Week 30 2012

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

 Once again – Public Sector to the Rescue!

   Why on earth, I wonder, is the present government so obsessed with the idea that ‘the private sector’ can always perform more economically and efficiently than ‘the public sector’?  Public authorities, they believe, should no longer actually provide the services for which they are responsible (refuse collection and disposal, maintenance of public buildings, parks and recreational facilities, care of the disabled and elderly, highway maintenance, catering and routine cleaning of schools and hospitals to name but a few)  but merely ‘facilitate’ them. All these services must be put out to competitive tender and given to the contractor who undertakes to perform them at the lowest cost.

The government is continually trying to extend the field of the private sector further (into the provision of health, policing and educational services, for instance) and to reduce that of public authorities.

This devalues or undervalues the loyalty that long-serving staff feel towards an employer who treats them fairly and respects their expertise and experience. It undervalues too the pride that permanent employees take in making sure that their canteen or staff restaurant provides the very best meals in the most welcoming atmosphere, that their ward is the cleanest and neatest in the hospital, that their park is always safe and welcoming to visitors, or that the service that they render the public is the very best of which they are capable.

The prime motive of private contractors is not to give the best possible service but to maximise profits by giving as little as they can get away with, for as much as they can get. Cost effectiveness, profitability, productivity, the three persone of Mammon’s unholy trinity, are the only criteria of the market place – and of the economic jungle.

            Over and over again we have seen the results of this.   Private enterprise has failed to set or mark examination papers efficiently or in the time required.  Private contractors have failed to pay out badly needed grants on time.  Public money poured into banks has been squandered, and call centres have been located in distant lands and staffed with people who can barely speak English – for no other reason than that their labour is cheap and they are prepared to put up with appalling living and working conditions.  The private sector was unable to cope with the effects of the nation-wide foot-and-mouth disease epidemic.   The public sector (the army) was called in to help clear up the mess.

            The latest example of this, and the one with the potential to produce the most catastrophic results, is of G4S the private contractors employed to ensure security at the 2012 Olympic Games that are about to begin.  Many people, it seems, had been well aware of the inadequacies of this private organisation but the Home Secretary remained blissfully ignorant until the last moment.  Then, just days before the Olympic Games were due to begin, she called on the public sector – war-weary troops from a government-depleted army many of whom were denied their well-earned leave  - to step into the breach and, as Houseman put it in quite a different context, 'save the sum of things for pay’.  For army pay, of course, not for the millions of pounds that private sector entrepreneurs G4S had been expecting.

            In Manchester and other urban areas accommodating Olympic athletes or otherwise associated with the Olympics, where G4S claimed to have recruited and trained sufficient private security staff, only a fraction of those needed reported for duty when required*.   Their place too has had to be taken by the public sector, by already hard-pressed police officers (also from government-depleted forces) working overtime to remedy private sector failure.

There are already plans to privatise some aspects of police work.  No-one, as far as I know, has yet thought of privatising the armed forces. It wouldn’t surprise me though to learn that there are those who are wondering if re-introducing 17^th century style privateering might prove to be a cost-effective way of strengthening our government-depleted Royal Navy!

*It was interesting to hear Jeremy Hunt, Culture Secretary and Minister in charge of the Olympics, making excuses for G4S on tv. He didn’t feel that there was anything particularly surprising or specially reprehensible in a private contractor promising a hundred trained operatives when required and then supplying only twenty or thirty.  This was, of course, the same Jeremy Hunt who hadn't noticed that his principal adviser was virtually on kissing terms with News International.

Preventing an Olympic terrorist attack!

          A warship in the Thames, anti-aircraft defences on the flat roofs of high buildings in the vicinity of the stadium, fighter aircraft patrolling the skies, thousands of troops on patrol – I am not at all sure that if I lived in London, particularly in the stadium area, I would be sleeping more easily in my bed in the knowledge of all the precautions against terrorist attack that are being taken.

            We are told that if an unknown plane approached the Olympic zone and refused to obey orders to change course ‘lethal force’ would be used against it; it would be either shot down or blown up.  And what, one wonders, would happen to the bits of the suspect plane?  We haven’t yet, as far as I know, perfected a means of vaporising them so we can only assume that they would fall on the buildings and people below, also possibly with lethal force!

             I think that if I were the commander of a terrorist gang, intent on having maximum ill-effect at the time of the Olympic Games, I’d give East London and all other Olympic venues a complete miss.   I would think that, with all eyes and all counter-terrorism measures concentrated on the games, this would be the best moment to strike at  quite different but prestigious targets in East Anglia, the Midlands or the North.

 Britain’s railway termini and airports, armed forces bases and depots, and our power stations might well be considered vulnerable.  I hope therefore that, in the concern about the protection of the Olympic Stadium and facilities in London, the defences of these possible targets have not been forgotten.

The Chilcot Enquiry

             The Leveson Enquiry, the revelations of jiggery pokery (I don’t recall ever before using that expression in a blog, but I can’t think of a better one!) in the world of finance, and the failures of G4S, have all but driven the Chilcot Enquiry out of our minds.   This, you’ll recall, was into the causes and conduct of the Iraq War and its aftermath, and ran from 2009 till February 2011.   I understand that the Chilcot Committee’s report is now almost complete and that it runs to two million words.  For those like me who can’t even imagine what two million words look like, it is roughly twice as long at Tolstoy’s mammoth historical novel War and Peace!

            It had been confidently expected that the report would be published this summer. We now learn though that this will be delayed for at least a year because of a dispute about the inclusion of just a few thousand words!  It is unfortunate that these are the words that many of us are particularly eager to read.

