E is for...............................

Today is Easter Monday, and as it is the fifth day of the A - Z Challenge today's letter is E so as I am a Christian it would seem to be appropriate to make todays post be either about Easter, or how I spent this one.

If you have been reading you will know that on Friday I played with some others members of the Croydon Brass Band for a Good Friday Walk of witness.   Although there were a good number of people on the walk and we made a decent sound it was very noticeable how little impact Good Friday was having on most people.   The shops were all open and seemed to be doing a good trade, lots of people were taking advantage of having a day off indeed this was the very image of a thriving multi cultural high street.

Previous years we have had a Police escort and walked down the road, admittedly holding up traffic and being a bit of an inconvenience, but not impact unduly on the shops and shoppers.   I understand that the organisers filled in all the official forms and paid the fee to Croydon Council to have the road closed for our walk, but apparently the Police no longer had sufficient funding to provide our escort, so we had to walk on the pavement.   Personally I think we could have still walked on the roadway with our own marshalls, but I was no making the decisions.

It does seem incredible that the Police could not manage to provide an escort for such a large portion of the local community.   Some see this as the increasing secularization of our society and the marginalisation of Christianity, and the same people of course also consider this to be a "Bad Thing".   I am not so sure, about either.   I suspect that as less people attend Church or claim to be Christians because it is socially advantageous, then those who do go to Church and publicly witness to their faith are more likely to have a genuine faith.   I also believe that if we are to have freedom to practise our faith then we need to provide that same freedom to others to practise there their faith.

I think I see this more as an example of how the government's spend cuts have gone too far.

After the walk I did drive down to Cardiff, and it was a truly awful journey, the roads were very busy with many, many families again taking advantage of the holiday to get away.   The heavy traffic on the M4 was punctuated with some examples of dreadful driving, probably brought on by the heavy traffic ( I wish people would remember that they do not get stuck in traffic, they are traffic), although I saw no accidents myself, there was one I only just missed and the outfall of several others.   Through all this I saw no Police cars, and I know that in Wales there are no longer any dedicated Motorway patrols.   I am sure that the odd Police presence concentrates the minds of drivers, and makes the ever increasing regulations more enforceable.   This is just another example of insufficient funding for the job we want done.

We are about to face a General Election where the main difference between the main parities seems to be the amount they want to reduce public spending by.   How little we can manage to get away with spending to provide the minimum levels of service.   We have institutes of Excellence, we have targets and aspirations to being the best yet are unwilling to spend the money to provide it.   Whether it's Education, Defence, Health or Policing services are being cut, and cut, until at some point we will find that just as with our infrastructure, they will be beyond maintenance and repair and will either be abandoned or need to be rebuilt.   Unfortunately I see no political will to invest ~ in services or in infrastructure ~ and although I am confident in the overall way society is moving I do worry about what sort of Country is going to be left for my daughter to grow up in.

So my E is not Easter but ENOUGH, I have had enough of these cuts, I want a government that will commit itself to spending enough to provide enough service.   I fear I will once again be disappointed.