Week 51 2012

Tendring Topics......on line

Pots and Kettles!

            Rarely before can such a relatively trivial thoughtless action have caused so great a tragedy as that of the two Australian disc jockeys who successfully phoned through to the hospital ward where the Duchess of Cornwall was being treated for severe morning sickness.  They clearly did it ‘just for a laugh’ and with no malicious intent whatsoever.  It should have done no more than cause embarrassment to the hospital (who should have had a professional phone operator on duty at all times), to the nurse who had actually discussed her royal patient’s condition to a caller pretending to be the Queen, and – just possibly – to the Duchess of Cornwall herself.

            In fact it resulted in the death of a well-loved and devoted nurse who was also a wife and mother. She had done nothing wrong but had tried to help by answering and passing on a phone call.  She died, so we are told, because she couldn’t endure the ‘shame’ of having received a hoax call and believing the caller was whom she claimed to be.

            My word!   During the past year we have seen government incompetence permit hundreds of illegal immigrants enter the country; appoint a private security enterprise to ‘police’ the Olympics that was clearly incapable of fulfilling its obligations; and make a complete botch of handling the West Coast Line rail franchise – costing tax payers millions of pounds!  We have also seen top politicians of both main parties involved in close personal friendships with the principals of a news organisation that has been exposed as involved in widespread criminal activities seriously damaging scores of lives.  Those are just the disasters that have come to my attention!

            None of the top politicians concerned have felt sufficient shame even to resign their office, never mind take their own lives!  As I have said before in this blog, they simply blame it all on the civil servants, tell us that ‘lessons have been learned’, shrug their shoulders and carry on as before. Nurses, whose duties are certainly as full of responsibility (and some may say are at least as valuable) as those of politicians, clearly have thinner skins.

            I have also found nauseating the alacrity of the British Press in condemning the Australian radio station and the two disc jockeys involved in the hoax phone call that had such tragic consequences. All of this was just a week after the publication of the report of Lord Leveson into the nefarious activities of the press in this country.  If ever there was a case of the pot calling the kettle black, that was it.

              And could the David Cameron who said that he couldn’t imagine why the two Australian disc jockeys had been ‘allowed’ to make that phone call, possibly be the same David Cameron who last week was denouncing the idea of ‘freedom of speech’ being stifled by any kind of statutory control on the activities of the news media?

 A New Layer of Bureaucracy?

          Countrywide, not very many people bothered to vote at that election in October for a Police and Crime Commissioner to appoint (and dismiss!) the Chief Constable, set the police budget and generally point the police in the direction that  they should be going.   I wonder how many of us who did vote (yes. I was among them) realized that we weren’t just electing one man or woman on an inflated salary to rule the constabulary roost but establishing the base of a new bureaucracy.

            It should have been obvious that it wouldn’t be only Chief Constables that the new Commissioners would appoint.  They would need their own office and their own staff.  They would need an accountant with some knowledge of public finances to help with the budgetary demands of the office.  They would need a deputy and at least one or two assistants to visit far flung parts of the police area.   Essex is a big area – as large and as populous as some European states, as Lord Hanningfield used to remind us.   They would need a secretary and probably a dogsbody to receive visitors, answer the phone, do the filing, and make an occasional cup of tea.  Oh – come to think of it, it might be a good idea to recruit someone with at least some experience of police work.

            A report in the local daily Gazette suggests that some of the newly elected Commissioners are already throwing their weight about.  Some have compelled the existing Chief Constable in their areas to apply again for his own job!  Sixteen of them have already appointed deputies on salaries of up to £65,000 a year!   Adam Simmonds, Northamptonshire’s Conservative new Commissioner has published plans to hire seventeen people, including four Assistant Commissioners to help him.  There should be several nice ‘jobs for the boys’ there!