            I am not greatly interested in the conduct of the war or even about the mismanagement of its aftermath.   I do know that Saddam Hussein was a cruel and autocratic dictator with many innocent deaths on his conscience.  I am  quite sure though that he had no time at all for Al Qaeda, nor had they any time for him.  Consequently he had played no part whatsoever in the 9/11 terror attacks on the USA.

            Furthermore I was sure that at the time of our invasion of Iraq he had no weapons of mass destruction, and I am convinced that Tony Blair and George Bush Junior were well aware of this too. Yet a majority of MPs and a large section of the national press were persuaded to support the invasion on the grounds that Iraq was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks on the USA and that Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction that threatened Britain.

            How did this mass deception happen?   It resulted in thousands of deaths and many thousands more damaged lives, the almost total destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure, a boost in the recruitment of volunteers for terrorist organisations, and the beginning of ethnic and sectarian acts of terror and violence that still continue  (to this very week in fact!)

            I think it likely that emails and recorded conversations between the American President, George W. Bush and Tony Blair the British Prime Minister during the weeks immediately prior to the invasion may help to throw light on the matter.   A record of these exists and has been seen by the Chilcot Enquiry Committee.  It had been intended to publish them with the final report – but the all-powerful Cabinet Office has objected. It is thought that public access to those emails and the records of those conversations might harm USA/UK relations and inhibit the future sharing of intelligence information.  Tough luck!   If USA/UK good relations depend upon the British electorate continuing in ignorance of a conspiracy of deception, then those good relations are hardly worth having.  Nor is it of any value to us to be permitted to share lies and carefully selected half-truths.

            If for no other reason that Tony Blair is now our ‘special peace envoy’ in the Middle East (it was rather like making one of the Kray brothers a Chief Constable!) we are surely entitled to know what he was discussing with George Bush immediately before he persuaded a majority of MPs to support the invasion of Iraq in our name.

Week 29 2012

Tendring Topics.......on line

An Ageing Population!

          As a nonagenarian I have a direct interest in the government’s plans to meet the needs of an ageing population.  I don’t really feel that I have so far been a very great burden on the state or the local authority.  I have cavity wall infilling to my bungalow, double glazing, a solar panel to augment my gas hot water and central heating system and an electric mobility scooter to give me mobility, all at my own expense.  I did take advantage of a government grant to have my roof space properly insulated and Essex County Council Social Services have provided me with a handrail to help me make my way safely from my front door to my front garden path.

            My age and disabilities have obtained for me the lower rate of attendance allowance which helps with cleaning the bungalow, keeping the garden tidy and keeping my mobility scooter ‘on the road’.  And that is about it.  I am thankful that I have as yet needed neither domiciliary care nor residential care in a care home – and I very much hope that I never need either.

            That kind of care is expensive and the great debate among the politicians is how much they can expect old people to pay towards its cost.  Currently they have produced a plan for the future that could justifiably be called Much ado about Nothing, or at least about very little!  There must, so they are agreed, be a ‘ceiling’ to the amount the old person receiving care can be expected to pay towards its cost – but it’ll be another couple of years (just after the next General Election perhaps?) before they decide where that ‘ceiling’ should be.  Well, I am 91 and it doesn’t seem very likely that they’ll make up their minds in time for me to cheer……or otherwise!  

            One thing that has been resented by many old and disabled people has been the need to sell the family home, into which a lifetime’s savings may have been poured, to meet the cost of residential care.   The government has come up with a brilliant (well, they clearly think so) ground-breaking scheme to make this unnecessary.   Local authorities will now be required to make loans of the cost of care to care-home residents who apply for them.  These loans, plus reasonable interest, will be repayable only after the borrower’s death, and will be a charge on his or her estate.  Thus, say the government, care home residents will no longer need to sell their homes to pay the cost of care.

             I can see how the government and the care homes might benefit from such a scheme.  The money for care starts to come in directly the loan is approved without any tedious and uncertain business of selling the family home.  For the life of me though, I can’t see any advantage whatsoever for the old person involved.

            Why is it that most of us are so reluctant to sell our homes even when it is quite obvious that we’ll never be able to live in them independently again?  It is because those homes represent the greater part of our life’s savings.  We’d like to be able to pass them on to our heirs when the time comes.  This may be a thoroughly unreasonable, antisocial and irresponsible desire but it is surely a very natural and understandable one.

It is a desire that the government’s scheme does nothing to satisfy.  Our homes will still have to be sold when we die to repay those loans and – in addition - our heirs will have the extra burden of the interest payments that have accrued in the meantime.  They will be worse off than they would have been if the family home had been sold directly the old person had entered the care home.

            Finally – and I have only just learned this – like so many of the government’s brilliant new initiatives, there’s nothing new or ground-breaking about it.  Such a scheme already exists with just one difference; it provides that loans made by local authorities to pay care home fees and repayable only on the death of the home resident are interest free!

And the rest of us!

          The rest of us oldies – the ones who have managed to keep out of care homes and don’t need social services care in our homes – needn’t think that we are going to escape the attention of those posh boys who don’t know the price of milk. Perhaps it is fortunate that in the nature of things, none of us will have to put up with that attention for very long!

            A Conservative MP, and I’d be surprised if he is alone in this, has drawn attention to the benefits that we get for no other reason than the date on our birth certificates.  Free bus passes, free prescriptions, cut price (though not by much!) rail fares, generous winter fuel allowances; they should all be abolished or means tested.  In an ideal world, he says, it would be wonderful to be able to have all these universal benefits but, in the present economic climate, the country simply can’t afford them.   Funny thing though – he didn’t explain how it is that we can afford to cut the level of income tax for the wealthiest members of our society, those with incomes in excess of £150,000 a year!

