11th April 2015

Tendring Topics……..on line

Oh to be a Non.Dom – in a new Financial Year!

          After I took early retirement from Tendring Council’s service in 1980 I earned a considerable income from freelance writing.  I wrote and had published five commercially successful books on domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage.   I wrote the plumbing section of a number of d-i-y manuals including the ‘Readers Digest Householders’ Manual’.   I wrote and sold dozens of feature articles to magazines and periodicals on domestic hot water supply and drainage, on local government, on camping and caravanning in the UK and mainland Europe and on any other subject about which I had at least some knowledge and experience.  For several years I wrote Advertising Features for Essex County Newspapers, and for ‘Look East,’ a publication promoting commerce and industry in East Anglia.  I also wrote a weekly column, ‘Tendring Topics’ for the Coastal Express’ for twenty-three years.  

  Some of this work was for overseas publishers.  I remember writing about Dedham’s and Harwich’s association with the USA and about the historic village of Bosham near Chichester, one-time home  of both King Canute and the ill-fated King Harold killed at the Battle of Hastings, for a magazine for retired citizens of New England.  I had a lucrative arrangement with an Australian publisher who sought permission to print articles of mine that had already appeared in Do-it-Yourself Magazine in England.

I declared every penny I earned, including those from overseas, to Inland Revenue and I claimed reasonable expenses.  I paid quite a lot (by my standards) of income tax each year.  I didn’t complain.  I enjoyed what I was doing and the tax was only a fraction of my income.

I would have been a lot less happy had I realized that there was a privileged minority of very wealthy people who paid no income tax on money that they received from overseas.  They were the ‘non-doms’ whose ‘domicile’ was said to be elsewhere than in the UK.  It seems that ‘non-dom’ status can be inherited and that having a clever lawyer is much more important than where you or your parents actually live or may sometime have lived.

Now it’s one of the issues that may affect voting in the general election.  Ed Miliband says that if he becomes Prime Minister his government will abolish ‘non-dom’ status altogether.  Apparently though the shadow chancellor has said that to do so would bring in very little extra revenue, and Ed Miliband’s political opponents claim that it would lead to all these wealthy and talented ‘non-doms’ leaving the country and domiciling themselves elsewhere.

It is a sad reflection on the zeitgeist of our wonderful ‘free market’ society that discussion about ‘non-dom’ status has been solely concerned with whether or not the Treasury would benefit from its abolition.  I have heard no-one say that it is clearly wrong for a privileged minority of very wealthy individuals to be exempt from taxation to which ordinary ‘hard-working tax-payers’ (about whom David Cameron claims to be so concerned) are subject.  Morality, it seems, has nothing to do with it.

United Kingdom Independence………but from whom?

It is always interesting to hear what Nigel Farage has to say about any subject other than the European Union.  Recently he was discussing Britain’s defence policy and I was just a little surprised to hear him say that he was all for our spending two percent of our national wealth on ‘defence’, as requested by NATO.  It was the as requested by NATO that astonished me.  Mr Farage believes that the government should comply with ‘the will of the people’.  He’d like to see an immediate in/out referendum on the EU because he is quite sure that the Outs would win.  He’s certain that the British people don’t want to be ruled by ‘foreigners’.

He could be wrong about that but, in any case membership of the EU is one of the few matters about which the British electorate has been consulted in a referendum.  Surely there are several matters of national importance about which we have never been consulted.  One of them is membership of NATO and another, closely related, is our ‘special relationship’ with the USA.  I’d have thought Nigel would be demanding a referendum on these subjects before demanding yet another on EU membership.  Doesn’t NATO consist almost wholly of ‘foreigners’ and isn’t the special relationship a little one-sided? 

We blindly followed the USA into the invasion of Iraq, and the USA and NATO into an unwinnable conflict in Afghanistan.   The USA entered World War II against the Nazis only when Hitler declared war on the USA in accordance with Nazi Germany’s treaty with Japan.  We’ll never know if the USA would have engaged in war in Europe had he not done so.  I think it at least possible that the USA would have decided that their war was against the Japanese and in the Pacific.  They’d have thought about Hitler only after they had defeated the Japanese.

We do know that the USA gave us no support when the Falklands was invaded by Argentina, and actually led an armed and unprovoked invasion of Grenada (the island in the Caribbean, not the town in Spain!) then part of the Commonwealth, in order to force a regime change.

Nigel Farage is righteously indignant about the cost of our membership of the EU.  Perhaps the BBC’s Radio 4 ‘More or Less’ team could discover if our membership of NATO and the Special Relationship have cost us more in cash than our membership of the EU.  Without a shadow of doubt our participation in those two USA-led ‘colonial wars’ in the Middle East have cost us much more in dead and wounded!

All of this simply confirms in my own mind that Farage has no objection to British foreign and defence policy being dictated from the other side of the Atlantic but he dislikes our co-operating with our European cousins and developing into a federal super-power able to co-operate (or compete) on equal terms with the USA, the Russian Federation and China.

