Week 21 2013

Tendring Topics…….on Line

‘It wasn’t your fault – Someone else was to blame!’

            That’s the message that we all like to hear when catastrophe strikes, whether it affects us alone or a whole community. It’s a principle that makes the fortunes of the ambulance chasing lawyers whose no win/no pay adverts fund day-time commercial tv. When such a catastrophe or a series of catastrophes affect a whole nation, astute politicians make certain that we hear it. They can usually find someone else, a convenient scapegoat, to take the blame.

            Thus it was in Germany in the 1920s and ‘30s. Defeat in World War I had been followed by the world-wide ‘flu epidemic that claimed more victims than had the recent conflict.  The German Empire had collapsed, the Kaiser had abdicated and fled into exile, politically the country was in chaos, and economically in ruin.  There was uncontrolled inflation, widespread unemployment, homelessness and starvation. Folk were totally disillusioned by the apparent impotence of the government and the traditional political parties.

            There was just one rising politician who gave the German people a message of hope.  Germany’s intellectual élite thought that Adolf Hitler, the posturing little Austrian painter with his Charlie Chaplin moustache, was just a joke and his followers nothing but ‘fruitcakes’ (or the German equivalent).  The country’s leading businessmen helped finance him. Their fortunes were threatened by the revolt of the common people. They believed that they could control him and that he and his followers could defeat the socialists and communists whom they saw as their principal enemies.

            Hitler told the German people what they wanted to hear.   They were in no way to blame for the mess in which they found themselves.   Their brave soldiers hadn’t really been defeated in the Great War.   They had been betrayed; stabbed in the back by Germany’s internal enemies – the international financiers, the politicians, and the Jews.  Vote for the NSDAP (the National Socialist German Workers Party or NAZIs).  He and his party’s gallant storm-troopers would curb the financiers, get rid of the parasitic politicians and the Jews, and create a great new German Empire (the Third Reich) that would dominate the world.

            Enough Germans believed that message to give the Nazis a majority in the Reichstag – and, having gained power, they made sure (or so they thought) of securing it ‘for a thousand years’.  The rest is history, in which I and millions of others played tiny and insignificant roles.

            There are parallels between Germany in the 1920s and ‘30s and the UK today.  We haven’t been defeated in war but military adventures in the Middle East have impoverished and weakened us.  Our economic and political situations are nothing like as dire as those of between-the-wars Germany.   They are serious though.   We have narrowly missed an unprecedented ‘triple dip’ recession. Our credit-worthiness has been down-graded. There are two and a half million unemployed, and the number of homeless people sleeping rough in the streets is rising, as is the number of families relying on charity hand-outs from ‘Food Banks’ to keep their families alive..  We are all, except for the very rich, feeling the pinch.

            Most significant of all, we have lost faith in our traditional politicians and in their political parties.  We don’t really think that the present millionaire-friendly government is going to solve Britain’s problems (their continual bleat about the terrible mess they inherited is beginning to wear a little thin as the months and years pass) and we very much doubt if New Labour would do much – or even any – better.  There was a time when Labour’s objectives were pretty clear; the creation of a classless democratic socialist society in which poverty and homelessness had been abolished and the gap between rich and poor narrowed. After ten years of New Labour rule in which the gap between rich and poor widened it has become clear that their only real objective is now much the same as that of their opponents – to get elected and to hang on to power at all costs.

            But now – just as in Germany in the ‘30s - we have an anti-politics political party with a charismatic leader who reaches  above the heads of more conventional politicians to their disillusioned former supporters; and to those who have never before taken any interest in politics.  Nigel Farage, leader of Ukip (United Kingdom Independence Party) has a very English charisma.  He’s that very likeable - and very persuasive – fellow that one might meet in a well-run pub. He is always ready to explain complex economic and political issues in plain language that anyone can understand.  He’s ‘one of us’, enjoying a pint and a fag, and having no time at all for those who claim to know better than we do, how we should live our lives.

            What’s more, he’s found foreign scapegoats who, so he claims, are responsible for all the UK's political and economic ills.   Brussels is the hub of a web of evil called the EU whose sole purpose is to ruin the UK and everything in which we true Brits believe.  No-one, listening to Nigel Farage or any other spokesperson of Ukip would imagine for a moment that the European Union is an organisation of which the United Kingdom is an influential member and that it has a democratically elected Parliament in which there are Ukip members. 

           

The other factor contributing to the UKs downfall is, according to Ukip, the thousands of foreign immigrants who pour into this country from Europe and every other part of the world taking our jobs and our houses and enjoying our social and health services.  Withdraw from the evil EU and stop all immigration, in the first instance for five years (Oh yes, and allow smoking again in pubs, stop building wind farms and scrap all that ‘health and safety’ nonsense)  and all Britain’s problems will be solved.

            I think that, like Hitler, Nigel Farage has found a recipe for electoral success.  I am glad that I am most unlikely to see and experience its outcome, and be able to say, I told you so!’  Being very old isn’t all loss!

‘

PS    I note that Nigel Farage’s magic doesn’t work in Scotland.  The rough reception he received there has led him to the conclusion that Scots Nationalists harbour a hatred of England and all things English.  I think it more likely that their antagonism is directed not at England but at Nigel Farage and his deluded disciples. If I were twenty or thirty years younger I’d be thinking of relocating north of the border!

Some birthdays!

          I have had some somewhat mixed experience of birthdays in the past.  My 20^th birthday, for instance, was spent on guard duty in Montreal Park, Sevenoaks, where 67^th Medium Regiment, R.A. was camped under canvas while waiting for orders to go overseas.

Twentieth birthday – a break from guard duty.

           

My 21^st was spent in the Libyan Desert waiting for Rommel’s Afrikakorps to attack, and the next two, which I prefer to forget, were spent as a PoW in Italy and Germany.  My 24^th birthday (on 18^th May 1945) was a very happy one though I received not a single birthday card or present.  It was the day, just ten days after the end of World War II in Europe, on which I stepped through the front door of my home in Kensington Road, Ipswich after having been overseas for four years and a PoW for three of them.