            We don’t live in an ideal world.  We never have done so and we never will – but that shouldn’t deter us from striving for one.  Even in an imperfect world it is astonishing what can be afforded when it is really needed.  In 1939, for example, the world was even less perfect than it is today.  Yet the government managed to afford millions of pounds every week for six years, in pursuit of the war.  Thousands of young men and women couldn’t afford to interrupt their early careers for six or seven years to help destroy Nazism and Fascism.  Yet we managed it.  Is it so unreasonable to expect that those of us who have survived and have paid (without either evasion or avoidance!) our taxes for over half a century and are still paying them, but  are now very old, should expect a share of the comforts of civilised life without having first to prove that we are desperately poor and in dire need?

            MPs who seek to means-test or withdraw the benefits of the old should remember that there is one privilege enjoyed by everyone over the age of eighteen and by rich and poor alike.  That is the right to vote in parliamentary and local elections.  Statistics indicate that we oldies are far more likely to exercise that right than those in younger age groups – and universally permitted postal voting now makes it easy for even the most disabled of us to do so.  If I were an ambitious member of parliament, or hoped to become one, I would think twice, and then again, before provoking the wrath of a large, and growing, number of electors!                                          

           

 What the Council costs us!

            Leafing through the back pages of a copy of the daily Gazette a few weeks ago I found, among the adverts for used cars and lonely hearts, an official notice from Tendring Council ‘Members’ Allowances 2012/2013’ setting out the annual cash allowances received by each councillor.   It made fascinating reading.

            Every councillor gets a basic allowance of £4,962 a year.  On top of that the Council Chairman gets £6,070 and Vice-Chairman £2,140.  That’s reasonable enough.  They both have ceremonial and hospitality responsibilities and need a bit extra.

            Then we get the political (or, as they put it, ‘Special Responsibility’) allowances, all in addition to the basic allowance.  The Leader of the Council (the leader of the majority political grouping; much more important nowadays than the mere Chairman) gets an extra £17,862 and his deputy £10,494.  Cabinet Members (that’s the little clique of members of the majority group who actually make all the executive decisions) also each get an extra £10,494.  Opposition Group Leaders get a lump sum allowance of £1,473 plus £174 for each member of their group.

            Then come the Chairmen of the eight committees.  The Chairmen of the Planning Committee and of the Licensing Committee each get £6,072, the Chairman of the Audit Committee £4,467, the Chairmen of the Corporate Management; the Community, Leadership and Partnership Committee; the Service Development and Delivery Committee; and the Human Resources Committee each get £3,573.  Then there’s the Vice-Chairman of the Planning Committee and the Chairman of Licensing Sub-Committees.  They each get £1,965.

            A footnote explains that, ‘in addition to the above, a Dependent and Childcare Allowance continues to be made available to those members who are eligible.’   

            Local government has changed a great deal since my early years in the service when, certainly in the smaller authorities, party membership was simply an indication of a councillor’s general political outlook – not an expectation that, on every issue, there would be a ‘party line’ that all members were expected to follow.  Those were the days when councillors were motivated solely by public spirit and received no payment beyond their out-of-pocket expenses. 

            It seems to me that we are getting into the era of the ‘career local politician’ in a local government that has adopted (or had forced upon it) most of the nastier features of that lot at Westminster!

Week 28 2012

Tendring Topics......on line

 ‘Where ignorance is bliss ‘tis folly to be wise’

            That is, of course, unless you are a national of some other country, living in the UK and wishing to acquire British citizenship. Citizenship is a valuable and valued possession and I think it quite right that every British citizen should have at least some acquaintance with our customs, our traditions and our culture.  This could, as the government suggests, include some knowledge of Shakespeare and his works, of such historical characters as Florence Nightingale, Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington and of past events such as the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar.   My only reservation about requiring would-be British Citizens to acquire this knowledge of British culture, history and geography is the feeling that such a requirement, like charity, should begin at home.  In my childhood and, I think, until after the 1960s, most British citizens would have had at least some acquaintance with the events and people mentioned above.   I am by no means certain that that is so today.  

            I have not reached this conclusion as a result of careful research but simply by casually watching and listening to bits of some of the popular quiz shows on tv. I assume (perhaps rashly) that those prepared to take part in such a quiz consider themselves to be pretty knowledgeable.  From this I have learned that there is widespread encyclopaedic knowledge of world-wide sporting events (particularly football), and of ‘pop and rock groups’ and their performances; and an astonishing ignorance of practically everything else.  Quiz contestants confess that they ‘didn’t do’ history, or geography,  or English literature at school (or found them ‘boring’!) – and don’t seem to have picked up anything about these matters from radio or tv, or from general reading, since.

            My tv viewing preferences are far from being mainly scholarly or intellectual.  I am, for instance, a regular follower of Casualty on Saturday evenings.  It is preceded by the National Lottery Draw, with which is a popular quiz programme, In it to Win it.  I often therefore find myself inadvertently watching the last ten minutes or so of this programme.  One evening a month or so ago I switched on to hear the ‘quizmaster’ saying to a so-far successful contestant.

            ‘This is your final question.  Get it right and you go home with a cheque for £26,000.  Get it wrong – and you go home with nothing.

            ‘This is it.  On one side of the Straits of Dover is the English Channel.  What is the name of the Sea on the other side: Is it The Baltic Sea? The North Sea? or the Mediterranean Sea?’