 The Fruits of Desperation

            Do you remember how the coalition government, supported in this instance by New Labour, offered concession after concession short of complete independence, to the Scottish nationalists in a successful attempt to secure a majority NO vote in the recent referendum?  Desperate measures were needed because opinion polls suggested that the YES voters might be successful.   It was a tactic that they may now be regretting.  A number of English towns and regions are demanding autonomy comparable with that of the Scots.  At the same time it seems likely that SNP candidates will triumph in the forthcoming General Election and, since Scotland remains part of the UK, may prevent the Conservatives forming a government with a comfortable majority in the House of Commons.

            The leaders of the main political parties are now taking desperate measures to gain, or retain, a few votes.  I mentioned David Cameron’s promise to would-be home buyers of thousands of homes ‘on the cheap’ a blog or so ago.  They’ll be cheap because the developers won’t be required to build any ‘social housing’ or contribute to the provision of public services in the area.  Now there’s the idea of lending would-be tenants the few weeks rent-in-advance that nowadays landlords demand.  It’ll certainly add to the burden of debt that most people have to carry these days.

            There’s a promise to freeze rail-fares (though a BBC analyst says that it’ll actually mean a fare rise!), to pay large firms and public authorities to allow some of their employees a few days off to do voluntary work, to make more apprenticeships and so on, and on, and on!  They make wild promises about what they’ll do – but they’re even better at rubbishing the claims of their opponents.  The SNP threatens to rob the Labour Party of what were once ‘safe parliamentary seats’ in Scotland.   So ED Miliband has toured Scotland today  telling electors that the SNP’s proposed programme can only be carried out by raising taxes and making even deeper austerity cuts than  the Tories have.  Mind you, Ed Miliband has recently been at the receiving end of just such a ‘rubbish your opponent’ campaign.  It’s a bit complicated and depends on lots of ‘mights’, but I’ll do my best to explain.

            It is just possible that Labour might win enough seats in the election to have more parliamentary seats than any other party, but not have an overall majority.  It is also just possible that the SNP might gain enough seats to make up an overall majority and might be prepared to support a minority Labour government.   They would obviously expect a quid pro quo for this – and it is possible that the price they might demand for that support might be that the Labour Government does not renew the Trident Nuclear submarine fleet with its ‘ultimate independent nuclear deterrent’.  If they did so then Ed. Miliband, in order to become Prime Minister, might accept that condition.  According to the Conservative Defence Minister he has already ‘stabbed his brother in the back’ to become leader of the Labour Party so he’d have no hesitation in ‘stabbing his country in the back’ to become Prime Minister..  David Cameron says he supports his Defence Minister in this assertion and proudly announces that only the Conservative Party will present the electorate with four brand-new state-of-the-art Trident submarines.  Goodness, is that a threat or a promise?  It's certainly as good a reason as I know for not voting Conservative.

    

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27th February 2015

Tendring Topics……on line

Is our economy safe in their hands?

            One of the main points of the Conservative Party’s election campaign is that the country’s economy is safe in their hands.  Vote for any party other than the Conservatives, they say, and you’ll have Ed Miliband as Prime Minister. Our economy – your money – is safe with David Cameron.   Well, I’m not all that keen on Ed Miliband but I really don’t think his economic policies are materially different from those of David Cameron.  It doesn’t seem to occur to either of them (or perhaps they’re both too scared of well-off voters to mention it) that cutting essential public services is neither the only nor the best way of reducing that deficit. 

The deficit is the difference between the government’s income and its expenditure.  Why not try increasing its income?   A penny on income tax would hurt no-one (even with the skewed-in-favour-of-the-wealthy income tax system we have today) and would have an instant effect on the deficit.  Instead David Cameron is talking about cutting income tax!  Both he and the Liberal Democrats are convinced that they’re doing a tremendous service to the poor by raising the level at which income becomes liable, thereby taking some low-paid workers out of the income tax system altogether.  Sometimes they say, ‘Out of the tax system altogether’, as though income tax were the only tax we all pay.

In fact, by raising the  threshold at which income tax becomes payable, they are helping everyone who pays income tax – but they are not in the least helping those whose income is already too low to be subject to taxation.

 One way in which the Government has wasted our money is in the maintenance of our Trident Nuclear Submarine ‘independent Nuclear Deterrent’.  It is not independent (can you imagine us using it – or even threatening to use it – without the OK of Washington?) and it hasn’t deterred any of the many acts of aggression that have occurred in the post-war years.  When the Falklands were invaded by Argentina neither our ‘nuclear deterrent’ nor our ‘special relationship’ with the USA were the least help to us.  Nor does everyone think that the lavish cost of an all-but-a-state-funeral of a politician who deeply divided the country and whose flagship ‘right to buy’ legislation is responsible for our current housing crisis, was money well spent.

Perhaps though the most absurd and obviously crazy way in which the Conservative dominated coalition government has frittered away our money has been the replacement of area Police Committees with directly elected ‘Police and Crime Commissioners’ with power to appoint and sack Chief Constables and to determine the general direction of police work though operational control remains, thank goodness, with the Chief Constables.   The former Police Committees were, so the coalition claimed, ‘undemocratic’.   How can one man or woman, elected by a tiny fragment of the total electorate, possibly be ‘more democratic’ than a committee, at least some members of which had been elected locally?

