Tendring Topics……..on Line
Making Sure of your Vote
Have you received the official envelope containing your Electoral Registration Form yet? If not, you should be receiving it shortly. Should you not receive it, contact your local Electoral Registration Office. For Tendring residents that’s Westleigh House, Carnarvon Road, Clacton-on-Sea, CO15 6QF, Tel. 01255 686586. Some Clactonians may remember it as having been my office, as the town’s Housing Manager, prior to 1974!
We receive this form annually, but this year it is doubly important that every householder should read it and carry out its instructions. Next year there will be a parliamentary general election. As a result of the recent expenses scandal an unusually large number of sitting MPs will not be contesting this election. This gives us an unprecedented and probably not-to-be repeated opportunity to fill the chamber with new faces. It is by securing and using our right to vote that we can ensure that our representative is one we can trust to make his or her voice and vote used responsibly on our behalf and on behalf of the whole nation.
Read and respond to the Electoral Registration Form to make sure that your name, and those of eligible members of your household, is on the Electoral Register. You don’t bother to vote, so why bother to register? It’s your privilege to refrain from voting if you wish to. Don’t complain though if your indifference helps to set the scene for the advent of a 21st Century Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini who’ll make sure that you never vote again except, of course, for his approved candidates.
Responding to the Electoral Registration Form has never been difficult but the current form is the easiest ever! If, as in my case, your household is exactly the same as it was last year (no-one has achieved the age of 16, no-one has moved in, moved out or died) you don’t have to fill it in at all. You can register by Freephone, by internet on the registration website, or by text message. Straightforward easy-to-follow instructions are given (believe me, if it is possible to misinterpret instructions I’ll manage it!). I responded by text message and, within minutes, received a return text confirming that I had been registered.
If there is an alteration simply cross out the name of whoever has died or moved away, and enter that of anyone who has moved in or achieved the age of 16, sign the form, slip it in the envelope provided, and drop it into the nearest post box. Why 16 when the eligible age for voting is 18? Simply to make sure that 16 and 17 year olds will be able to vote in any election that occurs after their 18th birthday. On the form there’s a special place for their names and dates of birth to be entered.
Political Tactics
I have been involved in the local government service for the greater part of my life. Throughout those years local government has degenerated from a proud and largely independent provider of most of the services that make for civilised life, to a mere ‘facilitator’ of just a few of those services, always kept on a tight rein by increasingly dictatorial central governments.
The latest development has been the compulsory introduction of parliamentary style politics to every Council Chamber. Each council now has its political ‘leader’ with his ‘cabinet’, a small group of influential members of the majority party. Each of these is a ‘portfolio holder’ and brings to cabinet meetings the recommendations that would previously been made after full consideration by a committee. The cabinet’s decisions are then presented to the full council, where party members are expected to toe the party line. All the other trappings and trimmings of parliamentary government (except perhaps five-figure expenses claims) follow from this. There’s a leader of the opposition, shadow portfolio holders, three line whips and so on.
Where all this pretentious nonsense leads is being amply demonstrated in our own Tendring District at the moment. Those (quite a tiny minority I suspect!) who bother about such matters, will know that Tendring Council has two almost evenly balanced political groups; the Conservatives and the Tendring First Group. The latter is a coalition of Labour, Lib Dems, Community Representatives and others. I, and I dare say quite a few other people, think of them as the ABC (Anything But Conservative) Group.
The ABCs held power, by the narrowest of narrow majorities, for a couple of years and I don’t think that they did too badly. It was stupid of them to set up a private regeneration company when they could and should have done the job themselves. However, despite all the criticism from ‘Readers’ Letters’ in the Clacton Gazette, and our local MP's expressed opinion that they ‘couldn’t run a bath’, the ABCs actually succeeded in running successfully a blossoming district that, despite the recession, has and is attracting major businesses to its main shopping areas and holiday makers to its seaside resorts..
However last May, thanks to the absence of one member and the Chairman’s casting vote, the Conservatives gained control of the Council……..and promptly discovered that, despite all their promises, there was really not a great deal that they could do to change things. The town’s water feature, for which they had had nothing but condemnation while in opposition, still operates though with an ugly fence around it. The Regeneration Company, about which they shared my views, still exists. The only pronouncements that I have noticed have been the probability of being unable to carry out promised regeneration, particularly in Harwich, Brightlingsea and Jaywick. ‘Money’, one of their spokesmen proclaimed, must be ‘saved for a rainy day’. As a correspondent to the Daily Gazette pointed out, as far as the economy is concerned, it is pretty rainy right now!
