Our children made good progress at school and we had a few outings with the Kimbolton Fireworks being the highlight. I progressed my conservatory/koi carp pond and games lawn top-dressing during some very variable and strange weather. I swapped my trusty Comart micro-computer for an Apple Mac to work on my Little Paxton History book. A busy month for dealing with financial matters and winterising our boats. Much time on political matters, FOCUS newsletters and Parish and District Council meetings whilst publicising my campaigns and holding the Tories to account, enlisting the help of Labour colleagues. I encouraged three new Parish Councillors to volunteer and responded with help and sympathy for some of my constituents’ problems, being the prime mover in ‘saving’ the Little Paxton Village Hall from a crisis of governance and driving forward my own St Neots SLD colleagues to campaign for election.
The UK economy is suffering, a raft of controversial and extreme measures is introduced by Thatcher’s government. Britain’s nurses, miners and now TV technicians and journalists are all on strike as Thatcher plays on the world stage in Poland, the US and Russia. Many public safety issues are highlighted with chemical spillages, the Kings Cross Fire report, the Pipe Alpha Inquiry and widespread deaths from AIDS. The Northern Ireland troubles have been exacerbated by the governments ‘Shoot to Kill’ policy, IRA suspects cannot be extradited to the UK because of our contravening the European Convention on Human Rights for detention without trial and now Welsh extremists are suspected of fire-bombing five London Estate offices over second English homes there.
Significantly, for Middle East affairs the right-wing Likud party in Israel under Jitshijk Shamir wins the national election after their recent violent excesses with the Orthodox Jews sustaining them in government. George Bush wins the US presidential election, as the US venue of the UN comes into question and united condemnation from all other United Nations countries after The US bans Yasser Arafat from entering to speak in the Middle East debate. The biggest human disaster is in China where the toll has risen to nearly 1000 dead after large earthquake on their border with Burma. Benazir Bhutto is re-elected in Pakistan. Nelson Mandela is giving more liberalised conditions for his South African political imprisonment as ANC anti-apartheid activists and bombers face death sentences each side of the border with Zimbabwe
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November has been a month of strange weather. Starting dry, fine sunny and cold for Bonfire Night, then snow and sleet before frosty mornings and dreadful freezing foggy weather that led to deaths and injuries on the roads. Then mild weather and some heavy rain completed the range of experience. A busy month for me which left little time to see anybody but my most immediate family; who are doing well enough.
Daniel and Debbie were finishing their exams and their school reports were not too bad. Debbie’s school teachers were happy with her progress, as she was excellent at Maths though struggling in Science. Daniel’s teachers were also quite pleased with him during his school parents’ event. We did not celebrate Bonfire Night, but their school was an ideal venue to take the family for the Rev Lancaster’s Kimbolton Fireworks Night. We had outings to the Fair on St Neots Common and to the Little Paxton Village Hall ‘November Fayre’, we joined a well-attended RSPB film and family night and a less popular visit to Fiona Lockett’s house in the St Neots Priory estate to socialise with DOOM supporters. We continued our customary family Saturday lunches at the Bridge Hotel in St Neots and joined The Remembrance Day service at St James’s Church. The girls continued their ballet lessons and Di and I still found time together for the odd relaxed evening watch TV films. Daniel was being his teenage self; just managing to help clean the Range Rover but being a problem rejecting his new leather briefcase is not being ‘cool’. Debbie was confident and doing well horse riding in Offord with a good pony and in her school orchestra but was less confident performing in the ‘Brownies Entertainments’ show to parents. Daniella was finishing off her time at Playschool and prepared for the transition by being allowed to visit the Little Paxton Primary School for story time one afternoon and being taken with the ‘Rising 5’s’ children in a coach to the Godmanchester ‘Wood-Green’ Animal Shelter. My 42nd birthday was a bit of an anti-climax for I had celebrated it the previous Sunday with my father, Fred, with his on the 2nd. The conservatory was being built this month but was still not finished by the end of it and so it was just as well I had not let them wait any longer before starting it. Frost & Co first came with two teams of men to erect the conservatory frame, then flashing and glass for the impressive lantern, as well as installing the underfloor heating after screeding the floor and fitting the piping and soak-away. They knocked through the lounge wall into the conservatory to provide a new opening and then the plasterers, plumbers and electricians all worked on the conservatory fish pool, pump, filter and electrics. This involved fitting the liner and putting the coping stones around the two sections of conservatory pond but the plumber’s efforts were disastrous, damaging alarm wires and achieving very little very slowly. I followed up by screwing down all the floorboards and relaying the carpets in the lounge. Pete and I worked hard on the Games Lawn, completing its top dressing. I managed to get back to my history book, writing, editing and typesetting some of it. A lot of time and