davidsberry

I found myself in new social territory yesterday. I attended the usual Remembrance Day service in North Berwick with my Rear Admiral councillor colleague. We hustled along to the war memorial to take the salute and found the dais that had been properly placed earlier in the day had disappeared. Someone either was a little late with Trick or Treat or was five months early with April Fools.

That it reappeared by next morning didn’t help us much because, standing at the kerb did not distinguish the saluting party from the crowd, despite the Rear Adm’s sword and resplendent uniform: the ex-CSM parade marshal missed the ‘eyes left’ and the parade went by in some confusion. The wreath-laying ceremony rather redeemed it—more wreaths from more organisations than I have ever seen being laid in splendid weather in front of a big turnout of locals. But that wasn’t my new social territory.

Most pleasing to me was a big turnout of active military. As part of my cooncil travels I had attended an “Operation Firm Base” meeting at Redford Barracks where Edinburgh territorial 105 Regiment, Royal Artillery is based. As part of their effort to be more part of the community, I had invited them to join North Berwick’s Remembrance Day, which they duly did.

As well as a section of gunners and NCOs in uniform, there was a fair bit of brass, including two Lt Colonels, a Major and two Captains. Given that veteran numbers in the parade have been wearing thinner each year (and no reflection at all on the firemen, lifeboatmen, etc who regularly march) this real military presence was a splendid boost on what is, after all, a day about their forebears.

The officers turned up at the Legion for the traditional hot bowl of soup and a little socialising. I think our Legion has never seen so many pips and crowns at one time. And so, while the usual groups hogged the booths, I was left standing with the officers, strategically positioned within a few feet of the bar. And, making conversation as you do, I was gradually struck by a strange feeling.

Of the five officers, two actually live in North Berwick. I had never seen them before. Although they were from several branches (signals and engineers, as well as artillery), there was a lingua franca that they shared to deal with this novel—and not entirely comfortable—social situation. But when the talk turned to local issues and politics, even those who lived in the town appeared poorly informed about civil matters, even how mundane stuff like bin emptying and grass cutting got done.

I mean no disrespect to any of them: they made an effort to attend our ceremony and even went the extra mile to come socialise at the Legion. But I could not quite place the feeling that overcame me until I remembered: it was the same feeling I had when the mayor of Kertiminde or English language students from Spree-Neisse visited—that of entertaining perfectly nice people visiting from a foreign country.

It wasn’t just in conversation about the council; it was about Scotland, its culture, its local quirks and, most of all, its rapidly developing sense of self that seemed to leave them rather baffled. These perfectly civil, well educated, articulate men could have been in Raffles bar in Singapore just before things got rum with Johnny Jap or on the up-country mess verandah far from Nairobi in between swatting at Mau Mau incursions. One of them spoke of being glad his ‘tour’ here in Scotland was soon done and, nice though it was here, he could go ‘home’.

Maybe it was just an over-active imagination but, civil, polite and friendly as they all were, I could not shake a feeling of standing there as a colonial native, tentatively mixing with smartly turned out officers from the garrison of occupation.

No matter what FIFA says, it seems entirely appropriate for all of us to remember those who served in the British armed forces and most especially those who returned home disabled or who did not return home at all. For the first two centuries of this Union, we Scots were willing and active partners in the great Kiplingesque cause of building the British Empire, which became a cornerstone not only of prosperity but of pride and of identity. The British Army and Royal Navy were instruments of its policy and, although the concept of Remembrance Day came from WWI, a grateful nation celebrated its heroes, whether at Trafalgar or Rourke’s Drift, the Nile or Inkerman.

And, whether press-ganged jolly tar or lifer redcoat, life in the empire-building forces was harsh and brutal: for them to survive, courage and fortitude against the enemy had to be augmented by courage and fortitude against a harsh military regime imposed by the cat o’ nine tails and the lash. “Ah” said Wellington, inspecting his troops on the eve of Waterloo “the Eniskillens; I hang and flog more of them than the rest of the army put together”. Often, the men suffered from the bigotry or stupidity of its commanders, whether under Cornwallis at Yorktown or Chelmsford at Isandlhwana. Seldom did they get to retire with dignity, with enough of a pension to see them through old age.

In the first half of its third century, the empire and its forces were called on for what might be considered more noble reasons than colonial ambition. The two World Wars taxed Britain in all senses of the word. Whether WWI was against German aggression or a kind of collective, self-destructive hubris by European powers is a moot point. What is a fact is that, for four years several million soldiers died under machine gun and artillery fire disputing trivial amounts of shattered land along a thin, bloody corridor running across France, Italy, the Balkans, Ukraine and Poland. It was also, in retrospect, the swan song of empire. It is little wonder that Remembrance and its symbolic poppy came out of the utter carnage of a “war to end all wars”.

But it didn’t. Easy though it is to blame Allied negotiators for fostering German resentment through the harsh Versailles Treaty, the fact was that peace had come because everyone was fought to a standstill by the horrors of mechanical war. In WW2, this then developed to such a pitch that lives were actually saved at the front, even as the civilians suffered disproportionately. But WW2 is generally regarded as a ‘good’ war: the enemy was clear, the cause of defending against aggression obvious and resulting ‘Dunkirk’ spirit under pressure was undoubtedly Britain’s ‘finest hour’. And whether sweating in a Crusader tank in the desert or in a Japanese PoW work camp in Malaya or freezing in the tail turret of a Lancaster over the Ruhr or on the ice-bound bridge of a corvette bucking its way towards Murmansk, there are countless examples deserving of remembrance for the terrible hardships they had to endure.

