Blog date 32

Tendring Topics……..on line

‘Now is the hour…..

                          …….for me to say goodbye’

 

            Those were the opening words of a popular song of the wartime years when there were so many goodbyes, many of them for ever.   I am afraid, dear Blog readers, that time has come for what was my weekly blog.  Google informs me that I have been writing and publishing it for seven and a half years and that I have written and published 390 blogs in that time.   For the first three or four years I wrote an average of about 2,000 words per blog.  More recently I have reduced that to about 1,000.  I reckon that I averaged about 1,200 words a week for seven and a half years.  That’s 7.5 x 1,200 x 52.  No, I’m not going to work it out but it certainly comes to quite a lot of words.

            Also thanks to Google, I learn that my blog has a world-wide readership.  There are twice as many regular readers in the USA as there are in the UK.  I have regular readers in Germany, France and Russia, and occasional readers in virtually every European country and in such countries as China, India, Sri Lanka, and Japan.  Thank you all, dear readers, for your interest and encouragement.

            I used always to enjoy writing my blog and was proud of it. Lately though I feel that I have become stale and repetitive.  I find myself forgetting how to spell simple, straight-forward words.  I often have to refer to Google for facts that should be – and once were! – engraved in my memory.  It is, I think, just old age. Now that I am 94, it seems better to depart from the internet stage before I publish something that is obviously total rubbish.

            The causes that I have supported throughout those seven and a half years remain the same.  I can only hope that others will keep them alive.

Nuclear Disarmament

I believe in unilateral nuclear disarmament.  Our own nuclear arms are concentrated in the Trident Submarine Fleet wrongly described as ‘our independent nuclear deterrent’.   It is anything but independent (can you imagine our government even threatening to use a nuclear weapon without the OK of the USA?).  It hasn’t deterred any one of the many acts of violence and aggression that have taken place since the end o0f World War II.  Did those nuclear submarines deter the Argentines from invading the Falklands?

It might persuade other governments relying on nuclear defence to refrain from using their weapons because of the certainty of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD!)  It would not deter the jihadists of the Islamic State from using such a weapon if they ever got hold of one. They are quite certain that they’ll be assured a ‘front seat’ in Heaven if they kill themselves while precipitating a satisfactory number of infidels and apostates (every-one who doesn’t share their noxious beliefs) to the ‘other place’!

 A country relying on a nuclear weapon ‘as a deterrent’ has a government as stupid and as irresponsible as a fifteen year old adolescent who carries a sheath-knife into the classroom with precisely the same motive!     

Working for World Peace

            I do not believe that the best way to secure world peace is to ring Russia around with members of Nato – inevitably seen by the Russians as a hostile alliance.  We complain of the ‘provocative action’ of the Russians in flying a couple of bombers round Britain keeping just outside British air space.  What are the Russians to think of NATO military manoeuvres in Poland, just beyond Russia’s frontiers?  We know the Russians have an enormous army and air-force.  They know that NATO has too!  For goodness sake, let’s stop trying to prove that ‘mine is bigger than yours!’   They’re both big enough to reduce our wonderful world to ruins if their top politicians are daft enough to let them. And I fear that some of them may be. For goodness sake let us talk peace and join together to think of how best to counter the acts of the jihadists – the real enemies of both Russia and ‘the West’.

Working for a more equal economy

            The top ‘at home’ priority of any responsible British government should be to narrow that yawning, and ever widening, gap between the incomes of the very poorest and very wealthiest of our citizens. Shamefully this gap actually widened during the decade of New Labour rule.  A way in which any government could narrow that gap would be the radical reform of the income tax system and making a reformed income tax the principal source of government revenue. Every adult, rich or poor, should be required to pay the same percentage of his or her gross income as their annual subscription for the very-considerable privilege of living and working in the UK.   Benefits to the very poorest of us would need to be raised to prevent this tax reducing anyone to homelessness or malnutrition.  I think that 20 percent of every adult’s gross income (before there’s a chance to salt it away overseas or in a charitable trust!) would probably be sufficient.  We would then all have an interest in Britain’s economic future and really would ‘all be in this together’

The European Union

Forty years ago I voted no to the European Common Market in that famous referendum. I had the rather romantic idea that we could seek closer economic and political union with the countries of the Commonwealth and what was left of the British Empire, to create a political and economic bloc capable of co-operating or competing with the USA and the  world’s emerging powers.

If I’m still around when we have the opportunity to vote either to stay in or depart from what is now the European Union, I shall vote to stay in, and I will hope that we achieve an even closer economic and political union with our European partners. I believe that the UK can make its voice heard and its opinions respected better as an active member of a federal Europe than as a non-voting protectorate of the USA.

We are part of Europe by geography, history and culture.  Nowadays it isn’t politically correct to say so but over the centuries the Christian faith has been the background in front of which the ancestors of all we Europeans have lived, worked and died.  As was repeated over and over again in the Scottish referendum campaign;  ‘We’re better together’!

I’d have a little more respect for Ukip if they really stood for an independent United Kingdom as they claim. They don’t. Their venom is reserved for our neighbours and friends in Europe.  You’d think that the EU was another hostile country determined to weaken and destroy the UK instead of a union of Nations in which we have exactly the same influence as anyone else. Remember the Ukip members of the European Parliament rising and turning their backs at the playing of the European Anthem.  I don’t believe that even the most fervent Republicans would be so ill-mannered as to turn their backs when others were standing and singing ‘God save the Queen’.

