Tendring Topics.....on line
Quite
Legal……but Immoral!
That,
you may have thought, was an accusation that might be made about some of the
activities of money-lenders, bookmakers, escort agencies, massage parlours and
similar dubious individuals or institutions.
They though are all just small fry compared with the big operators who
(obviously for a reasonable fee) can make sure that the rich and famous, the
great and the good, get away with paying only a fraction of the income tax of
us lesser mortals.
I
have been protesting about the iniquity of legal tax avoidance for years. A
particularly flagrant case has at last caught the attention of David Cameron
our Prime Minister. His shock/horror at finding that a well-known comedian’s
financial arrangements had the perfectly legal effect of reducing the
percentage of his income-tax payments to
lower than that of the council employee who empties his dustbins, spurred him
into making his judgemental statement about the morality of income tax
avoidance.
I’m
not going to pretend that I understand the details of the tax avoidance scheme
with which this individual was involved but I understand that his income was
first paid into an off-shore account from which he received no income but
‘borrowed’ all the money that he needed.
He, of course, was just the one tax avoider who was singled out and
pilloried (and has, as a result, withdrawn from the scheme), but there are
scores, perhaps hundreds, of others involved in the same or other similar
schemes. I suspect that if all the tax
avoidance loopholes were closed, we would be well on our way to solving the
deficit problem that is responsible for so much of the austerity that the
government has imposed upon us during the past two years.
My
own solution to the problem would be to tackle it from its source. I would make the principal source of the
national revenue a ‘citizenship tax’, a percentage of the gross income of every single one of us without exception or
exemption, as our payment for the very considerable privilege of being a
citizen of the United
Kingdom . Evading, by any means at all, that
basic ‘membership fee’ would be
considered to be as irresponsible and antisocial as drink-driving is today! I
think it likely that fifteen or twenty percent of income overall would be more
than adequate. This percentage would
amount to a very small sum from the very poor (just as percentage increases to
their income are very small) but a very large sum from the seriously wealthy. Once that citizenship tax had been paid,
what happened to the remainder of the taxpayer’s income (which, for the
seriously wealthy would still be a very large sum) would be no concern of the
state. It could be paid into an
off-shore account, donated to charity, used to buy a football team, a yacht, or
a home on the shores of the Mediterranean, frittered away on extravagant living
– or saved for ‘a rainy day’.
No - it isn’t going to happen – not this year,
not in this decade, probably not in this century.
In the
meantime I hope that our Prime Minister and government will cease wringing
their hands at the immorality of tax avoidance and close the legal loopholes
that make this avoidance possible. If
they can’t do it then it is time they were replaced by a government that can –
and will!
A Forgotten Anniversary
I
am often awake at about 5.00 am. I
usually listen to the 5.30 am news headlines, weather forecast and Prayer for the Day on Radio 4, before getting up at 5.45 am with the
arrival of Farming Today. Just before Prayer for the Day listeners are reminded of news items that made
the headlines on that day in bygone years.
Last Thursday (21st
June) for instance, we were told that Prince William had been born on 21st
June in 1982 and that it was therefore his thirtieth birthday, and that on that
date in 1945 American forces had finally succeeded in taking the Pacific Island
of Okinawa from the Japanese. There were
one or two other anniversaries that I have forgotten but there was one,
certainly front page news at the time, which was conspicuously ignored.
It
was the capture of Tobruk by General Rommel’s German Afrikakorps in 1942; not
quite as disastrous as the fall of Singapore to the Japanese earlier in that
same year, but certainly the nadir of British fortunes in North Africa – a
situation that was to be dramatically reversed a few months later with the
Battle of El Alamein.
The
fall of Tobruk was seventy years – a lifetime – ago, but it is not an anniversary
that I shall ever forget. I was one of the 30,000 British and allied troops taken
prisoner on that day and destined to spend the remainder of World War II as a
PoW.
The
eight-gun Medium Artillery Battery of which I was a lowly member had been in
almost continuous action from the day in late May (a few days after my 21st
birthday) when Rommel had launched his offensive in the neighbourhood of
Gazala, some forty miles west of Tobruk.
Continuously on the move, we had in mid-June become part of the Tobruk
garrison, defending the perimeter in a position to the south-east of the town and
port.
On
19th June we learned that we were cut off from the main British
forces but were assured by ‘Military Intelligence’ (we used to say cynically that, in descending order, there were three
kinds of intelligence – human, animal, and military!) that the main German
forces were by-passing Tobruk and moving eastward towards Cairo and the Nile
delta. We settled down for the night
expecting a long siege.
We
were woken before dawn by the thunder of artillery fire, the roar of low-flying
aircraft, the rattle of machinegun fire and explosion of bombs. The enemy attack had begun – and it was
clearly concentrated on our sector of Tobruk’s perimeter! We manned the guns and, for several hours,
fired at unseen targets, our guns directed by an Observation Post Officer and
Assistant in a forward position. Our 4.5mm gun/howitzers were designed and
built to batter down fortifications, not to be aimed at relatively small,
moving targets like armoured cars and tanks. Our guns targeted the terrain over
which the enemy tanks were advancing – but if the tank commander made sure that
they were well separated as they advanced he could be certain that some,
probably most, would come through unscathed.
