Week 13 2013

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Happy Easter to all Blog readers!

          This week is an important one for all of us.  There has been – at last – agreement among politicians on the way in which the press should be regulated following the publication of the Leveson Report.  We will have had time to digest the effects of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Budget, which was presented to Parliament last Wednesday the day after last week’s blog was published, and it is the final week of the 2012/2013 Financial Year.  The main force of the government’s austerity programme will begin to be felt a few days into the following week.

A depiction of Christ’s Resurrection in St James C of E Church in Clacton-on-Sea.  The risen Christ is asking weeping Mary Magdalene ‘Why weepest thou?  Who seekest thou?’

           

It is also ‘Holy Week’ the final week of the season of Lent which comes to a climax on Good Friday with the remembrance of the rigged trial and cruel crucifixion of Jesus Christ whom we Christians believe to have been the incarnation of that true light of God that St John declares in verse 9 of the first chapter of his Gospel, 'enlightens everyone who comes into the world’. This is sometimes known as the Quaker Verse because it gives scriptural authority to the Quaker assertion that there is a divine spark, ‘that of God’, within every man, woman and child in the world, irrespective of                                                  their colour, race or creed.

            Fortunately for all humankind the agony and grief of Good Friday was overcome on that first Easter Sunday morning by Jesus’ resurrection and his appearance to the weeping Mary Magdalene.  Blinded by her tears she had imagined that it was the gardener who was sharing her pre-dawn vigil until Jesus made himself known with those kindly words ‘Why are you weeping? Who are you seeking?’ and with incredulous recognition her sorrow turned to joy.   That miraculous resurrection gives Christians the assurance that, in the end, good will triumph over evil.  Compassion, love and forgiveness will ultimately triumph over greed, hatred, selfishness, fear, and thoughts of vengeance, and the will of God ‘will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven’.

            I hope to join with others in giving thanks for that assurance on this Easter Sunday morning.

 Our ‘Free’ Press

          At the beginning of this blog I mentioned that, at long last, agreement had been reached by the political parties about regulation of the press.  Perhaps that statement should be qualified.  The politicians have indeed agreed, but membership of the group of newspapers to be subject to regulation is voluntary.  The editors (or would it be the owners who make the decision?) of one or two newspapers have reluctantly agreed to join ‘the club’ but others are strongly opposed to it.  Unless a clear majority decide to ‘sign on’ the whole elaborate arrangement could surely collapse.

            I was  interested in the comments of Ian Hislop, Editor of Private Eye a hard-hitting publication that I always enjoy reading, during the course of a BBC tv news programme on Tuesday 20^th May.   He pointed out that the press practices that have caused outrage among both celebrities and members of the general public – phone hacking, bribing or attempting to bribe the police or public officials, using recorded material in stolen mobile phones, unwarranted intrusion into the private concerns of members of the public by means of force or deception, were already criminal offences.  Why was it that they hadn’t been pursued before by the forces of the law?

            I think it likely that it was for the same reason that Jimmy Savile was allowed to get away with his activities for so long, and locally and on a much smaller scale, how Lord Hanningfield’s extravagant expense claims as a member of the House of Lords and Leader of Essex County Council, didn’t attract official attention for several years.  Those who knew or suspected wrongdoing had mortgages to pay and families to support.  The person they suspected had powerful friends who clearly had no such suspicions. They may though have had control of the future of any potential whistle-blower, whose promotion, job and whole future could be at risk. It would be best not to say a word without absolute, cast-iron proof.  Even then, it might be wiser to leave it to someone else to blow the whistle.

This brings me to the question of the ownership and control of our ‘free press’.  It is surely wrong for the means of influencing public opinion and swaying the mind of the electorate to be in the hands of wealthy individuals.   It is even worse if those individuals are not British – whether they be Russian oligarchs or American news media millionaires.  Such owners of the press wouldn’t dream of asking their editors and reporters to print anything that is untrue – but those employees know that their future careers will be enhanced if they select material that supports the newspaper owner’s preferences and prejudices as being newsworthy, and reject or put on a back page material that opposes them.  Meanwhile those owners, or their trusted lieutenants, seek the acquaintance and friendship of top politicians.  They don’t, of course, seek to bribe or bully them – but they leave them in no doubt about which policies and actions would ensure favourable headlines and news stories.

            This is not something that could happen.  It is something that has happened and I believe is still happening.  I don’t know the answer but I do know that a ‘free press’ tightly controlled by wealthy individuals isn’t free in any real sense of the word.  While I’d hate to see a government controlled press, I’d hate even more to live under a government controlled by the machinations of foreign media millionaires.       

‘It's all right for some!’

 On Wednesday 20^th March, most of us were trying to work out whether we would be better or worse off after George Osborne’s Budget.  Beer drinking motorists seeking daytime care for their children, who have been deterred from house purchase by the size of the deposit required, may well be better off – at least for the time being.  

