Week 5 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

 The Blame Game

 

            I find it painful even to imagine what it must have been like over Christmas for the families whose electricity supply was cut off for day after day.  It made me realize how very much my life relies upon a dependable electricity supply.  I have a gas central heating and hot water supply system but they have electric controls.  My water heating is supplemented by a solar panel that has its own photo-electric cell to operate the circulating pump – but there’s little enough sunshine for water heating or for the solar pump on a succession of dark and dismal winter days!   I need electricity for lighting, for cooking, even for heating a kettle for a cup of tea; for charging the batteries of my mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) without which I would be completely housebound, for operating my tv and radio, and for keeping this laptop  (on which I write my weekly blog and communicate with my far-flung family and friends)  operational!  At 92, without electricity I would just have to climb into bed, pile blankets on top of me and hope to hibernate until the lights and the power came on again.

 

                 I can remember a time when we were not as dependent upon electricity as we are today.  In 1926, when I was five years old, my mum, dad and I moved into a newly-built terraced house in Ipswich with no electricity.  Space heating was by coal fires, lighting was by gas and there was a gas cooker (with a wonderful new gadget, a ‘regulo’ thermostat, to control the heat of the oven!) and a copper gas-fired boiler provided hot water for the weekly ‘washing day’ and ‘bath night’!  We had a battery operated ‘wireless set’ with a ‘dry battery’ and a ‘wet battery’ or ‘accumulator’ that had to be charged, at a local garage, weekly.  A few years after we moved in, mains electricity was installed – but for a few lighting points only.  My mother used to speak enviously about wealthier acquaintances with ‘all electric’ homes.

 

            No – I don’t yearn for the ‘good old days’ – but in the ‘20s and ‘30s we certainly didn’t have to worry about power cuts!   Nowadays most of us don’t have to worry about them very often, but they are devastating when they do occur – and when they happen over the Christmas period they are that much the worse.  I’m not surprised that our Prime Minister had a less than friendly reception when he visited a much-flooded and power-cut-stricken area in the New Year.

 

            Why was it that so many households were without power for several days?  This is what the power company bosses were asked when they faced a committee of hostile MPs a week or so ago.  It was hardly surprising.  No doubt the memory of those days is already beginning to fade, but at the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014 Britain was buffeted by storm after damaging storm and drenched by heavy rain day after day, for weeks at a time. The engineers who had to restore electricity supplies to those cut-off homes had to work round the clock in appalling and often dangerous conditions.  It shouldn’t be forgotten either, that power supplies and their maintenance are now the responsibility of private firms, driven by market forces.  Their first responsibility is not serving the public but satisfying the shareholders – many of whom don’t even live in the UK.  Like all private enterprises they have been forced to cut their workforce to make it cost-effective under normal circumstances – which inevitably means it is inadequate to deal effectively with abnormal circumstances such as we have experienced in recent weeks.

 

            Then again, the government has received warning after warning from scientists world-wide about climatic change, largely the result of human activity, producing extreme weather conditions throughout the world. This isn’t just something that may happen in the near future.  It is happening now – and, thanks to tv and modern information technology – we are seeing it happen. Still the political response is half-hearted and inadequate.  I am not an unqualified admirer of modern China, which seems to me to exhibit some of the nastier features of both communist and capitalist societies.  The Chinese government though, does seem to have appreciated the reality and importance of climate change, and of humankind’s responsibility for it. They are seeking and exploiting renewable sources of energy and are, for instance, building hundreds of wind turbines throughout their vast territories.

 

            Our government’s response so far has been to impose cuts on the Environment Agency, cut back on its ‘green’ programme, and encourage ‘fracking’!  I wish that I thought that any probable alternative government would be materially better – or even materially different.  What Britain needs is not reform – but a revolution of ideas and values; not more competition but more co-operation, an end to the ‘bonus culture’ (ultimately far more noxious than the 'benefit culture' that worries members of the government so much!) and to the notion that humans are motivated only by greed and fear.

 

The Face on a Coin

 

              Almost daily my laptop brings me messages urging me to support this, that or the other campaign by joining with others in ‘signing’ a petition, writing a protest letter or passing on the appeal to a friend.

   Some I simply ignore – like the one I received asking me to urge that some councillor, a member of UKIP, should be sacked because he had announced his conviction that the recent storms and floods were a divine punishment for the government’s recent approval of ‘gay marriages’.  Well, daft as that idea is – I don’t find it much, if any, dafter than the idea that UKIP will solve all, or even any, of Britain’s problems.

 

           A campaign that I do wholeheartedly support is that of commemorating the centenary of the outbreak of World War I by issuing  a £2.00 coin bearing a replica of the bust of Nurse Edith Cavell, a true heroine of the ‘Great War’. She was a British nurse (a Norfolk girl as it happens) working in a hospital treating the wounded of all nationalities in German-occupied Belgium. She was arrested, court-martialled and summarily shot in 1915 for helping wounded allied POWs to escape to neutral Holland.  The official intention is to issue such a coin with a replica of a recruiting poster used in World War I with a bust of General Lord Kitchener with pointing finger urging potential recruits that Your Country needs you!

 

Edith Cavell’s best remembered words are ‘I realize that patriotism is not enough.  I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone’.  Surely in the centenary year of the outbreak of ‘The Great War’ this is a much more appropriate message to the world than that of a General urging others to sacrifice themselves on the killing-fields of Flanders..

 

 

 

 

More or Less

 

We are now over three weeks into the New Year and I have realized that something is missing from the news-media scene!   Whatever happened to all those planes and coaches full of Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants whom we were told would be flooding into Britain to demand our homes and jobs and to take advantage of our health and social services directly the barriers came down on 1^st January?   I am sure that the Sun the Express and the Mail would have told us all about them had they arrived.  One or two did turn up by air on New Year’s Day and received a VIP welcome, including a hand-shake from a concerned MP.

 

 We have since learned that not only has there been no flood of east European immigrants but there were no applicants for jobs in Britain that had been advertised in Romania and Bulgaria. A Romanian spokesman said that Germany and not the UK was the favoured destination of those of his compatriots who wanted to move to other parts of the EU.  I hesitate to say I told you so because my guess was no better informed than that of the editors of the Europhobic press. I was right though and I do feel justified in saying that I’m not surprised.

 

Not being brilliant at mathematics, I listen with fascinated admiration to More or Less on BBC Radio 4 from 4.30 pm till 5.00 pm on Friday afternoons.   Researchers for this programme check figures about pay, unemployment, crime, hospital appointments and so on, made by politicians or in popular newspapers and sent in by Radio 4 listeners..  They usually prove the claims to be false or exaggerated and I have never yet heard the accuracy of the findings of the More or Less researchers questioned.

 

Last week they investigated claims that immigrants to this country were an added financial strain on our economy, and counter-claims that they brought more to our finances than they claimed back.  One or the other had to be right!   More or Less discovered that migrants from other EU countries (those are the ones to whom we cannot bar entry and about whom the UKIP-friendly press gets so indignant!) do pay more to us in tax and other charges than they withdraw in ‘benefits’. Clearly we should welcome them.