Ukippers seem to be quite happy with our membership of NATO (on which we Britons have never had the opportunity of expressing an opinion) and our one-sided ‘special relationship’ with the USA.    NATO and the ‘special relationship’ have cost us far more that the EU in both blood and money.  They involved us in two ‘colonial wars’, one illegal and the other unwinnable.  In every country where we have interfered the result has been disastrous. In Iraq Islamic State forces are slowly but surely taking over.  I’d be very surprised if there are not Iraqis today who look back on the rule of Saddam Hussein as a golden age! In Afghanistan the Taliban attacks ever more boldly, and the even-more-bloodthirsty jihadists of Islamic State have also put in an appearance.  Libya is now ungoverned and ungovernable – thanks to our helping in the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi!  Gaddafi’s rule was awful but the current anarchy (of which Islamic State is already taking advantage) is surely worse.

Climate Change

            I have left climate change till the last despite the fact that this is the threat that is capable of making the other causes that I have supported seem to be trivial irrelevances.  The reason it comes last is that effective countering of climate change demands the support and action of the government of every country in the world, and there are powerful forces trying to prevent this.

I took this photo of the Rhone Glacier on the pass between Italy and Switzerland in 1980.   I was told that last year 2014 there was no ice visible from that vantage point 

            
We don’t need a university degree to note that in recent years there have been more extreme weather conditions than even folk of my age can remember.  There have been extreme heat waves destroying rain-starved food crops.  There have been typhoons and hurricanes, devastating floods, prolonged droughts, occasional unseasonable spells of arctic weather. All of these have brought loss of life and destruction of property world-wide. The polar ice-caps are melting at an accelerating rate as are the mountain glaciers.

            The overwhelming conclusion of the world’s most eminent scientists has been that global warming is taking place and that this has caused those extreme weather conditions world-wide.  Furthermore, they are equally certain that most of that warming is due to human activity – to humankind’s relentless exploitation of the world’s natural resources, in particular to the profligate burning of fossil fuels (coal, gas and oil) for space and water heating in the home, in industry, for travel, and for any other activity needing an energy supply.  The remedy seems simple and straightforward enough; reduce and eventually eliminate the use of fossil fuels and replace them with sources of clean, renewable energy such as can be supplied by wind turbines, solar panels, the sea’s waves, the flow of the rivers, the ebb and flow of the tide. There may be others. The UK, with its enormous coastline, is well suited for the use of tidal energy.

            Voices demanding urgent international action to combat man-made climate change include virtually the whole of the scientific community and, surprisingly but very, very gratifyingly, the Pope.  The present Pope has won the admiration of many non-Roman Catholics  and will, I hope, have persuaded thousands over to the ‘Green cause’.  Lined against them are the many thousands of people who work in, or profit from, the fossil fuel industries.  These include some very wealthy and influential men.

            Our new government which once, just before an election, urged the electorate ‘if you want Green. Vote Blue’, seems to have joined the forces of Mammon.  They are abolishing grants toward the production of wind turbines, giving local councils the final word over whether they should permit wind turbines in their areas (of course there will always be lots of local Nimbys who will oppose them) and are encouraging fracking – exploiting yet another source of fossil fuel as well as despoiling our  countryside.  In an earlier blog I said that if either the Conservative or the Labour Party won the election outright the results wouldn’t be as good as supporters had hoped but, on the other hand, they wouldn’t be as bad as their opponents had feared, I was wrong.  On the climate change front at least, the Conservative government’s action is even worse than their opponents had feared. Shortly there’s to be an international conference on climate change  My guess is that there will be lots of good intentions expressed but precious little urgent action promised.

            Perhaps I’ll conclude with a couple of verses from a poem by Arthur Clough, a 19^th century poet.  It has cheered me on occasion:

Say not the struggle naught availeth,

The labour and the wounds are vain

The enemy faints not, nor faileth,

And as things have been, they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars.

Perhaps by yonder smoke concealed

Your comrades chase e’en now the flyers

And, but for you, possess the field.

Although the tired waves, vainly breaking.

Seem here no painful inch to gain;

Far back, through creek and inlet making,

Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And that, dear blog readers, is the end of my final blog.  I’m sorry I couldn’t contrive a happy ending – but it is, at least, a hopeful one.

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17th December 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘Lord, make me chaste and celibate…….

          but not just yet!’

            This was said to have been a prayer of St Augustine of Hippo (no, not the St. Augustine who brought the Christian faith to the heathen English) and proves that saints are 'only human'!.

            I think of St Augustine’s prayer whenever I read, or hear on tv or radio, about yet another international conference on climate change resulting from global warming.  There’s always a remarkable unanimity about these conferences.  The leaders of almost every nation accept the reality of global warming resulting in extreme weather conditions throughout the world.  The northern polar ice-cap is shrinking as are glaciers world-wide. There have been killer typhoons in the South Pacific Ocean and unprecedented monsoon floods on the Indian sub-continent. North America has had searing heat and drought as well as floods and unseasonal arctic spells that have stretched most of the way from Canada to the Mexican border. 

The Rhone Glacier, photographed by me in 1979.  There is now no ice to be seen.

Africa has had prolonged droughts and Australia has had both floods and bush fires, laying waste to hundreds of square miles of land. 