            A few privileged employees of Barclays Bank had no such worries.  For them – despite the banking scandals of the past year – Christmas had come early!  On the same day that Mr Osborne was making his annual Budget Speech, Barclays were announcing that they were paying a total of £38.5 million in bonuses to their top employees.   At the top of the hand-out tree was their Head of Investment Banking who was given shares worth £17.5 million!  He may have had a few personal cash-flow problems – or perhaps he knew something about Barclays that we don’t – because he promptly cashed the lot.

            Barclays Chief Executive didn’t do quite so well.  He pocketed a mere £5.3 million worth of shares of which he cashed only half.

            It’s nice to know that these two gentlemen will also be getting a hand-out from a grateful government next week when the income tax on their take-home pay above £150,000 will be reduced.  Who was it said, ‘We’re all in this together’?

Talking about income tax reminds me………

          …….that one feature of the Chancellor’s Budget will benefit me if I’m still around to take advantage of it in April 2014, when it comes into force.  The first £10,000 of my income will be tax-free.   I’d rather that it wasn’t though.  I don’t think that those whose income is less than £10,000 a year should be ‘freed from the burden of income tax’

            Income tax is the only form of taxation that is levied directly in accordance with our ability to pay it.  VAT and taxes on petrol, alcohol, the lottery and the like are the same for wealthy and poor alike.  Consequently they hit the poor the hardest. Income tax could be properly graded so that it has the same impact on us all.  I’d like to see the same percentage of every adult’s gross income be their first and most important tax demand – an ‘annual membership fee’ for the very considerable privilege of being a British citizen.

            Levied on everyone, from the very wealthiest to those on minimum wage or ‘benefit’, it would of course mean that a much larger sum was collected from the wealthy than from the poor.  But we would all part with the same proportion of our income.  No one would starve or be rendered homeless by having to pay it – and I believe that quite a low percentage of gross income (30 percent perhaps) levied on every adult without exception would make it possible for the minimum wage and unemployment and similar benefits to be higher.   We would all have a stake in the country’s prosperity.  We would truly, ‘all be in this together’.

England’s most deprived area

                                                                         

 An Avenue on the Brooklands Estate taken by a ‘ Guardian’ photographer.  

The Guardian newspaper sent a reporter, Ms. Amelia Gentleman, to Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate  on Budget Day to discover how England’s most deprived area would be likely to fare under Chancellor George Osborne’s Budget.  In her report Ms Gentleman described the Brooklands Estate as consisting, ‘of small houses, some barely bigger than beach huts, packed together along potholed lanes’. Many of the residents were, ‘entirely dependent on the welfare system which the Chancellor described as “bloated”.  With 51 percent of adults receiving benefit, the Brooklands Estate acts as a test zone for the impact of government welfare reform.   Residents here will experience the changes in great numbers as they roll out later this year.  They are already feeling the effects of tightened eligibility to some benefits…………As well as being named the most deprived place in England and Wales in 2011, the area was found last year to have the highest number of young people not in employment or training, with a third of 16 to 24 year olds claiming jobseeker’s allowance, more than five times the national average of 6 percent.

Later in her report she comments that, ‘Brooklands’ population has always been transient but recently officials have noticed a bigger influx of families from London – possibly as a result of housing benefit changes in the capital, which are forcing families to search for cheaper housing elsewhere’.  A house price survey had revealed that Brooklands is one of the easiest areas in the country to buy a house.  Bungalows there are on sale for around £20,000.

            She reported that many people living in the area , ‘would like to sign up to Osborne’s vision of an aspiration nation, and become hard-working home-owning taxpayers’ but that there simply aren’t the jobs in the area to make it possible for them to fulfil that dream. ‘There are 3,500 unemployed people in the surrounding Tendring District competing for just 500 jobs currently being advertised’.

Making the most of the Budget!

A economics expert on BBC Breakfast tv on 21^st March pointed out that, thanks to the Budget, if we drank 10,000 pints of beer – we would save £10!

           

  

Week 12 2013

Tendring Topics…….on line

Lies, Damned Lies…….and Statistics!

          I don’t think that I have been alone in finding some of the regularly appearing national statistics very puzzling.   The United Kingdom’s economic situation clearly isn’t improving.   It seems likely that instead of climbing out of the ‘double-dip’ recession into which we fell a few months ago, we are heading for an unprecedented ‘triple-dip’.  The value of the pound sterling is falling against that of the American dollar and the once-derided euro, but this doesn’t so far appear to have helped our exporters.

Yet, at the same time we learn that the number of people in work is rising and the number of unemployed steadily falling.  It is true that the unemployment figure for our own Tendring District continues to rise but perhaps there are local reasons that account for this.  Nationally the employment situation has unquestionably been improving.