The obvious way to make the police answerable to the local public was to make them the responsibility of the local county or unitary authority council. They would elect some of their members to serve on a ‘Police and Crime Committee’ with the same responsibilities as those of Police and Crime Commissioners.  These police committees would be more representative of their whole area than any single individual could hope to be.  They’d also be much better able to co-ordinate police activities with those of other local or regional services such as education, social services, highways, and parks and gardens, for which the County Council or Unitary Authority is responsible.  What’s more, they’d cost less, which I would have thought would have been a prime consideration of our Prime Minister and Chancellor.

You’ll recall that the public showed its contempt for the whole idea of directly elected Commissioners (an idea imported from the USA) by failing to turn up at the polling booths.  Nationwide the percentage of those bothering to register their vote was the lowest recorded in any election – and Essex set a splendid example by having the lowest turn-out of the lot!

Of course there has always been the possibility that those of us who were convinced that the appointment of Police and Crime Commissioners was a costly mistake were quite wrong. There could have been a dramatic fall in crime and rise in the detection rate, and we might have all been sleeping easier in our beds in the knowledge that we had a Commissioner looking after our interests.  Essex’s own Commissioner – Nick Alston - seemed a pleasant enough chap.  Perhaps he could work miracles.

Headlines in the local Daily Gazette suggest that he can’t; It’s official……crime is rising in Essex.   In fact, that is only partly true.  The number of domestic abuse cases rose from 9,222 to 10,825 in 2013 and there was 35 percent rise in prosecutions against Class A drug dealers. The solved crime rate fell to 27.63 percent.   On the other hand there was an 11.6 percent drop in the number of burglaries and there were 900 fewer incidents of rural crime.

 While the government exercises tight control of the purse strings there is little that either the Crime Commissioner or a Police Committee can do to reduce crime.  Mark Smith, chairman of the Essex Police Federation is quite sure that the politicians are to blame:

 It is quite clear that what we are being told by the politicians is not true.  They say crime is down.  It is not and we are not even recording new crimes like cyber crime and ‘grooming’.

We have already had cuts of £72.5 million and have heard that in the next five years we are going to have to save another £80 million. We will probably lose 200 officers this year, so we will have gone down from 3,600 to 3,000. In five years there will only be about 2,000 if the cuts go ahead.

I’m not a great Ed Miliband fan and intend to vote Green in the General Election. However I’d support Ed Miliband’s promise that a future Labour Government would put more coppers on the beat and pay for the change by scrapping those expensive and largely impotent Police and Crime Commissioners.

Yet another NHS reorganisation?

In this blog I have again and again criticised the action of successive governments – both Conservative and Labour – of stripping local authorities of the powers and responsibilities that were theirs in the 1930s.   When in 1937 and aged sixteen, I stepped onto the very lowest rung of the staff ladder of Ipswich Corporation’s Public Health Department in 1937 the Department was responsible for a General Hospital, an Isolation Hospital (infectious diseases like diphtheria and scarlet fever were much more common, and deadlier, in those days), a Maternity Home and a Tuberculosis Sanatorium. The department was also responsible for the domiciliary midwives and district nurses and the school medical service, as well as the environmental health services for which it is responsible today.  There may well have been other services of which I was not aware.  I was very young, on the very lowest staff level – and my local government career was interrupted after just two years by the outbreak of World War II!

After the war I was older and, I hope, wiser than I had been.  I was one of the returning servicemen who voted for Clem Attlee’s Labour Government – but I was a little dismayed when all those local health and medical services were taken over by the NHS.  However I thought that the advantages of a truly National Health Service outweighed the disadvantages, and – until the last year or so – I have had no reason to think otherwise.   I wasn’t impressed with the Government’s last NHS reorganisation.  It sounds wonderful to make GPs responsible for all their patients needs – seeing a consultant, getting a bed in a hospital and so on.  But GPs are fully occupied examining patients, treating them and passing them on to consultants when necessary.  They really didn’t have the time for administrative work.   I wrote in this blog that they were getting rid of one layer of bureaucracy and replacing it with dozens of smaller layers as GP practices took on extra staff or formed consortiums to deal with this work.  Now it seems the Government is really trying to localise the Health Service in at least one part of the UK.  They are making the local authorities that comprise Greater Manchester a single comprehensive Health and Welfare Authority, responsible for both Health and Social Services.  It sounds a brilliant idea but there are several matters on which I’d like further clarification.

The government will fund this new authority.  This government isn’t famous for its lavish support of public services.  Will there be adequate funding?

He who pays the piper calls the tune.  Are we quite sure that this new authority will not find itself directly under the thumb of bureaucrats in Whitehall?

Just now the new authority will be under democratic control by elected councillors.  But I understand that within a few years the area will have an all-powerful ‘Mayor’.  Will a Mancunian equivalent of Boris Johnson dictate Health Service policy?