Sad circumstances have brought the stability of the Conservative administration into question. Conservative councillor Charlie Bambridge, of Clacton’s Burrsville Ward suffered from a stroke and died unexpectedly towards the end of July. This, of course, gives the ABCs a, possibly temporary, numerical advantage. Now they have called for an extraordinary meeting of the Council, to be held before the by-election that will decide Mr Bambridge’s successor.
I don’t know what they have in mind. They could, I suppose, use their current majority of one to insist on and elect a new Chairman who could then exercise his casting vote to ensure their control of the Council once more. The Conservatives, naturally enough, are outraged and accuse their opponents of ‘exploiting the death of a leading councillor in an attempt to win back power’.
It doesn’t seem to me to be very different from the tactic by which the Conservatives unseated the ABCs and seized power themselves. Those who have taken advantage of Parliamentary style in-fighting in local government must learn to take the rough with the smooth. I don’t think it is, or should be, true that All’s fair in love and war but all is undoubtedly fair in national, and now in local, politics.
‘The Light of Other Days’
Oft in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,
Fond memory brings the light
Of other days around me.
So wrote the Victorian poet Thomas Moore. I know what he meant, but it tends to be news stories rather than sleeplessness that bring ‘the light of other days’ to my mind. Memories of a warm and sunny afternoon in May 1973 flooded into my mind when, on two successive evenings, there were news stories about punting on th
e Cam on BBCtv’s Look East programme. Our elder son Pete was in his second year at Cambridge. Heather and I, proud parents, were visiting him and he had introduced us to the joys of punting. We hired a punt and made our way up-river to Granchester, at first Pete wielded the pole and after a while, having grasped the principles of punting, I replaced him. I didn’t fall in. I didn’t lose my pole. In fact, I was quite good at it. Pete took a photograph that I look at from time to time to remind myself that Heather and I weren’t always old fogies!
The news stories? Oh yes, it was claimed that paddle-boarding was challenging punting as a means of recreation on the Cam. The board resembles a very large, wheel-less skateboard. The user stands on it with a long handled paddle and paddles his way over the water. It’s faster than punting and, so it was claimed, was no more likely to deposit its user headlong into the Cam. It’ll never rival punting though. Punting is a leisurely social activity that demands at least one passenger to make it enjoyable. There’s certainly no room for a passenger on a paddle-board!
The other story was a little more serious. It seems that in order to attract and retain customers, hirers of punts are pestering potential customers and even pursuing them into the town with ‘special offers’ and other inducements; behaviour considered to be more appropriate to a middle-eastern market than a historic English university town.
It was a report on Farming Today on Radio 4 about the resurgence of rabbits as a pest to farmers that took me back in memory to our very first real married home, a bungalow two or three miles north of Ipswich. It was adjacent to a large area of wasteland teeming with rabbits! I fought a long war of attrition against their depredations on anything green planted in our garden. Wire netting fencing had to be inspected at least daily to prevent burrowing underneath. Our cat would occasionally deposit small rabbit corpses (she wisely didn’t try to tackle large ones) on our doorstep.
Myxamatosis ended our warfare abruptly and painfully. Dying rabbits with enormously swollen eyes hopped blindly everywhere. I despatched as many as I could quickly and, I hope, fairly painlessly. I had much preferred the infestation to its conclusion.
The news that a young man suffering from Asperges Syndrome, an IT whizzkid who had foolishly penetrated American defence computer files, was to be extradited to the USA (and that there was nothing that the government or anyone else could do about it) brought newspaper headlines from the past into my mind.
There were the American Law Courts which, during Britain’s struggle with the IRA, repeatedly refused to extradite suspected and convicted IRA terrorists to the United Kingdom on the grounds that, ‘they wouldn’t get fair treatment here’.
There was the case of General Pinochet who had presided over the torture and/or murder of hundreds of Chileans and others, including at least one British citizen*. Britain refused to extradite him to Spain because of his ‘ill-health’. On his return to Chile (a far longer journey!) this ‘sick man’ demonstrated his contempt for British justice by immediately reviewing a military parade. He, of course, had influential friends in Britain including Lady Thatcher and Mr Norman Lamont.
Nevertheless it seems that we are happy to hand over this unfortunate young man to a judicial system which we know has, in the past, used and justified such means as ‘water boarding’ when questioning ‘terrorist’ suspects. I would have thought he should have been thanked and rewarded, for exposing the weaknesses in the security of defence plans that may well, since Britain and the USA are allied, contain some of our military secrets too.
