Week 43 2013

Tendring Topics……on line

Our ‘free press’ and the politicians……. just who controls whom?

          I have been observing the current quarrel between ‘the press’ and all three main political parties with astonished fascination.  Our free press is, so its representatives insist, the envy of the civilised world.  It is the safeguard of our hard-earned freedoms and must be at all costs protected from interference by scheming politicians.  Ed Miliband’s recent protests against  the Daily Mail’s  vilification of  his father as an ‘enemy of Britain’ is, so it was claimed, an example of attempted interference; ‘Just what one might expect from the son of a committed Marxist’, was implied.

            I knew nothing about Ed Miliband’s dad until recently. However I now know that he was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who subsequently served on a destroyer in our Royal Navy, and took part in the D-day landings on the Normandy beaches. That surely speaks for itself.  I am old enough to remember that the Daily Mail in the 1930s supported the Nazis in Germany, and Hitler and Mussolini’s pal General Franco in Spain.  I remember too the Daily Express, a newspaper with a very similar outlook to that of the Mail assuring us throughout 1938 and the early part of 1939 that ‘There will be no war this year – or next year either!’ There really wasn’t much to be proud of in our ’free press’ in those days.

            With regard to the present concerns of ‘the press’, my own anxiety is almost the exact opposite of theirs.   Unless UKIP triumphs in the next General Election, I don’t really think there is the least possibility of our press coming under government control in any way comparable with that of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or the USSR.   What is a matter of concern is the way – often quite blatant – in which the owners of the press have manipulated and bent the minds and wills of our top politicians.

            I have little doubt that the credit/blame (delete as preferred) for the creation of New Labour lies as much with Rupert Murdoch as it does with Tony Blair and Lord Mandelson.   Remembering The Sun’s boast that, ‘It was the Sun wot done it’ when in 1992 persistent vilification of Neil Kinnock by that newspaper led to an unexpected defeat of the Labour Government, Tony Blair and a few of his colleagues moved the Labour Party’s policies far enough to the right to win the approval of the head of News International.  While Tony Blair was in control, the Sun supported New Labour. Rupert Murdoch acknowledges his own over-riding influence on the political outlook of The Sun, but claims that the editor of The Times has complete freedom of action.  No doubt, but the editor of that once-illustrious publication is well aware of the owner’s views and would be very foolish to ignore them.

            He who pays the piper calls the tune.  On a much more humble scale, I had complete freedom of action when I wrote Tendring Topics (in print) for the Coastal Express. No-one even dreamed of telling me what I could, and what I could not write.  However my awareness of the fact that adverts from Estate Agents and Used Car Salesmen kept the free weekly on the road, made sure that any criticism in my column of either occupation was very limited and discreet.

            Mrs Thatcher courted the good will of Rupert Murdoch and other senior figures in the News International Empire. So did Tony Blair and so, to a greater extent than either of them, did David Cameron and senior members of his government.  John Major was an honourable exception – and John Major suffered for it at the hands of the The Sun.  Of course there were no written agreements between any senior politician and the rulers of the press.  It was just that they were all good friends and the political leaders knew what their friends’ views were (on Europe for example, on immigration, on anything that might cause inconvenience to the extremely wealthy) and bore them in mind when formulating party or government policy.  They were also, of course, well aware of which policies would and which would not produce positive headlines in the Sun!

            It is sometimes claimed that the newspapers have little effect on the way that people vote.  I simply don’t believe this is true.  The newspapers do influence public opinion, and can do so without publishing a single word that isn’t true.  Out of the thousands of newsworthy events that occur every day, most are probably politically neutral.  Of the ones that aren’t, the editor who wishes to succeed in his profession gives those that support the owner’s views, headline and ‘feature article’ treatment.  News stories that oppose those views are either ignored altogether or tucked away half-way down an inside page.   When did you last read a positive story about the European Union, about Green Energy or about the contribution that immigrants make to our economy in the Sun, the Daily Mail or the Daily Express?   Remember that the Sun, arguably the most noxious of the three, has over seven million readers – the largest readership of any daily in the UK.   Of course a sizeable proportion of those seven million believe every word they read – and vote accordingly.   