Regular blog readers will know that my 90^th birthday was a very special one. I went with members of my immediate family to celebrate it in Zittau, the small town in eastern Germany where I had once been a PoW but now had good friends .We were given a civic welcome and a champagne reception by Mayor Arnd Voight, treated to a special performance of a local piano-accordian orchestra and I hosted a celebratory evening meal to which my family and I  invited our German friends and the Mayor and his wife and other local notables.

 90^th birthday; Here is the Piano-accordian orchestra. I am on the left in the shadow. In the background on the right can be seen the Lenten Veil in the history of which I played a tiny part 

           

        As my 92^nd birthday loomed ahead it seemed that there was a distinct possibility (I will put it no stronger) that it might be my last.  I thought that I would like, on my birthday, to thank and express my appreciation to those who have helped and supported me since my wife’s death seven years ago.  There were my two sons and daughters-in-law, Pete and Arlene and Andy and Marilyn.  There were my grandchildren; Chris living and working in Taiwan, Nick, living mostly in Brussels and his Belgian girl-friend Romy, and granddaughter Jo, working as a social worker attached to the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield Hospital.  Then there was Ingrid Zeibig, originally from Zittau but now living in Bayreuth, a good friend  for some ten years, her English partner Ray and her Austrian god-daughter Jenny who spends a good deal of time with her.  There was Heather’s thirteen-years-younger sister Margaret, Dr Volker Dudeck, former Direktor of Zittau's town musem and his wife Julia, and two Clacton friends who had been a great support and help to me. I invited them all to a celebratory lunch at the Bowling Green Restaurant and pub at Weeley a few miles from Clacton, at 1.00 p.m. on Saturday 18^th May. My sister-in-law Margaret and Dr and Mrs Dudeck were already committed elsewhere but the others all accepted. 

            The Bowling Green is planned with a number of semi-private areas, some suitable for a party  like ours – or larger, and others offering a degree of privacy for just two or three.  It was almost as though we had a room and two tables to ourselves, though with no doors for the staff to negotiate between us and the kitchens.

The 'oldies'  -  Fortyish to ninetytwo

      It was a very successful occasion.  There was a wide á la carte menu.  The cooking was excellent and the service efficient and friendly.  Ingrid had arranged for members of her family and others who knew me, to record their birthday good wishes on a tape that we played on a tv screen provided for us.  The few words of Ingrid’s 101 years old grandma and her little nephew (aged 5) and niece (aged 7), were particularly moving.  She had also obtained  a message from Fritz Michel who in 1944 had manned the telephone of the Hitler Jugend headquarters next to our PoW barrack room.  A clandestine swap (of which I don’t think either Hitler or Churchill would have approved!) of some of our jazz records with some of the Hitler Youth members’ German folk and dance records had been arranged!  

Ingrid’s English partner Ray, played a guitar, and Ingrid a recorder to accompany sixteen year old Austrian Jenny singing  Lili Marlene, equally popular with both British and German forces in North Aftrica, and Regen Tropfen, die am dein Fenster klopfen  (raindrops that fall on your window) a popular German Tango of 1935 that had been one of the records we received in exchange from the Hitler Jugend way back in 1944.  It was a wonderful birthday celebration enjoyed equally by the British, Belgian, German and Austrian participants; a great pity some of the Europhobes of Ukip weren’t there to share the experience.!

The young'uns - sweet sixteen to thirtytwo 

                      (younger grandson Nick took the pictures so he doesn't appear on them)

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Week 20 2013

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Syrian Bloodbath.

            I know of no better validation of the Quaker testimony against all wars and physical violence than the current situation in Syria.   The Civil War there has cost the lives of thousands of men, women and little children, has inflicted disabling wounds on thousands more and has turned tens of thousands of innocent civilians into homeless and penniless refugees.

Let’s forget for a moment questions of morality and consider the current conflict from a purely materialistic and practical point of view. It is surely obvious that, however awful the Assad regime may have been, when the war comes to an end, whichever side is finally ‘triumphant’, life in Syria will be far, far worse than it was before the first shot was fired in anger. If the rebels win, as seems quite possible, we in ‘the west’ hope to see the emergence of a free and democratic Syria with equal rights for every Syrian,  male or female, and freedom of religious worship comparable with every country in Western Europe.  It is quite possible that that is the objective of some of the rebels.   It certainly isn’t the objective of all, or even most, of them.  I have little doubt that within months of the peace, Syria will be under the control of Islamist extremists, women will be relegated to the status of second class citizens, and all the freedoms that are so important to us will have been made illegal.  It happened in Iran after their popular revolution against the Shah.  It is happening in Iraq, in Egypt and in Libya.  It will certainly happen in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of  NATO troops.

            What is more, the extreme Islamist rebels, having become experienced in the art of killing their fellow-men and women, will look round for fresh worlds to conquer and destroy, and fresh targets on which to vent their hatred of everything we think of value.   They will find them in Western Europe, in the UK and in the USA.

            Was the Assad regime a cruel dictatorship?  Perhaps - but I have heard of no secret killings and no torture chambers such as we heard about from victims of the regimes in Iraq and Libya. Compared with Saudi Arabia, pre-civil-war Syria was an oasis of freedom and tolerance in a desert of autocracy and bigotry. Women enjoyed freedoms unknown in other Muslim countries and Christian and Muslim communities lived side by side in peace and tolerance. Now the Saudi Arabian government is backing the rebels!  I suspect that President Assad’s principal fault is that he is ‘the wrong kind of Muslim’, was probably too friendly with Iran and was giving positions of power and influence to his co-religionists.   Now, of course, we hear of mass killings carried out by government forces.  The reports are probably true.  Violence begets more violence.  It was Gandhi who said that if we all insisted on ‘an eye for an eye’ we would all end up blind.  If in a civil war both sides claim ‘a life for a life’ they will surely end with a country of the dead.

             Other nations are taking an unhealthy interest in the conflict.  Russia is supporting (or at least not opposing) the Assad Government.  The UK and the USA are supporting the rebels. As if there was not already death and destruction enough, the Israelis have launched lethal rockets into Syria, ostensibly to prevent arms from Syria reaching a pro-Iranian Islamic group operating from Lebanon.  Does anyone seriously imagine that a Syrian government, fighting for its very existence, would allow, much less encourage, arms to pass out of the country to any other armed group whatsoever?