Since then, wars have been less clear-cut and the morals rather fuzzier. Was fighting the Mau-Mau in Kenya or Eoka in Cyprus of the communists in Malaya simply postponing the inevitable end of empire? Were the well executed but ultimately futile Suez or Korean or Falkland operations just throwbacks to an earlier glory of which our armed forces were now barely capable? And whatever your morality over Kosovo or Iraq or Afghanistan, were any feasible independent of the only real world power: the US.

But in all of these post-WWII/Cold War conflicts, the British armed forces have done what was asked of them without demur, maintaining throughout a high level of professional competence that continues to earn the respect of other countries. Whatever your political stance on such conflicts, our veterans deserve the same respect that their fathers and grandfathers bought so dearly.

As readers will have gathered from an earlier blog, I am no great fan of British colonial leadership. But for all that we on this island have achieved in the world on the back of the indefatigable Tommy, whether in trench or Tornado, who did his bit with humour and humanity, I will be at my war memorial like other millions to give thanks and remember those millions who risked everything to serve, especially those “who grow not old, as we that are left grow old.”

I woke this morning to Good Morning Scotland extolling the virtues of East Lothian Council and its house buy-back programme. My colleague Cllr. Stuart Currie was on being interviewed on why this was a good idea and was backed up by the housing minister, Keith Brown MSP and several spokespeople for the housing market. For those of you who may wonder who it’s a good deal to spend public money in some cases buying back houses, sold to their original tenants for rather less, allow me to fill in the background detail.

Like other councils, East Lothian started off around 1980 with an appreciable stock of public housing. The Tenants’ Rights, Etc. (Scotland) Act 1980 introduced the Right to Buy to tenants of local authorities with the following conditions:

• qualifying period of three years;
• minimum discount of 33% after three years, rising with length of tenancy by 1% each year to a maximum of 50% after 20 years;
• tenants had a ‘Right to Loan’ of 100% of the purchase price from the local authority landlord;
• the right to buy at a fixed price – upon payment by the tenant of £100, the property price was frozen for two years; and
• disincentives for the buying tenant to sell on the open market, by the ‘clawback’ of discount from resale after three years.

This scheme worked so well that 25 years on ELC stock had dropped from 20,000 to under 8,000 and many had further changed hands on the normal housing market. Unlike some areas where the stock was poor, ELC maintained its housing to a high standard. This, combined with many improvements made by new house owners meant that the stigma of public housing that grew elsewhere didn’t really happen in East Lothian where the distinction between public and private housing has blurred.

For reasons best known to themselves, the previous Labour administration felt they should not build more houses in case they were sold off but also eschewed a range of Housing Associations (who were supposed to take up the slack) to focus on the Homes for Life Partnership in Haddington that was effectively under direct control.

Unfortunately, instead of delivering the 500 houses in three years as promised in 2002, HfLP failed to even deliver 300 houses in five years. Because EL tenants move seldom and those with a house knew what a deal they had, affordable housing to rent became like hen’s teeth and the local waiting list grew to over 4,000.

Meantime, under pressure from developers and Edinburgh city, successive local plans allowed a myriad of private housing developments, totalling over 5,000, to be built all across the county. Fewer than 5% of the total were affordable. This meant that the bulk of residents in those new houses were from outside the county. While we welcome all to discover the joys of living in East Lothian, this middle-to-upper range build skewed demographics in several towns, where a young generation was forced to live at home after leaving school and many local shop staff, artisans and hand/craft workers forced to live elsewhere.

But, since May 2007, despite a major economic downturn which has virtually frozen private house building (and a new 25% affordable requirement in East Lothian), ELC has succeeded in building over 400 affordable house with a similar number at various stages in the pipeline. It has a achieved this by having its new SNP-led Administration put this at the very top of its priorities for delivery to local residents. This has been made possible by pursuing a number of interlocking measures:

1. Full use was made of discretionary borrowing powers available to councils. As ELC’s business plan for housing ensures that rents for new houses covers the interest paid on the loan to build it, this has resulted in a self-sustaining “virtuous cycle” of building. These new houses are not subject to right-to-buy
2. While happy to build council houses, ELC have been very flexible in their approaches, which have included purchasing homes from private developers, having private developers build to spec, enabling housing associations to build where they already held the land and working with the Scottish Government so that additional capital funds were made available from them.
3. All houses built have been to specs superior to current private homes in that insulation standards were much higher, room dimensions more generous and a proportion of homes were purposely built to suit those with mobility or other difficulties. This has been confirmed by the delight of all new tenants.
4. Allocation policy—including where the council puts tenants in housing associations homes—has been altered to preserve communities and avoid creating unnecessary social problems. Until 2010, in a well intentioned effort to support the most vulnerable, virtually all new homes went to such people. Since many people with social problems were bunched together, there was no natural support system. The change was to allocate most new homes as transfers to existing tenants in good standing. This pleased them and then an equivalent number of homes (but scattered through well established, functional communities) was where the vulnerable were housed.
5. Care was taken to continue to invest in existing stock with an ambitious and ongoing programme of kitchen, bathroom, heating, fence and electrical upgrades that ensure that ELC stock remains among the best in the country. This has proved possible while still retaining 2nd-lowest rents in Scotland.