A partial explanation is to be found in figures recently released by Manpower UK Ltd a commercial employment agency with offices nation-wide.  As a result of the incompetent (or could it be plain dishonest?) activities of the Banks that the government is so eager not to offend, a large number of short-term temporary jobs have recently become available in the ‘financial sector’.

Remember the banks wrongful selling of ‘protection insurance’ to tens of thousands of their customers who neither needed nor wanted it?   That little mishap cost the banks £10 billion in compensation and they have had to take on 20,000 temporary staff to cope with the claims.  Then there was the Libor (fiddling the bank rate) scandal.  That cost Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland £300 million and also gave rise to temporary job vacancies on a scale sufficient to skew the statistics.  It appears that a substantial part of the fall in unemployment isn’t the result of a thrusting and entrepreneurial financial sector finding ‘fresh worlds to conquer’, but of its creating mammoth messes that required temporary extra staff to clear up.  

            Manpower UK Ltd also revealed that many public authorities had been over-enthusiastic in discarding staff to meet central government’s demands for ever-greater austerity cuts.  These authorities (local government, the NHS and so on) have statutory duties to perform which they cannot do without sufficient trained and experienced staff.  They are now having to find and recruit fresh staff to carry out those essential duties.

            This too, may present unexpected difficulties.  In order to reduce staff levels as painlessly as possible, many authorities invited voluntary redundancies.  It was an opportunity that some senior professional officers seized with both hands.   They knew that, in the private sector, their skills and experience could command higher salaries than most public servants can ever hope to enjoy.  What’s more, private sector employment would free them from the constant jibes of an irresponsible press and ignorant politicians.  Finding suitable replacements for them is not an easy task.  In the fantasy world in which top politicians dwell, a man (or woman) may be in charge of the nation’s health one week and then, on a Prime Minister’s whim, in charge of foreign affairs or immigration control the next.  In the real world of the hospital, the town hall, the school or the police station it isn’t quite so easy to fill posts demanding professional skill and experience.

UKIP on the march?

          Could the Eastleigh bye-election mark a significant turning point in British electoral history?  The big surprise was not the fact that the Lib.Dem. candidate won despite scandal about two of its formerly leading politicians that had made the tabloid headlines during the week.   Eastleigh had, after all, been regarded until quite recently as a very safe Lib.Dem. seat.   What was surprising was that UKIP came a good second, beating the Conservative candidate (whom many had been expecting to win) into third and the Labour candidate into fourth place.

            Not long ago UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) had been regarded as a fringe Party whose membership, according to David Cameron, were mostly nutters and closet racists.  Those of us with long memories recalled that in Germany, at a time of general disillusion with mainstream politics, Adolf Hitler had transformed a similar small fringe Party into a powerful political force that, for   a blood-soaked decade and a half, threatened to engulf not only Germany but the whole of Europe.   Britain in 2013 is going through a similar period of disillusion with mainstream politics. Is it just possible that UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage, could perform a similar, though of course very British, miracle?

            Nigel Farage, aged 48 and therefore young for a professional politician, seems to be the epitome of the popular chap who enjoys a pint or two and a fag, and is the life and soul of the pub lounge on a Saturday night; the sort of bloke who has no time at all for politically correct language (and demonstrates this freely!) or for any sort of regulation that prevents chaps like him (red-blooded British and proud of it) from enjoying themselves in any way they like. Nor does he have any time for the machinations of traditional politician of any persuasion.

            But Mr Farage is a lot more than that.  The typical pub lounge hero would be a bit contemptuous of women, patronisingly regarding them as being provided for his service and entertainment.  That’s not Nigel Farage.  He doesn’t make the mistake of underestimating the role of women in politics.  His candidate for the Eastleigh bye-election was Diane James, a very impressive contestant who came a creditable second in what had been a very safe Lib.Dem. constituency.  UKIP has a number of capable women members who, I have little doubt, will play an important part in the Party’s future.

 UKIP attracts supporters from across the political spectrum but is possibly most accurately regarded an alternative Conservative Party, well ‘to the right’ of the Party led by David Cameron.   UKIP is fervently nationalist. Its members believe that severing all links with the European Union will instantly solve most of Britain’s problems.  They urge a complete halt to immigration, in the first instance for five years. In other fields they pursue the objectives of the most right-wing members of the existing Conservative Party.  They want, so they say, a government of the British, by the British and for the British!

            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, the European Parliament Elections next year.

            Another straw in the wind; it is reported that Mr Farage has recently dined with Rupert Murdoch.  Mr Murdoch can hardly be described as a ‘king-maker’ but, as his favourite newspaper boasted with an ‘It was us what done it’ headline after a Thatcher electoral victory, he has certainly been a ‘Prime Minister maker’ in the past – and may be again.   David Cameron’s extraordinary determination not to give any statutory authority to future press regulation (despite his earlier promise to introduce the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry in full ‘unless they were clearly bonkers’) suggests that, even after all the revelations relating to his seedy media empire, Rupert Murdoch is not without influence.  