Mainland Europe has had floods, mud-slides and avalanches. During the winter of 2013/2014 the UK’s weather was unseasonably mild but heavy storms battered and broke the sea defences on Britain East Coast while elsewhere – particularly on the Somerset Levels and the Thames Valley – hundreds of acres of land, together with farms and homes, were flooded for weeks as a result of continuous torrential rain.  Last month, our government produced plans for flood prevention to be carried out in the next two or three years.  If only nature proceeded at an equally leisurely pace!

            The latest international conference on climate change was in Lima.  The world’s leaders heard scientific experts explain that a major cause of climate change is the steady increase in ‘greenhouse gases’ produced by fossil fuels; coal and coal products and fuel oils used in industry, in road transport and for warming our homes.  We must, say the world’s scientists, urgently reduce the use of fossil fuels – leaving some reserves untouched – if we want to save our planet for our grandchildren and their grandchildren

            The world’s political leaders agree.  Reducing the use of fossils fuels must be a priority – but not just yet.  The Chinese want to wait until their industrialisation has caught up with that of the USA.  The UKs leaders have got a general election coming up.  They certainly don’t want to take any precipitate action that might cost them votes – or the support of those giving generous donations to the ruling party.  Beside in shale oil, another fossil fuel obtained by ‘fracking’, the Americans are sending us cheaper fuel – and encouraging us to wreck our own countryside by producing our own.  Producing a cheaper fuel (never mind that it produces greenhouse gases) is certainly a vote winner.  There are very few votes to be gained in the pursuit of clean and sustainable energy.

            The result of the International Conference in Lima?  Well, no worth-while action will take place this year.  Next year, perhaps something positive will be agreed – but I’m not holding my breath.

        We’ll never know whether the prayer of St Augustine to be made chaste and celibate – but not just yet, was answered.  Perhaps it was.  It is the nature of the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ to forgive sins of the flesh, particularly those who have acknowledged and confessed their fault.   ‘Perverse and foolish oft I strayed, But still in love he sought me. And on his shoulder gently laid, And home rejoicing brought me’   I think God may be a little less forgiving towards those who, from greed, national pride or fear of election defeat, ignore the warnings of the wise, and are prepared to sacrifice future generations to their own self-centred interests.

‘It’s not what is done……..it’s who it is does it’

       The American Senate’s report on the conduct of the CIA in the aftermath of ‘9/11’ has brought the whole policy of the USA at that time into the limelight.  As well as the torture of suspects under interrogation, there was their ‘rendition’ to countries, Libya for instance, where torture could take place without as much as raised eyebrow, and there was the establishment at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, of a concentration camp of which Himmler would have been proud!

        I find myself interested less in what the CIA and their political masters did, but what they didn’t even attempt to do.  The outrages of ‘9/11’ were planned and carried out by El Qaeda, the dominant jihadist terrorist organisation of the day. At the head of El Qaeda was Osama bin Laden whom the CIA tracked down and killed, without so it seems, making any attempt to capture him.  It certainly stopped him from revealing, in the dock, the support El Quaeda had from the CIA in their campaign of terror against soldiers and civilians of the Soviet Union.

          Osama Bin Laden was a Saudi Arabian, so were the overwhelming number of the terrorists who had successfully planned and carried out the destruction of New York’s ‘Twin Towers’ on ‘9/11’.   There was not an Iraqi or an Iranian or a Syrian among them.  Saudi Arabia practises and preaches the noxious perversion of Islam that has been taken up by El Quaeda and their successors IS or Islamic State.  Compared with Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and President Assad’s Syria were havens of freedom and tolerance.  Furthermore, it is known that prominent Saudi Arabians helped finance Islamic State in its early bloodthirsty progress in Syria and Iraq – and possibly continue to do so today.

       

            The USA, and the UK the USA’s ‘special relation’, invaded Iraq on the pretext that the Iraqi government had been involved in ‘9/11’ and that it possessed ‘weapons of mass destruction’, neither of which claims had even a scintilla of truth.  Hundreds of British and American service-men died as a result, together with thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.  Nor did we bring peace and prosperity to Iraq.  Since our departure Iraq has never been at peace and is currently under attack by Islamic State.  We have now sent in hundreds of British troops ‘to train Iraqi forces’.  How long will it be before those troops have to defend themselves against IS attack and we find ourselves dragged unwillingly into a third ‘Gulf War?’

       Again, in support of the USA, we went to war in Afghanistan because their Taliban government was protecting the bases of El Qaeda.  Within months El Qaeda had moved those bases to Somalia and Yemen – but the Taliban fought on.  We have, after ten years and goodness knows how many deaths on both sides of the conflict, withdrawn all our combat troops.  They may not have been defeated but I am quite sure they wouldn’t claim to have gained a great victory.  My guess is that in six months time a fundamentalist Muslim government (it may not be called Taliban) will be ruling Afghanistan and all those mini-victories, for education, for women’s liberation and so on, will have been lost.

              Meanwhile Saudi-Arabia, the inspiration and (I believe) clandestine supporter of Islamic terrorists, remains unchallenged as one of our ‘trusted allies’.   We buy their oil and we sell them our armaments and don’t ask too many questions.  As I have said before, nowadays it isn’t ‘what is done’ but ‘who did it’ that is of greatest concern to our Government and that of our American allies.  What a pity that not even the combined efforts of the CIA and MI6 can manage to establish that Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein and President Assad, conspired together to carry out ‘9/11’!