   Services inside the new authorities’ area will inevitably be different (not necessarily either better or worse) that those outside.  What will happen when someone complains that ‘That woman over the road got into hospital immediately.  I’ve been told I’ll have  to wait two months – it’s just a post code lottery?'

      

           

27th October 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

The EU isn’t some hostile foreign alliance!

          …….but sadly, that’s how some newspapers and some politicians behave as though it were.  The European Union is a political and economic association of European States that Britain joined for its own advantage.  Over its policies and activities we have as much power and influence as any other member.   What’s more, it is the only international association of which the UK is a member and of which we – the members of the public - have already been asked in a referendum whether or not we wished for membership.

            The Scots have recently been able to say whether or not they wished to be part of the United Kingdom – but neither the English, the Welsh nor the Northern Irish, nor any of our ancestors have ever been asked in a referendum whether we want to be part of it.  Probably there’s little doubt that most of us would vote ‘yes’ to continued membership – but a resounding ‘yes’ is much less certain about our continued membership of the United Nations or of NATO, or our ‘special relationship’ with the USA.  I would not have voted yes to the last two of those.  I think it’s quite likely that they have cost us more in pounds and pence (keeping that Trident submarine fleet active for instance) than the EU ever has and they have certainly cost us much more in British lives.   They have dragged us into an illegal war in Iraq that has made us thousands of implacable enemies world-wide and has certainly not made Iraq a happier, more peaceful and more tolerant country in which to live; and into an unwinnable war in Afghanistan from which we are now withdrawing if not in defeat, certainly not victoriously.  When the Falklands were invaded and we could have done with some help from the ‘allies’ we support so loyally, we received none.

            Freedom of movement of goods, capital and people was an important feature of the European Union when we joined and for some years no-one objected.  We wanted a ‘level playing field’ for our exporters and importers so there naturally had to be union-wide labour and health and safety regulation.  The membership, when the UK joined, was of nations with similar economies and public services.  There was no influx of workers into Britain from Germany, or the Netherlands or Denmark or any of the ‘old EU’ member countries.  If anything the flow of migrants was in the other direction.  The popular tv comedy series Auf Wiedersehen Pet was, at least in the first instance, about a group of British building workers who found employment in Germany.  My grandson, an international Tourism Publicity Consultant, lives in Brussels but commutes to his office in Ashford in Kent (near the Eurostar station).   His business takes him to every part of Europe and indeed the world but, thanks to Britain’s membership of the EU, travelling in most of Europe is much simpler than it once was.

Some years ago the then existing members considered making their union a united political and economic bloc capable of co-operating and where appropriate competing on equal terms with the USA and China, or expanding to include former members of the Soviet bloc like Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria.  Tony Blair, then Britain’s prime minister, was one of the keenest and most determined of European leaders to draw these countries into the EU fold.  The problems that this could lead to were fairly obvious. Their economies and public services were in no way comparable with those of existing members.  The uncharitable thought crossed my mind that his enthusiasm for expansion could have been to ensure that Europe would never unite into a strong federal political force – a United States of Europe – that might not please his bosom friend across the Atlantic, George W. Bush.

            Well, the expansionists got their way, and provided Nigel Farage and his Ukippers with some ammunition, though hardly as much as they had hoped for. Do you remember the imaginary coach-loads of eager immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria who, according to the popular press, were just waiting for the gates to open so that they could flood in, swamping us poor natives and taking our homes and jobs?   Some turned up – mostly those who had jobs waiting for them, but in a trickle rather than a flood.  The swarm of migrants who now seem to be permanently camped near Calais waiting for an illegal opportunity to enter the UK are not from EU countries.

            The strange thing is that the worry about immigrants from the EU seems, at least from a casual glance, to be in inverse proportion to the number of EU immigrants in the area.  We clearly have some Polish immigrants here in Clacton because I note that there is now a shop here dealing with Polish delicacies. Perhaps if I were a Roman Catholic and going to mass at Our Lady of Light Roman Catholic church, I would meet some of them - and be pleased to do so.  As it is, I don’t think I have ever encountered a Pole in this town, though a Polish worker was one of the team from Enfield that very efficiently, insulated my roof space a year or two ago.  As a former public health inspector I have met Greek and Italian restaurant owners – but they were here before we were EU members!

            Clacton’s immigration problems are mostly home-grown and all-British. They relate to the fact that we are within easy reach of London, have generally dry weather (a help for those in b. and b. or sleeping rough!) and that cheap accommodation of a sort can usually be found on the Brooklands Estate, Jaywick or elsewhere in the area.  None of this has anything to do with the European Union – yet Essex’s seaside holiday coast is real Ukip country, with many of its residents worried to death about EU immigration and the fact that 70 percent of our laws are now ‘made in Brussels! – a blatant lie that Ukippers accept as a fact.