            Britain is becoming steadily more and more involved.  It started highly commendably with humanitarian aid.  Our intervention in Libya began, you’ll recall, with the very moderate ‘enforcement of a no-fly zone’.   In Syria we have progressed to non-lethal military aid.  What next I wonder – supplying the rebels with weapons?   That would surely be almost as daft as the idea, currently held by some in the USA, that the best way to end gun crime is to make sure that all ‘the good guys’ are armed to the teeth!   The only winners in that particular arms race will be the arms manufacturers and dealers.

            The Syrian conflict is not of our making.  When it is all over I hope that we will help with the reconstruction and the establishment of peace.   In the meantime I do urge our rulers:  For God’s sake (and I do not mean that blasphemously) keep Britain OUT of it.

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good…….

          ……..and the cold wintry weather that plagued our holiday resorts during the Easter holiday seems to have done no harm at all to one outdoor leisure activity enjoyed along the Essex Sunshine Coast.  Sea angling has flourished and a report in the Clacton Gazette by John Popplewell carries the headline Cod and Thornbacks in plentiful supply.

            During my adolescence I was a keen fresh-water angler.  My home was on the outskirts of Ipswich and I fished regularly for pike, perch and roach along the River Gipping at weekends and during school holidays.  Occasionally, venturing further afield, I would cycle the ten or so miles to Flatford Mill to spend a day in the ‘Constable country’ angling along the River Stour between the lock gates at Flatford  and Dedham, a mile or two upstream.

            Only once have I been sea angling, and that was some twenty years ago when I was writing advertising features for Essex County Newspapers.   I went out on a charter boat from Harwich for a very enjoyable day’s fishing off the Gunfleet Sands and, with help and advice from the professionals, I caught several skate and a sea bass. I know that I later wrote a glowing report of the day that I hope brought the skipper of the boat some custom!

            John Popplewell reports catches from boats, from beaches, from kayaks operating just a few hundred yards offshore, and from piers all along our coastline.  Boats from Mersea and Brightlingsea have been catching more thornbacks than he can ever before remember, as well as fair-sized (one weighed ten pounds) cod.  From Walton-on-the-Naze, Frinton and Clacton there are similar reports, with bass, whiting, dogfish and skate also being caught.  

            Clacton Gazette readers are accustomed to reading angry criticisms in readers’ letters about the wind turbines proliferating off our shores – they’re inefficient, an intolerable blot on the seascape, unreliable, uneconomical, a danger to migrating birds, and so on.  It was quite refreshing to have quite a different point of view from John Popplewell.  ‘My personal opinion on why we have so many thornbacks now is to do with our wind farms.  We have two that we can see from our coastline – the Gunfleet Sands and a larger one further out on the Greater Gabbard.   They seem to be acting as man-made reefs, and are a safe haven and breeding ground for a lot of species, including lobsters, which are now breeding happily in these areas.

            It really is an ill wind that blows nobody any good!

‘The old grey widow maker’*

            The juxtaposition of the anniversary of VE Day (8^th May 1945) when the war in Europe ended, and the commemoration of the thousands of dead in the Arctic Convoys, and in the Battle of the Atlantic, brought flooding back memories of my own artillery regiment’s voyage to Egypt through submarine infested waters in the late summer of 1941.  At that time enemy air power and submarines closed the direct route to Egypt via the Mediterranean.  We sailed in the New Zealand Shipping Company liner The Rangitiki from Avonmouth, first to the mouth of the Clyde to join a large convoy.   From there we sailed north-west almost (so we were told) to Iceland to avoid the German submarine packs, then south and east down the West African coast to the Cape of Good Hope. We put in for a few days in Durban, and finally sailed up Africa’s east coast to the Red Sea and Port Tewfik at the southern end of the Suez Canal.

The Rangitiki

           

 I volunteered to man a Breda machine-gun on the Rangitiki’s bridge, doing a four hours on and eight hours off ‘watch’ throughout the voyage. This was not out of heroism (my fervent hope was that there would be no air attack!) but because I was and am, as I mentioned in last week’s blog, mildly claustrophobic. We machine-gunners slept with members of the crew in the fo'c'sle on an upper deck, and not in hammocks on those crowded mess-decks at or below the waterline!

            There was a submarine alert while we were in mid-Atlantic.  We were warned to be ready to go to our lifeboat stations. I had been allocated a place on a raft with ropes round its side to which, if we found ourselves in the water and still alive, we could cling until rescued – or not, as the case might be.  The destroyers (or were they corvettes? I have no idea) circled round the convoy. Then their paths converged. We saw depth charges being launched and felt, rather than heard, the shock of the explosions on the Rangitiki’s hull.  I really wouldn’t have wanted to be a submariner!   The danger was declared to be over.  We relaxed and the convoy sailed on.

            There was one more, even more alarming, episode off the West African coast – in the vicinity of a reputed U-boat base.  The Rangitiki’s engines failed and our progress stopped.  The convoy, and its escort, sailed on. The escort had a whole convoy to worry about. They couldn’t stop for just one ship.  It was a clear night with a full moon.   To add to our disquiet there were thunderous banging, rattling and drilling noises emanating from below as the ship’s engineers strove to repair the engines.  We must have been clearly visible and audible to the crew of any U-boat within twenty miles! At last, after several anxious hours, there was silence, and then a scarcely audible hum.  We could feel a vibration in the deck and a white wake appeared in the rear of the vessel as the engines sprang into life.  We were moving again.  Soon after dawn the convoy came into sight.  We took our place in it and the journey continued uneventfully.

‘Ferret’ (left) and I in Durban.  The chap with the splendid head-dress never pulled that rickshaw. He just stood there having his photo taken with soldiers off the convoys

We put in, but didn’t go ashore, at Freetown.  It poured with rain. Local boys came alongside in their canoes and dived for pennies that we dropped into the murky water.  They always managed to retrieve them!  The seas were turbulent as we rounded the Cape of Good Hope.  The heavily loaded vessels of our convoy were tossed about as though they were match boxes.   At Durban we put in for five days and were allowed to go ashore if off-duty.  We machine gunners had no other duties and there was no risk of an air raid in Durban.  ‘Ferret’ Hawes (I don’t think I ever knew his first name), a fellow machine-gunner, and I went ashore each day.  Local residents were very welcoming.  Notices announced in English and Afrikaans that this, that or the other facility was ‘for whites only’.  I can’t pretend that this bothered us, though it probably would have if there had been any non-whites in the regiment.