Merry Christmas?

     This will be my last blog before Christmas, probably the last blog in 2014.  It’s the season of good will and I’d very much like to wish all humankind a Happy Christmas and  New Year.

       Sadly the news seems to get worse from day to day. World-wide no early effective action will be taken place to counter climate change.  On the other side of the world, in Sydney Australia, a jihadist fanatic has held the customers and staff of a busy café hostage – a situation that resulted in the death of the fanatic, of the café’s  manager and of one of the customers, a barrister in her thirties with two children.  Worst of all was the massacre by the Pakistan Taliban of 132 children, and nine members of the staff, at a school in Peshawar in north-western Pakistan – a crime even more heinous than that of  King Herod’s slaughter of the 'Holy Innocents’ in Bethlehem two thousand years ago!

     For ‘good news’ we are told about the new vessel –  half a kilometre long! – that is being built in South Korea to exploit new fields of (greenhouse gas producing) oil that lie beneath the ocean floor off the north of Australia. The production of similar enormous vessels to extract and process submarine oil fields is planned for the future!

     It’s the ‘season of good will’ and I have to  confess that I feel very little good will towards politicians who are prepared to sacrifice future generations in their pursuit of immediate economic or political advantage.  I feel even less good will towards those who torture or murder their fellow men and women in the blasphemous belief that their crimes will earn them the favour of God, and none at all towards those, whoever they may be and whatever their cause, pretext or excuse, who harm or kill innocent children.

     That said, I do wish a very Happy Christmas and a New Year of Peace and Hope to all readers of this blog and to all those who, with love for humanity in their hearts, are striving to make this sad world a happier place, and to work towards an answer to our prayer, Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven’.

                                                                                            t   

14th November 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

Greed and Self-interest Rule – OK?

        When our two sons were children, my wife Heather and I never tried to indoctrinate them with our ideas and values.  On the other hand we did make our ideas known to them and made sure that they knew that there were values that were important to us.  Looking back over the half-century that has elapsed since then I am very pleased, as I know their mother would be were she still with us, that both of them have lived socially useful lives and that their outlook on matters of importance is much the same as my own.

                      Sons to be proud  of!  Left Andy, then aged 13; and Pete aged 15, on holiday in Cornwall 1968 

 Last week, for instance, I received an email from my older son Pete, who founded and runs a successful and expanding consultancy, about one his major concerns. He expressed thoughts that could well have been my own.  Here are a few paragraphs from it: 

            This week started with the most explicit and extreme warnings and recommendations from world scientists about climate change, clearly and unambiguously saying for the first time that we have got to stop burning fossil fuels by the end of the century and halve our output by 2050 and that means that much of the known resources of coal, oil and gas can never be burned.

 But the BBC, instead of making a feature of it, and trying to explain the gravity of the situation to the ignorant British public, gave it a five minute slot on the National News, with a weary tone, saying that we have heard all this before but politicians never deal with it and won't this time. That instead of reducing carbon emissions global emissions are actually increasing year on year.  And then there was the ‘feel-good’ information, Britain and Europe are doing their bit, but China and the USA are the biggest emitters. After that, we could move on to the next news item.

I just despair. The climate change debate really does seem to encapsulate the problem of human greed where we are actually prepared to sacrifice the quality of life of our grandchildren for the sake of short term financial gain for this generation. Also, that we measure quality of life by the Gross Domestic Product, not by the environment in which we bring up our children. From the big global issues to the small local ones you see the same mentality. In London doctors are saying that 4000 people every year die prematurely from breathing disorders directly caused by pollution from cars, which is far higher than agreed European levels in London's hot spots. Millions of children at school also have breathing problems and need to use inhalers. This seems shocking to me and surely demands swift and uncompromising solutions.

But - with general public support - Boris Johnson has dragged his feet, postponed and watered down measures to deal with this. Why? Because it might damage the London economy or the livelihood of Taxi drivers or the financial health of road hauliers or upset the motoring lobby to act too swiftly.  

While I can see the economic need for Delivery vans and Lorries to drive through central London, 50% of the traffic consists of private cars owned by people wealthy enough not to care about the Congestion Charge, who have a company car park to go to and "prefer to drive". How can that be justified or dealt with by a higher charge? It should just be banned!

My sentiments exactly – and I couldn’t have put it better or more forcefully. This is not just a British or just a European problem. I watched last week a tv programme about the Mekong river, one of the greatest waterways in south-east Asia, that flows through the countries of Cambodia and Vietnam.  Along its course is an enormous freshwater lake, the level of which is raised several feet during the rainy season. Communities with homes built on stilts exist round this lake and for generations they have lived by harvesting the fish with which the lake teemed.

            Recently though both Cambodia and Vietnam have been introduced to free-market competitive capitalism.  Local fishing methods were anything but cost-effective.  Big corporations are now using modern mass-market fishing methods – reaping, for a year or two, a rich harvest and enriching their share holders. They’re also depleting the fish.  Tough luck on the lake-side communities!  They clearly have no future in the world of the 21^st century.

One of the verses in Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam says

Ah Love, couldst thou and I with fate conspire

To take this sorry scheme of things entire.