            Ukippers have convinced themselves that if there is a simple IN or OUT referendum  on EU membership, there will be an overwhelming OUT majority.   They may well be surprised at the result.  I voted NO to EU membership in that earlier referendum because I had a romantic notion that the Commonwealth could be moulded into a viable political and economic unit.  It was a stupid idea that I have outgrown.  In any future referendum I shall vote for continued membership, hoping that the EU will become more politically and economically united and that there will be fewer UK opt-outs.

Nor would I be alone. Recent MORI and Ugov public opinion polls, publicised in the London Evening Standard, indicate that nationwide, despite the rise of Ukip and although there is a big worry about immigration, a comfortable majority favour retaining EU membership and that this majority is even larger in the London area.

A Boost for the Ukippers

          The shock was considerable.  The timing calculated to bring maximum joy into the hearts of Nigel Farage and his motley band of followers.  If I were a believer in ‘conspiracies’ I’d be considering the possibility that an under-cover Ukipper had   penetrated the inner defences of Brussels and, just when Europhiles were rejoicing at opinion polls showing that most Brits would prefer to stay within the EU, arranged for ’Brussels’ to send the UK a peremptory demand for the almost immediate payment of the eye-watering sum of £1.7 billion pounds!  And, adding insult to injury, they were proposing to give substantial cash hand-outs to France and Germany.

            Rarely has there been such agreement between British political leaders.   They were unanimous.  We weren’t going to pay it and we asked our Prime Minister to make that clear to other European leaders.  No one, it seems, even considered the fact that the criteria that decided whether EU members were to get a hand out or a demand had been agreed by our representative as well as that of other members. Nor was much said about other countries who had received demands that seemed at least as ridiculous as ours.  The Netherlands is probably as well able to pay as we are, but are scarcely likely to be any more eager than us to do so.  How about Greece?  We haven’t heard much about the Greeks recently but not long ago many of them were literally starving.  Then there was Cyprus and the Irish Republic. All three have received similar demands and all three are poverty-stricken compared with either France or Germany.

            The decision to demand payment from us is at least partly because of our much-trumpeted economic recovery and growth. It had been more than expected.   The anger of the public, reflected in that of the top politicians, has been strengthened by the fact that very few of us have noticed any improvement whatsoever in our daily lives as a result of George Osborne’s economic triumph.  Inflation is low but wage rises are even lower – in the case of thousands of public servants – non-existent.  Due to ridiculously low interest rates, thousands of life savings, mine included, are steadily losing their value in Bank or Building Society savings accounts.

            Only the very wealthy have benefited from that recovery and there has, so far, been no sign of that wealth ‘trickling down’ to the rest of us.  I have no doubt that somehow some kind of an agreement will be reached in connection with the EU’s wealth redistribution.  I wish I felt equally sure that the anomaly that working people on low wages pay a much bigger proportion of their income to the government in taxes, VAT and customs duties than the bankers with their telephone number salaries and bonuses, the big property owners, financial fiddlers and tax evaders, will also be put right.

Blog readers

     Only last week I wrote that I would not, in the future, be able to write so long a blog, nor would I be able to publish it every Monday - yet here I am, with a blog that is every bit as long as usual, and is published on Monday morning!

      I did say though that I would write and publish it 'as and when' the situation might demand.  Last week there were two news items in quick succession that seemed to me to demand immediate comment; the two pro-EU opinion polls, and the demand from the EU that the UK should pay up £1.7 billion pounds -  so I duly commented.  I could have published my comments on Saturday 25th October, but decided to wait to see if there were any new developments over the weekend.

         Next week?  Who knows?

           

      

Week 38 2014

Tendring Topics ……….on line

‘Don’t tear our happy family apart!’

            That is the message that David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband, leaders of the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour Parties, took with them on their separate journeys to Scotland last week in a desperate attempt to boost the number of NO votes in the referendum to be held in that country on 18^th September (only three days away as this blog is published!). This will decide whether or not Scotland becomes an independent nation or remains part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as it is at this moment.

            They have left it a little late. Over 150 years ago Benjamin Disraeli, destined to become a distinguished Prime Minister and to be regarded as the founder of the modern Conservative Party, declared in his political novel, ‘Sybil, or the Two Nations’  that Great Britain had already been torn apart ‘horizontally’ into a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor.  He wrote vivid descriptions of the squalor and abject poverty in which  working people lived in the early part of Queen Victoria’s reign.  Since then circumstances have improved for all of us. However, the yawning gap between rich and poor caused by that ‘horizontal tear’, dividing Britain into two nations grows wider year by year. This is a direct result of the actions and failure to take action of the political predecessors of Cameron, Clegg and Miliband.  It widened during the decade of Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ rule, and is widening again today as the coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats rewards the wealthy and penalises the poor!