            UKIP’s aim is claimed to be Independence for the UK.  It is stridently anti-European but, surprisingly perhaps, its publicity says not a word about the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the USA.  That unequal alliance has, with its US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, cost us billions of pounds and hundreds of British lives.  In the 1960s we had in Harold Wilson, a Prime Minister who kept us out of the United States’ Vietnam war.  There are, thank Heaven, no names of British service men or women on the war memorials to victims of that disastrous venture

            I do intend to vote in the Count Council and, if I’m still around, in the European Parliamentary elections.  I believe very strongly that the best future for the United Kingdom is as an important part of a Europe more closely united both politically and economically.  Within and as part of such a Union the UK could co-operate or, where necessary, compete on equal terms with the members of any economic or political bloc in the world.

            I won’t know for whom I shall vote until polling day is a great deal closer – but it’ll be for the candidate most likely to defeat the UKIP candidate and any other candidate who shares UKIP's views!

Three Score years and Ten – and Another Score…..or More!

          The Old Testament psalmist declared that the span of human life was seventy years; ‘three score years and ten’.  He went on to concede that some people made it to eighty (four score years) but suggested that this wasn’t really a good idea. These days though more and more of us are passing even that second milestone – and we’re creating problems for the younger generation.  We can’t work (I don’t think that writing his blog counts as work as I’m not paid for it) but we still eat and drink.  We still need warmth and shelter and some of us – because of the infirmities that come with old age – may need other, often expensive, care.

            We all get free prescriptions for those infirmities, together with free bus travel, a free tv licence and a winter fuel allowance that, for the over eighties, amounts to £300 a year.  Some of us, because of very limited mobility or some other affliction, receive an ‘Attendance Allowance’ amounting to about £40 a week.  Those who are bedridden or unable to walk at all receive a considerably larger Attendance Allowance.   These freebies, and the winter fuel allowance and attendance allowance all have to be paid for out of taxation and are available to all, the millionaire and the destitute.  Age and (for the Attendance Allowance) disability, are the only criteria.

            At 91 and with steadily decreasing mobility, I am eligible for all of those benefits except the higher rate of Attendance Allowance. I hope though that I’m not so self-centred as to be unable to see the injustice of it.  I am certainly not in the same financial need as much younger folk who are homeless, unemployed or trying to support a family in a low-paid job.   Means testing, suggested recently in the House of Lords, would be a clumsy and expensive means of solving the problem. It would also probably mean that some proud old people would rather suffer hardship than apply for what would appear to them to be ‘charity’, especially as it would mean revealing to some uncaring official the details of their finances.

            What would be reasonable and I think acceptable to most pensioners, would be to make all those benefits subject to income tax like any other income.  This would mean that really poor old people would receive the whole of their benefit while those, like myself, who are fortunate enough to be eligible for income tax, would pay back  some but not all of it.  Such a change would leave no-one hungry or homeless because the very nature of income tax is that it is levied only on those who can afford to pay it.   If, in fact, we had a properly graded income tax system the only ‘means test’ that anyone of us would ever need to face would be our income tax assessment!

         

  

                       

           

             

 

Week 11 2013

Tendring Topics………on Line

‘Onward Christian soldiers……..

            The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), of which I have been a member for over sixty years, is perhaps best known for its Peace Testimony, its practical peace-making, and its opposition to all wars.  This didn’t stop George Fox, founder of the Society, and other early Friends from using military imagery in proclaiming the truth of the Christian Gospel as they saw it.  Many of those early Friends were disillusioned ex-servicemen from Cromwell’s army. They declared that, using peaceful means, they were fighting The Lamb’s War against the forces of evil.  This thought was in my mind while I was composing last week’s blog.  I was delighted that our fellow-Christians in the Salvation Army had organised a Food Bank to help Clacton’s poor and that we Quakers were supporting it as individuals and as a Meeting.   I was glad that this palliative action was being taken by Christians of every tradition, nation-wide.

            On the other hand, I had been pleased to read in the Church Times that, in the House of Lords, the Bishop of Leicester had expressed concern that these Food Banks were becoming accepted as a normal part of the ‘welfare state’ – not simply as a timely and temporary remedy in an emergency.  The welfare of its citizens should be the concern and responsibility of the state, not left to the charity of its better-off citizens.

            Last week the Church Times recorded efforts by Christians of very different traditions to encourage the government to bear in mind the causes of ‘the western world’s’ current economic crisis and not to make scapegoats of the very people who are already suffering most as a result of it.