*Dr Sheila Cassidy, a medical practitioner, who recorded her agonising and humiliating ordeal in her autobiographical ‘Audacity to Believe’ (publishers - Collins). During her recovery in England she briefly became a nun and has subsequently been deeply involved with palliative and Hospice care for the terminally ill
Making Sure of your Vote
Have you received the official envelope containing your Electoral Registration Form yet? If not, you should be receiving it shortly. Should you not receive it, contact your local Electoral Registration Office. For Tendring residents that’s Westleigh House, Carnarvon Road, Clacton-on-Sea, CO15 6QF, Tel. 01255 686586. Some Clactonians may remember it as having been my office, as the town’s Housing Manager, prior to 1974!
We receive this form annually, but this year it is doubly important that every householder should read it and carry out its instructions. Next year there will be a parliamentary general election. As a result of the recent expenses scandal an unusually large number of sitting MPs will not be contesting this election. This gives us an unprecedented and probably not-to-be repeated opportunity to fill the chamber with new faces. It is by securing and using our right to vote that we can ensure that our representative is one we can trust to make his or her voice and vote used responsibly on our behalf and on behalf of the whole nation.
Read and respond to the Electoral Registration Form to make sure that your name, and those of eligible members of your household, is on the Electoral Register. You don’t bother to vote, so why bother to register? It’s your privilege to refrain from voting if you wish to. Don’t complain though if your indifference helps to set the scene for the advent of a 21st Century Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini who’ll make sure that you never vote again except, of course, for his approved candidates.
Responding to the Electoral Registration Form has never been difficult but the current form is the easiest ever! If, as in my case, your household is exactly the same as it was last year (no-one has achieved the age of 16, no-one has moved in, moved out or died) you don’t have to fill it in at all. You can register by Freephone, by internet on the registration website, or by text message. Straightforward easy-to-follow instructions are given (believe me, if it is possible to misinterpret instructions I’ll manage it!). I responded by text message and, within minutes, received a return text confirming that I had been registered.
If there is an alteration simply cross out the name of whoever has died or moved away, and enter that of anyone who has moved in or achieved the age of 16, sign the form, slip it in the envelope provided, and drop it into the nearest post box. Why 16 when the eligible age for voting is 18? Simply to make sure that 16 and 17 year olds will be able to vote in any election that occurs after their 18th birthday. On the form there’s a special place for their names and dates of birth to be entered.
Political Tactics
I have been involved in the local government service for the greater part of my life. Throughout those years local government has degenerated from a proud and largely independent provider of most of the services that make for civilised life, to a mere ‘facilitator’ of just a few of those services, always kept on a tight rein by increasingly dictatorial central governments.
The latest development has been the compulsory introduction of parliamentary style politics to every Council Chamber. Each council now has its political ‘leader’ with his ‘cabinet’, a small group of influential members of the majority party. Each of these is a ‘portfolio holder’ and brings to cabinet meetings the recommendations that would previously been made after full consideration by a committee. The cabinet’s decisions are then presented to the full council, where party members are expected to toe the party line. All the other trappings and trimmings of parliamentary government (except perhaps five-figure expenses claims) follow from this. There’s a leader of the opposition, shadow portfolio holders, three line whips and so on.
Where all this pretentious nonsense leads is being amply demonstrated in our own Tendring District at the moment. Those (quite a tiny minority I suspect!) who bother about such matters, will know that Tendring Council has two almost evenly balanced political groups; the Conservatives and the Tendring First Group. The latter is a coalition of Labour, Lib Dems, Community Representatives and others. I, and I dare say quite a few other people, think of them as the ABC (Anything But Conservative) Group.
The ABCs held power, by the narrowest of narrow majorities, for a couple of years and I don’t think that they did too badly. It was stupid of them to set up a private regeneration company when they could and should have done the job themselves. However, despite all the criticism from ‘Readers’ Letters’ in the Clacton Gazette, and our local MP's expressed opinion that they ‘couldn’t run a bath’, the ABCs actually succeeded in running successfully a blossoming district that, despite the recession, has and is attracting major businesses to its main shopping areas and holiday makers to its seaside resorts..
However last May, thanks to the absence of one member and the Chairman’s casting vote, the Conservatives gained control of the Council……..and promptly discovered that, despite all their promises, there was really not a great deal that they could do to change things. The town’s water feature, for which they had had nothing but condemnation while in opposition, still operates though with an ugly fence around it. The Regeneration Company, about which they shared my views, still exists. The only pronouncements that I have noticed have been the probability of being unable to carry out promised regeneration, particularly in Harwich, Brightlingsea and Jaywick. ‘Money’, one of their spokesmen proclaimed, must be ‘saved for a rainy day’. As a correspondent to the Daily Gazette pointed out, as far as the economy is concerned, it is pretty rainy right now!