            Lord Leveson in his report, touched on the way in which newspaper proprietors and their senior staff may influence politicians but, as far as I am aware, offered no solution. I don’t believe that very wealthy individuals, who need not even be British citizens, should be able to control such a powerful means of moulding public opinion. Perhaps a national newspaper or regional newspapers, could be run by an organisation similar to the BBC, which (since it is criticised from both the left and the right) probably gets the balance of its news bulletins and discussion programmes about right.

            I wouldn’t like to see national newspapers under the control of politicians.  But they are at least answerable to us at election time.  I would prefer that to their being controlled by a foreign cosmopolitan billionaire, who is answerable to no-one but himself and owes no loyalty to Britain or to British traditions and culture.

The British Red Cross Society

          A few months ago Ingrid Zeibig, a German friend of mine, sent me a photograph that brought vividly to the forefront of my mind events of nearly seventy years ago when I spent eighteen months as a prisoner of war in Italy, followed by a further eighteen months in Germany.  Particularly in Italy, where I was in a large POW Concentration Camp in northern Italy I learned what constant nagging hunger meant and what could be its consequences.

       
           Now, my doctor would probably tell me that I am overweight. Then my face fell in, my ribs protruded, and my weight fell day by hungry day. Scarcely a week passed without one of my fellow-prisoners dying of hunger related disease.  During that time we had the opportunity of having our photographs taken and sending home to our parents or wives.  My mum took one look at mine and tore it up.  She couldn’t bear to look at the emaciated scarecrow I had become. What kept us alive and never completely devoid of hope during that dreadful time, was the delivery to the camp of food parcels from the British, or sometimes the Canadian, Red Cross Society.  Each parcel contained tins of meat or fish, dried or condensed milk, margarine, a tin of jam or honey, tea or coffee, sugar and biscuits.  We were supposed to get one each, every week, but in Italy delivery was very spasmodic and sometimes we’d go for weeks without a parcel.  Then, when they arrived, the Italian guards insisted on opening each parcel and piercing every food tin so that its contents had to be consumed almost immediately.  We all believed that this was done out of spite and envy but, on reflection; I suppose it was to prevent our saving food to eat if we escaped!

           

There’s Ingrid with a genuine World War II Red Cross Food Parcel originally intended for a hungry POW!  I could practically see – and taste – the contents.

In Germany things for me (though by no means everyone had the same experience) were much better.  I was at a small working camp. Our guards weren’t bad chaps, our rations were better (they realized that they wouldn’t get much work out of us if we weren’t better fed!), the Red Cross parcels came regularly and were distributed unopened. And, of course, when you’re working with food, as we often were, you don’t go hungry!  I have tried always to support the British Red Cross and have often thought of those food parcels and how pleased we were to see them.  The photo that Ingrid sent me was of her with one of those parcels!  She was visiting Colditz Castle (now it seems to be a museum) with a friend, and the parcel – just as I remembered them from my POW days - was among the exhibits.

            I received that photo some months ago but I was reminded of it last week when I learned that the British Red Cross was again distributing food parcels to the hungry – but this time to the hungry in our own country. And Freedom from want was one of the ‘four freedoms’ for which we thought we were fighting in World War II! How shameful that one of the world’s wealthiest countries – that can afford to give tax hand-outs to its wealthiest citizens and patrol the world’s oceans with nuclear submarines - has an underclass that depends on Food Banks and Red Cross Parcels for survival, that this winter will have to decide whether to eat or heat, and spends its coppers ‘having fun’ with the national lottery in the forlorn hope of escaping from soul-destroying poverty to extreme wealth!

           And top politicians have the effrontery to claim that we’re all in this together!

           

             

           

           

             

Week 16 2013

Tendring Topics…….on Line

‘Fifty-three quid a week!’

 I can remember a time when £53 a week would have seemed to me to be wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.   In the circles in which I moved in the 1930s anyone with an income of £5 a week or more was reckoned to be ‘well to do’.  My dad supported my mum and I on much less than a fiver a week, even counting in the weekly pension payment he received for his twenty-one years army service.