            Nick Alston. Essex’s new Commissioner is taking a more cautious approach.  He is first of all recruiting an adviser to help him draft a job description for the post of Deputy.  He hopes to have the deputy in office by April.   A rather more urgent task will be finding a replacement for the existing Chief Constable, Jim Barker-McCardle who has announced that he will be leaving ‘for personal reasons’.   There are said to be fourteen forces currently looking for new Chief Constables (I suppose it couldn’t be the thought of having a political ‘commissar’ breathing down their necks that has prompted a mass exodus?) so he’ll face strong competition for the best.

           The Government could have avoided all this extra expense and further tier of bureaucracy by simply passing the responsibility for overseeing the police to the democratically elected local authority for the area.  Those authorities would then have had to make fewer of their existing staff redundant, would have ensured closer co-operation between the police and other closely related local services such as education and social service – and would have saved the expense of that stupid, unrepresentative and expensive election.  If only they could get it into their heads that what may be right for Boston Mass. isn’t necessarily the best thing for Boston Eng. And that Littlehampton’s needs aren’t necessarily exactly the same as those of Little Rock!  You’d never dream that this was a government cutting services and benefits to the unemployed, the old and the disabled in a frantic effort to reduce the national debt. 

            Will the new Commissioners breathe fresh life into our police forces and thus justify their existence and their very nice salaries?  Perhaps…….but  I’m not holding my breath!

Local Statistics

          I don’t suppose that anyone was surprised to learn that last year’s census revealed that the Tendring District was among the top ten with the oldest populations.    I was only surprised that as many as eight of the 363 local authorities in England and Wales have populations older than ours.  Over 35 percent of Tendring’s population are over the age of 60 and 1.4 percent (more than 2,000 altogether) are – like me - over ninety. I am personally acquainted with only three of them beside myself and I suppose that the reason we are not very conspicuous is that old age tends to limit our mobility. Certainly it is only my mobility scooter (my iron horse!) that prevents my being housebound – and a miserable old so-and-so I’d be if I were!

            I was pleased to see that 88,000 of us describe ourselves as being Christian.  That’s 64 percent of Tendring’s population, five percentage points higher than the population of England and Wales as a whole.  I think that the relatively low figure may be at least a little misleading.  I know personally several people whom I would describe as Christian but who don’t themselves do so because they feel that it associates them with the crusades, the religious wars and persecutions of the Middle Ages, the witch trials and the inquisition.

            I prefer to think that it associates us with such great Christian characters as Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, William Penn, Elizabeth Fry and thousands of other unknown-by-name men and women who, over the past two millennia, have opposed the evils of their world.  Many have suffered as a result.  Tens of thousands of others have quietly tried to live their lives in accordance with the example and teaching of Jesus Christ.  Without them the world today would be an even sadder place than it is. 

Some Good News

          As 2012 draws towards its close it is good to have news of the progress  of an international enterprise whose activities will affect us all and whose efforts are proceeding on time and in accordance with promises made months ago, despite a year of extreme weather conditions that did their best to hinder progress.

            Earlier this year I commented on a ground-breaking addition to the Gunfleet Sands Windfarm visible from Clacton’s beaches and promenades.  Two giant turbines – beside which the existing turbines will appear as midgets! – with vastly increased energy producing capacity, are to be added to that wind-farm.  If  successful they will be the prototypes of future wind turbines round the British coastline.

    Dong Energy’s recently published Community Newsletter tells us that they are well beyond the half-way point in the offshore construction of these two giant turbines.  Onshore and offshore cable installation has been completed as has the foundation structures for the turbines.  It is hoped that the turbines themselves will be installed in January (this does depend to some extent on the weather) and that they will begin to generate power by March of next year – in less than three months time          !

            I look forward to the appearance of these two new ‘one-legged giants’ on our skyline.  Wind turbines can’t supply all Britain’s energy needs but we do need urgently to end our reliance on fossil carbon-producing energy sources.  Even our climate-change sceptical MP, and the one or two misinformed correspondents of the Clacton Gazette who oppose both wind and solar farms, must surely see that the sources of fossil fuels are finite and even if they did not hasten climatic change (which I am sure they do!) we would need to replace them with clean and infinitely renewable means of energy supply.