            Archbishop Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Church world-wide, urged Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne to tackle the big banks whose irresponsibility and incompetence had been the primary cause of our problems.  As a member of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards the Archbishop (whose knowledge and experience of the commercial world is at least equal to that of the Chancellor!) declared that, ‘Big complex banks are not only too big to fail; they’re too big to manage’. He went on to say that the Chancellor was, ‘continuing to defend the idea of a small group of absolutely colossal banks’, and asked, ‘if this lack of will to break them up and reduce them to a size that eliminated risk to the economy is not simply a recipe for a repetition of the disasters we’ve seen in the last few years?’

             Much more recently the Archbishop has endorsed the strongly worded protest of over forty Church of England Bishops at the government’s attempt to solve the country’s economic problems by capping benefit payment increases at one percent, less than half the current rate of inflation. This, the Bishops said, would bring some 200,000 children into poverty. They asserted that at times of national financial crisis the vulnerable need extra – not less – help.

            Because of the Church of England’s ‘established church’ status Prime Ministers are closely involved with the filling of any Bishopric or Archbishopric that becomes vacant during their term of office. Could it be that David Cameron furthered the appointment of Justin Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury because of his Eton education and his wide and successful experience in the world of business before becoming an Anglican priest?  Had he imagined that that background made him ‘one of us’ and that he could be depended upon to support a government of millionaires, by millionaires and for millionaires?  It would have been understandable enough.  Some nine hundred years earlier King Henry II had made exactly the same mistake when he appointed his former close friend Thomas a Becket to that same post.

           I can well imagine the Prime Minister or the Chancellor of the Exchequer rhetorically  asking, in exasperation,  'will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?'  Fortunately there is little risk of Archbishop Welby suffering the same fate as his martyred medieval predecessor.

            Meanwhile a coalition of nonconformist Churches – The Baptist Union, the Church of Scotland, the Methodist Church and the United Reformed Church – have produced and published a report The Lies We Tell Ourselves challenging ideas about poverty that are spread by the Government and some sections of the news media.

            The report says that statistics have been manipulated by politicians and the media to support a comfortable but dangerous story: that the poor deserve the cuts that they are facing. ‘The poorest 120,000 families in Britain have been scapegoated, labelled as troubled and blamed for a large proportion of the problems in society’. Researchers had found that the common factor in the 120,000 families was not criminality or addiction, but the mothers’ mental health problems and that, ‘the figures used by the government were statistically flawed and highly misleading’.   Other ‘myths’ about poverty that the report claims to expose include the suggestion that child poverty is due to the parents’ not wanting to work.  It was found that, in-work poverty is now more common than out-of-work poverty’.   The report is being sent to every MP in the United Kingdom and to every Member of the Scottish Parliament.

              I am reminded of a verse of a hymn ‘O God of Earth and Altar’ written by G.K.Chesterton, author of, among many other things, the Father Brown detective stories.   In the hymn he asks God to defend us from:

Lies of tongue and pen,

And from the easy speeches

That comfort cruel men.

            The mother of Jesus Christ declared that the God whom we Christians worship ‘Scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts, puts down the mighty from their seats and exalts the humble and meek’.  Moreover he has ‘filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent empty away’.

            Does that declaration have any relevance for those of us today who are neither proud and mighty nor poor and hungry?   I think so.  St Theresa told us that, ‘In this world God has no feet but our feet to run his errands, no hands but our hands to do his work’.    Christians, of every tradition, are called upon to live ‘in the imitation of Christ’ and to work towards the fulfilment of the prayer: Thy Kingdom come.  Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven!’  

            ‘Onward Christian soldiers……..’ carrying the banner of truth and armed only with love and compassion for our fellow men and women, whatever their colour, race or creed!

The Debt Time-bomb!

          I have written before in this blog about the way in which the government, while penalising us all as it tries to reduce the nation’s debt, is actively encouraging individual indebtedness.  Student loans can leave graduates owing tens of thousands of pounds, and perpetuating the idea of ‘home ownership for all’ while insisting that no-one can expect to have a ‘job for life’ leaves no-one confident of being able to pay off the mortgage debt that makes home purchase possible.

            The government’s policies of cutting social service benefits and public servants’ income while food and fuel prices increase, drive those existing on a subsistence income into debt whenever their households are struck by a sudden and unexpected financial crisis – an expensive repair to a car needed for work, the irreparable breakdown of a cooker, fridge, freezer or washing machine, the illness of a major contributor to the family income, and so on.   In the first instance the sum that has been borrowed may seem small but if it is not repaid promptly (and how can it be by those already on a just-get-by income?) the accruing interest will soon take on astronomical proportions.    It isn’t surprising that Clacton-on-Sea and the Tendring District generally, with its high and growing unemployment, its deprived areas and its impoverished families and elderly residents, should be among the first to experience the wave of indebtedness among its inhabitants