            To my amazement the contestant was dismayed.  ‘Oh dear’, he said, ‘I never was much good at Geography’.  He scratched his head, pondered for a few minutes and then said, ‘I think it must be the Mediterranean’. 

While native-born Brits display that degree of ignorance about our country, it seems a little harsh to deny British citizenship to someone born and brought up in Karachi, Budapest, or Little Rock, who confuses Florence Nightingale with Lady Godiva or Elizabeth Fry with Boadicea.

Dangerous Liaisons

          Everybody is shocked and dismayed at the revelation of widespread corruption and fraud in the hallowed world of The City.  Everybody (except, of course, those directly involved) insists that there must be a full public enquiry to find out what went wrong and to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.  What’s more it is generally agreed that it must be thorough and that evidence should be given under oath so that if subsequently it were to be established that witnesses had strayed from the truth, they could be prosecuted for perjury.

            There was profound disagreement though about how this enquiry is to be conducted.  Ed Miliband wanted it to be a transparently independent enquiry (like the Leveson Enquiry into the activities of the Press) presided over by a judge.  Prime Minister David Cameron however and as was to be expected his view prevailed, insisted that what the public want is an enquiry that can be conducted speedily and efficiently, and conclude with firm recommendations that can be swiftly implemented – quite unlike  the Leveson Enquiry.

            I am not at all sure that on this matter the Prime Minister has correctly gauged the public mood.   Surely most of us would like to see a thorough rather than a rapid probing of ‘the City’s’ little secrets and would prefer it to be conducted by a politically-independent judge. The MPs’ expenses scandal has left us with as little trust in professional politicians as in professional money-changers.

            To me one of the most fascinating aspects of the Leveson Enquiry so far has been to see top politicians squirming  as they tried to answer embarrassing questions about the closeness of their relationships with Rupert Murdoch and his entourage (I bet David Cameron will never again sign off a letter, email, text or even a birthday card to anyone at all with L.O..L.)  It confirmed my suspicions that, although there was never any formal agreement to do so, political leaders did bend the policies of their parties to please their media friends and, by so doing, ensure friendly and positive press headlines.

            Had the Enquiry been conducted by MPs, however carefully chosen, I don’t believe for one moment that we would have had those revelations.  Conservative MPs certainly wouldn’t have wanted to take part in the embarrassment  of those on whom any possible future advancement would depend.  Opposition MPs would have been cautious – thinking, ‘It could be me being questioned next time!’

            I would like there to be a similar probing of close friendships between leading MPs and influential leaders of The City’ – the Chairmen and Chief Executives of  Banks and of similar prestigious financial institutions.   I think we might well be given a few surprises.

            This is unlikely to happen if a parliamentary committee is to preside. We had a preview of this in the ‘grilling’ given to the former Chief Executive of Barclays Bank when he appeared before a Parliamentary Committee.  All that emerged was that the former Chief Executive dearly loved Barclays for whom he had worked for many years; that he had suspected that other Banks might be metaphorically ‘cooking the books’ but that it had never occurred to him for one moment that his own bank might be doing the same thing.   He would never have got away with that had Lord Leveson been questioning him!

The Taliban’s ‘Fifth Column’

            When, during the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, the Fascist General Mola was besieging Republican-held Madrid, he claimed that he had four columns of troops outside the city and a further clandestine ‘fifth column’ of sympathisers inside. Thus was born the expression fifth columnist to describe the unknown enemy within.

I thought of this when I learned of the latest ‘friendly fire’ incident in Afghanistan.  Three young British soldiers had been shot by an Afghan.  At first we were told that it was by a man wearing Afghan police uniform, giving the impression that he could have been a member of the Taliban who had stolen the uniform.  Later it was revealed that the culprit was, in fact, a genuine Afghan police officer who had been recruited two years earlier and had been trained (presumably this had included perfecting his marksmanship!) by us.

            I can imagine nothing worse for a soldier on active service than to be never quite sure that you won’t unexpectedly be shot in the back by someone whom you had helped train and whom you were expected to regard as an honoured and trusted comrade. Afghan soldiers and police officers who turn their weapons on those who have trained them are, so we are assured, only a tiny minority. No doubt - but for every one who summons up the courage and resolution to act in this way, there are probably a score who would do the same if they could summon up that resolve – or who are waiting for the right moment.   What’s more, I am quite sure that for every active Afghan mutineer there are thousands of Afghan civilians who would never dream of actively revolting against NATO forces, but who equally would never consider handing over one of their compatriots and co-religionists, whatever crimes he may have committed, to the justice of the foreign infidels.

            I have little doubt that a week before the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny in northern India in 1857 every junior officer in the East India Company’s army would have sworn that, whatever might be the case elsewhere, the men under his command were unswervingly loyal to the Company and to the Crown.  But, of course, they weren’t.  Hindu and Muslim native soldiers were united in believing that they owed a higher loyalty to their culture and their faith.   

            We have to face the fact that many, perhaps most, Afghans have a very different mind-set from our own.  A clear example of these different values was given us some months ago when some American soldiers thoughtlessly but accidentally, burned some copies of the Koran along with other discarded paper.  A week or so later a single American soldier ran amok, entered an Afghan village at night, and deliberately shot a number of innocent civilians, including women and children.  The accidental book burning provoked violent anti-NATO demonstrations all over Afghanistan, and the murder of NATO soldiers.  The deliberate murder of civilians was followed only by local protests and, as far as I can recall, there were no violent reprisals.