            Wind-power, solar power, tidal and wave power can, I believe, ultimately supply that need.  We should welcome any and all progress toward that end.    

           Christmas is coming!

            In fact, when I publish this blog on the internet next Wednesday morning 19^th December, it will be less than a week away.  Christmas Day is on the Tuesday of the following week so I shall publish my blog for that week on Christmas Eve, Monday 24^th December, instead of on Wednesday 26th.  I really don’t yet know when the blog after that will be published – possibly on Wednesday 2^nd January.

            I know from the statistics given by my website provider that I have many greatly valued readers in India and in the Middle East.  Christmas is a Christian Festival and my blog next week will relate to the Christian story of the birth of Jesus.  May I assure Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist readers (and readers who have no religious faith at all!) that you will read nothing in that blog that will offend you or your religious faith in any way.  I hope that you will find the blog interesting and entertaining and that it will encourage friendship and understanding between people of every religious tradition.

            Whatever your faith may be I wish all blog readers a very happy day on 25^th December – and a New Year of Peace and Hope. May God Bless us All.

            

Week 7 2012 16.2.2012

Tendring Topics....on Line

The Thirteenth of February

           Tuesday of this week (13^th February) was the 67^th anniversary of an event has played a major role in moulding the political and ethical attitudes that motivate me in the weekly production of Tendring Topics….on line.

  Regular readers of this blog will know that I spent the final eighteen months of World War II at a working ‘camp’ of thirty ‘other rank’ British POWs in the small East German town of Zittau, at the point where the frontiers of Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland now coincide.  By February 1945 no-one in Zittau, not ourselves, not our guards, not the conscripted foreign civilian workers, nor the German civilians with whom we were in daily contact, had any doubt that Germany had been defeated and that the war would be over within weeks.  The failure of the Christmas offensive (‘the Battle of the Bulge’) in the Ardennes had ended any hope of a German victory or of a face-saving negotiated peace.  The RAF and American Air Forces ruled in the skies, the news from the Western Front was uniformly bad and in Zittau the sound of gunfire from the east had grown from a distant murmur to an ever-deepening roar as the Soviet Army advanced inexorably through Poland into Germany itself.

Throughout that bitter winter the flow of refugees westward through Zittau  grew from a trickle to a steady stream.   There were old men (the young and middle-aged ones had long since been called up), women and little children.   There were British and allied prisoners of war, still under guard, and conscripted foreign workers mainly from Russia and the Ukraine.  There were defeated units of Germany’s allies – Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, renegade Cossacks.  Some were in ancient lorries fuelled by Holzgas  (a flammable gas produced from smouldering wood chips). Some had wagons drawn by oxen.  All the fit horses had been commandeered by the Wehrmacht.  Many trudged through the snow with all their worldly goods piled onto small handcarts. As the thunder of battle drew closer, folk from Zittau joined them.

A fellow-prisoner and I, with our German guard, returned to Kurt Kramer’s wholesale grocer’s premises in Zittau’s Neustadt Square, from delivering  groceries to local retailers, to find that a young woman refugee from Silesia had climbed to Kramer’s top storey and, in despair, thrown herself to her death on the  cobbles of their yard.

The refugees were heading for Dresden, sixty or seventy miles west of Zittau, where they would be sorted out and distributed to the rapidly diminishing areas of Germany that were still relatively safe.  As the second week of February drew to its end, Dresden was packed with them.

Dresden's Lutheran 'Cathedral'. Almost totally destroyed in the bombing raids of February 1945 but now lovingly restored to its former glory.