Would we not shatter it to bits, and then

Remould it closer to the heart’s desire?

 In 1945 our world had been shattered to bits by world wars.   I believe that with the welfare state, the foundation of the United Nations and the beginnings of the foundation of a united Europe, there was a genuine attempt in many countries, including our own, to create a world of peace and justice, closer to the heart’s desire.  This vision of a better, fairer, co-operative rather than competitive society persisted, in this country at least, through the governments of Clement Attlee, Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson and Ted Heath (I look back on that time as a golden age!) until the 1980s and the advent of Thatcherism and, the other side of the same coin, Tony Blair’s New Labour.

It was during this period of privatisation, of the development of the idea of a world-wide market free of bureaucratic regulation, that greed and naked self-interest took over. I like to personalise it as the triumph of the false god Mammon with his unholy trinity of profitability, productivity and cost-effectiveness.  I wonder how many well-meaning Labour supporters realized that in erasing ‘Clause 4’ of Labour’s constitution, they weren’t just voting that not everything should be nationalised but opening the door to the privatisation of all public services.   I remember being quite shocked when the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper for the ‘responsible citizen’ if there ever was one, carried as a keynote feature an article entitled A Defence of Greed!

I have been proud of my country but now I am ashamed. It is a land in which the gap between the wealth of the richest of us and the poverty of the poorest is the widest in Europe, in which conspicuous and flaunted wealth exist while many hard-working people have to rely on charity and food banks to keep their families from starvation; where an army of lawyers and accountants earn a parasitic prosperity by making sure the very rich pay nothing like their fair share of taxation; a form of ‘immoral earnings’ that is risk-free and richly rewarded!

I can only hope that our fellow men and women will come to their senses and repudiate Mammon and all his evil works before the unbridled greed and selfishness of a minority drag, not me at 93, but a future generation to disaster.

A fateful Decade

Writing about the decade that I think of as the ‘avaricious eighties’ has brought to my  mind the fact that it was during those fateful ten years that  Home Office files, that are said to have implicated members of ‘the establishment’ in child abuse disappeared – were lost or destroyed.  No, I am not suggesting for a moment that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in any way responsible for their disappearance. It unlikely that she was even aware of their existence.

I do think it possible though that someone with authority in the Home Office who was a fervent supporter of the ‘iron lady’ did glance through them, saw some of the names mentioned, and recognised their potential ability to hinder – or even halt - Mrs Thatcher’s revolutionary crusade of privatisation and removal of every trace of what she considered to be the taint of socialism.  The last thing that she would want would be a major public scandal possibly involving some of the government’s most enthusiastic and generous supporters.  

So, those potentially damaging files ‘disappeared’.  Who would have imagined that anyone would remember their existence over thirty years later?

‘We’re better together!’

I had never expected to get very excited about the progress of space exploration.  Much of it is really beyond my comprehension.  However, the fact that the European Space Agency has succeeded in placing a man-made object on the surface of a comet millions of miles away and travelling at breathtaking speed, really does deserve heartfelt congratulation. 

I am particularly pleased because it was achieved by fellow Europeans, working together.  Some components were manufactured in an Essex factory.  It is an achievement that neither the Americans, the Russians nor the Chinese have managed to accomplish – and you can bet your life they all would have if they could have!  This European achievement in the field of space exploration could be repeated in the fields of politics and economics.  Europe could, once again, lead the world!

This is no time for the United Kingdom to think of leaving the European Union.  As the leaders of all Britain's main political parties proclaimed on the eve of the Scottish referendum:

                                       We’re better together!

Dear Blog Readers,

When, a few weeks ago, I wrote that I would no longer necessarily publish this blog on Mondays I had in mind that it would sometimes be later in the week.  However, this week 'next week's blog' was completed and it seemed to me that I should get it published as soon as possible because it has important messages.  So here it is - published on Friday 14th November instead of Monday 17th.  I've no idea when the next blog will be published.  It all depends on what happens in the world!  

  

Week 34 2013

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Fracking

A’fracking we will go,

 A’fracking we will go,

Because our toil

Will find the oil

That makes the economy grow, grow, grow!

That makes the economy grow!

The above ditty, which I offer free of copyright to anyone who wants it, could well become a popular playground song of the 2020s though only, of course, if a strictly non-profit-making activity like singing is permitted by the Directors of the Education Industry (by then fully privatised and market sensitive) during primary schools’ productive leisure periods, formerly known as ‘playtimes’.

‘Fracking’ is by no means the most attractive and melodious word to have been introduced into the English vocabulary by modern technology – but it seems likely to be one to which we will have to accustom ourselves.  It is a shortened form of ‘hydraulic fracturing’, a means of extracting gas and/or oil from hitherto inaccessible, but apparently plentiful, reserves of both these sources of energy in beds of shale deep below the earth’s surface.

Like the coal, gas and oil to which we are accustomed they are ‘fossil fuels’ and thus doomed eventually to come to an end.  However they will – if exploited - reduce our current dependency on oil and gas from distant and unreliable overseas sources.  They will also postpone, perhaps for many decades, the exhaustion of these sources of energy and their inevitable increase in price as they become depleted.   What a relief to politicians – no need to persevere with those unpopular wind and solar energy farms!   No expensive and unpopular barrages to be built across the Severn and other estuaries to harvest tidal power!  That’ll really confound the ‘green lobby’, and trim the wings of UKIP and other organised opponents of green energy!  A government that welcomed fracking (thousands of jobs, smaller fuel bills, cheaper petrol – perhaps) should surely gain thousands of votes. Any serious troubles that may arise from it are probably several general elections away!