The Clacton Gazette records that almost half of the 7,000 local people who sought the help and advice of the Clacton Citizens Advice Bureau last year had serious money problems, with about 60 new cases turning up each month. CAB adviser Lee Fraser told a Gazette reporter, most people sought help only as a last resort when they were already thousands of pounds in debt.   The average debt had been almost £10,000 and one client had total debts, including his mortgage, of over a million pounds!   ‘By the time they come to us, said Mr Fraser, ‘They are fully into the debt spiral.  Usually we see them when it has got to the stage when they are being plagued by phone calls from creditors and they are no longer opening any letters they receive…….people with council tax arrears have bailiffs knocking at the door’. Studies have revealed that one in eight people in serious debt has contemplated suicide.   CAB say that they can’t work miracles.  They can only help and advise.  However the fact that last year they helped to prevent 400 people within the Tendring District from losing their homes, and succeeded in getting £4.5 million of debt written off, seems pretty miraculous to me!

This year the benefit cuts, so-called bedroom tax and changes in liability to pay Council Tax, all of which will take effect within the next few weeks, will put further pressure on the finances of the poor, just when those with incomes in excess of £150,000 a year are having their income tax liability reduced! This, in turn, will increase pressure on the CABs throughout the UK, at the same time  as many of them, including Clacton CAB, are having to reduce the number of their specialist advisers (the only people employed in ‘financial services’ who are serving the community!) because of official spending cuts.

The Adverts Tell the Story

            From 2004 to 2006 (the last two years of my wife’s life) when I was her full-time carer, she and I watched a great deal of daytime commercial television.   It seemed to me at the time that the programmes were financed largely by adverts from firms of ‘ambulance chasing’ no-win no-fee lawyers encouraging those involved in an accident to sue, and by money-lenders eager to lend large sums of money often to people who, in their own interests, should never have been encouraged to borrow a penny.  Never mind, they insisted, if you are already deeply in debt, are old, out of work, have a bad credit rating, or have been refused by other lenders, get in touch with us.  We may well be able to help you.  They had a special message for those who already had multiple debts.  We’ll put them all together and pay them off.  Then we’ll be your sole creditor – and there may even be enough slack for you to enjoy some of the  really important things in life, like a holiday in Bermuda or a second car.

            Since 2006, increasing mobility problems have meant that I still watch daytime commercial tv from time to time. As  the national economic crisis deepened I noted that those public benefactors offering loans to all and sundry had changed their tone.  They were no longer eager to help one and all, but concentrated on those who had a reliable income but were sometimes faced with a sudden expensive emergency, just a week or two before payday.  'A small, perhaps £500, ‘payday loan’ would solve your problem.  Just say the word, and it will be in your bank account within hours'.

            Now that payday loans have been exposed as the potential debt-trap that they are, there are fewer of those adverts and those that still exist are less strident.   There are still plenty of ambulance chasing lawyers on the scene though, and the moneylenders’ adverts have been largely replaced by those of the gamblers.  There’s at least half a dozen on-line bingo games –Sun, Robin Hood, Foxy and so on – plus on-line roulette for the serious gambler and, of course, the National Lottery.

            It is as though members of the tv-watching public have come to realize that they’ll never escape from poverty by hard work and saving (with interest rates below the level of inflation saved money is likely to be steadily losing, instead of increasing, its value) and borrowing offers only a temporary and illusory escape.   The only chances of escaping from poverty to wealth are of suing somebody (preferably a public body or a rich corporation) for injuries you have suffered in an accident that was ‘their fault’, or by successfully gambling with the few pounds that you still have in your pocket or handbag.  You’re ‘in it to win it – somebody has got to be a winner and it could be YOU’.  

           Here's a bit of of 'tax avoidance' advice of which even the poorest (perhaps particularly the poorest)  of us can take advantage.  Don't gamble.  Don't buy National Lottery tickets and don't buy scratch-cards.   Don’t be fooled – you are far more likely to be struck by lightning than become a lottery millionaire!  The only sure winners, week after week, are those who run the gamble and the government which taxes your folly!  

Week 10 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

The Children of the Poor

          In the 1920s and 1930s an annual event in Ipswich was ‘the Poor Children’s Outing’.  The rest of us would watch and wave as bunting decorated lorries drove out of town filled with laughing, cheering and singing children (no-one bothered much about health and safety in those days!) on their way to some rural, or perhaps seaside, destination where they’d enjoy a big, generous tea, lots of fun, entertainment and games, before being driven home again, still laughing and singing in the evening.

            My dad (a former Regimental Sergeant Major of the RAVC) who was clerk, veterinary nurse, dispenser and general dogsbody to a local vet, was once deeply offended when a well-meaning client offered him a ticket for the Poor Children’s Outing for me.  Goodness – we weren’t ‘poor’; not in that sense anyway.  There was always food on the table, I was always adequately clad and I went to a secondary school, leaving school to go to work at 16 instead of 14 like most of my contemporaries. We weren’t poor!  I realize now though that it was only my father’s modest army pension that kept us above the poverty line.