It was then that the Western Allies struck. On the night of the 13^th February wave after wave of RAF bombers rained fire and destruction on the capital of Saxony, a beautiful historic city crammed with refugees.  Thousands of incendiary bombs created devastating firestorms from which there was no escape. Zittau’s inhabitants saw the westward sky blood-red from the inferno.  With dawn the RAF withdrew and bombers of the US Air Force took their place. Estimates of the dead range from a conservative 30,000 to as many as 100,000.  Among them must have been many of Britain's and America's allies.

I have heard all the explanations and all the excuses.  I remain convinced though that those raids, slaughtering thousands of innocent civilians at a time when the war was all but over, was a war crime and a crime against humanity.  It was not, of course, on the same scale as the Holocaust or other crimes committed by Nazi Germany – but would we really wish to make such a comparison our excuse?

My memory of the cruel slaughter of the innocents in Dresden changed my whole outlook on life and was a major factor in the decision of my wife and I in 1948 to turn our backs on violence, whatever the provocation, and to join the peaceful Quakers.  

‘Full of sound and fury!’*

            ‘Fury’ is a word much overused in the press.  There is ‘fury in the city’ over the suggestion that heads of huge business corporations might be overpaid, ‘fury’ in the House of Commons at the obstinate refusal of the Bishops in the House of Lords to rubber-stamp their plans to penalise the poor, ‘fury’ almost every day in the Daily Mail about ‘benefit scroungers’ being subsidised by hard working Daily Mail readers.

  I try not to get furious too often.  I am sure that at my age it is bad for me. Just occasionally though I read in the press, or hear on radio or tv something that brings me very close to it!  Such a moment occurred this morning (10^th Feb.), making me choke over my boiled egg and toast as I watched a review of the daily press on the BBC’s tv Breakfast programme. A newspaper sympathetic to the government carried a headline telling us that one of David Cameron’s closest advisors (that usually indicates that the government is giving some thought to the matter) suggests that old people should carry on working longer and should downsize their homes. 

Why on earth, the advisor no doubt thinks, should an ancient widower like Ernest Hall, who is no longer a viable ‘human resource unit’ and whose children have long since left home, continue to live in comfort in a three bedroomed bungalow?  ‘A one-bedroomed flat would be ample and much more appropriate for his needs. At ninety he’s probably too old for most paid work but possibly he could take up some profit-making hobby, knitting or basket-making perhaps, that could help to prevent his being quite such a burden on the state’.

              What is the point of urging old people, well past their prime, to carry on working when there are tens of thousands of young, fit and active people looking in vain for jobs?  The government (well, I suppose that one can’t expect too much from a group that probably holds the biggest concentration of millionaires in the UK!) seems to persist in the delusion that unemployment is mostly, if not entirely, the fault of the unemployed.  Government efforts to reduce unemployment concentrate on making young people ‘employable’ – how to prepare a CV, how to write a winning job application, how to prepare and conduct themselves during an interview!  All that would be fine if there were jobs for which people could apply and be interviewed but, thanks largely to the government’s own policies, there aren’t. Perhaps we’ll finish up with having the best-qualified army of unemployed in Europe!

We learn that only one in five of ‘graduates’ from the government’s much-vaunted training schemes obtains a job within a year. That is about right, bearing in mind that nationwide there are at least half a dozen applicants for every job vacancy! 

           

As for the accommodation down-sizing - when the palaces, stately homes, desirable residences and second (and third) homes of the wealthy have been occupied to capacity by the homeless, I’ll think about the future of the modest bungalow that my wife and I bought with our blood, sweat, toil and tears in the 1950s,  '60s and '70s; the home in which, five and a half years ago, my wife’s life came to an end, and in which I hope  mine will come to an end too too!  I don’t think I’ll need to be consulting an estate agent just yet!

            Yes – it does make me furious to think that instead of the better, fairer and more peaceful future for which my generation thought we were fighting in World War II we find ourselves in a grubby and materialistic world of sleaze and corruption, of bankers bonuses and of a press controlled by non-tax-paying cosmopolitan billionaires owing loyalty to no-one but themselves; a world of wealth and privilege for a small minority and homelessness, hopelessness, poverty and enforced idleness for the many.