There will be trouble of course.  The process of fracking, if I have understood it correctly (and if I haven’t I’ll gladly publish any corrections that blog readers send me!) is to bore vertically a mile or more down from the earth’s surface, lining the borehole with concrete to prevent seepage of pollutants into the subsoil; then, when a pre-determined depth has been reached, extending the bore-hole horizontally for perhaps another mile underground. The ideal situation, I understand, is for the horizontal excavation to be through porous sandstone between two strata of shale.

Now the work that gives the operation its name begins.  Water, charged with grit particles, is forced under very high pressure into that horizontal bore-hole.   The pressure fractures the shale beds (the actual ‘fracking’) and grit carried by the pressurised water prevents the tiny fractures from closing again.   The water is then pumped out and oil and/or gas that had been held within the shale leeks into the bore-hole from those fractures.   The borehole becomes a well.

As I typed those last two paragraphs the sequence of events seemed to become more and more improbable with every word I typed!   However, fracking has been carried out with success for many years in all parts of the USA and has been proved to be successful in this country too.  There are snags about it.  The actual fracking is done deep underground but the surface works are extensive and, to say the least, unsightly.  Pictures have been shown on our tv of no-doubt formerly attractive countryside in the USA turned into desolate – but highly profitable - wasteland.  The fracking operation has been known to cause earthquakes – only small ones perhaps but earthquakes none the less! As well as the despoliation of the environment, fracking brings very real dangers of pollution of lakes and rivers and, in particular perhaps, of aquifers or natural underground water reservoirs.

Unsurprisingly, like sewage treatment works, landfill refuse disposal sites and waste incinerators, no-one wants a Fracking operation anywhere near their home.  They are the ultimate NIMBY (not in my back yard!)

Lord Howell, Mrs Thatcher’s Environment Minister and George Osborne’s father-in-law (a weighty thinker if there ever was one!) recently gave members of the House of Lords his valuable thoughts about the future location of Fracking wells:

‘But there are large and uninhabited and desolate areas. Certainly in part of the North East where there’s plenty of room for fracking, well away from anybody’s residence where we could conduct without any kind of threat to the rural environment.’

            Geordieland is certainly ‘well away’ from Westminster and from  London’s ‘stockbroker belt’ but I doubt if the residents of Newcastle-on-Tyne,  Durham and other North-eastern  cities would agree that their beautiful  unspoilt countryside and coastline were ‘desolate areas’ offering ‘plenty of room for fracking without any kind of threat to the rural environment.’’

As it happens it seems that beds of shale offering rich pickings to frackers are distributed pretty evenly over – or rather under - ‘England’s Green and Pleasant Land’  There are areas of southern England where the residences of  some of the government’s most loyal (and wealthy and generous!) supporters are to be found, that are particularly promising.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our Prime Minister demonstrated his enthusiasm for this exciting new wealth-creating enterprise by encouraging one or two trial holes to be bored in Buckinghamshire (not a heavily populated county) in the immediate vicinity of Chequers!

I think fracking is a very interesting idea that may well have a great future – but I’m quite glad that no geological map of England I have seen shows any sign of oil-or-gas bearing shale strata beneath the fertile fields, wind-swept heathland, winding estuaries and salt marshes of East Anglia!

…….as others see us!

 

Ray and Ingrid

            I had a very pleasant surprise on Sunday 12^th August.  Ingrid my German friend of many years standing, and her English partner Ray had been entertaining two sixteen year old German girls from the Bayreuth area of Bavaria who were for the first time paying a short visit to England.  The previous day they had taken them on a lightning tour of London, seeing Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace, the House of Commons, London Bridge and Tower Bridge, the London Eye and Oxford Street.

            Sunday was their day to see the English seaside.  Where better than Clacton-on-Sea with which Ray was familiar (his home is in Ipswich) and Ingrid has visited on two or three previous occasions.  They spent the morning and the early part of the afternoon on the pier and the beach and called on me, for a cup of tea and a chat, at about 4.30.

            I found the two visitors to be very courteous and friendly young ladies who were full of teenage enthusiasm for England and everything English.  They had thoroughly enjoyed their visit to London, where they had seen all the places they had heard about or seen on German tv.  I was astonished that they commented on the cleanliness of London’s streets – though it is some years since I have been to the capital and over sixty since I lived there. Perhaps things have changed since those days.

            They were no less enthusiastic about Clacton.  I am glad they saw us at our best.  It was a warm and sunny day at the beginning of carnival week.   They had thoroughly enjoyed themselves on the pier and on Clacton’s safe and sandy beaches – though of the four of them, only Ingrid had had a swim.  The others found the North Sea too chilly, even on a warm and sunny day in August.  They had been somewhat disconcerted by the speed of the rising tide!  The girls had previously known only lake-side beaches and Ingrid had spent only a brief time on a beach on her previous visits to Clacton. 

The two girls were learning English at school and our conversation took place in both English and German.  Either I said very little (which those who know me best will consider unlikely!) or my German is much better than I had thought it was, because Ingrid emailed me later to say that one of the girls had subsequently asked her if I was German or English!  Be that as it may, it is good to know that two German teenagers have returned from their first visit to England with wholly positive thoughts about our country and about Clacton-on-Sea and the Essex Sunshine Coast.