It wasn’t till we left Durban that we were sure of our destination.  The convoy split up, half sailing eastward towards Singapore while we continued up the East African coast to the Red Sea and finally to Port Tewfik for our destination on the Egyptian/Libyan frontier.  As we went ashore, thankful for having had a relatively uneventful voyage, we little dreamed that just over a year later, fifty of our number would be crammed with 150 other prisoners of war into the hold of the Scillin, an Italian merchant ship, to be transported to a prison camp in Italy – and that they would meet their deaths in the Mediterranean, torpedoed by a British submarine!

Most of the 200 victims of the sinking of the Scillin were young unmarried men, but Kipling's old, grey widow-maker (Nicholas Monserrat's 'Cruel Sea) made a few more widows that night.

*What is a woman that you forsake her, and the hearth fire, and the home acre, To go with the old grey widow-maker?   ‘First verse of ‘The Harp-Song of the Danish Women’ by Rudyard Kipling.

             

           

           

Week 19 2013

Tendring Topics……on line

The Global Market

 I am mildly claustrophobic. I am never very happy in an enclosed space and the thought of being buried alive in the ruins of a collapsed building is the stuff of my very worst nightmares!  That’s just one of the reasons why news of the collapse of an eight storey building in Bangladesh in which some two thousand people, mostly women, were employed in the manufacture of cheap clothing for the European and American Markets, filled me with horror.  More than 600 of those employed in the building have died, many after having been trapped for several days.  Over 1,000 have been injured, some seriously.  All are human sacrifices to Mammon – the god of greed and selfishness or, if you prefer, of the entrepreneur and the ‘free market’.

            It seems that the building should have been limited to five storeys and that three were added illegally (no doubt to ‘maximise profits’).   Furthermore when warning cracks appeared in the walls of the building the workers were told to ignore them and carry on with their work, instead of being urged to get out while there was time to do so.

          The manufacture of cheap ready-made garments for export is a principal industry of Bangladesh, employing some 3 million people on an average monthly salary of £40. (Try living on that for a day or two!)  Industrial accidents are a frequent and regular occurrence and not a single manufacturer has been prosecuted in connection with them. Similar incidents would occur in this country had it not been for the activities of the Trade Unions and the Parliamentary Reformers of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries whose Public Health Acts and Factories Acts (fiercely contested by the political friends of the Factory Owners) created the relatively tolerable and safe working environments that most of us enjoy in this country today*. We joke about ‘health and safety’ but the Bangladeshi experience could be repeated here if there were no health and safety regulations and no ‘snooping bureaucrats’ enforcing them.

            But, of course, the safe environment and tolerable working conditions that are enjoyed in the UK and in most of Europe render us ‘uncompetitive in the Global Market’ that politicians of all parties seem to find so attractive. So retailers get the supplies of the cheap clothing that their customers demand from such places as Bangladesh where few safety regulations exist. Those that do are ignored by officials so poorly paid that they are easy targets for those who wish to corrupt them. I suspect that at least some of the powers that our Prime Minister and UKIP are  determined to ‘repatriate’ from ‘Brussels’ are the regulations that protect the health, safety and well-being of workers throughout Europe.

            We can only become truly competitive in a market that includes countries like Bangladesh by replicating their slums, their public services, their working conditions, their health services, their education, their low wages.  Is that really what we want? A much better alternative would be for the people of Bangladesh to raise the level of their environment and public services to that of Europe. While I am sure we should help and support them in such efforts it is something that we can’t do for them.  

*The Song of a Shirt

An example of the way in which workers in clothing manufacture in the UK did suffer working conditions comparable with those in Bangladesh today is found in Thomas Hood’s poem, The Song of the Shirt’ published in 1843. Below is the first verse and one of the subsequent verses:

WITH fingers weary and worn,

With eyelids heavy and red,

A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,

Plying her needle and thread--

Stitch! stitch! stitch!

In poverty, hunger, and dirt,

And still with a voice of dolorous pitch

She sang the "Song of the Shirt”

Work—work—work!

My labour never flags:

And what are its wages? A bed of straw,

A crust of bread--and rags.

That shatter'd roof--and this naked floor--

A table--a broken chair--

And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank

For sometimes falling there

 Its origins, according to Wikipedia, are as below:

'It was written in honour of a Mrs. Biddell, a Lambeth widow and seamstress living in wretched conditions. In what was, at that time, common practice, Mrs. Biddell sewed trousers and shirts in her home using materials given to her by her employer for which she was forced to give a £2 deposit. In a desperate attempt to feed her starving infants, Mrs. Biddell pawned the clothing she had made, thus accruing a debt she could not pay. Mrs. Biddell, whose first name has not been recorded, was sent to a workhouse, and her ultimate fate is unknown; however, her story became a catalyst for those who actively opposed the wretched conditions of England’s working poor, who often spent seven days a week labouring under inhuman conditions, barely managing to survive and with no prospect for relief.

The poem was published anonymously in the Christmas edition of Punch in 1843 and quickly became a phenomenon, centering people’s attention not only on Mrs. Biddell's case, but on the conditions of workers in general. Though Hood was not politically radical, his work, like that of Charles Dickens, contributed to the general awareness of the condition of the working class which fed the popularity of trade unionism and the push for stricter labour laws'.

Universal Benefits

            It seems that the government’s Work and Pensions Secretary Mr Ian Duncan-Smith has noticed that there is something a little incongruous about elderly millionaires being able to take advantage of the concessions intended to make the lives of us less affluent oldies a little more comfortable.  It is surely surprising that a septuagenarian with an ocean-going yacht, a second home in the Caribbean, and a chauffeur-driven Rolls, can claim the winter fuel allowance, free tv licence, free NHS prescriptions and free bus pass, just like you (if you’re a pensioner)  and me.

