29th July 2018

Yesterday was the weekly BBC Radio 4 question/answer programme about topical news items. On the inevitable discussion about Brexit, at last views were given on whether the UK can survive on its own.  Some people are already stockpiling food(!) whilst others talked about bringing back our long-lost British manufacturing industries. From childhood, I recall world class British trademarks like Rolls Royce, Bentley, Land Rover, plus jewellery, cutlery, pottery, Axminster, Wilton, Cadbury’s, the wool and cotton industries etc. Some marks still exist, of course, but are sadly now owned or made elsewhere. Would it be so difficult to reinstate such factories and buy back the original brand names that our forefathers worked so hard to establish? Think of all that British goodwill over many decades, now lost. Couldn’t we at least emulate the French in charging less insurance for home-grown products, thereby reinforcing the impetus to buy British? Sounds like war time spirit all over again. Him indoors says even that’s probably made by the Chinese. Enough to drive a man to drink..

Blog extra

UK politics is full of accusations against the Labour party of Holocaust denial. Such thought processes tend to happen in those who are desperate to justify their innate anti-semitism, however illogical, and despite reams of historical proof and witting testimony.  It’s over 70 years since WW2. Does the world never learn?  

I’d love to start a discussion on Facebook over who made the right decision in those dark days: Churchill in England  on declaring war on Hitler and everything he stood for, or Petain in France on signing an armistice with Germany in a misguided attempt to protect his people from war? 

Everyone should make sure they are aware of what actually happened both before and during WW2 in the UK, Germany and France. Read LAMPLIGHT (authl.it/4q0), then VICHYSSOISE (authl.it/52l) and let me know your opinion.  If you’re quick, you can get each of them for just 99p/99c until Friday 27th.

Only with education can we hope to change hearts and minds.

22nd July 2018

On Friday our local Conservative councillor knocked on our door. He was interested to hear we’d spent some time in France and inevitably asked: why did you go and why did you return? Clearly I pointed him to my books Pensioners in Paradis and From Paradis to Perdition. But we also discussed the increasing problem of urban knife crime, not just here in Bham but around the world. In France, Macron’s security aide is facing the sack for violently beating protesters. Elsewhere, with Trump, Putin and Kim seemingly now bosom buddies, seems to me that defence spending needs to be rationalised away from old, war-type troop deployments to inner city protection from youth gangs and cyber warfare. Local police just can’t deal with it any more. With Mrs May too busy making a Brexit camel from the idealised thoroughbred horse, and the EU leader Mrs Merkel busy agreeing gas deals with Putin, who’s going to solve local, urban issues? Maybe I should write another book.

15th July 2018

A week of hopes dashed, resignations and a visit. In the end England came 4th in football’s World Cup. Reasonable, I suppose, in that - unlike the US World Series - we really mean all the countries of the world. Upsetting, though, as the whole nation expected to bring the Cup home again. And then, on the crumbling political front, we suffered the ignominy of two senior members of the Cabinet resigning, making the already shaky Brexit negotiations ever more fragile. Then, along came the President of the USA, putting his foot in it in his own inimitable way. First he appears to upstage HM The Queen by standing in front of her. Then, at a stroke, he allegedly suggested Boris Johnson would make a better PM than Mrs May and stated that the new white paper - so painstakingly put together by the government to allow us to continue trading with the EU after Brexit - would mean no future trade deal with the US. Fake news? More like an own goal Mr Trump.

8th July 2018

Thursday was the NHS’s 70th birthday. I was born a few months beforehand, a time when my father was still in the army and we couldn’t afford a doctor, so my mother, in labour,  had to bang on the wall to fetch our neighbour. But the following 5 July Aneurin Bevan brought nurses, doctors, pharmacists, opticians and dentists all together under one organisation. Medicine was now free for all at the point of delivery. But it was clear from the start that money would run out, so in 1952 prescription charges of 1s (5p) were introduced and a flat fee of £1 for standard dental work. However, since then decades of immigration have increased the population, people now live longer and modern expensive drugs mean that Bevan’s original concept simply can’t cope. If we’d stayed in the EU, at some point our beloved NHS would probably have morphed into a hybrid EU health system. So, what to do? No amount of funding will ever be enough, especially as our population continues to rise. We may have to follow the French route of 70/30 split - where everybody bar the old/infirm has to pay something. That’s the only way to keep the system going. Happy birthday NHS!

1st July 2018

The most compelling image of the week was not the football but the one of Prince William standing silently, with outstretched arm on the ancient, biblical stones of the Western wall...
Today in France marks the burial at the vast, domed Pantheon on Paris’s left bank of a remarkable woman, Simone Veil. As a survivor of the Holocaust, she and her family joined the 76,000 Jewish people forcibly expelled from France during WWII. Who’d have thought, back then in the worst of times, that a slim, slight woman would rise in France’s patriarchal society to become France’s choice today to be placed amongst the country’s ‘great men’.
....How fitting, then, that in the very same week that Prince William drew the world’s attention to the Holocaust by visiting the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem, that a resilient French Holocaust survivor and champion of the Jewish people, should at last be remembered for her achievements. That is why I wrote Lamplight and Vichyssoise - one small step by me too, lest we forget.