effort was spent on working on my version of the Manorial History of Little Paxton and I had a visit from Mrs Rosa Young to compare notes on the matter, though we did not always see eye-to-eye on the detail. I got my framed maps back from Colin Howard at long last and then embarked upon a long work session sorting and selecting old computer discs for transferring data onto the Apple Mac and reorganising my office before removing the Comart microcomputer altogether after its long service. I was then able to work with much more efficiency on my history book computer files, designing my contents and preliminary pages, spelling-checking my prehistoric history chapter and drawing a diagram with a computer drawing tool. I was beginning to look forward to Christmas and a break from my meetings and the children’s social commitments after another complex exercise reconciling accounts and dealing with financial matters generally, with my accountant Roger Brittain. I had the odd hour aboard The Lady drying the bilges and then winterised both of our boats. All that sounds quite a lot to do, but it belies the fact that most of my time was being spent on Council and political matters. The trouble is that the council and other work was very time-consuming if it is to be done properly. After installing my new Macintosh microcomputer and getting help from SLD colleagues, and Bill Walston in particular (visiting him and getting disks and software copied at his Thriplow farm office), my St Neots area colleagues and I used it to layout FOCUS newsletters (my own and five other regional editions). Mike Pope and Percy Meyer were constant contributors, producing copy for content and, with Pat Meyer, typing up and photocopying the results. I also welcomed political colleague Tricia from Spaldwick who had come to write her own FOCUS newsletter. I eventually mastered PageMaker to produce our own typeset copy, so we longer relied on Bill Walston. Once produced, they had to be delivered and whilst I was first organising the delivery of my focus newsletters to Little Paxton, Southoe and Diddington. I then helped Percy with Buckden and Mike Pope with The Priory by designing detailed delivery round instructions and documentation. In other aspects of campaigning, Percy and I were publishing press releases which we also had to deliver. It was a very necessary part of the process to spend time thanking and talking to the volunteers that helped with the deliveries and I even receiving a visit from Linda to brief her about being a parish councillor. I fact, I encouraged three new sympathetic Parish Councillors to volunteer and be appointed. In return, I was receiving requests for help and sympathy with some of their problems and constituency queries. Poor Mrs Smith phoned me about being burgled one night and I visited and consoled her a little. Mr Wilmot of Carisbrooke was all upset about a planning development issue. The Council meetings were endless, I attended local Little Paxton, Southoe and Diddington Parish Meetings and a special Little Paxton Parish Planning Meeting which was organised at my behest and endorsed just about all the proposals that I had made for a village plan. I attended Pathfinder House for my Full District Council Meeting, spending considerable time spent planning my contribution, delivering motions in advance for debate and preparing questions and ideas for the agenda and conspired with Labour leader Jim Lomax to gain his support and be effective for as a sole SLD member, I needed a ‘seconder’ so that, together with the Labour members, we held the Tories to account. Afterwards, there would be more press releases to write and campaigns to progress such as their refusal to support lorry restrictions in Little Paxton. There was good coverage for my activities in the local press and several phone calls received after my focus newsletter distribution, which I followed up. Though I was allowed to sit on very few HDC Committees, I asked for papers on all of them and attended as an observer but also got to speak when my motions and questions were referred to the HDC Policy and Planning committees. I witnessed and exposed the Tories easing regulations for building dwellings on farms (which suited their agricultural councillors) and when the owners of Buckden Marina were getting away with evading planning laws. Locally, I was supporting Priory Doom, attending their committees and appraising them of the activities of the Tories who were working against their aims of protecting their rural environment and we shared the shocking news of two chemical spells in the Priory Park, St Neots, are with the neighbourhood being evacuated twice. I could not do everything. I had to turn down an invitation from the Huntingdon chairman of my SLD party to stand for the County Council Elections next May. After being the prime mover in ‘saving’ the Little Paxton Village Hall from a crisis of governance, I allowed an arch Tory to become Chairman of the new Village Hall Committee but still became its Vice Chairman to keep an eye on him! At my own party St Neots SLD Committee meetings, I was driving things forward, and encouraging them to campaign for the forthcoming elections. In the Chancellor’s Autumn statement, Nigel Lawson announces £2 billion more for the NHS but he had to admit his forecasts were way off course. Record falls in unemployment were only achieved by taking young people out of the figures entirely, and there was revealed a record trade balance deficit, inflation has rose above 6%. which hit the flagging pound sterling leading to the CBI wanting protection from bargain basement foreign takeover bids. Beforehand, the Chancellor was rumoured to be cutting down on benefits for older people and free eye