            I can only hope and pray that this triumph of Mammon is temporary and that goodness, justice and peace will ultimately triumph – though I no longer have any hope of seeing even the beginning of the beginning of that victory.

*From Macbeth again and perhaps particularly appropriate to politics today ‘A tale told by an idiot, full of sound  and fury, signifying nothing’

Toward a Godless Britain?

          It seems likely that the prohibition resulting from a court case, of official prayers at the beginning of local Council Meetings will be short-lived.  Providentially, the Government’s shortly to be enacted Localism Bill will restore the right of local authorities to begin, as Parliament does, with a short period of prayer if their members wish it.

            What disturbs me about this matter is the implication of the National Secular Society, which I haven’t heard effectively refuted, that religion is a private matter having nothing to do with local or national politics, that should be practised only by consenting adults in a church or other special building intended for that purpose.  As a committed Quaker and a communicant member of the Church of England, I believe the exact opposite to be true.  Our religion should inform and guide our every thought and action.

            George Bernard Shaw, no great lover of the Church, said that our faith does not consist of the things that we think we believe, but of the assumptions on which we habitually act.   Jesus said that those who heard his words and acted upon them were like the man who built his house upon a firm foundation. We may indeed hear the word of God in Church, Meeting House, Mosque, Temple or Synagogue but we act in our daily lives. St. Theresa pointed out that, ‘In this world God has no hands but ours to do his work, no feet but ours to run his errands’.

Certainly, before beginning their Council business, Christian councillors should pray that they may be guided to speak and vote in accordance with God’s will.  As an Anglican I am happy for that prayer to be formal and vocal. As a Quaker I’d be equally happy for there to be a few minutes silence at the beginning of each council meeting to be used for silent prayer by those who wish to do so.  Even committed atheists might find a few minutes of quiet reflection helpful before the business of the meeting begins.

            The National Secular Society has the impertinence to consider that it speaks for the majority of Britons.  I am quite sure that it does nothing of the sort.  It will surprise me if the recent census doesn’t reveal that in the UK a comfortable majority of the adult population do have a religious faith and that the Christian faith is the one with the greatest number of adherents.  I am personally acquainted with dozens of committed Christians – Anglicans, Quakers, Roman Catholics, Methodists and United Reformed Churchmen.   I don’t know a single member of the National Secular Society.  Do you?

             I know, none better, that Christians have done some appalling things to each other and to other people in times past.  But I also know that it has been Christians ‘dabbling in politics’ who have pioneered every worthwhile reform that has taken place in this country during the past fifteen hundred years*.  Christians, from King Alfred the Great onwards, have pioneered education for the masses, have cared for the poor and provided shelter for the homeless.  It was a Christian priest, John Ball of Colchester, who preached that When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ He went on to become a leader of the medieval peasants’ revolt, and paid for his egalitarianism with his life.   Christians led the campaigns against the slave trade and against the exploitation of men, women and children in the ‘dark, satanic mills’ of England’s industrial revolution.  Christians pioneered prison reform and the provision of social housing and medical care for all.  Christian Bishops in the House of Lords today, lead the opposition to the penalisation of the poor and disadvantaged to help solve national financial problems created by wealthy, but greedy and incompetent, bankers.  Christian charities such as Christian Aid, Cafod and Quaker Peace and Service help people of every race, creed and colour world-wide.  

            Yet the National Secular Society would like to see Christian – and no doubt every other form of worship – confined to special buildings serving dwindling congregations and having no connection with their ‘real’ world!   We must not let them succeed.

*  It could be argued that Christian concern about material matters has a much earlier beginning. The triumphal prayer of Mary, when she knew she was to be the mother of Jesus, contains a note of distinctly radical and very practical politics: ‘He hath showed strength with his arm.  He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.  He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things and the rich he hath sent empty away’.  Isn't that just what is needed today?