            Over eighty years later though, things have changed.  Such has been the progress of inflation that nowadays £53 a week is roughly the amount that someone who is unemployed can expect to get from the state in ‘benefit’. In contrast I’d be very surprised if the take-home pay of Mr Ian Duncan-Smith, Work and Pensions Minister is less than £150,000 a year or £2,800 a week - rather more each week than an unemployed man gets in a year!  He says though that he could live on £53 a week if compelled to do so – and has been challenged by his critics to prove it.

            I think it probable that he could manage it, almost certainly for a week and possibly for several weeks.  It wouldn’t be a fair test though because all the time Mr Duncan-Smith would be well aware that the discomfort and deprivation – even hunger – that he’d be feeling, was only temporary.  He would know that in a week or two things would be back to normal.  He’d be back to his comfortable home and life-style and his no-doubt ample and well-balanced diet.  What’s more, he would have proved to his own satisfaction, if to no-one else, that he could endure without complaint exactly the same hardships as those constantly moaning plebs.

I have never tried to live on the equivalent of £53 a week.  I think though that during the winter of 1942/1943 in a large concentration camp for other-rank PoWs in northern Italy (Campo Concentramento Prigioneri di Guerra No. 73) I did experience and survive conditions that were  as bad as any poverty experienced in this country, at least in the 20^th and present century.  We were ill-clad.  We were cold.  We were louse-infested. We were constantly hungry.  We had a small maize-flour loaf (scarcely larger than a bread roll) between two of us each day, plus about a pint of a thin rice or macaroni soup in which there would sometimes be shreds of an unidentifiable meat.  The Red Cross Parcels sent from England, whose contents (powdered milk, tin of spam, butter, biscuits, coffee or tea) kept us alive, turned up only spasmodically.

There were 5,000 of us in the camp.  Rarely a week passed by without one of  us dying of a hunger-related illness. A mate and I had the opportunity of having our photos taken and sent home to our parents.  My mother glanced at mine and tore it up.  She couldn’t bear to look at the emaciated scarecrow I had become.

Most of us survived because we had one thing that many of today’s benefit claimants lack and that Mr Ian Duncan-Smith would have in abundance if he ever did put his boast to the test.   That was the hope of better things to come.   Most of us PoWs, certainly all those who lived to go home, had the firm conviction that the war would end – that year, the next year, perhaps the year after – and that we would go home again to England to be with those we loved.  We even dared to hope that when the war was over we’d play a part in creating a fairer, peaceful, more equal United Kingdom that would set an example to a war-weary world.

Our hopes sustained us and half our hopes were realized.  The war did end and we did get home again.  We have though conspicuously failed ‘to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land’.  In 1944 not even the most incorrigible pessimist among us would have imagined that nearly seventy years later there would be wars and rumours of wars worldwide, and that in our own country there would be hunger, homelessness and unemployment, with the poor and disadvantaged depending on soup runs and food banks for survival.

‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast’, insisted poet Alexander Pope.  According to St Paul, Hope,  Faith and Love, are the qualities that endure when everything else has failed.  Sadly, in the United Kingdom today, hope appears to be fighting a losing battle against despair.

Postscript

          It seems that if, as I suggested above, Government Minister Ian Duncan-Smith does have an income of ‘only’ £150,000 a year, he is pretty poorly paid by ‘top people’ standards. 

            You’ll remember that in the general banking collapse that triggered our current economic crisis and age of austerity (yes, as the Governor of the Bank of England has told us again and again, it was  the banks that dug the hole in which we find ourselves!)  one of the first to fall and one that fell the furthest, was HBOS (Halifax/Bank of Scotland).    Thousands of share-holders (including me, though fortunately on only a small scale!) saw the value of their shares tumble - and the government bailed the bank out with millions of pounds of our money.

            A House of Commons Committee investigating the whole sorry business has identified three top officials of HBOS as primarily responsible and suggested that they should never again be allowed to hold a directorship in any company.  One of the culprits, Sir James Crosby, the former Chief Executive of HBOS has bowed to public opinion and has, as the newspapers put it, fallen on his sword.   He suggests that he should be deprived of the knighthood bestowed on him by a once-grateful government and agrees that he should relinquish about a quarter of his pension.