            No government ever agrees to a referendum unless it feels confident that a majority will vote the way that that government prefers. Two years ago, David Cameron felt quite sure that a referendum on Scottish Independence to be held in September 2014 would yield a comfortable NO majority vote. He was happy to agree to its being held. He insisted on a simple IN or OUT vote because he thought, probably quite correctly, that there might well be a large number of voters who would hesitate to vote for full independence but would like greater autonomy for Scotland.   I have little doubt that he now wishes that he had offered Scottish voters that ‘middle way’.   If the Scots had been offered the choice of greater autonomy within a looser British federation, it would certainly have split the nationalist vote and might well have made it possible for the present system to continue unchanged.  Now – faced with the real possibility of a majority YES vote, he is having to offer ‘greater autonomy within the UK’ as a bribe to try to win over a few thousand still-undecided or YES voters. Thus, even if the Scots Nationalists fail to get a majority YES vote they will have achieved considerably greater autonomy – as well as having retained the possibility of full independence at a later date; not perhaps a win/win situation but far from being a total defeat either.

      
             The possibility that an independent Scottish Government might try, in at least one part of Britain, to narrow the gap caused by that horizontal tear that makes one nation into two, the poor and the wealthy, is one of the reasons why if I were a Scot, I’d be voting YES in that fateful referendum in a few days time.  Other reasons are the hope that independence might result in country free of nuclear weapons and without Trident nuclear submarines, and a country that wished to remain in a more closely integrated European Union but was questioning whether it benefited from membership of NATO and from a very one-sided ‘special relationship’ with the USA.

            Within the United Kingdom these are all issues that are not available for negotiation and (except for EU membership) on which we will never be given a chance to vote.  Oh yes – and it would be nice to live in a country virtually free of the neo-Fascism of Ukip!

And the effect of a YES majority on the rest of us?

           I don’t live in Scotland and, as far as I know, I don’t have a single Scottish ancestor.  I am about as southern-English as it is possible to be.  On several happy camping holidays though, my family and I have travelled the length and breadth of Scotland from the border to John o’ Groats and from the Isle of Skye to the east coast.  We liked the Scottish people and the mountains and the lochs – though we never learned to love the Scottish midges and few would deny that we generally get better weather at home on the north-east Essex coast!  We don't call a drizzle a 'Scotch Mist' for no reason!

            If the referendum on the 18^th yields a YES majority I’ll congratulate our Scottish neighbours and wish them well.  If I were half a century younger I’d be considering emigrating there! I can’t though ignore the fact that we English would miss them badly.  There would be no group of Scottish MPs to challenge the more outrageous of the coalition government’s policies. It is very likely that we would have to endure a Conservative/Ukip coalition government – perhaps a succession of them! We would probably leave the EU without bothering to go to the expense and trouble of a referendum. Outrageous Ukip demands would be likely to result in many responsible Conservatives repudiating the coalition, and the Ukip leader deciding that ‘because of the mess we have inherited from the previous Con/Lib.Dem. coalition government it will be necessary to have temporary single-party government under firm leadership, to ensure the speedy implementation of necessary emergency measures. The country’s political leader will adopt the traditional English title of Lord-Protector and will continue in office until those measures have been introduced and enforced’.

            No, I don’t really suppose that England’s future would be quite as dire as that in the event of a YES majority. During what is proving to be an unconscionably long lifetime I have discovered that, particularly where political issues are concerned, outcomes are very rarely as good as optimists had hoped – but are even less frequently as bad as pessimists had feared.   I do remember though how, in Germany in the late 1920s and early '30s, many people first dismissed Hitler as a funny little man with a Charlie Chaplin moustache and some really daft ideas – a bit of a fruit-cake in fact.  Later, major German industrialists and traditional military leaders thought they could control him and use him for their purposes – but he and his brown-shirted followers controlled and used them – and the Third Reich was born.  I hope that I didn’t spend seven years of my late teens and early twenties playing a tiny role in the destruction of that Third Reich, only to live to see comparable developments in 21^st century Britain!

 Our own by-election

            The possibility that Ukip could develop into an Anglicised NAZI Party and its leader into an Anglo-Saxon Adolf Hitler will certainly be in my mind when I place my cross on the ballot paper on 9^th October. United Kingdom Independence Party sounds innocent enough, and Nigel Farage seems a pleasant enough fellow – enjoying a fag and a drink, and not a bit like everyone’s idea of a scheming politician.  Quite so, but then who would have expected the mildly cranky National Socialist German Workers’ Party to become a movement of extreme right-wing nationalist thugs prepared to use any means – mass murder, torture, genocide – to achieve their ends.  Hitler too; we think of him as being an unscrupulous raving rabble-rouser, but he had an unquestionably magnetic personality and could be good company when he chose to be.  Certainly he too was no-one’s idea of a scheming politician.

             The national press is forecasting a landslide victory for Douglas Carswell and his Ukippers.  I can’t think why. Our former MP has deserted the political party that has loyally supported him and has forced a totally unnecessary by-election only seven months before a scheduled general election. That by-election will cost us taxpayers something like £100,000.  He presumably hopes to bask in the glory of being Ukip’s very first Member of Parliament.  That should guarantee him  a top job if and when Nigel Farage forms his first government!

