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Issue No. 86 Spring 2022
Paul Laxton
LOOK BACK IN ANGER
Greetings and felicitations to all our readers. It’s good to be back, but not under the circumstances I would have chosen. Let me begin by thanking Graham Mumby-Croft not just for deputising in my enforced absence, but also for producing two superb issues of the newsletter. I am grateful to the Committee for their unstinting support and to individual members who made contact with me. Graham officiated at my wife’s funeral, and I can thoroughly recommend his services in his new capacity as a funeral celebrant. Oddly enough I also have a former colleague who has become a wedding celebrant after retirement from HMPS, but I have no plans to enlist her services!
One job I don’t want back is PGA Conference Chair where Graham Mumby-Croft showed his star quality last October coping with aplomb under the pressure of unexpected amendments, card votes and other procedural matters, ably aided by Gerry Hendry in his capacity of Chair of Standing Orders.
Well, the clocks have gone forward, there is that feeling of warmth on the neck when the sun is out, and after just over two years, we are free of covid restrictions, both at home and when travelling
abroad. Two years ago, in my editorial I wrote that we would endure the most draconian restrictions on our civil liberties since World War Two, and I wasn’t wrong. More pertinently, I also wrote that some of those given unfettered power would prove unfit to wield it. That certainly proved to be true. The shocking treatment of our elderly living out their days in care homes came to the fore very swiftly. We had police commanders confronting people sitting in parks but ignoring the mob which threw a statue into Bristol docks. We had idiots who prevented the sale of children’s pajamas in Wales on the basis that they were non-essential goods. We were asked to ‘grass up’ our neighbours if we spotted them breaking the rules. The only thing missing was the Stasi Lastly, we endured the most unfeeling bureaucracy when our loved ones were stricken with Covid or dying of a terminal illness.
It’s no surprise that people are angry with politicians and officials who have been caught out breaking the rules they forced on us mere mortals. The Inevitable Inquiry, when it comes, has to go much deeper than whether or not lockdown came too late, because that is essentially a blame game for political advantage. The Inquiry needs to look at the wider damage inflicted, not just on the economy, but on the elderly, on mental health, on how the NHS became little more than the Covid Health Service, and how the education of our children and university students was disrupted, sometimes by educators themselves. Most of all it has to ask what damage has been done to the concept of our being a free society, and crucially, how that can be repaired.
No sooner had I finished typing the final draft of this editorial than came another threat to our freedom, the ultimate threat, that of nuclear war, as a consequence of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Our sufferings under Covid bureaucracy are nothing compared to those of the brave Ukrainian people. Let us hope that somehow world leaders can bring Putin swiftly to his senses and end his senseless war.
PAUL LAXTON, EDITOR
Graham Mumby-Croft
(This Edition)