            Mr Duncan-Smith appeared to suggest that it might be a good idea if such people handed benefits that they didn’t need back to the government, but he now stresses that he didn’t mean that at all.   Like all members of this government of the wealthy for the wealthy he seems desperately eager not to cause the very least offence to anyone even richer than himself, and he has made it clear that millionaires are at liberty to keep their benefit, hand it back, or give it to charity, just as they please.   He would express no preference on the matter at all.

            I am a long, long way from being a millionaire but, unlike many pensioners, I am not entirely dependent upon the state pension and any benefits that I can squeeze out of the government.  I have a modest public service pension for which I paid six percent of my salary throughout the many years that I was working.

            I cannot take advantage of a bus pass or concessions on rail travel, because physically I am no longer able to walk to the railway station or even to the nearest bus stop.   The winter fuel allowance though has meant that I had no qualms about keeping my central heating on continuously during the icy weather of February and March this year! I am glad too that my NHS prescriptions are free as it seems to take an increasing amount of medication to keep me going. 

I also very much appreciate my free tv licence, and the lower rate of ‘Attendance Allowance’ that I receive because of my steadily diminishing mobility. This frees me from being housebound and has made it possible for me to buy and maintain the electric mobility scooter that I use to go to Church and the Quaker Meeting, as well as for shopping and visiting friends.  The blue disabled parking badge that I use when, very occasionally, I am driven in a friend or relative’s car has been free too. It is due for renewal in a month or two and I understand that it will now cost me £10.   As far as I am concerned that won’t break the bank.  For some disabled people though it could prove to be the final straw that breaks the camel's back..

            I am certainly not proposing to give any of my benefits back to the government – they’d probably fritter them away on nuclear deterrents that don't deter anybody, expensive funerals for former politicians, or arming ‘freedom fighters opposed to tyranny’ who, before you can say jihad, are liable to become ‘dastardly terrorists trying to murder us!’

           
           Nor would I welcome the idea of any of those benefits being means-tested. It would be expensive and time-wasting to administer.  Many needy but proud pensioners would feel that submitting details of their income and expenditure to a faceless official was intrusive, demeaning, and a form of ‘begging’ in which they were not prepared to engage.  Others would seek means of ‘fiddling the system!'

           

There is just one way, that would I believe be acceptable to most pensioners, in which the government could make the ‘old age benefit system' fairer than it is at present  That is, to make all those currently tax-free benefits subject to income tax. All old people would continue to get their age-related benefits in full as at present.  Pensioners who have no source of income other than the state pension would be completely unaffected by the change. Those, like me, who have another modest source of income and are currently paying income tax would have the appropriate proportion added to their income tax demand, and really wealthy pensioners, with incomes in excess of £150,000 a year, would have an increase in their income tax equivalent to 45 percent of the value of the benefits to which they were entitled.  It would, of course, have been 50 percent had it not been for the Chancellor’s recent generous hand-out to the very wealthy!

            This system would work very well so far as winter fuel allowance, free tv licence and attendance allowance are concerned but would present difficulties with bus passes and prescriptions as the financial benefit from these varies from person to person and from time to time.   It should though be possible to work out an average benefit, a notional sum that could be added to the taxable income of every income-tax paying pensioner.  Thus, I would be helping to pay for bus passes that I can’t use but others can, while those who don’t need as much medication as I do, would be helping to pay for mine.

            Many of us would pay rather more income tax than we do at the moment but we would all receive our full benefits and, unlike any other kind of taxation, it is the nature of income tax that no-one is ever asked for more than they can afford to pay. The system would, of course, be much simpler and fairer if the whole income tax system were to be overhauled and restructured so that all adults paid an equal proportion of their gross income as their annual ‘membership fee’ for British citizenship.  The annual income tax assessment would then be a ‘means test’ to which everyone would have to submit – but it would be the only means test ever needed.

             But there – regular readers of this blog will know that that is a hobby horse of mine.

I told you so……..

          …….but very much wish I had been wrong.   Below is an extract from a blog that I published in March, forecasting UKIP’s likely performance in last week’s county council elections.

 Nigel Farage seems also to have acquired the knack of attracting the serial non-voter, the kind of man or woman who dislikes politics and will never trust politicians.  He gives the impression that he feels just the same as they do; that he is an anti-politics politician. Such people comprise a considerable slice of the electorate.   If he can persuade them to vote, his Party will do very well in the forthcoming County Council elections and, even more importantly, in the European Parliament Elections next year.

  My forecast proved all too accurate.  Although UKIP does not have any county councils under its control it has massively increased its representation on these councils throughout the country – mainly at the expense of the Conservatives but both Labour and the Liberals have also suffered.   In my own North Clacton electoral division Conservative Andy Wood was elected with a total vote of 929 thanks to our ‘first past the post’ method of election. He was the choice of less than one third of those who voted.  Second came Samatha Atkinson, the Labour candidate, for whom I voted, with 790 votes, followed by UKIP Anne Poonian with just one vote less. Mark Stephenson of ‘Tendring First’ had 396 votes, Lib Dem. Harry Shearing 191 and James Horsler Green Party 75.  Anne Poonian's relative success is all the more remarkable in that she doesn't live in Clacton and that she was the only candidate from whom I - and presumably others - received no election literature.

            I view the future with foreboding – not least because Nigel Farage’s Party’s success will mean a swerve to the political right in Conservative policies in an attempt, that will probably prove to be fruitless,  to avoid being outflanked  by the UKIP.

Week 18 2013

Tendring Topics……..on Line

County Council Elections

            I have always believed that local government officers (and civil servants) should be prepared to give of their best in pursuing the policies, whatever they may be, of the authority that employs them and should refrain from playing any active part in local or national politics.  Although for most of my life my political outlook has been ‘leftish’ I have had no problem working for Conservative controlled councils and have always felt that I should not seek membership of any political party.

            That changed when I took early retirement in 1980.   I joined the Labour Party which at that time seemed the party with which I felt the greatest empathy.  Since I had both knowledge and experience of the ways in which local government functions, and had become an experienced writer and public speaker, I put my name forward as a potential candidate for election as a Labour candidate to the district or county council.   I had a very friendly interview with ‘party bosses’ in Chelmsford and was accepted as a potential candidate.  Fortunately perhaps, there were then no local elections in the immediate future.