            Douglas Carswell and his Ukippers are certainly working hard for his election and don’t appear to be short of funds.  I, and presumably all Clactonians, have been deluged by leaflets – I’ve had at least five of them (two a couple of weeks before his defection!) telling us what a wonderful fellow he is and how lucky we have been to have had him as our MP.  I have also had a leaflet from the Labour Party.  The Conservatives have been handicapped by not having a new candidate waiting to be selected, but they’ve chosen one now and I wish local man Giles Watling, actor and Frinton town and district councillor, success in this expensive, absurd and totally unnecessary by-election.

            I had a doorstep Ukip canvasser calling at my home before the Conservative candidate had been selected.  He was armed with a list of voters, a clip-board and a ballpoint pen. He seemed to have expected me to be an enthusiastic Ukipper and  may have been a little taken aback when I told him I was hoping that Douglas Carswell would be roundly defeated in this by-election, and that all Ukip contestants in all future elections would have the same fate.  I intended to vote for the candidate most likely to defeat him, and that - for this by-election and for the very first time in my long life – I intended to vote for the Conservative Candidate, whoever he or she might be!

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 12 2012 22..2012

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

 That ‘Special Relationship’

            Benjamin Disraeli, founder of the modern Conservative Party, was a very shrewd observer of his fellow men and women.  ‘Everybody,’ he once remarked, ‘likes flattery – and with Royalty one should lay it on with a trowel. Today, even in a country like ours with a constitutional monarchy, top politicians have largely taken the place held by royalty in Disraeli’s Victorian age.

            How very heart-warming was the welcome given by the USA to David Cameron and his wife! And how inspiring were the speeches made by the two leaders! Our relationship with the USA, over whose policies we have no influence whatsoever (why should we?) is obviously much more important to our Prime Minister than our membership of the European Union whose policies we can help to shape.

            ‘Britain and the USA have stood together and bled together’, it was said.   Sometimes we certainly have, though not always (in 1810 for instance!) on the same side.   On the basis of lies (Saddam Hussein had ‘weapons of mass destruction that were threatening us …….Iraq was involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack on the USA’) Tony Blair, our then Prime Minister, persuaded Parliament to ignore the million-plus British protesters (I’m proud that my sons and their families  were among them) who believed otherwise. Parliament voted for an illegal war that cost Britain millions of pounds and hundreds of lives. 

            The war in Afghanistan was a little more justifiable.  I have no doubt that the Taliban Government was sheltering El Qaida and similar terrorist organisations threatening ‘the West’.  That is why other NATO countries joined in.  However El Qaida has now simply moved its bases across the border into the tribal areas of Pakistan, and to the Yemen and East Africa.

             

            Those were the times when Britain’s special relationship led us to the support of the USA.  There was one occasion on which it didn’t.  Prime Minister Harold Wilson did not send troops to ‘stand and bleed’ beside the American troops in Vietnam fighting the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong rebels, as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair undoubtedly would have.  Does anyone in Britain today regret that the United Kingdom was not part of the USA’s war which ended in defeat and ignominious withdrawal – or the fact that there are no British names on Vietnamese war memorials?

            Incidentally, we were told at the time of the Vietnam War that if the Vietcong won it would be the end of civilisation as we knew it.  Stalinism would prevail over the Far East.  Well – the Vietcong did win.  I really have no idea what kind of government there now is in Vietnam.  I do know though that Vietnam has become a popular holiday destination for western tourists who, despite the lasting damage done by the USA, are made welcome.

            How about the USA’s response in Britain’s hours of need?   They didn’t help in any way when in 1974 Turkey invaded Cyprus, then part of the Commonwealth. In the 1980s they actually organised and took part in the invasion of Grenada, another Commonwealth country in the West Indies; an illegal act of aggression that was condemned by the United Nations.   They didn’t help when Argentina flagrantly invaded the Falklands – an occasion when American intervention really would have made a difference.  The USA’s mining of the approaches to Cuban ports in the furtherance of an illegal blockade, endangered British shipping.  During Britain’s struggle with the IRA, United States law-courts repeatedly refused to extradite IRA terrorists – even those who had been convicted but had escaped – to face British justice.

.

18^th May, 1941. My twentieth birthday and, watched by a hungry dog, I am taking a break from sentry duty. 

The UK had been at war for over eighteen months.

France had fallen.  The USA and the USSR were both still neutral.

 Britain and the Commonwealth stood alone against Hitler    

The Americans came into World War II to save to us from defeat?  That really is a myth than needs to be debunked.  The USA, like the Soviet Union, came into the war only when they themselves were attacked.  In 1941 the Japanese attacked the American fleet in Pearl Harbour.  The USA declared war on Japan. Hitler, in accordance with Germany’s treaty obligations, immediately declared war on the USA.  We shall never know whether, had Hitler not made that fatal mistake, the USA would have engaged Hitler at that time.  Perhaps, wisely from their point of view, they would have said they would deal with the Japanese threat and leave the UK, the Commonwealth and the Soviet Union to deal with the Nazis.

            Right now, I believe that David Cameron is being softened up to support (or at least not to oppose) the USA and Israel in a ‘pre-emptive’ strike on Iran’s nuclear installations, because of their conviction that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.  I wonder if the intelligence sources that have led to this conviction are the same as those that, just a few years ago, confidently asserted that Iraq had ‘weapons of mass destruction’.