.

Week 46 2012

Tendring Topic.....on line

‘They shall not grow old………..’

A Lifetime ago ……….. The last voyage of the SS Scillin

            The SS Scillin was an Italian cargo ship, built in 1903, of some 1,600 tons.  Just seventy years ago, on 13^th November 1942, she was in Tripoli Harbour being loaded with a living cargo of allied prisoners of war to be transported from camps in Libya across the Mediterranean to Italy.  814 prisoners were ordered into her hold which is reported as having been suitable for no more than 300.   There would have been a further 195 but for the vehement protests about the severe overcrowding and insanitary conditions of the prisoners’ accommodation, made by Captain Gilbert a British medical officer

Among the 814 were 50 members of my own regiment, the 67^th Medium Regiment RA. Most of them, like me, were from Ipswich or East Suffolk, were in their early twenties, and had volunteered for the Territorial Army early in 1939.    We had been in action in the Egyptian/Libyan border area since the previous November.  By the end of 1941 we had been involved in a number of successful assaults against German and Italian garrisons in Bardia, Sollum and Wadi Halfaya (Hellfire Pass). In the spring and early summer of 1942 we found ourselves in defensive actions in the desert south and west of Tobruk.  Finally we became part of the Tobruk garrison and were overwhelmed and taken prisoner by Rommel’s Afrikakorps on 21^st June.  My own transportation to POW camps in Italy had been from Benghazi in July on the SS Ravello.  The voyage across the Med. to Taranto had been uneventful and the fact that, after 70 years, I can remember little about it suggests that it can’t have been too awful an experience.

            That of my 50 former comrades in the Scillin was vastly different.  What happened to them, and to all but a handful of the rest of the 814 prisoners crammed into its noisome hold, remained a secret for more than half a century. It was not until 1996 that persistent enquiries by historians and by relatives (among them friends of mine in Ipswich researching the lives of their fathers who had been in my regiment) forced a full revelation from the Ministry of Defence. 

            It transpired that during the night of 14^th November the Scillin was intercepted by the British submarine HMS Sahib.  The submarine surfaced and fired 12 rounds from its 3in deck gun at this unarmed Italian merchant vessel. Ten of these rounds found their target and brought the Scillin to a standstill.   The Sahib then closed to within 750 yards and fired a torpedo at the Scillin’s engine room.  The torpedo did, in fact, explode in the hold and the Scillin sank almost immediately. Only 27 of those 814 prisoners, plus the Scillin’s captain and crew, survived and were picked up by the Sahib.

            At an enquiry the Sahib’s commander (Lt. John Bromage) was cleared of culpability.  He claimed that the Scillin had no lights, had not responded to his initial shelling and had appeared to be heading for Africa.  He had believed it to be carrying Italian troops.

Nor was the Scillin the only Italian vessel to be similarly attacked.  Five other vessels carrying PoWs were attacked by British submarines during 1941 and 1942. These attacks resulted in the deaths from ‘friendly fire’ of a total of 2,000 British and allied PoWs.  It was particularly in  memory of those forgotten 2,000, fifty of whom had been from my regiment and some of whom had been my friends, that I wore my scarlet Flanders poppy on Remembrance Sunday.

A Triumph for Democracy?

          It is said that a somewhat taciturn Scotsman, who had just attended a service at a local church that had a new Minister, was asked what the sermon had been about.  ‘Sin’, he replied.  ‘And what did the Minister have to say about it?’   ‘He was agin it!’

            I feel somewhat like that questioner with regard to the six candidates for the post of Police and Crime Commissioner to the Essex Constabulary, for whom we are all invited to cast our vote on 15^th November. I have already received my ballot paper as I vote by post. I assume that all six applicants are ‘agin’ crime or they’d hardly be standing.   I know their names.  I know that four of them are standing as representatives of political parties (Conservative, Labour, UK Independence Party and English Democrats) and two are Independents.   Apart from what appears to be a political party slogan ‘More Police – Catching Criminals’* after the name of the political party (English Democrats) that candidate Robin  Tilbrook is representing, we know nothing about the candidates other than what we may have seen in the press or on the internet.

            I’m not really blaming the candidates for this.  I daren’t think what delivering an election address to every household in Essex would cost – and the candidates have already had to find £5,000 deposit!  No doubt the government, always ready to save money, declined to go to the expense of a free mail-shot for each candidate!

            To pretend that this election is an exercise in democracy, much less an exercise in the ‘localism’ for which the government claims to be so enthusiastic, is quite ridiculous.  How can one man, or one woman, possibly be able to respond to the needs of residents of a Police Authority Area as large, as populous, and as diverse as Essex?   How can the election of just one person in charge of its police force be, in any sense of the word, ‘democratic’?

            No doubt the old Police Authorities were less than perfect, though I don’t recall hearing very many complaints about them.  There were surely better ways of replacing them than with a single all-powerful individual.  

There was a simple, democratic solution to their replacement that would have empowered local people while saving the government the very considerable expense of this ridiculous election.  Police Authority boundaries coincide with those of County or Unitary Authority.  Why not make the existing democratically elected local authority the Police Authority?  It could perhaps be stipulated that the authority should appoint a Police and Crime Committee of say ten members, representative not of the political parties comprising the council but of the geographical parts of the council’s area?   Then, all voters would have their own member of the Police Committee whom they could contact with regard to policing problems.  Such a system would also have facilitated co-operation between the police and other local authority activities – education and social services for instance.