            Hardly had I returned home than I began to have misgivings.  Would I really manage to toe the Party line as would certainly be expected?  Had I a thick enough skin to laugh off all the insults to which I knew all politicians, local and national, are subjected?   I had recently been commissioned to write a weekly ‘chat and comment column’ Tendring Topics for the local free newspaper, the Coastal Express.  Wouldn’t I be better able to use that column to further the causes in which I really believed, if I had no party ties?   Would I feel able to criticise the Labour Party (as I knew I would sometimes want to!) without being considered disloyal?

            I withdrew my application for candidature, though I remained a member of the Labour Party until Tony Blair and New Labour made the Party ‘electable’ and – in my opinion – less worth electing!

   

        

This blog is to be published on 30^th April, just two days before the current County Council Election.  For my Clacton North Division there are Conservative, Labour, ‘Tendring First’, Lib.Dem., Green Party, and UKIP candidates.  In recent blogs I have made it clear that I certainly couldn’t possibly vote for either the Conservative or the UKIP candidate.  The policies of the Green Party attract me but I know perfectly well that, under the first-past-the-post electoral system, a vote for their candidate would be a vote wasted. After giving the matter a good deal of thought I have decided that my vote will go to the Labour Candidate Samantha Atkinson.  Her election leaflet (on which she is portrayed with a friendly smile!) is attractive and doesn’t make extravagant promises.  She appears genuinely to have the interests of us Clactonians at heart.   I think too, that she is  the candidate most likely to deny electoral victory either to UKIP  or to  the Conservative Party that currently dominates the County Council. That was the Party that elected, and for many years supported, Lord Hanningfield as the Council’s political   leader!

Debt……or Deficit?

According to Wikipedia (the handy source of all knowledge for laptop users!) even top politicians sometimes get confused about the difference between the National Debt and the Deficit that the government is determined to reduce.   The National Debt is the total sum of money that the government owes – mostly to pension funds and savers in our own country but some to overseas sources.  It is an enormous sum but its significance depends to a great extent on its percentage of the GDP (gross domestic product, or the total value of the country’s production or services during any particular year).  By that criterion  the UKs National Debt is large but by no means as large as many other countries.  The Internet yields the information that in 2011 the UK’s National Debt was 68 percent of GDP while Japan’s was 180 percent and the USA’s 100 percent.  In the immediate aftermath of World War II our National Debt in terms of percentage of GDP was over twice what it is today.

            The Deficit, on the other hand, is the difference between the Government’s expenditure in any one year, and its income in that same year.  Mr Micawber, in Dickens’ novel David Copperfield  summed up the effect of this on a domestic scale like this, ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, result happiness.  Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and sixpence, result misery’.   Comparing domestic finances with those of the nation can be misleading, but an annual deficit inevitably means an annual increase in the National Debt – and cannot be allowed to continue.  Not just one, but several international credit agencies have now downgraded the UK’s ‘Triple A’ credit rating.  This means that it won’t be long before a higher rate of interest is charged on loans to the UK – and we shall be even deeper in debt!

            There are three main ways in which the deficit can be reduced; by cutting public expenditure, by increasing taxation, and by stimulating the economy to create more jobs. That would mean more money coming in from taxation and less spent on social security benefits.

            The Government has so far attempted only one of them seriously – and the effect has been to make matters worse instead of better.  They have desperately tried to reduce public expenditure by sacking thousands of public servants, both in the civil service, in the local government services, in the NHS and (with the exception of the totally useless Trident ‘independent deterrent’) in the Armed Forces.  This is resulting in an ever-growing army of unemployed, a run-down of public services and an increased demand on the depleted social services and for benefit payments.

            Their attempts to stimulate the economy seem so far to have had little, if any effect. They have managed to avoid an unprecedented ‘triple dip’ recession – but only just!  Many private contractors depend upon orders from public authorities, who have been starved of funds.  The attempt to encourage house building by helping would-be home buyers with their initial deposits is likely to drive up house prices and create a bubble similar to the one that preceded the current economic depression.  The sensible course of action would be to repeal the ‘right to buy’ (better named compel to sell) legislation and encourage local authorities to build homes for letting as they did successfully during the century before the advent of Thatcherism.

            It has been in the field of taxation that the government’s actions have been particularly perverse.  An increase in VAT added to already rising inflation (oh yes, of course – inflation is yet another, thoroughly bad, way of reducing the deficit!) and the Chancellor seems to have gone out of his way to reduce his revenue from income tax – the only tax that relates directly to ability to pay, and which has never brought anyone to starvation or homelessness.

            Raising the level at which income tax becomes payable takes thousands of people out of income tax altogether.  I believe this is a mistake.  It perpetuates the myth that there are hard-working beings called ‘tax payers’ who keep a non tax-paying underclass in idleness.   We are all tax-payers and those who only pay VAT, customs duties on cigarettes and the occasional drink, and buy lottery tickets in the vain hope of winning a fortune, probably hand to the government a higher proportion of their meagre earnings than many of those of us who are fortunate enough to be liable for income tax.

            It is sometimes overlooked too, that raising the lower threshold of income tax doesn’t just help the poorest – it reduces the amount of income tax paid right through the system. As for the Chancellor’s actually reducing the highest rate of income tax; quite apart from the obvious unfairness of rewarding the wealthy at a time when the poor are being penalised, it seems incredible that this should have been done at a time of national financial crisis. A correspondent tells me that the revenue lost by that hand-out to those with an income of over £150,000 a year will be twice as much as that likely to be saved by the ‘bedroom tax’ on those in Council and Housing Association homes.

            The same correspondent points out that a great many wages are at or very close to the minimum wage of about £15,000 a year and that the average salary is about £26,000.   ‘Why on earth then’, he asks, ‘is the threshold for ‘very high earners’ liable for the highest rate of income tax, set as high as £150,000?   Surely few people would have considered £100,000 unreasonable – and I personally would have set it at £80,000, or about three times the average wage’.

             Would the only possible alternative to this government do much better? Possibly they wouldn’t – but perhaps there’s some comfort in the thought that they could hardly do any worse!