and dental checks for everybody else but that would have been political suicide and so he ‘chickened out’ and announced more pension increases instead. Thatcher was also being pressed for action on environmental issues, and she was distancing herself from her Chancellor as her Tory government nearly lost a key House of Commons vote on health charges and Eye Test fees which were only passed by eight votes! The State Opening of Parliament saw the announcement of a raft of controversial and extreme measures by Thatcher’s government including ID cards for football supporters and it is now the case that the government are closing mental hospitals too quickly to allow the community care schemes to take up the patient’s care satisfactorily. Others concerned intervention on TV programming and broadcasting, and thousands of government employees walked out in support of union colleagues being persecuted at GCHQ. The nurses dispute escalates as nurses take industrial action in Wales and in Birmingham about unfair grading but the government refuses arbitration in their pay dispute. As well as unrest with Britain’s nurses, miners and now TV technicians and journalists are all on strike. The new UK Official Secrets Bill has been published and the powers have been stepped up for political as well as security reasons. Thatcher visits Poland and trades views with General Yardeskio, speaking out on human rights, completely ignoring her own curtailment of such rights at home. She had a meeting with Lech Walesa and then started rousing trouble outside the Gdansk shipyard gates. Back home, the Scottish Nationalist Party makes great gains in Glasgow Govan after opposing the Poll Tax. The troubles continue in Northern Ireland and such is the sectarian division that Lord Mackay has fallen out with his Protestant colleagues by attending a Catholic colleagues funeral. A large arms cache is found and removed in Belfast and there was another major arms find in the Irish Republic close to the border at Dundalk. The British Army shoot one of their own during an IRA attack a Londonderry Police Station, and an IRA bomb damages a Belfast army base. The arrangements for the IRA ‘Shoot to Kill’ trial may be challenged by judicial review as two men are charged for the murder of the two army corporals at the IRA funeral. David John Evans awaits extradition for the murder of Anna Humphries as does IRA suspect Father Patrick Ryan but the problem is that evidence was incomplete and contradictory and Ireland has opted not to arrest him due to the flimsiness of the case against him, and although Thatcher is lashing out at Ireland and Belgium, Britain has been contravening the European Convention on Human Rights for detention without trial which does not help. Even so, the Royal Ulster Constabulary are being cut back and now Welsh extremists are suspected of fire-bombing five London Estate offices, in protests over second homes being bought by the English. London Transport leaders resigned as the Kings Cross Fire report castigates their organisation, and the London Fire Brigade remain concerned about London Underground fire safety. Hundreds of Londoners have been moved out of their homes in Docklands as a 500lb unexploded bomb is found. The A45 was closed for 15 hours after a chemical lorry overturned and the lethal chemical called Resouranol was spilt, the second chemical disaster in two weeks. The Pipe Alpha families reject the compensation offer and deaths from AIDS in Britain is predicted to rise to 17,000 in the next few years, as so far over 1,000 have died. Thatcher rushes over to see the outgoing and incoming US presidents to outflank the Europeans and loves plays on the world stage inviting Gorbachev but the Queen is advised not to go to Russia for security reasons. Outside the UK, Spanish police are struggling to control loutish British tourists but the serious developments start in Israel where the right-wing Likud party under Jitshijk Shamir wins the national election after their recent violent excesses with the Orthodox Jews sustaining them in government. More extreme religious measures are expected after Palestinian olive branch proposals for compromise are rejected. George Bush wins the US presidential election, defeating Dukakis quite convincingly and was congratulated by world leaders. Reagan and Mrs Thatcher enjoying a banquet and much ceremonial in a bout of mutual admiration which extended to new President Bush and Vice president Quayle. The US as the venue of the UN comes into question and the US government has run into united condemnation from all other United Nations countries after they ban Yasser Arafat from entering into the U.S.-based United Nations assembly to speak in the Middle East debate. They adjourn to Geneva to let Yasser Arafat speak there. Christina Onassis dies young at 37 from a heart attack and there are rumours that the death of Mrs Onassis was by suicide. The biggest human disaster is in China where the toll has risen to nearly 1000 dead after large earthquake in China on their border with Burma. As expected, Benazir Bhutto retains her power in Pakistan by winning the national election. Predictably, three Zimbabwe men are sentenced to death for a bomb attack on the ANC and on the other side of the border in South Africa, three anti-apartheid leaders may face death also. At least, Nelson Mandela is giving more liberalised conditions for his South African political imprisonment. The Soviets have suspended their withdrawal of Afghanistan because of rebel breaches of ceasefire and Lech Walesa has set tough conditions for the Polish government. The Speaker of the West German parliament resigns over his comments appearing pro-Nazi. Mercenaries are fighting for control of the Maldives.