Sad circumstances have brought the stability of the Conservative administration into question. Conservative councillor Charlie Bambridge, of Clacton’s Burrsville Ward suffered from a stroke and died unexpectedly towards the end of July. This, of course, gives the ABCs a, possibly temporary, numerical advantage. Now they have called for an extraordinary meeting of the Council, to be held before the by-election that will decide Mr Bambridge’s successor.
I don’t know what they have in mind. They could, I suppose, use their current majority of one to insist on and elect a new Chairman who could then exercise his casting vote to ensure their control of the Council once more. The Conservatives, naturally enough, are outraged and accuse their opponents of ‘exploiting the death of a leading councillor in an attempt to win back power’.
It doesn’t seem to me to be very different from the tactic by which the Conservatives unseated the ABCs and seized power themselves. Those who have taken advantage of Parliamentary style in-fighting in local government must learn to take the rough with the smooth. I don’t think it is, or should be, true that All’s fair in love and war but all is undoubtedly fair in national, and now in local, politics.
‘The Light of Other Days’
Oft in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,
Fond memory brings the light
Of other days around me.
So wrote the Victorian poet Thomas Moore. I know what he meant, but it tends to be news stories rather than sleeplessness that bring ‘the light of other days’ to my mind. Memories of a warm and sunny afternoon in May 1973 flooded into my mind when, on two successive evenings, there were news stories about punting on th
e Cam on BBCtv’s Look East programme. Our elder son Pete was in his second year at Cambridge. Heather and I, proud parents, were visiting him and he had introduced us to the joys of punting. We hired a punt and made our way up-river to Granchester, at first Pete wielded the pole and after a while, having grasped the principles of punting, I replaced him. I didn’t fall in. I didn’t lose my pole. In fact, I was quite good at it. Pete took a photograph that I look at from time to time to remind myself that Heather and I weren’t always old fogies!The news stories? Oh yes, it was claimed that paddle-boarding was challenging punting as a means of recreation on the Cam. The board resembles a very large, wheel-less skateboard. The user stands on it with a long handled paddle and paddles his way over the water. It’s faster than punting and, so it was claimed, was no more likely to deposit its user headlong into the Cam. It’ll never rival punting though. Punting is a leisurely social activity that demands at least one passenger to make it enjoyable. There’s certainly no room for a passenger on a paddle-board!
The other story was a little more serious. It seems that in order to attract and retain customers, hirers of punts are pestering potential customers and even pursuing them into the town with ‘special offers’ and other inducements; behaviour considered to be more appropriate to a middle-eastern market than a historic English university town.
It was a report on Farming Today on Radio 4 about the resurgence of rabbits as a pest to farmers that took me back in memory to our very first real married home, a bungalow two or three miles north of Ipswich. It was adjacent to a large area of wasteland teeming with rabbits! I fought a long war of attrition against their depredations on anything green planted in our garden. Wire netting fencing had to be inspected at least daily to prevent burrowing underneath. Our cat would occasionally deposit small rabbit corpses (she wisely didn’t try to tackle large ones) on our doorstep.
Myxamatosis ended our warfare abruptly and painfully. Dying rabbits with enormously swollen eyes hopped blindly everywhere. I despatched as many as I could quickly and, I hope, fairly painlessly. I had much preferred the infestation to its conclusion.
The news that a young man suffering from Asperges Syndrome, an IT whizzkid who had foolishly penetrated American defence computer files, was to be extradited to the USA (and that there was nothing that the government or anyone else could do about it) brought newspaper headlines from the past into my mind.
There were the American Law Courts which, during Britain’s struggle with the IRA, repeatedly refused to extradite suspected and convicted IRA terrorists to the United Kingdom on the grounds that, ‘they wouldn’t get fair treatment here’.
There was the case of General Pinochet who had presided over the torture and/or murder of hundreds of Chileans and others, including at least one British citizen*. Britain refused to extradite him to Spain because of his ‘ill-health’. On his return to Chile (a far longer journey!) this ‘sick man’ demonstrated his contempt for British justice by immediately reviewing a military parade. He, of course, had influential friends in Britain including Lady Thatcher and Mr Norman Lamont.
Nevertheless it seems that we are happy to hand over this unfortunate young man to a judicial system which we know has, in the past, used and justified such means as ‘water boarding’ when questioning ‘terrorist’ suspects. I would have thought he should have been thanked and rewarded, for exposing the weaknesses in the security of defence plans that may well, since Britain and the USA are allied, contain some of our military secrets too.
*Dr Sheila Cassidy, a medical practitioner, who recorded her agonising and humiliating ordeal in her autobiographical ‘Audacity to Believe’ (publishers - Collins). During her recovery in England she briefly became a nun and has subsequently been deeply involved with palliative and Hospice care for the terminally ill
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