The Money Fiddlers!

          It seems that when, in my blog last week I suggested that the modern equivalent of Old King Cole’s ‘fiddlers three’ were the money fiddlers who advise their wealthy clients how best to avoid paying income and corporation tax without breaking the law, I was being inadvertently and quite accidentally topical.  I had no idea that the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee had been considering that very issue and was about to make public some very disturbing conclusions.

            It seems that there are nowadays not three, but four, major firms of accountants in operation in this country that, among other services, advise their clients on means of legal tax avoidance.  They are Deloitte, Ernst and Young, KPMG, and Pricewaterhouse Coopers.  Between them they employ 9,000 staff and make a profit of £2 billion a year in the UK and £25 billion a year globally.

            Parliament’s all-party PAC (Public Accounts Committee) discovered that financial experts from these commercial organisations have been seconded to HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) to assist in the drafting of legislation to prevent tax avoidance – and are then in a position to point out to their real employers the loopholes that will enable them to circumvent that legislation!   Margaret Hodge, Committee Chairman, says that it is as though poachers have become gamekeepers and are then using the ‘inside knowledge’ they have obtained to poach more successfully.

            Margaret Hodge is, of course, a Labour MP and might be expected to be critical of a system introduced by the government.  Richard Bacon though, is a Conservative MP serving on the PAC.  He is reported as saying, ‘The United Kingdom’s Tax Authority is outmanned and outgunned by the four big accountancy firms.  Their resources far outstrip those of the taxman, but they also help HMRC to draft tax legislation.  The big four know exactly where the loopholes in the tax system are to be found because they helped to create them.

             There is nothing that I can usefully add to that.

And the Good News is……..

            ………..that the amount of violent crime in the United Kingdom has fallen substantially during the past decade.   The murder rate has been almost halved from 1.90 per 100,000 population to 1 per 100,000 and violent crime generally has fallen from 1,255 to 933 per 100,000 though, in the county of Essex, our own Tendring District comes second only to Southend-on-Sea in having the most violent crime!.

          An ageing population may be among the factors responsible for this general improvement (we nonagenarians do tend to be non-violent!)  However I believe that the development of DNA identification and the ubiquitous CCTV cameras in town centres and large retail outlets have reduced the chances of the criminal ‘getting away with it and that, rather than the severity of the punishment is  surely the most effective deterrent to crime.

            How ironic that the knowledge that ‘Big Brother is watching you’, one of the most sinister features of George Orwell's. 1984 should prove to be a blessing in 2013!

           

           

            

Week 17 2013

Tendring Topics……….on Line

A Very Public Funeral

          ‘Speak no ill of the dead’, my mother used to say.  De mortuis nil nisi bonum, (of the dead say nothing but good) means much the same thing for those who wish to display their knowledge of Latin.  It has probably been this thought that has made me refrain from comment about the death of Baroness Thatcher and about her very public (and very expensive) funeral last Wednesday (17^th April)

            I’m certainly not going to add to the fulsome praise that has been lavished upon her during the past two weeks (you’d never dream that it was not Dennis Skinner, George Galloway, Glenda Jackson  or their like who put an end to her political career, but grandees of her own party!) but, on the other hand, I wouldn’t wish to descend to personal abuse or even personal criticism.  She was a very able and remarkable woman of strong and determined views and, as the UKs first woman Prime Minister, she set an example that all of her successors have tried to follow.  The fact that I consider her views mistaken and her example a bad one is beside the point.   I did warm to her just a little in the distress she displayed when her son Mark (now, thanks to mum, Sir Mark Thatcher Bart.) was missing for a few days in the Sahara desert while taking part in a motor rally.

            I have never for one moment hesitated to comment on and criticise the policies that she pursued so relentlessly. Only the week before her death, when I was unaware that she was even seriously ill, I wrote in this blog at some length about the ethics of compelling local authorities to sell off at bargain-basement prices houses that their predecessors had provided for the benefit of the people of their areas.  And I outlined the malign results countrywide of this successful attempt to widen political support.

            I have commented critically on her attitude towards European Union, her mass privatisations of public services, her widening the gap between the richest and the poorest in our society, her close association with Rupert Murdoch, a foreign media millionaire, in his conflict with British Trade Unions,  her friendship with General Pinochet, Chile's brutal fascist dictator, and her connivance with his escape from justice.

            One cannot but admire her resolution in recovering the Falklands after the Argentine invasion. However it should be remembered that she was the head of a government that had left the islands defenceless against such an attack, the last vestige of a British naval presence having been removed shortly before the invasion.  Patrolling Trident submarines (our ‘ultimate deterrent’) had not the slightest effect upon the Argentines, as they have had no deterrent effect upon any act of aggression that has occurred since World War II.  Might not the permanent presence in Port Stanley of an adequate British garrison been a more effective deterrent and possibly have saved a great deal of money and many British and Argentine lives?   

            Shakespeare got it right when he put into Mark Anthony’s mouth, ‘The evil that men do lives after them.  The good is oft interred with their bones’.  It doesn’t apply only to men.

The County Council Elections

Broken and dangerous paving stones in Agincourt Road, Clacton-on-Sea  

I have written several times in this blog about the dire state of Clacton’s pavements.   There are broken and uneven paving stones and kerbs in street after street away from the actual town centre.   They shake up the ancient bones of mobility scooter users like me.  They’re a danger to all pedestrians after dark and they’re a peril to those with impaired vision at any time of the day or night.

            I last wrote about them only six or eight weeks ago and was astonished, and very pleased a fortnight later to see the County Council’s contractors hard at work in Clacton’s Old Road near the Waterglade business park repairing one of the stretches of footpath about which I had complained.   Since then I have spotted other footpaths being repaired and have noticed that at least some of the potholes in the middle of roads, that had existed for years, have been filled in.

  

The relaid footpath in Clacton's Old Road.
             

Why, I wondered, is all this happening just now?  Had the county council (who are the highway authority) suddenly discovered a few thousand pounds that they hadn’t known they possessed?  All became clear when I realized that there is to be a County Council election on 2nd May.  Existing members of the County Council  had no doubt urged their contractors to get on with the job in the hope of encouraging residents to use their votes for candidates of their party.  I'm afraid they realized the importance of those repairs a bit too late to attract my vote.