            It is time we realized that training indigenous armies and police forces and supplying them with weapons, does nothing to prevent those weapons and that training being used against us.   Some of the Argentinian army officers involved in the invasion of the Falklands, had been trained at Sandhurst.  The Taliban today are finding that the killing skills that our Intelligence Services and those of the Americans instilled in the ‘gallant Mojihadin’ a generation ago to kill the Soviet foreign infidels, are now being found to be equally effective at killing foreign infidels from NATO.

            When French NATO soldiers were shot by those they had helped to train, the French Government promptly withdrew its troops from Afghanistan.  My only reservation about our government taking the same course, is concern about the fate of Afghans who have been foolish enough to accept western values when they lose our protection.  There was a little-publicised bloodbath of ‘collaborators’ when Soviet troops withdrew.  I very much fear that our withdrawal would be the prelude to another slaughter of the innocents.  But that, I think, is bound to happen whether we withdraw early or ‘according to plan’ in a year or two’s time.

Danegeld?

          I learn from a tv news bulletin that there is international agreement to donate billions of pounds (mainly from the UK, Germany and Japan) to the Afghan Government ‘for development’, to buy their  loyalty when our troops are withdrawn.  Let’s hope it works.  I am reminded of a piece of verse that my wife Heather and I wrote many years ago to amuse our grandchildren, about King Ethelred’s attempt,  at the end of the first millennium, to buy off marauding Danes.

‘The Danes rampage throughout the land’, said poor King Ethelred.

‘No-one is ever safe from them, not even home in bed.

They’re worse than football hooligans, they’re worse than lager-louts,

And we’re not much good at fighting them.  We’ve lost the last three bouts!

I’ve heard that Norsemen can be bribed. I think that what I’ll do

Is scour the land for golden coins and find out if it’s true’

‘You there, the Danish leader! – yes it’s you I am addressing.

Let’s get this deal sewn up today – and let’s have no more messing.

Just take these three large bags of gold and sail away to Denmark.

First sign here, on the dotted line.  You can’t? Well, make a pen-mark.

‘Why, thank-you and God bless you sir. You’ve no more cause to fear.

We’ll sail away this very day;

See you again – next year!

  

Week 27 2012 3rd July 2012

Tendring Topics......on Line

 ‘Education, Education, Education’

            The above three words were an indication of the important priorities of one of Tony Blair’s governments.  I remember that, on an official visit to Moscow, he even managed to introduce this slogan into a Russian tv programme.  However the educational standard of a great many school leavers of recent years suggest that not many people took those three words very seriously.

            A regular blog reader who is founder and managing director of a small but flourishing business (the kind of business man that David Cameron, George Osborne and their colleagues hold up to us as a shining example) is unimpressed with the educational ‘progress’ of the past forty years.   Commenting on my recent blog about the Education Secretary’s suggestions for the future direction of primary education, and his more recent proposal that the GCSE school leaving exams should be abolished and the more-demanding ‘O’ Level GCE exams restored, he says that although he isn’t an admirer of Mr Gove, the Education Secretary, he does think that it would be a good thing if all the ‘advances in education’ that have been made since the 1960s (when he was at school!) could be reversed.

            He had recently seen an ‘O’ level examination maths exam paper from the 1960s and had had an opportunity to compare it with a GCSE paper set last year.  The 1960s questions were as challenging (simultaneous equations and the like) as he remembered them but those set last year were trivial in the extreme.   Here are a couple of them ‘Write this number in words – 1,234’ and ‘A worker was paid £5.20 per hour, he did four hours work. What should he be paid?’

            And that was for an exam at the end of five years of secondary education.  One would really expect an intelligent eleven year old to answer them correctly!  If I had found those maths questions on my maths school leaving examination in 1937 I’d have been quite sure that they were ‘trick questions’ and would have wasted valuable exam time trying to work out the catch!

            No wonder, says my correspondent, that a 40 percent pass rate has risen to 60 percent (I’m only surprised that it isn’t even higher!) and that bright children regularly get as many as ten Grade 1 passes and make a mockery of the whole system!

            Nor, he says, is it only in maths that children are unchallenged. He is an IT consultant and creator and supplier of specialised software. He says, ‘I have had enormous pressure to include a spell checker in our database system. This is because young people today make no effort to spell correctly.  They just type any old thing and expect to see red lines under the errors!  We have also been asked to ‘convert’ automatically names and addresses entered to capitalised first letters because staff aren’t used to doing that any more (well, you wouldn’t when you text, would you?). I notice that whenever they enter a new address they do it all in lower case!

            Nowadays, so my correspondent claims, it is possible to get right through University without ever even learning to speak properly!  Such young people are at a huge disadvantage in the world of business and are left totally without self-confidence in any professional or representational situation.

Hitting the Target

          When I was a little boy of eight or nine I joined what we then called ‘the Wolf Cubs’.   They were the junior branch of the Scout Movement and are nowadays, I think, called Cub Scouts.  The ‘Wolf Cubs’ were based on Kipling’s Jungle Book, passages from which were often read at our Meetings.  Each group was called ‘a pack’ (I was in the 11^th Ipswich, St. Thomas’ Church pack) and it was led by Akela, in our case a very earnest and enthusiastic lady called Miss Eva Hack, in her early thirties, wearing a scout uniform with a khaki skirt.  Ladies didn’t wear slacks, and were even less likely to wear shorts, in those days.

            At the beginning of each meeting Akela would call out ‘Pack! Pack! Pack! To which we would shout ‘Pack!’ and gather in a circle, with her in the middle, for a ‘grand howl’.   We would then, as I remember it, recite the Cub Promise:  ‘I promise to do my best; to do my duty to God and the King, and to try to do someone a good turn every day’. Akela would then solemnly say ‘Dyb, Dyb, Dyb’. We would reply ‘We’ll Dob, Dob, Dob, Akela!’ and leap into the air.  The grand howl was over and the meeting could begin!

