Tendring Topics…….on line
Climatic Change
A
fortnight ago I commented in this blog that four damaging storms in the one
month of December were more than just coincidence. I had no doubt that they were part of a
world-wide pattern resulting from global warming and climatic change. If the New Year has brought in any change it
has been a change for the worse. Cornwall and Wales have had an almost continuous
battering by wind and sea for day after day.
There have been deaths and
flooding both from the surging sea and from drenching rain falling on already
sodden ground. The Somerset Levels have
filled with flood water and supplies have had to be taken by boat to some inland
communities. Meanwhile, a blast of
Arctic Air is producing polar conditions through Canada
and the northern half of the USA
with hospitals having to deal not only with hypothermia but frostbite! Temperatures lower than those at the South
Pole have been recorded! Our tidal surges, damaging gales and floods are just a
small part of a global problem.
This
had all been foreseen. As I pointed out
in my blog; The signal fires of warning,
they blaze but none regard. And so
through night to morning, the earth spins ruinward’. A Cambridge University professor,
interviewed on tv explained that as long ago as the 1980s, scientists had
warned the world’s governments that climatic change, largely the result of
human activity, would produce extreme weather conditions world-wide – and so it
has. Desperately trying not to appear to
criticise the government, the professor said that of course the prime minister
and chancellor had wider economic issues to consider. He did regret though that
they had found it necessary to cut the grant to the Environmental Agency,
striving to alleviate some of the worst effects of these extreme conditions. A much-travelled Blog reader, on his way to Cornwall on business,
sent me this email:
This kind of weather is exactly as predicted in my Climate
Change booklet I got from the UN in Geneva
Flooding and Wind disasters have gone up around the world
massively in the last 10 years, and are set to continue to get worse as there
is more and more heat energy in the atmosphere.
But your MP thinks it’s all a load of rubbish! Let’s hope his
home is flooded out.
Well, I do try
to avoid having such uncharitable thoughts about our MP and I don’t think it at
all likely that either of his comfortable homes will be flooded. I do wonder though if he has now considered
the possibility that the Australian authority on whom he based his climate-change-denial
might just possibly have been wrong and virtually all other scientific opinion
right.
Whatever else
our Prime Minister may be, he is certainly neither stupid nor ignorant (though
his grasp of 20th century history sometimes seems to be a bit shaky!) I have no doubt that he is well aware of the
accelerating effects of climate change and of the urgent need for all nations
in the world to work together to counter them.
However he is constrained by the need to hold his Party (which has its
fair share of ‘neanderthalers’) together, to keep on the right side of the
millionaires who control the popular press, and to do nothing to imperil his
Party’s chances in the now-not-so-distant General Election. Today
(8th January) he has publicly conceded that the extreme weather we
are experiencing may be the result of global warming. The next few weeks could make it clear whether
David Cameron really is a great
statesman with his country’s, and the world’s, interests at heart – or whether
he is just another successful politician.
Our Iron (hearted?) Chancellor
I do wish that George Osborne,
Chancellor of the Exchequer, could manage to have a less self-satisfied smile
on his face as he tells us that, despite the growing economy and falling
jobless figures, we’ll have to endure increasing
austerity for two years after the next general election. This will involve making further billions of
pounds of savings, a large proportion of which will have to come from
‘welfare’. His previous forecasts have been mostly wrong so we can always hope
that this one will be too – not least with regard in the assumption that he’ll
still be chancellor after the next election.
Once again the
poor (they’re the ones who’ll be affected by cuts in the welfare budget) will
be the ones to suffer. The lengths to
which Mr Osborne will go to prevent the really wealthy from experiencing even
the slightest inconvenience is really astonishing. You’ll recall that one of his early acts as
Chancellor was to reduce the tax
payable by those liable for the highest rate of income tax. That’s people with a taxable income in excess
of £150,000 a year (roughly £2,885 per week!)
I am tired of hearing the oft-repeated tale that if the government dares
to ask the wealthy to pay the same proportion of their income in tax as the
poor, they’d simply up sticks and leave the UK .
Let them go if
they want to; but I suggest that those who care so little for their native land
that they’ll live abroad rather than pay their fair share of meeting its financial
needs, should automatically lose their British citizenship – which would be
restored to them only after they had paid the income tax for which they were
due.
Here are some ideas to raise a few extra million (or possibly billion) pounds that, unlike his
austerity measures, would make no-one homeless or unable to feed their family
or buy them the necessities of life:
Restore that
extra payment on the highest band of income tax and reduce the level of
liability for that tax from £150,000 to £100,000 a year, a figure that is much
more than twice the average income in the UK . This is surely a very moderate
and reasonable suggestion.
Make all universal state benefits liable for income tax. Those, like myself, with a
supplementary pension from our former employment, already pay tax on our state
retirement pension, so why shouldn’t we pay it on winter fuel allowance,
attendance allowance, free tv licences, free bus passes and so on? This would mean my paying a little more
income tax for my fuel allowance, attendance
allowance (paid because of my limited mobility), and tv licence – but it
wouldn’t seriously impair my living standard.
Others might have to pay rather more but
folk whose income was so low that they were not liable to pay income tax would
be unaffected.
How much those
two measures would raise for the exchequer I don’t know. They would, of course,
raise much more if we had a properly graded income tax system in which we all
paid a percentage of our gross income
in tax. However much or however little it raised, it would
make those with low or average incomes (those
hard-working taxpayers top politicians are always on about!) feel that
perhaps we are all in this together and the whole thing isn’t just a ‘Robin Hood
in reverse’ conspiracy to rob the poor and give to the rich, as it seems to be
at present.
‘What’s
in a name?’
……..asked
love-sick Juliet Capulet in what is probably Shakespeare’s best-known
play. There can be quite a lot, as our
Clacton MP Douglas Carswell may have found out when he invited readers of his
Newsletter to describe him in two
words. I wonder what he was hoping for –
Clacton’s Crusader, the People’s Voice, Brussels
Hardly
surprisingly, his request was greeted with derision by his opponents. Norman
Jacobs, described in the Clacton Gazette as a ‘respected historian and Labour supporter’ said that the two words
that came to his mind were ‘diddly’ and ‘squat’, words that had been used
together by former Tendring Council leader Peter Halliday to describe his
opinion of Mr Carswell’s contribution to the town. I have been acquainted with Norman Jacobs for
some years, often supporting his point of view – sometimes opposing it. I really believe that he could have done
better than that – and I wondered if I could.
Stringing words together into a readable narrative is the only real
skill I have ever possessed. Could I
summarise our MP’s qualities in just two words?
The
two characteristics that come to my mind whenever Douglas Carswell’s name is
mentioned are his fervent Europhobia and his conviction that, if climatic
change is taking place, it is part of
a natural cycle and nothing whatsoever to do with human activities. It follows that all this business about
finding renewable sources of energy and reducing the ‘greenhouse gases’ in the
atmosphere is waste of time and money.
‘Climate change denying Europhobe’ uses twice as many words as those
requested in Douglas Carswell’s invitation.
Then it came to me – I’m not really sure if it is one word or two but it
certainly sums up succinctly my view of our MP. How
about Crypto-Ukipper,* a Conservative MP who prefers Nigel Farage’s outlook
to that of David Cameron?
* Ukipper is pronounced You-kipper. You won’t
find it in any dictionary yet, but give it a year or two………
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