         I certainly intend to use that vote in the County Council election  So far I have had election literature from the Labour, Conservative and 'Tendring First' candidates.  I understand that UKIP are contesting every county council seat in Essex.  I certainly won't vote for their candidate and, although I have nothing against the Conservative Candidate, I can't possibly vote for a member of the political group who elected and supported Lord Hanningfield as County Council Leader, who have neglected the maintenance of Clacton's roads and footpaths, who have closed, despite wide public protest, a recycling and refuse site in St. Osyth, resulting in fly tipping and congestion in Clacton's Rush Green Road site, and more recently have first closed Colchester High Street to traffic and then, just when members of the public were getting used to the closure, cancelled it - presumably because they could see it was losing them votes.   

'LEADER SLAMS BISHOP REMARKS'

          The above announcement, accompanied by a picture of the Rt Rev Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Chelmsford (a diocese that includes Clacton-on-Sea and the Tendring District) greeted readers of the Clacton Gazette last week.  The ‘Leader’ of the headline is Councillor Peter Halliday, recently elected as political ‘Leader’ of the Tendring District Council.  Another smaller headline declared Church told not to interfere as benefits reforms hit Clacton hardest.   What, I wondered, could the Bishop possibly have said to upset the Council’s leader?  Had he insulted the Council in some way or made light of our current economic problems?  

He had, as might have been expected, done nothing of the sort.  The Bishop had expressed concern at the revelation in a recent report, that poor residents in the Tendring District are likely to feel the impact of the government’s welfare reforms more than those of most other districts.   It might have been expected that that would be a concern shared by Tendring Council and its political leader.   It appeared that working-age benefit claimants in Tendring will lose £620 a year by 2014/15 because of the reforms.  Those in the City of London will lose an average of just £180.

The Rt Rev Stephen Cottrell is quoted as saying that he wanted to voice his concern about the injustice that had been revealed.   ‘Although some reform of the welfare system is necessary, I cannot turn a blind eye to the injustice that it is the poorest people in our poorest communities who will be paying the price of the current welfare reforms.  Of course benefits should not be paid to those who don’t need them or to anyone who is claiming them falsely.  But in a time of austerity there is actually a greater need to support the poor and to ensure that everyone in society bears the costs  of any reductions, especially those who are better able to afford it’.  That sounds eminently reasonable to me, especially in the light of recent figures showing that 3,480 people in Tendring are claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance – 4.5 percent of the working-age population.

But Mr Halliday will have none of it. ‘Are these people the poorest in society or are the poorest people those who are going to work, being paid the minimum wage and just managing to keep their heads above water?’, he asks rhetorically..  Perhaps the Bishop would arrange for Mr Halliday’s local parish priest to take him to one side and explain the ways in which those people being paid the minimum wage are also penalised by the so-called reforms.  Perhaps too, Mr Halliday will tell those 3,480 unemployed local residents where they can find work – at even the minimum wage.

Peter Halliday says, ‘I’m concerned at the level of interference by the church about changes to welfare and this government’s policies.  Some of the actions of his own organisation need to be sorted out before worrying about what other people are doing’.   A spokesman for the Diocese of Chelmsford gave some examples of the way in which Britain’s Christian Churches ‘interfere’ in the lives of their disadvantaged fellow citizens; ‘Churches are communities made up of people who care for one another.  They set up support groups for people affected by problems so that they can share their experiences and address the challenges they are facing together.  They help people who are struggling with debt, they work with charities to help people who are worried about losing their homes, and they are involved in setting up and running food banks’.

Mr Halliday might care to find out what local churches are doing in Clacton and in the Tendring District generally - and perhaps join in.   He’ll find there’s plenty of work to be done but it differs from that of district councillors in that there’s no payment made for simply turning up at meetings – and volunteers for church activities can rarely claim even their out-of-pocket expenses. 

‘He called for his Fiddlers three’

         There is, of course, a kind of fiddling that doesn't involve the use of a violin! Nowadays, I suppose, Colchester’s legendary Old King Cole would have called for his financial advisers. There have always been people who enriched themselves unscrupulously but I believe that the situation worsened during the avaricious 1980s when Mrs Thatcher was PM.   That was the decade in which the market philosophy of ‘get as much as you can for as little as you can get away with’ really took hold.  Everything – and everyone had a price - and the Daily Telegraph (surely reckoned to be one of our more responsible broadsheets) published a  leading article ‘A Defence of Greed’.

            We hear, and read in sections of the popular press, a great deal about benefit fraudsters and those who use state ‘benefits’, not just as temporary help in an emergency, but as a preferred lifestyle.  It’s a pretty uncomfortable and squalid lifestyle though and I don’t believe as many embrace it from choice as some sections of the press and some politicians would like us to believe.

 Nor is it only the poor who are on the fiddle.  We haven’t forgotten the many ‘honourable members’ of the House of Commons and at least one ‘noble Lord’ who, despite receiving what most of us would regard as generous salaries, claimed fraudulent expenses.  A very few were prosecuted and gaoled but many got away with paying back the money that they had fraudulently claimed.  I have just read in the daily Gazette a report about our very own Lord Hanningfield (who did serve a very brief gaol sentence for his fraud).  In the first eight months of his return to the House of Lords after early discharge from gaol, this convicted criminal has claimed £21,000 for attendance and £1,736 in travel expenses for his attendance there - but there is no record of his having said a word or asked a single question  in the ‘Upper House’.  Nor is there any question of his having once again broken the law. He could certainly teach a lesson or two to small-scale benefit cheats!

            Then, of course, there are the seriously wealthy cosmopolitans with their tax havens, their charitable trusts and their phony charities. They keep a whole financial industry profitably engaged in advising them on avoiding the taxation that should be the responsibility and privilege of everyone who enjoys British citizenship, is permitted to reside here permanently, or who operates a business enterprise within our shores.

            Catch the little fish with their benefit fraud by all means – but don’t forget the big ones with their stashed-away millions, and their armies of ‘professional fiddlers’. They may be more difficult to hook, gaffe and land but they'll prove to be a far more profitable catch!