            Akela’s thrice repeated Dyb was an acronym of Do Your Best and our, also thrice repeated, reply was assuring her that we would Do Our Best!

Ernest Hall the Wolf Cub. Circa  1929/’30  

It really was good advice and it is advice that, throughout my life, I have tried hard to follow.  I haven’t always succeeded and my best hasn’t always been a very good best but, on the whole, if I have thought that something was worth doing, then I’ve really put my heart and soul into it.  This blog, for instance, I usually complete several days before publication on the web.  Then I read it through again and again, altering a word here and a phrase there until I feel that the grammar and syntax are as good as I can get them.

            Similarly when I was Tendring Council’s PRO or, earlier, Clacton’s Housing Manager I really put everything I had into the job.  I rarely took my full holiday entitlement, and certainly never watched the clock or took the odd day off with an imaginary malady.

            Joy and satisfaction in one’s job isn’t required these days.  It’s no good getting too interested in it and attached to it anyway.  We’re constantly being told that there’s no such thing as a ‘job for life’.  The work force has to be flexible.  You may be made redundant tomorrow and have to train for some quite different occupation to meet the demands of ‘the Market’.

            Nowadays it is assumed that nobody works for job satisfaction – money is everybody’s principal, if not sole, motivation.   To spur us on and make sure that we keep our noses to the grindstone we are given, usually by ‘human resources management’ experts, ‘targets’ that we are expected to meet. Salesmen have a fixed target of successful sales.  A receptionist at a busy office might be expected to deal efficiently with a certain number of visitors per hour; Casualties brought into a hospital accident and emergencies department shouldn’t have to wait more than, say an hour, for attention and should be discharged or passed on to another hospital department within three hours.  Social Workers are expected to deal with a fixed number of cases every week.  Schools are expected to get a given number of good GCSE passes.

            The target can be used as a threat.  ‘The government is making it easier to sack unprofitable workers and if you can’t reach the target I’ll have to look for others who can’.  It can also discourage staff from working beyond the target.  ‘If we do that they’ll simply raise the target – and then we’ll be in dead trouble when we’re really busy’.

            At the other end of the income scale, managers regularly reach and pass targets that they themselves may have set, thereby ‘earning’ enormous bonuses on top of their already inflated salaries;  bribes to persuade them to ‘do their best’, something that was once taken for granted.

            Hit that target!   That’s today’s message – and never mind how many corners you have to cut, how many dodgy deals you may need to strike and how much human tragedy you may cause (that’s just ‘collateral damage’) on the way.

            I reckon that if there were wolfcub packs today as there were in the 1930s Akela would no longer urge her flock to DYB! DYB! DYB! and expect to be answered, ‘We’ll DOB! DOB! DOB!’ but RYT! RYT! RYT! (reach your target, reach your target, reach your target) and be answered,  ‘We’ll ROT, ROT, ROT’ ( We’ll Reach our target, Reach our target, Reach our target).

            How very appropriate!

 Integrity in 'the City'? - Don't Bank on it!

          Last week I commented on the revelation of incompetence that inconvenienced – at the very least – thousands of bank customers.

           

This week there have been much more serious revelations;  of banking dishonesty, directly affecting Barclays (I reckon that the bank’s 17^th century Quaker founders must be turning in their graves!) but suspected of involving other national banks as well.   There are demands for a public enquiry on the lines of the Leveson Enquiry into press misconduct, and demands for criminal prosecution.  The response, so far, of Barclays Chief Executive that he won’t be accepting his usual few-million pounds bonus demonstrates how little he understands the scale of public anger*.

            What we are seeing is evidence of widespread dishonesty and corruption in  ‘the City’, a field of commercial activity that has been regarded, by politicians at least, with awe and respect.  This is where self-made billionaires are engaged in activities that ordinary mortals can’t hope to understand but upon which, so we have been told, the UK’s prosperity depends.  Its most favoured denizens aren’t just ‘millionaires’ in the sense that their assets are worth in excess of a million pounds. Their annual incomes are in excess of a million – and, of course, that’s before they collect their annual million-pounds-plus bonuses!

  Because ‘it might harm the city’ David Cameron has distanced us from our mainland European partners and vetoed legislation that might narrow the gap between rich and poor.  The denizens of ‘the City’ were among the principal beneficiaries of George Osborne’s ill-fated Budget.  One provision in that Budget that has remained unscathed is the iniquitous reduction in the upper rate of income tax, affecting only those with an income in excess of £150,000 pounds a year!

One thinks of the Conservative Party as being the natural champions of ‘The City’ and, of course, its finances are as reliant on ‘City’ donations as the Labour Party is dependent on those of Trade Unions.  However, as Conservative spokesmen have not been slow to point out, New Labour was no less blind to the machinations of high finance.  A New Labour Government helped to free the Financial Sector from some of the tiresome regulations that were hampering its activities.

I have remarked before in this blog that, just as Ramsey MacDonald betrayed Labour’s principles because he allowed himself to become dazzled by Duchesses Tony Blair and his colleagues were blinded by billionaires!

Not everyone was blind though.  The supporters of the Occupy Movement who protested on the steps of St Paul’s (remember the Mail’s scathing comments about them) – and in Wall Street, New York; the Red Square, Moscow and a score of other world-wide venues, may not have known quite what it was that they wanted. They did know exactly what they didn’t want though – an immoral and unfair economic system manipulated by a handful of self-serving greedy and powerful people, which penalises the poor, the disadvantaged and the disabled, and pours wealth into the laps of the already wealthy.  May the Occupy Movement’s cause prosper!