Clacton and the other towns on the Tendring Coast have a preponderance of old, retired and disabled or semi-disabled folk like myself.   Some are struggling to survive on the state retirement pension and whatever other financial benefits may come their way.  Many are dreading the coming of April when increased government cuts come into effect, and they will receive the bills for the gas and electricity they have used to keep the winter’s chill at bay.   I had thought of poverty in this area as principally affecting the elderly.  I hadn’t realized the extent to which we have an even more serious problem among families with children.

  It therefore came as something as a shock when the local Clacton Gazette carried the headline One in Three Clacton kids live in Poverty, and I heard on a tv news programme that, in BBC’s Look East Region, the Tendring District is one of those with most child poverty, defined as children in households with less than 60 percent of the average national income. The same issue of the Gazette recorded that although nationally we have had reports of a steady reduction of the number of unemployed, in our area the reverse has happened.   In January we had almost 3,500 unemployed and the number had risen during each of the preceding five months.

Every Sunday morning as I attend Meeting for Worship at the Quaker Meeting House in Clacton’s Granville Road I receive another salutary reminder of the poverty in our midst.   In the entrance lobby of our Meeting House is now a large cardboard box for the receipt of canned or otherwise imperishable food destined for the Food Bank run by our friends in the Salvation Army.  When the box is full our Warden takes its contents to the Salvation Army Citadel where they are gratefully welcomed.  I am sure that we are not the only Christian body that supports the SA in this way.

Clacton’s Salvation Army Food Bank is by no means unique.  Food Banks are nowadays to be found all over the country and there is a steadily increasing need for their service.  61,468 hungry families or individuals were helped by them in 2011 and 128,697, nearly twice as many, in 2012.  This year, especially after the government’s assault on the meagre resources of the poor and disadvantaged that is to take place in April, the number is expected to rise to a quarter of a million.   Food Banks are always run and supplied with food by voluntary effort, frequently though not invariably, by members of Christian Churches.  It is indeed, the duty of Christians to support them; the founder of our Faith told his followers that whatsoever, good or bad, we do to even the very least of our fellow men or women, we are doing to him.

But should the feeding of the hungry be left to charitable giving?   Is it not the responsibility of the State to ensure that none of its citizens needs to starve?  In the House of Lords the Right Reverend Tim Stevens, Bishop of Leicester expressed this concern in a recent debate.  He feels that we are moving towards a situation in which visits to a food bank are no longer seen as an emergency response to an economic crisis but as an integral part of the Welfare State.

That was certainly not my intention when in 1945 I voted, with tens of thousands of other returning ex-servicemen and our wives or girl-friends, to establish the Welfare State sketched out by Lord Beveridge at the end of World War II.  In that year of victory and peace not even in my worst nightmares did I imagine that nearly 70 years later thousands of homeless men and women would be sleeping rough in shop doorways and alleys in Britain’s cities, that there would be beggars on our streets and that the poor would be relying on soup kitchens and food banks to fill their empty bellies.

Successive Prime Ministers; Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron have all contributed to an achievement that, just a few years ago, few of us would have thought remotely possible. They have managed to make the era of Ted Heath and Harold Wilson seem like a Golden Age!

‘If you knows of a better ‘ole – go to it!’

          Four or five years ago, if I had been asked what Triple A or AAA meant I would have probably guessed that it must be the title of a Western ‘soap’ on tv, probably set in Montana or Wyoming in the latter half of the 19^th Century.  Every week we’d see the ‘boys of the Triple A ranch’, dealing with hostile Indians, rustlers, crooked land-owners or whatever.  The Triple A would, of course, be the brand AAA burnt onto the hide of each one of their ‘shorthorns out on the range’.

            Now, of course, I know better.   A Triple A rating is the mark of a sound and reliable borrower of money, a borrower who can be depended upon to repay his debts promptly and with all the interest due on them.   If such ratings were accorded to individuals (and, who knows, perhaps they are) I would certainly expect to be awarded one.   I know this because over and over again our Prime Minister, David Cameron, and our Chancellor of the Exchequer have stressed that, thanks to their wise and prudent handling of Britain’s economy the United Kingdom held a Triple A rating of credit worthiness.  This meant that we could borrow money at the lowest possible interest rate. They intended to keep it that way.  But they haven’t managed it.  Because the British economy has suffered a double dip recession and shows little sign of recovery, an international credit agency has downgraded our credit rating by one notch.  This hasn’t yet had much impact on us except that the pound sterling has lost some of its value (have you noticed on the radio and tv news bulletins that the Euro, which a month or two ago was worth only 82p is now up to 86p and climbing).  This can be good news for British exporters since it means that their prices are more competitive but, for the rest of us it means that imported goods – from mainland Europe, the USA and the rest of the world – will all be a little more expensive.  I think that most people, having learned that their credit rating had come down a notch (from the level it held throughout the Labour years about which the government has been so scathing!) would consider the possibility that they were doing something wrong, and try to put it right.  But not Messrs Cameron and Osborne; they believe that the loss of credit worthiness proves that their policies are sound.  We need more of the same medicine. We must dig the hole into which they have pushed us even deeper.