           

            I fear that, thanks to the flattering star-spangled manner of his reception in the USA, David Cameron may have already pledged his unquestioning support.

Tendring is doubly fortunate!

          The village of St. Osyth, just two or three miles from Clacton-on-Sea is said to be the driest spot in the United Kingdom.  It follows that the Tendring peninsula’s  coastal towns from Harwich to Brightlingsea are the British holiday resorts in which visitors are least likely to have their holiday ruined by rain.

            During the 1970s when I was the Tendring District Council’s Public Relations and Press Officer, I used to make the most of this fact.  Our rainfall, I would say, was comparable with that of the fringes of southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert!  When my family and I had moved to Clacton some two decades earlier, the then Council had the holiday publicity slogan ‘Champagne Air – Rainfall rare!’  It was hardly the most brilliant example of the use of the English language, but it made its point.

            Though, as the district’s official Spin Doctor I loved our low rainfall, as an enthusiastic amateur gardener I detested it.  Why did my garden have to be just a couple of miles, as the crow flies, from the driest spot in the United Kingdom!  No wonder that during the summer months I had to spend an hour or so every evening with the hose pipe watering my thirsty runner beans, sweet peas, tomatoes and courgettes.

            Nowadays I cultivate my garden no longer. I was still pleasantly surprised though to discover that the Tendring District – Britain’s driest area – is the one district in our region that isn’t having to endure a hose-pipe ban from the beginning of April; this despite the fact that water level in the region’s reservoirs is even lower than it was during the scorchingly hot and dry summer of 1976.

            The reason so I understand, is that Veolia East, supplier of our water, obtains it from giant natural reservoirs or aquifers deep underground.  Thus they are not so dependent on seasonal rainfall and surface reservoirs as, for instance Anglian Water,   Colchester’s supplier.

            Our supply is still finite.  We should all use water as sparingly as we can – if only to keep our water bills within the household budget!   It does mean though that I’ll be able to continue to enjoy my daily morning shower without twinges of conscience!

Will Private Enterprise ‘Breathe new life’ into the NHS’?

            Those (there must surely be some!) who are looking forward to the Government’s  NHS Reform Bill sweeping away bureaucratic cobwebs and bringing the fresh air of the private enterprise and the market place into the NHS may be interested in this story brought to light by ever-vigilant Private Eye:

            Four years ago the Camden Road Medical Centre, serving 4,700 patients in North London, was acquired by the American health giant United Health who undercut a bid by local GPs by twenty-five percent.  Within a month there were complaints about inferior service and, in particular, about the loss of two locum doctors, one of whom had been based at the practice for eighteen years.

            A year ago, quietly and without consulting or even informing patients, United Health        sold the practice franchise to a company called The Practice plc.  Now The Practice plc has failed to renew its lease on the premises that have been used by doctors for almost a century.  The Centre is closing, staff will lose their jobs and the 4,700 patients will have to find other GPs – miles away!

            It must never be forgotten that privately owned businesses are run primarily to make money for the shareholders – not for the benefit of those it claims to ‘serve’.

Salute to Slovenia!

          Since last November, when I changed the means by which I gain access to my weekly blog to Google, I have been able to keep a check on how many people view it and the countries in which it is most popular.  For some time the greatest number were in India – the United Kingdom coming a poor second!  In the New Year my Indian viewers almost disappeared but there has been a welcome increase in viewers from Britain, the USA, Germany and Russia.

            Some smaller and/or less populous countries came and went – Sri Lanka, Israel, Belgium, Australia, United Arab Emirates and so on.  One small country though remained constant.  I haven’t many Slovenian viewers – usually between six and twelve – but then it is a small country, and those viewers are loyal.  There has never, so far, been a day on which I have checked my ‘readership’ and found none at all from that small but beautiful country.

And beautiful it certainly is.  When my wife Heather and I toured what was then a united Jugoslavia in 1980 in our motor-caravan our first, and very happy, experience was of crossing the frontier from Austria into Slovenia and driving to the shores of Lake Bled where we parked our van and spent our first night .  We spent the last day and night of our tour there too.  It was there that I first tasted Slivovice!

Many years later, after Slovenia had gained its independence, my elder son, daughter in law and younger grandson Nick also visited – in the winter – and found it, and its capital Ljubljana, to be a true winter wonderland.  Nick incidentally, became an expert on European travel and is currently Acting Executive Director of the European Travel Commission, encouraging folk from all over the world to spend their holidays in beautiful and historic Europe (see, www.visiteurope.com)

Our motor-caravan at sunset in an olive grove

            So, may I say thank you to my Slovenian viewers.  I very much hope that you will continue to find my blog interesting.  I am not sure whether or not this picture, of sunset in a lakeside olive grove, was taken in Slovenia. Then there were no national boundaries within Jugoslavia.   If not in Slovenia it was certainly taken not far away and it typifies the memories that I have of a very happy holiday; memories that are specially precious because they are of the last overseas holiday that my wife and I were to enjoy together.