page of the local Daily Gazette. The object of his wrath is, as you may have guessed, the five wind turbines that are to be built off St. John’s Road, between Clacton and St. Osyth. After a full public local enquiry in which the objectors had every opportunity to state their case Tendring Council’s decision to refuse this development was overturned by the government inspector.

Mr Halliday says that it became clear to him that this would be the outcome of the enquiry, ‘When the Environment Minister told the Labour Party Conference that local Conservative councils refusing such applications would see their decisions overturned by Government Inspectors’. I had realized it well before that. Regular readers of this blog may remember my comment, at the time, on the Council’s decision to refuse the development, against the advice of their own professional planners, for no reason other than that of well-orchestrated very local protests.
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I forecast with confidence that the developers would appeal, that there would be a full and expensive (for us council-tax payers) public enquiry, and that the Council’s refusal would be overturned. But there, I have probably had a rather longer experience of local government and of public enquiries than has Councillor Halliday.

The sole objection to the development was, as far as I know, the one plastered on all the objectors’ posters and banners ‘Too near to Homes!’ The Council’s Planning Officers, who were on the spot, and the Government’s inspector who visited the site, clearly thought otherwise.

There was no possible risk of physical danger from the turbines. Almost a mile away from homes, they would surely be inaudible. Unlike the hideous electricity pylons that stride across the English countryside, there has never been any suggestion that living in their proximity can endanger either child or adult health.

The sole objection was their appearance. They would obviously affect the view. The same objection could be made though wherever wind turbines are provided in a rural or semi-rural area ……..and if the turbines were to be sited anywhere but in such an area then they might truly be ‘too near to homes’.

Needless to say our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell, like Mr Halliday, is outraged by the inspector’s decision. He, together with two or three correspondents to the local press, is convinced that no climatic change is taking place or, if it is taking place, that it’s a natural phenomenon and nothing to do with human activity. It must be very comforting to watch on tv the human misery created by horrific floods in Cumbria, for the second time in just a few years and worse than anything ever experienced in the past, and to be able to say, ‘Ah well, very sad……but of course it’s an “Act of God”, nothing whatsoever to do with us and our activities!’

Iraq

The long-awaited public enquiry into the events preceding the war in Iraq, the conduct of that war, and its aftermath has only been hearing witnesses for two or three days. Already though, it has become clear that the reasons for our joining the USA in invading Iraq were far different from those we were told at the time.

The invasion took place in the aftermath of ‘nine eleven’ and it was claimed that Iraq was a sponsor of the kind of international terrorism that was responsible for that event. This claim, it has been revealed, was held by the United States’ Government but was never really believed in Britain.

‘Nine eleven’ had its genesis within the frontiers of Afghanistan and of ‘the west’s’ allies in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, rather than in either Iraq or Iran.

Then we were told that the Iraqi government possessed cunningly concealed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that posed a threat to the whole of the Middle East and to ourselves. The United Nations’ Weapons Inspectors had found no evidence of these before the allied invasion and none have been found since. It has now been revealed that there had never been any really convincing evidence that they existed.

It seems that the real motive of the Anglo-American Alliance had always been ‘regime change’ rather than either retribution for ‘nine eleven’ or the eradication of unspeakably terrible weaponry. Saddam Hussein was a cruel dictator whom ‘the west’ had failed to topple after the Kuwait War. This was the time to make a thorough job of it. It now seems that, even if this very dubious excuse for war were considered to be valid, conflict could still have been avoided. Our former Ambassador to the USA has told the enquiry that pressure on Iraq was prompting rebellion and that, very shortly, the regime would have collapsed from internal pressure. Tens of thousands of lives may have been destroyed for want of a little patience!

That same former ambassador also told the enquiry about the friendly meeting between our Prime Minister and the American President at the latter’s ranch in Texas. The two of them had a cosy chat from which everyone else was excluded. No one knows what was discussed or what agreements may have been reached. It had been noticeable though that from that moment the Prime Minister’s attitude towards Iraq hardened. He began to talk both about possible war and about regime change. He was singing from the George W. Bush hymn-sheet!