            I am reminded of a well-known cartoon by Bruce Bairnsfather, the satirical cartoonist of World War I.  His famous characters ‘Old Bill’, the walrus moustached old soldier and ‘Bert’, his less-experienced mate, are crouched in a shell-hole in no-mans-land with shot and shell whizzing just a few inches above their heads.  ‘Old Bill’says, ‘Well, if yer knows of a better ‘ole – go to it’.

            I think it possible that, at the next General Election, a majority of voters may do just that.  I only hope that the holes they choose aren't labelled BNP or UKIP!

‘It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good

So says the proverb and that is certainly true of the horsemeat scandal.  One effect has been to increase the number of people buying vegetarian ‘ready meals’ and  vegetarian meat substitutes generally.  Although I’m nor a strict vegetarian I generally prefer vegetarian meals and am pleased to find that Morrison’s in Clacton’s Old Road, where I do most of my shopping, have increased the range of their vegetarian foods and have made sure that there are plenty of every kind of non-meat dish always available for sale.

There’s an increasingly wide range, and you don’t have to be a conscientious objector to meat-eating (I’m not one of those myself!) to enjoy them.  Newcomers to vegetarian dishes are likely to enjoy Linda McCartney’s vegetarian sausages and country pies, and Morrison’s own vegetarian cottage pies and vegetarian curries.  There’s a far wider range than that but those are just a few meals that I reckon always to have in my freezer.  I don’t possess a micro-wave but none of the above needs to be cooked for more than 30 minutes at 200 degrees C.   Oh yes – and there’s one little tip that I have learned the hard way.   If you have a ‘fan oven’ knock at least five minutes off the cooking time recommended on the packet.

Finally – I happen to shop at Morrisons.  They’re within easy mobility-scooter range of my home and I have found the staff friendly and helpful.  I am quite sure though that other retailers have equally helpful staff and an equally appetising range of vegetarian dishes.

The Bonus Culture

‘Brussels’, so they say, has decided that Bankers’ Bonuses should not exceed their annual salary except with the specific agreement of shareholders.  This seems a modest enough idea, but at once our Prime Minister was up in arms declaring his opposition, and endeavouring to give the impression that he is defending Britain’s independence against the dictates of a sinister all-powerful clique of ‘foreigners’ in Brussels, determined to undermine our national sovereignty.

It was, in fact, the European Parliament – the voice of the European people on which the UK is fully represented – who made what most of us surely feel is a very reasonable demand on a group of people whose greed and incompetence were responsible for the current international economic crisis.   For months our top politicians of all parties have been talking about introducing measures to control the activities of the bankers and the ridiculously high monetary rewards that they award themselves.  Now the democratically elected European Parliament (yes, it does happen to meet in Brussels) has suggested one small step towards that end – and this has been met with a howl of opposition from those same politicians.

I would like to see not just the limitation of bonuses but their abolition.   We should all; road sweepers, dinner ladies, factory workers, farm labourers, civil servants, school teachers and bankers, receive a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.  We should all do our very best in the job that we are doing – and not expect to receive an extra reward for doing our job well.

Doesn’t it ever occur to any one that those who receive these huge bonuses don’t actually do anything to benefit their fellow men and women?  They don’t produce food or clothing.  They don’t build our homes or our factories. They don’t make any practical contribution to the society in which they live. Imagine being marooned on a fertile and temperate, but uninhabited and totally undeveloped island in their company.  You would surely be glad to swap a score of them for just a couple of gardeners or carpenters complete with their tools, plus a few muscular and willing labourers!

            Top bankers juggle money – lend it, borrow it, bet with it, and make sure that they retain a substantial share of it. Past experience leads them to believe that if, somewhere along the way, they accidentally lose a few millions of it, the rest of us will ‘bail them out’.   Money, whether pounds sterling, euros, dollars, even gold bars (try making anything useful. as distinct from decorative, from gold!) has no value in itself.   All those currencies only represent the harvest of the soil and the products of other people’s labour.

I am quite sure that this truth, which seems so obvious to me, will not be generally accepted within my life-time.   Perhaps in some distant land centuries after the collapse of our civilisation, the historians of a new age of freedom, equality and enlightenment will conclude that it was our obsession with what we thought of as wealth that led to our downfall.