*Late News (2nd July 2012)  Yesterday Bob Diamond, Barclays Chief Executive, informed his colleagues that he would be leading the Bank's reconstruction, made necessary by the current scandal.    Today - under pressure - he has resigned his post.  Those worried in case he'll become another of those 'benefit scroungers' the rest of us have to support, can be reassured.  I have just heard on Radio 4 that he'll probably get a golden handshake of between £20 and £30 million!  That'll be a relief to Daily Mail readers.

           

           

              

  

Week 26 2012

Tendring Topics.....on line

Quite Legal……but Immoral!

          That, you may have thought, was an accusation that might be made about some of the activities of money-lenders, bookmakers, escort agencies, massage parlours and similar dubious individuals or institutions.  They though are all just small fry compared with the big operators who (obviously for a reasonable fee) can make sure that the rich and famous, the great and the good, get away with paying only a fraction of the income tax of us lesser mortals.

            I have been protesting about the iniquity of legal tax avoidance for years. A particularly flagrant case has at last caught the attention of David Cameron our Prime Minister. His shock/horror at finding that a well-known comedian’s financial arrangements had the perfectly legal effect of reducing the percentage of his income-tax payments  to lower than that of the council employee who empties his dustbins, spurred him into making his judgemental statement about the morality of income tax avoidance.

            I’m not going to pretend that I understand the details of the tax avoidance scheme with which this individual was involved but I understand that his income was first paid into an off-shore account from which he received no income but ‘borrowed’ all the money that he needed.  He, of course, was just the one tax avoider who was singled out and pilloried (and has, as a result, withdrawn from the scheme), but there are scores, perhaps hundreds, of others involved in the same or other similar schemes.  I suspect that if all the tax avoidance loopholes were closed, we would be well on our way to solving the deficit problem that is responsible for so much of the austerity that the government has imposed upon us during the past two years.

            My own solution to the problem would be to tackle it from its source.  I would make the principal source of the national revenue a ‘citizenship tax’, a percentage of the gross income of every single one of us without exception or exemption, as our payment for the very considerable privilege of being a citizen of the United Kingdom. Evading, by any means at all, that basic ‘membership fee’ would be considered to be as irresponsible and antisocial as drink-driving is today! I think it likely that fifteen or twenty percent of income overall would be more than adequate.  This percentage would amount to a very small sum from the very poor (just as percentage increases to their income are very small) but a very large sum from the seriously wealthy.   Once that citizenship tax had been paid, what happened to the remainder of the taxpayer’s income (which, for the seriously wealthy would still be a very large sum) would be no concern of the state.  It could be paid into an off-shore account, donated to charity, used to buy a football team, a yacht, or a home on the shores of the Mediterranean, frittered away on extravagant living – or saved for ‘a rainy day’.

 No - it isn’t going to happen – not this year, not in this decade, probably not in this century.

In the meantime I hope that our Prime Minister and government will cease wringing their hands at the immorality of tax avoidance and close the legal loopholes that make this avoidance possible.  If they can’t do it then it is time they were replaced by a government that can – and will!

A Forgotten Anniversary

            I am often awake at about 5.00 am.  I usually listen to the 5.30 am news headlines, weather forecast and Prayer for the Day on Radio 4, before getting up at 5.45 am with the arrival of Farming Today.  Just before Prayer for the Day listeners are reminded of news items that made the headlines on that day in bygone years.  Last Thursday  (21^st June) for instance, we were told that Prince William had been born on 21^st June in 1982 and that it was therefore his thirtieth birthday, and that on that date in 1945 American forces had finally succeeded in taking the Pacific Island of Okinawa from the Japanese.  There were one or two other anniversaries that I have forgotten but there was one, certainly front page news at the time, which was conspicuously ignored.

            It was the capture of Tobruk by General Rommel’s German Afrikakorps in 1942; not quite as disastrous as the fall of Singapore to the Japanese earlier in that same year, but certainly the nadir of British fortunes in North Africa – a situation that was to be dramatically reversed a few months later with the Battle of El Alamein.

            The fall of Tobruk was seventy years – a lifetime – ago, but it is not an anniversary that I shall ever forget. I was one of the 30,000 British and allied troops taken prisoner on that day and destined to spend the remainder of World War II as a PoW.

            The eight-gun Medium Artillery Battery of which I was a lowly member had been in almost continuous action from the day in late May (a few days after my 21^st birthday) when Rommel had launched his offensive in the neighbourhood of Gazala, some forty miles west of Tobruk.  Continuously on the move, we had in mid-June become part of the Tobruk garrison, defending the perimeter in a position to the south-east of the town and port.

            On 19^th June we learned that we were cut off from the main British forces but were assured by ‘Military Intelligence’ (we used to say cynically that, in descending order, there were three kinds of intelligence – human, animal, and military!) that the main German forces were by-passing Tobruk and moving eastward towards Cairo and the Nile delta.  We settled down for the night expecting a long siege.

            We were woken before dawn by the thunder of artillery fire, the roar of low-flying aircraft, the rattle of machinegun fire and explosion of bombs.  The enemy attack had begun – and it was clearly concentrated on our sector of Tobruk’s perimeter!   We manned the guns and, for several hours, fired at unseen targets, our guns directed by an Observation Post Officer and Assistant in a forward position. Our 4.5mm gun/howitzers were designed and built to batter down fortifications, not to be aimed at relatively small, moving targets like armoured cars and tanks. Our guns targeted the terrain over which the enemy tanks were advancing – but if the tank commander made sure that they were well separated as they advanced he could be certain that some, probably most, would come through unscathed.

