Tendring Topics………on Line
‘The
old order changeth, yielding place to new……’
So declared
the dying King Arthur according to Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem The Passing of Arthur. If there is any historical basis for the
Arthurian legend, it is that Arthur was a Romanised Briton struggling to save a
remnant of Roman civilisation in a country overrun by Anglo-Saxon
barbarians. Many decades were to pass
and much blood shed before our land again became a civilised united kingdom
comparable with the Britain of Roman times.
There was a similar end of an old order and
its replacement by the new just a week ago, on 1st April. The final nails were being hammered into the
coffin of the caring welfare state established by my generation in the wake of World War II. It was being replaced by a new brutal
barbarism, devoted to the service and worship of its false god Mammon, to whom
it is determined to sacrifice our poorest and most helpless citizens in the
interest of a favoured minority. It was
on 1st April (and how appropriated that it should have been on April Fools Day!) that the government’s
austerity cuts, and the radical reconstruction of the NHS increasingly opening
its doors to ‘the private sector’,
came into force and the direction in which our country is being led became
abundantly clear.
I have little
doubt that many years and a great deal of suffering will have to be endured
before we return to a Britain comparable with that of Clement Attlee, Harold
MacMillan, Ted Heath and Harold Wilson, in which Freedom from Want and Freedom
from Fear for all our citizens were the objectives of all our political
leaders no matter how different may have been their means of achieving them.
The Chancellor
and his supporters claim that the government’s policies encourage those who
work hard to support themselves and their families. Yet two of the measures that came into force
last week will penalise low-paid workers as much as, if not more than, the
unemployed. As a former local authority
Housing Manager I find the new ‘bedroom tax’ particularly objectionable. Yes, I
know that the government dislikes that designation but I’m afraid they’ll have
to learn to live with it just as their predecessors had to live with the ‘poll tax’ that they found equally
objectionable and that brought about their downfall.
The bedroom
tax clearly labels tenants of ‘social housing’ (Councils and Housing
Associations) as second class citizens. Owner/occupiers
can, of course, have as many bedrooms as they like and so can occupiers of
publicly owned ‘tied houses’, provided they are posh enough. Nobody asks how many spare bedrooms there
may be at either 9 or 10 Downing
Street or at Chequers.
It is only Plebs who live in Council Houses who must pay extra – or get out
– if they have a spare bedroom to accommodate an occasional guest, or a
grown-up son or daughter who sometimes comes home to spend a weekend with mum and dad.
They have got it all worked out. Single or widowed, and married or ‘living
together’ tenants with no children, need only one bedroom. If they have one child, two of the same sex, or
two of the opposite sex but under ten years old, they need only two bedrooms,
and so on. When I was Clacton ’s
Housing Manager we used to encourage elderly
tenants whose children had left home, to move into smaller accommodation – and
many of them did. We never dreamed of
compelling them or of penalising them if they failed to do so. Nor did we ever
suggest that they should move into less roomy accommodation until we had such
accommodation to offer them. They may
have lived in one of the Council’s houses but it was their home and the (Conservative) Council respected that.
Nowadays those
who seek ‘social housing’ are not allowed the privilege of transforming their
council houses into ‘their homes’.
Tenancies are all to be ‘short term’ and, unless they are prepared to
pay extra for the privilege, they’re just offered minimal shelter from the elements.
No, of course the local authority or housing association can’t be expected to
have smaller accommodation for those who simply can’t pay that extra ‘bedroom
tax’. ‘They must find that for themselves – or sleep rough as many others have
to. The Salvation Army or some other lot
of ‘do gooders’ will make sure that they don’t actually starve – and the weather
will surely warm up eventually’.
Another
measure that will affect the employed as much as the unemployed relates to
Council Tax. From last Monday thousands
of disabled or otherwise disadvantaged house-holders will be liable to pay
their full Council Tax for the first time.
This imposition of central government is particularly clever as Councils
are permitted to continue any existing rebates provided they can make up the short-fall elsewhere. Thus it will be local and not central
government that gets the blame.
And the wider picture
Just
as the members of the government are penalising the poor for failing to move
into non-existent smaller homes, they are penalising the unemployed for failing
to take up non-existent jobs. The cap
on benefits and restriction of cost-of-living increases to one percent when
inflation is over twice that rate are all justified as helping to break the
‘dependency culture’ and encourage the unemployed to work for their
living. The biggest and best
encouragement that the poor can have is for there to be plenty of properly paid
work for them to do. Not until that
situation exists is the government or the popular press entitled to denigrate
the unemployed as ‘work-shy’. How extraordinary that those who believe that the
poor can only be persuaded to work by holding over them the threat of
homelessness and starvation, simultaneously believe that the very wealthy can
only be persuaded to give of their best by the promise of substantial
bribes, euphemistically referred to as
bonuses!
I
am glad to see the Christian
Churches Christian Churches
They are lazy. They are addicted to drink or drugs. They are not really poor. They cheat the system. They have an easy
life. They were the cause of the
deficit. These are false claims
that all Christians have a duty to challenge.
An ‘Old Hand’ for a New Job!
In 1974 the
Tendring District Council was newly formed from the amalgamation of Clacton , Frinton and Walton, and Brightlingsea Urban
Districts, the Tendring Rural District and the Borough of Harwich. As the new council’s first Public Relations
Officer I soon realized that the councillors from Harwich, of whatever their
political allegiance, exercised an authority and an influence well beyond their
numbers on the new Council.
That was
nearly forty years ago but it seems probable that the recent victory of John Hawkins
in a District Council by-election will continue and strengthen that tradition. Mr Hawkins had been Chief Executive of the
Tendring Council. He retired in 2010 after thirteen years in the Council’s top
job.
During his
election campaign as the Labour Candidate for the vacancy, he had said that he
would use his knowledge and experience of local government within the Tendring
District to give Harwich a strong voice on the council. It was after my own retirement from the Council’s service that John Hawkins was appointed to the post of
Chief Executive, so I have
never met him. I wish him well though
and I have little doubt that, now that parliamentary style politics have been
introduced into the Council Chamber, his experienced voice will strengthen and
hearten ‘the Opposition’.
‘Brain Upgrade’ needed?
Do you have a
feeling of apprehension when you go to close down your computer and a notice
appears on the screen urging you not to switch off because one or more updates
are being installed? The computer will
switch itself off when the process is complete.
I know that I do, because experience tells me that when I switch on again, something (who knows what?) won’t be quite the same. I know that whatever it is will make my computer more secure and/or more efficient. It may also mean though that I will have to perform a familiar task in a different and unfamiliar way – and, at my age, I just don’t like change!
That’s why
this cartoon, forwarded to me by my fifteen-years-younger-than-me
sister-in-law, speaks to my condition (as
we Quakers say)
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