I have been surprised by the amount of deception and chicanery that has been openly revealed in just the first few days of the enquiry. Whatever, I wonder, can possibly be in the evidence that – the press tells us – the Prime Minister has insisted must be revealed to the enquiry only in secret!

Crisis at the Top

Can it, I wonder, possibly be true that Tendring Council’s top three officials (each of them said to be enjoying a salary of over £100,000 a year) are facing redundancy and that councillors are thinking of replacing them with a new, lower budget ‘management board’?

If so it is interesting to speculate on the deliberations that preceded that decision. It must surely have been made by a group of influential councillors meeting in what would once have been described as ‘a small smoke-filled room’. Contrary to popular belief it is quite possible to sack a top official. I have a fairly recent memory of a Clerk of the Council (the less-well-paid equivalent of a Chief Executive prior to local government reorganisation in 1974) of the former Clacton UDC resigning his post after having been strongly encouraged to do so. To make the three at the top redundant does seem a little unusual.

The difference between local government in my day (admittedly over thirty years ago!) and life at the town hall today, was brought home to me by the composition of the triumvirate that comprises a management board of Tendring Council’s top, and most highly paid, officials. They are the Chief Executive, the Deputy Chief Executive and the Assistant Chief Executive, each of them I have no doubt, an expert in cost-effective ‘administration’ and ‘the management of human resources’.

In ‘the bad old days’, The Town Clerk, or Clerk of the Council, was ‘the first among equals’ of a number of Council Chief Officers, each of whom managed his or her own department and reported regularly to a Committee concerned with that department’s sphere of work. There would be the Council’s Treasurer, the Engineer and Surveyor and the Medical Officer of Health. Larger authorities might have an independent Housing Manager and the Chief Sanitary Inspector (later Chief Public Health Inspector) would sometimes be regarded as a separate Chief Officer.

The idea that there should be a Deputy and an Assistant Town Clerk who outranked, and were on a higher salary scale, than those professional heads of departments, would have been received with incredulity and derision, as would the suggestion that there should be a Chief Officers’ ‘Management Board’. It is true that, after the reorganisation of 1974 there was a ‘management team’, consisting of heads of departments, who met regularly to discuss common interests. Heads of departments though made their own reports and recommendations to their committees and the committees discussed them and made their recommendations to the whole council.

The present system of ‘professional managers’, exercising authority over professional doctors, accountants, architects and surveyors, appears to be part of a package that included the abolition of the committee system and its replacement by one aping party political government in Westminster. We now have a powerful officers’ ‘management board’ making recommendations to ‘Portfolio holders’ (local cabinet ministers!) who make decisions that would previously have been the responsibility of committees. At intervals the full Council meets and members of the majority party are expected to support loyally policies decided by that small ‘Cabinet’ of portfolio holders.

It is a system that may make for greater speed and efficiency (though I haven’t seen much evidence of this in Tendring) but it is a negation of representative local democracy.

Some Modern Art

I am not a great enthusiast for all-things-modern. It has sometimes seemed to me that there is a late twentieth century/early twenty-first century enthusiasm for ugliness…..in art, in architecture, in music and in poetry. Not all my family are so unenlightened. My younger son Andy and his wife Marilyn are enthusiastic Friends of the National Gallery. They share my liking for much of the art of the past, but also appreciate the work of contemporary artists. Possibly in an attempt to educate me in the finer things of life, they have recently sent me photos of an example of the work of Anish Kapoor CBE, Royal Academician, whose work has been acclaimed and exhibited world-wide.

Above - Sculpture by Anish Kapoor displayed outide National Gallery.

Left - Detail from above

Well, it certainly isn’t ugly. It’s new and refreshing. It’s beautiful in fact. But still (put it down to my advanced age) it’s not really my cup of tea!