            That ‘sword’ must surely have been one of those collapsing ones sometimes used in costume dramas on stage or tv.  The pension on which he will have to struggle along after this generous act of contrition will be a mere £400,000 a year!  That, I think, works out at over £76,923 a week, which makes Ian Duncan-Smith’s estimated £2,800 a week income look pretty paltry!  If a Chief Executive who admits responsibility for the failure of a bank that cost taxpayers and shareholders millions of pounds can walk away with a pension of £400,000 a year, what on earth do the top people of successful banks expect to get on retirement?  ‘We’re all in this together!’    You must be joking.

‘What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?’

            This was the caption on one of World War I’s most successful recruitment posters. It portrayed an earnest little boy asking his still-young father, after the war-to-end-wars had come to an end, what part he had played in it. He was clearly hoping to hear stories of valour and heroism.   My dad had been a regular soldier and served throughout World War I in France, Egypt and Salonica.   As a child, I took all that for granted and asked very few questions about his military past.  Among his campaign medals, that he brought out and polished for each ‘Armistice Day’ (11^th November), was a French 'Medaille d’Honneur with crossed swords', accompanied by a splendid certificate signed by the President of France.   I now deeply regret that I never asked him how he had earned that, surely unusual, honour.   For the benefit of my own sons and grandchildren (and any great grandchildren I may one day have!) I have written a fairly detailed account of my own totally undistinguished military career from the beginning of World War II till April 1946, almost a year after its end.

            Some seven years ago two Ipswich ladies – a Mrs Diana Watts and a Mrs Jane Bradburn contacted me.  They had learned that I had served in the East Suffolk Territorial 67^th Medium Regiment, Royal Artillery.   Their then-deceased dads had served as volunteers in the same regiment and they were researching the regiment’s history and the story of their fathers’ lives during the war years. I was happy to tell them about the two years we had spent in this country preparing to repel the enemy invasion that had then seemed inevitable. That immediate danger had receded and I told them about our voyage to Egypt in the New Zealand liner Rangitiki in August 1941, and our part in actions against the Germans and Italians in the Egyptian/Libyan frontier area from November of that year.  

The gun-crew of which I was a member, with our 6in howitzer, near Hellfire Pass, Christmas 1941

I am fourth from the right – wearing a woolly hat!

We had had our minor triumphs, taking part in the successful sieges and attacks on Bardia, Wadi Halfaya (‘Hellfire Pass’), Sollum and other German and Italian strong-points in the Libyan desert.   In mid-May 1942 the enemy forces, under General Irwin Rommel had launched a major attack.  After several weeks of almost continuous action we became part of the garrison of Tobruk – and were taken prisoner there when the town fell to the German Afrikakorps on 21^st June 1942.

After capture we were all separated but, with the assistance of friends that I had later made in Germany, I was able to help Diana Watts find and contact an Austrian family who had befriended her father in the turmoil at the end of the war.  Diana and Jane were indefatigable in their pursuit of the regiment's somewhat brief history. They managed to track down a number of survivors. They collected photographs and memorabilia.   They organised regimental reunions, and a photographic exhibition at the Ipswich Public Library.  They attracted the interest of the local press.  They welcomed some of the Regiment’s survivors (including me) as visitors to their homes.

           

          

  Sadly, Diana has died but Jane has carried on with their work, amassing a very considerable archive.

 At the Suffolk Record Office in Ipswich on Saturday 25^th May at 2.30 pm she hopes to share the results of her and Diana’s research with sons, daughters, grandchildren, nephews, nieces and friends interested in the wartime story of the men of a Suffolk Artillery Regiment.   Using first hand accounts from veterans and written records, Jane, who is an experienced and entertaining speaker, will tell their story. It is an occasion that shouldn’t be missed by anyone with a relative or friend who served in the 67^th!   The copy of the poster printed above gives details.

                                                                                     

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