But we are afflicted with a government convinced that what is best for those living on the other side of the Atlantic must necessarily be best for us. Possibilities other than that of having a single elected commissioner overseeing each constabulary had not, as far as I know, even been considered.  All of this presented me with a dilemma.  If I voted in the election would I be giving support to a process that I believed to be a ridiculously expensive and unnecessary waste of time and money; a cynical negation of the principle of representative democratic control of our Police Services?

 

  My first inclination was to ignore it – or perhaps deliberately spoil my voting paper before posting it back.  Then I realized that although I didn’t know much about the individual candidates, I did know something about the parties that four of them stood for.  Was it just possible that my failure to vote would allow the UKIP candidate, representative of a Party with policies to which I am strongly opposed, to head our Essex Police Force?

            That possibility made me decide that I must vote!  My first choice will be Linda Belgrove, Independent.  She lives in Alresford and is therefore more-or-less local. She was vice-chairman of the Essex Police Authority that is being replaced, so she at least knows what the job is all about.   She has worked for solicitors and has served on the parish council so she is acquainted with the workings of the law and of problems in our area.  She is not the representative of any political party and (this was probably the deciding factor!) on the photographs that I have seen of her in the local press, she has a friendly smile!  I don’t suppose for a moment that she’ll get elected, but I wish her well. 

And my other vote, my second choice in case whoever gets most votes doesn’t get a clear overall majority? I haven’t yet decided.  Perhaps I won’t use it……. or perhaps I will.  I’ll make up my mind just before I slip my voting paper into the envelope provided and post it.

* I'm rather surprised that that was permitted.

Making the most of the Sunshine

            I have no doubt at all that Britain’s best interests lie in developing alternative renewable sources of energy to reduce, and ultimately replace, our reliance on such fossil fuels as coal, gas and oil.  I believe, and the recent great storm affecting North America has strengthened that belief, that neither Middle East terrorism nor ‘the deficit’ but steadily accelerating climate change, is the biggest and most urgent threat to Britain and to the rest of the world of the 21^st century.  The use of fossil fuels, particularly coal, increases that threat.  What’s more, our oil and gas supplies come from notoriously unstable parts of the world and are, in any case, finite.  They will one day – perhaps a few decades, perhaps a century or more ahead – begin to run out and as they do so their price will escalate.

            The production of nuclear energy, although favoured by the government, is – as we have seen in at Chernobyl and, more recently, in Japan – potentially dangerous. Moreover it produces a waste product that remains lethal for centuries, and for which no-one has yet discovered a safe and permanent means of either disposal or storage.

            Safe and infinitely renewable sources of power available to an island nation such as ours lie in the waves that break upon our shores, in the inexorable ebb and flow of the tides, in the wind and in the rays of the sun.  I believe that the power of the waves and of the tides has yet to be fully exploited, but that of the wind and of the sun is currently being harnessed and has infinite further potential for exploitation.

            I am delighted to see the still growing regiment of wind turbines off our north-east Essex coast and have little patience with those who complain they are spoiling the view.  Consider what climatic change, strengthened and accelerated by mankind’s profligate use of fossil fuels, has done for the view of the east coast of the USA!

            A proposal to build on-shore wind turbines never fails to produce local outrage.   They are, and will always be, either too near to people’s homes or alternatively, destroying hitherto unspoilt countryside and a threat to wild life. There was certainly a storm of protest about the proposed provision of wind turbines between Clacton and St Osyth.  Yet now that they are actually in position and operating we hear little about them.  Could it be that they haven’t proved to be quite the noisy, unsightly and health-threatening monsters that protesters had been led to expect?

            Then there’s sunshine – and this really is the Essex Sunshine Coast!   Solar panels have no moving parts so they can’t be noisy. They are effective.  My single solar panel, from which water heated by the sun is circulated in a sealed circuit through my hot water storage cylinder by a pump activated by two small photo-electric cells, supplies nearly all my hot water needs during the summer months.  Winter sunshine preheats the water in the cylinder before it is brought to the required temperature by my gas boiler, and therefore saves money all the year round.

            More ambitious schemes involve virtually covering the sun-side slope of the roof with solar panels that are, in fact, photo-electric cells and convert the sun’s light, rather than its heat, into electric power to be fed back into the national grid, making the householder an actual supplier of electricity.

            I was delighted when I learned that there are plans to provide no less than 40,000 power generating solar panels locally on fields at Chisbon Heath between Great Bentley and St Osyth, and 15,000 at Sladbury’s farm between Holland-on-Sea and Great Holland.  The south-facing solar panels would be no more than three metres off the ground and would be screened from public view by trees and bushes. Together they are expected to produce sufficient electricity to power 4,750 homes.

            There are similar plans further inland.  A £20 million pound solar scheme in Kelvedon will involve 60,000 solar panels and is expected to provide enough power for 7,200 homes.  Wind power we have and solar power is on its way.  If only some practical and economic way can be found to harness the power of the waves that crash on our beaches, Southern East Anglia could be among the leaders of the development of safe and carbon-free means of energy supply.