            Meanwhile Stuka bombing aircraft were flying without opposition overhead (on that fateful day we had no support either from the Royal Navy or the RAF) and enemy shells were falling all around our gun position.  ‘Airburst’ shells exploding overhead were particularly deadly.  Much of the force of those bursting on impact was absorbed by the desert sand.

            Our targets were getting closer and closer.  Before we could be over-run we were ordered to ‘limber up’ our guns and withdraw to a new position to the north-west from which we could see, in the distance, enemy tanks heading toward the town and port.  Again we opened fire, this time within sight of our targets.  The dust and smoke of battle made it impossible to see whether our shells were having any effect.

            As darkness fell, the firing on both sides subsided. The air reeked of burnt cordite and of smoke from burning vehicles.  It was painfully obvious to us that Rommel’s attack had succeeded and that the centre of Tobruk was already in enemy hands.  We laid down to sleep beside our guns on the desert sand with the prospect of death, maiming and/or captivity on the following day.  Exhausted, we all slept soundly anyway!

            With the dawn a German spotter plane flew low overhead.  We reached for the captured Italian rifles that most of us had acquired and fired an ineffective volley.  We ‘stood to’ on the guns awaiting an order to fire. We fully expected to be ordered to make a heroic ‘last stand’ and no doubt we would have done so. Fate though, decreed otherwise. A radio message from the garrison commander, a South African, General Klopper ordered us to disable our guns, set fire to our transport and await our victors’ orders.  He had surrendered the garrison to avoid further pointless bloodshed.

            Thus, I became a PoW.  I spent the next almost–three-years, first in a large PoW camp in Italy and later in a small working camp in Germany. When the Third Reich collapsed in May 1945, I liberated myself (with a great deal of help from the Soviet Army!) and made my way through Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia ultimately to the British army – and home!

            There was an unexpected sequel to my capture at Tobruk and my subsequent life as a PoW.  Years later (it must have been in the early 1970s) my wife and I, with our two then-teenage sons were enjoying a camping holiday in Austria.  Taking a  trip to the summit of the Muttersberg near the small town of Bludenz in Vorarlberg province, we found ourselves sharing a cable car with an almost identical German family.  I commented on the father’s very good English.  ‘Yes’, he said, ‘I was a PoW in England for three years and worked on a farm there’.  Shaking hands I told him that I too had been a PoW but had spent 18 months in Italy and 18 months in Germany – that accounted for the fact that his English was much better than my German.  I then asked him – what one PoW always asks another! – ‘Where were you captured?’   He replied, ‘Tobruk’ adding, in case I had never heard of the place, ‘that’s in North Africa!’    I had been captured there on 21^st June 1942.  He had been captured a few months later, subsequent to the Battle of El Alamein!

            It’s a small world!

 A minor banking crisis!

             Nat.West, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulsterbank are banks which last week spectacularly failed to perform what most of us see as their main purpose – looking after our money, adding incoming sums to our accounts, paying our bills, and repaying, promptly and efficiently when we need it, the money we have entrusted to their care.  I wonder if those banks are managed by some of those brilliant financial supermen who need  a salary of millions of pounds a year  to persuade them to turn up at their offices, plus the promise of further five-figure bribes (or bonuses) if they’re to give us their very best?   Offer them less, so we’re told, and they’d go elsewhere.

            When my family and I first moved to Clacton in 1956 I signed on with the Co-op Bank, largely because they imposed no bank charges on those who kept their accounts in credit, and they had a branch office on the corner of Rosemary Road and the Grove, just a couple of hundred yards from the office in the Town Hall where I worked.  That was over half a century ago.  The Co-op Bank is not one of the UK’s largest and most prestigious, but it has never needed to be ‘bailed out’ by us taxpayers. It has never let me down and it has an ethical investment policy that allows me to be confident that my money, entrusted to their care, isn’t used to buy armaments, to exploit the poor, or to help prop up dodgy enterprises or autocratic regimes. The nearest branch is in Colchester but the bank is easily accessible by phone or on the internet. I can pay cheques into my current account at any post office and, again from any post office or cash machine, I can use my Co-op VISA debit card to withdraw cash from that account.  Using the internet I can instantly check the state of my current account and details of payments and withdrawals.  I have no complaints.

The Weather!

          This is a subject on which, this year, words almost fail me; a winter drought that the water companies assured us would take months of steady rain to remedy, followed by a late spring and early summer of high winds, torrential rain (some areas have had a month’s rainfall in two or three hours), floods, high winds and – just occasionally – warm sunshine!   We are just at the beginning of my ninety-second summer and I have never seen another like it! It’s true that I can’t remember much about my first two or three summers I but have been credibly informed that in the year (1921) in which I arrived, the summer was particularly warm and dry.

            Surely no-one can now deny that we are in the midst of a period of world climatic change and fewer and fewer can possibly believe, as our MP does, that human activity has no responsibility for it.  Our ancestors would have been convinced that we had incurred the anger of God (or perhaps of ‘the gods’) and so perhaps, in a sense, we have.   If not God, then certainly Nature is reacting to our selfishness, greed and our profligate use of fossil fuels.

            I am only thankful that Clacton and the Tendring District generally have, as is often the case, escaped the flooding and devastation that has occurred elsewhere - and we have had more than our fair share of the occasional warmth and sunshine!

           

           

Week 25 2012 21.6.2012

Tendring Topics......on Line

 'Just good Friends!'

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

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

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

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

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

 What goes around, comes around

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

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

           

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A timely reminder

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

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

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

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

Those WMDs!

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

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

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