Meanwhile
Stuka bombing aircraft were flying without opposition overhead (on that fateful
day we had no support either from the Royal Navy or the RAF) and enemy shells
were falling all around our gun position.
‘Airburst’ shells exploding overhead were particularly deadly. Much of the force of those bursting on impact
was absorbed by the desert sand.
Our
targets were getting closer and closer.
Before we could be over-run we were ordered to ‘limber up’ our guns and
withdraw to a new position to the north-west from which we could see, in the
distance, enemy tanks heading toward the town and port. Again we opened fire, this time within sight
of our targets. The dust and smoke of
battle made it impossible to see whether our shells were having any effect.
As
darkness fell, the firing on both sides subsided. The air reeked of burnt
cordite and of smoke from burning vehicles.
It was painfully obvious to us that Rommel’s attack had succeeded and
that the centre of Tobruk was already in enemy hands. We laid down to sleep beside our guns on the
desert sand with the prospect of death, maiming and/or captivity on the
following day. Exhausted, we all slept
soundly anyway!
With
the dawn a German spotter plane flew low overhead. We reached for the captured Italian rifles
that most of us had acquired and fired an ineffective volley. We ‘stood to’ on the guns awaiting an order
to fire. We fully expected to be ordered to make a heroic ‘last stand’ and no
doubt we would have done so. Fate though, decreed otherwise. A radio message
from the garrison commander, a South African, General Klopper ordered us to
disable our guns, set fire to our transport and await our victors’ orders. He had surrendered the garrison to avoid
further pointless bloodshed.
Thus,
I became a PoW. I spent the next
almost–three-years, first in a large PoW camp in Italy
and later in a small working camp in Germany . When the Third Reich
collapsed in May 1945, I liberated myself (with a great deal of help from the
Soviet Army!) and made my way through Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia
ultimately to the British army – and home!
There
was an unexpected sequel to my capture at Tobruk and my subsequent life as a
PoW. Years later (it must have been in
the early 1970s) my wife and I, with our two then-teenage sons were enjoying a
camping holiday in Austria . Taking a trip to the summit of the Muttersberg near the
small town of Bludenz
in Vorarlberg province, we found ourselves sharing a cable car with an almost
identical German family. I commented on
the father’s very good English. ‘Yes’,
he said, ‘I was a PoW in England Italy and 18
months in Germany
– that accounted for the fact that his English was much better than my
German. I then asked him – what one PoW
always asks another! – ‘Where were you
captured?’ He replied, ‘Tobruk’ adding, in case I had never
heard of the place, ‘that’s in North Africa !’ I
had been captured there on 21st June 1942. He had been captured a few months later,
subsequent to the Battle of El Alamein!
It’s
a small world!
A minor banking crisis!
Nat.West,
the Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulsterbank are banks which last week
spectacularly failed to perform what most of us see as their main purpose –
looking after our money, adding incoming sums to our accounts, paying our
bills, and repaying, promptly and efficiently when we need it, the money we
have entrusted to their care. I wonder
if those banks are managed by some of those brilliant financial supermen who
need a salary of millions of pounds a
year to persuade them to turn up at
their offices, plus the promise of further five-figure bribes (or bonuses) if
they’re to give us their very best?
Offer them less, so we’re told, and they’d go elsewhere.
When
my family and I first moved to Clacton in 1956 I signed on with the Co-op Bank,
largely because they imposed no bank charges on those who kept their accounts
in credit, and they had a branch office on the corner of Rosemary Road and the
Grove, just a couple of hundred yards from the office in the Town Hall where I
worked. That was over half a century ago. The Co-op Bank is not one of the UK ’s largest
and most prestigious, but it has never needed to be ‘bailed out’ by us
taxpayers. It has never let me down and it has an ethical investment policy
that allows me to be confident that my money, entrusted to their care, isn’t
used to buy armaments, to exploit the poor, or to help prop up dodgy enterprises
or autocratic regimes. The nearest branch is in Colchester
but the bank is easily accessible by phone or on the internet. I can pay cheques
into my current account at any post office and, again from any post office or
cash machine, I can use my Co-op VISA debit card to withdraw cash from that
account. Using the internet I can
instantly check the state of my current account and details of payments and
withdrawals. I have no complaints.
The Weather!
This
is a subject on which, this year, words almost fail me; a winter drought that
the water companies assured us would take months of steady rain to remedy,
followed by a late spring and early summer of high winds, torrential rain (some
areas have had a month’s rainfall in two or three hours), floods, high winds
and – just occasionally – warm sunshine!
We are just at the beginning of my ninety-second summer and I have never
seen another like it! It’s true that I can’t remember much about my first two
or three summers I but have been credibly informed that in the year (1921) in which I
arrived, the summer was particularly warm and dry.
Surely
no-one can now deny that we are in the midst of a period of world climatic change and
fewer and fewer can possibly believe, as our MP does, that human activity has
no responsibility for it. Our ancestors
would have been convinced that we had incurred the anger of God (or perhaps of
‘the gods’) and so perhaps, in a sense, we have. If not God, then certainly Nature is
reacting to our selfishness, greed and our profligate use of fossil fuels.
I
am only thankful that Clacton and the Tendring
District generally have, as is often the case, escaped the flooding and
devastation that has occurred elsewhere - and we have had more than our fair share of the occasional warmth and sunshine!
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